II.
Fin de Siècle
Werenât you always deplaning somewhere warm
with different hair & no job
beyond a less-than-part-time gig
tutoring a dilettante for 1,200 pesetas a week,
all of which youâd waste
with your imagined slam piece,
someone cruel saidâa composite
of wants, really. (He loved the Latvian
bartender-model who ate only lemon wedges
dusted with salt.) At twenty, the turn of a century,
you chose a life without texture,
a half-dark, predictable plot.
The elevator to your host momâs flat
smelled like bleach or what bleach tries to block.
During the breakup talk,
when he said your melancholy,
you heard a contraction
(you are) instead of what he meant
& threw a plate. Those days
you couldnât see
Hemingwayâs misogyny,
sought him out.
Love has changed
says your dying matriarch
who grew up on a dairy farm
thatâs now an airport.
Why buy the cow when the milkâs free?
A friend texts that her fetus
kicks her hardest, wildly, right after orgasm.
For the life of you
you canât muster a response. Haha
you finally text back,
followed by the hotdog emoji
(a mistake). Sheâs the kind
who writes poems about being suckled
raw, âwet with milk in Starbucks,â
always writing while walking,
chai in one hand,
tram in the other.
The model becomes a peach,
a woman waiting for what.
Her hands cover her genitals
from behind & underneath
but Man Ray leaves her ass exposed,
a portal bathed in soft light.
Tender or horrific?
As you exit the exhibit
you feel manhandled,
not moved.
Or cell phone service is stalled
again & again, not one neighbor
you know. The guys at the 24-hour
car wash on 4th gone
& gone the false Polaris
of their neon sign
on your stroll home from the Slope.
No traffic at all
now that the ecstatic
sunâs gone too.
What to do in a blackout?
Masturbate? Down
this pint of pistachio
before it spoils, before
the Milky Way & Cassiopeia
redden the horizon.
Fuck Nick & his body like a rock,
his paratactic problems
across a big two-hearted river.
You have one heart
& oneâs enough. Two-minded
would be better, more spiritual.
You were in the Tyrol or Lowell
when you figured out your body.
Did you shout from a mountain
or fire escape, I have a body & it is useful?
You remember stowing your bag
above your seat, showing some skin,
a glimpse of belly,
everyoneâs eyes on you.
Apologia
Iâm sorry I subjected you to such bad art
that rainy morning you left me
âas bad, I think, as that wisp of a womanâs
performance on Governorâs Island:
she drank pink lemonade, then urinated
through her tights & tutu over & over.
I didnât get it, but she sure was beautiful
in her cube on a swivel chair, on the floor
resting or stretching her lithe body
like a cat, yogic, wholly dismissive
of her hipster audience. Me?
I was crouched in a corner of our home
unable to stop the flood.
Not even by swaddling myself
could I sufficiently diminish the I.
Nothingâs less arousing than a woman
weeping, a bird confused by the weather.
The street cat hasnât been ravished yet
to which she, too, will respond by crying
just like the toddler next door
whining without end while I fake-sleepâ
which is it? A child not trained
to self-soothe or routine cat-rape,
his barbed part inside for far too long.
Femme Maison
after Louise Bourgeois
Head in a whole leaky house
bought at auction, Massonâs bird-caged
mannequin reinvented with two sons
in diapers, a gold-plated cross
around her neck thatâs strained
under all the brick, the immense
mansard roof needing repair,
needing paint, they, all three of them,
listening for the drips. The thickness
of the curtains bugs her most.
They block the sun, so rare here,
and part of her but not the wet.
Too much mind-clutter to work
and no spine, her motherâs voice now
entering her headâhouse.
What makes her tragic, self-defeating,
to her own children even,
is that she doesnât know sheâs exposed,
half-naked. Sheâs caught hiding
but doesnât know from what.
Venice Is Sinking
and so am Iâinto this wrought-iron chairâ
distracted by laundry, a strangerâs blouse blown stiff,
and my own mosquito-wrecked legs: thatâs what I get
for getting lost in the half-light.
There was a rushed introduction, the Giudecca
slack, sky-colored. No, Iâve never been atta...