in the dark, you laved my clitoris with Tiger Balm.
Why Itys? I asked you.
I drape a scarf over the mirror so as not to see my face accidentally.
The sound, you said, serious, it’s the sound. When the mother returns to the nest, you hear her peeping Itys, Itys, Itys.
I can no longer listen to Pharoah Sanders.
Can’t sell the records.
Or give them away.
Or imagine anyone else listening to “Upper and Lower Egypt.”
The hiss and pop: you in the kitchen frying eggs.
I dragged your record player to the basement. Brought it up again.
Bright Moments, Rahsaan Roland Kirk:
Yes, yes.
Bright moments.
Bright moments is like hearing some music that ain’t nobody else heard,
and if they heard it they wouldn’t even recognize that they heard it
because they been hearing it all their life but they nutted on it,
so when you hear it and you start popping your feet and jumping up and down
they get mad because you’re enjoying yourself but those are bright moments
that they can’t share with you
because they don’t know even how to go about listening to what you’re listening to
and when you try to tell them about it
they don’t know a damn thing about what you’re talking about!
In the bucket of your mouth
you brought me water.
The lulling of doves.
Each day, your death’s woven into fact and each night, I let out the knots.
In bed, alone, in the dark, I fly toward you.
And through you.
This spring I see, dangling from the arborvitae, dozens of bagworm cocoons. Tiny mummies.
I’m glad you never watched the light in my eyes glint out.
The smoke blown away and then sucked back into the fire.
When breath meets the reed, the air propagates an elastic wave of energy.
Like the severed head of the egret we found by the path in the pine woods, its tangerine eye open, unclouded.
Was I kicking again?
Here it says that most people walk at least three hours every day to fetch water.
In the bucket of your mouth.
Villon: arrested a dozen times. He writes The Testament between jail stints. Then he’s sentenced to the gallows. A last minute reprieve banishes him from Paris for ten years.
That was in 1463. Villon was thirty-four. No one saw him again.
So lightly you slept.
As though afraid to close the door
on consciousness. Were you afraid
of letting go?
You slept like a bird
with one tangerine eye open.
You nudged me awake
and said my name
when my legs kicked out.
Your long fingers on my stomach.
Itys, Itys, Itys.
Was I kicking? I thought I felt a baby kicking. Beloved among women.
On Rifle Range Road the summer signs are up: Tomatoes Corn Lopes Watermelon Queens.
They are fishing again from the overpass bridge.
When I drive back to our rent house
the primroses are gone.
Dead leaves blowing against the fence.
It was ages ago. Last year.
But whenever you went away, you always came back.
Not to be refused.
I sit lightly on the bed. To run my fingers through your curls.
Rubbing my tongue against prickles in back of my throat. I know I have a cold coming on.
So many hawks in the trees along the highway. You’d love their white breasts blazing in the sunset.
But to whom do I write this
if you are not coming back?
Never heard from again.
A black kitten crossed my trail.
The name of my beloved is Irrecuperable. Liar.
Albert Ayler at the Village Vanguard. The way to listen is to stop focusing on the notes, he says. Listen to the sound inside the sound.
I brushed on nipple rouge this morning.
In the evening I scrubbed it off.
Devour me.
You said, Two men are inside me. Remember
the other one. The one who did not do this to you.
The sound inside the sound.
Eternally en route.
Like a dog is ripping my heart out.
This music I cannot listen to, it makes me dizzy.
The pendulum swinging stably in space while under it, the floor is carried around by the earth’s rotation.
Yesterday the snow came, bearing no message.
The wooden chair on which you sat at your desk.
How you wrapped your shins behind the front legs.
Empty of you. Dormant.
Who was it who ravished me? Who ravaged
me?
Your thumb stroking the nape of my neck.
The membrane separating me from oblivion has ruptured.
How could you betray yourself like that?
Like that.
When the mower hits the mint.
In a sandwich bag in the freezer, a belted kingfisher.
Flew into the windshield. I thought we could bury it together.
They are wrong who tell me otherwise. It will not be all right.
Villon, shivering and hungry and still going to his desk to write, finding the inkwell frozen solid.
A cockroach on the kitchen wall. It would be blasphemy to keep house.
That mentholated C-flat of your laugh. Its
intervallic swoop into the upper registers,
your eyes closed. Tearing.
You laughed like a rollercoaster.
Completely infectious.
Coltrane’s Meditations. The dissonance leads to a modulation.
Cat got your tongue?
A downy woodpecker eyes me at the window. Each illumination, another kind of shadow.
As if the light—
A photograph of you that I pore over
looking for clues to what would happen.
What happened?
Can you whisper it to me or have you fallen asleep?
One last breath leaving the circle of your teeth.
You are strange in my dreams.
I hollow inward. I’ve gone dark as a hedge.
What a completely outrageous mockingbird.
Purgatory this place, and I, a wraith
wandering lost.
A wraith.
And this photograph I did not take of you
with your arm crossing your chest,
your hand cupping your shoulder
as though it stoppered a wound:
of whom is it a photograph now?
The house finch wiping its beak against the empty tray of the feeder.
Still walking in my socks around the house as though I wouldn’t wake you,
not letting all my weight down.
Carrying the unbearably heavy last words I said to you.
As I am going under.
Purgatory this place.
As if the light had stopped in the air.
My sweet.
When you were.
Les: Outtakes from the Film Interview
* * *
I don’t know. Until you’re emptied out and chucked to the side of the road. To anyone you have something to give. I try not to judge someone’s need, you usually can’t anyway.
*
To be consequent to my friends.
*
So the Nixons and Unferths of the world roll out of bed, they look in the mirror and see their mug in the tain. And they think they’re some kind of radiance surrounded by fog. The genius among pissants. And they think about their desert loneliness, how isolated and heroic they are, surrounded by a lesser race of men. You’ve seen that kind of man, we all have. But I’m going down with the ones in the mead house snoring and dreaming on the benches.
*
An ordinary man. With an exigency, I guess.