Yellow Morning Sky

A plain yellow morning sky
nails itself to my forehead.
You complain that I don’t watch
enough old movies to brace myself
against the crush of daily news.
Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd. Agreed,
these ossified figures should,
in real-world conditions, sate me
with humor enough to survive
the windiest political angst.

But I can’t focus long enough
on small-screen imagery plaited
in bits and bytes in shades of gray
that remind me of virus swarming
under electron microscopes.
You promised an improved life
unsheathed by digital forces,
but reduced yourself to a self
captured by Zoom and pointed
my way like a weapon of war.

I’m more alone than ever,
the crystal voices stilled at last.
A fresh wind moves the trees
with large but neutral gestures.
The sky stuck to my forehead
flaps like a sheet of paper.
Remember when we named things
after their ordinary function?
Paper, pencil, hammer, wrench?

The old movies flow through the ether
with Mary Pickford smiling
and the Gish sisters distraught.
They’ve lingered too long and hardened
like paint. I’d like to revive them
on a screen as big as the sky,
but that sickly yellow tint
renders everyone foolish and wan.

We Could Be Brave as Thomas Hardy

After days and weeks of boredom,
you devise toothpaste that blackens
the insipid grins that offend you
in the pages of Vogue and Elle.
Meanwhile I’ve coded programs
that suck people into their laptops
and fold them six ways to conform
to a surface etched with graves.

Today a rainstorm replete
with wind as brisk as politics.
Histrionic trees will flail
and shed their excess baggage,
Perhaps electric power will fail
and I’ll have to stoke the generator.
The roar of its hungry engine
will make us feel useful again.

Maybe despite the weather
we could be brave as Thomas Hardy
tramping the landscapes of Wessex,
and travel downtown to peer
into closed shops and imagine
the web we could have woven
if our seasons hadn’t rendered
every gesture superfluous.

The rain has already arrived,
dragging its hem. I step outside
and sample its contaminants.
It dragged itself across the South,
sparking a hundred tornadoes.
Eventually weather will evolve
into flesh, and its great oblongs
will lounge like Romans bathing.

These creatures will learn to talk,
and talk will lead to boredom.
Then like us they’ll flop around
with little projects to ease
that tedium. They’ll place themselves
on the larger map the universe
must redraw hour by hour
as vegetable and mineral
ambitions keep expanding.

The Whiskey Hour

The toasted color of bourbon
at teatime expresses itself
apart from my needs or desires.

You don’t understand how shy
I feel when deprived of small
but regular doses of liquor.

Without it, I couldn’t face
the sharks that devoured Hart Crane,
the gangrene that eroded Rimbaud.

You wonder why I should want
to indulge these outdated horrors
their biographers have deflated.

You argue that liver function
in the present outweighs history
and all its gruesome fantasies.

The wind today rocks the house
with a primal rage the color
of every object it molests.

I waste an hour on the phone
discussing a friend’s problems
with her daughter’s indigent spouse.

My friend and her daughter agree
that the spouse isn’t sober enough
to savor the family he wreaked

upon himself in a moment
of uncharacteristic diligence
he has spent his life repenting.

I waste another hour prowling
up and down the road in the rain,
exercising so gently the ache

feels like the onset of puberty.
Not that I’d want to reenact
that primitive moment wasted

on dark back roads in summer
with tobacco fields ripening
in tiers of rubbery leaves.

When you leave me to my sins
I settle into my leather chair.
The bourbon goes down in sips

as tender as first kisses
but free of all secret doubts.
The wind and rain reiterate

what I learned a lifetime ago,
every pore open to effects
textured to flatter the flesh.