Evening*

You already said you

Waited on an ocean for me

Cupped a sonata to your ear

While I let it

Slip away trust me it can’t

Slither too far because when

I run out the end of the dock

You’re still standing on the sand

Somehow stars play chess at night

But honestly it’s just the reflection

Off your glasses when you drive

Me home the car idles

An uneasy guard dog you

Hand me music as it spills out

Your right ventricle you appear one

-sided now and your voice is tinny

How exactly did you prepare

The turkey? Do you still shuffle

Cards in the bathroom line

Do you still use the bathroom

With my toothbrush staring

Starry-toothed into your glasses,

Which I spot from the end of the dock.


* after Frank O’Hara’s “Morning”

jackinthebox[1]*

Sometimes I need to take my brain off the record player & listen to it skip because every now & then

You pop up you jackinthebox with a trombone

It would be nice if a little jazz every now & then

Could cure this internal beatbox but it’s more than your things I miss it’s the smell of your deodorant on your neck & that pause between conversations when we’ve talked ourselves into the record player it’s right then that you are intimately in you and

I am intimately in me every now & then

Your face gives me pause because it carries more than dimples & glasses they have always shone back other countries & other languages & other everythings where you & I could go together

I’d like to love you the way Frank loves Vincent but I was always more an impressionist than an abstract & the impression of your jackinthebox on the sill

Makes me dizzy sometimes & sometimes that pause

Returns to the back of my neck & you’ve arrived

In time to slow my brain down to a crawl.

[1] After Frank O’Hara’s “Poem: Ά la recherché d’Gertrude Stein”

* published in Catalyst, spring 2006