1.
A plain under snow
under a moonless sky
so the whiteness seems
a self immolating fire.

The aseity of light.

~

A man and woman are in bed.

A young man and a younger woman are in bed
in Philadelphia. It is autumn.

A young man with blue eyes and nearly
brown hair and a younger woman with green
and blue eyes and frazzled hair are in bed
in a home in Philadelphia. It is October.

A young man with limpid cerulean eyes
and faintly reddish hair that is on the verge
of thinning and a younger woman with eyes
like topaz veined through by lapis and
hair that has become unruly with sweat
are in bed inside a row home in Philadelphia.
It is the third week of October.


He is a poet and she is a poet.
Their hearts share a syntax.


2.
A man the
lone protuberance.

So vertiginous
he begins to remember things

lacking a dialect.
Reference-less. Folded over

and over,
and all intuition.

~

Do you expect me to save you? She asks. Because
you will look at other women and want to fuck them
more than you will want to talk with me. Because
they will occupy quadrants of your heart
and you will only know love as clastic.
Because you will forget my youth, forget
what it feels like to need me, and then you’ll die.

Her finger dissects a line from his throat
to his dick. He reaches for a book,
plumbs its pages, and recites something
to her. All you men looking for salvation, she
says when he is finished, already beginning to dress.

After she leaves, in the margins of his book,
he writes, Lyricism is the assumption
- unfounded -
that inside a life, beauty is innate.
Lyricism denies the factual nature of life.


3.
He sleeps the first night
under a panoply of stars.

Sleeps his body carved
a small cave in snow.

A windless night, so naturally
his dreams are of fierce wind,

licking up behind him, burying
his tracks as he wanders, further,

no discernible path as record
of his maundering passage.

~

Some years later, the poet was living in a minor southern city,
one whose grand Victorian homes had survived the war. Spanish
moss draped the stoic, slouched trees. One week in November,
an old friend of the poet’s from high school arrived, unannounced
and frantic. His wife had left him. He’d decamped from his apartment,
his job as copy editor at a vapid tabloid magazine, and, finding his
life suddenly without its gravitational center - a perilous chasm
inhabiting its once solid core - did the one thing he could think to
do: he moved, rapidly, without intent. The motion being the
end. The poet, himself only marginally employed, welcomed his
friend and the two men spent numerous weeks walking aimlessly
through the laconic, heavy stasis of the nighttime city, smoking
cigarettes and drinking obscenely and trying to find women. They
found dozens of them. Many very young; a few old. Most were
women their younger selves would have been ashamed to be seen
with, agrestic women with Bacchanalian figures. Careless women,
their days spent languishing in the realm of fast pleasure. The poet
and his friend were voracious and insatiable. Quick and ruthless.
Lupine, even. And at the end of every night, beyond the distended
air and the fetid matter of their bodies lay a concavity that threatened
to possess no end. They plunged further, through the alembic of darkness,
approaching some pure madness. Some spatial totality where they
roamed unencumbered, maundering madmen, eager witnesses to
their own diffusion, so in the sudden, translucent dark, they both, in their
own forms, stumbled upon some essential element. For the poet, it
was an objective equation for perfection. Indecipherable behind the palaver
of daytime. Unreadable when confronted with silence. A melody lurking,
a diaphanous melody. For his friend, it was the corporeal engagement
with his millions of tangible selves. Spread like specters of light over
the opaque desire of the sea. Both men passed through this aperture
and exited almost at once. A brief efflorescence similar to distant
childhood memories with their mysterious origins and their truths
striking with the silent celerity of heat lighting, then vanishing so
what lingers is absence. But of what? Then, they’d gone too far.
They left the women naked and wet in the sultry near morning, walking
home to the city’s aubade: the birds, the diesel buses, the voluminous
exhale of all her people letting go their dreams. The two men walked
in silence, smoking, wizened like summer fruit exposed to frost.

One night, they went out but found no women against which they
could brace themselves. Walking aimlessly, the friend turned to the
poet and said, “You know, there are people who have really lost
things in this world. There was a boy in Mexico I read about,
a seven year old kid who watched his father and his sister get
shot up by some drug cartel. Mistaken identity. So the boy, because
he’s only seven, starts to run. It’s his instinct. He can’t help it. And
some gunman shoots the kid in the back, over and over. Eight or nine
times, I think, they shoot this kid. His mother lived in Texas, and she
had to come identify all three bodies. Her whole family gone. Mistaken
identity they say.” The poet’s friend was a placid man, tall and gauche
and callow. “I read that and all I could think of was Amanda fucking
that faggot cop. Sucking his faggot dick. And I keep wondering
if he’s better at fucking her than I am. This thought just swallows me.
All the beauty in this world is tainted by it. I can’t sleep because of
this. There are men dying all over this world for useless
revolutions in countries I’ve never thought of. And their children
will die for another forgotten cause, the revolution against their
father’s dying cause. And I can’t feel a thing about any of it.”

The next morning, the poet woke up and his friend was gone.
Six months later, he walked into his old church - a modern Methodist
congregation, the building blocky and uninspired, gloomy even -
and shot his wife twice in the head before shooting himself.
Attendance for the next three months of services spiked, then
leveled off once summer conceded to the sere clarity of autumn.


4.
The second night he spent in the elongated
shadow of a city. Adumbral light, incarnadine.

Overwhelmed with cold. Listening to the
audible machinations of his body

to corral his mind from the stillness
of the sky. The dissonance of his heart.

The thrush and sough of blood. He
dreamt that night of water borne

blossoms under obliterating sun.
Closing their flowers to the intensity.

