Potomac Falling--2013

Maybe it is the time of year, but

Potomac, where are your swans?

Your cold churns dreamily clip

A piece of brain for a slide,

Sliver it across glass,

And it is my hands, which

Without me, hold it to the light.

This is where 8 a year lose their bones.

I will address you

The undress of a lover:

Time after time

Inch after inch

Address after address.

River of swans you draw eyes like Picasso--

Pull them in with the suggestion

of a dangerous line— like a poem.

Above you, bundled couples

Tread the treeline

In some approximation of a ritual

Circle. you spit up like a child at their blindness,

You reach out like the dying.

You rise up shallowly

Like the alcoholics at a thousand points

as if a river of mouths growing desperate

For air runs just beneath your surface.

Where is the air you breathe, river of swans?

Wherefore? Why?

Potomac if I jump,

Will you carry me like a swan?

Will you cherish the whirls in my bones,

read the calligraphy on my skull?

Will you scatter my memories,

Forgive my skin and the contents therein?

Potomac, we mouth the same cold, exultant language—

We lose that bit of foam others need to speak.

Your rocks hold it, hide it.

(If she plays “Chicago” I will cry

and turn my back to her,

and if she asks, I won’t have the words

in her language. The sobs will just collect

like foam in an eddy.)

Potomac, do you recite Hicok, Whitman,

Or something older?

My sadness must seem young to you.

Do you see my life behind me,

Like a stretch of muscled water?

I must seem terribly forgetful.

Potomac, you look like one

Who has never spoken of the end.

Some things are not worth talking about.

No, but that is something learned.

Potomac, you have not learned

Those things you should not learn.

The hardness, the shortsightedness of the road,

The strange numbness of the soft skinned,

To miss the swans who no longer line your shores.

Potomac, I know one.

She plays like a peacock

And speaks like a soul

Of a body larger than her own,

Some great river.

Sometimes we fuck to dispel darkness.

And sometimes we speak dates through

Printed glass: causes of death, single sentence summations

Of each other.

We make poems of only words.

Potomac, I am in love with her

And have learned to forget

The false old histories of those words.

Potomac, I may have just learned the name

that she makes me feel fashioned in the image of.

Potomac, no, she makes me feel fashioned in my own.

Potomac, I will remind you, you are not my first.

I will introduce you.

I was forgetting her when I asked about your swans.