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The Old City

excerpt

....One thing that's bowlegged and can't put its feet together is the rainbow.
DH Lawrence

1)

They were twirling frills, learning their bicycles,
And had discovered that opening up little buds
Clinically,
With their sticky fingers,
Gave them pleasure.
They only played free in their gardens,
And looked at the unaccountable outside the bars of their whiteness
Harshly.
It was their truest medium,
And brought out the wit in them
For years their muses had rolled their eyes,
Exasperated at having to serve such spoiled little prodigies...
But taking the white idle hands, and putting them to the paper,
And saying 'Write.'

When I next saw them
they were slow dancing under soft lights
with the men who had beaten the shit out of them the night before.

It gave me a warm feeling.
It made me want to divvy up some macrobiotic rice.
As if I were Mother Earth,
and had shifted my genitals to cover the face of Atlas.


2)

Never know a great love when per roll of toilet paper
...and there's nothing on your childhood street
you've grown tired of
Nothing that can't make
Cielo Drive a desirable piece of real estate,
Jonestown a spot for family picnics.

a vacuum
calling itself a sentimentalist
screaming
to the
dust, kitty litter
and nail parings it sucks up:
'love me; love me!
For I have delivered thee
from the rug that wants to munch thee!'

A Narcissism that throws itself back up at itself
like a snake striking up through water

'It was my niece Moonshadow's kindergarten school play. They were to focus
on human anatomy. Right away, shrewdly, I saw my chance to use the young to make
a feminist political statement. I suggested she go as a vulva, and wrapped her in
yards of pink satin, at the center of which I fashioned a gathered clitoris from
tulle.'

'A candlelight vigil to commemorate the death of the ego? Never....but
I will take time out to protest the selfish depletion of the open spaces I
devoured.'

One hand clapping
is something for somebody to run into,

a wayward bird or an assault of mosquitos on the windshield,

the sound of the triumph of deafness.


3) The Old City

I jumped, when I saw it.
It had been sitting there all those years,

mesmerizingly beautiful with scales.

But it had been asleep for a long time,
and it hissed at me.

I walked into the restroom
and looked for the old graffiti.
It had been painted over.
But underneath, like veins

the blue letters I had scrawled
when I was less than a quarter century
were
still there, quietly
dispatching blood through a network of channels.

And returning to your city
was the same,
as if I had been dead
for some time
roused by the undertaker
and told, 'Our lease
on this place is up.
You'll have

to be moving on.'

The birds were cawing in the trees that day.
I couldn't believe they were going on.

I saw people passing, in the streets,
in broad daylight,
and the tops of red hotrods like blood.

I couldn't believe they were going on.
I couldn't believe I couldn't feel it anymore,

that the smell had gone away.

----

Descendants keep through every season
but we begin to turn. .

In the incarnation where you
Finally have, again
access to my age



I may be a gator or a mouse.
Or I may have already been born
50 years earlier
And be a hag.

whatever you are now
A
new tree
ready to live for another 2 centuries,
readying yourself as a shoot,
all your human intelligence
packed folded away for you in
a secret sac somewhere.
And then a girl
or some absent little animal
comes traipsing through the forest
and pops it

and your gooey humanity
or what was left of it,
spurts into the world.

------

I did not dare go

Out into the garden, at night
There was a male tree


Waiting for me to step off my daddy's porch. In nine months, he said,
You will turn a noxious green.
The land is shrunken and silent and shameful
Then, like a sewer
The smell of Girl.


Persephone & Compson's heir:

'I send you spring, but I never get to see her.'


The land smelled of honeysuckle.
And the rivers.


-------

Paranoia insists everything concur in the short run
while the faithful wait out the miles,
knowing everything of how scrutiny
devours love; and moves in on it,
at close range, like a camera,
scrambling textures into cells
an appalling mass, reducing a beloved face to
the million prism rainbow refractors of flies.


----------

If you notice a lack of passion
It's because time has put it there-`
But if from that stone
I rub to bring something flicking upwards in spray,

Flicking upwards,
Then settling downwards again,


Fizzing

As some child from the bow points at it in delight
And a doting governess laughs indulgently,
Pats him on the head,

And goes from drink and cigarette
To a stone pilgrimage in Europe,



Where there are people who
Still love you, you know
Like Lenin or a child-saint that never rots in its grave:

A flash from the deck, and we are face to face, riding each other.

I can't see you anymore, dear,

though somehow, I know
through my blindness,

that there is real sorrow there...
and often I'll put out a finger to catch

what streams from your eye...
quizzically, sadly, puzzled-

I hear you trying to describe color to me, but I can't remember it...
and though I understand, technically,
how I must have loved you,

Paradise is the end and goal of all ambition
and not for those on earth beholden to destiny.

The depth of the sea lives your radarless life


glowing white as phosphorous; sulking through the
secrets of evolution and man as if they were chores...
though you know they'll say of you
though he died like anyone,
he was like Christ in his Fate;
and could only kill himself with a golden razor.



Lisa Flowers

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