A GEOGRAPHY OF PLEASURE

by Amy King

An orange star dying on my windowsill

—the sugared thing—is never a ship but a leisure.

Yes, to be allowed at least one leisure per life,

to sky someone in from the dispossessed

is to dispose of mind and body contents,

a bouquet of erotic breaths, the honeyed air

of a lover’s lungs open as this planet, or the next

inhabitant: rabbit, blank face or bicycle man.

That banquet unknown, like manna torn

by the ridges of your tightening teeth.

How I wish one was matter

from one’s own country, belly up

beneath the spell of geography, responsible only

to celluloid snapshots, neck turned,

half-smile of tight-cells tied by the growling oil green

of a bench on which sit figs, pomegranates. --The markers of country, corner fruit.

Sunflower seeds shell the dirty asphalt.

Square basement windows belch

a pack of cigarettes that flinch on star gas.

At dawn, a banknote’s smile sucks us down,

frames a flock of sheep by the chimney’s feet

that climb twelve more floors of syllabled steps,

the first piano view of a factory as nature.

Money the men. We nature whores.

Toes in black and white keys.

Depleting minor corpuscles and drain

the red serum from our skin graft’s scales.

I have never found the neighboring sea

pretty, insert eyes that, instead, the lake frogs

and flies stretch over the cobwebs of me

in a bouquet of barrel trees: they spear through

vineyards, the airy earth too thick with painted vines

and footsteps up to the fronts of our wheelchairs.

Children’s voices wash across a city terrace,

loudspeakers drown on our bottles of wine,

and a marching song comes rolling in

from the mountains of those who work to own

the luxury of bills, the leisure of beaches

and beaks that scramble along the attic walls… --Plastic-filled entrails.

You go there, fondle that star,

and ache the race to kid-dom again.

The spectral vanishes with a rope painted chalk

to skew the sky apart. Cloud the weapons’

outlines that hopscotch us all where parallels meet.

A beak set to maw is only

a problem of vocabulary,

white syntax on paper, insofar unoccupied.

Comes the promise of boring bad weather.

Buy the pear tart at the kiosk raining

matchsticks from a pale sun and peer

through your dalai lama keyring. Your feet ache.

Heartbreak and sunset nooses evoke a theater,

but the three little dolls on the banks --Trinity hole @ Roping Wind.

of dying marshes smell like ellipsis.

An omission rests on what is certain:

not the germ of a story but the energy

to rope it, the events of sins that mar the wind

we peer through on sunny days we invented.

How do you find it? Down there, already

sober, droplets, the brakes and the valley are dirty.

I am sitting at a table by the little window.

Darkness falls into smoking. On a dictograph

even the imperfect valley sings holes over hills,

waiting to fill, pre-Spring. An afternoon passes quiet tulips

between these four lungs. Cribbage. A game

of tea and crumpets for perspective. The hour signals

a wayward cloud of light, cache in more-than-one place.

Something of protein we find ourselves

thinking O warm wall, wall of goats

moutainside, why won’t you reveal what

rides beyond your reins, your plastic exterior,

why do you hide in the arteries of this planet’s

metal and concrete static? The hearts’ satchel thrum?

Who else can hide these arteries of small smiles

and tired-but-true handquakes? The portrayal of space --Diffusing the body electric.

is an inner door, an interior decor. A monologue we think

to share aloud leaves us seeing in three dimensions only.

That myth of the ten percent brain, our omen.

A proverb is also nature petrified.

Meets the eye with ferocious green trees and minerals

holding a molecular structure. We energy, we sculpture

immortal, the skull of the valley falls perfectly ochre.

A frog sways its posture in the choreography

of agriculture. Genetic discouragement, DNA infects --What is Africa to me?

the blight that warts imagination. Smoothes it so far.

We other inhabitants, not-frogs or DNA gospels

retain opaqueness, a “crazy” tag

on the toe of our corpses. That lasts before dawn

and all the rage. I have never had anything

to say in the face of such prisons. I’m open. My conversation

is a play on the stage of vanity, the who I fuck

and the why I am no boy, how I erase the space

of his mouth’s residence from my skin, how I was never

a room to his marriage plans. I meticulously color out

the ease of nonchalance, the temptation to settle

into permanent housing. Good fences make good cages

and good cages teach patience. Or so the ides of childhood

sell those skeletal portals. I always wanted

escape into dwelling but never held the map’s location.

