Boy Wonder (Nick's at it again!)

So I had no idea Nick would be so inspired by the response to post twice in one week. I'm so proud!

Showtime on the A Train

From 42nd to 14th, when the black boys
with music in their hands
stop me from writing the poem

stop me and my will                 from letting the thing go
or come, as perception says to,
I want to close from them,              turn back to the page.

But they know the exact shapes of their bodies:
they wheel and leap, flex to pose and bend to clasp
each other.          The man in me

catches ab and wrist, shirt falling
above pec, held there. The halting,       wet navel.
I feel guilty not giving up my dollar,

though it would be, itself, a guilty one.
The look in their eyes, the loose clothes:
they know what more they are giving up.

And it should cost me and my not turning away.
Shame on you,          not for looking but for
holding back, though it’s hardly worth

the poem I lost to their worked song.

Mousetrap

(That one with the broom is me?!)

So my bestfriend and roommate, Nick, has started (under much pressure from yours truly) a "graphic blog" -- meaning he will be blogging (ideally every week) using his rad comic skills!

And since it's all nonfiction and I live with him, I'm going to be ALL OVER THIS THING! Which of course is my true reason for irking him toward its creation. Except not really.

Check it out at interrobanger.blogspot and let him know you stopped by (an audience would be just the incentive he needs to keep this thing going.

Oh, and by the way: an "interrobang" is that wonderful question mark/exclamation point combo ----> ?!

Seven Phone Calls

My friend Mehmet has a really awesome photoblog (funny how we learn such things about our friends so long after knowing them). He took this photo of me in DC over labor day weekend.

Check it out.

Tentative Sonnet Sequence (pt.1)

 
I call it sorrow, but who am I to say
what replaced the kiss with such a myth as this.
My God, I am my father, made of clay,
but Daddy, who are you? A mark, a fist?
A glove for one? Not really. Only the ghost
of pain, or what is passed to a boy through love
                                                               holding.
So that what we find in time is only the lost
other half of a century. A family’s not enough
to keep me, though it does
                                will. Unbroken vow,
unbridled passage from one room to another
in the house that is not the house you know.
Ask the sister, ask the only brother,
and he’ll tell you: love
                          a home is made of something better:
a rock that holds, a piece of gold to enter.
 

A rock that holds, a piece of gold to enter
you in the morning, like the dawn that brings
a life when you’re not looking. In the center
of the kitchen is a counter, and inside: things
that shine and cut, that coil the heart or sever
                                              hope
one piece from another. Useful things that bait
and cradle us in the morning. Like a lover
                                                     man
would, if he was not an answer built by faith
or faith’s father. But a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh
and all that. So that when we talk of mornings
and the peeling off of sheets, the sweet lie
after, we know we are only speaking of longing,
the gift that made you, the cause that held you close
while you were sleeping. I was making toast.
 

While you were sleeping, I was making toast.
While I was cooking, you were fast asleep.
And in our quickening, I thought I heard you, lost
to some slow flurry, beginning to break. The seed
around you splitting, the root like a foot at the door.
And your body: how I wanted to be the gravity
that showed the way. N, how I longed for more,
and how I longed for you to call for me.
And yet nothing seemed enough, or rather
nothing seemed to stir you as I came,
my arms full of eggs, my quiet answer
of good morning. Your lips were the same
as mine, your soured breath, your slow wake.
I was your waiter, you my silvered snake.
 

I was your waiter, you my silvered snake,
toy fish, blind giant walking his rounds all night.
But your day was closing; it was mine opening to take
you in. All shift I’d count the hours by your bright
quarters. Oh happy music of your currency,
those stacks of dollars across the table, falling
for me. And later, dawn loosening like an apron string,
my blood filled with morning, sunlight calling
my body to wake, though it still was. To fall
as the sun comes up, its birds untucking with song,
is to find a kindness, pin it to the wall
and let it wake in its own time. All along
the streets, lovers were walking home from love.
                 children                                   sex
I in my costume, trying to fall; you that starting dove.
 

Beauty is Useless

How can you say that, as though
pleasure itself is a conceit, desire
itself a solvent, a kind of failing
grace? Beauty, my friend, is itself

a use, residing among the simple machines.
It lifts, propels, lightens the weight.
I, too, saw beauty once and was made
useful. I have also looked away and looked

away again. The ancestors may
call it fire, but they have called many things
fire. I have been thrown similarly:
the gentle aim of the eye outward.

2. Beauty is Useless

It is hard not to look the other way
as the dung beetles, beginning to call
the corpse to its own chorus, plea
with life by turning, yes, turning it.

And all the beauty that we call it anyway.
And all the atoms we aren’t aware of.
And all the things left out in the rain
while children ride off with the water

still clinging to its only elegance.
What of the fact of water and only the fact?
It is hard not to look away from the turning.
Of course it is all being born and, yes,

of course it is all dying. But what of life
of absence? What of recalling the atoms,
fearing you could fall through, walking?
Take the bus to tenth street, then catch a cab.

