so close that your hand on my chest is my hand so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. —Pablo Neruda

Yes, cigarettes are metaphors for sex or solitude itself;
whatever is live and deep and gone. We stood
in the express lane with Parliaments, our last dollars
crumpled in my palm. I have always been
a left-handed man, meaning a dumb passion crashes
through my brain, requesting everything I have and have not.
This hand is what I have left. I’m talking about control
or lacking it. We should have bought bread,
but I bought smoke. Now, you have fallen asleep,
And I am lifting the last of a solitary butt to my lips.
In photos Picasso’s left dons a cigarette
And it is hopeful. He made women solemn and infinite,
though fractured careening from his stroke. Hopeful stroke.
I am a left-handed man. These fingers have no logic
in their need, and desire is a curse. The stroke. Realizing
he couldn’t exact their beauty, did he turn his back,
crack a mirror, paint the lines their reflections cast?
Who knows how art is born. You have abandoned me
for sleep and this is what I am left: a room
the color of your sleep. In this darkness I imagine
his Sleeping Woman With Shutters. I saw it in a book:
the sad irregular head lowered on her arm, the left hand
touching a blue circular breast. Your left hand touches
my chest and it is perhaps only coincidence,
that American word for fate. Fate. I have tied fate
to everything, to your body and it is a blessing. Even now,
when you are still as a woman posing for a painting.

The painter strokes that stillness onto a canvas,
hopes his hand can give it breath. I am only as blessed
as a man bound to his desire; to lines that cannot deliver
or mimic life. I am only as hopeless; closing these fingers
around your wrist as it sleeps upon my chest.

STILL MUSIC

STILL MUSIC

“Reminiscence of the Tempyo Era” Ishibashi Museum of Art, Japan

How long til this water evaporates?
There is rain & beauty everywhere
Tonight. Hanging from the train straps,

Nodding with exhaust in the seats.
Women in with wet scarves
& hair, faces which have grown,

These last months, more beautiful
To me. Last week I saw a woman
From the Tempyo Era hanging without a name

On a museum’s wall, a strange string
Instrument held in her hands
The way the neck held her face. Still music.

There are tunnels guiding each note
Tonight, these women’s murmurs,
Soft, indiscernible, away from me.

What do you call desire in a married man?
Women’s bodies shine
In the buttons on my coat. Women lean

From the train straps above me,
Women are anchored
To the seats. The rain falls as if to wash

Away their stations of fatigue.
I know nothing about this place,
But, Wife, tonight I don’t want to sleep.

I want to rise into your lungs,
Linger like a music in your throat,
Vanish like water under heat.