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NINE RECENT
POEMS
SLEEP
I
was pulled
here by the
chrome ethos
of sleep.
You
are the day
in the night
and the
gravity that
spins my
cells
together each
year, the
hourglass
collecting
years in a
whisper
AFTERLIFE
There are never enough beds
To go around the stars.
I keep these things to myself,
As the moon keeps
A vast collection of shoes.
There is a time clock inside of me
You keep punching out,
To stop me from dreaming.
These travels have no future.
Like the establishment,
I
was once aftershave and anticipation.
Everything began there,
With its artifacts and oblivion.
But I still prefer the daydream with its agenda,
And the afterlife of fingers,
Taking my measurements.
Alas, I am done for the day and have a few requests:
Perhaps some fried squid to unclutter the mind where
all roads end.
Or some aromatic sleep with its beautiful crescent
pillows.
And a book with long legs who tells me where to begin.
OEDIPUS 2000
It’s not too late to dream of sleep.
It’s not too late for the sun to whisper,
Die with me, the next time you sleep”.
The
fates are in the bedroom blowing candles out.
My dear, dear heart, I no longer suffer with you.
I won’t forget you.
THE WORLD AS RED AS WINE
Nevertheless, this hiatus is for you, with its
graceful maps
And romantic equilibriums. How much is there to
waiting?
There is not enough for two:
A one way destination of colorless illusions on the
baggage cart.
I
will be civil to your Chinese Fighting fish and I will
not overcook the
Broccoli rabe. Have we forgotten our daily walks
today?
No, it has forgotten us on its way to the stars with
our marzipan
Memories covered with disquieting Turkish fig leaves.
I
keep the stairs to heaven in my wallet with my son s
photograph,
You can join us whenever you wish or find the time
between migraines
And pagan accountings. The sciatica is no longer in my
imagination,
It has moved out and up to the center of my chest
claiming it is the heart
I
wished for after the car accident. Let me memorialize
my
Thoughts of you for another time of bucolic
accessibility.
Your thoughts have so much to say to me but wander
away into the fog
That keep the monkeys silenced during their arboreal
rituals of feasting
Their eyes on the onlookers who are as strange as the
trees in heaven.
Perhaps life will be better with you in bed where
zippers are antediluvian,
As hysterical inventions and we are the outdoors of
each other’s skin.
My night poems will drone on for centuries without
respite
Or
moisture to survive the milky pounding of solitude.
I continue to recede like the inventor of the pencil.
What keeps me going is the fear of bliss,
Your last word in my ear.
THE BLESSED
for David Shapiro, my very best friend
Why
am I worthy of this mystery, I am not a prodigious
sinner,
I don’t have the time anymore: There are
commemorations and odes
That have committed nameless enormities while
forgetting their dinner of
Consonants and overcooked pronouns. You have only to
watch the
Mouths of the agents to realize how squalid and untidy
creation is with all
Its words that amount to three hundred species of
snakes, one dynasty of
Comas and one declarative seraph without speech. What
is really at the
Bottom of the ocean is an epiphany of beliefs we will
never recite or swim
With on the surface. At the bottom, no one gets turned
away,
No one because here this is equal to the abnegation of
living.
The day is too long for short trances and telling the
future what to do
About the past. The public has been wrecked with
faceless words.
The
hands of Christ are out night-clubbing
And the angels are finally watching the stars in the
shower,
The dead poets are sleeping calmly and will no longer
harm the language
The Madonna with the heavy Israeli accent is wearing a
torn glove
Holding asparagus, so we can keep our crucial updates
of the Crusades to
Buy bigger cars. Poetry is twisted from our skin and
dedicated to an
Aging memory because the countdown is not very far
away anymore,
And the seconds are priceless and enjoying the view
And
the diamonds we caught up in the bed of the world,
when it was
Correct to sleep with someone’s long hair to become a
member of love,
A member of Jerusalem, a light with a heart that no
one could break with
A kiss but with the mathematics of poetry.
