Object

The waking up to television
static, to the record left on.
Since the music ran out
at four the needle has
circled black center—for once
allowed to sing of
its own inanimate pleasures.

The waking up same-clothed
but a stranger in the sunlight.

Remembering
those two who kissed on your
porch, glasses in hand.
How the Night's tense
shoulders relaxed and turned
buttery.

She was on
their side the
whole time
Vicariously present
in their new
skin.

Blushing for them:
the hues of her helium
and nitrogen
tempering the the vast
mascara blackness of
her complexion because
it has been so long since
she was young enough
to be loved.

Panama #3

When I almost died
in those waves I crawled
out of the ocean like it was
the first time—something evolved
and nameless. Squinting in the
unfiltered sun, coughing up seawater
on to the sand in the shape of your
face or of God's, I sat on the dunes
and wrote you a postcard. It may have
been a concussion. I didn't want to sleep.

Panama #2

I am
reminded of you while
reading Jack Gilbert, skating
by bus through teeming
mountains. The volume is
yours: one of the innumerable
borrowed and few I have
yet to destroy. There
are depressions though
on the sheen of
the front cover. Evidence
of a shuddering carelessness
endemic to me, my propensity
to set things down
so hard without
even looking.

When you
still loved me I would lie
in your bed while you
got ready to go out drinking, reading
poems one at a time. I wanted
to feel the weight of those words
on my tongue, dissolving
like hard candies to ropes
of sucrose that would thread
between my teeth. I never
understood why you would prefer
films to photographs
when isn't it always motion that turns
everything to shit?

Now I see
your perspective. Collections
bring cohesion, you were always
the most beautiful while dancing
and without narrative
what remains is a vase
without flowers--that sort of felt
idealism you never
believed in anyhow.

But darling, the same way
I pray it is not a sin to
read while so much rushes
past the windows, I pray
you were wrong about certain things.

That Panama is nothing
like Belize. That I did
love you even in the moment
when my hands so deftly
pulled us apart. That I will
not shatter the next
beautiful thing
I touch, and how
maybe there is
a pair of kid gloves
hidden somewhere
in your deepest
chest of drawers.

Panama #1

We set on the mountain
with the sun in pursuit
of new ways of living.

A stupid crush
on a pretty hostel worker who
missed her friends in New York
City, thinking there
must be a word for this--if not
in Spanish then in another
tongue--attraction bound
to momentum like dancing
while constantly picking up
speed.

And will
the wild rivers wash my body
clean? May I set new
clothes ablaze in the equatorial
sunset and drink coffee from between
the shoulderblades of the mountain
like taking the very earth
into my mouth? What little
difference it will make when
the toughest of my new
skin sloughs off crossing
the borders to home.

As in
the moments spent staring
across tables at one another.
Saying: "Is this more
or less real than what
we left behind?"
Not knowing if the answer
lay in the slow blinking
of eyes exhausted
by the raw and
the novel or in the thick
dreamless sleep
that came after.

To Declare

we fish
for cherries
with white bic lighters
clink glasses on stolen
rooftops and who really
can remember the names
of all those they have loved?
Our parents tried to do right
by us while living in the shadow
of their unbound youth
and in exchange we grow
bags under our eyes
like rings around rings
inside tree trunks, meaning
to declare:
“we will only add
to your history.”

A Month

Dallas, Texas: I hate your
mirrored buildings. I have
broken the hearts of all
of your women and they, in turn,
have broken mine. The ones
you cultivated inside your blooming
desolate, white-washed suburbs
and was it there you taught them
how to file their teeth? that you
taught them how to look so good
in their underwear? They kiss
like apparitions on their
satin bedsheets. They unfasten
the clasps on their bras for you
so you don't stretch out the material.
Dallas, Texas: your borders will never
stop growing and what's worse
is that I will never stop loving your girls. Never
pull my head from their rivers to breathe.
I will stand in their rainstorms
with my head to the sky.

