Yes or Now
Airplane
stuck in this space
just the size of my body
limbs obedient
in perfect L’s, every movement
must have intent. Underneath,
a vicious rumbling erupts
like elephants
running from a memory
they can never forget.
The height is not the horror
but the pure impracticality
we’ll sustain ourselves
in this state, a veritable floating
organs bobbing like apples
inside us, gravity suddenly a myth.
You’d have to be a child
to trust this, I think
and then, as the horizon
stretches straight its arms
again, as if to welcome
the impossibility
that this,
is what it’s like
to fall in love
with you, without you
the terror teeming in the
trust, invincible if only
out of self-deceit
and strangely serene.
Call me crazy, and still
like the horizon, so certain
it is ceaseless, I will open up
my arms to you.
dream man, wherever you are you are wearing these.
Retrogress
this is as close as I can come
to putting flowers on your grave.
The fable’s cafe, the room where you once
told me time could turn us, blessedly, back
into strangers
is now a Chinese greasy spoon.
The walls, deep veined and viscous,
flaking paint the color of smashed peas
have gone a sterile slate grey,
bonsai trees, untended, out of element
replace the saint votives
at each window box, those
tiny surges that used to tell us
they’d stayed open on one thick
July night or another, to burn a backdrop,
to set stage for rapture,
pulsing like tiny halos, fireflies.
the floors are the blonde, bald
wood that must have been beneath us
all that time, but there is no music
now and as though to take the
question of masquerade head-on
the acrid pinch of sardines
and cilantro has cut through that lazy
kiss of burnt sugar and buttercrisp
I’d search for at your collar, to read
if you’d been here.
if we can forgive it,
we were young enough to make
no shadow and everything that was ever
happening was happening
just outside, on a corner that dissects
me where I stand, with limp love and
no purpose now
but to resurrect the waiting I perfected
for the wicked whirr of your bike spoke
to whisper in and undo the day.
-M.P ”
The Beach House
At the magic hour,
the sunlight decomposed,
juiced and puddling like
macerated berries in the breakwater,
the thought of leaving, the house
haunts us
the tender mineral scent of
old wood and storied linens
tearing through the halls
like a summer child,
filling our suitcases
with permanence.
Supine, quixotic
evening tucks its purple quiet
into tide pools as the
edgeless day
downshifts,
the soft June waves too weak
to push their pull away.
From the sand, we hear the rooms
argue over who to keep,
the victrola pouring it’s husked warble
like molasses down the lawn,
their hundred- window buttered glow
shuttering the starlight into fractals,
bone damp, exponential dew.
Such pure burn
to time capsule
the gold, accordion breeze
languid paced in the evening,
sharing enough skin
for canvas,
palms to the gale force brine,
the horizon drunk with honeysuckle
and our bodies, moon-burned
on the jetty
that crags
a stone
arm
into
sea.
All we ask is to mark us in a place
we’ll never muddle, melt us
conjure a plume fog
to saturate the sound,
blurring the driftwood houses
that blink-out
our smallness.
Taste the salt on our necks
and tell us
what it feels like
to be timeless, to empty
and float out
where a bottom
can’t be believed.
