what flows away

I was walking
in the high meadow, parting waves
of insects in wild grass. The voice said
lie down here
and be done with wandering.

My thoughts were philandering like bees.
I was transparent, safe as a maiden in the garden.
No maiden is safe in the garden.
The animal came upon me and I fought,
and beat at its head and neck, went for its eyes,
as red as if his shot out eyes bled bright
and blood exploded in his skull.
Claws ripped my arms
and nerves shot up like flames on a screen.

Dog’s breath on my face, sick with my own
blood on his tongue, I fought. I held.
So once we owned dominion.

And yes, the fruit becomes a bird
and flies away.
The flower becomes a bee.

I am a woman, and I would not be
meat for the dead.
Lie down here and be done with wandering
for the kingdom is at hand.

Ooh la la Lulu,
she pursued you
down Sepulveda Avenue.
Chased you, wooed you,
yoo hoo hoo-ed you.

Whatchu doin’ with Lulu
up in Santa Cruz-zoo?
Drinkin’ ouzo?
Where’d you go so suddenly
after drinks in Albany? Totally

lonely, up here on the seventh floor.
Out the door in Baltimore.
Neither-nor Norfolk, Kansas City two-step, bad bet.
Once a night in New Orleans,
“Po’ boy” in between.

Can’t you see I’m shook up
from this hookup?
When you gonna see through
all her hoodoo?

Stay with me one time, will you?

I was in my sick bed
I was at the seashore
I was at a conference
Nothin’ there was making sense
I was home by the phone
Where were you? Off with Lulu?
Well then screw you.

“Og hvad foregår der så her?” spørger de af politibetjentene, som går rundt på hustagene eller med begge arme strakt ud til siderne balancerer faretruende oppe på gesimserne. “Og hvad foregår der så her?” spørger de af politibetjentene nede på gaden, som, siddende på hug foran dørene, kigger ind gennem brevsprækkerne. “Og hvad foregår der så her?” råbes der ind gennem portåbningers gitterlåger med kun et svagt ekko som gensvar. “Og hvad foregår der så her?” spørger politibetjente, der møder politibetjente, som selv, noget opgivende, stiller samme spørgsmål: “Og hvad foregår der så her?” Selv om natten, mens de blinkende positionslys fra et fly langsomt bevæger sig over himlen, lyder spørgsmålene som en næppe hørbar mumlen i mørket mellem husene: “Hvad . . . så . . . her?”

Inde i centrum af byen er de nyeste huse konstrueret, så længden og højden på bygningselementerne passer, sådan at et gennemsnitsmenneske altid vil kunne stå i forlængelse af ét eller flere andre gennemsnitsmennesker eller danne for eksempel en pyramide af gennemsnitsmennesker. Ude i forstæderne kender hver indbygger den nøjagtige højde på selv hække og kantsten. Her, i grænseområdet mellem centrum og periferi, er målebåndene altid et par centimeter for korte, og når man vender tilbage med et, der er længere, er der aldrig nogen, som kan huske, hvortil man var kommet i sin opmåling.

Et helt hus holdt oppe af balloner, i hvert vindue et frimærke som rullegardin. Endelig et brud i rækken af huse, endelig et udsyn over bugten. I horisonten, ude på næsset: en gulnet kindtand i vintersol.

*

Did you get the money? Don’t say you’ll pay me back when I know you won’t. It was nothing really, take all the time you need to do what you should’ve done, I won’t believe it, even if the money should come round again as things that circulate tend to do—all that blood rushing through our hearts that we can’t control. So don’t. I’m lying here in bed, not wanting to get dressed, to get all gussied-up—for whom pray tell? And you, gorgeous in your nakedness, what could poverty do to you that hasn’t been done already? Your flesh that answers, my mind that questions, your body like cash exchanging hands, only none of the hands are mine. I bailed you out before, remember?, a curtain of mist rising from the gulch where the waterfalls tumbled down, a double rainbow embroidered to those veils. I’d given you three bills instead of two, knowing how you ask for less than what you need, and I said just take it, you don’t owe me a thing. You said you’d pay me back. I offered you a gift, and this you took but couldn’t really take, emptied out of change, paying in prose what it cost in verse as if you knew the difference. In every letter since, you say you’ll pay me back with the very next check, the day already spent and night with empty pockets stumbling zigzag in the streets where bodies reek of purloined cash.

*

Can’t tell if writing this makes me miss you less or more. Why does the thought of addressing you complete something inside myself I couldn’t otherwise do alone? You walk into a room—just the thought of that room, any room, whether I am in it or not—and I’m struck dumb. You call my name and I come running, good dog, bad dog, with a loyalty that can only embitter the heart. What a good sport sincerity is, corrosive and adhesive, the words holding as much distance as closeness will allow. Babbling ruin. I send this note in the hopes that you won’t receive it, or that you’ll choose not to read it, setting it on your mantel, sealed. Were you to write me, I would do the same, what you wrote already written in my own hand left unread, the selfsame hand I use to touch the parts of me you can’t touch, this hand that won’t abuse the seal. You leave the room just as I open my mouth to speak, as is your practice. Keep the money you owe me, I say, I don’t want this bond, unless you choose not to open what I send, in which case, you’ll still owe me, and whatever it is that’s been going on between us will continue to go on.

