Joshua Beckman

 

 

 

*  *  *

I saw them all walk through

with a promise pinned to each sprouted smile.

The saw, the guitar, the sweet blue pulse

of every eye.  This is how

people are said to act,

but get yourself together

and I’ll start in on another.

Did you ever see the lovely daisy

of your chest held to?

That’s a crowd.

That’s a crowd of the sincere and wantful.

That’s the sound of a pink sweater

hitting the floor.

Always we will want

but next year I will take

your pretty palm into my pants

and the Flanagan Family Singers

will pipe up with their only aloofness

and we will sing along

we will take each single sound

and leave it inside you

for there you are, afraid again

falling over every memory on your way

back from the bathroom.

Ugly people cover themselves in smoke,

and I’m one of them.

Countries fill their countrysides

with sheep so that their countrysides

can be nibbled upon – everyone’s trying.

But you’re at home jumpstarting each pore that opens.

Did I ever tell you how, when I was young,

I was the biggest doer,

all fathom and future,

pretending to understand?

Well, that’s who you’re sleeping with darling,

that’s who stares into your eyes waiting again tonight.

Soon a place.

Soon a little open place.

And if you want to I want to too.

Swing over the sleeping earth

and fuck at will.

*  *  *

So to not be heard

it’s him, for here to lay

down what one has made,

to watch the lovely drop on it

displayed – to make of something

something – to be done –

your voice is now that silent noise

we look – such is the fallen

ceiling, such is the constant pool –

your lights, when you spin your wheels,

the recession of memory until it is that drop or less

and the condensation we’ve come to bless

so as to make it certain and gone

of the mind

it has been said: its inabilities

are most interesting – that a square foot

of air cannot be filled with both

a bicycle and the sound of a bird,

that to lay in the grass and

await the falling leaves is only one thing,

though there be heat, though there be light,

though, elsewhere, there be her

continuing on with her life.

*  *  *

On the contrary, he was astounded

to discover it was another, the horse

pulling the carriage through the dandelions

and watching them fold over

the weary plaintive whistling

of a lookout over birds

or as he kept saying, the moonlight

shining down, the lamplight shining down

the boat splashing through the garden

the town speaking to the stranger

another fearsome landscape

of beautiful shadows just shaking there,

the dream of which is to be seen

or again to be touched

on the cheek – s’etant

endormie doucement –

and inlaid in the cabinet,

shells, the ocean, the piper

piping above the bushes

as palms as groves as plans

as charm as safety as danger –

and will you ask again

“What’s that?”

Sur les fleur, sur les fleur,

wrapped in a blissful dream

the moonlight shines down

brightly –

but I don’t really know that

I just read it in a book.