All the while, like a nest made in the body,
they burrow without knowing the music
being made. And yet you love them for it.
Because where there are beginnings

there are also something else. Because
where there is something else there is possibility.
Because possibility helps you lose track, yes,
but mostly because your love made it yours

and you like that better.

Faustian Parables: Euphemism

Tied to the page—cagey speaker
In a cage—how now brown cow—
And all that? And the N-word
And I-word, but I’m not so I can’t

Say it: Oh, how I love that rich shade,
How I’ve raised and felt her. Tightness of calf

And wrist, of lip and muscle quickened.
The fine jaw. The smooth and supple skin.

And why not the stable, you animal?
Why not king-sized bed and king-sized
Queen? Why not the slow roast?
Check it at the door, buddy, and they’ll

Thank you for it, invite you to stay
As long as you like, so long as you

Buy Buy Buy. Though they couldn’t possibly
Care if the massa makes some more

Of those millions: rotting places
Beneath the weight of however many dollars.
Count them out; give us a report:
Line it up and count your worth in rows.

Line it up, honey. I want to see
How much fits in that tiny nose.

Ear to the Ground

A god and a paper, a dish and roses and a hat.
The list goes on to offer us Sun and shade from Sun.
Children through which we could have lived.

It’s February, early February and the clocks have started
up again — but I, having lost my body and some hope,
can hear the blood still in the body, like water

in the morning pipes, ash after a fuse has been lit,
beauty trapped in the closed face of a mother
kneeling before her only child. My lips were warmed by stone

as I lay there, wondering when that sun would come.
Had I thumbed the wrong ride? Had I forgotten to love,
that longing cast away to a pulling tide being pulled

by some greater shape? I thought it was a boy.
I thought it was a particular boy. At the top of the stairs,
it woke and walked slowly to the mirror

in which it wore its mother’s best dress.
When the dress came off, say, is when the blinding
light turned toward us. And around it, a field

of what looks like life: Moths crowd the bulb,
form the skin of a bowl below it, the moving skeleton
and the music cast from its woody net

setting dust on the glass of its moon.
I wanted to call. I wanted to dial just to hold
the cold received to my ear. The dead are wild,

but considerate; they know how to put the fire out after
the village is burned. They talk about us like we aren’t there.
They think we are beautiful and discrete. All we want

is a glossy buffet and a scrap of denim in a cab.
A box of barley to boil to beer. Someone to let us
put it in or someone to put it in us. Into that same dark,

from out of the too-lit rooms, we form a shallow
and take turns sneaking back a breath. But it is a long drag,
and our lungs, too, have turned. All around us,

it settles like a gilt edge. To look deep into it,
just to get and place it, with some shadow of a thought
toward its being the way back, is its own death.

Enough to call you away from where you’ve been.
They’ve been hilarious, these day-long seconds
since I died. And yet I miss my mind:

I can’t remember the last time I laughed, though I am
still laughing. I can’t know what it is about it
that opens and closes. Only a part of me understands

this siren lodged in the throat, its leaning past seasons
to change me. But what, really, is changed? All language
sounds like the destruction of language as the light turns

unfaithful; the house seems to belong to no one, so we stay
and raid the pantry; suddenly the music, too, has been replaced,
and we begin to realize we have seen more than Him —

which makes Him angry, though He seems to forgive us.
There’s a rumor we’re waiting for another death,
another of our own deaths. Which is its trick,

that bit of lust and magic: transience, and the grave ability
to thin my scope so that it’s only yet another end I see
through window square and hourglass eye.

For Jessica and Neil on their Wedding Day*

Sometimes with love comes the gift of union,
And if the lovers are allowed, and the love is able,
Families will call one another to a place such as this
To gather in the warmth of the wishes they share
And to make them on behalf of their children:

Keep them close and keep them safe;
Let this joining keep them joyous, even as years
Turn the sweetness of their longing
Into ordinary days. And if that friendship draws them
Out of happiness, let them return to the kiss

That was their first pleasure: the crossing of water
To claim a kinship, the variable partings
Blessed by returns, the tendering of words
And looks between them. This is that map back,
That place, that wish, that gift of union you deserve:

.

You let the dawn wake the dogs, and the dogs
Wake you both gently, so that one day is many days
In a home that is always beginning in love.
And if the answer, then, is Yes, that what I read
In the greeting card is true and the key to marriage

Is in watching children grow between you,
May you learn in your own time the meaning
Of that anchorage. And if it is a lie,
It is a good one, because the truth
Is in the way a boy smiles up to his mother

Or a father down to his girl, so that each knows
It is she who keeps his heart from breaking,
Even as he lets her go. So that one day
The door to his heart will open again
And it will be the whole of them walking through.

*Nico's sister Jessica is getting married October 15th, and she asked me to write a poem to read for the occasion and this is what I came up with. I'm so touched they're including me to this extent. I hope I don't faint.