deceleration

Slip of the Ear

“This is the museum of absinthe.
You may not enter.” --Frank de Waehle

All the great Impressionists were notorious
drunks. Their world was a blur of absence,
their paintings that now hang in museums,
reflecting off the marble floors are just blurred products
of their dissolving brains and livers. Each room
is a party to which the viewer isn’t invited,

scenes from a stranger’s head. But those invited
into the world of high art become notorious
because we just assume that in a world where there is little room
for genius they have slipped in by the back door. Our absence
from the bohemian universe of snobbism, books and organic products
turns us green with envy when we go into museums.

I have been to too many museums,
too many Renoirs in a row, too many uninvited
offers of pretzels and mind-altering products
along the marble steps up to greatness. Those pills are notorious
for making us see the world in disconnected photographs/impressions, in the absence
of the tendons of movement. I have no room

in my life for such detachments. My room
at home is littered with ticket stubs and receipts from museums
that I keep taking out of my pockets, and old absence
notes from parties that I wasn’t even invited
to... You see, I am notorious
for not abusing all those “health care” products

and I only smoke Cuban cigars. Foreign products
have something classy about them, something that leaves room
for the imagination to roam freely through the notorious
folds of the brain. We can find its way in the canned brains of convicts on display at
science museums,
but I know your head so well that my fingers, uninvited
(they’re just there) can trace the path of your thoughts on your skull, temples. In your absence

I try to replay God, remold your face out of clay, get drunk on absence
like the Impressionists, so that I, like the Impressionists, can create desirable art products
and display them at exclusive exhibitions to which you won’t be invited,
because I’ll be so famous that there won’t be enough room
for my lover to stand beside me. All the museums
will want me. I will become notorious,

a notorious high-class whore and dealer of absence,
forgetfulness and similar products, relics of the human mind’s living museum.
Art will be personally invited up to my room.

Sacrilege

I am moving down
the highway at 100 miles or kilometers per hour and God
lounges in the back seat. I ask to stoop
to more familiar terms, forget formality. (Rain
curves around the windshield, threatening
to come in. I clutch the steering wheel
and look ahead.) Voice falling
in step with the wiper-beat, god leans
forward and murmurs, “how about we pull
into the bushes and fuck?” Soon we’re out of the passing lane
and in heaven; the rearview mirror shows no frightened animal-eye
headlights, steams up before any round the bend. Finally,
god is the real thing, no longer some hitchhiker I picked up
back by exit 69 because I was lonely and subconsciously longed
to be raped. After minutes and minutes, I
notice suddenly that he is hard
and cold and carved out of marble or something, think
where the hell did I steal a statue? Palms wet with fear
I try to slide out from under him, but he is stone and crushing
my breasts, bruising my stomach. His knee digs into my left
thigh and I manage to unlock the door with groping toes and heave
the shining perfect rock-thing into the wet grass; step on the gas and
the car skids once again onto slick gray road. Back there, behind the secretly
sexual inverted-triangle French “yield” sign (commanding:
cedez le passage!), his perfect ass sinks into the mud and raindrops
pool in his belly-button. I lengthen the kilometers between us into miles,
and, far enough away to go unanswered
and unheard, roll down the windows and shout
his name. Everything is dark and flashing by so fast
the speed-limit signs all add up to about a thousand
and all I can think is “why hast thou forsaken me?”

Binge

A girl has a sudden desire to eat cinnamon. She longs for
the feel of the spice-motes pressing against her taste-buds.
Even the sounds of these words are arousing, recall what
seemed like hours of playing with one lock of hair, caressing
a single ear or finger. She gets the jar and unscrews the cap.
It is a plastic jar with a lid that has holes in the shape of a star
for sprinkling cinnamon evenly. She tries carefully to spread a
thin blanket across her palm, but her hand is shaking a little so
it comes out as a soft brown hill. The girl doesn’t mind. She
puts the cover back on, but doesn’t screw it shut in case she wants
it later. This is the way she used to eat sugar when she was little,
slowly, layer by layer, hand to tongue, but this is finer and lighter
and darker than sugar-grains. The girl licks her palm clean and
reaches for the jar to have some more. She thinks she can feel the
cinnamon flowing in her blood. It tickles a little along the insides
of her ribs and wrists. It is nearly three in the morning and she sits
at the dining room table consuming cinnamon. She is thirsty, so she
brews some cinnamon with hot water and drinks.

