Delft Interior

I sit by the window staring out.
The light, I think…
falling on my face is perfect and gray Northern light:
I am a Vermeer tableau.
I wish that you were sitting
across the room from me.
I should be holding something of
tin glazed white earthenware
covered with petal like brushstrokes
of that unmistakable muted cobalt blue
that only the really old, expensive pieces have.

I want this so that when we go
to the art museum and see Delftware
aquariumed behind glass
and those serene Dutch interiors
labeled and arranged and
preciously leashed in on long wires
you will know why we belong there.

You would not even have to think twice,
you would just know:
"This is the cool northern light
on her pearls like your pearls
and light like that falls
on her linen and her wool skirt
like it falls on yours. 
That plate is decorated
with the Delft blue of my eyes."
You will know why these un-things
are all our own priceless
museum pieces, identical and meaningful:
the still life we lead in our own museums.

NOLA

A vampire in a city of vampires with decorative dishevelment even of the buildings around you. The black lace and white lace of balcony garters. A city that was to be seen by candlelight swimming in the mud and the rain and the river. You over there with that damned hair that could be Bacchus or some High Victorian dandy absorbing two and a half centuries of moans in the orchid roots of your damp curls. There's jazz and glitter under your fingernails when you scratch your chin.  You should have slept before dawn but it never gets quiet enough in New Orleans and you know that the dead here have more deluxe rooms because you saw them but the locks are all on the wrong side of the doors.  It's a madhouse here.

You order a bourbon because of the streetsign but you're still waiting to get back under the swamp, away from becoming coal, away from compressing yourself into diamonds in that city.  That dream exists in geologic time like you and right now it's hot with that swamp gas candlepower and she pours you that sixth one and then it just Feels Better.  The alcohol makes slop in that black river soil of your brainpan and the roots of jazz and the blues hang down deep in that bayou slime and they draw that swamp voice up.  Rising slow and cracking the plaster on the walls... because that's just how it works... moisture like the saxophone... like the singer's voice as she feels the whore blues sliding up her thighs.  Nothing is immune to the sex and ravages because it's the voice of the goddamn muck they tried to tame and the best you'll ever do is sing backup with all the golden flies and the peeling flocked wallpaper and the lillyflowers that French this place up.

And this is how I find you late at night curled in a rented bed and you are passed out and don't feel me as I bend down and put my ear to your ear and like a shell gives back the sound of the sea I can hear in your skull the sex noises of mud. We are a slatternly old bayou of legs and foliage and masks and beads and sequins and wonder and shutters and arms and rain and moss. I haven't seen you for ages... but darling, we have always lived here.

Fictions

When I am alone my fictions
start doing exactly the opposite
of what NYC cockroaches did
when I flipped the kitchen light on
for the midnight double vodka
I thought would put me to sleep.

The women who buy your drinks,
the men who buy mine don't know.
Maybe it's too precious to bring up,
or it's just convenient to leave it out.
Like Heisenberg: speed or location
but never both at the same time.

Your monologues to me at 4 am
are my non-fiction bedtime story,
but most of the time all I have
to work with is the classic noir:
chalk outline on the asphalt,
a pool of blood, and no witness.

All I know for sure is that
when we're under
the Christmas tree 
(unwrapped)
my fictions are quiet,
and in the morning you make quiche.