For Her, Forever Ago

I walk with heavy feet

Down these city streets

Pounding my thoughts down pill fire brick throats

Into cement hands flat as night stands

Or window sills catching the afternoon

Or Chilean steppes under old skies

And the sun drips like Beirut honey

Or cohune oil

Into these skunk freeways, alleyways,

Slug ways, roadways,

Down these pepper ash walls,

These clown colored awnings,

These pawn shop windows and pojangmachas with their tinted portholes

And into the Rorschach ink pad splotches of last night’s rain

Caught in the zigzag of this Huguenot walk,

Like a comma caught between the thoughts of Ezra Pound or the horn bones of Scylla

Frowning between the teeth of a salt cliff-

Yes, the sun, like pressed Sicilian olives,

Drips down the cigarette sign,

The old lady on the corner with her fire work memory and kimchi fingernails,

The street vendor with his cow hide bag and coffee bean pupils

Stuffing his dead dreams of a Vienna retirement down a spandex waistline,

And it drips down the pine black bench where expired lovers

Sold laughter and ghost pain,

The locksmith with his vanilla long sleeves, slat nose, and Congo hands 

That once held his only child born dead,

The tangerine pot where only withered petals lie

On a corner under telephone wires and borrowed trees,

And it’s a moment where I can feel her

Through the cane roots of this earth

In every face kept in clay jars by unused doors,

In the words of dead lovers

That still burn like the evening candles they were hacked in quill under,

And I can feel her, as far away as the dew stars,

For it is a moment where I roll up the flax hiding my skin

Only to find ‘memento mori’ seared into smoking leather

Because she will never be more beautiful

Then she is right now- and never less-

And I feel her in the wake of this rock storm

Where all of this city becomes brittle and collapses

Like hearth ash into streets covered by bootlace vines and plots of prettied dirt

And lines and levees and orchard aisles and dust roads between aging rye

The color of Dutch hair or the gut of a stovepipe,

And I am caught in her beauty,

Like spindle light in stained glass

Or a body on a Penrose staircase

Climbing up the spine of this steeple,

Or an addict who shoots up on habit, on Pavlov,

To sustain the cycle of content and the miracle of beauty,

And my soul

Feels like an orchid blooming only once on a ghost eve,

Or a bomb exploding in a Dresden platz-

Because I’ve never wanted so much

And yet been willing to accept so little-

And to want nothing else-

Not the water of Mimir

Or ambrosia or the shorthand of the Muses,

Not a Capri suite, not an empire or a sacred garden,

Not truth, not wisdom, not warm amnesia,

Not a seat at the dais or an isle with black sands or a hand like Dali,

Not even a cotton nail piece like ‘The Fountainhead’

Or a Chilean sunset caught in esperanza ink

Deep in the binding of something like ‘Crepusculario’

Written in the smoke of stewed chili, tapas, and robust cigar-

Because-

I want only her and her and her-