Pleasure Dome. Yusef Komunyakaa
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love is busy with the trees.
Arch-mechanic of electrical sky,
blood-red tree of knowledge, ichnology,
witch hazel, mid-May. I think of Bob,
with his “little piece of string & sharp
stone,” over at Minnie’s Can-Do Club,
as if the go-go dancer in her cage cares
who knows injustice’s oblique cape.
Sagittarius Approaching Thirty-Five
Yes, you’re still a little eccentric
around the velvet edges of your voice.
Your martini eyes say you wish you could
stop Cherokee Creek behind the unpainted house
you were born in. Boards drop off like slabs
of digital ice. The mortar of the doorsteps
cracks with green flames. You’re crouched
in a corner, crying because your face plays
the girl who returns summers to watch the yard
swell with wildflowers. The iron signpost,
an arm holding the nameplate
almost corroded away.
Cubism
Deep-eyed painter through black windows
Across night
Mountain rain
Drips blue
Cezanne thinking Six triangles of sun
Insinuations
Around from Kentucky Fried Chicken
at Liberty Belle, I met someone
who looked like somebody’s dream.
We talked about the obsequy
behind John Berryman’s eyes,
about how we loved
reading The Voice in bed
while sipping Southern Comfort.
She showed me where some bastard
kicked his baby out of her.
We said we didn’t know why
we loved walking in the rain
till everything disappeared,
but knew why Eric Dolphy
pried the lids off skulls.
Loneliness
New Mexico peels off
plum skin.
A night-blooming cereus
leans against an adjacent building
like the town’s drunk.
Morning swells in my brain
till my fingers retrace a woman
on the air. We all use our hands
for something, against something.
The Orange Pekoe taste of her
stays, even after a brown bottle
wraps my voice in cerecloth.
Again, I find myself
watching the old silversmith
work plains of buffalo
from his head. I return
to my rented room,
put a bullet into the chamber
& snap the trigger four times.
The sun’s now on the shoulder
of an Indian woman walking into
distance filled with dirt trees.
I go to the pay phone again
outside El Triumpho Tamales,
& Ray Charles cries from a car
speeding past.
Dedications & Other Darkhorses
Returning the Borrowed Road
The hard white land
calls you back across
iron months to Missoula,
overtaken in Colorado’s slow mountains
among gray cloud horses.
Lines, muscles, the heart’s
great naked timbers, swing
music. You said, Get away
from the poem. You’re too close.
Now, I let each stone
seek its new mouth.
In Boulder, your first word
homage, a lifetime of birds
gone wild with brightness,
like bundled hayfields.
That day when you entered
the room, we mistook you
for a man who works
a mile down in the ground.
—for Richard Hugo
Chair Gallows
Beating wind with a stick.
Riding herd on the human spirit.
It’s how a man slips his head into a noose
& watches the easy weight of gods pull down
on his legs. I hope this is just another lie,
just another typo in a newspaper headline.
But I know war criminals
live longer than men lost between railroad tracks
& crossroad blues, with twelve strings
two days out of hock.
I’ve seen in women’s eyes
men who swallow themselves in mirrors.
—memory of Phil Ochs
Allegorical Seduction
I am piled up so high
in your walk, I
slide down a chute of years.
Touch me, mountains
rise, & the pleasure
tears us into a song.
Quicksilver skies, these birds
over The Four Corners
down through Gallup & Window Rock
catch fire in clouds.
No god tells them
different. No hand
disclaims our closing
distance, as doors open
under the sea.
—for Linda G.