Rahway (part one)
Like highways standing too long
Used and untouched
1
The gravel crunching beneath your tires-
The jingling announcement of back door bells
The women looked up from the fireplace and said “hello.”
What followed was old like silence,
Both comfortable and awkward
I felt clumsy about my existence
With these women who could see through but not into me
Who need to see my face to remember that I breathe
These comfortable quiet women
placed me between them like a bundling board
Sitting like wood in front of a fire
I feel such things grow as they die, expanding
And I know that we share knowledge
and know nothing of what comes before
and nothing of the nothing that comes after
2
What shall we do after we’ve driven each other away?
at the stake of identity
What shall we do when we know an empty burning cry?
You’ll curl into a blanket and into a chair
I’ll learn to choose not to be there
Empty pain is the price for our knowledge
Outside the window over the fireplace hangs a feeder
I watch the birds come to eat
You stare into the flame
We have different fantasies
But the feeling is the same
You look at the bird, I stare into the flame
We’re cross-eyed from our visions
Together we are electricity
That drowns the bird in the flame
3
The ghosts make noise
In the cold that moves through these rooms
Trying to latch on
This painting Maid on the Front Room by the Door
Is the call of someone desperate to be remembered.
This center room is like tombstone,
Its objects handled or noticed and reflecting
But unable to give the feel of things
comfortable with their place.
Where there are no noises there are shadows
Moving with the silence that has made them
When we’ve burned our senses away for being too much of us
What will we want to feel?
After we’ve learned that we have learned the illusions of color
Where shall we want to look?
In the numbness that has not survived but has given the appearance of surviving
4
For nights with a map of the world
Hung over my bed next to empty bookshelves
Listening to this house constantly running water
I stayed as you left me
And was at my best unconscious
When the mix of the scents makes you make for a new bed
And the mix of the men helps you find a new home
Will you lace up your smile for someone’s face?
Rahway (part two)
Back from Minneapolis
1
Waiting in a car, then by a door
Waiting like I’m held, then blown apart
Lying in a dim room
I say “This can’t come to any good end.
I’m always there with some message
Then I’m always shot
Back here- unable to move”
The room is part of revival
Stretching like anticipation
Slow time
Breakfast is last night’s dreams
Imagination fills the places I imagined were there
A rebuilt sense of sanity
Reaching for surrounding influences
2
Summer bugs stray in these rooms
Moths beat themselves against my reading lamp
Shapes blend from compositry to pureness
Like grain in a magnified photograph
Where time is place
3
Fixing a mind
Like arranging furniture from the traces of old patterns
With some confusion complicated by the necessity of light
And the need of a window
On more nights than I care to imagine, I think of you
After the sleep I did for something to do
Left us together
If there were no forces between you and me
If there were no places and there was no time
If hope could turn black as a night cat’s eyes
Glowing in the fire of their darkness
If we lived in the light of the moon
4
Weeks become months
Time is spinning cylinders of a combination lock
Images freeze in my eyes
What I feel is my weakness
Prying me loose inside my mind a line at a time
She said that a careless death was a sloppy compromise
That brought no one any closer
She held my soul and said it was the last time
5
Her place measured security by distance
Land stretched land to the front and back
Endlessly stretching and flat
Where the river divides the city, the town has a bridge
Stretching as far as you can see
The people walk and the people ride
At least once each year, one goes over the side
From twilight to twilight when distance escapes
In the illusion of the guardrails and the blackness below them
A large concrete bridge with a glass way that runs down the middle
Where I heard a flute song and the Indian saying that something gone wrong
Has to be started over again to be put right
She sat across from me with freckled cheeks and asked if I remembered the way
That her hands used to creep into my pockets on cold nights
Then she asked if I would repeat everything that she said
6
Walking through the parking lot to the botanical garden and the zoo
Arms and hands locked together
We went to the half-acre cage where they kept the wolves
One white male with dog sad eyes, showing his teeth
And twitching his ears at the summer flies in hope of a piece of meat
One elephant held to a tree by a chain that clanked beneath his step
The monkeys are modeled after New York City
Packed in and surrounded by a mote
Shouting to those outside, shouting among themselves
Moving with the business of the tribe
Some asleep and some silent
The imported gardens stocked with birds and songs
And trees that reach for a glass-covered sky
And the garden statue with her smooth body and surprised face
Holding out her hands for water
Rahway (part three)
New York and the Jersey Shore
1
Unfamiliarity,
Made by distance, confusion and velocity
Meeting at the airport gate
Without looking at me, she asks if I want to see her pictures
There is a tree that bulges from a flatness
A face made with one side of a face
And shadows that look like bars on an alley wall
Her short hair and summer caressed face tell stories
That spin the mixture of our combination
She says, “I tell everyone now that it is hard to be a person.”
The room is cluttered in the way that someone who is visiting overfills a space
I ask if there is somewhere that she wants to go with me
She places a thought filled finger to her lips and answers, “Where don’t I want to go alone?”
I want to reach what is between us
As we feel the flickering closeness that tries not to leave us
As if there was something to be done
She says, “There’s nothing to be done with everything that people have shared.
We’d have leftovers.”
2
Walking in circles from the bottom to the top of the museum without stopping together.
The green violinist has a foot over each roof and only the smile that a man in purple pants can wear.
We turn
There are no lovers on the walls of this place
There is a pillar at the top
Wordlessly, into each other’s’ arms like we’d been there before
She says, “I think you make things up about me.”
