Daniel Coudriet
Can one whisper cityscape, not understanding
what it means
to those walking nights breathing intimately
its rivers
and knowing the moment the capillary flow of
taxi cabs
halts, the streets vacant and without
passers-by.
What IÕm trying to say is if one allows a
river
it becomes fatter and fatter, no longer
recognizable as river.
What IÕm trying to say is thereÕs a child
outside the shopfront
slumped over in a chair, wailing on the
squeeze box.
I donÕt remember the feel of your hand as it
slips from my fingers.
I left a nipple in the Tuileries.
Whenever the bleeding stops, unevenness,
my family telling me theyÕll create a second
afternoon
tea to commemorate the loss.
Even now the strollers bumping off curbs,
strands of pastries jostling the
undercarriages.
Taking all of the moustaches wriggling up from
subway stops,
watching them fall from faces, crackle and
effervesce,
realizing they are not moustaches
but slugs, the sidewalks littered with salt.
IÕm not speaking to you completely,
and IÕm sorry and IÕm there with how many of
them
having crowded the entryways in pajamas
alarm bells pulsing off fire escapes.
No amount of late-night tuxedo-wearing can
save us.
IÕm not speaking to you.
My attempts at domesticity, a series of
kitchens
abandoned and scattered around similar
climates.
I can still hear the slipslip of dropping
plates.
Outside, snow beginning to fall like tiny
scabs.
What IÕm trying to say is if one allows a city
I must hold your voice
and
build a museum of my mouth,
lipstick-stained cigarette butts embering.
The first word is shredded bits of paper
bursting from every window suddenly,
cars
careening
through stoplights, headlights blinking.
No one manning the luggage carousel
running beneath the sidewalks.
The theater doors crashing open, the torrent
of beautiful women in bridal gowns spilling
The museum of your voice as doors falling shut
all over the hotel splinters sinking into
parquet:
if you ever wish to be a father you must
exhibit here
and in all the proper places
paint
will fall into shapes.
You must let them stitch your tongue
to
the backs of your teeth.
Was it the river-merchantsÕ cries I heard
wandering
Morningside Heights?
There
is no river, the merchants
have left and gone home to milk goats on the
cliffs.
Where are the cliffs?
Whichever
of us wants someone
constantly rounding the next corner.
Where are the cliffs?
Can
we unfurl the fabrics we stashed
under our mattresses, can we make them our
flags?
Can
we burn them into bodies?
The ashes will never be bodies.
Will
they sing to us?
TheyÕll sing as they always do, so soft they
are inside us already.
The skin in our hands
we imagine connecting
something green
sprawling alive
or buried by our feet,
naked feet.
Too
many
resemblances
inside arteries
only the pressures coal feels
or asphalt families
scree to the coasts.
Even vineyards
sense salt in the air.
The horrible noise of footsteps
in sand, undercut
reverberations
of wires and concrete,
hitchhikings,
Mar del Plata.
Buzzsaw,
buzzsaw.
Our toes bivalve
and fuse themselves
little clampings.
We suspend them in pools.
ÒAma solamente
lo que queda,Ó
written in spraypaint
or blood in an overpass,
an artery
IÕve
forgotten boundaries
a glimpse of thighs
brushing each other,
gearshift, a skirt
in the passenger seat.
What
message
does it send, washed
laundry strewn
these bucket seats?
How small this fabric,
how it fits around you there.
O, that my eyes
spheres nestled
orbiting
in softest fabric,
sunÕs heat
through linen.
If I painted them,
a soft voice
exclaims, Òthe flower beginning
this momentÓ
and begins tunneling
into the wall
with objects at hand.
Eventual sunlight
in flecks or lesions.
IÕd want to lick plasterdust
from your skin,
one who is shouting,
who is a tongue of warm salt.
In disembarking
the tallest of them swallowed,
now we use that gesture
to refer to this country.
When you swallow
you do it for us.
The insects were birds
nesting beside our eyelids,
at night their eggs
pressing like pregnant
tearducts, the soil
as we touch it peels
into a tapestry
trailing behind us.
We will never build a city
because it would eat us.
We need a use for cobblestones
weÕve brought a legion
of masons. Leaning on shrubs
they keep muttering how natural
everything must look,
they stack stone walls
any heath would envy,
just now sheep nuzzling there.
Except weÕre in a cold forest.
The masons practice angry
hand signals, you can tell
them by the crevices
in their knuckles.
The sheep are soil we forgot
to touch properly.
The stones slide over
each other like a loverÕs
vertebrae that morning
in winter. But how is it
winter when we disembarked
we never had a ship?
This doesnÕt bother us.
There is a small hole I cradle myself
inside the wall of my stomach, no one hears
me and the gestures only I can feel them
there, itÕs one now.
My
stomach is a bird,
see her, see her enveloping
the tiniest rare birds with names
or commonness, dozens of canaries
darting an oil slick
melted into concrete.
As
repetition,
there were never answers ankledeep
as we are the suddenness of current
when our ankles—
can
burrowing
be a gesture of affection, starburst
a swallowÕs touch in landing, ovendoor
closing.
Never answers.
What
we find is ours,
we say to whoever is listening,
you
the pointlessness of my touch,
horneros
humping
vigorously, unabashedly on the playground,
are my stomach,
the
children shielding eyes,
covering ears from frenzied moans
there are never enough hands,
hollowed mud sounds.
IÕm
washing your skin
I cannot, this image, I cannot.
Handfuls
of dirt into my mouth,
&
still the croquettes.
A mouth around fingers feels bones.
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