torch

OK, I know what this is. A torch song. A wounded bello through the dionysian wilderness of longing and pain for lost love. I don’t disown it; I hope I never have to write it again; I have not lost my love for the language of flowers; the erotic sublime may be insufficient but no one will convince me it is not a necessary condition for existence, for mine anyway. Ten years was not enough. And yet, of course, it is behind me. It has become art.

 

clap hands

 

i have through singing tried to alter the sun

blow back the wind and green the autumn trees

seen what’s coming burn and flee as cinders

down the black paths back to flint, match head, dial;

made the garbled statements seem as declarations

as if truth and love and order mattered more

than the dance of coy displacement

like those tulips in the garbage

and glasses sharded in the sink.

 

all your new clothes won’t change the image i have nursed

through a numberless corruption of beers

it doesn’t rot or tarnish, it hangs on living

breathing in the cool green morning of this sudden house

with no legs or voice to intertwine or kiss to give

when the garden’s blossoms, zinnias and four o’clocks

flame and deepen into shapes of afternoon

but i sing on, don’t i?

 

i sing on when i’m walking down the new-paved road to town

or drinking iced espressos on the porch, dreaming of a cigarette

leaning into torpor always thinking

of ears pierced with many hoops

or stones and noises nerving close.

today i stood sweating in the sun and new shorts

breathing like a redfaced fool in suburbia, mouth;

we moved quickly, mindlessly from state to state

through closets choked with dustballs overwhelmed by thirst

and the random, ceaseless flow of memories

 

there is no light round enough to break this edged, paralysis of soul

the brilliance of touch without art when I am open, out and shining

though all our strength is spent in hiding here, in song.

sometimes you are a black glass, cracked and reveal

till we blow back to song and smoke fills up the empty sky

between the stars. i talked breasts last night with migdalia

nordic oaks banged the window time tore at my brain

where was breath? you are food

and the night spends darkness till it’s bled white and dies

 

so this is panic.

but we have always loved the afternoon papers

and people who drink gin, donatellos of the sidewalk

café orlin

and motorcycles parked in neat bent lines

the skewed orders of sleep, still blinking on the corner of 1^st & 1^st

where we used to breed

and all our early stories were burnt.

 

i see colors everywhere, in the banging upright echoes on the porch

free shadows i can’t repeat, dancing on the wall

colors everywhere blinding rice paddy green

cloverleaf and birth, here in the loam;

treetops in golden light and lion’s play in the dust

that would be grey

i see lion’s play in the rust of sun that lies between the arches

of high substantial tree limbs, stirring with cicadas;

the song is a tangle of roots and rock

it pursues through dogged boredom every imperfection

of the casual weeds, berating this or that impure hue

never finding in the clover, cornflower, milkweed, pansy

a narcissus or morning glory or any other rose worth being.