Two Poems

Gap Year

after Frank O’Hara

Blaze drops me at the side of the road where a trail cuts through volcanic rock to the nude beach, but not before he pockets my Mountain Goats CD as a memento, a thing he does with everyone, I find out later. I stub my toe on the way down to the water because I’m carrying a heavy edition of Gravity’s Rainbow, nothing else, not even a purse, and I sit in the sand with a bloody foot as the Kenosha Kid asserts, questions, addresses what I did and didn’t do. Late-morning, Lloyd from the dolphin school stops by and drives me to his bungalow, where he wants to watch The Secretary with Maggie Gyllenhaal—which IYKYK, but I didn’t know—and afterwards he shows me the swimming hole at the back of his yard and says you have to strip and dive in or the mosquitoes will eat you alive and he’s stripped and in, and I’m walking myself and my book up to the road to thumb a ride. A tourist in a rental van drops me at home, where Dennis is harvesting chard with Angel the cockatoo on his shoulder, Angel who turns and bites a divot from his ear just as Matty offers me an amaretto sour and invites me on a walk. I swab my toe with  alcohol and grab my book, and Matty leads me to the grove of guavas near a stream where a god once washed her hair, and he leaves me there in the green with Tyrone Slothrup, and when guavas drop their bombs onto my head, I feel them first and recognize them later.

***

Still Life (Fruits of the Earth, 1938)

I arrange us in the night and try to wipe away the fingerprints. Your kernels chant the violence back to me, demand their missing husk. I set them to the side, hide the plump fruit of your eyes at the bottom of a bowl. They swivel to the light. 

*

The melon shares a single spot of gold, withholds the rest. 
When I knock, it makes a hollow sound. 

*

My eyes unlatch like halves of a plum, a neat split down the middle. Your outline doubles and duets. I trace the pit to find the whole.

*

A pear cored and flipped on its back could be chayote. 

*

Once I thought a bowl of sweetness could be motionless. Then sky dragged on my cigarette and exhaled, flipped perspective on its edge. 

*

The table grows an eye each time I think of you.

*

I cut myself in two to feel the wind, to bare my longing to the elements. It ripens, breathes its spores into your mouth. 

*

Pan dulce, unattended, weeps red sugar. When chiles dry, I save them, change their names.