Circle Game Read Free Page A

bruise,
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows
    give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster
    when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.
    That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;
    guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air
    tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows.

On the Streets, Love
    On the streets
love
these days
is a matter for
either scavengers
(turning death to life) or
(turning life
to death) for predators
    (The billboard lady
with her white enamel
teeth and red
enamel claws, is after
    the men
when they pass her
never guess they have brought her
to life, or that her
body’s made of cardboard, or in her
veins flows the drained
blood of their desire)
    (Look, the grey man
his footsteps soft
as flannel,
glides from his poster
    and the voracious women, seeing
him so trim,
edges clear as cut paper
eyes clean
and sharp as lettering,
want to own him
… are you dead? are you dead?
they say, hoping …)
    Love, what are we to do
on the streets these days
and how am I
to know that you
and how are you to know
that I, that
    we are not parts of those
people, scraps glued together
waiting for a chance
to come to life
    (One day
I’ll touch the warm
flesh of your throat, and hear
a faint crackle of paper
    or you, who think
that you can read my mind
from the inside out, will taste the
black ink on my tongue, and find
the fine print written
just beneath my skin.)

Eventual Proteus
    I held you
through all your shifts
of structure: while your bones turned
from caved rock back to marrow,
the dangerous
fur faded to hair
the bird’s cry died in your throat
the treebark paled from your skin
the leaves from your eyes
    till you limped back again
to daily man:
a lounger on streetcorners
in iron-shiny gabardine
a leaner on stale tables;
at night a twitching sleeper
dreaming of crumbs and rinds and a sagging woman,
caged by a sour bed.
    The early
languages are obsolete.
    These days we keep
our weary distances:
sparring in the vacant spaces
of peeling rooms
and rented minutes, climbing
all the expected stairs, our voices
abraded with fatigue,
our bodies wary.
    Shrunk by my disbelief
you cannot raise
the green gigantic skies, resume
the legends of your disguises:
    this shape is final.
    Now, when you come near
attempting towards me across
these sheer cavernous
inches of air
    your flesh has no more stories
or surprises;
    my face flinches
under the sarcastic
tongues of your estranging
fingers,
the caustic remark of your kiss.

A Meal
    We sit at a clean table
eating thoughts from clean plates
    and see, there is my heart
germfree, and transparent as glass
    and there is my brain, pure
as cold water in the china
bowl of my skull
    and you are talking
with words that fall spare
on the ear like the metallic clink
of knife and fork.
    Safety by all means;
so we eat and drink
remotely, so we pick
the abstract bone
    but something is hiding
somewhere
in the scrubbed bare
cupboard of my body
flattening itself
against a shelf
and feeding
on other people’s leavings
    a furtive insect, sly and primitive
the necessary cockroach
in the flesh
that nests in dust.
    It will sidle out
when the lights have all gone off
in this bright room
    (and you can’t
crush it in the dark then
my friend or search it out
with your mind’s hands that smell
of insecticide and careful soap)
    In spite of our famines
it keeps itself alive
    : how it gorges on a few
unintentional
spilled crumbs of love

The Circle Game
    i
    The children on the lawn
joined hand to hand
go round and round
    each arm going into
the next arm, around
full circle
until it comes
back into each of the