Pressing and stroking it like someone testing the grass for a picnic.
Outside the subway train rolls and exhales and the hot water
Comes on as the pipes cough and the air is thick as a basement sauna.
The window cries with droplets, and the long line of Fifth
Is lost behind the IKEA curtains and yet, despite all this,
Despite the sweat, the egg-white liquid stretching between your legs,
The irregular strawberry pattern on his hairless back and pecs,
There is something reserved about it, something classical and staid,
Like a Noh play where a blind man beats a cripple, or like a ballet
Still in rehearsal, the movements unsounded, as the bedframe
Taps percussively and wet skin plucks on skin. It is all the same:
He turns you through positions, expertly restaging old routine,
Until you end up head down, examining the duvet’s bobbling,
Trying out the bad banana taste of Durex on your tongue,
Fucked deeper as he eases a finger in, the nail beckoning
Inside the hole, around the clenched twitch of resistance.
It tightens like a toothache. And now you are moving
Faster together, beating out time, until he slams you hard
Into the bedstead and you knock your collarbone. A deep retarded
Wave of pain. Then the surrender as you start to come and squeeze
Against him, while he pulls you backwards, lightly as Thai yoga, easily.
Afterwards you lie in marshy sheets, hearing the subway trains
Increase in frequency, the pipes’ morning aubade, the cries
Of women upstairs waking children, looking at water stains
Running across the plaster and the newly painted ceiling rose’s
Sad modesty, its oak leaves, touching the moisture on your thighs.
And instead of saying ‘I should go’, you mouth oak and elm, pine
And juniper. Poplar, tasting your mascara drips. Out loud you say
‘I love you’, waiting the requisite three beats, wiping away
A clump of old black Maybelline, watching the retraction
Of his toes beneath the sheets, their waisted shape, an action
Familiar as the two black hairs on each. An hour later,
Walking home on Fifth, you are still thinking of them, sated
By self-abjection, stuffing down some pineapple cubes
Bought at a metal hot-dog cart. Your lips feel tight and bruised;
His flesh, the enzymes in the juice. You are looking for a lighter,
Holding your shoes and a fist of dollar bills as it brightens
Quickly into pink flamingo dawn. In winter, night seeped
Gently from the sky, like red wine stains in watery bleach.
Now it is April and another summer. As you go past the subway
An older, also shoeless guy leaps out and shouts, ‘Girl, hey’.
He starts to twirl a topless bowler and it dips like an early swallow.
He raps, ‘I love you, girl’, getting low, and the sky over the Park
Whitens in a punched-out square, as one unlit cab follows
Another down Fifth and, through tears, you are laughing.
REPEAT UNTIL TIME
THE HERACLITUS POEM
ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμβαίνουσιν ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ (DK 22, B12)
On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters keep on flowing …
1.1
The picked mosquito bites scab over, resin sap.
The bites are as itchy as ever, and the anaesthetic river
Still concentrates its cold, but the ankles are different this summer,
Less lean, veinier, slower in the river.
Other old women step delicately into the same floodwater,
But the river is different without the nesting moorhens,
And magpies hovering by their uncracked eggs.
There is no stepping twice in same or different rivers.
Nor would anyone step once if she hadn’t first shivered,
Toes spooning in the mud, watching an older sister
Striding through grasses, imperiously batting off butterflies.
The river cracks, slides on, a parquet floor for hens.
Clouds filter sea, snow hollows flint. March brings new rains.
1.2
When things are patternless, their fascination’s stronger.
Failed form is hectic with loveliness, and compels us longer.
The horse chestnut gets on tediously with its leaves,
Provides spiked toys, diets middle-aged in winter,
Gets low-carb skeletal, squash lean, only to
Have another go with the old Coolwhip come spring.
The oak tree is absurd as new parents amazed
That a baby’s nails need cutting, dead keratin: so slick
So dull, that eternal kernel rigmarole,
The bee-sucked flower, the pig-shat nut,
From which, what junky miracle, new oak trees grow?
The pollarded tree is subtler, its season a fungal autumn.
The branches that were husbanded will never grow clean.
But stunted they stay, an old woman’s cobbled knees,
Thick legs beneath a butterball skirt, a green flare,
Her skirts lifted high as she dances to wedding music.
Rolled-up sleeves around each cut-back head
End in slender new sprouts,
Crooked forearms shot from the bark.
You think of Alabama at noon,
A quiet clapboard church,
White shirts rolled up, dust motes
Antsy on the windows, in the heat,
An uncertain hosanna.
It is hard to say if there is progress in history.
