Excerpt from Sky Lounge

JUST YESTERDAY

Before prayer in the schools we had the Crusades
and we cleaned out the stockpot once a year.

Virtually everything we ate induced narcosis,
a condition we often confused with god.

Some told of a river that ran outside the city walls
and of how it moved to avoid their touch,

a giant serpent twisting forever away. If it wasn’t the devil
it was the work of the devil like everything else we wanted.

Remorse held us together until we died young
and most of us never realized we were mammals—

indeed we were suspicious of birds but rats, well, rats
we found charming, with their eyes so full

of sympathy, their need for warmth like our own. We also
wanted love to suffice. Flies that collected on the lesions

of the dying: angels one and all: no one could be too careful.
It seemed a flood was forever rinsing ideas from my tongue

so I said nothing or spoke louder, I was always drowning.
I couldn’t have changed anything.

All right there was the alchemist
and I loved him but I could not save him.

Once I dreamt of electricity. Was this the river,
the one that altered its course like a wounded thing?

We had no trees, only sticks.
Huge gears turned in the sky.

GROUPIE

All the money I lied about, the makeshift
stomach pump—forget everything

and the way to where it happened. The guitar
god wants me/has me/ditches me/calls me

from the road and can I wire some money, he’s
gotten into a situation: a barren tour-bus fridge

so can I meet him in Trenton and bring a bag.
The next nude reveals herself

and she’s thin in the way the age demands—
not conventionally pretty, not conventionally shaved,

but a rail to rail against if there’s time and there is.
I’m at work on a new line of lipsticks—Foie Gras,

Primordial Soup, Contusion—everyone who tries them
gets beautiful.

The girls and I wanted to be famous,
instead we love an astronaut who blows

sunshine up our asses from halfway to its source. Fuck him.
Our supply lines have snapped—no more K, no more X,

no more. I take comfort in gossip, the usual
gossip, but different: this one stitched a quilt of moths,

another painted all his rooms gold. We, the girls and I,
we pull the wings off swan boats, follow our favorite

to the stars and the capsule in which we keep
recipes we’ve saved for our successors so they do not starve.

A LITTLE EDUCATION GOES A LONG WAY

R is lately taken
with the abyss, invoking
Kierkegaard’s notion of
the despair of possible infinity
v. the despair of infinite possibility.
We agree that any artist
worth/with a grain of salt
must face the latter
and set to fashioning variations
of our own (the infinite
possibility of despair).
I begin an essay on this
as it is manifested in popular music
(“So Many Men, So Little Time”).
But since I’ve been obsessed
with ice cream lately, I abandon
it in favor of one on which poets
liked ice cream (Schuyler)
and which ones did not (O’Hara).
To do this properly, I stop
reading their poems
and provide no footnotes.
Dead poets only—
that way, they can’t
call me up and say,
Hey jerk blah blah blah blah blah.
Of course, they’d only be talking
to my answering machine, next to
which I may or may not be
asleep, a magazine
covering my face.

KNOWING YOU COULD IS BETTER THAN KNOWING YOU WILL

I must see you; let’s meet at the fringes of respectability
at quarter past nine. We could straddle the oft-licked
curb (it’s the repetition we like). I promise not to say
anything louche when you buss the backs of my fingers.

What is that noise coming from the other side of the river—
maybe pavement being set perfectly straight or a woozy guitar.
In light like this we become automatic and can reach each other—
what a difficult noise to hold and clearly making love is all that.

Juiced, I’m sure we’re taller than before and don’t miss
what we’ve lost. Meanwhile the streetlights blush
in their globes as if they could tell how the party towed us
along like a chain of rollerblading kids latched onto a bus.

Later let’s go swimming down by the electrical plant
since as you know the water runs out warmest from its pipes.
Bring on the horse tranquilizers
for my listing heart is pecker-fretted, truculent and true.

Copyright 2003 by Mark Bibbins. All rights reserved