Eklektika

“You see how unpedestrian and what a gentleman he is
when the chips are down?”
[Bruto Cavendish]


Cleaning Head

Across roomful of isolated eyes
in the apartment yellow he naked and wiry
of a thousand smiles still sleeping with wolves

unless paper story in unease and familiar
accepting him as one of their own
who does not devour them

drab like the dark hall
glinting as she talked and used her hands
fresh back from Italy
as a point remembered later

full-breasted flowing with condensed milk
sweet and intense in the same woman.
The other half is true.

Over the city in ice-yoked dance
never short of breath
swollen, about to ejaculate.
straight into her
but
always the gentlemen
my with such big teeth.

he meets her in a bar
sidles up to her crablike
(boy can those fucking little critters skittle)

“Hello”, he says,
“My name is Gertrude Stein,
and I want to write your autobiography.”

on the floor they explore buttons
together
skin breathing in
grace bending to answer.

not reached the mainstream
because they once had been truck
had lived in fall out
were limber and could touch
licking all afternoon in the wet heat

That is the illusion of the one
could always feel some other proposition
though others and deny this or that
snack to prove a point
with pure factual.

Here is something hidden about
and which can be talked out of
to others eventually, undermines
elect and openly consorting.

She will not see the doctor. She says
the street in front charged with any necessary vulgarity.

Carry it on all afternoon
far away as the border and smell
white mind, like a cloud,
covered in flesh-colored
hands clasped in front of her

To the backstairs
lives across the racial border
god bless formica!
From aliens that has to be
cost, but possibly also by
sty organic smell.

The whole place over the still
alive beyond her when she dances we amuse one another
I bet on her killing.

You like to hear a poem
sound modest
surprised by the long wait
of a kind of limping pseudo-aluminum foil
in a window dresser’s mind.

It is not about sex. It is about species.
How much harder to reach across a room in brick
face and no substance.

Not much was exchanged
or mysterious events.
those were the days
when he talked to trees
it was a date, a time, an appointment
often by the chemist who made the world.

They lived in the fallout
waiting for nuclear war.







Subway Interruptum

Intricate intersex
At the edge of the parapet
Become stiff, dancing…

Sings the canary of liberty

Will mineshaft empty
Will he jump ship
Will he get out in time

Or will he bump and grind on company time?

She punches the clock. 9:15 AM in the Moon of Blood.

“Time’s up, boss,” she says looking at her stopwatch,

“The shuttle will be along presently.”

They are virgin snow in its size, ice cold
Dual footsteps in smooth butter tango….

But, dear reader, did you exit there the underground,
at the fourth dot?







Humility [The Rendezvous]


You ask about old age and humility.

I answer thus: a young man still stands in awe of Neruda.

You wear spectacles and do not speak Spanish.

So I am at a great disadvantage.

[she is unmoved before bare fact]

How then burnish the clang and sharp angles
Of rude private language to snare nude rose lips,
To bare the sly blush of cheek…

[she touches the frame of her glasses]

How dare the deep of liquid hips…

[which may or may not
to himself
have drifted down from

mind
or percolated up,
leaving you divided

country
higher and lower,
without fertility

born between]

[she had leveled a mountain of boys unthinkingly, and rightly]

To ride the lolling tide of white watered body…

[unseen blush spreads. she nods and voices the invisible text]

You ask again then?

And I say again: I am a child of Neruda,
neither young nor old,
whom you do not know.

And so, we are at a disadvantage…

[assent and resistance electrically, like live wire in bath]

Do I not give you my word to make cunt

[blue iris dilates]

the quaintest and most treasured corner of this tongue?

Do I not unfold your inner thigh?

Do I not whisper pleasure upon your most secret unhooded sigh…

[she gestures “Enow!”, now stands unknowable for long seconds. He is still. She moves bare-faced toward podium. He holds out hand. They exit the empty lecture room slowly, nor yet arm in arm]






Shaft

Once upon a time
There were three swallows called Cornpone.

They smelled butane and sang for supper.

Nobody listened.








L’Age D’Or

Is there nothing left of her
I wish to take with me?

Is there anything left of me to take it?

I talk to whiteness as witness now
imagining black-clothed bodies
on the snow.

It is much too dark
to see red.

We will sleep soundly this December
pretending to be dead.

We will separate universes
drawing a line through the house—
that yours and this mine.

We will have real time away from one another,
in different Milky Ways, in different spirit worlds
in severed common futures.

You will go your way,
I will go mine.

All will be fine.

I will steal away with every memory
and you will be warm stove in predicates
with her arms wrapped around herself
like a deck of cards.

The wolf will be mine,
the dog yours.

The bear paw and zebra skin will be mine
the parrot who chewed
the molding yours.

You take the beaver too
and watch the bite.

What to do about the comet we saw
on the blue prairie you sold?

Flip a Persian gold dinar—heads it is mine,
tails it is yours.

The border will be airtight
sealed five times with beeswax
and half a kiss.

Your crew will make silent films
And build snowmen with coal-black eyes.

I will take a sleighful of clowns
and angels in the snow.

You can have the canoe
the steak knives
and all the butter and jam.

I have no use for them anymore,
with my curly left-handed Cyrillic lambda
just being born in a manger floored with hay.

You can have Xmas and the tree and three wise men too.

I will keep the camels and the tea.

You can take one Good Friday and Easter per annum.

You may want Thanksgiving too.

I am off with a revolver of new months
to Leningrad.

If there is life under the warming ice
I will send you a telegraph from the ledge.

If Spring jumps up green
and speaking with night flowers and roulette
we can stare at one another giddily in the sun
awaiting fireflies and crickets
in warm nude cafe over cream.







Food Group

He in anger, she in lies,
we feed on one another,
one to uncover, the other
to hide.






Dawn Of The Unold

L'orecchie attente allo spiraglio tenne,
e l'aria ne sentì percossa e rotta
da pianti e d'urli e da lamento eterno...

Ears pricked to hissing.

(Do you see?)

Hear the kiss of forest floor.

(It is a crash of many colors with a dash of smoke)

Missing love-sick pair?

There Panpipe:

Where we meet smiling in the crisp air of now
under ancient indices of quick brown ire
and bodies anodyne in lust,
let it be out in open blue sky

free of wiles and hid again in rain,

for barely living gray has space
under the dome of past ignoring,
soaring bittersweet with the round face of sound.

Owl-eyed is Athena,
and would you be else
it is only in wise silver hair
mined antic in Greek
that eyes may speak
smiling of a book with no begging or beginning.

Power bores.

Weakness twitters.

Let your glittered lying abed leaves be light-feathered in owl fur,

warm as winter and deceitful as an opossum.


[E.A. Costa copyright 2009]