ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

do you think a duck gliding across a pond, moving with the current as if pulled
by an imaginary string, really gives a flying fuck about the economic status of
somali refugees travelling in a midday sun with their burnt and boiled feet
somehow withstanding the heat of some white sand covering a vast desert located
only a few degrees away from the equator?

does a deer, a buck or doe, stop in the middle of chewing the dewy grass of a
meadow to ponder how a black man locked in a jail cell for thirty years will
ever be able to buy a navy blue hyundai sonata and a fifty-inch widescreen
television with which to watch the vikings, or that diamond ring for his lover,
or the college tuition for his beautiful teenage daughter?

or what of a mammoth.

would the last mammoth on earth truly have given a shit about a fifteen year old
transexual filipino kid fiddling with the belt buckle of an american tourist who
was on his paid vacation for sitting in an office and working speculations for
an investment bank, who was still fat from the avocado rissoto salad and the
clam and mussel bordelaise and creme brule?

really, does a wily fox or confident lion, or a squeaky mouse chased by a cat
care at all if a poor mexican boy starves to death next to the lifeless body of
his parents in an abandoned trailer sulking at the side of a bumpy gravel road
left behind by some greasy greedy liars who ran away with their money under the shadow cast by a morning sun across the boundary, across the border?

are there any animals that care, out there?

if so,

might i ask ...

where are you?

CHRISTMAS IN WASHINGTON

I.

it happens on a thursday while i stand soaked in an afternoon rain underneath a few indelible clouds which deny and reject stray autumn rays too weak to push their way through

and the weight of a passing bus bears itself into a puddle showering dirty water all over and i am waiting patiently for the white outline of a hollow man to signal me across so i can meet her

and even through suffering through the uncomfort of cold wet clothes sticking to warm skin i can still mutter to myself that it's all okay, i'm okay;

i am mostly water, anyway

II.

what i do know:

sharing isn't in our blood.

we weren't born selfless.

no one has to teach us how to take and
want what's not ours;

we weren't made to remember all the
people we meet on the street,

especially the foreign souls we don't
love or know,

for more than sixteen minutes at a time.

and the settlers (make no mistake) they didn't leave for anyone else
but themselves, and maybe the children playing in the vast unpolluted
pasture with their hoops, sunday afternoons after church, blonde locks
overflowing tight white bonnets

they didn't roll forward onward across the new found land passing
families whose wagons were burnt and broken, whose exposed rotting
flesh were made a meal of by ravaging birds for

anyone but themselves:

they just rolled on by, not one look back;

they didn't even flinch


III.

now that you're gone i recognize that this moment and experience can't be translated into just any language (be that the spanish spoken in some particularly green valley of southern andalusia or the ukranian spoken over vodka in a tenement house, or the verse and rhythym of your fluttering eyelashes when you'd sigh in bed)

sharing is not what we do; memories experienced alone shouldn't be shared (they won't mean the same to anyone else), so i want to keep them for myself

hold onto them, just like i hold onto this one:

the image of a tiny shiny aluminum gum wrapper falling out of your patterned purse gone unnoticed to all the passerbys

how it flew away into the wind on a fall evening as an early twilight erased the shadows

how it was like a paper airplane off to some ignored destination,

how you walked away and got on the bus, disappeared into the orange glow of tall street-lamps

how you hummed to yourself, staring off into the distance through the tinted bus window and how you went off

without a sound

to washington

NOTHING (STAYS THE SAME)

those two kids holding hands walking down the street
while leaves in fall dance to a silent beat and

the boy and girl drinking coffee at the shop softly
talking shop while they rub each others feet

and the couple sitting next to me at the movies,
her head on his shoulder as she falls asleep

i want to tell them

perhaps you should remember that
nothing ever lasts at all

nothing ever lasts

WEREN'T EVEN MENTIONED

outside the coffee shop window and it's as if i'm a wolf who's
paused on top of a patch of permafrost somewhere in russia in the
dead cold of winter panting heavily after an unsuccessful chase

