Valium & Valiance

The room is aching                        the way I wanted to                 sail                  with super-silk                                    on our silica                                           -ed secret                                                             an everywhere slip                              into the nightgown                                 of you                                   the failure of form                                                       only the mouth can make                                                 so much                                                        to glide upon                                     I detest my need                                                        of you                                     the failure                                of my body                                             to produce                                 anything but ink                     useless time                                 and again                                             against my tongue                                                                  you taste awful                                                         I know                                             you can’t save me                                                         you are the location where                                             I save myself                                 when I am out                                                        of my body                                 you cull me back                     with a glissade                                 foamed with impatience                      frothed with an imagination         I detest how easy I thought         it was to know myself to continuously learn                     I only know the failures                                 of us                     together, you could never                                         satisfy me                                                         you are the only thing                                 I know how to ride                     when everything else fell away you brought me back          to show me how easy it is to fall      or at least          that is what I told myself                                 to keep myself                                            satisfied amidst the failures                                                         of friction                                                                     how I lose you each time                                             I insist on perfection                     my body could never be                                             what I demand         of you

For my uncle, a drink must be extravagant  pleasurable but not sentimental. There must be  a love for the gurgle of the bottle, a sound  for the click of neck & lip which sleeps for years  in the canals of his ears. There must be fire  down his throat. The tumbler must have nerve  despite the pain in his backbone, despite the leg  that goes off. As a child when he first learned  to form questions did the answers light up  the bottle pocketed in his father’s jacket. On winter holidays when he got so lit my father  drove him home & most likely put him to bed.  I always knew he would come like this, outdrinking  everyone & no one lifting a finger to stop what then  meant nothing now means every lick of it. I love  to see the lines of his eyes curve when he savors  juniper berries like a good monk in a monastery. I love  to hear him say, you gat dat right, when he speaks  of my dead father. It is possible to make a phrase sound  so beautiful there’s a rhythm to it. From my uncle  I’ve learned so much I’ve got nothing on his father. I could paint the notes for you, the madder  & amber color of a bottle in a Rembrandt painting.  Such a non sequitur, I must exaggerate to be exact. All my lousy life I have fallen for it, this dark brew  personified. I can tell the answers by the way  the gin rises in a burst out of his throat. I mean it  like a clenching mourner, I’ve carried a flask. 

Copper keeps life from my womb; aluminum   fills my pores, silver my teeth. My blood won’t hold iron,  so I take it daily. Food brings a sickness I can’t measure  under my tongue, only on my waning waist. Some metal 

belongs in the body. The day a grate raised my skirt  on the street, I noticed only one rush of air between ore  and whore. The boy who learns to caress his face with a blade  will grow into a man I’ll pay to slice my skin with steel. Beauty 

is no alchemy: it merely means making space for more things  that shine. Like the ancient statues men scrapped for daggers.  Like powder packed into bullets, their touch so intimate it kills. Like any body in this millennium, I’ll survive 

in silicon chips after death. Until then, lead me  somewhere precious. Guide me with ungloved hands.

Maybe it ruins the story to say at the start that no one was hurt the day Scotty Forester swung open the door of the family car, climbed up, put one hand on the wheel and, then, while pushing and pulling on buttons and knobs, he found and released 

the brake, and it started, the silver-blue Mercury, to roll  down Robin Street, best street in the neighborhood for sledding,  for coasting on a bike with arms waving above your head,  Scotty gaining speed on the long sweep of that block, heading 

toward the intersection, then into it, then speeding  through, the car beginning to slow as the street leveled out,   although, toward the end, Scotty going fast enough  to jump the curb before stopping, three feet from a gas pump. 

Maybe knowing the ending ruins this story, but sometimes  we need a break from dread. We need to know that the car  did not crash, the child did not die. We need to briefly forget  that we live in a world where a car is gaining speed, and 

no one seems to be at the wheel. We need to be more  like the dog Scotty drives past, who barks, and runs in circles  as he barks some more, driven by some circuitry we have lost  for loving this dangerous life, living it.

