|
delcalcomania (transfer)
You leave the imprint underneath the chair.
You leave the directions for the chair with me
(how to walk, how to talk to the door).
I do remember myself as the owl inside a box of mistakes.
Let's transfer you to a new shelf.
Let's move your skin to the dark side of a tree.
Let's make a carbon copy of the owl and smell our fingers.
Let me have the book of receipts.
Let me smudge myself and bang around in my new box.
It's my copy. I made the press that made me again.
But a stamp is not a transfer (not wholly anyway).
how to get the girl
I forget that when the world came for you he drove a car—
a black car that had learned how to smell like a flower—
a black car that left the skin of itself above ground.
And the skin tried to make something happen,
to trick the water into making a face of its own.
But the skin was always just saran wrap and empty pants.
The skin that had once been a car, and before that a man said,
Now I know what others have suffered for me,
for I burn with a love of my own self.
Sometimes when you walk out of the ground and back into
the light world, I see the shadow of the car.
He has learned how to hide behind trees.
He still wants to be the skin on top of your skin
and to become a face in the water.
But he knows that repetition is punishment.
Small gods understand that better than we do.
All tools are eventually discarded, no last words, no speaking first.
It's a shock when I hear him in the grocery store,
the kick and catch of his motor.
It's easy to think that the Gods don't love us.
There's no fuss.
I know now that you still leave me because it's winter.
But the earth doesn't cough up a car
and your mother doesn't cry anymore.
There are only the shadows of disagreememts.
The foot remembers how it stamped out No!
And the tool, the trick called a man,
is always sorry that he cannot find himself inside of you.
|