Drunk with the Gamut April 2010

On the stereo the song asks me to push it real good
Its true that for weeks I've been aping the songs of the flowers
All stem and need, all saffron that fleed
From the scene, demanding a little rest.
But the light unfolds into little deaths,
Winds strips the petals like unwelcome guests.
Hoe long have I stayed on this earth
Bleary and spitting in the jam?
Sire of unwelcome desires
I am I am I am

It’s April and I’m watching videos of dead men
telling their stories. And half-formed ideas
shake their tendrils from the books of dead men
scattering their seeds all over me. Oh people ask me
why do you write all these poems about blooms.
Oh people ask me
what do you do with all these blossoms.
There’s wisdom behind the podium.
Pile the books to the bones of your brow.
And down your handles of black coffee.
If you black your brow with ink
a fine sorrow will guide you through your trammeled nights,
these days fettered by whorled suns.

So I go out to meet the dead in a rumpled sweater
and a crushed dress.
And each day my humble body
longs for an egress.
All day the birds repeat themselves.
What are they saying anyway?

It’s April everywhere.
All on earth is full
to its green brim.
Your curls, flushed husks,
burn down to your shoulders
and the moon,
a rind picked clean,
sweeps over a scene
heavy with bulbs and bric-a-brac.
What you hold between your palms
burns like a lamp in its glass cradle.

poem

It’s April, barely
April any longer,
the leaves are flushed dark now
no longer pale and new,
and I’m afraid and drug-flushed
on a Monday night,
dreaming of my Alejandro
whose skin the rain washed white
when he stood, dizzy, under it
for twenty years; softly
the night breaks over him, lowly
the eaves and asters bow to him
where he goes on the street
the rent brick summons itself whole again,
he is Alejandro, in his black boat-shoes
whom the night looks wonderingly on
filling his pockets with stones and grasses
with damp odors, with sussurant stars.

response poem for wide sargasso sea [it's really long]

It’s April, and the blossoms are being put out all around us like calves’ tongues. Who knows what kind of strangeness is in them? We shouldn’t forget that, in order to spread out and photosynthesize, the minute new leaves have to break open the waxy scales that shut them in all winter, like hands cupped tightly over a flame. The little blossoms, severed by winds, fragrant, even a little phosphorescent in the sodium lamps that burn down by the river all night, lap at the air and at our hands, desirous of something as strange and terrible and transitory as they. It’s April. I read Wide Sargasso Sea to remind me that sitting in the heart of a blossom like a pretty cat on a lap is a kernel of madness, and each stem is like a little bone plucked out of a defenseless animal. What am I? A woman in love? Where do I sit? By the river? What am I, hungry, dreaming of Caribbean seas, of merciless thunders? Here the year droops blackly through its months, sunk low in cold; it’s so prostrate it doesn’t believe in itself, its presence, just like the mad young woman didn’t believe she was in England. Being in love in spring it’s easy to remember how we bewitch each other, we tear into each other’s hearts like a new leaf into its hard containing scales. And what does it mean to love? What’s the difference between love and enchantment? Mr. Rochester never knew the difference, he sat in the rain-gutted house and when he spoke bronze coins fell from his lips, he didn’t know whether he loved her for her money, her hair, and what the blossoms, white as gold-ore, had to say in the matter. We can gut a chicken for obeah, scatter its blood, hope the drops turn to blossoms that nod in a code we can decipher, telling us what our love is, and where our twinned bodies begin and end.

it’s april
the leaves are breaking open their wax scales
and putting out pale tongues to the light
the slick birches are sloughing off skin
so many flowers too the trees calving these soft-
bodied blooms which flare and die in an hour
and oh my love whose restless hands don’t still,

your mouth is livid
as a branch impelled up by flowers

history is drowning there
and in the sunlight which washes the day pale to nothing
and in the vivid clapping of the pale leaves as they emerge knocked roughly
by the spring wind which takes in its arms a roomful of blossoms

open your mouth
let the wind in which takes all succor and turns it into song

It’s April. I want to build up a dozen white columns and break them again. The stems of the tulips look like bones to me. A field of unbearable bones. Spring, a violent dream, a shudder through all growing things. I feel like one of those waylaid on the road by Siris the bandit, a giant who tied his victims between two bent trees and let them go again. Flung on the curved shoulders of winds, my limbs, like red standards, will fly into the bellies of many countries; where the drops of my blood fall a flower with a new name will rise and open its gaping mouth. Spring, feeding on blood and dust, will grow lurid as a painted bust, will continue its dense chorus, adding day after overbloomed day like a handful of seeds that brims, lapping up the wrist, falling, piling, trembling.

