Windwrack

The train jumped the tracks, plowed through the town,
on the ground twenty minutes that felt like two hours.
The sky with its eyes shut down, the man in the moon
shielding his face. Where there are no stars the wind,
God’s own locomotive, slams to smithereens what was
above the bald earth, the roots of bark-stripped trees.

(29 April 2014)

copyright 2014 by Floyce Alexander

Reckoning

Leveling dark. Absence of owls. 
No sun igniting the sky while rain falls.
If you look long and listen hard
you may find some way to return
to what we remember we were
in that light always trailing us.
Your tracks have left your feet behind.
Wild webs. Door hanging by one hinge.

(28 April 2014)

copyright 2014 by Floyce Alexander

Reckoning (first draft)

Leveling dark. Absence of owls. 
No sun exploding the sky into rain.
I have looked long and listened hard.
In that way, I return to what I was
in that life always behind us.
My tracks have left their feet behind.
In the distance there is only the past.
Wild webs. Door hanging by one hinge.

(28 April 2014)

copyright 2014 by Floyce Alexander

Antiphon

As soon as love showed its base intention,
a relic of his manhood stood, a ghost
whose shadow rose and fell in time to catch
a swallow casting its silvery glide
opening her passionate lips to speak:
When will you love like I would have you love
my body so my heart would know the soft
touch of a man, yours, stir ash to flame. . .

(21-22-23 April 2014)

copyright 2014 by Floyce Alexander

Antiphon (first draft)

As soon as love showed its base intention,
a relic of his manhood stood, a ghost
whose shadow rose and fell in time to catch
a swallow casting its silvery glide
and opened her beautiful lips to speak:
When will you love like I would have you love
my body so my heart would know the soft
touch a man, you, so easily will steal . . .

(21-22 April 2014)

copyright 2014 by Floyce Alexander

The Street

They led me into the street, the others.
The little one gnashing her teeth,
eyes flickering under the sudden sun;
the suave guard with his collection of keys
sounding when one struck the others
like a call to prayer or to silence;
the tall, burly fighter, no one’s brother
now that he no longer climbed through the ropes,
posturing now only for sycophants;
San Francisco poeta with brave words
that could find no test equal to her charge;
and I could no more have written this then
than go to sleep when I was not walking,
find the hour of night I could call my own,
the hour of seeing my Irish lover
cavorting with her other secret men.
The street, how I loved to roam its borders
as though I were back in the fields again
listening hard, seeing through, tasting the air,
smelling the rainwater drenching my skin.

(15-16 April 2014)

copyright 2014 by Floyce Alexander

Bobby Goes South along the Coast

She tells Bobby she loves and misses him. Such pain
runs deep down in both of them. To heal, he hitches
to San Francisco, that place in the West he loves.
His bedroll and little steno books are ample company,
with the money he’s earned over the years playing clarinet,
singing blues in the same places, but mostly Hotel Congress,
sleeping in La Iglesia De La Puta, practicing his alchemy–
what Paula calls what he tries to do with words–
but the music provides him dinero, like it does
his mother, who waits at the end of the line to see him.

There are girls who look across the room and he looks back.
There are women who see him hitching beside the road
into the white city; they stop their Lincoln Continental
and wait until he’s nearly there, then go on without him.
In the city he sees Paula’s sister. She’s free from meth,
got a new man whose sax she loves. She’s herself again.
They talk about Portland and Paula, Sanchez and Co.
He asks her to call Paula and tell her the good news,
she says she has. Now he goes to see Henrietta Murphy,
his mother, singing blues for a living on the edge
of La Jolla, a brittle edge. He sees Donna, still dancing
mostly naked at The Cave, Mission Beach, where they met.
He drives Henrietta’s car to take Donna home,
Imperial Beach. She rides him sinuously. Then he sleeps
beside her Afro, her dark body, her agile dancer’s legs
celebrating his return, however brief. And it is brief,
though like the last time he was here Henrietta makes dinner
for him and Donna, and then like before they cross the street
and lie on the sand in the shadows beyond the moon
bright as a sun with the tide coming in to spill
over their sandy bodies locked together. They come.
She takes him home for one last sleep before he leaves.

He misses loving her on the the East Coast.
In the dream, they've never met. Will he wake in time?
He sent off to Thomas Wolfe’s birthplace for a map.
Asheville looks almost part of the Smoky Mountains.
She lives near the Atlantic, though her town gets hot as hell.
In Seattle rain makes words and pictures on his window glass. 

(12-13-14 April 2014)

copyright 2014 by Floyce Alexander