I hear the sons of the
city and dispossessed
Get down
Get undressed
-The Sisters of Mercy
Dancing at Le Phonographique with Sylvia Plath
the smell of afterdark
and dry ice crimped
from the brutalist bowels
of Merrion Centre,
and you, Sylvia
red was your color back then.
although you wore
a Batwing Coffin necklace
you kept time
at the clubs in Leeds,
your Hellenic two-step like a peacock
blessing the black engine oil carpet
with arsenic feathers.
down here the sky
is always falling
through a sisterhood
of long glitter kaftan.
to the barking black lung
machine of doctor avalanche,
white roses and March violets
hatch like snake bites in Margaret’s garden.
you attract men
who perch in the margins, crow-eyed,
meaty-hands like tree trunks, tongues
brackish as the tails of northern pike.
They never dance with you
like I do, Sylvia
around the Phono’s mirrored pillar,
watching each hammerfall of stone
ripper names into the dark.
Pail Shop Corners
I watch from the window of Pail Shop
Corners
Enough sky to patch a Dutchman’s
trousers,
And the wind’s tra la la in the
darkening greens
In the low-lying swamp off of Goose
St.
Galas and Gravensteins pressed pummy
dry
Cider from the rig and rottletraps;
I watch the women jugging and singing
Old Vine Welch charged a bear with a
broomstick.
On a day when the spider guides string
on Fly Creek,
On a day when the devil honeys the
blossom,
On a day when the hammer trips a pail
full of poundflesh,
I watch from the window of Pail Shop
Corners.
The women jug the cider’s black-legged
broth,
A whitetail is cranked high on the
meat pole.
Our leatherstockings darken with snake
spit
On a day when the hand presses rack
and cloth.
The Kings of Rattlesnake Hill
On Pushkin’s birthday
You challenged the busker to a duel
At a gas station in New Hampshire,
We’d been snorting rocket fuel
And stealing granite
In the heart of Rattlesnake Hill;
Feldspar, Concord Grey,
We strayed deep into holes
Cutting lines, quarrying time.
Everyone lords a gun in New Hampshire,
Except the busker at the gas station;
He owns a blue guitar. We give him a ride.
Paul, with the scampering eyes
And merseybeat smile, wandering
The White Mountains, busking
Cadaver towns north of the Merrimack.
A flat tire in Moose Alley—
Our car’s outcropped fender
Flecked in the sun’s quartz and mica,
The lupines angled in repose
As Paul challenges
The purple finch to a song.
It hops three times, turns
And fires.
Impressionists
The talk is of tennis and tulips.
Ants wheel cheese in brush strokes
across the banks of the Seine,
that’s the impression in the light, at
least.
The ducks have bell-shaped eyes
and mean forehands,
that’s the impression in the light, at
least.
You make a perfect martini from a
picnic basket.
I taste lips sepalous with olives.
The ducks are at it again, their
all-court game
and the ants are busy, busy
wearing vests and running bookstores.
We won’t go with the cars and trucks.
We’ll stay among the loose grasses and
glances.
That’s the impression in the light, at
least,
cross-hatched in the sun’s little
golden match.
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