Why is it cinnamon? She wonders what it stands for, what uses has it
been put to historically, whether this would be something good to write
about, the symbolism of pure cinnamon, or impure cinnamon because
she starts to imagine what it would be like to kiss a boy with cinnamon
on his tongue. Oh, she wants to try it, to play the game of mouths sharing
each other’s thirsty cinnamon. For those kinds of kisses she wouldn’t be
afraid to close her eyes. She wouldn’t care how the cinnamon got there,
how silly the two of them would look, pausing to sprinkle some more into
each others’ mouths and then resuming the kissing. If it goes any further
than kissing, she imagines that the places where his mouth has touched
her skin she will be marked with auburn stains, faint smears that she won’t
want to wash off. For one wild moment she wants to take all the remaining
cinnamon and turn her body into a roadmap for the boy’s lips. But it is
nearly four. All the cinnamon is making her head feel heavy, and she needs
to save the rest for later, because tomorrow she is baking cookies in the hope
that the way to a boy’s heart is through his stomach. The red cap of the jar
has rolled between the table’s legs. The smell of cinnamon is thick along the
floor, a puddle merging the girl with the darkness. Exhausted by the cinnamon,
the girl sprawls with her stomach against the table edge and her thoughts fallen
into dreaming. She has lost control of her hands and knocks over the jar so that
when she wakes the spilled spice will have been blown away. She will go and
brush her teeth, wonder why her hands and face look darker, and when the shower
water fully wakes her up she will cry out because the last bit of the color is
forever mixed into warm water, because the last swirl is twisting down and away.

to have
the beggar comes in and whines, whines and comes in closer and the car shakes and you can smell the orange through the paper bag. smell, touch ripeness and you offer him the slice you knew he wouldn’t take because the juice is already possessed by you, blood-brother to your sticky fingers, palms, wrists. getting off at your stop, leave a fragrant rind-ribbon curled in the empty seat. and if you put a finger to your lips in thought or silencing, the taste at the tip is citrus—bitter.
and have not
if morning and you find seeds hard and swollen under your tongue, you know immediately you have dreamed of oranges, and woken too late...

twirling

Silent and solemn, about
and about they face. sunset sits
at the tip of her tongue—tastes
gasoline, cigarette smoke and loneliness. loveliness
lies in the crook of her arm, in the turn
of her neck, dormant, prostitutes
sleeping curled-up in doorways and sucking their fingers
will show her the secret of traveling out of herself, the loss
of some passionate hours.
crepe-paper petals of unearthly flowers will dance
at the teetering steps of her salsa shoes, settle
to cover her footprints, and leave only his.
when they have finished their talk of Picasso
and past entanglement, nothing is left
for the stroll back along the green river,
where lovers sit, dangling their toes in the water,
also Silent

Monsters

When no one is home at night, and I approach
the handle of my door I am afraid
of finding something tall and green-eyed
inside. Something with an evil grin
and long fingers. Such creatures hover outside
the bathroom window when I take a shower, if
I close my eyes.
Soap-suds and shampoo-lather do not deter them,
though both are scented and bitter.

In bed, I hear them whisper
that they love the way I compound words—
door-handle, tree-branch, flower-stem—
subtly wrong, a sign
that I do not belong here with the proper-
tongued girls doing homework near a vase of putrefying
orchids, blooming blossoms on a slimy stem, and anthers curling
their long white tongues out of withered pink carnations.

Their world has the smell of caves and fur and incense, spices
that my mother never used. They hold me, tenderly, smooth
hands down shivering shoulders and arms,
then spin around once, turn
fanged and cat-clawed, swoop
away into the darkness, leave
me stone-clutching on a ledge.
And I wait for them...

