Californian
The way ejaculation once meant a short prayer
hastily made—a hand has its uses.
And I loved nouns
when they were wet
especially, how a word like a lover could unclothe slowly
its modesties, prodigal
among etymologies of a secular age,
though, looked up, the word rain seemed to intend forever
to mean rain,
and his name was the last entry in a dictionary of textures winter kept, wind
cracking rain’s splendid lacquer on glass café tables, fog a white saucer
holding white paper down. February’s book
swollen open with water,
there’s a page
where sour wet denim stiffens, a passage
where what’s pornography is a more gorgeous art : slow
flange of his cock,
meanwhile
one finger
and then another—his—put in…
From his bed a metal grid in window-glass framed the city
winter had written : a sky
in pieces like that was called security and clouds
banks, there where rain flipped nickels into gutter runnels,
where his body was its own weather, system, pressure, heat and pleasure,
the way during that time winter started
to love couplets, words topping words as in coupling, fucking’s lingua
franca, and frankly
why speak without profanity? As if the lyric never licked a boot?
I couldn’t get under enough
the utter lexical heaven
of—he said, “Blow me”—how men talk to one another
about sex,
and after it, the corner flower-stand and the cock’s-comb’s pomp
of livid velvet, how I wanted
to touch it, how he said it’s going to pour, you’ll get soaked,
and then it did and I did and I went away, wet, empty-handed,
good-bye. It went like this :
what I meant
to remember I loved so I could live there,
the scent of his hair
a nest.
Floating Wolf
