Four Poems

The Day of the Weigh-In
For Emile Griffith
 
When fighters meet they’re starving.
The scale sits middle stage as totem
And their entourages rally on both sides
The trainers and hype men, hangers-ons
And neglected wives
Draped in towels like priests, or flashing 
Endorsements, energy drinks, and chaliced style
Or stiletto nails and fake tits.
Lost in them, on two respective sides of the stage
The shrunken fighters, cheeks sunken and eyes
Gibbous as praying mantis, like a god kept captive
By some sick forest cult 
That provides sacrifice seasonally, 
Never satiating their needs for fluid, 
For meat, trapping them in the arboreal 
Closet like a winter coat. 
Down to their underwear
As carnival spectacle or slave auction 
They display their fallow bodies 
Their bulging cocks, their torsos sinewy
And tight as twisted rope.
 
             And then, the stare down
 
                   eye-to-eye 
                           disassociated
              sneaking peripheral glances   of muscle 
       or collar bone       how the neck
               meets the chest
                      or a brown eye
                             becomes hazel 
                      when gazed into long enough
               like a crystal ball foretelling of lovers meeting
 
 
  
Recovery
 
Wife’s out.  Home alone.
My rest limbers, a stretch
With pops and cracks.
I adjust a coffee mug on the nightstand without drinking.
I survey the home, turning a faucet
Or checking for mail crumpled by the door.  The breath
Of motors and rolling tires on roadways can sound
Like a slow and oily stream, but it’s a hollow
And constant pulse I can forget unless I listen for it,
Like my heartbeat.
I doubt I notice every plane that flies overhead, rattling
The windows.  The refrigerator downstairs clatters with ice.
 
A desire can be an infestation slithering out of electrical sockets
In great heaps slopping onto the floor,
Or warmth dripping down a throat
With a sting fresh on the lips.
A year sober and I am still cask
In an oak body, aging but not quite distilled.
I notice how quiet things can be when I’m alone
And then suddenly just as loud.
My prayers like orderlies shuffle from room to room
Taking vitals.  That’s right, try to relax as I take your blood pressure.
Good, now breathe for me.
 
  
Visitations
 
Could I be a mystic with an apartment
Instead of a desert
Locking the cell door
Within myself and meeting You?
Who (or what) visits me
When the creaking wood floors upstairs
Crack demonic?  I always feel them
The moment they enter the room.
And I struggle back to my breath
Like a teacher instructed
When a shadow haunts a hallway,
Or I whisper Hail Mary’s
Or invite Michael into the room,
Hoping for his heat on my cheek.
Why do all my meditations
Invite the darkness?
Is this why we’re to lock the door
Because it’s only You and I within me?
A vision of St. Lucia,
Candles wreathed around her forehead
Guide her through the dark.
She delivers food in the catacombs of myself
Where all the dead things still linger.
I eat and know it’s the three of us within me.
 
I open my eyes and the demons are behind the dunes
Howling for tomorrow.
 
 
Florida Prophecy
 
The swamp will crack asphalt
In one seismic moment Vesuvius
Splintering roads, gushing rotten
Earth as muddy magma, swallowing iguana
 
Bloated on hibiscus and bougainvillea
And sprout sawgrass necromantic
With a swaying zombie walk straight
For our storm proofed, shuttered homes.
 
The conch-horned wail of mermaidens
Screaming through their gills will return
And Ponce De León will sit crow’s nest
In wreckage, cursing the fountain of youth.
 
Floridians know this day will come
Like an uprising against alien invaders.  
That marshy scientist may just concoct murder
With cough or spore and the survivors will retreat
To the smoke stacked planets we’ve already wrecked.