(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

James L. White

Taken to a Room

Taken to a room with you asleep,
I want to touch you there
beneath the galaxy of star quilt.
You unfold letting me into the warmth
and everything rises from my dick to my breath
saying we are here.

In my mind I kiss you away, your beard
and earring, the tattooed heart of Christ
on your chest, and remember
a prison boy named Rubio,
then I kiss down on all of you.

Now I'm taken to a room fully awake
and warned my imagination is out of hand.
They show me a solo screaming bed
and quilt of fallen stars.
I pant hard over this poem
wanting to write your body again.

In this totally conscious poem
you're gone and they unplug my systems,
my heart, my lungs, my brains.
In front of the crowd they flash blinding lights
on my crotch and neuter me down to a smile.

I try to think about your eyes
and remember nothing.
Now they drag me off to the next room
where the real work begins.

---

Dying Out

I love the cambric night snowing down First Avenue
and the heaven of being near things I know,
my apartment, the old rugs and chair, the moons
of my nails above which I write.

And the snow in distant woods where animals
give silently all
and everything into dying--their fossils in spring,
the jonquil and pure bone.

I'm no more alone than usual
with this perfect history of snowing
so quietly without people.
I've left so many this year
who've felt too comfortable with my old design.
Because I want another life rinsed new in middle age,
the way a hard sickness changes a person.
The way snow changes the billboards
by my drugstore to read VANQUISH PAIN and
RELIEF FROM THE ORDINARY.

I don't want forgiveness from people,
only to be seen from another way,
like the back of a sculpture,
perhaps the nape of a neck or an open helpless palm,
some familiar form viewed from another direction.

---

Sunday Snow

I walk around the cold rooms trying to remember
if it's sorrow or light that brings me to her small face
and ribs I want to play like forbidden chimes.
I walk the cold alone and admit it's sorrow
that brings me to the light.

My emptiness festers into a Sunday forever.
I want to believe in the little girl
beyond my needs for darkness.
I want to bring her into light like a tablet washed by sun,
where she can finger up each contour of my despair.

A gray mist comes from the gray park below as I write:
'A gray mist comes from the gray park below.
The little girl rides a naked horse gray,
rides blood red over his back
in the gray park, in the gray naked snow.'

It is Sunday.
It is Sunday forever and begins to snow.
I am going into the snow
as I have wanted to do for years.

(from The Salt Ecstasies, Graywolf Press, 1982)