Cosmopoetica

"Home Movies"

Coupled, link and manacle, forged from heat and stone,
House teetering on a bed of crumbling sand stone.

Intertwined, sweating in the hammock, smelling grass…
For years now that lawn a lot, paved with scree and stone.

Nesting in the Christmas wrap, last bits of credit,
The stale sweets sent from home taste of candy and stone.

Denali in the mirror, shivering with bass,
Your forgotten necklace, cold filigree and stone.

Not content with murmurs from the empty room,
Roll tape, tell me what I can demand from stone.

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[yes, I broke my own rules twice]

"Thought Experiment"

Sealed inside a soundproof room
without doors or windows, an occupant
is unable to distinguish between
being dangled from a crane above earth or
towed through deep space at a constant
acceleration of 32 feet per second.

***

If you drop a penny it will fall
exactly the same way in either case
as one did when you found yourself
fumbling for change at the store,
without the money you thought you had.
The experiment has nothing to say
about luck that might come from
seeing a penny and picking it up,
though it would feel just the same.

***

Lying with your feet dangling
over the edge of the soft couch
is uncomfortable, but in this
featureless room it helps to
know time is passing somewhere.
You realize you can’t remember
a time you weren’t in this room.
Surely, you tell yourself,
you came from somewhere…
you’ve been places.

***

An answer is given when you
find yourself rising, levitating,
your bible fanned and swollen,
toast crumbs drifting from the plate.
You can look for slight vectors
from the coriolis effect or assume
the full lotus position and wait
or consider lessons from the good
book floating just out of reach.

***

You may have arrived at your
destination in the icy reaches.
You may be falling from a height,
after the respite of existence.
On the one hand a door where
you know there can’t be one
on the other the wheezing
accordion moan of implosion.
Either way a light, impossibly bright,
despite your nuclear expectation,
the kind of light that makes you blink
and tear up a little,
the kind of light that, like you,
but the one which was first said
and so now must be.

***

At your car, stop in the unlit lot.
Feel the weight, an obscured star stream
pressing down on the bowl of city lights.
Close your eyes and stand still.
Remember: you are trapped by
the limits of your perception of motion
relative to all the things that leave you.
That’s someone else in the windowless room
without trajectory. That’s not his faint voice,
it’s the radio from the window from a bedroom,
someone listening with the lights off.
That’s your heartbeat you are hearing,
not his muffled fists pounding
on the bare, bloody walls.

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[as agreed-- why, oh why did I agree-- a villanelle. Of sorts.]

“Pioneer”

The dusty light, cold space, and stars,
mark how little we’ve progressed,
mocking what we thought was ours.

Now just ash where once were towers,
the city fades while the pilot nods, chin to chest
beneath dusty light, cold space, and stars.

The sea shakes three times, the village scoured
and as suddenly the water returns to rest
Mocking what we thought was ours

“Hello from the children of earth” the first bars
of a one-sided symphony addressed
to the dusty light, cold space, and stars.

Ghosts make love in the last grey hours
the sounds of the soon to be dispossessed
mocking what we thought was ours.

Hand raised, and etched in gold, time alone devours
the plaque, our pitiful bequest
to the dusty light, cold space, and stars,
Mocking what we thought was ours.

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“What the Man Sleeping in the Bus Stop Hut Told Me After Waking Up and Lighting a Cigarette”

It’s all fire, you ever noticed that?
There are fires burning deep in the earth
surviving on ancient seams and gas pockets,
burning since before his back was bent,
when his hair was the color of coal.
The fire started when a shaft collapsed
just after the war and ever minute since
it has burned, simmered, and smoked.
Through both his marriages and his son
crumpling in the hot rain,
friendly fire near Chu Lai,
through a bushel of presidents
not one worth a damn.
They can’t put the fire out
it’s spread too far, too deep.
I say it’s a cancer and he says
no. It’s a hemorrhoid, a boil on our ass.

It’s all fire, have you noticed that?
You get fired from your job
fired at on a street
fired up to get going.
Look at the boss’s wife
and you’re fired up,
kiss her and you’re fired,
but while you have her, you’re on fire, right?

An essential element, he says,
I’m thinking a primeval force
but I keep my mouth shut
and he tells me about the old cemetery
on a hill peppered with coal.
Sometimes smoke just boils up
from the ground, over here, over there.
He’s afraid to stay too long at a grave,
afraid to dawdle over that boiling earth
in case it vents and roasts him
right there where he kneels
over the dust, the ashes, and
the earth’s unpredictable wrath.