Kitchen-dreams

Mother is all apron-strings and bathrobe-belt tied in back,
and long fingers that I would tangle and tangle
into knots that never stayed, and sprang
apart to braid my hair into thin-plaited rows. In summer,
she comes, towel slung over shoulder, military-style, policing
the close kitchen for presumptuous intruders. Casualties
fall like flies, are flies,
at the crack of her oft-laundered whip. Small bodies
upside-down, inverted periods sprouting black wiry commas
of insect-legs.
Buzz and crack and silence.
Clatter and then something green and broken,
the etching of a fall leaf split
along the central vein, with spring showing through autumn,
and shards of porcelain grit like snowflakes on slate-blue tile,
white and sharp.

wisp

if I were to sit on a rotting tree-stump
in the curling humidity of the thin strip of forest
between the river and the road,
laying square words, one by one, into my open notebook
and then jump up, startled by the sudden coming of a train
would the words fall apart,
and letters come tumbling down to lie prone on the tracks?

would the ghosts of spiderwebs turn to steel and bar my escape,
thin metal strands crisscrossing the muddy path?

Time

I’ve tried my hand at different ways of molding time.
The only thing that’s changed is my hand, holding time.

Long ago I read accounts of a freer universe,
a world where people move by wrinkling and folding time.

Once you have traced the beauty in the pattern,
that thread dissolves, and there is no use scolding Time.

Spring, winter, summer—seasons old and trite.
I only love the fall, that bright and coldening time.

Press pause for coma, stop for suicide—
all but fast forward work as ways of jolting time.

All grown-ups have symptoms of that disease;
only Peter Pan knows the cure, for he was told in time.

Frightened, the shape-shifter, the runner shrinks into the darkness,
there is no escape—he is beholding Time.

She promises she’d rather die than be like that...
Don’t worry, Olga— you, too, will grow old, in time.

No fury like a woman scorned

I know not by what low, unholy craft
you learned, at last, the science of geography
and the geometry of tangent human bodies.
So tell me, darling, did you really lie
about those tens of times that you got lost
on your way here, and wandered (alone, you said) through the darkness in the rain,

on nights when it didn’t rain?
Do you take pride in your devious craft?
Have you made up for all the time you lost
with me? Could you still brave the perils of geography
to find your way into the messy room where we would lie
together? Did you enjoy your long parade of bodies,

the way you claimed to have enjoyed my mind? Those bodies,
hair dripping water, lashes holding drops of rain,
those sodden paper dolls?! Do you remember how you said we’d lie
and watch the stars from the bottom of some unseaworthy craft,
give ourselves up to the mercy of geography,
drift aimlessly, try to become thoroughly lost?

You might assure yourself that all is not yet lost,
that we will reach a violent of bodies
some stormy night, unhindered by geography,
that you are still my magnetic north. Keep dreaming, dear! Tomorrow it will rain,
and you can think of why I’m gone, and you can craft
a thousand explanations, each a lie.

Come, did you really need your constant lie?
You should have realized at once that I had lost
any suspicion of you, darling, that your craft
had lulled me, that those moments when our bodies
touched I’d melt like sugar in the summer rain,
sweet and metallic... Was the geography

of my soul just too complex for someone who can’t even read a city map? But your geography
was just another tool to help your lie...
And now, I stand in the rain,
(truly alone), and look for people lost,
seek out the humans in the crush of bodies.—
Darling, I’m learning my own craft.

Winter Nocturne

The taste of blood metallic on my tongue,
the smell of smoke infused into my hair,
my fingertips are pricked by icy air,
scratched by the branches where the Christmas lights are hung.

There are no shadows—lines are sharp and dark,
and rows of houses, so correct in sleep
are silent. Only moving branches keep
responding as the wind caresses cold-chapped bark.

Returning from a party late at night,
I bite my lips and shiver from the cold,
forget my gloves… The night is growing old.
The stars and moon burn hard and cold and bright.

Awakening

The world is slow and graceful in the dark
before the sunrise, where the shadows lie.
I reach instinctively for nighttime’s dying spark,

and close my eyes to block the paling sky.
I fumble with the fragments of my dreams.
Before the sunrise, where the shadows lie,

dark lingers in the corners and the seams
of windy streets and lines of sleeping trees.
I fumble with the fragments of my dreams.

This quiet place, this quiet moment frees
my mind for taking in the sound and sight
of windy streets and lines of sleeping trees.

