i am not sure whether these will remain two separate poems or if i am going to morph them into one but here ya go…
The corked eye
A sterile dressing to the complete wound, including cancer (a sculpture zigzagged across the abdomen). You have started a shelter, a farmer of fairies of the history outside an idea, of and in an hour which that what goes terribly seriously through everyone as if a relative’s face was caught behind a fog of aerosoled memory.
Were they not always as this? What was? I cannot say, they have hidden the pictures of you at the time of the free rivers and they have extended your arms outward. Nobody speaks, as if to wish. Concerning the malady, whom he has to have obtained for a clear when, the pseudonym and the caricatured sculptures which by its headstocks have proven to be. But that is when in the first place I found it transmitted, concerning an area of the substance of the asbestos with the windows which become the pictures of flowers and the saxophones-covert, to the stoppers of the eye which are opened in rain.
I wait for that turn of the eye. An expert I was but this much I anchor myself to you— absolutely, no fragrance, citrus fruits, and the floor bathed of regret, absolutely, no song, late, some of the cavity still caught in the dark breath. And of the storm in this echo of modernization; it’s whistling wildly.
* In the 1980s, New York City mayor Ed Koch decided to improve the image of the Bronx by covering the windows of abandoned buildings with cardboard portraits depicting pleasant interiors. “In a neighborhood, as in life,” Koch declared, “a clean bandage is much, much better than a raw or festering wound.”
trompe l’Å“il
A clean bandage helps any wound, even a cancer caught in the serrated gulch they carved across your belly. You started out an idea, a refuge, a rustic fairy tale and now it’s all gone terribly wrong. Your face trapped behind a fog of aerosoled memory.
You weren’t always like this, were you? I can’t tell, they’ve hidden the pictures of you in the time of clear rivers and stretched out farms. No one wants to talk about it, speak of when the malady became obvious, when the aliases and caricatures appeared across your wrists.
But that is when I first found you, past the asbestos dust with your windows covered in portraits of flowers and saxophones, oak shutters thrown wide open in the rain. I know it was just a trick of the eye but this is how I keep you in my memories. No scent of citrus and wet dirt, no song other than hollow cans whistling in the dark and the fierce storm still beats a Doppler echo of renewal.
* “to trick the eye.” A style of painting that gives an illusion of photographic reality as in the series of painted windows inserted in neglected tenements in the South Bronx to insinuate a revitalized urban landscape.