I beheld the misprints. And ate that choreography. --The living by osmosis.

Each key is the footprint escaping,

muting its position’s maker.

That was what I wanted, a wandering gypsy Band-Aid,

one that would wait out the American Dream

to regroup and hold-in-court its listeners. For none who hear

can stand the ephemeras’ absence. The passing boy --Other, then the self.

clasps and delights in a fiasco sketch, undoes

the necklace in mime and offers us his baggage.

Which preoccupation will carry his lantern, aid him

in the mystery of no puzzle to produce and no employment

to escape him? He is the perfect pin-up of cliché

kitsch and which way did the wind go in this economic sidebar.

He will make good news someday. And that is a bet

you can write home about, if telling stories becomes your mattress

and the line that tows your part. Sometime milk cows,

sometime red boned, sometime go to Ireland

or a part of the sea you’ve never witnessed. Where makes

the smallest difference except the part you drop

the hold on newspaper heights and monstrous instruments

from your diction wand. Hitchhike the gates

to heaven’s latest, a boy in the clutch of untold stagehands

narrating a bouquet of neighborhood proportions:

narrator-perfect enjoys the fission,

though his intentions seemed the grosser sketch

despite a capsized portrait, we accepted the route

with country-manners and storehouse-sales.

Azure smoke too is a redundant claim in the face

of baby-turns-child, small chin of the adult face

designated by the color of fire curling --Graphing the fetal position.

from God’s promenade zone. Cut from the same cloth,

or so we’re told by those who wish to own a partial print

at the end of a gun. The right end. That leaves love

enough to suck drag from a cigar stem and hit the pavement

for the next burlesque. The real romantic is the woman who hangs

up, sighs and lights her pipe on the windowsill, looking

past any world, Ah-choo. Not the divinity of a Last Supper

painting but more of a Kahlo blemish, defunct or sky-colored

Cerulean. We move beyond bones now, epoch editors --Slant light, a housekeeping.

of evolution, the one that avoids progression but, like

any old woman worth her weight in wax,

she can bite a nail in two and suck the iron

for plutonium, our next best energy bet. The waft of smell

reminds us that at one time northern ladies stood

beneath a carried-on horizon reciting, I am posture and toe,

content with a fake-fog stage, gazing into an overhead sea

with intense turtle blues reflecting my eyes

by the well of your loneliness, not a shadow in sight

of our simple undying, this Mediterranean

world is a beauty we beat to submission,

a salted backyard beautician leans us back in short chairs

and laughs at the lack of yard and an unwashed sense

that liquid oxygen creeps up our toes, knees, nipple gasps,

we lean heads back for the laugh, clear throated

gladdening the length of this cabin, fitting in with

the corpses it produces and the babies too, we suck them

in like many beer cans tipped, sun-up

and still. The waves roll toward the backdoor, --The generative incest.

the sea is a sense making

whether full of oil or hard-bodied salmon or dolphins

and octopi that think much like peopled brain waves

a plastic goodbye before we place rocks gently

in trench coats and begin the bottom-up exploration,

that planetary part that remarks

we’re inadequate as shells but insist on the vault

of human endeavor and mischievousness we sink to enter.

The ash trees across the neighbor’s yard yell

before we go that so much depends on the conjugal visits

of a million stellar forks and hands:

crashing voices, mobile Venus, a Zephyr for café days,

this marble embrace, the seated cry of populations in stasis,

the loosely-knit scarf of dusk around the souls’ last

murmurs and snaking vines, Eve’s lizard-shaped back,

the way we curl smoke into air,

how everything takes shape back into space,

the animated ancient, gods borne from almond-white kids

we dive to descend to, how we leap the divide

where nothing is, make stone decorations, attend an invisible,

blame the range of antelope, mothers, televised brands

of anarchy, and folk nomads for anything after

this land is our land, the god guts and glory plan goldens

our wooden tables and glass franchises, the roads

that pave this way as if we’re choices, our selves --In always, again.

in unbridled pleasures, map quest replays and love strategies,

somewhere that isn’t, the false start always, as often the evermore.