1.3
You see them all together and then the aspect alters;
Repetition is inexact, eternal return is falsehood.
1961, a street in Hollywood, a famous photo shoot:
Black cats are trying out to play the title role
In The Black Cat, a movie based on Poe, the whole thing flopped …
At first, you see the group, the collective noun –
A scattering of beanbags in the sun,
A clutch of black cats straining on their leashes,
And all the plaid mid-calf-length skirts, steam-pressed at dawn,
All the kitten heels and bat-winged Aviators,
Women smiling as if suddenly free in the Reno divorce courts,
Even the thick-ankled turning out their feet,
Nervous as debutantes …
Taken together, the cats are alien,
Eerie and luminous as silkscreen Marilyns …
But then the interest changes again:
One has a brush of bobcat tail, a milk-foam hairy chin,
A pompom peers out of a zipped-up bag, tip-tongued,
And one throws a winsome look behind himself, apart,
Flashing the squeezed-lime eyes that make a feline movie star.
And a blond kid in a tapestry waistcoat
Watches a big sullen cat on a diamanté leash,
While an older woman in peep-toes throws a hip out,
Squeezing her cat like a tantrum,
Watching him letting his black cat wander wherever.
She knows that 1960 was the future and JFK is in office.
His mother is wondering if she could be pregnant again.
She wears space-age Courrèges like emmenthal.
He is waiting for the sixties to start, for the violence to be real.
He looks like David Bowie on the cover of Young Americans,
Uranium-bright hair, a softly permed disco halo.
2.1
Days may be where we live, but mornings are eternity.
They wake
us, and every day waking is absurdity;
All the things you just did yesterday to do over again, eternally.
The clench of tonsil on extra tonsil is an oyster only once,
Once, the blood and itch of broken skin, and afterwards indifference,
The boredom of the weeping aromatic bedsores only once.
But, forever fumbling for the snooze button, the gym is there
Forever, and the teeth silt over yellow to be flossed, and there
Will be, in eternity, coffee to be brewed and that moment in the shower
When you open your mouth and rhotacise the water and just stand there,
Stupid bliss of hot water, tongue-tingling, steaming the shower.
2.2
Yes, the hipsters crumble their kouign-amann in San Francisco,
Fog lifts away like garage doors, MacBooks get going.
A girl with drug sores rocks by a steamed-up Bikram studio.
Women pour milk on Kashi for the men from Tinder in the Mission,
Wondering if they didn’t come because of the Last Words or the sertraline.
Or maybe it is just what happens when you get older or heartbroken.
And the flamers in the Castro from last night order oat pancakes,
Bacon crisp in a cross, white lozenge of butter, dispelling headaches,
While the pastry chef folds cinnamon into tres leches cakes.
Su-Yen pauses lordly before he crosses, reproving his owner
With a shake of his standard-size poodle head at each corner,
His jaw primitive and cautious (cave!) as the mosaic dog in Pompeii.
And you ease out behind huge Ray-Bans, counting the avenues
Of rubbery ficus trees, past ox-tongue taquerias,
Into the tangle of collapsible concrete freeways.
Grey coaches carry hooded children south to the Valley,
A coder who grew up in a car in Hawaii is drinking a Snapple,
A quant checks the calories on a granola puck and checks Facebook.
So no one sees the sparrowhawk stall in the outside lane.
And he is himself surprised by the deer in the windscreen,
The plump bunny rump, the hooves in child’s pose. Balasana.
It took the car out in the early hours. On the seat
The bored drool of its jaw, the crushed pearlescent teeth
Turned to the side, like someone whimpering at sleep.
2.3
7 p.m.: commuting home: arrest.
Trader Joe’s, the Daly City multiplex.
Repetition’s sense of comedy
Unsheathed as architectural poverty:
Beige curves on Taco Bells,
And fog, the old dry ice machine.
Three sooty wraiths
Fade on the bridge like figures on a vase,
Faded already in an eighteenth-century house –
Stooped, waterthinned
Chinoiserie.
Some kid from Stanford GSB
Enters the 101 the wrong way round.
He kills two Puerto Rican passengers
And the taxi driver.
DUI. The Dean writes: ‘Our community
Can only get stronger
From this manifest tragedy.’
An Audi TT in the next lane gets rammed:
The driver pops a nicotine gum,
Even though he is already chewing one:
Sweet watermelon shell in gum strings.
His wife goes through to voicemail.
Parked up, his face mashes into the wheel.
It is July and the fog falls
Like a solid,
Like raisins in soda at elBulli.
