Unbecoming

That fist against
the diaphragm
pressing for release
is not a parasitic monster
to be jack-in-the-boxed in,
but the shape of her,
a shadow of him,
knuckling to leap
at halfway


And a true fanatic
of true-blue love
will disown
all tongue-tied parables,
cheek her
pharmaceuticals,
and choose instead
to show and spread
a mouth full
of matchsticks
tucked between
two
gunpowder
legs


You find destruction
distasteful?
You find it
hopelessly
helpless,
depraved,
and
selfish?

So does he,
so might she,
with all the
crusted consideration
and fleshless discretion
for dots
to be
connected,
protected,
lied to,
invested


But as carbon breath
freed into its hell cell
of dioxide eyes darkened,
yet unblackened by shame,
love’s skin is as
pure as a
dew of daydreams
kissing its
sulfur blade

-----

The artwork is Klimt's "Danaë."
The poem's inspiration was my
re-reading of Henry & June.

Walking into Stillness

“You know what I loved most about my time there?”

“What?”

“The absence,” she said. “The total absence of all the usual crap.”

“They didn’t have the internet?”

“No.”

“Television?”

“Uh huh.”

“It wasn’t boring?”

“It was a relief. My mind was quiet, free. There was nothing pressing. No advertisements for perfect beaches in the Caribbean. No guilt or desire that stretched my reach. No sense that life was elsewhere. It was here. I was here.” She placed her palm over her diaphragm. “I’ve never experienced a greater solitude. Or been less lonely.”

“But what did you do?”

“I cried at first.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Like a baby.”

“Why was that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Huh.”

“And then I walked. I walked for miles. I walked until I could feel my unhappiness . . . detach. Until I felt all those snarled chains float free.”

Her friend dropped his gaze to her tennis shoes. Some of the seams gaped. A big toenail peeked through.

He cleared his throat.

“So why did you come back to us? To all the craziness?” His voice wavered. “To . . . me?”

She touched his shoulder, but he pulled away. Reaching for a drink on the coffee table.

“You were never a chain,” she said, eyes seeking his. “Never. You were just one of the roots to lead me back home.”

He coughed himself into a blush. Definitely needing a couple sips from that drink.

“If we were in a TV movie, they’d cut to commercial break now,” he finally said.

“True. Women would be crying. Men would be all stoic and strong-eyed.”

“Thank God I’m a man.”

“I embarrassed you,” she said.

“No! I mean . . . no.” He scratched his nose and leaned back into the cushion. “You were just getting all Dalai Lama on my ass there for a minute. That's all.”

She laughed and put a finger over her lips.

“Okay. We never had this conversation.”

“Or if we did, we were stoned.”

“Completely gored out of our heads.”

“High on shrooms.”

“High on love and truth. Truth in love.”

They were silent for a moment. Him sloshing ice cubes in that drink. Palms protecting a chill.

“Why is it so hard to say these things?” he asked quietly.

“It wasn’t," she said. "I wanted to say them.”

He set down the drink and hooked a foot on the opposite knee. Fingers peeling at the tread of his boot.

“Then why is it so hard for me to accept them?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

She smiled at him. He saw it light her eyes.

“But I’m telling you, anyway.”

----

This piece is dedicated to all my friends,
and particularly to The Walking Man
and Cat, whose words and paintings
this week were the light
and inspiration.

Barefoot in Bach

I want to write about music tonight.

No, that’s not right. I want to play music tonight.

But since my skills are fairly feeble at the piano, and my kids are soaking up some gamma rays from the television, I will try to write about music instead.

And completely fail to do it justice.

There must be a reason for this divide. For the distance between words and notes, and the emotional effects they conjure in us.

Writers have to design emotion like a slow and meticulous spider spinning its web. It’s an intellectual process, at its very foundation. Readers absorb words in a similar way. Poetry—particularly free verse—is the closest we writers can get to being the conduits, and not the architects. While music . . . well, music is IV emotion shooting straight to the heart.

Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

If books and film are story-driven and wide, music is moment-contingent and deep. Complete immersion. Suspension. What I choose to listen to often shapes my mood like liquid being poured into an elastic and evolving reservoir. A song’s meaning is also layered by its past listenings, until we are moving through a grand canyon of visceral memory. In one sense, the emotion a song conjures deepens with every play (until we’ve worn it out, that is), and nostalgia is often the space/time harmony accompanying the melody itself.

