A new poem

I've been reading a book called Reluctant Gravities by Rosemarie Waldrop, and I really love the bend it gives on gender. It's comprised of conversations between a man and a woman which are all "on" something, like "on the horzontal" or "on heiroglyphs" for example. There are also interludes and songs (stanzaic, mostly quatrain poems which seem especially lyric) between some of the conversations. She manages to retain beauty, hold a contingent flow, yet still maintain a fractured sense of narrative all the while keeping up a sort of wierd dialogue between genders. I really like it. I love how wierd but beautiful it is. It's a relatively new book too, 1999, which is one of the most recent books on my reading lists (Oh, the irony). The combination of reading this book and having a really wierd dream about some tall, thin guy I don't even know but in whose presence I "felt" so very comfortable and alive, I wrote this poem, which I have no idea how to even talk about. I'm worried about the gesture at the end, which I actually borrowed from the movie The Company which I just saw the last 10 minutes of the other day but was struck by how fre words were spoken and how much gesture and image represented the narrative. It seems a bit out of place (as much as anything can seem out ofplace in a poem like this) but I'll see what my poetry group thinks of it on Sunday when we meet. Worry that the "he" and "you" are too alike and that I have not built the tension enough between these two characters. The form is wierd, too, almost like a sonnet but it has 9 line stanzas instead of quatrains. Which, I suppose, makes it absolutely nothing like a sonnet. But it has a sonnet feel to me.


The façade of a certain aspect


He was a taller version of reality
unlike a pigeon or any hyacinth. I rested comfortably
against his bin, my weight unreal and sliding, my neck
against a cloud in its own dimension. He could be any
dreamface, the thinness of backbone
in glistening silence. I know I will see him again
because he lives here, in the mud, in the green clay
I found you in
so long ago.

I try to remember the conversation,
the floating feeling a sleeve of maybe.
I say I will give you everything I no longer use,
spoons and where to get there. Suddenly we hold hands
on the electric street inside of me. I want him
to make the move
out of this synchronized walking, out of our elbows
rubbing together like kindling
blow blow trying to spark.

When I see your face it’s more like an aquarium
than a river. It takes me nowhere
but moves so gracefully within itself. I want to smooth you again
from the inside
but we don’t know what that means
even though. It confuses our octagonal sense of desire
which only now hits us from two angles. You can’t even hear me
in the mornings, our eyes almonds in the cream of daybreak, clinging
to a patterned wall.
I wave goodbye and mouth the words, as if across a stage,
I will see you after some time.