Arts of a Cold Sun: POEMS

The Seconds

35 The Seconds December Second Early, cold light of tin angels. Us hauling a year’s weight now dusted and nearly deceased. So pray for release from the glee quota that doesn’t hold. Christmas approaching. Coming in horizon-low, those forces under seasonal wind or radar screen. Time to signal general quarters. January Second Ice forming from my sleep. ZZZZ. Winter surfacing as a book of snow. ZZZ. Under gun, hotel-bound, feelings unfinished, all communications sealed. ZZ. January darks notching down to empty depths. Now wisely go on hibernating. Z. 36 February Second In the lee of an empty room, a wink eventually becomes a twitch. Contents under pressure: delusions of safety, whispers and defections gone secret. Snow suddenly whips Michigan Avenue white. I think of the hardening causes of muscle, Central Time, scientific praises. With my skin humming, this instant blanks to the bleak sincerely, the heart oversized, leaking at last, uncommonly. Then in the song of the empty room, accidents unloved, perfected later perhaps. March Second Struck dumb by an obscurity, bamboozled by the lure of body English. Going once, twice. Overheard, an unknown tongue, less sure of hocus-pocus than usual, than a gray-morning ache for some bottomless number. This very day turns cruel as a nursery rhyme. April Second A wetness sprung from stone under high-roller clouds. I come to love this trail through the actual. 37 Temperatures still raw. Sounds still proud. There’s a pleasure to be gained in authenticity, in the first jazz-notes of spring, quick and truant as habits. Take shelter from a proper angle on who’s in the offing or over the top. In a pre-dawn speech you claim the trill of Miles Davis remains ever pressed, thin and suspect as the hide of a hummingbird. May Second This sureness of edge, the jackknifed life. Running under a caution flag flying lakeside as holy remembrance, so a true north bearing can serve as our extra brain. Fast track, hiking out on boat rails, slick water reaching toward insouciance. So the act becomes young and customary as accomplices and urges. This lathering, that cut. Such a French gesture. June Second Incurable necessities against memory stand down now among fastballs 38 that get lost in the high weeds, ever on a string. Give chase to greater games, to souvenirs and swaggers, to bad news from the outfield, knowing it always gets dark here too late. July Second That circling proceeds with assurances, and this instant of connection on death day. My late father twists in a wind-blown curtain, as a clarinet hails cliché truth, as if the precise mistake you ordered. Lucky for us the sun also sets; us still steam-bent. Champions know best how ice works in heat. August Second Huffed and straddled among travelers in Alphabet City, feeling delinquent to hot-brained hurries, and passwords and blue moons, each ridiculously beautiful; and me, thinking beach, thinking distance and desire, just getting the hang of it all that’s delicious, private and rising on less than an average planet. 39 September Second Make way or weigh in. Last chance for linen suits and sheer pluck harborside. This day pours like music among undecided realities. Anchor the eye to lush loneliness, sailboats gliding northerly, spinnakers rising full-hearted, drunken balloons. Even in ruins, love that ripens all around you, leaves much unsaid in the vacant present . . . Soon, lesser times. October Second Oarlocks cranking alive before dawn takes the Charles River with deep, repeated phrases for the unlistening ear . . . Cruising the skin of the scene this captured day, I shoot a look into the shadows on shore, air bristling over there, in the bushes and beyond. Something’s busted free in the dark—love’s knot unraveling, sacred mist lifting from that dream discontinued again. 40 November Second Bitter autumn evening, near the end of a story you finished long ago but anonymously. In the company of fog, night turns colder, the cold darker and, more seriously, dislocated. Oh, comic memories of blood and stitches, that wounded-stag look now appearing heroically stupid in old football leather, not yet stunned enough, not yet the unstoppable self. December Second Again Dear holiday receptions and sweet anticipations beg seasonal inculcation against proposition and a holy consignment of weather. Give...