that stayed immaculate
even on the nights he lost to our hero
Wahoo McDaniel who never played the heel,
he who hailed from the lost tribes
of Oklahoma, who made us want to be chiefs
so much we wore pigeon feathers
and circled each other inside a green square
of water hose until someone finally rang the bell
that was never there and we sprang
toward each other like animals in love or at war.
SAUDADES
When that word, one part swine,
one part evasion, first wobbled into my life
I was eating pastrami and hiding in my office
from students and I know Andrade was in the air,
as was the samba, and how it’s almost impossible
to translate either one, nor should you
unless you’ve been a disciple of the rough grief
that lovingly wraps you in its wings, which is warmer
than one would expect, so much so that it’s easy
to forget for a moment something trivial like pigs
aren’t supposed to fly or that if you say saudades
with enough pain and heart the pigs of your past will come
trotting out of the dark, doing their little sideways dance
around you, shaking their hips to the drum
in your chest until you forget what a frown is
or why we need them and oh they will remind you
how delicious Carnival is, and how glorious
it is to make the past present, and how
easily one can sleep dressed in feathers.
NUDIST COLONY
Wind-whipped, ear-clapped
by the rocky thunder of the coast,
they cross the wet grass
in burnished loafers, sandals
twined on the grounds
to drink and merrymaking.
Inland, they face the empty
hour between lunch
and dinner in a frail
building with a barking
door and incandescent
lighting that wraps the matte
surface of their trunks
in an amber glow. Sheets
of paper shuffle, chalk
boxes are laid out,
oils are stirred, sharpened
pencils line up in formation,
hips swivel and settle
on wooden stools
legged in metal. She
enters and her shoes click
across the white tile
as she assumes the center
of the room in a pencil skirt
and matching jacket, taupe
blouse and run stocking.
Her husband sets a flock
of gooseflesh up his neck
and starts to chalk her legs
from memory: his first
black dash and swipe
might be an eel
beached on blanched rock
but for the second
slash against the page
that frames the long thigh
and the knot of the knee.
She shifts her weight
from one foot to the next,
scarlet-heeled, toe tips
white with pressure.
Soft rock in hand,
he drags it slow
on a fresh wall of white
and applies the pressure
necessary to make her
more than a pool
of smudges and parts.
Wet clay in the corner
begins to harden
and blended watercolors
matte the predrawn
run of the ribs,
the swaddled shoulders
grained in autumn
tones like the disrobed
grasses in drains
that suffer cold-scald
and wind-jag.
The wrists busy now
lashing and hooking
hair to the scalp,
skin-cap to the face,
drifting shallow wrinkles
at the eye-pinch,
southerly to the ear,
leveled around the neck
like the soft-piled lines,
ruddy-pale-white,
on the brassy cheek
of the dusk-christened cliffs.
WEEKEND HOME
Not like any of the solemn ones on the cape
sitting empty week after week on those
ice-bitten January streets one can never find
in summer magazines and I am tempted, as with
so many things, to say a house can grow
a conscience when no one is around to slam its
wooden tongues and I wonder if it’ll miss
the romantic declarations of our long nights
spent sobbing and roaring, promising the end
of the end of love, and how I so wanted to see
the face it made when we slowly pulled out
of the driveway for the last time I never
shared out of meekness until now; was it a Garbo
pleading for adoration or a wrinkled Rimbaud
for melancholy, because with much effort
we had done what we do best and put away
another season of anger in the books, made healthy
our tab with another debt we could never repay.