Untitled
Beneath a daylight moon, the bag lady
kids called the Hag
foraged doubled beneath the hump
she lugged everywhere.
Were she the Goddess of the Hunt,
forever young, lithe as a bow, half bare,
the gilded fall of her undone chignon
would have made nakedness demure.
Instead, a matted gray flow (the grotesque can take the length of a life to grow)
swept the pavement before her every step.
A dog pack ran, further clearing the way.
Her battered straw purse proudly swung
from the mouth of a dirty white hound.
From "Anti-Memoir" (4)
At this hour, grated pawnshops appear
to jail all the lovely instruments
condemned to exile by electric guitars.
Along this block of lyres for sale,
the singing head is junked
as if it were an antiquated radio.
Follow the street singer, mute and blind,
he won't look back a second time.
Here, virgins abandon their illegitimates,
and magdalenes, whose stiletto
heels on concrete mimic the obsolete
lonely peck of a typewriter,
hang bedsheets to bleach back
to a tabula rasa, vast pages
blank as shrouds scribbled
with the automatic writing of wind.
From "Anti-Memoir" (5)
The walls are a journal kept by crowds
passing into a phantasmagoric mural,
graphite coats the tablets of tenements
with the scorched patina of angels
in Prague, manholes vent
the illusion of heat at the core
of every spiritual world.
In noirish fog lit by a sparking tram,
the slumlord of the Tower of Babel
absconds with the rent.
This is a street whose tentacles
ravel about you, drawing you in,
la calle en su tinta,
a street stewed in its own ink.
Late for a dinner date, the disciple
corners his reflection on the window
of a bar, and stops to tie his noose
into a Windsor knot.