Poetry : Smoke Letters

 

 

 

Yes I said yes
I said, we will never be here again?
And he said yes. And that was when I knew it was done.
His body was cold and I was cold too.
It was done. It would never do again.

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There isn’t a bit of this that makes sense.
If there is, I want to put it between two blank, dark bookends,
like two gasps preventing you from hearing the words between.
The words were: “Does this feel good? Tell me what turns you on.”

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Well, …
I start ambiguous
She didn’t know my name

At first
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So I say
This is the face you will remember—
The pale hesitating fin announcing itself.
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I don’t like to swim in smoke.
I like to see where I am going.
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You know, music is allowed to say more than we are.
It says, ~”I don’t want to live through winter” ~

I want to say, I am made of dirt, just like you. So many colors
from so many places.
I know you must have a scar like me:
one for the one on my knuckle
behind my ear, my lower back, down my forearm.
I want to tell you,
I think somewhere there must be a man who cannot say a thing
Just itself. He must say instead:
I said,

Imagine hearing I love you from that man.
“I said, that feels good, right there.”
Like receiving your emotions in the mail, seeing the envelope first, the grime of travel on it,
The name of it.
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Every summer, the water where I swam naked with her grows darker,
clouding like smoke.
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Music is allowed to say a lot more than we are.
If this were the seventh resolving over onto the eight,
Skipping an octave to become the ground of the sustained chord,
a cello down scooping up your diaphragm,
catching your breath with sheep-gut—
You would understand.
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I will go to the post office tomorrow. I’ll mail the
letter I’ve been keeping
underneath a pile of blank postcards.
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~“I think it is beautiful that you are 256 colors too”~
That you too have fallen out of love. That your brown eyes are thick with smoke.
That I will never see into you,
unless you blow it out,
into my mouth.
The next song is called, “Jump into my mouth and breathe…”

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Frightened animals that we are,
We can hide behind a bridge,
Behind the clever structure of a poem,
Behind a metaphor or two.
We aren’t above this.
We swim in these polluted waters,
the only ones we have ever known.

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Most people think of choices in binaries.
“will I fetch the mail or not?”

There isn’t a bit of this that makes sense.

How many more things are there than the mail? How many things can you do with a letter? And what’s more, what’s a letter if not an entire history encoded into a moment into an expression into physical writing?

On LSD you see
Thin pages fluttering in the sun.
Sometimes you can pick out a word before it falls
~“I can’t stand to see everything ending”~
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What about if there were a man, handsome, gentle, and kind—

He may be too scared— +++++++++++ it may be too much—
Could you love that man?
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~”Take this waltz”~ I want to say to you,
because
the song is better known. The song knows better.

So I say,
Look, these are more than words.
It’s like music.
Let them
Be filling you fill you up filling the day to fill you.
Then fall
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We swim in this music
But it is not ours.
“Not yet.”
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She loved Henry David Thoreau. She used to say his name like chocolate on her lips. Thoroueaugh.
I took off her yellow shirt.
And she unbuttoned my jeans. They all fell in the sand.
I couldn’t see where I was walking.
She took my hand and squeezed and put it on her chest and then used it to point at the moon in the fog.
I didn’t know we were in the water
Until she took my head with her other hand
And took my mouth with her wet mouth
And brought me under
The dark.
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I am only asking you who you could love for no reason.
I am only asking because I have glass hands
and a glass tongue on a stone frame.
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Even Golem’s have dreams.
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And you might hear your heart now.
“+++++ .Thuh. .Th. +++++ .Thuh.” ++++++ I know it well.
But remember I said, I am a dangerous image
A cutting elegant ++++++++++++++ natural glide.
If I didn’t say it,
It is because my mouth was by your thighs.
You can’t blame me.

I raised my head like a fin, looking up skin,
the thin expanse of sea between you and me.
The body drips with it, your legs quiver like riptides
You pulled my face up +++++++++++++++ still wet
And I dry up.
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I want to say

“a long time has passed since somebody told me they did not love me
but I don’t forget what it feels like.”

But I am frightened my tongue will break.

“it is something about the eyes looking at you, as if through smoke
and you realize it is all around you.”
Remember I said, I like to see where I’m going? Like anybody.
But then again, when it’s all over
you, you aren’t going anywhere.
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It is exciting for a time,
To be caught in another’s eye
“ ++++++ . Thuh. +++++++ .Th. Thuh. ++++ TH.THUH”
To say ++++++++++++++++++++ how wondrous this form,
The smoke curling about you,
The way the light plays with your skin against the wall,
And the glorious image
Of you standing with a bottle of tequila open
Smiling at me and your eyes candles eyes so bright.
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When I told her about you,
When I was sweating through my jeans for a meal
And the earth had almost swallowed me,
She thought it was so silly. And it is, now that it is done.

Penina leaned on her hoe with her dirty gloves crossed
And said,
“I expect a poem about her. About her and the lake.”
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We have to get past ourselves as referents.
There are moments when we can say more.
Yes. +++++++++++ The empty jar of nutella, the crippled plywood in the corner, the dirt from our shoes, the low hanging yellow lamp, the pockmarked paint on the walls, the stacks of paper on every piece of furniture, the sheets clumped at the foot of the bed, the broken alarm clock by the door, the mess of wires, the dull no. 2 pencil rocking on the desk, the keys on a red lanyard hanging out of one of my boots.

Yes. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ We are both here.
Yes.
This is both more than I can ever say
And exactly what I want to say more than.

The small light glowing on the edge of the laptop, the hum of the refrigerator, the scratchings of the room above us, the dusty blinds with the missing rows, the torn screen, the grey morning light outside, the sound of car tires picking water off the asphalt.

use us,
use these things and the words that come out of them
to show a new light that has never been seen.

It isn’t – like- anything.

Perhaps these quiet moments are its death rattle:
The you drawing away from the me.

But perhaps they are the birth
Of the strange new music in which
We are.
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You are always moving.
Don’t move, I say.
My eyes trace you.
I want to be the king.

My fingers try to turn you to gold.
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Your oily plume stirs in a full wind,
Muscles tense for flight
In the cage of my arms.
The damn short sightedness of the image.

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I said, “you are beautiful” so many times
And each time I meant it, but
It does nothing.
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The best writers use the words themselves as characters.
Borges does infinite so infinite
Because already within the words, you realize
the impossible, you must get beneath them.
His name on repeat in each story:
Our bodies cycling through one another.

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Don’t move, I say. I draw out the blade.
What should I do? You say.
Then my fingers are cold. The strain
Of my irregular heartbeat yanks the neck tendons.
The blood isn’t going anywhere and
The edges go dark.
I AM TRYING to hold you.
“What do you want?” ++++++ you ask, trying to
get blood flowing.

You rap your raindrops against the glass.
Rapping and scratching, looking cold.
Does the crow want to come in?

It isn’t warm in here.

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Someone is saying “don’t move” to me
And I am almost all gold:
Something coldly valuable and still
That You might tell a story of perching on
But will ultimately fly from.

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It’s like this. we don’t live in Spain.
This isn’t wine country,
Or your mother’s way of love.
These aren’t the fights,
Or the drunken days.
She told me not to put her in a Hemingway story.
It’s just… well, when I want to I can’t.

And don’t you always want to?

Yeah, I do. That’s the kick of it. She makes me want to all the damn time.

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Footnote: All song lyrics set off in ~’s are from the Black Moth Super Rainbow song, “I think it is beautiful that you are 256 colors too.”

Poem by Aaron Dockser

Collage & Illustration by Luis Figueroa