but really i'm just a shaky human man breathing smoke from out of
my lungs into a cutting gust of wind swaddled in a thick coat and
all i can think about is how your feet will be cold when you walk

here through the alley in your ballet flats with no socks on and how
your yellow dress flying up in the breeze will have to be scrunched up
in a bunch, clenched at your side with your gloved fist hidden in a sleeve

and i'm thinking about how i need to tell you how sorry i am, how
sorry a mistake it was and is to have been so casual and chronic in
forgetting the comfort of the digging of my nose into the locks of your

dirty blonde curls, to have forgotten your blue eyed stares at the
coffee shop so quickly, when your smile was like a good novel, or to
have lost all the sharps and flats of your five minute shower solos

the bottom line is it's just as sorry a thing to forget the millions
of other sentient souls who stay up awake late drinking whiskey and
crunching rocks in teeth, wanting and lacking love just like me

how goddamn sad a man i am to be such a liar, to have made such
promises to myself on those many early mornings in dark rooms lit
blue with all those words on the screen and

to have crushed them, broken and shattered them, scattered them
all over, over and over:

don't forget her; don't forget anyone i've ever loved; don't forget the
ones i should and shouldn't love;

don't forget her and don't forget them;

don't forget;

just don't.

LAY AND LEARN

on the first day of january gloves are
removed and keys are fumbled with, dropped
in the snow by warm hands, in a hurry

and there is glitter left from the party
stuck in the cracks and sharp ridges of
shoulders, noticed on the drive home as

he changes the radio station, as she
presses her warm sweaty forehead against
the cool glass of the passenger window

once inside the plaid scarves disappear and
so do the long wool coats, a tie and shirt,
her dress and her sparkling diamond tiara;

meanwhile the belt buckle has slid off
silkily and black tights are already wrapped
around the feet of a peach love seat.

then, it happens, the scene of an early love and
the making of it, while white confetti falls light
and christmas decorations clutter the basement.

i wonder how many virgos were made this drunken way
in january, when the all the toys have had their
use and the new year brings new dramas to play?

wonder if later on i will sit around a fireplace
and wait for the children and grandchildren to
visit, wait for stains of brown tire tracks

and wonder if he or she will ever know that it was
something unexpected

wonder if he or she will know and take
comfort in the fact that

all love of someone else is
infidelity to ourselves:

that we are all bastard children

we were all such sad boring mistakes

ROME

monday morning you're so much like the red painted sky,
all color, all full of feathery flocks of birds that
chirp to one another as they migrate in late fall.

on tuesday you're a busy corner of a heavily walked
street, where the pavement in the shade is cool to
the touch of hands and dirty bare-feet.

wednesday you're a stray blonde hair stuck between
interlaced threads in the hood of a red sweater,
laying empty in my dresser drawer.

on thursday you're the forceful snap of a finger
which hits the rhythm exact true to the beat, echoing
off the walls and filling the street.

friday is an end and you're the end of a long novel,
written in the 19th century, when all one could do
was write with a pen.

saturdays we usually spent at the river, you're
the blanket - warm and soft and damp from the
grass on top of which we slept.

sunday's you're a yellow dress worn clean and mannered;
you're a pink flower behind an ear, stuck in yellow hair;
you're the stained glass;

you're the holy water.

you were something i loved so much,

but now i just hate you

so damn much

NORTH COUNTRY

i am a feely soul sitting in solitude
on an autumn evening in my studio apartment
in the village listening to downtown train,
a song sung by tom waits. it rains gently
and there is a beautiful coffee table in the
room - we bought it together - do you remember?
now it's all mine, you have your own glass-top
somewhere in a quiet suburb in portland where
all the sprinklers click on at 5am.
rest assured, the fine wood remains, the mark
in the top exposing the white flesh
where you accidentally knifed through
an orange, it's still there. now it's where
i rest the chicken and the peas and steamy
carrots. where i iron my sleeves and collars,
where i write in my book of poetry.

sometimes, in the night, i wake randomly with
this thought:

a coffee table is nice but the scent of your blonde tangled curls
is best