apricot
I sleep on an apricot,
a leaf for a blanket,
a seed for a pillow.
I sleep under the stars,
a rising gibbous moon
pushing aside the darker sky
I dream of insect highways
and wind through the grasstops
and of how precious is
my small life
Nothing left, no more choices to be made,
now that you are gone, both of you are gone
humoring last requests – your liaison
tasting words left, emotional grenades.
The evening before I came to your aid,
that glittering night before crimson dawns
timid soul quavered as newly raised fawns
moving in perfect steps like the parade.
But why did you lean across the table?
Like feral cats homesteading under pine
expecting I was more, you always had
biting center filling – now both sides mine
words of worship left on thin mulberry
staling plated cookies – we’re all damnable.
This the first time I admitted
Yes, I am retired.
Afraid of falling? Hell, yes.
Does your husband work?
I have none.
Do you ever feel depressed?
As heat steams the yard
The sprinkler provides relief
In arcing rhythms
Children dance in spray
From opened urban redheads
The hydrants unleashed
An aloe balm now
Soothes heels and soles of bare feet
The concrete blistered.
I want to live
in the Kentucky Ada Limón
knows. Where lady horses
win and words are no longer
stuck to the bottom of my
soul, fearing sharks in a river.
She wraps in cashmere
to match White House
dinner, fabulous model
earned through brilliance
I most admire. I wish
while wearing Chanel
to Keeneland, sipping Bloody
Mary, more intent on white
linen than betting odds.
I resign my soul
to land surprising, enveloping
me in comfort more richly
than couture, more satisfying
than shrimp cocktail, even as
I clutch my pearls.
i’m still so angry
some days i wake up in the morning
with your face burned into the back of my eyelids
some days i don’t think about you at all
i sip my latte and smoke in peace
some days i’m sad
like when i pass your new house
or watch The Bachelor with my pipe
but most days all i can remember is the careless pain you caused
grievance after grievance at work
reminds me that you still own this place
and i’m still so angry
I awake.
She’s awake.
Another day’s about to break.
Once again
we have escaped
to continue our beautiful crime
in progress.
Dribbling Penny’s Lied
with tearful rainfall filliping foibled stone,
she stood at the slouching stoop
of young Cohen’s koan,
the darkened door,
her ears gone
cross-eyed picking from toddling droplets
fledgling dregs of discoloring songs and
psalms that throttling songsters teased,
dissembling bells among broken breezes.
A soddenly sobering mood entwined
with the twisted chimes no elbow nudged
and the punctured drum of macadam
beat raw as a
beetle, borne on its back,
still strumming the staling air,
on the cusp of a relapse.
Thrawn,
the moire of macadam muddling
fickle reflections fleshed against glaucous rock:
a man, beneath an umbrella
mat black of a stone-cut crow
or lighter-chewn tissue,
milled with a maybe malingering limp
at the lips of abandoned manses
froze in the wallowed out moan
of a car-cracked squirrel;
he imposed his crackling stature,
much as a doddering bubble bulges forth from frothing surf,
and snaked through the din of the dandling rain,
Are those apartments?
He pointed at Cotton’s coldly moldering skull
of a clumsily sunken structure,
stretched to Italian eaves
and operatic balconies,
black-eyed, shucked, and rat-tailed husk
of a vaudeville playhouse kicked
to the barnacled curb of a swollen street, gone
verdigris green of a buckling headstone.
She offered,
I’m sorry?
Are those apartments?
This went on
like a fob watch
gropes to applaud,
at a pitying pace,
a community theater’s rendition of
Cats, though stripped of all
those songs and costumes,
butchered back to Old
Possum’s practicum,
belly rubs and malodorous
borders, streams run
red with ablated skipjack,
puckering sough of assiduous tongues
like chalk bluffs licked to a pitiful powder—
I think it’s somebody’s house.
What’s that?
I think it’s just a house…
Ok.
he spoke a succession of numbers
several times, six seven five, then Somebody’s house,
though in an ascent,
and sluggishly lumbered forth,
the street like a frozen hedge maze
felled by a catling’s sneeze —
another man, sporting some kind of
shower cap over what bulged like
an officer’s hat, and looming
a beetle-black walker
forth, then froze before her,
void as a ruptured door;
he smiled and trailed off further,
I knew there was a reason
I was living
in San Francisco—
I was beginning, I was
beginning to forget
how to recognize people.
She politely smiled and
squeezed out the hull of a
decorous, albeit reticent, chuckle,
through rictal, cabbage-patched, fjord-tall teeth.
She’d never been to San Francisco.
She thought of the moon like a worn down penny,
the Beggar’s Opera, Penny in heaven or hell now,
Reading beat in a chattering tailgate, Pennsylvania,
Baltimore, Akron, B & O—
She thought of those strange machines you’ll find
at the zoo, that flatten and flatly emboss upon
mangled zinc a playful impression of apes or
elephants tickling wrinkly calves with a
sneeze suspended.
She picked through the din of the dandling rain
this chortling croon of a traipsing train
that brayed like a hunting horn harrowing,
heralding brumbies come to deliver her
leeward,
muttering cars and Lamington Timtam bitching
with curtest conceit about all of those times he’d scolded his
oogle compatriots, heavy as rain-sopped talc, to just stop
singing the goddamn Big Rock Candy Mountain already—
My teeth hurt.
scales uncoiled through threads of the molting Elkhorn,
stocks of Seward Park perturbing her
plangent bones to buckle and boil,
an A ensconced in winter creeper nudging a homely C,
a fresh and impressionless folio
peeled from the cheek
of a slithering birch tree,
swoln with a loathsome song of longing lapped
like tar pits licking at pachydermatous plastic—
My cat had tacitly batted at shreds of her freedom
for nearly ten or so years now. When I’d adopted
old Murder Slag, she was found chipperly licking the penitent
backs and bellies of every kitten they’d canned there.
If I so much as graze one lazing finger
over the lip of a can now, idly teasing
silence from an harmonica cobbled from gormless tin,
she won’t stop whetting her fingers over my feet
until I’m obliged to
open it.
I only talk about you when I drink.
On the porch of some starless night my friends and I,
I blow clumsy smoke rings and smoke all my friend Cam’s American spirits.
I don’t smoke unless I drink.
For some reason drunken conversation
Leads to me being destructive.
I’m like you I guess
When it comes to things like that.
