The opposite of Amnesia

If you're familiar with the stretch from then to now, or now to then,

if the moment eludes you, no matter how tight the grip of my hand

on your leg, if every second you don't need to learn how to live again,

if you tally every debt owed, every love unraveling, every humiliation

so complete only a psychiatric condition could explain forgetting,

then, you'll really feel the losses, and whichever losses your losses beget.

Eating dinner with my father for the last time before he died,

I stared at his gilded portrait high on the wall; turned to look at him:

sun-pocked, feeble, silent, just chewing and chewing and chewing.

That’s all I can recall.

Second Flight

When Noah sent the dove again,

giraffes butted the bulkheads,

two mice rubbed their paws,

zebras stamped their hooves,

and the ship was a riot of waiting.

Meanwhile, in the back of the ark,

Ham and his wife lay

grinning at each other, and fucking—

who cares if the flood was abating?

The man about Town

Once baptized with freedom, never at ease.

You’ll learn it the first time he makes a demand,

he’ll be damned by the choice to be damned or to please.

Before his merciless charm, I fell to my knees.

He drew back to strike me, and I kissed his hand.

Once baptized with freedom, never at ease.

He scoffs at death like a tyrant at treaties,

he lords over lovers like God over man,

he’ll be damned by the choice to be damned or to please.

When doubted, he bristles like burglarized bees.

Embraced, he withers like an armful of sand.

Once baptized with freedom, never at ease.

He loves a woman like a wished-for breeze;

Leaves devotion to the bourgeois and bland.

He’ll be damned by the choice to be damned or to please.

Like an ape who loots all her mate’s fleas,

he picks long enough to take what he can.

Once baptized with freedom, never at ease.

He’ll be damned by the choice to be damned or to please.

Villanelle

Occasionally our bodies unite,

lashed together, wordless, aware,

each with comprehensible grievances.

Then we begin to speak and repel

each other, babbling and unfazed;

but occasionally our bodies bring us closer

to our unplanned, hasty, earnest lives.

Leave night for night and day for day.

Be brave; fuse lips and limbs with hers,

or hers, or hers, or hers.

There is a weakness to raze.

A little tribute: what we do

with our bodies in the dark. Occasionally

we are able to understand one another.

It’s easy to wish for more.

Defending Vanity

Locked in the bathroom, shuffling plastic compacts

I pick or dismiss vacuoles of eye shadow and rouge.

My fingers, purveyors, dust powder across my cheek,

smudge and rub at my face’s colors, my faceless face.

Vanity, that’s all. My mouth, no longer my mouth,

flushed pomegranate. Seeds of black mascara melt

in the mucus at the corners of my eyes. Eve, too, occupied herself

when Adam’s industry and indignation grew too bothersome to ignore.

So I prod. So I pull. So I brush and coax my skin

until it, witless, cannot resemble me, and I watch

the mirror, invoking creation, brokering an epiphany.

On an unbearably hot Night

Apoplectic at the edge of a bare mattress,

my eyes boring holes

into the public housing across the street,

I am pillowless and sweating. No sleep.

From a concrete courtyard, a Puerto Rican man screams,

“CHICKEN SANDWICH” eight times

before his buddy hears.

“WHADDYA WANT ON IT?”

“WHATEVER YOU PUT ON YOURS!”

And then, one taut, love-torn, scrawny ligament rips

in me, rolls up elastically to where my heart should be,

twangs to my fingertips a small camaraderie.

So when I flip to look at you, whom I love and I do not love,

clutching the pillow you stole from under my head

to your rough, cratered skin, I don't keep on wondering,

why am I sleeping on a bare mattress in the projects?

Instead, I start collecting tiny surrenders in a nasty world

like Picasso sketches in a socialite’s bathroom.

Portrait of modern Energy

Bijan drops two dumbbells, the rubber floor rolls with reverberation.

In the locker room like a bomb shelter, I cringe at the false disaster.

Thin metal doors are clanging.

I hate the gym tableau: men lifting shirt sleeves to the mirror,

grunting appraisals, anorexics galloping on jangling machines.

By accident, one looks at me. Her eyes are indistinctly desperate,

the energy she’s expended in the last three hours could generate

enough power to light the building.

What would our forebears make of such willful waste,

shut away in a basement, all urgent labor leaking into air,

useless as an empty oven left lit in the night?

A list of things to burn to prove that my heart is Broken

Lady Brett Ashley, I burn you.

I burn Chelsea Hotel, No.2.

I burn Bilbao, Melville, Salinger,

I burn you all, regrettably.

Renfe, the Spanish rail system.

Hemingway, San Sebastian,

the running of the bulls.

Cordoba’s languid, mercurial afternoons.

A white-washed Andalucian boarding house.

So much beauty, so abused.

I like to imagine a return—

purified, phoenix of symbols.

What then? Will these tatters turn on me?

As the convalescent laid on white sheets

in his paper gown, pickling in intravenous chemicals,

who resigns to imagine his corpse in the pyre;

finally delights in the notion of an end.

But then, he survives.

Does he hate the force that left him alive?