After We’ve Eaten Our Fill of Everything

Just yesterday I saw
Gasoline flowing from my flowers into blogs

& as I was reading The Lice by W. S. Merwin
A beam of light came up over the basketball courts

I was quietly drowning in the parlor
I could feel the glass paranoia of some trees I’d planted

& I realized that the writing always comes from
The faith we have in it—from the wreckage we make

Of a complicated system
But there are no signs of life here

Just the shimmer of a car or two passing slowly
& a voice calling out to us from the old xenophobic staircase

& though we’re just sitting here looking up
Movie times on our laptops

There is the metallic feel of snow in the air
When no clouds appear in the sky

& so winter breathes its sentences for us
& the stairs lead down & out to the beer garden in summer

& to the nightingales of memory
& to the neon mosquitoes throwing tantrums on the sidewalk

& this whip of wind keeps shrieking
Like mom throwing dirt on our graves

& death is a sink stacked high with dirty dishes
After we’ve eaten our fill of everything

Realism Is in Bloom!

1: Ah, Film!

& because life is big but not grandiose
It gets edited out & then put back in

& because the black rubber penis Tanya bought Eva
Is only a crazy gag gift—It’s so big!

& because it turns up missing from the gift table later
& we all go searching—following the psychic vibration

In our hearts & because the ghost of Tanya’s last hetero fuck—
A poet named Wu—pulls up late in a rickshaw & because our laughter

Is ramshackle It’s poetry, says Eva & so everything is improvised—
A film shot on a cell phone & because the mystery is never solved

& History is a lot like life & the facts are a lot like
Our own lives in particular & because a legacy of facts

Tramples the empty pages of an early white snow tonight
& because the sky is still falling like a stunt man

Thru the stain glass candy of the skylight in the parlor
& because everything’s to scale but this one azure chair

& because whatever it is our notice apprehends
Blends with the background & because to fool is human

To care divine—we stand on our heads
& look nothing like ourselves after 2 am

2: The Silence of a Car Parked on the Street

Winter exists in the cage of some formidable white noise—truth
& white paint & the silence of a white car parked on the street

& people shooting video on their cell phones of snow accumulating at dusk
& like pretty girls that lie down in their sleep of delicate white dresses

Everything the camera loves is art & everything it shoots it loves
& because the scene just ends in John Lowther’s rickshaw toting Mr. Wu

& because the cosmic splash of the moon (which is the universe)
Is anything but a flash of something moving & meaningful—a first kiss

& because we doubt its existence while giving it the romance of a name
The long pause of the viewer takes it all in—it leaves its mark on us