She Is In Love With The Sailor
She is in love with the sailor who wears a uniform of wrecked ships, blood, & silver fingerprints. He has come across many oceans. There are maps etched on the backs of his hands. He knows the secrets of stars & carries the image of a silver sextant pressed against his cheek. She is in love with him & her lips knock at his ear. She lets down her long hair, it is like a river that flows & flows beyond its visible self. They turn in each other’s arms wrapped in the soft gauze of the afternoon sunlight. It pours through the large bay window, past the thick curtains. His hands teach her the ways of the sea. She goes liquid & flows into him like the tide. He tattoos her breasts with his mouth, her thighs with his perfect star shaped teeth. From the large brass bed through the window they can see the moon climbing into the sky.
He prepares to leave her. He puts on his uniform of light, straps on his weapons, closes the scar of his right chest. He kisses her & strides out of the house down to the beach. He raises a glowing hand to her, turns & walks away over the water like a comet. She sits at the window for many hours watching the phosphorescent trail he left behind stretching across the sea into the mouth of the moon that hangs low on the horizon. His face, his retreating passage across the sea, his uniform of light are photographs taped to the underside of her eyelids, pinned up in other places in her head, photographs she will pass around in there when she dreams. He was perhaps a historic lunar eclipse. In the morning she is awakened by a tendril of light nosing around her body. Birds & their constant singing. On the windowsill a rose puckers like a mouth in the light. A naval uniform of wrecked ships, blood, & silver fingerprints draped over the foot of the bed.
Razor Blade
A razor at my throat every night for the last twenty-five years. Every time I shave that long clean blade becomes her body, silver with rain, beautiful breasts plastered against the white paste of her shirt, long dark hair, damp eyes like wounds. That long keen blade like the sharpness of her tongue, her precise beauty. I dream of that point, the tip of the blade where the steel leaves itself to jump out into space. I use her body to trim my beard, silver beautiful edge of steel cutting the black & blonde hairs on my chin, the nightmares that came in the night & left their small black boots scattered across my face. I cut & trim & her body sings a song the human ear cannot hear. Outside the window, the sun a crabby old cab driver with a ragged mustache of solar coronas in his yellow taxi, hauls himself into the sky. She sings & a bird on a wire cocks its head as the dead bodies of my nightmares, the old black boots yield to a blade of singing light. Every night a razor at my throat & a dream of that silver shining edge where she lurks with her song.
Leaving
for M
When I hear you talk of leaving the small bones in my chest contract & spell out the lonely alphabet of death. When I hear you talk of leaving the wind dies outside the window, the sun slanting into the room turns into a dark absence that wears your name. When I hear you talk of leaving the dying light of the day closes its lips on my eyes & for a moment I am living in those last images trapped under the lids. When I hear you talk of leaving a long hollow fear climbs the stairwell of my spine into a black universe that blooms at the base of the brain. I fall on the black knife edge of night & feel my heart fly out of my body. The blood clocks run down, the kiss of death on their white drawn cheeks halts the journey of their arms. Stars in the dark commit suicide, the light from their dead bodies floating through thousands of years of space. Under the thin shell of the eyelid, inside the pupil, birds spell out their lonely ciphers in the empty black sky.
Song Of The Last Light
The last light singing its song puts its lips to my window. I am floating in a place between the body & the head. The ocean spreads out in front of me like dark glass. Delicate sailors move over the water like shiny black angels hovering at the knife edge of the horizon. Old witches in the village to the east, where the sun falls down on its knees, collect the tongues of drowned sailors, debris from wrecked ships, old moonlight, rusted anchors, the remains of enormous monsters. Everything comes back into my head at once, the images so fast I gnash my teeth, clutch the nightmare of my penis, gulp the darkness, break my eyes open. I open the scar of my right chest lifting the heart out like a beautiful jewel, its pale red luminous muscles glistening in the darkness. I pour the light out of it & move off across the water singing the song of darkness, a shiny black angel of the curved air.
These poems are from a chapbook entitled Song of the Last Light, published by The Thunder City Press. Some of these poems first appeared in Dekalb Literary Arts Journal and Images. Copyright 1977 Thunder City Press.