The water, which was everywhere, was
in the roots and beneath, was endless, was

impenetrable, lissome, and devouring
the light despite all its eviscerating heat.

~

She wrote poetry until she was twenty four
and could no longer defer her college loans.

Some nights after, when she could not sleep,
she would write verse, almost always broken and
discordant. She would think, if a poet

does not have her faith in form,
in the geometry of rhythm and rhyme,
then what faith does she own?

By twenty nine she was married, and
through inexplicable coincidence, perhaps fate
(no), was selling real estate.

She had two children, bright and pellucid
before finding their own tongues, roiling
their bodies in the mud, and at times

she would watch them and be mystified,
not knowing a word of their lives. The terror
in the unfamiliar way her daughter’s

hands contorted on the piano, the improbable
reverberations in her heart, the loquacious singing.
Her son’s blithe eyes - an argental color, like the

ocean under an approaching storm - their
inscrutable distance. She loved them as a
bloated river, torrentially, to the threshold
of abrasion. She felt her own body wither

as they effloresced. On a business trip to
Memphis, she fucked a man in his hotel room.
He was boorish, stilted, awful in bed. Rapacious.

But he lavished her with praise. Her hips, he
adored her hips. Weeks later, her husband began
to trace the varicose veins on her thighs, absently,

gliding his finger over them as on a map. Little
streets of your soul, he said, and she felt he didn’t
know a true thing about her. Though, she asked,

what of herself held any truth? The gracious warmth
of her skin. The gentle way she liked to bite his
ear when they made love. No, just artifice. The

warmth was not sovereign; the biting she had seen
in some porno she’d watched as a girl. She spent two
weeks in San Diego one winter and started meeting

a young painter for dinner. He was impish, his
streams of thought involute and volatile. “We do
preposterous things to one another for a reprieve

from the loneliness that engulfs us,” he told her one
evening. “Because we all know that we will die
and be forgotten and that all the grace we have

attempted to hold has no endurance in this universe.”
He talked of some essential beauty that lurked
inside of her, and how badly he wanted to plumb

her depths to find it. Why? she thought, if it will
only be lost. That summer, she saw the poet once more.
She was in Philadelphia for a flight to Barcelona

and had one night free. He looked callow, as
if the expenditures he put into writing were
slowly abrading his physical body. He spent much

of their conversation lost in the miasmas of his
mind. Still, she felt she loved him because
he was the only soul on earth who named her,
in his own private language, a poet. They

walked languorously down the alleyways where
he used to live. He took her hand, very slightly,
and she pondered the palliative sensations of

touch, the mysterious doctrines of her heart. Later,
she endured an implacable melancholy. She had
encountered a hypothetical life - a rare occurrence,

surprisingly, since their were nearly infinite
variances - one in which she might have been
happier. Or, perhaps sadder. Perhaps more

perceptive to her melodies. She wanted to
call the poet, to tell him that he opened
some numinous kind of singing inside of her.

Always so plangent and abstract. What is the
name for it? she wanted to ask. Surely, you must
know. She fell asleep on the floor, and when

she reached Barcelona the next day, she took
a train, impulsively, without a thought as to
where she would end up. With each mile, she

found herself convalescing, the peculiar melancholy
from Philadelphia losing its corporeal hardness.
Carving through the spare earth. The groves of fruit, the

villages, like a novella no one read, forgotten, or
even like a novella that had never been written,
had germinated and taken shape inside the head

of a failed writer who had once journeyed
on a train, and started to write, thinking, but losing
the thread between his eyes and his fingers, so the

story lingered and shook in the organs of his body,
was lost a few years in the small intestine,
vacationed in the kidneys, retired in the lungs.

Always, always finding its home in his heart.

Some place in the fields, or the villages, a man
bearing the esotery of his day - the lethargic

sun glaze, the reaffirmations of open space, the
quiet solitude of failure - watches the train glide
noiseless and distant, polished and pure and elemental.

Inside, she begins to write. Tentatively at first, then
with a lucent fury. The music seems to originate
from outside her body, and her translation is

desperate, torrential even. And at the end, she
confesses, it fails. It does not even come close.
But by then, the music is already gone, lost

somewhere in the desert, in the stasis of a
man watching the horizon, beguiled by the way
air bends and distorts and that his memory,

the molecules of his life, withstand such pressure.


5.
He dreamt of his first night
in the snow. In the dream world,

a small tribe of people kept him
company. Lovers, family, though

he did not recognize their faces.
Every human component distilled

so they spoke in phonemes, were free
of narratives; themselves, all equitable parts,

the etymology of meaning. Their
desire an eviscerating heat,

adamantine and limpid. Immaculate.

~

The poet never learned discipline, and
remained mostly unknown. Occasionally,
he would write a few lines of honest, indisputable
beauty. Then, he would overreach, descend
into abstraction. He was simply too insatiable.

He prized these few jewels, but he could
never understand their origins. They arrived
on the same mysterious currents as the wind.


6.

The compacted wholeness
of man in the city. Indiscernible
at the atom’s level of memory.
The drowning din of continuity.

Grace veiled, lost beyond the incandescence.

~

A man and a woman are in bed. Outside, the maples
are adorned in their autumn jewelry. As the sanguine
wind moves through them, it gains the quality of
ruby or topaz. Diffuse sunlight into their room,
miraculous in its coming apart. The woman laughing
as the man traces the veins across her stomach, her
thighs, the small maps of her body. Day acquiescing
to evening as their hearts slowly exhaust themselves.
The slow, fleeting transfiguration of solitude. Though
it does not save us, we find paths to beauty.