tiny vessels

you begin with a problem, as scholars do:
it’s the little things that make you inconsolable.

I wake up and decide I am half you,
half empty of everything;
I was absentminded in SoHo;
I memorized the cadence of your city girl heart,
dodging your coffee like the severed, writhing
tail of a gecko; we are all learning, all growing;
on the drive back home, Brooks told me
all about Shangri-La
(you can't find that on a map);
I took the wrong turn and hit a deer,
bone sticking out in a rare way, as though
someone had stitched an ancient ceramic head
onto its body; your mother gave me an evil-eye bead
to dangle from my rearview mirror once,
when we had first started dating;
Brooks asks me, in his big New York voice,
if I see my future in the dead kids at Kent State;
I drink my tea lukewarm because I hate
the taste of coffee.

stuffed into the crawlspace
of a rental agreement,
I am looking at the silverfish
darting through the encyclopedias,
their bodies like graphite shavings
off a pencil.

she told me once that
even the shortest distance
is a series of infinite, halved betrayals;
today I caught myself not
thinking about her for longer than
one heart beat. I was fooled.
I had been completely engrossed
in a conversation inside my mind.

when the mayans calculated
the cycle's ending, they gave us
the gift of the wheel:
the nature of a circle
requires revolution,
the presence of an ending
requires a beginning.

pompey oozed his way down
the port like chèvre,
the screeching miles behind him.
he wanted to be alexander the great,
just like all men in his position.

everything was blue,
and before that, grey.

she asks me what I mean;
she hates my people but loves
my pedigree.

bleh

I thought of you by the railings on the Pont de Sully,
where the Seine looked like hammered tin in Mays before
I had known you. I am oxidizing, shifting colour
like a gumball machine mood ring.
when Gabriel asks what I like in a woman, I say:
"when she is green for me."

the locked jaw of Notre-Dame
was holding the sky in place.