A distant city, near others

 

 

Wished the sky, but it was only

painted plaster, only the thinnest moon over this

steaming town.  Starlit water shatters in the bathroom. 

And the mirror’s windows as eternal and empty

as ever.  In these western mountains

a bearded man—

 

wrestles all night with his drunk

love for a rotting sofa

—abandoned to the dawning

street    the weeks a harvest of autumn wildgrasses. 

Each sheaf, within him, blinds him—his worn guts—

to the traffic, to the snowcurb. 

 

Falling and falling into night.  Or each breathing  : 

a simultaneous branch blooming, throat

 

upon throat, street

upon street of wires and barely waving  :  the thistled ice. 

 

 

 

I went looking for flowers here

and they have come up

stone.  I was looking for faces

 

and they came up

branches     dreamed doorless rooms, filled with

dry leaves    the hallways and yellow,

hallways      scent of half-dressed

 

persons in unlit

doorways    leaning, smoking,

she lifts her skirt to

rub her thigh    or the edge of head-

lights below in all the lonely

towns.  The mufflers gone and

 

 

 

My lover is a man who carves my sleeping

words with his own, pulling the sheets

from these winter accusations. 

 

dance  :  stuffed night-birds

stables in full flame    dance  :  empty boats

on sharpened prairie lakes    so the reeds,

plotting through the moon

 

 

 

Each night someone falls down the stairs. 

Each night we pace, reading in the broken kitchen,

shouting out open windows

should bring warmer winds, and in them  : 

storms, small places, destroyed. 

 

Each night

we wake to the waking dream of life. 

 

as the children here throw rocks

as the young here never sleep

—winter moths with penknives in their wings

 

 

 

So every thing leaning like a ship to just after

midnight, and the moon smeared

throughout one sky.  As every window

 

opening    closing    as a drowning chest—a mass of bodies,

smaller and closer and lost

at sea.  We

 

 

are asleep.  And the hands

of the mother, frozen

on the east mountains.  Covering

herself with moss. 

 

                   —for Doug Powell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whiskey Ditch

 

 

She said “the roses were wonder-

ful,” but what she meant was

the rain, if it continues, will

kill me. 

 

 

Somewhere beneath us, a miner

forgot his helmet.  Somewhere in

the water the company left, in place

of ore. 

 

She’s seated a bar’s-length

away    she is her face, but less,

she is the smoke about to fall

from her face, and because of

 

that he’ll never know her. 

          He remembers her as he remembers

a piano, pooling. 

Lightly against the molting

          walls of a near

                   apartment.  Or somewhere as a

swatch of mother, or just

her apron—

he cannot say. 

 

 

The door opens on seven more

possibilities, each with a name.  And

as do immense and hovering fish

 

quaking in a sunken hold—

          in its suspensions—something settles. 

And does not  : 

some part of town will flicker, go

out and settle into abandoned

 

place.  Beneath  :  the sifting negation of the

possibility of paychecks, as up on the grassy

 

land (where we live) it makes only a sinkhole  : 

divides the town to hamlets, divides a new chain

fence    as slowly the return of gray

vegetation. 

 

 

She empties a glass. 

Each possibility has more than

a name—each has a paycheck.  Some of

them even have wives, but

 

they smile, in a friendly

way.  The woman with her eyes of

peeling wallpaper is now no more

than a glass, a palm-print and some

 

ash.  Of those possible, one is

making noises in the bathroom.  One

cries beside the jukebox.  The man behind the

bar is trying to read the lips of

 

the other four. 

The remainder

went outside.  I think he’s chasing

an old and hairless dog, which maybe is and

maybe is not

          fading wet footsteps  :  the sound of tonight’s

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lost Bay

 

                   as if I were so important

                   that it must accept or not accept me,

                   the earth with its leafy name,

                   in its theatre of black walls. 

                                      —Neruda

 

 

Shaking, the magnolias blue  :  night insects

waking for a black nectar    breeze so thick—

we two, close and walking.  Sleep calling.  Its paradox  : 

this garden where we’d rest, this small church where

 

 

Down, in the papered dusk below  : 

cows find their way through sinking

light    muffled bells—swinging sounds like fireflies,

 

the flung stones

of bats    rising from the bay.  The sky’s sputtering

wick, stumbling and the stars over backlit

clouds    vanishing. 

 

 

A second bay where explorers,

          released from their hopes of land,

thought this is where.  For tonight,

the moon is lighter    rises over the low thickening

hills roll in their fog comforters. 

 

 

One and one

      low lights stuttering the twilight

and another    appear in the dim valley  : 

 

Nimbus and wet—blending for a time  : 

          village and sky’s pinhole gambit,

the mist christening the gap between here

and above    glossal

 

 

tree frogs ply night crickets—

a call, response    a goaded lingering

chaos, eager for one provoking sentence

 

in this landless,

barricaded room of fog    every field a barge

cut loose upon the nearby and nearly silent  : 

a song to feast on smaller songs

a song of my younger body

before the tide and 

 

in my chest, a lantern    night knots

reeds to find its return,

          backs away, winding up each black flower in its hair

the moon and running through a quilt of hay

            drenched, naked in pure stone of    place  :  a field  : 

                        the moon—this lit cavern of no source

 

Somewhere home  :  the cow-rivers—

night swallows diving low

into gone    its long white grasses. 

 

 

All day we’ve said we’ll live

in that old house    or    in that one.  Only so long

as the bells from this church,

somewhere between here and the winter Pacific. 

 

All day we invoke lovers  : 

swaying rooms of dim shoulders    too many nights under

willow biers.  Cooling, watching the river-

boats, their half-noise caressing

 

the water.  And the coastal

stone  :  the green cenotaph faced east

from the wind. 

 

Below, the lagoon’s slow

trance into pasture

As slowly, a field dragged to the sea.  

As tonight, the grass, it swims

 

                        —for Doug Powell

 

Tamales Bay, Spring 2006

 

 Haines Eason's poems appear in Conduit, The Yale Review, and New England Review, among other journals. He lives in Chicago.