The Wine-Dark Sea
I want to answer questions:
what the date wants
from its box,
printed in red, a bright
lip.
The concerto
cast a morning
on me beneath
all the bridges
where the ropes dangle.
I cannot stand
inside myself.
What emerged
when I opened my mouth
was a thanking tomb.
So we tremble.
Do we tremble?
We tremble.
The Wine-Dark Sea
Asking is easy
for a number,
viral & tilted.
Words are burdens.
Mouths lumber.
I should not be afraid
of myself: a little
perpetuity with arms,
a comb whose teeth
are all bent back.
Around me the white
draws a ring, a one.
The Wine-Dark Sea
The hum, yes,
that corruption.
That rot
at play.
Beneath me, Easter.
Meanwhile, I am very difficult.
Meanwhile, a PO Box.
The Wine-Dark Sea
I almost died
like a letter
never posted.
The glue
crisp & brittle.
I needed it later
but by then
each word
quivered
in quotation marks.
The Wine-Dark Sea
I breathe
with the gate &
I breathe
with the light
& not only with it.
This is repetition.
I breathe the
law
the uninterruptible
construction
of no money
that we really love.
The Wine-Dark Sea
Bed of rain,
bed of fur,
voices bent in wire,
margins trimmed
to night.
The scriptorium’s walls
when touched.
Despite it all,
I am making an effort
at humanity.
In the future, I’d like
to look back
on the next chapter of this life
as “The Quiet Storm.”
The Wine-Dark Sea
Always casualties
of our educations:
the beautiful line,
the glossy rind.
My utopia opens
from both directions.
My problem is that
I’ve never not been able
to write.
The Wine-Dark Sea
The periphery
is interconnected.
Enter any blackness
& emerge in any nowhere.
Every nowhere
has blood.
The location changes but
there is only one Michael.
The Wine-Dark Sea
I am a stone heated
until it sheds
a skin of charred dust.
But the past,
imperially,
grunts & buoys.
Memory draws back
with dangling lips.
These unreal
reasons to write,
to say, straight true.
It is already a month
since I was
in the hospital.
Like everything in letters
there is only a little
& then ligature.
The Wine-Dark Sea
Come back, the with
of memory upends
the feeble balance.
Come back to ants
swarming up legs,
a pool of urine
on the kitchen floor.
Failure configured
into bent pine & incense.
The Wine-Dark Sea
I dig three points
in the frozen dirt & set
a small fire inside.
Wherever there are two things
there are three things.
The Wine-Dark Sea
Washed up in the island
that speaks a language
I can only understand.
Twelve years of service.
Long life is easy
on an island,
where a wish
is anything rotting
on the shore.
The Wine-Dark Sea
Let us not count the days.
I drink from both sides of the glass.
There is a sickness
& below, only
violin strings, accord,
& beneath, the dusty streets.
It is more horrible to imagine it
than to see it. We do this
every day.
The Wine-Dark Sea
Night rises
from the slit veins
of mown lawns.
Every song emerges
from the sea. Just as
every word lies
beneath the dirt.
And the music
makes the dancers
move together.
You should dance
if you want to dance.
And you can dance
as the devil dances.
The Wine-Dark Sea
Yes. Make margins.
Appear in the city
like sun-slits.
By night the lights
of downtown
loom & the patients
down their pills.
I am turning
but where is it going?
What I need is a chord
of bright light.
It is not a disappearance.
It is waiting.
The Wine-Dark Sea
I wanted nothing.
And never got it.
And now I want to want
a home for homes.
What was missing
was an of-margin.
Still I need
more maps.
A long work of logic
self-gravelling.
Desire is precarious.
Eventually I did that.
The Wine-Dark Sea
A brightly lit classroom,
an ageless crawling sun:
error is not the problem.
Another obligation,
another bomb scare
& the window propped
with a faded soup can.
Surveillance, punishment, shame:
why are you so small
Marx, Freud, Rimbaud, etc. ?
The Wine-Dark Sea
The wrinkles around my eyes
& my cracked teeth: finally
some objective facts!
What I am scared of most
is never transmitted.
If I had will
I’d be dead.
But I can’t remember when
I decided I would kill myself.
It happened all at once,
not like a levee breaking,
more like a car, at the end
of a workday, turning off the road
& pulling into a driveway.
The Wine-Dark Sea
This nowhere pulses
as a stuck key, so many things
inhabit it emptyingly.
I try to think with.
To feel clouds in each
piece of paper. Again,
these long days of white moths
rising around each footstep
fatigue. I don’t want
to give up, to feel
the clouds scratch
my throat.
I am thinking,
in our dayskin,
always thinking.
The Wine-Dark Sea
I know the curses
that bones speak.
I know the narrow
blessings of the dark.
It’s hard to be seen
through microscopes.
It is hard.
It is
the doubled exile of home,
caught.
You, see my hands,
see my wrinkled face,
those too an opening.
Hold me in you.