After Lydia Davis
Recording (after Lydia Davis)
Do you remember recording? That Sunday, it was so fucking hot, but we recorded anyway, tapping the microphone, check, check. So I bought ice cream like you wanted. Hauled ice cream up the hot third floor and dug two spoons in it. We ate from the same cup, and the sun—we wanted it in the room, through Sunday parted windows, we wanted to hold our white hands up to it. We recorded whatever—rubbing sweat on the microphones, saying months later that it wasn’t so bad. We were off that day. It was difficult music. And your hands on the guitar was like something I’ve always tried to re-create but can’t. I was singing and you picked. You squinted a little because I can’t sing. My voice breaks. Even during sex with someone else, I still hear the way I sang, how you hated it, how we cut a home-made record and shut the windows so the sound of sirens wouldn’t botch it. We made that record because it was April. Or May. Because we’d been living there for a year and all the equipment had been set up, cables connected; and we checked everything, adjusted the levels. You missed notes because you were tired, stumbling in like that, at four in the morning. I was tired too. Because sleep didn’t save me from waiting up. Sleep still doesn’t save me from the music of your feet coming up the steps at four in the morning. I memorized the number of steps and what your voice sounds like when you think I’m sleeping. It’s so sad that it was so hot in that apartment, that the air conditioner was too loud, so we shut it off. I sang badly and you stumbled on the cables. The cat ruined everything with her infernal meowing. So you didn’t send me a copy of it. I guess I can understand that. I think you’re right, but mostly wrong to not send it, and honestly I don’t even think it was a Sunday—it could have been February. There might have been snow.
The Devil (after Lydia Davis)
Mornings, with my red horns, I drive to the ocean.
Just to look, before work. To lick its eye.
Sign over the seaside chapel, bright flares of birds, the dogs gnawing their legs like violas, none to me. I touch what hurts of my face.
Tips of boats poke up, toddling, honking to and fro for no reason I can see. To honk all day, like flies on the meat, and be done.
Sand is chill now and wind fills my linen shirt like fat. Driving back about the hills and shadows and then hills appear again, like a calendar. I’m thinking nothing comes from these hills but shadows flattening the hills. Like enemies, if they are quiet. If they are black pieces against this sky, I define them.
I should have worn a sweater or thought ahead. Begged my wife to come the last time I came here. To tear off her hair, clump by clump, like a long blond shore. I force my whole face down there and what a man I am from a distance. Like little silver wires. Besides,
To populate these hills, these seas, piece by piece or turn around like I am doing now and just run.
Jesses (after Edna)
Dog wedged in my craw, slopped on my elbow, ass-up, underlit, but enough to read like a jackal. Let’s see, here are my hinds, a black shawl across my back, yanked it with my big sticky toes. Way down there. To sigh, string you up like a buzzy horsefly, count tinkles in the tinfoil. I wheeled out the electric heater for us. And hot tea, buddy. Be dragooning soon, rolling droll to the moon for ice cream cake. No, the ground floor. To binge my pinchy lips on your hair. My body swarthy topcloth lashed at the top, intonating to the neighbors. Here is Blazer: that words return where they never were. Thatch of blue, green, silver thistles, wish I could slur this. Or move with all my clothes on against the door, sort of waltz in white off balance, thigh of mine rising seven time two-ra-loo like dad dropping the soft gizzard in broth. That’s paragraphos. We volley hawks by the jesses, send them, scintillating green hills, and clear out. You laugh at my trousers, kiss my mick chin, that I am dutiful, too humanly faced. Touching tinges, the tine in your eye, look at you, fondling little hinges of a grasshopper, the stuff you love right here, how do you do that? My thing being sound you jiggle, lift out silibant, calling from me distant slipshod like I don’t know, a sparrow someplace. I’m afraid to pay rent, fix my headlights, partake, I think you know how flimsy plaited flailing I intimate the fields. When I was little, whipping heaps of leaves into shape, covered the a’s, half of the b’s in the dictionary, played baseball with a wiffle while Dad cleaned fish tossing the awful silver heads anywhere I pleased.
Phoebe is a Dog (after Edna)
The lovely learning evening we jumped some stones and followed Phoebe's titillating ass. You were phoned out. You were singing hymns and I think great, my body is a bordello, an air craft carrier. Your dog is cutting us off with trees, twelve am, one. We are leashed things, we are Bergman's pigeons, for once there are words and we have to do with them, what, an abscess, a wolf? I catch you caulking beside the fountain and you admit this silence is food, is wishing. Two people are a convention, they walk the dog. It's stayed sitting, it's licked your thighs, an animal hurting herself to be near you. As in animal. No way can I find the fuse en route, the orange ladderings up blue eaves. As in rafters. I know, I've known your life is a dog. Your face so early so close to my face I don't know how to look to you yet. We are thumbed figs, it is a or b, I'm bound to bore my head in your chest. That I slip in the building, the housing hushing, that I take tender fish from your mouth. Now pounding the fingertips into the box. Now some boat or distance to shore, in the gauze on your hands on my shoulders the tow, the paper you put a prayer on a pigeon. I am your holiday, built like a bird, a carafe of brandy angling light. The vowels are like lightness, the pining is light, the dotty seeds, plumed leaf tumors are light.
