HOURS
The bruises change with the hour. You lie in bed listening to the Lloyd Cole the semi-invented
Russian did or did not send across the Kremlin spires like a gaunt black bird tall in the gawking sky, something foreign inside you. They are invisible, these marks, like the birds flying in the night, like the H under my tongue of orangewood, because I conceal them, even from you know when. When they are has-beens on the phone they are quieter, naturally, because they are more humiliated to be beside themselves with grief or lust or some difference slid subtly between the two. The sentence they were saying was not so important anyway that it should mean not picking up the new cell and talking to the intimate who bides his time against a pit and the husband’s missing it, Hong Kong silk floral belted tops identified as black-eyed Susans He knows the half life of bruises, how ugly they become to the beholder as the black cars hurtle down the tracks like crows that sound in the tall firs
here by the Sound like carbon steel poured into a four-chambered cauldron that has no handle or
name. Maybe it had a name once but the name is gone. You get me, yes? He recognizes patterns, can map the water on your cheek with a family of fingertips. The card with a folded leaf, a signature inside, got put in a place so careful it was never seen again, just like so many signs or empty chairs in by the water restaurants or a seat in black cars at the sign store where the mattress man stepped back silent into the side door of his unlit cigar or the printer that would print the photographs never materialized. This is not to say that bruises are a life unto themselves, the blue stuff in the backed up tub sufficient and verisimilitudinous, if you will pardon me that, but it is true, you must, or possibly should, admit, that looking at them reverse in the mirror is poetical, if poetical means purple, which
it does, in my self-administered case. It’s when they become livid and turn black and green, meaning the capillaries that got burst from the impact have begun to die and the blood pooled under the skin to rot, that one wishes to ignore their presence from behind a closed and musical door.
TARE WEIGHT
A fifty gram calibrating weight tops the ashes. That steel shape too small, too full to be a bottle,
stands chessed. I look at it and should see from it. How polished before my inquisitive eye, pawn ona board with one square. Just a moment. Just a moment. I have to punch the dough, but more softly this time, more softly than ever before. Or else. Or at least that’s what you said, or I couldn’t have. Couldn’t possibly have raised the cabbage in that field, there were too many pale wings to poison. Long hair is falling out of the ceiling’s ear and these cabbages here in a darkness under the door think themselves green, and something else grows in the ocean, green too, that can’t escape my plate where I weigh this small piece, this remnant of my thought that I touch and move, this before anything.
YOUR TOE
Your toe freed from its tiny sock or the white towel wrapped around you after a bath is all anything is, your face freed of everything. If you chose from the port beach a grain of sand to place on my chin with your fingertip, then that would be the meaning of sand. A clock, too, has its face, but yours is the hour in the hands of hours. That sandpiper plunging the sand, that willet twinkling across the packed wave, your toes waving goodbye from a chair, it all flies in the sun as a ball rolls.
