Chapbook Selections
From 1992's "Dictionary of Blue Corn"
by Derek XAva
Poem Index
Low ku
poolside negative
we lie black in paved sleep for
her palms' whitest leaves
Traveling Light
Light, again being like water,
slips through her veins
from her four-chambered
heart toward the afternoon
clay shadows on her skin.
She shakes
the light from her skin
to dry, the whole time
drawing in her careful hospital bed.
she is rippling into thin
light like water herself.
Blind in Venice
An American sailor might have imagined the
canals to be deeper in the center, darker, like
pupils. Not her pupils, not Elisa's,
but those of the morning pastry maker's daughter.
Downstairs the little man would make pretzels with
sea salt and cinnamon, and with white sugar
glinting in his eyes. But now below the window
and its splintered pane, the tide
is returning sewage upon the city.
Perhaps the sailor, to sustain the moment, had
shut his eyes, to sustain the movement. He might
have imagined that it was the Summer Olympics in
Munich, 1972, and that
he was Mark Spitz shattering gold from the water.
His arms would swing straight over his head, face
down into the pool with a breath--his hands
meeting above her own head like the prow
of a destroyer--and slide into the water.
His torso would follow hard and fast, and his hips,
a hinge for two beats of a dolphin kick. He might
have driven his mind to hold back the tide,
but Elisa,leading, would have clasped her afternoon palms
to the sailor's temples and with her thumbnails
pulled back his eyelids. And half of me would be
there, blinded by the Adriatic sun,
to meet the other half.
The Dusk in Edvard Munch's room
inhales the cracked lines of the old man's face.
In his mind, uncertainty had become a color,
but it's squeezed yellow with light
in the back room, against the back wall
where shadows should be.
The man stands to the left, brushed a little
bow-legged between his grandfather clock and another
unframed woman hung by the bed. He stands
with eye-holes shut, with mouth-hole shut as if
not to scream, but to really feel the houses burn,
to hear the children cough, there are only
one or two others at a time here to see.
Like lost salmon, the man's hands
are smeared beside their trouser pockets.
The smeared face of the clock is a lost moon,
and he remembers the times, one at a time.
Once it was tuberculosis,
taking a young girl away, a sister.
Now it's my watch telling me I have a lunch date
in an hour.
A student friend, maybe older.
Unified Theory
Breathing earth,
she sits in the clouds.
Bright-shouldered, drinking fire
and rubbing her hands together
over water. Is this the woman
who has become so mindful of matter
that she can etch her own heart
into the elements?
No, she is an artist
and she is as cold as the universe
as it was before time.
Before space and the splitting
of the forces of gravity,
electromagnetism,
the strong and the weak
nuclear forces. So far back and so fine
it seems she has to clothe the contours of her mind
in satin just to touch
that dot beyond a dot, and still
she cannot feel it.
If she were to leave
this universe on the table, like a sliver
of onion skin, it would move
before she could even sense it.
All she could say
is that here everything has tended
to its lowest energy.
Call it absolute
zero, when even quarks can be quiet.
Where a universe finally becomes
that singular, neurotic
particle unto itself.
Breathing gravity,
it sits in the spectrum.
Dark-elbowed, drinking strength
and rubbing its hands together
over weakness.
But only for a moment
beyond a moment.
And then, yes,
he is an artist, and he is as hot
as a universe after time.
We should be careful
quote,
when we recount to you on particles
of silver where we sucked
the flavor of magenta
from a man in yellow whiskers,
though fully awake and pasting together
on pale retinas the curved, muscular edges
of old photographs, of
you, a woman, and where
others are uncareful, unquote,
we should be.
Death of the lieutenant
What could you say, Sir,
when I blamed the recklessness of our turn
on the speed of the howling
or bright lights of the oncoming jeep?
On all my thoughts for not seeing.
You could never suspect
my chance, sometimes sure desire
to have yer face
splayed like a broken hand on my lap,mi teniente.
And I would never write all my shocking treasons
on the windshield
with your blood.
What could you say?
Who would you report to?
The fact is,
I could tell anybody
anything.
And if what they didn't know
was true, that we were silent
and undetectable reagents,
were we to blame?
That we changed everything they wanted to know.
That we existed also to tag their movemnets
--check their pulse, so to speak.
That we could have had them all forgotten
when it served a purpose.
One day we were humming along hot microwaves.
Another had us melting coca into gold.
That we had never known our real names.
And were we to blame if all we wanted was
what is true?
If we just breathed.
At times we felt like no more
than spies of the human race, at times
just waiting for the next big thing.
And at times no one really needed to know us,
having been tossed so neatly into this life,
still trying to burn.
Me on the flatbed
The truth is that it was pouring rain,
the music was good, and I wasn't really sure
how to hang on.
(That's me on the flatbed of Johnnah's pickup
on our way home from the beach.)
Of course we had so much fun
at Playa Corozal, not caring
about the unfamiliar taste of purple sea salt
or the bottom we couldn't see.
And if you knew me, you'd almost think
sitting there, bracing myself
between the duffles and tied-down coolers
that I'd just let go, screaming something
about how I was such a pig
to be starving for more watermelon.
But seeing me now for the first time,
as if only the boy in this photograph,
surely you'll say that whatreally
told me to jump off
and into the yellow convertible behind us
was the fantastic wind and rain.
Double chin
Winter in New Haven, near her,
and the wind is forever
tossing you down the street.
You try to stand still.
Yes, that would be enough,
without even the thought
of turning back. But the white
beats forward forever, as if
every shadow in your life
was for this.
As if even giving up everything before
was for this.
And winter
is only momentary, only near her,
but in this moment
you have two chins.
One is for tucking into your coat
while you count the necessary steps
to her door.
The other is for the meat-hook
dragging you there,
kicking and screaming like a corpse
if it could.
The very personal joy of riding two bikes
When I pedal my bike I am like
the boy I saw just over the bridge
pulling his shorts up past his butt
to see the brilliant scrapes
from a sidewalk slip
and not a slide down the mountain.
He bends over and gives a sharp yank
to right his handlebar.
Then he hops back on his bike
to ride down the mountain,
over the stone to brook and prevail,
down the next street
to fly in collision with cars
Your good intention
In a dream there is a large bird.
And it happens in his life that he sees things
he was not meant to see. That he says things
which do little to secure her love.
Like a dream, it seems it nearly must happen.
He sees a glimpse of the planet as it would look
with her arms around his waist.
And there are oceans there, pregnant with the light
of everything he wants to see inside.
A young macaw, a scarlet with yellow shoulders
looks at him with one eye and with the other
at the rust-colored fence behind his cage.
And like a dream,
he tells her about it.
Perpetual intercourse
This long, black tail
gathered in coils like hasty loops
of dragon tulips in a room of their own
has only to be plugged
into the corner socket
to unravel
and dance its long, slow
panther waltz until now. No one
has to tie it around anything.
It does everything for them.
It dances.
Dormant
If I tell you now too quickly I love you,
please see that it's only because
I want to feel alive.
That i probably don't even know you.
That if we were in one of theThirty-Six
Views of Mount Fuji,
you could be The Wave frothing at its mouth,
and I, the readiness to die.
And when you leave too early in the morning,
when I pretend to remain dreaming,
please understand it's not because I wish
I could just dream a little longer,
but rather, that in
each of these thirty-six prints
by the great Hokusai, I know I am really
Mount Fuji itself.