From the Fishouse

“Why? It don’t matter why.”
—Billie Holiday, “Deep Song”

Don’t sing it
to me. Or I’ll stay under
here motionless

& blue gilled. I’ll drift
away from the shattered place
of irruption.

Where the summer song
crossed the winter street,
the corner

where we met. & don’t
worry about me,
I’ll stick close

to pockets of air beneath
the surface. Snatch shallow
breaths of marrow

from bends in the death-blue
shoulder blade of the ice patch.
Go on & sing it,

just not to me. Last night,
for a moment at rest
on the keys,

I saw my finger tips melt
chord prints into your frozen
back. & Gershwin’s

limo didn’t come around
to keep us honest. As you
hummed changes

thru the tune the pockets
of touch filled with water.
& scarred

by warmth, they freeze again
into glassy bullet wounds
like transparent

braille domes. My fingers
slip off rounded keys;
singularist

I lose hold of you.
Another song’s gone
off with the pale

figoric voice, alight
with the lilt of Southern
flame.

Am I playing a player-
piano? Behind the stool,
a white veil wafts

as a bowl of tangerine
peels dries on a hissing radiator.
Ancestress to burnt

lips on a scarlet trumpet,
you turn body heat into liquid
distance & back

to ice beneath my hands.
Almost round, a charcoal sketch
of a circle, we

dance underneath the ice,
impaled by bolts of broken
moonlight

& swayed in the tidal pull
of silence. Sing to me now,
rallentando down

to the sine qua non. Sing
to me again and all last night.
& don’t pause

at my fall away thru
scented pillows & cloudless
depths of the

sheets. Confess it
this once, the uncanny
chance.

The whetstone in your pocket
& the unsheathed epée
waved in your

voice. I stayed alert,
but my whole body fell
asleep. Round

about midnight & crescendo
needles hold my limbs.
Sing my forehead

back thru the eye
of the needle or a
millionth

of the mirror. Been under
five minutes now, lungs ache
& clutch, ears

drum a pressure rhythm
to the echo-depth of time.
If you’re down,

stay down. & sing me back
thru last night before I went
touch-deaf

& ear-numb, before I melted
at the edge of your lips
& slipped beneath

the sand. & don’t stop. Quiver-
still, how the hands of a mesmerist
work the future

out of fruit fallen from the Litchi
tree. When you hum
lightning

into Mera’s “Higanbana,”
a blue tree at the river bank burns
orange, blown

in a red wind. Our storm tongues
twist Madame Butterfly
onto her mythic

back & summon a thunder-reaper
with a Cutthroat on his
shoulder. A mirror

image or a sure sign, a raven
wears a ruby necklace,
Amadina fasciata.

Splayed open down to our beating
pit, two well ripened sinners
washed up

onto broken glass & black coral
of the soul’s beach. I’m hanging
on one muted line,

to touch the indigo heave
of nightfall to the windward
surf of cachexy.

If tone is homage to the pressure
of secrets, sing to the numb
spot, the nob

of bone growing behind my ear.
Sing the warm spot that moves
along my hip.