Houston, Texas: I spent six years
of my youth in your arms and all
I remember is your thunderstorms,
the greensky tornado warnings and
the toads who would exit your bayous
to have their ribs flattened by
luxury vehicles across the blackest of
asphalt.

Austin, Texas: I have sat in your
bars and hidden from your beautiful women
behind fistfuls of cigarettes and tumblers
of whiskey. I know that I have been pathetic, but
Please do not scorn me. I will flourish
inside of your streetlamps. Shower me
in the green light of your traffic signals.
I promise, I will redeem myself. Give me a month.

Untitled excerpt three

Continued from below. If this is your first time reading, you should probably start on the first of the last three untitled posts (demarcated by a I.). But this should also make sense on its own, more or less.

III.

Drunk by the point that Jen found me in an empty hallway leaning against a closet door, still on the whiskey, more gulping and less sipping now. Why are you hiding from me? extending a hand down, Bakelite bracelets sliding down her thin, thin wrist, as if I just needed a lift up and I would be back at it. Hiding, no, a little bit of a headache. Well, she's in a bit of a pinch. There are two boys here and maybe she's been with both of them recently, a few times, nothing serious, but, well, first of all, they don't know about each other, obviously. Me, an echo: Obviously. And, to make matters worse, let's say they'd both been calling themselves her boyfriend, even though everyone knows she doesn't do boyfriends, and maybe, oh, just maybe there's a chance that she hasn't had the balls--me, snorting, You have been ball-less for as long as I can remember, but the sentence is far too long for a serviceable quip and she rolls on—hasn't had the balls to correct them. Who are they? One bearded, one blond. Go with the beard, I say, but it's an icy stare and I recant. A pinch, yes, sure, but how am I supposed to help? Just come with her, puhleeze, and she reached out her clattering, retroclad arm again. I begrudgingly met her fingertips, and pushed myself up, precariously, against the door. Much more swayed by the liquor than I thought. The floors may as well have belonged to an oceanliner, but I found my footing and let her guide me, her finger tips still joined to mine with an ethereal looseness, remembering but then forgetting to ask where were going. There was nothing to read into moments like these: no flint sparking between the surfaces of our hands, not even during these small instances of synchronization.

We had been together once, nearly two years ago. A shared handle in the garage apartment she was living in at the time, a handful of details that became elusive in the hungover morning. What I remember is the way her neck tasted. Perfume from a handcrafted glass bottle that I admired in her immaculate bathroom, a perfect, thin film of sweat, the gin evaporating through her pores. And how skinny she was, the slightness of her body uncanny. Not unhealthy, not a drug problem, just the way she had always been, endowed with a metabolism faster than God's. I was too careful with her, made self-conscious by my drunken clumsiness, terrified I would punch right through her eggshell frame, those prominent ribs gleaming white in the mottled starlight that crept through the open window. Always silent too. She never made a show of her pleasure, never opened her mouth to give voice to the sensations of her body. Couldn't tip her hand like that, but she showed it to you— she let it be clear through the tremors, the raking fingernails. Those were the only indications Jen could bear to give that she was, in fact, vulnerable: that she could be affected and, even more, that you might be the thing to affect her. Or maybe those were just the select moments in which she couldn't help but reveal herself in such a way, where a display of her humanity was inevitable, where, as her eyes glazed over in orgasm, she was forced to succumb to the idea that her dominion over the world around her was contingent. But, even so, Jen wasn't going to stay—I knew it before the undoing of clasps and buttons and I knew it in the smothering morning light that woke us. She had always been a proximity girl, more at home flitting in the borders of every boy's vision, permanently aloof but still charitable with her long smiles and genial kisses. I couldn't be resentful of the way she spread through the world like wisps of smoke filling evening air. In moments like these, I allowed myself to be called upon, to be steered down kid-crowded hallways into a room filled with pot smoke where these two new lovers sat (oh, God) side by side, blitzed, and watched her enter like they were encountering the numinous. She gripped my arm before we sat down in the circle, hard, as if begging me to anchor her, as if I was the thing only that could keep her from slipping away entirely.