HARBORING VODKA


I'm never ashamed enough. Or I'm singular in my
declensions. Limp a little. Drag the day along

the avenue like you're named for a harpsichord. I
go outside, catch crows on my tongue. It's

what a complaint can do for us, breeding com-
placency. I hide, then I arrive. I create

an X on canvas out of tar--it's the pitch I smell
in the crown of thorns--bramble-like . . .

I was breathing turbines and milk, she said,
getting chesty about our cocktail piloting . . .

getting different, down to the backbone, blood in
the sprocket set, a hand left in disarray--pull

Tab B through Gap C. I don't care really--you
can't fake like you're an egg these days? I

stuck a match inside the cavity where
we harbored each other in ice floes and this was

a New Year's Eve ritual. The ground turned sour;
spoiled by moon. Stars, thoughts, the streets moving

like clouds. I can't tolerate the balloon. I don't think
it's something I want to revisit or remedy either. She

ends a sentence. I shiver a bit in the cold north crust
above the truck driver's elementally bracketed desire
   for more cigarettes.

*

Here is my poem from class, unedited, other than a
little lineation adjustments here and there. It's too long
for the assignment, but that's okay at this point.

How does yours play out?

Here is my second poem draft, the one using the slips
of paper drawn from the envelope:



LIVID WITH ENTHUSIASM


Them on my collapsible hamper to dry,
so he was naked. But we only kissed. Give
me a cross-section of the catalogue,
the one about coffins. The swirl of
an ancestry divorcing its genome in

the smooth polished wood, in hypertext, the
psychology of linking. During the coldest months
I perform unlike a refrigerator-- you love in a
bagful of store bought ice all warehoused and mass
produced. The kitten purrs but you're softer, diluvian

even, deeper than Scarsdale. It's much too easy
a solution for the problem that I have, I'm
interested, don't lie to me. He claimed agoraphobia,
and like a primate's foot, you clung to his burning-
couch ways. Do I sip sherry as some nectar from

disposable sex position number 9?  Or like a swan
flies down the embankment, its wings are an open boat.
The head reaches forward, into the last memory
of snow flurries, immanent in fog. A bird made mostly
of wool and granulated charcoal isn't the sonar

you release into life--in bed. But also in grass
some hot August, cold garden hose water dowsing
   the couple
we are back into an age of critical mass and somnolence,
livid with enthusiasm--you can't tell what one likes. Then
you can. I like you. I think we know that already.