Infidelities
He is crying again, he lifts himself toward me before I reach the stairs, his body tips like a cup he holds out to be filled — before I touch his hair dark with sweat I am already tired of him as if he were something I had spilled in a hurry, stain I had to dull before its bright colors soaked in before I could go back to those silences whose clear, bitter gins I stir — he will not stop crying, his cries cling to my sleeves, I try to pick them off, I seize him, I touch his neck, I lift him like a bottle I am about to smash ii The one who should be, the one kind as trees clasping their deadweight by the waist hard blond fathers shouldering their fathers over flames and floods — If only our fathers would move back into their names like unheated rooms If only there were room in our names if one could open his name Like a dream and let in the one sleeping beside him If only someone would careen back into my name like a drunk into the wrong house, the wrong woman’s arms We drink to our names like ships we had sailed on, like bars that never close iii The one who should be, the one who will dash back into my name like a burning house, that fine man who will finish my life for me like an old friend who always wanted to marry my wife — he will wear my clothes till he smells of me, he will spit into my hands, lift and smell them as if they were his my name will be laundered and laid out for him to step into, a little awkwardly, leaning back on my bed pulling it up over his thighs
Spring, Il Duce, Little Papa
In some border town the truce is broken, seeds wake, flung like boys from skidding cars. From remote hills my brothers and I watched like an old aristocracy another civil war, another town burning, mother taken again, madness, that grand confederacy. I wanted to dash back, be dragged away with her, a bright-eyed patriot. The seasons change, stinking of their cheap wines, vines climbing each other’s shoulders like crowds in a newsreel hurrahing il duce, Spring, little papa, fat dictator on his balcony. I want to climb a watertower, draw a bead. Hate presses his soft boy’s mouth on mine. Roots soak in their baths. Foxglove, fever flower, hawkweed, bindweed, loosestrife, poor robin’s plantain, moth mullen, pennyroyal, jack in the pulpit, nightshade lucky lady — secret code my mother had me learn as if there were time for nothing else. She came back, her nylons snagged on barbed wire we bellied under, we watched for hawks, we crawled through the tall grass, without speaking for hours, waving each other on like guerrillas — When I was six, I skinned off shoots of forsythia and whipped myself, imagining men making me betray her. My sons romp below me now like city dogs unleashed, they bail out of trees, they fold in my arms like parachutes. All Spring we watch flowers break surface like drowning girls.
The Black Box
Tiring of friends, of the old cereal of their dogs breath, of their rooms, of fish tanks and dirty clothes on their floors, of their mothers drinking gin out of bottles in greenhouses, of their little sisters always watching, watching, sucking on shirt cuffs, of long dark wars fought under the furniture, of crawling in and out of games changing voices, games, wrinkled, warm, stale with each other’s body smells like beds left unmade he would come home and lie on the floor in everyone’s way and design dog-exercising machines with levers and cranes and caterpillar tracks and wheel gears whose teeth turned gears that shook bars that dangled bones always before dogs there was always a bone and a long lead the dog could run to the end of — and treadmills — sometimes a car the dog kept chasing, the road rewinding under his feet — sometimes a record of thunder or riflefire the boy could flick on from his bed, all night the gun-shy dogs kept running while the boy slept — sometimes vapors of old cats or t. bones were blown in — sometimes there were fans to cool the dog’s legs — or sponges and brushes and tail-cleaning devices and mechanical hands shining the dog’s coats as they ran — sometimes the machine towed the dog behind it like a toy on a string, all the parts moving only when the machine moved — sometimes the dog was jostled like a toy with many moveable parts — often they were guardrails or guards — sometimes only a metal hand hovering at the end of a leash — occasionally mazes and slides and thick shrubs for a dog to crawl under and chew real bones, shoulder bones, leg bones. the boy would lie on the floor, drawing machines, his mother stepping over him, his father walking around him to go down into the basement to fix the burner, his dog leaning his weight against his legs, pressing into the hollows of his knees he fastened one lever to another coiling springs inside metal cocoons, running wire from switch to switch — whatever machine the boy built, there was always a black box, a square he darkened to the side, a case he built for the controls he couldn’t be bothered with, for all the mechanisms that ran things, that started them going, that kept them running.
