46. [submitted]
You raise your face, snarling:
'Comment contenir le nègre?' Contain the black? Here's how I did it to you: I lay like a fresh puddle beckoning
soot to solution and Bombay cats to lap me up. You trotted up
and stepped in, and I—silent, bottomless and elastic—drank your foot
and it dissolved beneath your startled eyes.
How can you die and yet remain
strong enough to climb streetlights where lunas fail to find satisfaction?
How can I sit and expect to keep love I haven't earned or even
made a case for? You lowered yourself of your own accord but you can't
say why.
I don't have anything to bring you tonight except this milk,
mint chocolates and dumb veneration—and never did. I can't contain
a single limb. Your other foot sweeps overhead, and the one I tricked
and made plenty of room for is lifting itself back out, to follow.
Libérer les nègres! You've found your opening, and with the light you'll fly.
The way you still sit beside me reading tells me more about you than
all our time unclothed.
So much of you I'll never know. I could've run
with you immortally perhaps, a wild horse. Instead it's just goodbye.
47. [submitted]
A young manager, two masked thieves with guns and a safe full of money
is a recipe rich with drama because of what's hidden.
If all
three men knew they each had a boy and a girl of about the same age
maybe there's no drama but three proud fathers drinking a beer upstairs
at the bar: the thieves still have guns, the manager's still young and the safe's
full of cash but the guns stay hidden in their clothes and the focus is
on the snapshots of the six beloved children slid out of wallets
slipped out of their back pockets.
Several things hidden at this moment could
worsen the drama but they stay hidden and don't. The young manager
for example hides his racist rant and gets off with a cold-cocking
this time. There's a later episode in his life when the racism slips
on through but instead of getting what he deserves the woman he hurts
forgives him because she had thought pretty much the same thing about him
a week or so earlier but hidden it — so this big makeup sex
thing happened.
Reconciliation, she said,
is like the collapsing
of a dam. One day, she said,
there will just be a smooth-flowing river.48. [revision in Workshop]
But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. —Gospel of Matthew
I am 200 pounds
all of which the Catholic catechism
says
is tare:
and when I die
the weight of what I'll take
is zero
until
the general resurrection
when my spirit shall be reunited
with the 200 pounds
to either be punished
or rewarded with
qualities I lack now
making me subtle, agile, impassible
and bright.
On that glorious day
if I could succeed
in earning it
I should be attractive to you
and you
as my wife
should be to me.
Although it may seem trivial then
more of those pounds will be muscle
and fewer fat;
maybe the penis a little thicker;
you'd like that.
If it's torment I earn
I'm at a loss
as to why God would bother
or what exactly He plans
to do
because
I have already known
and lost what I
both tare and soul
most want:
lost hopelessly,
and by my
own sins of neglect.
I don't mean getting fat—
that followed my neglect
of you both tare and soul
as I rolled on
as if there was no judgment
curdling the milk
around our hearts
and blocking passion's blue current.
I don't fear His hell,
think heaven possible again,
believe a thing.
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