Issue 3.6

The Shape of White Blued beneath a gauche, ostending moon, its whiteness was the strangest thing. Not the horse walking that silent street— houses and shadows picked clean as the jagged hill slanting the town up to a livid, star-rashed sky— but that blue-stained white, pausing its horse shape on the road below for one half-nod, half-snort stare, before the night’s bare flint took it out of sight.

How Do You Mean That? I wax poetic, wax my car— does daylight wax and wane here? I now present this present; for the present I remain here. In old Key West—this point is key— some locks no key will open. The right to right a wrong is right right here and now, I’m hopin’. Your mean is average—is that mean to say? I mean no other, so hit me up—your song’s a hit! We’ll hit the town, my brother. It’s dope to stay away from dope— go give a dope this warning. My head hurts now; I’ll hit the head and head out in the morning.

Returning to Form Late at night our bodies go still. We form a range of low, blue hills. Easy, unimperious. A man in a shabby winter coat could pull his cart over the great, dark lumps of us. Surrounded by the quiet foothills of our limbs, we need nothing else. The shifting of a tectonic plate— my leg on top of yours. Outside the birds are closing up their hymn books in the little parishes of the trees while the unripe berries of our eyes grow dark and incomplete.

If I Had Been in Love Before If I had fallen in love before, this past pain would have been a walkover; I would have rushed to the River Thames, dipped my body about seven times seven like the ten lepers at the River Jordan before returning home, the sun on my face, to face the long, long day of blistering pain. I would have rolled up all the cobwebs which the loving spiders wove in my kitchen and raised them at the trunk of the palm trees to climb and tap the foamy, spilling white wine into calabashes carved out of wood and love. Years of nursing the scars of intense hurt would have taught me what remedy to grasp in healing this fast-corroding despair before blossoming into sores and splotches, scalding the fragile heart built for eternal love. All birds of prey would have had a new home as the smooth, silent paean of paradise in whom I found a fraternity of love, not this loveless babble of equestrians doomed to die dark, lonely and miserable. I would have pursued the wonders of the moon, the benevolent god of the lost and the lonely, for whom the glorious trumpet of triumph blows, that has such affinity with the yellow sun through which the world bathes in sumptuous light, glowing like a girl in a lover’s delight. My face would be brighter than the sunflower field which my mother planted in her ploughing youth, when her harvest hosted the music of abundance though a flood struck before the reaping season. If I had been deeply in love before, I would have stopped for the blue sparrow’s song to cleanse me in the morning and evening, their lyrics seeping into my heart like creamy pudding, and my heart would burst into blustering flames, with a chorus, it’s a blessing! It’s a blessing!