Clair de Lune from Issue 90
We started back from the coast
in the darkness
watching out for black ice
with evergreen branches on either side,
the sea wind pushing us
up from the beach
and five or six people coughing,
everyone trying to rest…
on a morning like this
the sky draws close,
you can see the faint stars,
a strand of blue fog half covering
the fulsome, promiscuous moon.
Everyone knows
she’ll go home with anybody,
even you in your secondhand shirt
with aspirin in the front pocket,
your tongue asleep
in your mouth like a reef fish
tasting of smoke and wine,
its songs left behind on the ribbed sand
abandoned there by the ebb:
song of watching the crab boats at night,
song of watering the house plants.
She’ll follow you home
to your skeletal orchard, your barn
with its vagrant wisps of hay,
though she surely won’t let you fall asleep,
hours from sunrise over the driveway
shining into your kitchen.
They say she went home
with Stanley Kubrick in 1968,
posed naked under his arc lights,
lay on her back while the astronauts
gathered their fragments of feldspar,
planted their spindly flags.
She shines on the bus driver’s
blonde pony tail,
she’s making big eyes at him,
his hands on the wheel
with their black leather cuffs,
shines on the sheet metal
covering the engine
and the road’s thin shoulder
speckled with rock salt
hunched against the dawn.
Old Men at the Gym from Issue 65
They crack jokes above the Jacuzzi’s foam
clucking about doctors and common stocks.
Flesh drapes their limbs, banners of dim crepe,
white hair wispy and childlike
in the ragged steam rising over them
like dawn of the coming world.
One wears a T-shirt saying “Bourbon Street:
Hold My Beer While I Kiss Your Girlfriend.”
Another keeps promising everybody
He’s going to put them “on report.”
Surely Carthage and Rome heard this laughter:
Splayed feet at rest on the bathhouse titles,
Blossoming with blue veins, bunions, scars,
the body’s rosy pavilions fallen.
Outside the rain keeps falling too
into the Willamette’s middle fork,
the rock’s fractured trellises crumbling away
carving the alluvial valley westward:
as it must have worn down the nerves
of the Legions guarding the Empire’s borders;
as it must have kept falling through time
into the rivers of Babylon
where the Hebrew children sat down and wept,
remembering Zion.