zafusy

Before the march I tear
my shirt at the neck
because agony breathes through cotton.

It is a stitched wound
like breath after orgasm, or
strands of red tissue paper, or
a lush trembling river—

Do you believe the pussycock stains
winnowing your bed sheets
will vanish because today is a holiday?

I suppose this is unfair of me
to ask, as is my desire
to be alone
like empty drawers pulled open,
not to be filled.

Over the roof wind rushes
like the opening of sutures.
Which color? —it is morning.

*

I see my father walk into this bar
named after someone’s father.

He is young, well-dressed, & does not know me.

Just outside a bookstore
a woman opens the new year’s calendar
sitting in her car. Not yet started.

My mother dreams her father’s death again
as he is cremated & poured into a light bulb:

at night she visits the factory of abandoned light
to find him. In the dark, thousands of bulbs
are mounted on a wall
like trophy heads,
each numbered in a cipher
for an equation.

Only by answering correctly can she pick his ashes.

*

Try waking. Or. Now,
wake in the palm of your hand.
Among the dust. Days wending away like spent leaves.

Sunlight tumbles through the picture window
glancing off your naked shoulders,
& as you push back your hair
one ear glows like a coal,
the blood inside come alive.

*

I never bring old lovers into bed with us.
But it is like what Freud said,
how when a couple makes love
there are always at least six people in the room.

& Oh
the band
is playing something sweet,
trivial as adopted reason.

They are like brass
these morning sentiments
we polish to shine,
but forget
or fail to name.

Matthew Kaler

As you pull me from the meridian, I imagine
the tendons of your wrist become steely cords,
eyes answer predictable as hoarfrost. Even this conversation
is something dark you desire.
The luminous clock,
a pall over the apartment, said, I want to be good at what I do
as much or as little as it matters…
Excruciating, this discovery:
that brass bells knelling, the point
of a finger against thronging otters, those couriers of night,
are the things undoing courage, the rise above our basest natures.

No glance pregnant as yours across the room
ever created such wildness
in the mass of my chest. You entering the apartment—
How your black motorcycle boots lay beside the bed—
one fallen, one standing open to the heavens
to keep the luck inside
like a ten gallon hat or a horseshoe. Such emptiness we call Congratulations.
A plunge & taunt at the patina,
your glance returned

inside a glance. Now as it was across the room, my arms
my legs bound to the wood-stained chair
a waterboard torture
self-induced. Now as you call to praise the other coast.
Away from you, water-crossed
by rivers, lacerations over distance on the map.
The past empties unto them.

Occlusion, your gaze across the room. Other subjects brought up & so on…

Now, tenebrous, I stand before you, unto you
in narrow-lashed eyes
a solitary example
of redaction from time, where you are
poured into black boots
always entering the room.

Matthew Kaler

Excising Metastasis. White ash.
White ash, she imagines, is pity, & lingers for years.
A builder yells news in Spanish
from the neighboring beach house,
its walls sad paper standing roofless, gaping
for a sandstorm to whiteout the sun.

She imagines blind children obscured, their babble raising the sun
in orange-sash, goldenseals bursting,
the cambering yellow surface of rivers.
Evening, her legs bronzed. The fish simmering
Grouper, a name like the smacking of entrails.
Swamped in heat she stares up a palm to white-pinned stars,
dies on the most humid summer night,
is cremated & scattered into winds the desert natal, solemn,

she returns without memory of her mother’s hands
her father’s rough eye, her abuelita on Sunday morning—
Nobody’s there, her mind speaks to its absence: lines of tan, famished hills.

The sky is a gathering ash stirred & brushed to haze. The call yet to come.
The streaking geese, their cries light foghorns.

Maatthew kaler

Early season the trout lean & ravenous
rise to rain
we eggs of misogyny pound beer cans down
you toast to rain to drop & drop the bait & raise to blind depths
that fathom you
blackguarded eggs, fecund with nothing
salmon egg cluster
radiant gasoline over shredded water,
let the sinkers drop, lead
our lines jig the dead eggs puppeteer of still-lives
off the lakebed—raise & drop the bait, you raise this boy the man, fallow
your grave face what we use as lure you taught
taunt bull trout to impregnate hungry guts
with eggs like bunched grapes, lascivious fertility
the eggs recall you brought another woman home
the hands the thighs the moans
slept until shift
raised & dropped
the morning,
when your child asked you answered another stranger

Matthew Kaler

The conclusions of the Light Symposium were
out of favor with determinism. Thus no farmer is cursed
to plow, harvest & praise bats by one sister
of the-Weird-three. His crop of rivet-wheat no rebirth
of the sun god, no force of light sprouting an
insanguinated hand. However unaware, he chooses refuge
in the corporeal idea: where one brown hen can
peck the mist gluttonous, free from the deluge
of a moral imagination. Each morning
the fence needs tending, a record plays Rhumba
castanets and horns, those gleaming
matrices of elemental light. A Beethoven sonata.
Quantum physicists concluded that photons exist unusually
as both particles and waves. The mind bevels divinity.

Matthew Kaler