Fish Story
I wait for hours beside my life
fishing for bright, flashing creatures;
but when the water’s surface
remains unbroken
who will feed the fisherman,
and where is the fisherman’s wife?
In The Polio Ward
angels have red hair
they float above your head
the machine breathes in
the machine breathes out
your lungs are on holiday
so the angel reaches down
and strokes your fine blond hair
the machine’s heart goes pockety, pockety
the iron womb has an electric plug
and angels wear white uniforms
your favorite likes red lipstick
says, “honey,” and smells of cigarettes
she touches you often
and you never touch her back
The Much Edited and Lamented Death of My Step-Father
VI
Love is a weed we rooted out
again and again
only to see it creep
back in on the wind.
Lately I’ve been having dreams,
dark and complicated,
full of violent thoughts
swallowed back like spit.
Eventually, quite a few came. I wondered if attendants
would wipe the lipstick off your forehead and cheeks before
they closed the lid – always the lady’s man, even dead –
I said nothing, knowing we were too late for words;
I squeezed your hand instead, the hand tattooed
with swallows circling or chasing one another.
When I was a child, you could make them
flap wings of ink when you clenched your fist,
their faded green wings blurred after flying fifty years
over the realm of your right hand; on the left hand,
a naked girl, with tiny breasts,
shook her belly whenever you snapped your fingers.
I never understood why the eagles on your forearms
didn’t devour us all, women, children, dancing girls, and swallows.
Even now I half-expect to see the raptors shake themselves loose
from your raddled forearms, spreading new plumage wide as a shroud.
I laid my cheek against yours and kissed
your lips, and only later noticed the lipstick
smeared across my cheek and lips, a dead man
passing on the kisses of the living to the living.
Three Venice Firescapes
I.
I knew her at once,
dark sweep of hair across a model’s face
studied in its perfectness,
fine thighs and curious breasts
playing at hide and seek in the soft folds
of her luxurious robe;
the last in a succession of cigarettes
finds its way to her lips
as out on the balcony steps a man
white telephone in one hand, the other
laid purposefully on her shoulder;
she rises and with a downward glance
tosses her cigarette over the edge
and steps inside, closing the curtains tight.
II.
Long after sunset on my fire escape
I stare into the wet lung of night,
the obscured ocean rasping behind mist
hiding all but the dark arroyo
of the boardwalk four stories below me
I see a lone figure,
the wet ashes of a man walking
softly calling:
“place to crash, place to crash?”
echoing the hidden ocean blowing
the warm salt mist and wind into his bones.
I take a last drag on my cigarette
throw it burning into the night, thinking
“don’t look up, don’t look up.”
III.
Skateboarding children perform tricks
in the relentless teeth of gravity
Muscular women slide their thighs
on oiled roller skates.
Cyclists cycle by my bench
where I sit oceanbound,
watching the red tip of a cigarette
and pondering the joys of being blind.
Old couples walk arm in arm
where once they used to run.
They seldom glance to the ocean
where sailboats would fly on white gull wings
except for their wooden feet.
How pleasant it would be
to smoulder beside the sea
smoking cigarettes
and being blind