My mother took the bag from its box—  home to my father’s ashes for thirteen years—  and poured its heft into a form she made   on the potter’s wheel—a vase, damp and unfired.  She pinched the rotating lip, and sealed the clay   perfectly shut, a technique I haven’t yet mastered.

We planned to launch it like a football at low tide,   but when we arrived, the beach was lined with people,  and there was no subtle way for my brother to toss it out past   the children kneeling in the surf, the surfers awaiting the break. 

To carry my father out, arm above my head, heavy with him—  or hold him against my chest, side-stroking   with one hand while the clay disintegrated into the water—  I wasn’t dressed for it.

Instead, we dropped him in the water by the docks   by the old Shrimp Shack, all 6’4” of him,  and I watched the vessel slowly descend, a few bubbles   emerging as if the last breath left in a dying lung.

It's childish to assume people will understand unexpressed meanings. It's dangerous to confuse self-expression with communication.

He closed the door.

January bit through the walls.

The bed kept the warmth

seventeen minutes, then none.

No witness but the sheets.

I thought I stayed.

I inventoried the fridge.

The cream had turned.

I was late to the news of myself.

I didn’t starve.

I just never came back to the table.

Even hunger

has standards.

I left later,

quiet enough that air forgot me.

I went the way women go

who survive too long.

Afterward

I moved through rooms without arriving.

I lived like a light you forget to turn off.

The cream soured.

And I was elsewhere

long before I knew it

unfortunately, or blessed, it could have been hours, or years, but it was hours we disappeared into, touch i shouldn’t savor, not this day, not while missing you, not this deep in love, but a year ago, or was it days, we said i do which under it laid dozens more commitments, one being our commitment to pleasure, to touch, to the touch of others, so i do but also i will continue to do it, that it, with people that are not you—love, believe it, or not, lives in that promise too, i love the sounds others pull from you, i love your ecstasy even if i’m not around to engineer it, and here i am, on the other side of the promise, on the other side of the world, underneath this person who i have promised nothing but my attention and effort until it’s done, and it was, done under the moon until the rain started and, then, done under the rain, i am ashamed to say it, but i must say it: i would have asked them to stay, to do it again, to touch me forever had i not, and thank God i did, placed my forever in you, but amor, amor, you should have seen it, us: beneath the rain, a storm, under the promise, my loaned breath.

In a number of rooms in a number of states I began then abandoned notebooks. Pages long and blank. Sparse fragments in the margins: eager for otherwise    a second infancy Inside me, bones inflating, kites crowding a florid dome. In answer to a question, the poet said I write to return opacity to the glassbright world. Line after line slackened. My benedictions darkened like lack into night’s eventual black. The dead artist said for a painting to move us, it must become, not remind us of life. I stood vainly for many months, watching snow sink to the bottom of my mirror. For protection, I studied the contours of a deeper sorrow than the kind I grew. I thought I thought best with my hands in my hair, sweeping fears off my face. My nothing was novel—my desire for a different ending is a failure of imagination. All my life it’s been there, dormant knell ringing my neck. I was a finch, a feathered bellwether. Or I am an organ wringing, then wrung.

My father taught me how to write: على قد لحافك، مد رجليك. Extend your legs as far as your blanket. When I find parts of my poems exposed, I amputate them. I keep them tucked in light or night, away from those hunting for lines that don’t fit their blankets not realizing poetry lies in a poet’s satisfaction with their blanket. In my pursuit of tender lines, I’ve become a butcher, committing crimes against myself for the sake of beauty.

for David Lieberman

Every summer my neighbor  with a hard hat, heart, and hide  trundles out his hippo Harley  to go hissing out on a fat hot breeze He doesn’t know it  (or does he?)  but that is how pain  wheels itself out seasonal

It is real  It is recurrent  It is a reminder of the flaw  built into the machine to preserve perfection If we could delve into the granular caves  of the asphalt his wheels wheeze on  we might see in the crepuscular cracks a twisty little thing we call sorrow stretching its centimal length knowing it owns the world