Today the wind made a hail of petals all down the street. You watch the segmented flowers fall cup-down to the earth. You wish, as always, that there were labels on each of the trees, that the whole earth was an arboretum. You would also like to see labels on everyone’s foreheads: Ben Jones, born 1980, shivers when he passes big dogs and open doorways. Rashid Hamaowi, b. 1975, still remembers her. You wonder what yours would say. You wonder if, slimming the kern of each line, you could make your unruly self disappear. Limb by limb, like a rain of blossoms, you would drop to the pavement, settle in a whorl, drown a little, taken by an impulse of wind into the water. The days pass like geese driven backwards by a gale. You want to build your life like an almanac: ripe wheat, shifting moons, black lines of ongoing predictions.

It’s April
I pluck the last toke from the ashes
and listen to Ray Charles singing about America the Beautiful
there’s something poetic about a blind man singing this way
what does purple mean when you can’t see it?
what does a poem mean when you’re too drunk to see straight?
are we done?
I hope we’ll never be done
like the blossoms turned to princes
by the flowering of April
I hope we never get used to all this

It's April
I am falling in love with men in sweaters
with the gold stamen in each flower like the needle
in the brooch with whihc Oedipus blinded himself
and with April herself
a girl who hems her dresses with light
and from whose smoke-seared throat issues
a perpetual song of praise
April: I am listening for the sound of my hungry friends
who cry like ravens for a crust of bread
while in the public park the girls in bright dresses
built out of heat, draped in floral flags
dip whole loaves in fragrant oils

April, the violence on this earth has never seemed as sweet to me
the hot night comes like the crust of a dark bread
pressed deeply with signs
I dream that all night my breaths are turning into flowers
dappling the room, turning the air black with fragrance
I wake having dreamt that sleep evaded me
on a black ship gone over a white sea
April: I sleep and I drink and I smoke and sleep again
dying, like a field of poppies,
for the least touch of sun

It’s April, incantatory April
the warbles of birds rise up like a gas
and reading Marx under the almond tree
drinking a glass of coffee
My whole limbs feel sharp as knives
I want to rend the day open like a toffee
and place this rage, this unsaid
name at its heart
and the spring day strung on a gold thread
with its hungry art
the flowers blazons of sex
with whorled, sprawled limbs
and the sea-tempest of seeds
seeking blindly in
if I could make a blade of my tongue
if I could split the air in two—

Janusz Bartel

Janusz Bartel is staring at the plums
that hang, still tiny nubs
outside his fourth-floor window.
It’s April
and the whole apartment bloc
feels like a hotel,
the hall
littered with half-smoked butts,
cards, corpses
of mosquitos, green rinds, the cheap perfume
of blossoms.
It’s April, each bloom is a dizzy box of glass…
Janusz wrecks clocks
and rooms, leaving his prints
on the windows,
thinking of Ada while
mangling the shag,
a woman, a strange white
house to move
into, retreat from.
spring baring
its nectar-gutted teeth
through splintered glass:
the red stain in the cup
of the plum bloom pucks
its lips up, calling
an unheard name.

it’s april
we all hop in a van after ingesting too much marijuana to see straight
little cartoon rabbits keep hopping from the vegetation grinning blankly
and we all know their only purpose was ever to die
max calls up his ex-girlfriend and shouts at her
i know that chick her body is like an elongated diamond
i bet mark still wants to be pinned under her and the delicious hair of her crotch
and when he shouts he’s shouting at mark-who-is-dreaming of her pearl-and-anise tongue
i can’t see the lintels of the van through too much smoke
it’s april the magnolias put out their tongues like calves
ryan says each one is penance for each individual hailstone
that dented our heads and our shingles all winter
i myself am preoccupied with the fact that he just licked my knee
and with the poem i’m writing about these shocking experiences
the clouds pulsing round the low sun like a vulva
the narrow road dented by the flat brush of dusk
the miles disappearing themselves from yellow line to yellow line
the several hairs on ryan’s lip that i stare at half the way to daytona
like the feathers on an ibis like the corrugations on a cowrie shell
fuck anyone who tells me this is medicinal
i am going to daytona
i am going to hell in a puce van full of lucid uncertainty