Pleasure Dome. Yusef Komunyakaa

Observatory

      Three fat flies copulate

      on the lip of my coffee cup.

      Too many damn worlds

      of possibilities. Everything

      isn’t to be known

      or divided into itself

      by enigma’s big eyes,

      their heads glassy-black

      space helmets.

       Lost in the Bonewheel Factory

Looking a Mad Dog Dead in the Eyes

      Perception can force you to crawl

      on God’s great damn stone floor

      & scrape your knees to the bone,

      in love with the smooth round ass

      of death. You’ve come to admire

      that never-miss sniper on the rooftops.

      The man who dances in circles

      has fistbeaten a dog to the ground.

      All the newsreel faces turn away

      from the woman hanging naked

      by her hair in a picture window,

      as a scarecrow drags across a yellow field.

      The young man with a nail in his foot

      is your son, who believes

      he’s Christ, telling his father

      what he wants to hear,

      using a thorn for a toothpick.

Floor Plans

      Secret walls swing open when a dream loses focus & lights click on inside the head. The road here isn’t a flatbed of light, isn’t a soft ride, this bridge over our backs, & we won’t remember how we came here even if we stand naked in the Garden of Eden like fools with bright axes. Our intent philosophic as a black hand that steers the brain behind a liquid motor, pulled by every voice we’ve heard like a rumor of faded coins in our pockets. In the wild purple night we leave prints of extinct animals in white sand where footsteps echo a hoodoo drum. All the cruel rooms are identical behind different-colored doors: a black cellophane window to the outside, a woman sprawled nude on a red velvet loveseat, a copy of Premonitions of the Bread Line on a white shag rug, as the shadow of a dagger slides along the walls. Cicadas hum fire in a valley. This is where a god gets his heart cut out, someone underneath the blueprint wrestles with roots. Where a woman crawls on cobblestones & a man chops off three fingers to beg bread. In a country without moon, sun, or solitary star, lies rot in the mouth. Kit Carson caresses Magda Goebbels. Death sits in a skull pale as a dove, & Nero’s fiddle whines like a sick animal in the night. A rook dips its beak in gold powder & flies backwards toward the sea’s roar, into what the blind man translates in each voice he looks at.

Tour Guide

      It eats into the brain

      between daylight & coma

      like some small animal.

      You’re propelled onward,

      cackling like the old woman

      at the end of the night hall,

      her face smeared with rouge.

      She’s every pretty face you’ve known.

      This is where you begin

      in yourself, in the room

      alone with terror.

      This is really when

      the mannequin moves

      its head in a camera flash.

      In the chest a trembling starts

      the soul rocking off-balance—

      the last grin whittled

      from the pain in you

      where the shattered millstone

      takes shape again.

Sitting in a Rocking Chair, Going Blind

      the exact

      second

      the lights come on

      like the aurora borealis

      i’m sitting at a window of summer

      for two weeks waiting for

      a pomegranate tree

      to fall & scatter

      fruit on the ground

      on the corner

      a black buick

      special

      runs down a child

      like 40 brass cymbals

      & 40 tambourines

      the air coagulates

      in the background

      a bright bird

      falls from the sky

      its scream is black

      a dog drops dead

      pissing on a fire hydrant

      a woman’s dance burns off

      with a green flame

      anemones

      spray the air white

      in a world of dark

      i can only remember to put my hands all over you

Pushing in All the Buttons

      With armloads of lignum vitae, hands frightened over mouths, kinfolk gape at the paradox. Rods knock in the braincase as syndactyl hands plead like a Gypsy guitar. Not a daughter, but an angel whose legs Zeus tied together.

      How many times, in how many head-hung rooms I’ve taken my life with a look you can read things into? Leg irons wouldn’t let me go into woods spilt with light. Like a seaward dream, the day grayed with gulls. When was the last time I wanted to drag death home, foxy in all her masquerade?

      When the last beaten woman awakes no longer with the sun in her eyes, when no more poets are hanged effigies in the Library of Congress, when all the bagmen have fallen dead & fingers leap into pockets of love, a song will bloom under glass weather.

Confessing My Ignorance

      Perhaps the cello meant

      to be broken the moment

      you wanted music.

      Perhaps hog-back hills

      meant to obscure

      some incredible vision.

      I can’t say what tree

      drives us mad in the distance

      when we strain to see the heart at work.

      Something moves, worms

      of ghost meat under the moon—

      can we learn from what we

      see? Did those crows

      teach Van Gogh anything?

      I don’t know

      just what this is

      that