So anyway. Where was I going with this again?

I’ve been listening to Bach lately. Specifically, his Goldberg Variations. More specifically, Glenn Gould’s impassioned, if eccentric, recordings of the Goldberg Variations.

And what does it conjure? Well, to explain it is to dilute its essence. It’s draining the immediacy of that liquid immersion. But I’ll try, anyway.

There is a bright, glassy clarity to Bach’s sound. Even his more melancholy variations have such a strength of structure stabilizing them that I know I’ll never be opened up too wide, or dragged too low. If I close my eyes while listening to the Goldberg Variations, I’m barefoot in the summer grass, feeling the cool specificity of each blade underfoot, as I walk, tiptoe, or dash across the lawn (not a field or wilderness—that’s too overgrown and hopelessly wandering for Bach).

I like its pure lines. The transfer of structure and calm (if only in the moment, alas). My thoughts may wander to the clouds while listening to Bach, but my heart is centered in my chest, and again, my feet are earth-bound.

Bach is a soothing balm when thoughts have become too overheated and unwound.

Yet music can also be emotionally dangerous. There is a darker landscape of song that not only shapes our mood, but saturates it to the point of masochism and pain. How can it wield such a power over us? Power that even the most beloved book cannot hope to duplicate for immediate impact.

And more intriguingly, why on earth would we invite it?

So many parts of our lives are not pliable. They’re fixed, like the bricks in a wall. Or the words on a page. Which provides stability and continuity, but also limits our freedom. Yet there are no barriers to where our hearts and souls might wander when we close our eyes, and press play. Or if, by some stroke of enviable fortune, we can play an instrument ourselves. It’s intoxicating to travel in that canyon, if also slightly treacherous for what it seems to paint on our lids and promise in the other world. For what it fails to deliver when our eyes snap back open at the end of the song, and only white silence embraces us.

Most of the great rock and pop songs are about desire of some sort. It’s no surprise. Desire is restless, fluid. Desire is eternal. And so is music.

We are not, but want to be. We desire desire. We want to live in the canyons of songs. Forever.

So have I gotten anywhere here with all of this? I don’t know. All that water seems to have slipped through my fingers . . . my web.

Aw, screw it.

Just listen to Bach, and kick off your shoes with me.

Tabula Rasa

I feel it as a phantom limb,
this splayed uncertainty
that’s not quite there
but nonetheless spins my wheel,
this mad rustle of shapeshifter leaves
rooting for summer’s pruney teat,
a ghostly visitation that watches
everything
but refuses to say
or own the squirmy fear it makes

A vampire choked
around my neck
with garlic breath
and heart of smoke

Enough; no more.
Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

I’m disgusted with it all.

I’m disgusted with me.


You wanna know how to kill a bloodsucker?


Get up off those knees, and

Drive a fucking stake through it.

Deleted (LW)

Pulled for Submission

Arrondissement Unknown: Paris Equinox

A clock is ticking.

I see your body’s outline before the hotel window. The traffic has thinned with the hour. A breeze curls the curtains, and slides across my skin like a ghostly lover.

(The only perfect love, in life or fiction, is love denied.)

Already naked, you approach the bed. Your eyes are everywhere. The part of me that’s been waiting so long for this—for us—falls upon their sword.

I am reborn into eggshell arms.

Are my breasts too small? Thighs too plump? My hips too too?

(The only perfect love, in life or fiction, is)

Your touch cracks my fear. You stroke my thighs with a blind man’s fingers. Flesh grips viscera, claws air. Your lips descend, testing a knee’s hairpin trigger. My toes twist around your lower spine. My mouth opens, chin tipping high.

Shadows, shadows everywhere.

Seconds s     p         r            e                a                    d

(The only perfect love, in)

Your mouth searches higher, slowing. Heat flows like a kerosene sin. Your tongue slips between my—

(LIFE)

I clutch at sheets, your hands pinning wrists. My back arches, breasts flatten. Tears squeeze from blue, blue irises. Black-hole mouths explode into

Everywhere, stars.

(The only love)

I cry your

(perfect)

name.

You hear me.


***


I push deeper inside you.

(mine)

Your hair falls around, shielding my face from the window’s cold light. Your knees spread wider, hips grinding harder.

And, softer yet.

I can still taste you. My mouth is filled with your taste. Your lips find mine.

