Souvenir

Joe Milazzo

Since it happened, have
you walked the back
of our town, feeling
what you can't afford
feeling? The vulnerable ones
catch rain in their laps. Fences
are dented with bulls-
eyes. Centuries
of somber windows
frame a dovecote's light.
Dispossessed tracts
extend the extent of that
couple of concrete
steps that end up lead-
ing you through
the flimsy descriptions
of marestail and
nettles. A black
land's line connects
a tangent of childless
housewives and mother-
less skulkers. But what
traces your smolder in
the silhouettes of
the dump's wilted
men? What I taste
in the ozone:
images; I know.

You start the chairs around,
assuring them this is how
the merry-making keeps sunrise
from lisping its ABCs. You
coddle the flour beetles and bait
the television news. You ask without
quite asking if I've seen some relic
you liked, as if nothing was ever just
up to your specifications. I try
and remind you that the metaphor
that's been promoted to proverb
is not the same as the puddles
a middling tub can't minister. But
still we ram our bulks over whose
credences are these. To kill my pre-
vailings, or to outlast the ordinary
subterfuges of every last one: which
do you deem exceeding? Whichever's
imprint is more ruddy, that wreathing
can sort a cathedral from a crusade.

THE    DREAM    IN
WHICH        I       AM 
INTERRUPTED 
AGAIN                 NO 
SOONER  THAN   I 
HAVE 
OVERCOME THIS 
LATEST DELAY

THE DREAM  IN

THE DREAM
IN WHICH IT
ALL       JUST
FEELS       SO 

            "NOW"

                                             Your new orifice is
a genizah. My new
genizah resembles
my new heart. My
old heart was a cardigan
worn by a hard chair.
My new heart
has the pirouette
of a hatchet, or a
shiv. My old heart
was nothing but one
big set-up, a part of
many bigger parts. My
old heart welcomed everything
with a "How can I, how
can I, how?", not even
balking. My new heart
is maybe not so new, not so
much a tool, but it keeps coming
out, a sun whose every spar
bleeds with some forsaking
from now on. The modicums
daily reunite, the golem
rolls its rock in front of
the looters. My new heart
runs in weeds while your
old heart interrupts itself
with the flog of thorny
dissertations. The new
ghetto is ours to overcrowd,
yours with mine, so long
as its borders are
apocryphal, a place
of flags thumbtacking
"where" to "here,"
like barbarians.

THE DREAM IN      
WHICH           A
DIFFERENT
DREAM HAS

I wish you could have seen it,
how these smoothnesses somehow
know what a finger feels like, how
now the household's many monocles
collect some nerve from the marvelous
with which they collide. This awe of
love stops everything in its putting
and executes any habit which can't be
convenient. Where's the goosenecked corpse
to miss the ping-pong and clear reception and
divans of its living headquarters? The feet,
the legs have cranked their precincts back
up inside the crown's ziggurat scowl.
Let me press this verdict. No thudding
ever loved you as much as you
were fascinated by the mum of its
saints, the regiments—all identical, all
the snags of their shrapnel mittened—
with which it advertised the worth
of its patently attentive  "What."

UNFINISHED
BUSINESS
WITH ME

THE DREAM IN
WHICH      YOU
FEED           THE
LITTLE
ANIMALS      IN
YOUR EXILE

What if you are among the dis-
illusionments? What if yours is
the rescue that everyone is always
saying they're getting the hell
out of? What if your light hobos
as far as that? I need you to under-
stand: you're up to your boots in
happy treasons, whatfors that have
not held since the minute they had
any foreign glow. Let me show you
again and once more what immortal
surely lies at your address. He's a shoo-
in and, when he's your heckler, he's me