Blessed is the green and red light that invented us,
More so, blessed is the highway that lets us write,
And blessed are the poets who invented us as poets.
AN ANCIENT POEM
for
Jackie Sheeler
Holy is this moment in the subway,
Holy is the moment I awake clear but not rested with
second rate sleep
And historical mistakes that recall when they were my
proud cavalcades
On display. I am not alone, sleep with names and
sheets of paper and
Photos of my friends of the mountains. They have
memories of me as a
Sinless child to the acts of mothers and fathers.
I am the last hit man left in the stars,
The encore of a marble migraine, the daily cologne of
the lie
As
celibate as a sea shell that did not hang around to be
picked for the
Easter soup. What will become of me without a plural
in this fatherless
Sleep that feeds some duplicating machine at the gate
of a flower that
Once lived in heaven? We were created in the name of
art when it was
The
color of a new born child, when the rain was clear and
knew where it
Was going into a hole in the heart of a god that
recognized the smallest
Efforts. To live on olive oil, espresso and sonnets as
thin as wafers
Because that was all that was needed instead of death
or thanks for
Publishing my work or showing my rotten heart at the
gallery.
Nevertheless, I see the pages the city blow away into
the memory of a
Plague. The angels have new skin and are updating pain
for me with the
Long hair left in the bed of errors in some antique
transcription of a
A
young woman enjoying the last few seconds of a Sapphic
kiss,
Saying “join me so we can fold each other into the
spring,
Into those things poets like to write about, like new
poems in the forest,
Small, shiny, twisted with shame.
HENRI MICHAUD
Plato takes
His dog to
Work, too.
He knows
You’ll follow
His dog into
The future on
A flat, two
Bedroom
Postcard from
Greece.
That kiss
Shaped like
Philosophy is
Your idea of
A life that
Has lost its
Way in life.
You know.
When your
Fingers can’t
Stop spinning
The globe out
Of your way.
You become
The crackling
On the tether
Between
Madness and
Sleep. You
Want to leave
Your own skin
On purpose,
The ugliest
Place on
Earth.
MICHAEL GIZZI'S FAMOUS LIVER
Mice are pouring out of your pockets every time you
move
You strap yourself into a chair
They know how old and pale you are
Counting your leftover love letters
One love letter picks another “I loved you last”
The doctors are as vague as the squiggly
Riddles on your medical chart
You recognize the bony face of your last poem
You resuscitate it six times a day
It will be the poem’s last life
The poem’s eyes follow you
Watching every move you make on the page
This poem is not your last stop
And when you write Allah glows in the desert
Because you are special
Because the hairs in your ear are long
Because the hairs in your nose are long
And the top of your head is the largest
And least cluttered place on your body
Your wife or your lover is not a prune
That doesn’t close the bathroom door
Privacy is no longer the secret of love
You are the great poet from the another dream
As the night nurse steps out
Who looks like long ago
And someone else
And turns you over
For your evening walk
01/01/2000
We
found the words in a box and gave them indescribable
Attention. We studied their habits and became
recklessly
Enamored with them. As we watched, they smoked
And blew sacramental rings in our faces. We were
Blind old men, unzipping our lives and trembling at
the
Touch of naked marble. Pigeons were the wild fingers
of
Statues. The future sacrificed our soul for the erotic
Stillness of poetry. The words arrived in the kitchen
Through the nail hole of the last century wearing the
Faces of the past. I fit myself into anyone that will
have me,
So be gentle to me in your memories and they will
Stop looking over my shoulder in the subway. I’ll
collect
The
tickets at the door, wipe the dust off the seats
And make it perfectly clear that writing is as lonely
As a pile of shoes. Heaven is wingless and far away,
And there are no books that mention your name or mine.
Frank Lima was born in New York City in Spanish
Harlem, 1939. His parents were Mexican and Puerto
Rican. He received a Master's from Columbia
University in 1975.
His books include Inventory, Angel, Underground with
the Oriole, The Beatitudes. Trained in his youth, in
classical French cooking, he is now a teacher at the
New York Restaurant School.
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