Nathan Emory

Five Poems

I Here there is an arm, a simple limb lazily over a breast in the sunlight that falls in a white box. tracing with solid colors it tells a story. your eyes never looked so clean. your mouth moves and there is a sound bobbing on airy lines and clef, in the afternoon of the crimson day. II What you have pressed into your own life, you cannot press into mine. it is one person who lives for the joy of himself, not all for the misery of others. I sleep until two because it pleases me. you may tell a different story, eat the solid words, the hard lines, but the songs themselves contain no good or evil. III This is something I told Robert many times. in every photograph, we are walking, holding our jackets closed, all unwashed faces and riccochet smiles. twenty toes all pink and swollen up with humours and blood. Now his severed head is gone, uncommunicated as his mouth moves but no noise is made. To argue that he is alive or dead makes no difference. IV Then you lay in my bed, and cannot move, a jumble of woman and hair, crafted in soapstone and curled like a iris. this is a gift, like so many. left anonymously by some sleepy gang of jokers, those people I left in photo albums and old rehearsed tales. while you imagine you are a story too, nothing belongs in the hole that only grew when not acknowledged. V How they manage is always a mystery to me, watching as I have so many times from a bridge the quiet movement, as frogs in a pond easing into the city holding their coats Stoic beyond reason like they have no voice, backs to the sun, little arms hanging from soft bodies and a grim crevice for a face. They are impossible for me to understand. VI You tell me they need love. They need nothing but to be fed less fat and more bread, and to spend every moment thinking of what lives they have, where they have not gone, everything they have said no to, how easy it is to fall asleep to the song of a snare drum, tapping the same droll beat again and again. In love with rhythms, but never songs, they look like a trained army. VII But nothing can beat it, crying in infinite fear compressed so small under the stifling fabric and stretching arms out to you. Once in a year I see it, the holy places so starved inside each stomach, each spleen and bended heart that they rattle my cage and my telephone, that is when She leans in and with fiery pen stencils the word of pure life across my face. VIII I know that if I were to love you, you could not be the angel everyone imagines. in loving you we become something dead, some soldier left behind, a vast deleted space. While a girl lounges casually behind another small counter in a dirty shop, a novel goes unwritten, things go unproclaimed, drawn into a pinhole in the sky, and sold to merchants for pieces of paper and untruths.       My friend R. was complaining that I don't write about the war. He was doing laundry. You should be more political, he says as he picks her bra up from the carpet. I nod and listen, for surely I matter, my little voice that clatters like a lazy stack of plates. There are things, he explains carefully, that we can change if we expose them. then he pours his Tide into the porcelain. May the world be free, I shout to Catholic girls on their way from school May cheery heaven find you, may every zipper lead to something you can ride, Sing glory, glory holly-loo as your victory comes, we shall be free again. And this, O Robert, is my poem about the war, while bombs explode, heaven awaits her second string.

I was talking to M. about Rossi, a writer trying to get into Brown. some porcelain girl all oatmeal soap and champagne loved writing it out, all the things that made it wet like other girls, underground mags and tinsel boots I drifted away like an old board on the willamette PDX at daytime it's like a poloroid the light is thin Anyway, I remembered one day I had my car in the shop so I had to walk down Powell on Saturday I wasn't drinking I went into BK and it was about 2pm and nobody was there at the counter was a trainee, and this manager who who'd come over here to make BIG MONEY for AMERICAN CORPORATION and he was gonna BE SOMEBODY. because we all know money makes you someone rabid manager, he checked every push the trainee tried to pull I ordered two cheese b's so I said "I want two cheese b's" and he said to her, that is two cheese burgers the button is here the girl was clearly at her first job ever but she played cool. and so smartly, just went along covered by a polyester bill of the bland brown uniform she said, ok, and is that all you want and I said no thin reed of a girl kinda pale, I bet she played oboe in the band loved a senior boy that she'd never talked to but imagined his lips can I have two fries plz and then the paki told her what to push and where even though she knew how to do it she just let him mouth off then I gave her dirty money and she fished out four pennies and here's the thing she puts the pennies in my hand and looks up, and her eyes cleared the brim and I felt the soft fingertips in my palm and little feathers falling quietly in my ribs because her eyes made me think of Brian's words about unreal love the love that is not even spoken, or physical, but simply letters confessions as one would make to a god or goddess, so real and seamless now i'm a bitter shit, but right then she made me think what if I could start again with every woman that I'd known no lies or mischief just a box seat in the theater of my soul and M. kept prattling about this girl Rossi, that she wants to lay so much dirty cunt just perched on shelves, and my filthy prick can't cure it all.

Josephine was made of paper and kept her clit in a little locket left it sitting there in moonlight next to unpaid bills and lipstick I stole it & wore it like a priest I went to Walgreens at 4 AM green light and 2% milk, I think of zippers up and buttonholes do I make her burn or do I just make her quiver Josephine won't answer her phone eats white rice stuck to fork tines that snatch rips it from me & I can't get it back I don't have a chance

I will roll my sleeves up and become an ordinary man. Sleep at night in a house I own and fuck my wife with gusto. Reading old novels written by Germans unfamiliar and then on Sundays I'm by myself to walk alone without my children. Piled like discarded pistons are the bodies of other men, fleshy and browned. I turn up my collar. Tweeze the skin of seeds from between my teeth and sleep longways in a cot. This is a mighty American speaking. Tough like a cobblestone, I am armed and turn my sinister face to the wall. I will not write twisted words, nor ask others to understand. Better to walk alone, yes, this is a plan we've made, up into tinted skies and laundromats, this is a wonderful spaghetti dinner, I've made a lemonade stand for my sidewalk. I can sell you the happiest lines, make you hear the music of our marching. Now go forward, with average enthusiasm, lean into it, you men of grace! They may make martyrs of us yet, in our sturdy walls and parallel lots. May god's eye find you in your wicked bed, at the last avenue of disease and surgery, and wipe her pity across your stern mouth. That's your first taste of love.