FOR KASIMIR
The punctuation of erotic cries shows, wet paint in the museum,
you want to photograph the proof, the grand stairway of entry
where the leaves stick to your shoes before we awake in gilt twitters
like the wrong Buddha on the right year, you open in the terminal
after a thunderstorm, the people are only music, forgive them.
~ ~ ~
A man twisted and gyred in the fires of metaphors, he was on the news,
we saw him return always, on the windiest bridges, on the parapet
where the police had cornered him, on a branch of a tree in a poem
two thousand years old, he would never give up, a skin memento,
he was a spider-monkey in the tree of philosophy, screaming
like the bull of Heliogabalus until we could no longer hear his cries
in the traffic of our time, which was clearly in his key.
~ ~ ~
You were leaving me,
it was an interesting lecture, The Cloud versus The Phallic, I was intrigued,
I found myself invested, holding stock, my skeleton worn to your shape
like those stairs in Benares, swaled almost to the shape of a woman's sex
I bent to kiss them and where were you just now, here's baba ganoosh
and sushi in sweet little alcoholic travel cases, because you're like that
aren't you, and I know how to sing along. The mortal lovemaking clouds.
~ ~ ~
I mean the window shivers and laughs at the crucial moment
between something and everything you leave, I bend my pinky
into the problem, there is no "crucial moment," no crisis, no passion
that hasn't already survived us, nested elsewhere in the cosmic fluid like a swan
as fickle Zeus was, a shower of gold, a great waster of time, a better god
for this art, but why make love to a critic, anything that needs sick understanding.
~ ~ ~
The rooms continue to mouth your damage, the nipples of it,
which is the ancient mother really, is wet sand. I walked there beside you,
without memory, the indivisible sound the ocean is continually trying
to make, like Cy Twombly invading Roman history with crayons
you are warmer, you are very close, now drink him down and find
at last the divine animal he conceals, love him lost, be grateful.
~ ~ ~
The present has a flesh-hinge but denies it is a book. I have learned
unforgettable things, the fingers must be steel inside the painting,
the fingers must steal inside the painting, the kleptomaniacs of space,
like the white peasants in Malevich, who went ahead, brooming
all the snow of vision in preparation for Suprematism, cleaning out clouds
that chimed as if they were high crystals or vodka, or dead lovers, or lovers dead
to touch, how can I not love such peasants, those janitors of the avant-garde,
the only love of the New Year, a color's cold staring back.
—W. B. Keckler