I have never bitten into anything

"I have led a toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on, and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What's to be done? Break the shell?"
--Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason (1945)

When I went to the beach last week, I could feel your skin as I laid my palms on the sand. The people are always singing in the place that you are, and I know that the sun never fades away. I just ask that you wait for me there.

0.

Wet with
the obscure particles
of that rising storm,
the wind comes stirring
& whipping the trees.
A Pileus halo forms.
Mile west,
that darkening sky
boils & froths
the anvil warhead,
thrashing the ground
with its whipping deluge
& blinding flashes. Spin,
spitting supercell,
climb up & billow
outwards in
your electric revolution.
Churning up the warm,
placid air & marching
onward,
fatal downdraft
cuts the supply --
the beautiful, rageful
thing dies where it
stands.

0.

Lay your lungs
out on a slab
& I will show you
intricacies
in fissures.

Voices happen
all day
& I am fixated. Your
friendly fire barely
shows herself at all
anymore,
only in your absence,
like an ill-conditioned
cat.

I don't know
if you noticed,
but my boots
are booking miles.

I'm leaving
traces on the walls
you can scrape off
like brown ice;
don't let me decay
into a softer neon;
hold me tight
like Marie Curie did.

0.

When young,
I read Thoreau;
the transcendentalists
were gone
by over a century &
disobedience was
in style.

We would all head
toward the land &
live in the woods,
soybeans simmering
on the stove as
we headed toward
a dream.

The pull of the world
was a force so very strong
as to last throughout the ages
& interrupt our

free

fall

.

1.

With their great drooping wings,
the ospreys returned yesterday
to scan the raging snowmelt for churned up meals.
It is tempting to apply human traits to the natural world
[especially for a poet],
but in the form of a fish hawk,
we will work on an unnatural premise
of not measuring beauty
through form.

2.

From an indeterminate direction
billows the mechanical sounds
of the night-workers in the distance,
blinking their amber lights in warning
& anticipation.

The wind, undecided,
carries iron filings through
the sleep of the vacant lots,
& I lie awake beneath these minor constellations --
tower lamps, hazard bulbs, the slow arithmetic
of windows gone black one after one.

It is simple to think that
nothing in them asks to be loved,
yet everything persists:

the hoist, the piston,
the backing alarm repeating
its small square syllable into fog,
the vapor lifting from vents
& settling again on rail, on scaffold,
on the shoulders of weeds,

& I, with my soft animal heart,
listen as if the earth were assembling itself
just beyond the houses.

3.

For Robert, the poet.

In the dream Bobby tells me I am beautiful, he
moves his stool a little closer to mine

to see me in the dull glow of the bar.
I sip at my mocktail as he takes Howl
from his briefcase & tells me
he loves my baby-blue eyes ['Have you seen
Cape Cod this time of year?'].
Somewhere at the back of the bar
I can hear the jazz men munching sandwiches,
chatting to the girls who bring them
empty beer glasses for coins
to be dropped into, for requests to fill.

His old poet soul with its waistcoat
wants to change the world with its atom bomb,
wants the President of the United States
to be silent, & to be silent, & to be
silent.

Bobby calls the barman Moloch
& wants him to find himself in a wounded page
filled with catalogues that make the children sing.
'So you wanna be a Beat, Bobby?' I want him
to chant his evolution into the mind of the sax solo.
‘You can't beat the Beat,’ he tells me. ‘Jade,
the greatest minds of the generation
were writing poetry before you could
put colo[u]r on your book covers;'

4.

In times passing &
every December after
the next, the wooden floors
will show their age & the light
may be a different shade of color
afterwards;

though, there will always
be a story on our table
& a mug for me waiting
near the French press
when I wake up
after you.

5.

I know when it is winter.
When the books begin to show
their thinner side of verity

& the pages not the color butter,
but a rusted wheel blend
with words wheedling away
from memory as the crisp night settles
into bed -- too dark to retain our
archives, too withdrawn

from this warm tragedy tale
turned from mine.

6.

Spring moves by slowly.
I wrap myself in your stanzas.