By the Numbers. James Richardson

      They were right,

      those alchemists.

      Anything—

      tin-cold

      eye of salamander,

      a fly’s

      green shield and styli

      on your wrist,

      distinctly six—

      anything might—

      mutterings in the wet,

      two-packs-a-day

      brass of sax, bright

      tears pestled,

      or your hair’s backlit

      (same as the rain’s)

      slender metals—

      anything might flash out…

      *

      Surely one sip,

      mused Midas,

      gin and silver,

      surely her fine engine tuned

      to a dial tone,

      surely her famous sway,

      gone Gold, gone Double Platinum,

      Rare Earth, gone Transuranic…

      *

      Anything slow,

      slash-black and copper

      monarch settling,

      the shy key’s glint and turn,

      sunny-cloudy

      brass-and-tarnish fruit

      paused at your lips, reflecting.

      Any velocity,

      water under the bridge

      my leap

      like dropped change rings on,

      or seen from a train

      chicory’s blue

      extrusion to a wire of blur,

      the train itself

      (of thought)

      on its track and track and track,

      your soft, incredible metals.

      *

      …surely these vast reserves

      (Midas, that treasurer, surmised)

      I must address

      with a safecracker’s

      listening touch.

      I’ll be the anti-thief

      slipping certificates of silver,

      the slim faux-platinum

      yen of credit,

      palms flat,

      over and over into her skintight pockets.

      *

      Eyes, blank or deep,

      a lake

      gone bright dark bright

      (on thin ice giving way—

      one: roll up the window

      two: when the car fills…)

      the fatal-in-seconds

      keen cold of a mirror,

      the blank bright blank

      that any word might,

      any word might not.

      *

      No one my touch

      (that treasurer says)

      can bear and tell

      (apparently did not touch himself).

      *

      Wine so cold it’s nails,

      rings in the glass, poured,

      your ring and its click

      two-three, and click,

      the bar awash

      in digital and silver

      whispers of the disc,

      yes-no, yes

      yes,

      and This

      Just In:

      incredible metals

      the shifting of your silks

      imagines, unimagines,

      the thought-blue

      alloy of your lids,

      the pistol

      chill of your lips

      my lips might freeze to.

Head-On

      Flashing vehicles, unurgent lounging

      tell you what it’s too late for.

      Don’t rubberneck.

      Don’t look down the front of death’s dress.

      Don’t say that white oblong on a gurney

      looks like a bobsled, looks like room service.

      Don’t say it looks like a man,

      all bright days jarred from his brain

      like droplets from a branch.

Iron Age

      Lest he could not make out my name tag,

      I signed that I was a god, and would eat.

      He brought me, as was meet, utensils,

      but served, Lycaon, pans of scorn: sauté

      of which of the human muscles I won’t say.

      No problem. Nothing I had not imagined

      as vividly as its happening. Whereas a man

      concocts strange sauces for his cruelty

      that he may forget what meat he feasts on:

      thinner and thinner his wife, his pale subjects,

      his guests, ghost-thin, and at last,

      in anesthetic dark, painlessly he tooths

      the sweet flesh from the bones of his own hand.

      All this I knew, without what you call horror,

      but since he meant to horrify, I chose anger,

      and thereafter, it is true, he was a wolf.

      All one to me were his turns and swervings,

      confession, lies, indifference, remorse.

      Say that I showed him heavily how I saw him

      from above: no wanderer but a map, unmoving.

      Though a man thinks he can hide in changes.

Classic Bar Scenes

I. Apollo at Happy Hour

      Shoulders and faint sheen

      of lotion, torsion,

      loose