In our flesh a gear, nosing,
rolling through the drifting conversations,
little engine spoking through our pleated lungs,
piece of grit, hangnail,
last stocking with a run—
time for a few kisses on the barstool,
but that’s all;
no hand on the small of the back can stop clocks.
Little wheel in everything,
gravity and the folding earth,
grinning,
counting off the air as we go under,
brown knob of a tree that we arrange into a face
because we are afraid to live alone,
how do I know thee?
* * *
I used to fuck the soldier boys, last night home.
They’d pull me to their laps
in front of all their stateside buddies,
but later in the car I’d feel the weight go out of them.
I knew them better than their mothers,
fingering the inch of flesh above their collars stiff with fear,
tasting the iron they soon would eat,
kissing their mouths,
turning and kissing their mouths before the dirt did.
Wheel turning in the dirt,
how do I know thee?
* * *
So click on the tube, OK?
now that the day is over,
and see once more
how we are lashed to this world,
or worse,
a rag thrown over a chair.
Blood on the soap,
the skin’s rough solstices,
hag fluss latticeing down
the procelain throat
of the toilet bowl-—
is this how I know thee-—
Is this our work,
this, then the bile boogie?
And in another room the telephone
squats like an assassin--
“Did you know?”
“No, I didn’t.”
and the eye goes blind in its orbit.
“Had I heard?”
”No, I hadn’t.”
Wheel of this one and that,
that and the other,
the one with the needle over the bathtub
praying to his own vomit,
the other like Lear,stumbling
all over himself to get out of this world,
faces in mirrors, mirrors in faces,
names washed under like seaweed.
* * *
And now,
because we are afraid to be alone,
the bar is full of muscles and bikini wax,
fallen angels of the spa,
men in long leather coats,
and women trumpeting cigars,
their firm thighs cunt-crossed,
hard prescription beauty
and the men herded in some happiness I will not trust.
How do I know thee, sprocket and grind,
thin finger angled just so?
And outside in the sky the silver nose
of an airplane reckoning its either/or—
blood that circles,
little mouth that eats and eats.
Copyright Sibbie O'Sullivan and A Dim Puce Production, 2005.
Introduction.