Golem Dream

A flame burning inside of a chrysalis
but without heat
Both hibernating and exploding

Skitters or scuttles like a badly built robot
wound too tight

Both here and there at once
Capable of asking intimate questions

Sometimes like marbles in a jar
gleaming and even picked at random perfectly matched

Sometimes like a agitated frog

plopping on any available lily pad

Both inside and outside
A coded catalog of sense

references scrolling down the brain

A pulsing colored fog with glittering fingers

The noise that has no origin or endpoint
diegetic and rehearsed
Inquisitive but not acquisitive
A billboard bearing photorealistic painted fruit

As grandiose as a tiny cactus
and as prickly and as rarely blooming

Empty but overstuffed
A flexible mesh glazed in honey

Apology

Failure has black teeth. Gritty with the tar.
They smear it on the ground where it sleeps.

Break the teeth. They are of no use here.
When my mouth opened for the first time

A little noise was heard, like a curtain
blowing against the shutters at night.

But no words were spoken. The last time
my mouth opened, you looked inside:

The speculum held my lips apart in a circle,
Your flashlight left a glitter in my eyes.

I do not know what you saw. But afterwards
You smiled and wiped your hands off quietly.

If you could not find the love I know I owe:
Forgive me. Inside of my own body

A small beetle races around, antenna up,
searching for feeling before falling

Through every absence it finds.

Trees

There is the sycamore, the magnolia, the dogwood, the elm, the oak, the maple.
The cherry blossoms have bloomed and fallen. The street lies under their false snow.
The window is befriended by a tree and its branches. It is waving hello and goodbye.
In some countries, they leave the stumps of dead trees in circles just to prove a point.
I have been inside the hollow trunks of the largest trees in the world. I have lit fires there.
There is the mahogany, the redwood, the crab-apple, the lemon, the orange.
All the hunched over trees are handing out their fruit today for free.
The insects have taken advantage of the offer. They glitter in that sweet flesh.
A cross-section of a tree shows where the worms have burrowed through, years ago.
A plaque shows the man who has given his money to plant the tree.
There is the ash, the shredded paper, the dead fire and the smoke.
I have cut down a thousand trees and burned their bodies on a pyre.
The letters rising from the embers spell nothing we can read.

Dance

The lovers dip and dance
their faces parallel in infatuation.
Smitten, they swirl across the floor
under the dusty yellow light of memory.

The song is Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.”
The melodies are logical, the harmonies pleasing.

Like humans seen at a distance that upon examination
reveal themselves to be plastic figurines
The relentless upbeat of the music gives way
to the voice, trembling as if tears have lodged there.

What seems to be a quaver
is not a quaver, it is merely song
hesitating over emotion.

Before

We used to sleep skin to skin like one indivisible self.
Between our fingers the electricity glowed blue at night.
There was nothing on your face I did not know by sight.
Take from me this hunger, lay what remains upon your shelf.

We used to lie in sheets so soft we would dissolve.
Your laughter was the jingle of cracked seashells in a jar.
The sound echoed out like radio tuned to some far
City. Now the static hangs sinister, like some gray maw

Singing our torn bodies to sleep. I can’t sleep.
Not anymore. Not since your mouth came to an O
Saying only this: No, no, no, no, no. No
more will memory be the uneasy house we keep

Upright together. What is past is past. And fast.
Tomorrow I will stretch my limbs out wide
And shake my head and dip my face into the tide
And pretend that what has passed is not, is never, past.

After Traveling

I don’t dream any longer of kneeling in the black dirt by the gateway,
Of waking with grimy hands and dust in my beard,
Of new lilies, new petunias, of smelling dead earthworms,
Of turning over small piles of seeds under the ground,
Wedging bulbs between hard white roots. I dream
Of these street lights, the halogen moving in and out of my eyes,
Haloes that flash and meld before I can see the angel slipping
Into a roadside shack with his wings folded back.

Driving at night, all landscape becomes one
Plain strung with unreliable starlight.
I drove this way to forget that I had a direction,
A destination, to imagine it was all one light glinting, suspended
Above roads I would never map, homes and people I had forgotten.

You, at that dining room table so dimly set with blue velvet
(remembering the first time we ate at that table
How nervous you were, cutting stems so short
The flowers bobbed in their vases, lost)
Eating persimmons cut into quarters with cold fingers,
Puckered mouth and all unmoved dust incandescent.

The memories no longer reach into my spine with electric fingers
To tell me that you breathe, that I no longer live in a home spent
In constant conference with unruly children that tip over the vases,
Make you clean milk from the floor on your knees—you thank them—
close to the ground, you thank them.

Instead, a girl that pulled back the coverlet the same way you did
Without wrinkling the sheets. But she smiled with whiter teeth,
Not your shine and sweat. With my hand on her jaw,
I pretended this was comfort, that she was alive as I was.

Strange to discover that any two bodies will fit together,
That any coverlet will pull back so smoothly
To reveal these pale sheets.

Even here, wet forsythia drips into the highway,
Yellow leaves cling together, translucent in rain—
Spring, despite the chill.

Failed meals

1.
An egg in a pan
Blackens and stinks.

The spaghetti is hard.

And you are sitting in a dirty room
Surrounded by things that were never yours.

2.
In the castle, Don Carlos and Rodrigo share
A red flank of venison, sheared of the fat.

They dig their fingers into it.

In Flanders, they are burning the fields,
And the screams of the cattle
Are like the knives sliding on the plate.

3.
The cardboard threads
Of packaged noodles
Plump with lukewarm tap water
Until they are almost elastic.

Buoyed in the orange water
They drift like dead jellyfish –

Behind you, the uneven drone
Of the empty white refrigerator.

4..
Sliced potato in a ring
Turning brown, smoking.

Red onions in a bowl.