(touch what is mine)

Tasting, too.

Your voice breathes into my ear, baptizing me not with water, but fire. An always, surrendering fire. My nails clutch at your hips, digging you deeper into me until we both touch the heart of the pain that was always there, if hiding.

I groan.

Your scream is a silent shudder.

(touch what is not mine)

I’m choking on your hair. Your long, lovely hair. The air leaks from me, and my eyes smear over with

Stars, everywhere.

(I touch what is not mine)

I push you up. Gently. Away from me. You keep me locked inside. My fingers somewhere lose your skin. I look past your shoulder, into a hotel mirror. It reflects the white of your back in a Paris dreamlight.

I do not recognize the eyes staring back at me.

I do not

(I cannot touch what is not mine.

The clock.


The clock is ticking.

Arrondissement 7: Musée d'Orsay

“I have just one question for you, Mathieu.”

His voice could squeeze the oil from the canvases.

“What can I do to get you behind a camera again?”

I laughed one of those Hollywood laughs. Just to mess with him.

“That’s simple. Turn back the clock twenty years,” I said. “Or pay me in Manets and Van Goghs.”

I ignored the wall of Renoirs, so he followed me into the next gallery.

“Jesus," he said. "You won Best Director at Cannes. Twice! You were a national treasure. Godard’s successor. You could have been--”

Footsteps falling. Like water dripping into a cistern.

Drip.

Drip.

I turned like a man, suddenly thirsty.

Tall.

Dark hair.

Summer-scented dress.

Legs like a fractured laugh.

Color flaking off her toenails.
Electron-pink snowflakes.
Dusting the heart's eyelash.

When she stopped to examine my favorite painting in the gallery, her head tilted to the side. Her hair slipped off her neck. The lady in the painting copied her. Who wouldn't?

Her eyes slid over to brush mine with wet color.

Desire,desire,desire
Loud longing in a hush-hush cave
Building cresting breaking
Submission surrender squeezed
Broken
A tangled eddy of gorgeous pain
Sucking to swirl me up again

“So there’s nothing I can do to convince you?” his voice broke in.

I blinked.

Her eyes danced away. Like a pretty Degas.

“Mathieu?”

She moved into the next gallery.

Drip.

Drip.

I let her go.

I turned to my hustler friend and put a hand on his shoulder. “Frederick, do you know what my favorite part of a film is now? And I’m talking any film.”

“What’s that?”

“Those black scratches right before the first shot.”

I let him ponder that while examining the painting her eyes had touched. Some brushstrokes earlier.

“It’s the one movie I could watch over and over again. I’ve even given it a title. Want to hear it?”

He shrugged, and glanced at his watch. While I looked toward an artless doorway.

“The Greatest Story Never Told.”

Deleted (ND)

Arrondissement 6: The Latin Quarter

God. The way he fanned himself with that tour book. The summer sun had spent itself, and the temperature had dropped to seventy-some degrees. Not ninety.

But then, he’d gained a few pounds over the last forty years.

“Can you pass the sugar?” he said.

“What was that?”

The jazz pianist kicked it up in the bar. The music spooled into their candlelit terrace like a memory of silver. The restaurant’s eponymous lilacs were no longer in season, but the shrubs were pleasant enough.

“The sugar. Oh, never mind,” he said, and reached across their table for the packet.

“Sorry. It’s the music. And all the conversation.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’d prefer it quiet.”

Yes. That much was obvious.

He poured the sugar into his coffee. Under the table, she pressed the fork's tines into the tip of her finger.

I’m in La Closeries des Lilas, she reminded herself. The very same café where Hemingway drained his early works like a stopcock left open. (And hadn’t Papa’s image graced their menus, looking vaguely amused by all his new dignity?) The heart of the Latin Quarter, where artists, writers, and vagabonds swapped ideas and stories, in lieu of money.

But these furnishings—the mahogany tables with brass plates bearing the expensive names of famously dead patrons—reminded her of a leather-bound book. The self-consciously old kind, with gold-leaf lettering. Written in a dead language she could no longer fathom.

“How was your duck?” she asked.

He shrugged and scanned the room.

“We’ve had better back home. This place gets by on its nostalgia factor. But the Lilas of ’68 was very different.”

“Yes, it was,” she said, because she could think of nothing else. She looked past the red roses whose edges were browning, and directly into the candle’s flame, until she could bear its burn no more.