But windows tear the fabric of the night,
chase it away—such images torment
my mind for taking in the sound and sight,

for watching, silent, as the silk was rent.
The world is slow and graceful in the dark.
Chase it away, such images torment!
I grope instinctively for nighttime’s dying spark.

Missive to a Beloved Loser

You kissed her in the corner of the mouth, in
the hall, in full view, roughly.
I turned away and turned my thoughts to mud.

We walked on, and you continued telling me
about the book that you were reading, the
book of essays about our twisted

collectivist post-world-war
world ruled by the masses, your book
with the view of a naked woman from the back on the front

cover, with its thick, narrow pages, brittle, yellowed, old.
I saw you kiss her, saw her, was her
in my dream—but that was when

you kissed me just to get away, in secret,
ashamed. I was ashamed, too,
now, of the frizzy white threads of hope

caught up in my curls. She has straight hair and straight
seams running down her pant-legs, and it seemed
like you were looking at her the way you always look at me,
aqua-eyed, smiling.

Amour, armor, love

Qui t’a laissé ici toute seule
Key: tall, a sea-taut soul
who has left you here all alone,

jeune, blessée, folle de cet homme
June-blessed, fall-decent, home-
young, wounded, crazy about this man.

heureuse des ondes du passée?
You rose, descended, passed... Head
happy with the waves of the past,

pulse sticktickticking.

The Milkman’s Bastard Son

Mommy would stay at home,
wiping dust off the table and using up boxes of brownie mix.
Dad was somewhere, selling vacuum cleaners and buying beer,
or cheap cigarettes to smoke outside on the dilapidated porch,
extinguishing the stubs on the seat of the wicker armchair.
The milk truck would stand parked outside the house,
and sticky bottles drew the flies
in droves to our back door. The engine idled.
And the neighbors watched.

Mommy stopped buying milk and washing dishes,
and wore her housecoat on trips to the ice cream parlor for banana splits,
paying with grimy dimes and nickels from the penny jar on the kitchen table.
Dad sat in pubs with bloodshot eyes and big fists hanging helpless at his sides,
spilling his heart to strangers over salted peanuts.
Mrs. Rinaldo from the house next door
heard shouts at night, and sobs that echoed
between the leafless oak trees in the yard.

Mommy went on a trip, and came back skinny
with a bassinet in one hand, and the other
sticking a cigarette between unpainted lips as she stood on the frayed welcome mat,
fishing in pockets for a key.
Dad got demoted to a traveling salesman
and came back home on Sundays for bacon-and-egg breakfasts
with sideways glances glancing off the highchair.
Mrs. Rinaldo gossiped at her dinner table,
and told her boys to stay away from me,
the boy with the bad Mommy and the scuffed sneakers.

Mommy started buying milk again,
pouring me two glasses each morning with my corn flakes.
Dad called at two a.m. while on a run down south
to say that he was never coming back.
Mommy put on too much lipstick and pair of heels
and told me to go play with Johnny from next door,
and sat at the window and waited,
fidgeting with the curtain in her lap.

Commute

Subway cars are parentheses, holding people-scraps in carefully cupped hands thrusting: forward, an unwanted gift bursting out of sliding doors finally opened,; rising from grates heavenwards.
It is a tiny universe with fragile lines between the stars, threads of: strangewise gazes easily broken, averted, blocked; by book and papershields.
Whenever possible, people separate by seats and seats and veils of: “personal space”—finding the center of the largest circle of nothingness is; a science, an art, an intuition.
Rush-hour, the sixth sense fails, and all of us condense: into the shallows of a sweaty palm.

stranger’s arm at eye level in a crowded subway car

flesh.

I want to put my finger on the inside of the wrist
and slide it slowly, lightly up the forearm
so that it tickles.

I want to trace the veins
over and over again
with my thumbnail,

to watch the biceps ripple back and forth,
to watch the bending and unbending of the elbow,
to touch the knob made by the wishbone.

I wish
the train would lurch and I would smell the soap
and sunshine maybe lingering on smooth-tanned skin.
flesh.
I need the palm to cover
mine, and press it to the frigid metal of the bar.

I need the fingers
to trace my lips and eyes and lips and lips and lips
more intimately than a kiss.

part ii back