Do you remember recording? That Sunday, it was so fucking hot, but we recorded anyway, tapping the microphone, check, check. So I bought ice cream like you wanted. Hauled ice cream up the hot third floor and dug two spoons in it. We ate from the same cup, and the sun—we wanted it in the room, through Sunday parted windows, we wanted to hold our white hands up to it. We recorded whatever—rubbing sweat on the microphones, saying months later that it wasn’t so bad. We were off that day. It was difficult music. And your hands on the guitar was like something I’ve always tried to re-create but can’t. I was singing and you picked. You squinted a little because I can’t sing. My voice breaks. Even during sex with someone else, I still hear the way I sang, how you hated it, how we cut a home-made record and shut the windows so the sound of sirens wouldn’t botch it. We made that record because it was April. Or May. Because we’d been living there for a year and all the equipment had been set up, cables connected; and we checked everything, adjusted the levels. You missed notes because you were tired, stumbling in like that, at four in the morning. I was tired too. Because sleep didn’t save me from waiting up. Sleep still doesn’t save me from the music of your feet coming up the steps at four in the morning. I memorized the number of steps and what your voice sounds like when you think I’m sleeping. It’s so sad that it was so hot in that apartment, that the air conditioner was too loud, so we shut it off. I sang badly and you stumbled on the cables. The cat ruined everything with her infernal meowing. So you didn’t send me a copy of it. I guess I can understand that. I think you’re right, but mostly wrong to not send it, and honestly I don’t even think it was a Sunday—it could have been February. There might have been snow.
The Devil (after Lydia Davis)
Mornings, with my red horns, I drive to the ocean.
Just to look, before work. To lick its eye.
Sign over the seaside chapel, bright flares of birds, the dogs gnawing their legs like violas, none to me. I touch what hurts of my face.
Tips of boats poke up, toddling, honking to and fro for no reason I can see. To honk all day, like flies on the meat, and be done.
Sand is chill now and wind fills my linen shirt like fat. Driving back about the hills and shadows and then hills appear again, like a calendar. I’m thinking nothing comes from these hills but shadows flattening the hills. Like enemies, if they are quiet. If they are black pieces against this sky, I define them.
I should have worn a sweater or thought ahead. Begged my wife to come the last time I came here. To tear off her hair, clump by clump, like a long blond shore. I force my whole face down there and what a man I am from a distance. Like little silver wires. Besides,
To populate these hills, these seas, piece by piece or turn around like I am doing now and just run.
Jesses (after Edna)
Dog wedged in my craw, slopped on my elbow, ass-up, underlit, but enough to read like a jackal. Let’s see, here are my hinds, a black shawl across my back, yanked it with my big sticky toes. Way down there. To sigh, string you up like a buzzy horsefly, count tinkles in the tinfoil. I wheeled out the electric heater for us. And hot tea, buddy. Be dragooning soon, rolling droll to the moon for ice cream cake. No, the ground floor. To binge my pinchy lips on your hair. My body swarthy topcloth lashed at the top, intonating to the neighbors. Here is Blazer: that words return where they never were. Thatch of blue, green, silver thistles, wish I could slur this. Or move with all my clothes on against the door, sort of waltz in white off balance, thigh of mine rising seven time two-ra-loo like dad dropping the soft gizzard in broth. That’s paragraphos. We volley hawks by the jesses, send them, scintillating green hills, and clear out. You laugh at my trousers, kiss my mick chin, that I am dutiful, too humanly faced. Touching tinges, the tine in your eye, look at you, fondling little hinges of a grasshopper, the stuff you love right here, how do you do that? My thing being sound you jiggle, lift out silibant, calling from me distant slipshod like I don’t know, a sparrow someplace. I’m afraid to pay rent, fix my headlights, partake, I think you know how flimsy plaited flailing I intimate the fields. When I was little, whipping heaps of leaves into shape, covered the a’s, half of the b’s in the dictionary, played baseball with a wiffle while Dad cleaned fish tossing the awful silver heads anywhere I pleased.
Phoebe is a Dog (after Edna)
The lovely learning evening we jumped some stones and followed Phoebe's titillating ass. You were phoned out. You were singing hymns and I think great, my body is a bordello, an air craft carrier. Your dog is cutting us off with trees, twelve am, one. We are leashed things, we are Bergman's pigeons, for once there are words and we have to do with them, what, an abscess, a wolf? I catch you caulking beside the fountain and you admit this silence is food, is wishing. Two people are a convention, they walk the dog. It's stayed sitting, it's licked your thighs, an animal hurting herself to be near you. As in animal. No way can I find the fuse en route, the orange ladderings up blue eaves. As in rafters. I know, I've known your life is a dog. Your face so early so close to my face I don't know how to look to you yet. We are thumbed figs, it is a or b, I'm bound to bore my head in your chest. That I slip in the building, the housing hushing, that I take tender fish from your mouth. Now pounding the fingertips into the box. Now some boat or distance to shore, in the gauze on your hands on my shoulders the tow, the paper you put a prayer on a pigeon. I am your holiday, built like a bird, a carafe of brandy angling light. The vowels are like lightness, the pining is light, the dotty seeds, plumed leaf tumors are light.
posted by this is serious sumptuous tea at 9:32 AM
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