When George and Marth had their kid, they gave it life and form between them
And kept the thing from the outside
Poor, poor George and Martha, so much stronger than us
Each with a child lost inside.
3
Waves wash my mind
My dreams have left me
She says the water is cold and I dive, open-mouthed
On the beach she doesn’t leave when I close my eyes
Memories are old films, retouched
We lay on the beach with no blanket
The sun and the repetition of waves bring her sleep.
I touch the soft backs of her thighs with the gaze of my eyes
My fingers brush sand from the traces of her ribs.
What was between us has left space.
Rahway Part 4
Verona
1
Her eyes wonder-wide as she mouthed the words of her book
Which closed when I came into the room
In a face made of imagination, she said, “Tell me a story.”
Humming lush breaths with her ankles cross in back of my head
She’d hurry my hips with her fingers
She’d say I was the silliest man that she ever met
And make me laugh until I was as happy as an easy truth
A girl who put angels on winter lawns
Easing herself down like a slow secret
Bouncing like she was riding a horse
I’d buck into the air and shake her from side to side
Covered up to our necks with smiling faces
I’d say, “I feel more than alive when you are with me.”
She’d scrunch her face and say, “Let’s do things.”
We planted a garden alongside our bed
In the beginning of the year’s cold light
Undernourished things grew and the cats ate them
Her eyes close and her mouth shaking
Riding silently in a car with a place that we could not stand between us
Turning into each other
2
Opening is a parting gesture
She said, “I feel you in me and then I reach for other people.
You watched me and wanted me more after I left you.”
I said, “But the feeling when we are together…”
She said, “I won’t get into that again, not for a long time, not ever.”
We were given to feeling inside each other
Sometimes with a candle like a telephone between us
Sitting cross-legged, charting intuitions and dreaming
Set back in a house guarded by trees, I wanted us married
When we wished for who we wanted to be
She wore inspiration like a nursey school rhyme
She said, “I hate it when you make me sound like a little child.”
At a table, in the house with things that are left
Our candle burns longer than we had a right to expect
We move from now to then and then to now
With no conception for a future
I said, “Living in one place reduces me.”
She said, “Moving around thins me out.”
Her hands in front of her mouth, her forehead wrinkled like pain
Her eyes were open but they looked away.
Rahway (part five)
At Rahway
1
Centered in a space that is not a room
Arrangement does not hold
An artist did her painting where an unknowing man now stands and draws
A half broken closet door holds back things which should have been of use
Memory is an old cooking fireplace
Time is the constant sound of a ticking clock
A large mirror filled with smudges and distended reflections
When the full moon dogs and emergency sirens wailed
We knew of nothing gone wrong with us
The breeze lifts the black drapes in a motion without sound
We are an exit from the highway
In the back, under the floor of my room
A cat curled up to die
The decay covered everything before I knew what it was
I pulled up the floor and speared the rock-hard corpse
Fat black flies crawled out of its mouth gorged and bloated
Through the winter, we cursed and crushed them
But they left stains that would not wash away
And we knew of nothing grabbing on to us
We lived for wine-filed conversations, books and weed,
Music, sex and magic
The house gave itself to us sympathetically
A place where people come to dream and have dreams spun
2
She had the wondering feel of a child with painter’s eyes
Wide like an open door of fantasy
“I heard rats in the walls, so let me sleep with you tonight.”
She squawked and strutted and we called her the Bird
She painted rows of women lying on pallets
Under red and purple skies
Her color caught confusion and exploded
She left with steel in her eyes
The ecstasy of her belief vanished
So it was for us all
Rahway (part six)
Postcards
1
The river and house are pictured
With a low fog on a warm winter night
Drawn to our windows by the light
A piano and a voice, the scent of turkey and pipe smoke
A breeze with bells, the soft collusion of glasses
Filled with arrangements, pillows on the floor
Candles, reflecting glass and an open stack of magazines
The brightening fireplace, smoky banter
My palm slides on the welcoming counter
A kiss causes hips to quiver in the kitchen
The creak of dishes settling in the sink
The guitar and flute tuning a voice
Short laughter and then quiet
Remembering the darkness outside the window by the mimosa tree
Allen opening the back door and calling,
“Is that you Jean?”
Karen whispered up to me, “Don’t let him see.”
3
I remember our bedroom when it was filled up with bed
The walls were green and the sheets were red
Lovers in the morning in a crumpled moist spread
A gong by the door, a latticed ceiling and a slanted floor
She said, “These walls hold you when you try to sleep.
Something inside here won’t let me be.”
4
Pillows close to a fire and heads propped on laps
Drawling words like brandy
Lighting cigarettes and smiling down into the glass
Doors won’t stay closed here unless they’re latched
In this place of open spaces
5
On some very late days of a mild, mild winter
When the sun first warms you with its ins and outs
I remember then thinking about how we resembled sprouts
Showing our heads, needing to stretch
We’ll need more lifetimes to work what we’ve got to work out
Rahway (part seven)
Ensconced
I still feel like I am going home when I go to Rahway
But I wanted a place that no one could take from me
Spring music with a chill in the air and the warmth of a dance
The waxing moon appears and reappears
The house speaks plainly like a stage of life
Perspective is a view from the outside
As we crawl in dreams inspecting and naked
Calling into the early light
When she feels me
I wonder if she knows what to do
We fit what we see into what we become
Where I am she will be too