Revision in My Wife’s Powder Room
- It has been said that James Audubon once slaughtered a mangrove of birds in order to find the right specimen for a painting.
I’ll need more salt than this. A loose feather
sticks pink to the edge of the bathtub
and slides down to my fist. Her mouth
music boxes shut: its wish against human knowledge.
Inside her stomach—stones and sand and concept.
I can’t ask questions in that language. What if
my strings of English reveal the man I want to be?
My tongue waters at every lagoon, every disjointed
flamingo: the mistakes of God. There are
thousands of them and I will need thousands of them.
When the bird steps forward, her legs bow back,
behind her, toward the man she doesn’t know
will fit her to this canvas. Bend her to the
face of God. Grace I’ll need more strength than this.
- Lauren Berry
Proximity / Randall Mann
Out of the fog comes a little white bus.
It ferries us south to the technical mouth
of the bay. This is biopharma, Double Helix Way.
In the gleaming canteen, mugs have been
dutifully stacked for our dismantling,
a form of punishment.
Executives take the same elevator as I.
This one’s chatty, that one’s gravely engrossed
in his cloud. Proximity measures shame.
I manage in an office, but an office
that faces a hallway, not the bay. One day
I hope to see the bay that way. It all began
in the open, a cubicle—there’s movement.
My door is always open, even when I shut it.
I sit seven boxes below the CEO
on the org chart. It’s an art, the value-add,
the compound noun. Calendar is a verb.
To your point, the kindest prepositional phrase.
Leafy trees grow a short walk from Building 5.
Take a walk. It might be nice to lie and watch the smoky
marrow rise and fall, and rise. Don’t shut your eyes
I’ve been absent lately.
But I’ve been working on THIS!
Digital Graffiti at Alys Beach.
Artists from all over the world are selected to install/project their work on the walls of the town. It’s stunningbeautiful.
Variation on a Theme / W.S. Merwin
late in this spring that has no age
my window above the river
for the woman you led me to
when it was time at last the words
coming to me out of mid-air
that carried me through the clear day
and come even now to find me
for old friends and echoes of them
those mistakes only I could make
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it
thank you good body hand and eye
and the places and moments known
only to me revisiting
once more complete just as they are
and the morning stars I have seen
and the dogs who are guiding me
After you learn every story your mother told you about
prom caught hard in the back of her throat.After your sister finally tells you what happened the night
you didn’t pick up the phone.After that party your freshman year of college, when you
drank all the vodka and then threw yourself at that boy
who was so not into you.After the picture frames, the wine glass, and your vows
lay broken on the floor.After you remember every racist thing you said as a small
town white teenager. After you realize that no amount of
present day enlightenment will make those words unsaid.After you accept there are things you will never know
about your father or the man you love. After you accept
that each reminds you of the other. After the night they
met and shook guitar-calloused hands, staring each other
down with matching blue eyes.After he asks you to marry him, and you say “Not yet.”
After you find your underwear in the dark curves of a
stranger’s sheets and leave before sunrise. After you,
sobbing, confess what you’ve done, and he does not
forgive you.There is shame. There is fear. And there is this dizzying
freedom.
60 plays
|| The National || Slipped || Trouble Will Find Me (2013) || Indie Rock ||
This year will take from me / the hardened person / who I longed to be. / I am healing by mistake. / Rome is also built on ruins.
Today I receive a postcard of
a blue guitar. Here snow falls with wings,
tumbling in its feathered body, melting
on the window glass. How each evening becomes
another beautiful woman holding
the color of expensive sapphires
against her throat, I’ll never know.
It is an ordinary clarity.
So then was it music?
Something like love or
words, a sentimental moment once
years ago, that blue sky?
How soon the sky and I have grown apart.
On the postcard, an old man hangs
half-dead, strung over his instrument, and what
I have imagined is half-dead, too. Our bones
end hollow, sky blue; the flute comes untuned.
When you show yourself to the woman
you love, you don’t know your fear
is not fear, itself. You have never been good,
but now you are so good,
who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin
that bathes the world for you,
or her face, captured like a she-lion
in your own flesh?
This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring
upon ring of wedding, the kind
that doesn’t clink upon contact, the kind
with no contract,
the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.
(via pleasebebrave)
It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it.
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