Pleasure Dome. Yusef Komunyakaa
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the next city
of rooms filled with California
Spiritual Sunshine incense
I go, a sleepwalker
on a cliff.
Sunbather
She lies under July, a blue towel
across her buttocks, her bare back
new metal arched in a dark room.
A sycamore guards her. Three crows
in symmetrical branches
watch their feathers fall,
black leaves. Today is
an 8″ ×10″ platinum photograph
in an old man’s dresser drawer.
The sky’s a slow fire,
car lights over night ice.
I close my eyes, concentrate,
& try to remove the blue towel
till the sun goes out.
Apprenticeship
His fingernails are black
& torn from blows,
as if the hammer
declares its own angle of reference.
The young carpenter curses:
“Awww, fuck! Sonovabitch! Dumb shit!”
His girlfriend lowers her white dress,
then moves away.
She reappears nude,
props one foot upon a red chair,
looks him square in the eyes.
Her skin glistens like a woman
who’s made love all afternoon.
Twenty-two stories up, he steps out
over the beams like a man with wings.
Light on the Subject
Hello, Mister Jack,
make yourself at home.
Here in Deadwood City
our eyes flash back to
knives on silver whetstones.
Can I get you anything,
perhaps a shot of Four Roses?
In this gray station of wood
our hearts are wet rags
& we turn to ourselves,
holding our own hands
as the scaffolds sway.
I can tell you this much
Brother Justice, our faith’s
unshakable, even if we rock stones
asleep in broken arms.
Because we have a thing
about law & order,
we’ve all seen moonlight on lakes
& crows whittled from a block
of air. In this animal-night, no
siree, we won’t disappoint you
when we rise out of hawkweed.
Punchdrunk
So what if he walks into red
North Carolina traffic at night
like Jarrell, dreaming hollyhock,
blowing some horn of bone?
Hellbent for green dark
because a man’s mind runs
away from him like a wild horse.
The second thought of a wood thrush,
wings waxed to August sky. Deep relic
truths & strange tales. Once he
went ringing doorbells, singing
Sticks & stones may break my bones, but. …
If he knows nothing else, he knows
how to take a solid, left, black jab,
how to force a big man to kiss the canvas,
a life stronger than fossil & boxwood.
Vigilante
Each hired hand places
a dusty boot in a stirrup,
swings himself into a sweat-burnt
saddle, hoping to handle
a noose. The boss’s moneysack
& Willie D. Jones gone.
Far as the eye can see
a sparrow, conifers jut toward
enamel sky. Snagged cloth
leads a trail into hackberry.
Near the northridge
he crossed the river into
another country of nights.
A human form scuffles knee-deep
in this year’s first snow,
bobbing on the sights of five guns.
Nothing to Do with Janice Drake
Mister Humbug
returns. She runs
to him, wailing his name
as if her clothes were on fire.
Then she sweeps
this killer’s tracks
clean, removing fingerprints
from the murder weapon.
He looks at her
& says, “Let that dress fall, Sweetie.
Don’t tell me
dogwoods grow crooked
because of Jesus.”
He grins
like a new case-knife.
Then stands at the bedroom
window, & says:
“Don’t you know
one of these days
you gonna make me
blow your brains out?”
Reconstructing a Crime
The back door opened
quiet as a coffin lid.
From the yard a Douglas fir
stared over his shoulder
like some god.
He was shoeless,
a man tiptoeing upon a dream.
From the right angle, the way
the moon now falls through damask curtains,
if anything, you’d only seen
the gun.
Outside their bedroom door
he could hear blossoms
of