*

Not hearing from you makes me feel adrift, farther from the shore than where we started, where we remain, always the same age. Seems time would not leave us alone until we parted. These letters that go undated, unsent—not that either of us are keeping track. It’s all the same letter anyway unless you choose to respond. Even then, I know it’s only you talking to yourself, giving me or someone else the chance to overhear. Some say God has no power to change the past, but you and I know better, how words can creep in, how if you said, no, I wasn’t charmed sitting next to you that first night beside the river, the street lamps all aglitter on the waterfront, I only wanted to get away from you, you’d know I wouldn’t want to listen, but having heard, would try to forget. Just kidding, you’d say, retracting your words but not the doubt. Or if you had been charmed and didn’t want to say, then what a violation my own needs might impose on yours, the neurotic in me wanting to nail the meanings down—crude displays hung next to my diplomas. Best that we not read what the other has written. Keep the past pristine, you said. But don’t you see even the act of having written denies the past’s certainty, a shared past no longer shared, a secession? The letters I don’t send so unlike the ones that don’t get returned, those very words I long to see rewritten in your own hand. Without a past that both of us can agree upon, what hope do we have for any kind of future?

*

I must confess: there’s someone new, someone in this city whom I dare not write. That the letters I send to you aren’t returned somehow heartens me. Don’t think I don’t know, delivery confirmation an extravagance worth the extra penny. Response is so overrated! Better to walk past a stranger’s windows after dark to see if they are lit, the wordless prayers I leave behind but footprints in the mud left beneath his sill. It starts with a glance, and then what choice did I have but to follow him home? Important to know when a smile is more than a smile. Not a come-on but a recognition, not having met before and being sure of that. Well beyond the “you remind me” or “haven’t we met.” We pass thousands on the streets without giving or receiving the simultaneous glance, and then one day, we’re bussing our cafeteria trays, and it’s almost nothing, that look, one look among a thousand looks as we move on down the rest of our to-do lists, only now these items which seemed so concrete, so arranged according to their urgencies, give way to that look, and off we go, onto the next thing, only stunned, dazed, can’t quite go on as before. But we do. Even if we don’t believe in “love at first sight,” only first sights worth remembering. This is how the future arrives: unaware of its own arrival, apprehended after the fact. Out of sight, the glance becomes all seeing, the mind able to replay the scene as if it were happening again and again but unrehearsed, a second time, a third, each a stand-in for the gone-before. Desire has such eddies, such snags. Only a future event can offer release from one pool into the next, the nameless one now assuming a name, the one without an address suddenly located among the addresses that were listed all along if only I knew where to look, a building I’ve walked past every day of my life, never knowing the future was simply waiting behind a door. It may have never happened, the future I was waiting for, waiting in, for out of the many possible futures, why not another? And why not many possible pasts if time indeed flows in both directions as some have said? The mind doesn’t work that way, I tell myself. The future, once it actually arrives, is the only past I’ll get to call my own. Waiting for the arrival of each word, but patiently, like Moses following the finger of God burning his irrevocable will into tablets of stone equal to a past he always already has read, that virginal reading relived again only in forgetting. As I have tried to forget your face, your hair, your name, and the place where our future was about to become, a future about to happen again and again, ever more sweetly, lest we forget.

When someone brings you armor
And begins to lace the greaves
There is no kind way to let her know
You won’t go into battle

Try to cradle the heart cageless
Without sullying your gloves
Try to strap it like a mended watch
Against its rightful owner

Sailor taught me there’s one ocean
With a thousand given names
That any sea I thrashed against
Would flood my lungs the same

Now we sharpen garden spades
To slit the listing scarecrows’ throats
And free steam from the spoiled wheat
Packed damp inside their neckerchiefs.

Do not bow your heads to mourn
The farmers’ fallen effigies,
But turn your bloodcracked winter hands
Above their tracheotomies,

Wrap your starveling bones inside
The voodoo of their castoff shirts,
Pry you loose their muddy boots
Stuck like molars in the earth.

The feet that once curled in them swing
Suspended from the twirling forms
That hang from heaven’s rafter beams—
Lovers, we are food for worms.

Boulders the size of hills
Hills the size of Mammoth Cave
Giant scoops of air    Large as clouds

Earthquakes feel like lime Jello
But only for 12 seconds    Then silent
Birds circling in dust & air
Through bright layers of brown light

Cemetery of grass & buried wells
Graveyard of oak & pine
Part of the mountain still stands
As if someone had sliced last night
Braided it into a thick mad shadow

At home the honey lying on the toast
In the form of a butcher knife
Seemed to call forth a sixth sense

& the vigil candle’s heat
Did something more
Than erase the dark smudges
Around the Virgin Mary’s halo

The flowers too grew strange    Oranger
Yellower    Redder    Bluer    Whiter    Pinker
Part of the needle prop of thread
Stitching a new encyclopedia of pain
Even the dirt they thrived in seemed to breathe

The Internet is full of people
you can hire—or barter with—
to straighten you out.
Pay in the usual
currency—cocktails &
sad stories. Or just
lick each other clean.

California, it seems,
is ungovernable. Its festival of
prisoners. Old flashbulbs. Always-cold
ocean. Every story is a slave
narrative. An escape or implosion.
I haven’t dyed my hair in

some time. Here, too, is complicated.
Pigeons and coffee—rarely tea. And I don’t
know what the birds are
like over there.

Big & rainbowed, maybe.

I worked in a bookshop.
Small birds died in the walls.
The song inevitable, I learned
the dance dust did.
Walls that wouldn’t burn
parted us and floored the form
of walls that sounded like birds.
You stood in a field that bore night.
In the field stood a wall that held
the birds. Beyond the wall,
songs of walls, and behind
those walls, confusing the song,
you, shivering blank keys.

(Matt Henriksen’s poem originally appeared in Redivider)