berryman, you've never been much of a mentor, the way your words collide, a fisher's net of emotion.
your mouthfuls, are abstract, heavy socks, cotton in mouth.  it is like the way i lack fluidity, a disjoint here, a disjoint, disjointed, dreams, half awakenings.
i know your heart, or rather, the way the masking fluid, the weight cloth that puts out fires,
pins you by its corners, bubble of wet air underneath
a pink shower cloth.
there is a hungriness on the belly of a bathing baby,
i wish i could explain.

-

i know you.
there is a girl who is late for the experiment, so the science will go on without her, and i'm afraid that there is nothing left,
but chalkboards, nostalgic green things with slow dust, wooden desks.
sometimes i can't remember if i am again manufacturing my childhood
for more sunlit country days,
prim and proper teachers.
the classrooms are always empty so you'd never know
if electricity ever existed
and ruined our drifting days.

there is a song i've been meaning to sing,
but i want badly,
to touch the concrete, the gravelly unevenness
of courtyards, as if in the painful patterning, the afternoon
would stay with me,
imprint the steady gathered warmth,
so i'd remember what it was like, to hold summer on my skin

How Pretty Girls Dry Their Long Hair

...not like other girls, with shorter hair; I’ve seen.
They sand their dripping strands
between towel.
They let their heads fall back,
pulled down by the damp silk,
the lovely whispers that will o’ wisp
nightingales and fireflies to their billowy spines.
They let their chins drop to clavicle, grievers,
before they raise their coffin’d lashes
to the lone bulb in the ceiling,
slow breathing beneath the sweet suffocating veil.
And then, they apple,
one ear cradled in the wind of their hair,
stars shaken in glass jars in a dark room.

the abstraction:

oh river, river, the highway song
hums twilight lid
over the bright eyes of the zephyrs.

the carbon cells against my wrist
burn lemon, tap wet
fingers, flickering lamp switches and buttons

the way the awakening waves
stream through the sealed panes and the walls,
leaves me crawling back to some blackness.


a translation:

river, i smell your dawn,
between the fluid melody
of cars streaming, fish on the highway

my wrist has carpal tunnel
from love vibrations and voltage leak
of electric cells caught between stiff fingers.

the way the dreaded cockcrow arrives,
the first dark blue, the moon growing old,
leaves me crawling beneath my bedding.


the poem:

river, river, i smell your dawn,
the sea starved song,
the singing of the streamlined
fish on the highway.

it silences
the motors
tunneled against my wrist,
it runs dry
the masochism,
numbs the voltage buzz in my fingers.

in the dark,
the moon grows old.
night stumbles away again,
never lullaby nor lover.

Some nights, as the starry clouded hours lay with me,
I think of those who lay their aging bodies,
unshowered and uncradled,
into the empty pocket of their machine-worn sheets,
and then of myself, spray cleansed
and coiled like electric cooling in the flat folds of my quilt
to keep my bathed body from the damp of the dew,
that soaked my linens closer to midnight.

There is a wandering in my flesh,
that keeps me from silence,
the pieced pastorals of my mind.
My organs are hungering
for hairy arms and a bed
in Brooklyn. I call my lover, apologize.
He instructs: turn off the lights, lie down, close your eyes.
 
I say: goodnight. He says: goodnight.
And as he falls 
to heavy, luscious breathing,
the static on the phone becomes steady rainwater,
glistening orange and city as it drops,
sounding steps, high and ringing in wash colored pavement.
Heavy inhales, exhales,
June rain on my thirsting skin.