DOESN'T LOOK FAR

Watching a dancer near the river Darro,
I wake, in a cave, just this once.
He rises with the dust, hard pace,
pillared wave, as overhead
whitewashed earth
flakes in metered strokes.
Bearing cold-
shouldered luminescence,
clack of flecos, enters an emptied-out
umber-lit span,
far-eyed, intent, champing. Bites his epaulette.
Wields a hammer
of the inner ear, builds
rivalry, a device, a birthplace. Wasted
by discipline, this figure whose
damage, whose nightworld
knows no partition,
he circles tea-coloured
shadow, a sure, hard way to get from.

Far down, he is
hurled, he is hacked,
among turned backs, urge to
swill dark rum or squat
or strike or black out
among pilings.
Silence. The ash-pit’s frosted heap.

My life on fire, holy, idle. Cave
where hair won’t dry.
I wake, have you?,
doing the one push-up that matters.
I’ve lost my eyeglasses
and in the melted ice cream grey heads roll and bob.
I have a wife whose tears are sequins.
They seethe, they flash.
I have a child, whose mouthfuls of amniotic fluid
tell of a dark wet foal
alone on the sleigh track to the surface.
I choke up for the dance words like Water!
Get it! Pomegranate!
stamped out like holes in a belt.

Sometimes my love or I
will shout like this, banging
through kitchen drawers for batteries,
a jumpstart
jolt for a good move, doglike,
drained, flushed.
We are like those hanging
soundproof panels, keeping this to ourselves.

Slowly, the dancer sinks. His hand
rubs the stage, as though
spreading sugar,
preparing salmon for the flame.

As if at an edge, as if
grazed by blackened
transfers of weight or a late
mother’s fist, he errs
upright. Full height. Boldfaced.

Taller, thinner, he tries the attic door,
his fingers, antler,
orchid, on splintered wood.

Discerns a chalky berm of sound.
Banked restraint
or outburst polyped with silence.
Eyes fixed on some witchy
middle distance and his cheeks’ hurtled pallor.

He grinds his mother’s trifles
into powder, more powder. Sybil
is there in fractured glimpses.
Metal in his shoes
spawns a ghostly bridge below his feet
to Saturn, to the armoury. Our way is dust,
as if saluting
death’s jagged satin.

Air of it, half talc, half bourbon.
Our thighs in heated agreement
tilt toward the earth
as expert hands rifle my pocket.
Shoelace. Passport. Even my fillings are gone.
You ever try to keep it together
with only your teeth in your mouth?
Somewhere, my forgetful, my nameless
child. Somewhere, you grapple,
crown into entanglement, a dismal, locked-up mortgage.

Wary of a nailhead snag in the floor, the dancer,
down-sized, all-in
half-dead for a breath. His shadow, underfoot,
at odds
as though breathing water,
eel-like twists
where bodies flail
in constricted, unentered registers.

Every night like this. Winding stairs.
Crushed jasmine. Drowning
today; tomorrow, hanging. Panic,
at the hour,
pours divisive, heart-altering chalk into my beer.
That’s when I stand with last year’s
grief glistening in my beard.
It shines like cooked fat.
White rind of the dog’s eyes. Dog wild, eating shit.

My wife peels grapes,
her shoulders like closing wings.
You know how it is. Some days
we pull the joists from heaven.
Faucets and their pipes thunder empty, and in the downpour
the dancer leads us tramping
through Folly That Begets
Extinguishment in the Trance of Sorrow.
He gets thinner, I get fatter, with the same
punctual derangement.
Not long and the dancer will deliver his rematar
beneath my third and fourth ribs
as winged ants, drunk again, shelter in place.

Young one, there is a horse where I am headed
and today, its mother grazes
fitfully among the orchard’s rotten pears.
There is faint snow as runoff overflows
where my failed life meets yours on the road.
I cross a bridge now
with a cool, still-faced light behind me like a sail.
A dread clarity
I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to bear.