ALONE IN THE CITY WITH YOU.

 

I remember you as a refrain so I return to you (again.)
The flowers, I tell you, have no buttons.
They name their virtues while the wind strikes them without anger.
Comes the twilight sound, deeps also and deeps.

In a dream, the teeth of the wolf finally let go of the wolf.
Only dark eyes can agree with dark hair—
I try to put myself, therefore, inside an apple!
The half-night, always in revolt, always hungering for hours.

I remember you as a refrain so I return to you (again.)
The flowers, I tell you, have dressed as paupers.
Only one sun in a month of silver rain and wool rain.
Faith as the sole of a shoe, the obscure melody of a false silence.

You become visible in the place where I disappear—
Someday, you will become the one, the unique circle.



I wrote this sonnet in response to the song posted above. Discographic info: The Limps, “Someone I Can Talk To” b/w “Unreal” A-side. [B-side features another band called “No Support.”] Matchbox Classics – M.C.2. Carlisle, England (1979). Likely personnel: Tom Davidson (vocals); Andy Semple (guitar); Norman Jardine (bass); and Derek Watson (drums). Compositional credit: unknown, likely credited to the band. Though recorded in England the band is Scottish.

Want something a bit less elegiac? SeeThe Fox Who Loved a Corgi

SONNET NO. 2 (FOR CLARICE LISPECTOR)

The young woman’s whereabouts involve snow: seeds and dots weltering in halos of oily water at her shoelaces, which go boot-over-boot down the embankment to lengths of wintering scrub. “Garvey’s Ghost”—the bitter sweet percussion—starts on her earbuds. Her red hair clipped and chipped. The railroad tracks offer a north-south corridor between shallow wood where the wind can scour the poor footing of coarse ballast, culvert quiet and quiet akimbo. She had walked, once, through the pre-lightning metals, the stackable shoulders of a buckled housing distant, until she had lain down in a cemetery, long enough to be missing. A group of firefighters in t-shirts, heavy pants, and suspenders had discovered her, fetal, amid the irrational angles of the headstones. They had carried her (it only took one) (at a time) through a bright precipitate, and among the elevations and lift, she caught the slanted medallion of a fuselage in blue-gray suspension. Trumpet, the train drives through the wake of its own trumpet, the heralding, itself, always irrelevant.

There is little time to spread her arms in benediction as the locomotive—speeding, bright, juiced by catenary power—illuminates the regret of her body, organized forward in recognition of terror. Thirty minutes later, the train brakes, shrill, to a clatter, before the incongruity of a brief reversal, the passengers wakening to a small station, quiet akimbo. Abbey Lincoln had been guiding the musicians with the swells of her wordless voice, and the young woman must’ve deduced, “No, it’s good to be cold, it’s good to be cold,” before the engine’s number, 900 series, screamed beyond the glint of her good, cold, living eyesight. The conductor will fumble but save his coffee, the train will move, people will move, and isn’t that why she had protested in the first place, as the song clanged in her earbuds? Portraits will always decorate the hollows of a living room. They will always decorate fewer hours of dusty light.

also see

sonnet (for clarice lispector)

SONNET (FOR CLARICE LISPECTOR)

A young woman walked against the traffic, downhill, the breezy orbit of her scarf—the swept springs—unconceiling her, a sonorous swerve, ringlets brunette, varnished at street corners in the dipping light of eye contact. The many dress heels to pavement, the minutes and halves of a percussion compass would offer a bliss-erratic as bright as the tours of flickers, but for the directional mechanism of depletions in reverse. Those drab-dressed, vents whipping or other exodus, the day flattening. Three months later plus an hour, the weather had returned to seasonal: granular tableau above the river’s widening, husk yellow. She repaired, at the river, to the gradations of a hill, clean grass and dusty crown overlooking an eddy revolving with one styrofoam cup. Trees across the water in woolens. The sky lofted towards the coordinates of digital transmission. To receive alloys, the subfrigid metals of static, the needle electric in the ear, despair, of the listener. An air traffic pattern was changing, a rope of departures growling at the dimming detonation of the west. “I would shrink from attackers,” she may have thought. The young woman would turn away from the laugh of a bottle-thrower breaking, perhaps, on a vacant basketball court. An open palm, she concluded, is not always grasping for a handout, but a device that measures risk. The skeptic. The skeptic.

resurrection week editorial schedule:

Notes (for Sonnet)

“Great White Water” (Shaker)
“Cozy’s Mambo” (R&B Shaker)

Marian McLaughlin & Heterodyne

Sonnet (for Clarice Lispector)

also see

sonnet no. 2 (for clarice lispector)

SONNET (FOR ROWBOATS IN THE WOODS)

Are you in-country or incontinent?

Is your auntie’s bedroom an auntie chamber?

Do you fuck the fascists?

What is the rate of error with man-made lakes?

How can I overcome institutional inertia?

Who were the forebears of The Three Bears?

Isn’t the bullet harvested (more or less) the way the potato is harvested?

To the wounded, who insists upon stitching his own wound—‘ok, suture self!’

Why are there rowboats in the woods?

Is it a moon-colored day or a rain-colored day?

Can a bird be both scarf and insinuation?

Why does a person mourn within the apparatus of erosion?

What will our brothers be singing?
What will our brothers be singing, when we return their bodies to the earth?

SONNET (FOR EMPORIUM OF YOUTH)

Seen from another angle as when an area—station, square—contemplated on Sunday.

The expression may calcify into a demonstration of thistle-thorn dismay.

By “imagine your face” I mean shadow, your expression itself a shadow.

These colors: light green sky, pale stone, graffiti: these colors now.

The emporium of youth versus the emporium of adulthood.

If Person A will ail at Point X, then Person B will ail at Point Y.

(Loneliness aggrandizes the symmetrical nature of most pain.)

Whereas a big galosh of dirty cloud busts open a caucus of old doves.

These colors: pale stone, water-wood, radio tower: these colors now.

What brightens the ticking synapses versus what warms the solid state capacity for violence.

The difference between idling (unit of river bank) and waiting (unit of high-rise.)

Rust, rusty coloring, what gnaws into our porticos of awareness.

By “imagine your face”, I mean the uncorrected ritual of love.

Or the sliding scale of sunlight, or the balloting of voices in airshafts and alleys.

this post is part of a triple issue. also see: TRUMP & JUMPING JACKS