The world tastes of molecules,
Palpitates in ozone.
2.4
True form is often seen only in retrospect, too late.
Sometimes streams peter out; sometimes a grand Niagara lies in wait.
On August 5, 1914, Henry James was at home at Rye,
Wearing a watch-chain, thinking about being British,
Writing to Howard Sturgis: ‘The taper went out last night …
The plunge of civilization into this amiss, this abyss
Of blood and darkness …’ Theodora Bosanquet,
His secretary, takes down dictation, hearing the master
Becoming orotund to the click of the Remington keys.
That year it was the finest of English summers.
In the fields outside, the farmer’s boy
Rolls up bright bales, Valkyrie braids, of hay.
Drought beats older gold of them beneath a sky
That stays itself until November, and sparrows
Take their perches on the drying hay, waiting,
Listening for something to happen overseas.
‘A nightmare of the deepest dye …’
And yet the Channel is as ‘blue as paint’,
Neat as the rim on a soup plate from Delft,
Opaque, tin-glazed, and bold as the horizon
On medieval maps, a clumsy brushwork line
Drawn to disguise the fear of what is limitless.
‘The nearness of the horrors in perpetration just beyond.’
At night, James sees the farmer’s boy die, alone, over and over.
In the morning, the insect-filled heady magnificence of Indian summer.
3.1
True form is overlaid, like moss on broken tiles.
But scoured and weeded back, a mosaic face peers out and smiles.
The face in the toilet mirror could be anyone,
Lips tacky with the lint of two small Cabernets.
And then the seatbelt sign goes on and you stagger back,
As the undercarriage hauls itself, hauls itself down,
The local time is coming up to seven.
You are in a holding pattern over Heathrow.
In Greenford, Northolt, the places you were little in,
Curtains are being drawn in pre-war terraces,
Cornflakes are shaken out like leaves.
There is the anachronism of milkmen.
Only one house is un-insulated, red-roofed.
Your fingers grip the passport’s brown chamois.
Someone who has been abroad can never come home again:
London is home and it is foreign.
Today there is no hurry, because you have no luggage.
And there is no one to meet you in arrivals,
There is only the emptiness of the Terminal 5 cathedral lighting,
The pop of a Krispy Kreme sign and the tan embonpoint
Of Scotch bottles after customs to caress: the last way
After travelling so long to delay returning.
Home: a queue of open-toed sandals by the door,
The Velcro straps slack, guileless as dogs’ tongues,
The Persil-white brocade of laundered sheets,
And on the wall the Harvard calendar you bought them,
The knife-smoothed fondant of the frozen Charles,
Only your name against the day of coming home.
And then it is 10 a.m., and the stairs creak, corseted,
As the grizzled dog runs epileptic with joy into the hall,
And your father’s hand whitens on the banister
As he eases himself down, tanned like a skier,
His eyes turning inward, puzzled, the pupils contracted,
Your nose finding the blue pile of his dressing gown.
Later you stand in the garage, holding a plastic pony.
There is the long glissando of a motorbike on the arterial road,
A boomerang, the case of Saint-Emilion he didn’t get to drink,
The label working loose, the wine maderised,
The Magic Faraway Tree boxed up for grandchildren,
And, in your hand, the flawless yellow hide.
At night you leaf through Blyton in bed,
Crumble the book’s spine.
The wine you pour down the ou
tside drain.
Black spars, sediment:
A shipwreck in a bottle.
Clots on the lung.
3.2
There is saying the same thing again in a different form,
There is saying something new in the same form,
There is saying the same thing again in the same form,
There is not much saying something new in a new form.
3.21
Coughing in fog, sweet skunk of Jack Herer …
An old man lumbering with a mutt, plum-eyed,
Waving his glasspiece at you: You take pride
In fucking up the things we fought them for?
His breath is feline, fish-tin in the air,
And yet his choice of hat is not absurd;
The Tenderloin is also gentrified,
Straw Panamas are what the hipsters wear.
Mid-century has never been more chic:
Techies in vintage Levis get a fix
From looking for authentic Mission dives.
I’d like something with egg white and Mezcal.
Angel investors underwrite it all;
The shit-stained can, the iPhone afterlives.
3.3
‘Golden girls and lads all must,
As chimney sweepers, come to dust.’
Hugh Kenner believed in reasonable rhymes,
Poets as scientists, discoverers of verities:
Must / dust, shade / glade, thought / nought.
In Warwickshire he saw an old man blowing a golden lad.
‘We call them chimney sweepers when they go to seed.’
Three Poems Page 2