Beauty is Imperfection

I ate a burger

I wondered if it’d had a soul

Smoke was the only thing

I kept eating

I have a soul

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You sit next to me, dishabille, with

the curve swelling

Dressed in the patterns of Sunday paper

afternoons (airplanes crashing)

Looking at your hair

blown by wind over the pillow. Lipstick. Sun

comes through the ocean screen ‑ a wet calm

from juniper trees outside.

The cat plays in a blue light camisole

We threw off the bed. Tweesers

next to a hair. Rarebit in

the stewpot. Kinch. Rind.

I felt your own hot tears on the

back of my neck last night ‑

You didn’t even ask me what was wrong.

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Offense as sweet

As a box of raisins

You didn’t call me.

To offend a wizened grape

Is to offend me

Your hand as empty as a box

Of juice; I take the rain

Like I take the noise of children

Every nickel lies so forlorn on the tray

Bitterly remembering every grudge hugged

Come let us transact coffee and steam

Let us make a league of the offended

Dividing the milk of kindness

Until we are all even

–Eric Rasmussen

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Hoar ice splinters rattle,

Around the turkey warrens

Off the saltbox barn

In the Green Mountain, pumpkin vines

Smashed reds and yellows

Under the tongue

Of new frost

An alert nostril

Discerns the paper birch trees

The city dweller

Cold on his ice chains

Searching to find the brazen keys

A finger snaps against the icy thumb

Bone fraternal snow flakes

You pantomime old age

And slowly go inside,

make a cup,

vermouth, Old Tom gin and rye.

His wife removes his boots.

While outside the window

A marten fighting for bread with a weasel.

Cheap doggerel growls

A comic burlesque

Across the wood tableau

and the coffee on his desk

Spring doesn’t come early

Nature never shows its pettifrock too soon

No pout of cleavage, no flash of gam

Man walks in

Logs alight,

Effervesced and drinking,

Popping from the gold and green splits

While fast green grouses and big hearted tits

Remember how segmented ants bullied the tree

Sea, air and land,

Grass, grove and lea

Remember when she walked these halls

And rolled the cat mint into balls

Washed your ears and skimmed the soup

for winter’s necessity

Would the wood come

Closer

And open her yet again

Would she be a five or an eight or a ten

How many yards of night

Do you walk

To reach yourself again?

Her damp you will inherit tonight

But not ever keep;

Without the softness to fight

Or the strength to weep

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Her face is dappled in the window
Mottled reflection of the morning:
Pointillist noses, crisp burned curls
Of cat tail lip, coxcomb eyebrows
Until, lying again
She pours for me a pungent cup of her inspiration
Sallying, tart in the window
A recipe for breath, tongue, eye and nostril …
Soon a new face is brewing

Together we pull down the muslin corners
The sheet falls, a spirit rises within it
Last anesthetized night, the walls were furry with
Lilies and dried musk roses
Her blown skirt was to balloon–
Not afraid of what would be blushed into it, and
Was held down until we’d chased sleep.
It found us again at morning
Erupting from the bubble of what is indifferent
It crawled to the top of dawn, where every color
Is a different breath;
Every truth a little death

Last evening’s muse,
Now trimmed for flight
And I’m left heavy in the bed
as she flies away with her nectar,
No longer made of night

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It hangs from a

single stud,

A belt pierced by a boutonniere and tailor’s needles

More than something they fight over:

A belt that draws sisters together at the waist

Two girls, undressed

By the same hands

passing the same cigarette back and forth

Kick around the closet rooting for shoes, brown shoes

Unscrewing notebooks and letters

And light bulbs and kisses

From old sockets

Scratching their nipples

comparing white, sickly tongues

Throwing tampons, tampons

Like cotton footballs, soft dross

of earrings

falling next to pictures of a man

In this closet, love is spoken in clicks and whistles

And anger is passed along the warm lip

of a brandy glass

(Originally posted Aug. 20, 2007)

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From his Errata,

In a room of shelved books

Dressed in winter argyle

A scholar descends through

Winds of high blue December ice, vain ice

And clear lake leaves on a sweater

Head full of drink and argybargy

*

Pig iron sleds stand around the black stanchions of

Ice; clouds around hoof and nostril

Plunging churches

*

Underneath, blood, red around these points–Cymryn versus

Vainglorious Anglo, Roman versus Breton,

Jute versus Viking–runs faster than milk,

While bodies of slit-throated, sacrificed peasants

Persevere in peat marshes,

Silver as death, bogged down to study

The chalk fire of white

Where looming orange cottages

Gutted

By daisy-cutters of war

Are a necropolis empty of sentinels.

*

The sun is summoned,

The re-apotheosis of Apollo

Who last went grazing among the drink of stars

Like learned men drinking at the trough of irrational books

*

His mouth,

Such a small wound from which to reemerge

In his chariot

Pulling winter behind him

His season of greatness once more finding its career

Born from a wastrel’s body

Like all elemental myth

*

(First posted May 24, 2007)

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