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Peeling skin in the uranium shower
Get clean, Mr. Clean
Find the handle hanging
from the sun, a trap door
one small supernova
this side of birth.
The tattoo on your forearm
E = MC^2 = Last Year’s Love
sleep you can’t clear from your eyes
one penny, two penny, four,
a chessboard eight squares squared
all queens with no divisor,
just the redshift of acceleration
beyond my wormy, wriggling fingers,
grubs in their stinking flesh pockets.
Out in the anti-matter space
a change in your spin
buries me here
a million miles away.

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In my dreams he’s still an infant. I’m cradling him in my arm. His eyes are open, but he fits on my forearm. My palm cradles his head, my fingers easily spanning ear-to-ear. He sees me. I put my hand over his mouth and nose and he doesn’t blink. I can feel his heart pounding, and mine. His heartbeat, faster and faster, resonates in me, an alarm clock sounding in a dusty, unused room. I’m cradling his head so he won’t hurt his neck. He’s a hummingbird; I’m a slowly closing fist.

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“Re-Entry”

At dusk the plane’s contrail
slits the sky vertically
in the failing light.
It could be a plummeting,
oxygen masks swinging
from lamped gibbets:
fasten your seat belt,
smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

On the radio a report:
the first Chinese astronaut
has just returned safely,
his sizzling capsule plucked
still steaming from the sea
smelling impossibly of
blossoms and river clay.
His first breathless words:
he has finally seen the Earth
and it is beautiful.

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Tell a story enough
or intensely enough 
and it becomes real, or
indistinguishable from truth,
if there’s a difference.
That’s the transitive property:
If a = b and b = c then
b and c must be the same.

So if I nodded vigorously
when she told me of
her love for John Donne
and expressed amazement
at the coincidence
that on that very day
she too couldn’t get his words
out of her head when
what I couldn’t get
out of my head was
a vision of slowly sliding
her panties down with my teeth…
but then years later,
long after the taste of
her perfume had faded,
I found his words turned
bitter coming from my tongue,
she having made me
end where I’d begun…

Well, isn’t that
some kind of holy logic,
the eventual prophecy
of a burning glyph
that allowed us to
consume each other
and know from that
something of truth?

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• a poem a day, any length, any form, any subject… for 30 days
• prompts are OK (tonight I’m using one of Robert Lee Brewer’s prompts)
• 15 minutes allowed per poem from the moment pen first touches paper
• no explanations/no excuses
• haiku and limericks don’t count unless they are really good

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Your husband
two years home
from the forests
in Germany
drinks downstairs

over there
when the guns
were quiet
he pictured
the soft hairs
on your thigh
tiny sparks
of current
arcing across
the diamond
your knees made
drawn up
feet touching
sole-to-sole

over here
he traces
your wine-bottle
calf and
it’s cold
he thinks
of bodies
half buried
the sucking mud
and his fingers
numb clutching
at leather straps

you’re half in
shadow half in
icy light
you’re watching
the dust
and smoke
you’re waiting
and waiting

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Getting down on my knees
reminds me of movies
where the bad guy makes
the good guy kneel
for the bullet in the head
the contrived coup de grâce
and it’s true the one time
I had a gun barrel
in my mouth
(it tasted blue)
I was kneeling too
before being improbably rescued
from my twitching fingers
but that was a long time ago
the only other time
I’ve kneeled for no practical purpose
I was desperate for attention
from some higher power
promising to give up everything
if he’d help me out
just this one time
but the answer I received
static on every channel
a ringing in my ears
that has yet to go away
an itemized bill
for everything I could give
and a few things still unknown
but the worst part
was how for a few minutes
I couldn’t get up
knees on the pavement
the empty fountain
ringed by bare flagpoles
winter lying in wait
for all of us
but I alone
knelt there
the dark laying
heavy hands
on my shoulders
the terrible sky
turned to stone

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Feeling a need to get out of a writing rut that is laying waste to some part of my life (and envious of all those photography nuts with their 366 photos projects), I’m starting my own daily poem project that is like National Poetry Writing Month. Kind Of. The rules for my KindOfNaPoWriMo are:

• a poem a day, any length, any form, any subject… for 30 days
• prompts are OK (tonight I’m using one of Robert Lee Brewer’s prompts)
• 15 minutes allowed per poem from the moment pen first touches paper

The last rule is to keep me from frittering around forever, as I usually do, before deciding that the poem is best left in the notebook.

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