She closed her eyes.

There was revolution on the streets, and in their hearts.

It was '68, and the students at the Sorbonne were revolting against the establishment. Revolting against the double-jointed billy club of conservatism and a stale morality. Revolting just because they were young and alive and wanted to add the swell of their voices to the ferment.

And because they chose Paris for their honeymoon, she and Jake were like driftwood catching fire over a waterfall become kerosene. They couldn't ignore the burn, and soon, they didn’t want to. With their new comrades, they shouted protests in French, and seized on signs whose messages held more power for their mystery.

Une jeunesse que l’avenir inquiete trop souvent

All these words. Like marbles spilling from new mouths. And Paris listened. Throats turned raw, and people got bloodied. But they kept pushing. They couldn’t shout loud enough.

Later, back in the hotel, they couldn’t fuck hard enough. They drained every drop from the cup, and went back for more. Always more. Always, always—

She took a sip of her wine, and set the glass down.

He chuckled softly across the candlelight.

“What?” she asked.

“I was just thinking. Of that night in ’68.”

He reached across the table and brushed the inside of her wrist with his fingers. Her blood sweetened to the touch.

“Me too,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

His lips curved up on either side. She understood that smile to be the scale of their marriage—weighing one part love, against one part regret. The balance dipped back and forth.

He patted her hand and returned to his dessert.

But rubbing her thumb over the nameplate on their table, she could finally hear words from the ghost she’d hunted.

The sun also rises.

She raised her wrist to her mouth. Tasting the grains of sugar.

---

The words from the 1968 protest read,
A Youth Disturbed Too Often By the Future:

Arrondissement 18: Montmartre

Every night, he walked through her wall. And left by the door, before morning dawned.

“Will you stay this time?” she asked.

He touched her face in response.

“What do you do by day?” she said into his palm. “Who do you hold?”

He loosened her hair from its bindings.

“I only live for the night,” she said, as his mouth took the pulse of her neck. “When the gypsy starts his song, that is when I come a—”

He found her lips, and stopped the words. But couldn’t still the thoughts behind them.

The next afternoon, she slipped through the streets of Montmartre to track him. He must have a name, and friends. She imagined him working an ordinary job, doing ordinary things. He saved the extraordinary for her. But it wasn’t enough. She wanted the sun, and the moon. Her days felt too dark.

She couldn’t find him. Nobody knew a thing. He was a ghost without a scent, the cross-hatched alleyways a map without a destination.

That night, he eased through her wall again. After the gypsy started plucking that shimmery guitar.

“How do you do it?” she demanded. “I need to know.”

He looked at her, and smiled. With the trust of a child for his mother.

“You already know, my love,” he said, and took her once again.

Outside, a bottle shattered on the streets, as men stumbled from the adjacent bar to work out the violence in their hearts and loins. The gypsy’s guitar fell silent. A woman screamed. Coarse laughter haunted her echo, and danced with it under the moon's shadow.

The new lights of Paris never touched the dark hill of Montmartre.

He moved inside of her, but she only felt the emptiness to come. She knew then that she could no longer hold him far, or near.

The walls of her mind closed in.

The next evening, she waited outside for his arrival. The gypsy squatted next to the bar’s entrance. She edged closer to him.

“Will you play for me tonight?” she said.

He did not look at her, but he chimed a single chord.

She bent down, and slid the gold pieces from her pocket. “These can all be yours, if you stop your song on my command."

She leaned in, until she smelled the gangrene on his breath. "And if you never return to Montmartre again.”

The gypsy closed his eyes, his fingers sliding into a minor lament. But he took her gold.

Her lover came after midnight. From behind a tree, she watched him greet the gypsy as his leg melted into her stone.

She stepped from the shadows and slashed her finger across her throat.

And the music stopped in Montmartre.

Back in her room, she examined the thick wall. It bulged slightly in two places, roughly her shoulders' height. As if he were reaching to find the darkness's end. The pink flesh of one hand burned through the cold, hard masonry.

She pressed her cheek into its palm. Her lashes crossed his lifeline.

“Darling,” she said, closing her eyes.

“My darling.”

---

Note: the city of Paris is divided into
twenty arrondissements, or neighborhoods.
I will write a vignette for 7 of them.
Any requests?

Also, the above sculpture in Montmartre
honors the writer Marcel Áyme, and his story
about the man who could walk through walls.