Son                              

And he was a son, wasn’t he, firstborn, given to anchoring, to rooting a man, the father. And he had a mother did he not who was the water roots need unrooted in herself. Straw spun toward goal in the apple light—he is fruit and seed between branch and earth. The sky suffers the ground to imitate it.

*

All light like luck comes from elsewhere, shaped or sacrificed or spilled among shadows that need it, leaves, to breathe. By your leave I am your son. By my caul I accede to sonhood’s crippling rays. Sit down and taste this meat, bare forked from the soil you sprang from. A test of sibilance, serpent to say mine.

*

Dream of earth in town: all brown, the streets teeming with UPS men. Everyone tracks a package into and out of doors. All strangers exchanging gifts they’ll never open for others correctly wrapped and labeled. I exchange a small box for a big box, the big box for a bigger box. When the time is right I find an alley to set the box on its end in. I scan the barcode and step inside.

*

Hair long as a woman’s, my mother, but curled. An electric field’s fluid inward. She danced round a cup of coffee, eyes down. Smoke drifted from the wrists of her coat like ruffs. And what are you to me, she sang, and what are you to me. Salted away beneath the table to hear her toes tap the top. And what are you to me, my son, and what are you to me.

*

A sandwich stops this singing. All afternoon he watched atoms get stuck on the window like flies. Everyday the sun paints his house with another layer of thinnest light. The world becomes more visible, less accessible. Coming and going not going, wenting. As heat comes and goes with the forced air gone. The urge to count syllables. To count pairs of headlights catching the headboard, head-on collision with lights from the ear.

*

To play a part in the pageant bespeakes a bespoke inheritance: her hair, his lips. Her bones, his heat. Her mask, his mask upside-down. Her refraining kiss, his tennis strokes. A dry moistening of wet parchment, papier-macheing the skull. Which if made was well-made to contain and interact. Hope’s a bone home balancing on top of a parade float and an arm to wave its way. Paddling to spare the creek’s child.

*

Given: a present. A perspective-glass. Toward the son or daughter to be disclosed later. Behind a shadow getting longer: shadow of the coast, shadow of a sea. A singularity fixing to be solved by the discovery of time like parts per million of gold in a cubic mile of sea. You will be me, will to be yours, a went won’t will when disclosed by an advocate. My end.

*

Some bark for that tree. Some lunge for the falling apple. Some wait for inspiration. The pathos of this is passing.

*

His egg is a jail I sprang.

Le ciel des vacances                

I was delivered to an idealism: no seashore. Though “gulls.” Though “flotsam.” What use this deal of dunes to the dresser of deal? Exactly an avenue spreads its fronds to define a space for the eye to wander. The eye that fetches an image home. Two notes collided in a beam to be you, coughing. A trapdoor sprang for me, a ship went down.

*

Try to be less falutin’: it’s a nice place to visit. Brooklyn loosely mazes me and finds me a stoop to sit on. The New Year breathes tsunami news: not senseless. A man on the radio carefully distinguishes between the sounds of breaking and bursting glass. Drinking. Now it’s all political, now it’s getting all over my hands.

*

No pies to divide sang the bandaged clerk. Love passes with Artie Shaw like the advertising blimp in Blade Runner: yes, freshen my dystopia. The rain of rain falls samely to be rain. Crowds collect on the dewframe. This loneliness won’t stick. So I fought for a preserve for the wings that sheltered your face.

*

Lost in place. Even cigarettes are honest in the lips of an angry drag queen. Death dressed as a woman as usual. In my dream hand in hand we ran down into the beach’s well, our bare feet skipping lightly over pursed upturned shells. A shadow haunts these memories. Overtaken on the way out just as usual. Squeegee report at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel—escape with New York down the eyepatch hole.

*

Pleasure needs no introduction to a man in a filigreed waistcoat bearing a watchless fob. Dandy of the intellect kiss me hard on my chapped lips. We are running in place to stay here as the wave taps us on the shoulder. Our eyes caught by compacts in each other’s manicured hands. Once twice three times a lady gave birth: ladymass. Once a gentleman swallowed his eyeteeth in surprise as a dropped stitch. Bang buh-bang the bullets bounce.

*

Old wolf of the plateaus. Doctors under the influence. The presence of life on Mars. Europe, milk, hospice. Redeployed for the public trust. High salaries for high health. A power that needs no reminder. Repetition isn’t rust.

*

Minima mooring, whale crawl, subsonic chaser. The dance troupe pursued through twilit shoals. Academy gymnastics leave emo in the dust. On wave-tops. Invented shallow bathtub shook so noise ensures. Shock born bebop. Ocean crumples to become a flung cracked chorus of underwater stars. I hope we. I sin she. Banshee news.

*

Shapely I tongued thee, I found you foundered shape. Swimmingly I oared thee, I rocked you over the tidal. Sweetly I anchored thee, I bound you to promising sandbars. Heavenly choir buoy-borne. The ladder of extended arms in arrangement, splashed by your azure cynicism. Ladder of the folded brow. The discovery of underwater earth. We are moved.