Sunrise on Upper East
New York City, 1988
New York sunrise over Harlem River. Rising so amber,
so Amun-Ra against the miniature scrapers, walls of humble
steel and glass, hot orange on pavement. Morning sun
brilliant, across the luminous metal scarab of the Third Avenue
Bridge or the Willis Avenue Bridge. I really don’t know.
My first time to the Bronx, anyway.
I return to sun waking the city, dipping his pitcher into the river,
white-gold crucible of dawn. Inclined in the back seat of a taxi,
smells of upholstery. No cigarette ash, no paper pine. Squinting
at the morning through stains of mascara from crying mostly,
sleeping some. Too young to anticipate if I’ll always feel this thrown.
I still don’t know what the Bronx looks like in the light. But East Side
surrenders to Daybreak like she’s just waiting for him to rise.
God. Like, just ready.
I’m costing a boy a mess of money to send me home with this view.
He’s not even frustrated. Not even mad. Careful with me like
he’s known a real fight. Blond as this morning sun, streetwise eyes
and a cross on a chain. Irish Catholic, his family is tight, he says.
Tight. There’s a river of knife scars across his chest,
it’s okay, you can touch them.
I run my fingers along the car window glass that is still morning cold.
I never surrender to anybody. I save all my misguided refusals
in a jar of lament. Just a cry-baby tangled in the patience of
heedful men.
But not this city. Not the Upper East Side. Bold and fierce
and fearless and wanting. Watch her arching backwards
for the morning light, running hands along the spines of the streets.
Supplicating to the sky, mirroring lustrous in the glass
and limpid Harlem river. New York beckons and embraces.
The city says yes.
Aphrodisia on Bleecker
New York City, 1989
Aphrodisia on Bleecker Street. Shoppe in Greenwich Village.
I guess it’s gone now.
Like the jumbled altars of esoteric bookstores
and the smell of printed paper.
Aphrodisia. The world’s muffled library of wildcrafted secrets.
Memory sleeps, cradled in the lap of scent.
Every dream forgotten, langours in these cabinets.
Wooden mantles of herbs, cloaked in brown paper and twine.
Mandrake to Patchouli to Saffron.
A plant to anoint a maiden. Or a plant to stop a heart.
Canisters lining the walls, adorned with dried botanicals.
The air rippling from the embroidered essence of clove buds,
cardamom. A calliope of spices whirling behind the whispers
of outdoor rain, along the pavement of the city, wanderers
rushing by; forgetting or not remembering or never knowing
Aphrodisia. An apothecary castle for the senses.
And the oils. The soulblood of ylang ylang. The queen, Bulgarian
rose, prying open cobalt bottles, jasmine, king of flowers.
This table of potions, aromatic nest of liquid bouquet
seeping into porous walls, Everything exudes perfume.
Breathe.
Like Monstro the whale breathe and I’m just a puppet of twigs
losing all my ways on the crooked, village streets
dancing for copper pennies with pretty marionettes.
Unremembered now in this sanctuary of balsams
that echo of wooden chimes and clinking tinctures.
Frankincense. Dragon’s blood. Copal.
Speaking the languages of resin, speaking the tongues of
labdanum, syrupy tar and gilded sap. Breathe.
Aphrodisia. I am only beginning to learn that everything I understand
breathe
is right here.
To the Boy I Wrote Stories About
Juneau, Alaska. 1990’s
This poem won’t even matter because you’ll die so young,
tearing shadows into winters over winters, never to be sewn
with the sinews of branches when the sky hangs in ribbons
of cobalt and absence. I hurt for your family.
I might know as my father died like so,
before the first quarter month of thirty.
You might know as I’d write about him in class,
when you sat across from me, first
and next to me, later.
Your hair all burnt bark and tangles,
like how tree roots knead soil
and you never talked, I think I could read on one palm
how many times you spoke at all
with your perpetual 5 o’clock shadow
and your careless handwriting
and your poems about snow.
I wrote stories about you in class.
Since I’m a loud mouthed, know-it-all, can’t shut up
waves crashing against Let me tell you a story
waves crashing against It’s okay to play rough with me
Makes for one hell of an undertow.
That frantic sea-tongue swallow
clutched in deafening foam
dragging towards the fissures
where quietness dwells.
Or even just across the table in class.
If I could crawl into that thicket of noiselessness
since you would have let me
if I’d been unflinching enough to ask.
You’d move closer next semester, right next to me
quiet like drifts in the ice of the forest,
beneath the vigilance of ravens.
Listening to my shape shifting, contortionist fiction
as Fiction is just Memoir’s outcast cousin
with the compulsive lying problem.
I changed your hair, changed your eyes, changed your face,
changed your age, changed the time, changed the place
still, you knew it was you.
All up in my secret in a room of peer reviews
workshopping away on the nuances of metaphor
anonymous tips in a stack of sedimentary copies.
Except yours, since I already knew your handwriting
from your poems about snow
and you just scrawled
this sounds like me
and leaned back to watch
me reading you reading me
writing you.
Featured Image: Dusk
by Bebhinn McIlroy (2000)
