Out of Masks Press

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That night, each star 

was harvested by the sea of damp halos

that enchant your eyes, and hushed 

like dark coffee 

into the steam of candlelight.

I remember them so well, so quietly,

as though the music around us were a tide,

and you were barefoot

and I were sand.

     Leaves have taken to the trees like scarecrows against a matted sky. Beyond their fractured garden rain lingers in damp imprisonment, pressing its dark face against the bars, alone. The wind coughs in stiff impotence. Dusk stalks its battered ribs upon in the city in repose--all puckered flesh and bruised starvation, offering in its death an invitation to the softly-lit parlor rooms where jasmine plants loom like aged breasts upon walls tossed in candlelight. 

     The west gives stale retreat. Along the fence lines, oleander limbs climb through the fragrance of pregnant decay. A must fills the air, full of portension. The earth is an animal being born--slick with a mother's residue it will never see again. I have not the right to ask these things of Spring. To run my fingers through the steam of its satin vapor--to touch, as though in fever, the lace of its evening gown. 

      A chariot winds through the body toward the surface. Angels engorge themselves upon pillars of disease, heaven's dust lapping against their bare thighs. A light breaks. A clock stops its citadel upon the heart. 

     We are free. We are rain. 

     Porch lamps tangled with ivy. A red Japanese door alone in the dark, abandoned. The dark keys of shadow ensnared at the edge of light and turned over to asphalt as empty as the southern oceans--where music is the night's only gift. Grotesque patterns of iron hold back the stars, reaping their exhausted lust like fingers in a silver bowl. The mobile homes grow weary against their dreams. From quiet living rooms full of decay, televisions spread their turquoise ash upon devout antiques. 

     Somewhere a man is shrieking his life into a body, and a ghost emerges between the strokes of an old record. Who is passing beneath the halo's breath but the living and the dead in disguise, wearing the marble of Roman statues and earthless radar? 

     The throat of an ambulance opens in reply. An infinity of men are dead. The lips of an infant are breached with tears. Several cars roll by, full of eyes tearing at their breathing holes. Where, cries a woman with a half-empty bottle of wine, where is the god who stood against His will? Where is the hand that turned down the transistor radio so that I could hear the pianist breathing? 

     Silence, silence, metal that caught the curb. Beauty naked in a vacant window. A newsboy takes another pill to sleep. Tomorrow will be the day we all hang ourselves from telephone wires and write "ornament" on our graves. 

     There are still a few good hours left. Turn around--what was is still blue at the end of the sky. The paper has not yet come. 

     The sun was full dark measure. An elephant of light bounding through disintegration. Compromised gold washing ashore on empty tables. Children sprang like dark weeds in its path. Single blades of grass drawing shape untouched. We all went home that evening, each one of us. Each well-parsed shirt open at two buttons. Each pair of loitering eyes, mutinous with boredom. Each architecture of manicured cheek ranged across skeletal collapse. An invisible perfume crowds the air. The Spanish bricks lean away in recognition. Already night is a wet sapphire waiting to be announced. Dusk takes its coat and bows.

     For too long Egypt has been a ghost of passing tides. The damp living rooms of painted glass crane their necks against the navy schizophrenic half-light of University avenue. Presence is returned from an empty window's wicker basket, scrambling like a threatened creature away from a car stereo's bombardment of neon sidewalks. But we're not there yet. 

     First there was sunlight residue among the clipped grass, the impolitely planted trees who nonetheless returned beauty its rightful grave. There were: deformed mannequins up for auction, canted windows of retired patience, false, immaculate lawns upon which strangers likely nap and urinate, old iron streetlamps full of dead insects waiting for night to exhume their bodies, young women, barely old enough to know their young, with bare midriffs who put coins in the turnstiles of available eyes, girls who bend a paperback of Milton to its spine and count how many paragraphs they can read before the lonely café on 4th and 9th street coughs and asks for more sugar, stoplights who look into you with more depth charges than love's first sinking glance--this is the painting whom nature antagonizes by rebirth. This is the dead strength of men who do everything. Who pull themselves apart for a spade.

     In a dark bar with an expensive menu, there is an open seat. 

     At first, they will bring you water. 

you who remain within the egg

and carry the ghosts of soft ignition,

behind what limp door

have you consented to a mask

as colorful as garden phlox

in what velvet down-press

of empty jewels

have I left your dark myth crying

transcend me

as if a cold lamp 

could adjure its constellation

of fealty to a leaf

who has no river in which to fall

and not dare the crooked light

to intervene

to you,

mirror of Charles the VI,

I tempt that which hollows

to appear with fruit

and prepare for the appetite of a violent sun

carrion without a corpse—

I know how I will die:

in an uproar of vacuums