Writing the Life Poetic

the closer you look

Between the tides, the wise table.
The shining. There have been weeks
when I thought nothing. There have
been months when I prayed.
Bottomless days.
The gloves lie fingerless
between us, I write
time out of my bones.
Sax so symptomatic. Sad and sinking.
Collage my horses and forks.
Tea drifts, shifts its shallow
flowers into a steep of temptation.
Not for you and yet for you.
As everything is both itself
and reflection
diminishing into dividends
the closer you look.

More Like Music

By Sage Cohen

 

We all need a line against which

to measure our wildness.

 

The park is cut back along the path.

I align my spine with the heavy bench,

 

send my legs out around your waist

as the sun heats a halo through your long black hair.

 

Today I can understand how the scientists misjudged

the universe’s color for turquoise when really it is beige.

 

The sun must have been streaming through the trees

such that the calculation of space divided by matter

 

became more like music. And when the rhythm lifted

like a woman’s skirt in summer wind, someone sang,

 

as you do now, of the sky being cleared by a good hard rain.

Then the universe compressed like two bodies dancing,

 

perfected with the pressure of exchange, until

the planetary percussion became a salsa.

 

Leaning into the beat, those men reached further

than who they were. Surrendered fact to abstraction.

 

They got loose in their laboratories, pressed to the truth

of the blue of turquoise until it was the only answer.

free write

The past dangles its distractions like chandeliers. I want to be known. Come to me slowly, unfolding in the way a story fills a page. Perforate me with permanence. Fill my glass with glitter and bone. Good girls make it all look good. We were cage fed. Led like lightning to the divining rods. Wanting to be more than we were, no time for triage, adrift in red flowers and lift. We lost the magic to the diagnosis. Not everything needs to be explained. Turning my face toward tonight, my only lover this sky which is all over me and nowhere. My face heated with wine and time. There is no one I'd rather be than a river of time turning away from the light.

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I make you a river

By Sage Cohen

Philip Levine claims that there was at least one day when Lorca and Crane were in the same place at the same time. His poem is the imagined moment of flint on flint, as the poets’ minds converged in a small brush fire of tongue and ash before each fell forward into his own, inevitable future.

Stranded in my own moment in time, the electric pulse of poetry charging my clinging sweater, back lined up with the hard bench of listening, I enter the eternity of Spring, where Lorca stands stooped, his pockets weighted with unspent poems.

Each hard knuckle of bud containing a great courage of reckless beauty unfurls itself into words under the spell of my recording pen.

Levine says: “horse cock and mattress stuffing,” a name for a sandwich composed of Wonder bread and bologna. We can take any experience and make it matter: put it in a barn or on a train, make it back-lit or blast it with headlights. I make you a river, so my love has somewhere to go.

I take the word “sacred” into me, and assign it to your mouth, which is echoing my inner ear as the conch holds the ocean. We are blind as a field. I am a maple tree wide as century, your kiss the sun pouring through my green. Time rings me in radiance. There is only this moment of enough. Stable as seed, your hands hold all futures. My pollens drift to dust.

The little note cards on my knee are preserved petals. Levine claims he hasn’t met a poet who rivals Dickenson. We silence our beauty inside the heavy book of Past. These cascading evasions we call time and truth, around which we organize our disappearances, return me to the cross-hatched convergence of afternoon and future. The earth’s thirst for metaphor rains you over my listening skin. I breathe you in, then cry you out again. I write you down so when the river returns, it will know to flow right through me.

 

If I've reached for your lines

If I've reached for your lines (I have) and cupped in each hollow a tender word (I will), the fullness of night that turns in blades through this darkness will give me something I can follow, some net of stars that will hold me closer than I know how to be held. And into that great sentence unfurling to paragraph into the dream that our bodies weave together, too heavy to contain what we know, too impossible to line our shelves with the sturdy preservatives of time and tomorrow, will be the moment unadorned, light as a nightgown, empty as a name.

The Irony of the Small Horn

By Sage Cohen

Paul says the Great American Music Hall
should be called The Great European Music Hall.

Its gold flourishes and imperial balcony feel more
like something you’d yearn for from across an ocean.

Nothing is named right in this world.
I don’t know what to call Paul’s body against mine.

Dancing, maybe, but that’s not enough.
It’s more like a question before it is born

gathering force among the margins
of what is already known or believed.

Paul has his hand on my stomach where my shirt rides up
and I press into the beat coming through his chest.

My hips rotate with the room. Singular surrenders to plural.
Sweat and smoke and beer and bodies pulse in the darkness.

The music is a fire. Dancing is the flame.
We all depend on each other to burn.

Paul points out the enormous man playing the tiny trumpet.
All the big guys have small horns, we agree.

This poem was supposed to be about that. About the trumpet,
because that was how Paul and I planned it.
 
But nothing ever turns out the way you think it will.
The music ends, and then it’s time to go home.

Bridal

The pond drifts its corsages
along the withered wrists
of trees fallen too soon.
The broken vow folds
its paper wings.
No boat, no confetti, today
the leaving falls away
to a float of daisies.
Each opens her hungry yellow
throat to the rain’s staccato,
trodden banks, the simple
untamed thrill of hope. 

Edward Hopper and the American Imagination

There is loneliness enough. 
Blank-faced store fronts
squared like shoulders,
ordinary as hunger. 

Arsenal of exposed breasts.
One T.V. for each
idea. No names.
Narrative is unreliable.
This dance could happen twice
once for beauty and once for money.

There are never enough roses.
A housewife stands
in an empty landscape
at the open front door
in high heels.
Yellow light falls
like hair over everything.

There is loneliness enough. 
Blank-faced store fronts
squared like shoulders,
ordinary as hunger. 

Arsenal of exposed breasts.
One T.V. for each
idea. No names.
Narrative is unreliable.
This dance could happen twice
once for beauty and once for money.

There are never enough roses.
A housewife stands
in an empty landscape
at the open front door
in high heels.
Yellow light falls
like hair over everything.

Dear Sam,

When I squint my eyes
I can make your hair a single star

points breaking around your head. 
Winter breaking inside of me.

Cape of discarded color at my feet,
I talk the dirt out of my mouth.

I am no expert.
I shine my dim light

and you're out there breaking glass.
I filled a whole notebook with you once

but still you were missing. There are pink stars
on the red formica table. The mattress

a pulse of argument. Next year
New York will be different

but tonight the moon
is a white spine

and a small candle burns
our shadows into the wall.