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Nameless

Excuse the use of apostrophe
it is the only way to cure you
of your loneliness.

After you died
someone found your diary
in a trunk. The pages, in need of stapling,
were all that remained of one Bernardo Soares.
It doesn't matter if they buried you,
or scattered your ashes,
or kept them in an urn.
It was always your uneven spirit that needed stitching.

Disquieted man you remind me
of still nameless creatures
lurking at the bottom of dark oceans.
The ones made of wet lace and delicate white skirts
that rustle in the breeze of currents. All costume
and no bride they drag their long tentacle trains
behind them as they move through the blackness.
They are like lungs in a sedated search for air. And you
are like them, but are also like a small gathering of strangers
at a house without a host
where dinner is eaten at a headless table.

Like is not is,
is something more infant
or infinite,
is harder to heal.

You are a light speaking through too many panes.

Bookish

Literary meetings are the manner in which anglophiles express passion.
                                                  - Leonard Cohen

They don't know how to touch each other.
Their hands are cramped from too much fondling
of pens and keys. The wells in their fingers
are out of oil - the pages of novels
stained and leather skin covers
now poreless and smooth.

They sit with spaces between them
and write in cursive to compensate.
It has occurred to each of them
on several but separate
occasions that fiction should be printed
on softer paper than fact.
When they are alone they frequently
engage in the English equivalent
of French kissing: witty glossing -
gloss equals glossa equals tongue. Oh how
they love tracing English words back to
their smutty Latin roots.

He lets her have her tragic princes
and romantic heroes, because he married
his own favourite heroines in private ceremonies
years ago. Neither wishes to share their beloved characters
with any person of flesh and blood. Their affair
is conducted entirely in verse, glances
and free-floating words.

If given the choice they would choose
not to touch each other. They don't want to lose sight
of where one begins and the other ends.
They have come to prefer the feel of word on tympanum,
the sudden shudder in the ear alone.

The Poet's First Physical

The poet rattles off hereditary titles
that all sound as grand and enviable
as the Latin on a coat of arms.
His list of family jewels is long,
and a copy fills each keyless safety deposit cell.
Diabetes and Huntington's Genes
sparkle like fool's gold, and foreshadow ambulances
backless gowns and bed pans. He is as under-nurtured
as he is under-natured and tells of holes in walls
where fists were planted in self-affliction.

After the oral,
the doctor pokes and measures -
listens to secrets the body is thoughtlessly revealing.
The poet begs to differ with the stethoscope's opinion.
He stays focused on the words
he'll take in twenty years
when his knees start to creak, is certain
there is a prescription he can write
to keep his head above the rising bile
and stop his brain from running on,
sputtering slowly to a halt after his heart cuts off.

When he leaves he remembers the file
sitting open for him to see
nothing but the illegible scrawl of the G.P.
He thinks maybe it reads
like an alarm that says stay away
on these pages the words
and not the body betrays.

"The World is a Sea of Tears"

On a bus, an Iraqi stranger and I
discuss the looting of the Baghdad museum.
Of all its scattered contents he says he will miss most a vase
that once belonged to an Assyrian queen, whose husband
died in a war fought outside their country;
his body was never brought home. And the stranger,
three months shy of new citizenship, is misty-eyed
not for the queen
but for the vase which caught all her weeping
and kept the tears
unevaporated for so many centuries
though it had no lid.
What he doesn't say is whether the ground was wet
where they found the vase's case smashed and empty.

Looking out the window
it is hard to go a mile without spotting a carcass
be it mammalian, avian or insectile.
Turning wheels and speed often lead to a sad place
A professor I once had
witnessed a head-on collision
between a hatch-back and a bird.
The impact interrupted his steady logic
and made him think swiftly:
the world is a sea of tears.

I am on my way to the biggest city in the country.
Its streets are wide and long.
Below ground, in the subway system,
commuters try to cover the greater distances.
While they wait they think and their thoughts swell like clouds
above their heads. It is hard to go a week without
seeing someone crying on the platforms.
Their tears feed the underground aqueducts
that make the skyscrapers grow.
In some cities the tears are worn quietly,
shed into hands and away.
In some they are tattooed onto faces.