down-town Portland:
first
bound beads of storm:
a draping, weeping necklace
‘rounds the gated windows
of this sky-scraper’s throat.
& as it simmers towards a mane of grey,
boiling into smoke; into twilight,
its weight pulls a noose
‘round the moon’s finest ring . . .
so i remember
myself,
watching from so low.
head high but everything down,
walking slow with pacing eyes
like green balloons, tied strings released,
I feel like’a cockroach
who just made it outside.
i ‘round the next
bend of beaten, wet sidewalk,
‘round muzzled sewers,
where some subterranean wanderers
flout all their focus
- perhaps in drug-blissed
ignorance they once painted, peeling now
from their brick-wall backs –
for the red-light ladies; where, below
umbrella skirts and pedestal shoes,
some splattered neon
bleeds, grown from discarded sorrow,
dropped to tearful asphalt.
and, for reasons like wars,
i recall pendulum days
swung by stranger love,
harvested in July
nights, through the mountain space
of four brave kids –
naked, undressed stars, bare grass,
a world unraveled on a fingerprint,
galaxies blossom in bodies –
diminished
into myth; and stories saved
for the rest of life/night just patterns
on highways, the scent of charred
pine, a bedroom’s corner,
taking us back,
before i was here,
when great arms of city took me,
greeted me to a field of lights
kept kindled
to ward off the names
of those who are dead . . .
before i met two dreams
who couldn’t remember
themselves. oh yeah,
one was crystal, one was pyre!
&
how each of us could see a pulse
twitch in our wrists! how
they stood beside me; we
stood beside ceilings,
and moved to move, but slowly
becoming pieces of this palace.
we watched the foolish and saw the desperate
hang themselves on clotheslines
of smoke, of rush-hour ballads.
we were drowned
in the litter, smothered
by steep stairs, lost in networks
of iron and anguish –
graffiti, garbage, chalk-outlines
washed but not gone,
the words of a musician
too poor for a song,
all these pages and pages
of unwritten promise . . .
we walked and we dragged and heaved and held
each other, held
by the city,
hurling
up fire-escapes under a sea
of stone history.
the city burned in-
side the river
beneath Morrison bridge; in just one innocent kiss
we saw black birds sleep
in the dimples of windows. we joined them.
we knew god: a cruel joke.
& i don’t remember names
anymore, but i can’t forget
our mouths dancing for
peace,
expecting nothing at all, goddamn!
how we were freed, answered
in an orange helium-illumination
crisscrossed in the flaws
following
our shadows following
our breath turning cloud-
fog in the mirror
of truths we scoffed,
of faiths raped by our eyes.
how your name and mine
could become
what they became as we drew
blood on sky-shards,
lying
on our backs with one hope
left for sunrise.
in the moment when our words
ran dry, so convinced
of the earth turning back,
we felt alone, we felt the sea,
we were not dreams,
there were no dreams,
only chances.
i
can face
a new day
in wind
pale as skin in her shoulder–
blade beach, coastal spine, breath-tide.
i can walk slowly, with dead names.
i have wondered
myself into a dream
and woken up
inside a story:
where you
narrate my clever
fuck-ups, where i am
nowhere.
and as you pass my pieces
around a crowded room, your audience
return to you flashes
of their teeth, bursts
of their voices’ flowers;
i am nowhere but your lips,
yeah, your words of my words
of my nights and our days
in a city of rain
slip clean through their fingers . . .
you can tell, and so can they,
that there’s been something
left out. but you let it be,
that smile like a bow
pulled back-
arrow of your closing
eyes.
yeah, walking out here
in calm little letters,
still low, still slow,
still knowing
i am nothing, i’m no one,
just walkin’ and singing
where i left myself,
from those mountains to the port,
i am left-over, an ash-tray after-math
from that first night,
first plight . . .
so forgive the nostalgia
of sweet life, drank from
your eyes within her eyes, out
of the gutter of dawn,
when three people and a city
knew answers
to nightmares
of war and the absence
of god,
when we knew love
like a stone
in the pocket.
i left
but can’t leave,
and i’m all but gone, remembering me.