Almost Past That | L’Espoir du Désespoir | Like Human Currency Passing by Less Livelily
Almost Past That
1.
By dusk the lake was almost
not there, the bed looking
as it hadn’t. I sensed a question
in your eyes (of a luster
often seen on tea pots,
rarely on people), or maybe
you had nothing left to ask.
You were not you at all,
I guessed, as leaf shades
migrated through leaves
and hung in the treetops.
Last night I was never
in my life a child. I had
never felt so scared and cold
that I could hardly breathe.
2.
This morning leaves shake
at the dim-lit glass, faint paisley
of lake light on the backside
of everything. Suddenly
last night feels like
illusion, outlived by a wish, also
innocent until I called
it back, looking back
for the hint of a kettle’s breath,
to where I like to think, I thought,
I like to know the faintest things.
I know enough to know
most things worth knowing
are past that, you and I, and should
withdraw from all we half-
know, but reach instead
right towards you, limp in sleep,
and touch your head.
(Previously appeared in: Green Mountains Review)
L’Espoir du Désespoir
-to monsieur Jean Passerat
(“Inventor” of the villanelle)
I recommend you undertake despair.
Challenge yourself. Admit you just can’t fix
the part of hope that lies in disrepair.
Declare how “fair is foul and foul is fair.”
Take this bon mot to heart, and when it sticks,
I recommend you undertake despair.
“Facile, j’espere,” you say. “Elementaire!”
To this “espoir” I urge you to affix
the parted “des-” that lies in dis-repair.
In time you’ll find you really couldn’t care
that Frenchy maledictions come to nix.
I recommend you. Undertake despair:
The undertaker looks so debonair
each night he lies beneath the crucifix
imparting hope that lies in Dis. Repair
takes place below, where Kore must bear
her paradox, where Thanatos plays tricks,
ends what it takes to undertake despair:
the part of hope that lies. In Dis, repair!
(Previously appeared in: Tampa Review)
Like Human Currency Passing By Less Livelily
I confess, oh money,
to pausing as if capturing
a winged word: a wake
understood as an angel, one flavored
on earth. It’s cozy not being in love.
I look at you and you
and would rather not. So much in the way of civil
happiness, suits on Wall Street, public
representatives of lesser welfare
states to come. It is just that I was thinking of losing you—
said Love—this is over
and what a relief. We’re killed by beauty,
an airplane lost in a color the same as the sky’s.
I ghost through so many people. They never know it.
Not a phrase about the killer arc of a question
or a superb decision about death:
a voice bubbling over
with its own appeal to another, a crying together
in all kinds of weather: It’s like we were never here.
I will leave my own shore holding
its breath
on an unblinkered star-spilt night,
a space that once contained a bed of asphodel
beneath the chalk lines that once defined a suit,
the crime scene giving way to harder
bankruptcies, the patron of saints (who I never was) repeating:
How late I have loved you.
How late I have lived to lose you…
So long as I am leaving, I could go on—
from station to station, from time
to time—almost naming those obscure objects
mistaken for vacancies that we avoided, like wavy ideas
to which we’d return. Like the winded black tresses
of the aimlessness I married—mermaid, air-made
as this bank
of invisible ink in ozone—while I think
Just keep moving, keep writing, just to keep
from giving out.
(Previously appeared in: Quiddity.)
