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Four Poems
by James Pate


The Devil's Knife in Naples

It didn't faze me that the rain dropped
from the ceiling as a black dot to steady its hand of
purple fixation
down through the walls and garden
forming yesterday's hiss from sighs of thoughtful
discretion
like lovers conceived along the hem of a soft fungus

"you go through this narrow street first"               said the
waiter
it was known around town as the afternoon dress on the
evening bed
as efficient with shadow as this style of wetness
prone
blaming the wrong nap for its holy reasons
and gliding the slender encrustations down
throat by throat by throat
independent of the guidebooks in this hotel
where the staff leaves bulbs of bread for the
beautiful
deranged birds where candles behold the open
background of the saints and all the blood has quieted

below this sky of watchful lust and orange banners

the boats in swaddled cloaks sailed the oldmen
up to their nipples

and thrown into that tally with the motorcycle meat
with the vertigo of a beastly curiosity crouched
on the four thoughts of
inquiry slighted by Nature's black sun

otherwise we ate olives in the piazza where Dante
stands
as tenors do in their growls of simile
and nothing was being done which was not already
undone
in this detritus of owls in their imaginary nightlong
distance



The Devil's Knife in Naples Part Two

It was first and then the later ones and then we
balked.
In a certain century where the roaches bloom into
thorns.
I am trying to think a certain thought the size of
turtles fucking.
By the petal under a door of chess turned the sun into
this fairytale.
The sea dog at humor with the stilted. Your hands the
white slurs
the moon must wean from, your attic a pride of
slanderous gremlins.

I have heard the most mirthless tune sour in the
spring of its hell.
I like words spelled wrong and fondly, clusters of
noon at a confessional lunch.

Saying where to the faces of Naples since the verbs
heal black.
Saying there along the knees from Naples where the
gulf breathes beseeching.
Saying here in the encounter by Naples where the
paragraph seldom latches.
Staying gaunt under the graffiti where the pictures
bruise in their roses of deafness.
Staying near entrances, promising operas of daggers
for the waists of shriven milk.
Staying in this Eden of fang where evening unfurls its
negative calorie.
Swaying in the evidence of failure which the book's
phantom strokes by choice.
Seeing you attract veins of light with a vocabulary of
blindfolds and contradiction.
Seeing you throw off your dress where the burn of
blank pages lie.
Seeing this food sweep up architecture too far for
that steeple to last.
Saying hi to the hallway, the shower, the spaces of
ignorant dream.
Steeping a mile and an hour from what the volcano
grumbles everywhere heaving.
Saying what the blisters of nowhere prove to the
children of the moon.
Staying baked by heretical alliance between the daily
scratch.

"This is no time
for an animal like this" was the rumor before the TV
flew into its humid gray leaves.
And the sky at night was black infused by red and
planes like splinters of sleep.

Ballroom Dancing

A.
I couldn't make up my mind about the local music,
the melody of acid B flats which looked like elevators
in need.
I was sitting down thinking about Stacey when the
ballroom
started to light, the green carpet striking up its
emerald torches and parrot talk,
and the woman in blue argued about last summer
and the thousand dim galleries
where she had gotten tipsy. Sage was cut
into a thousand Aztec strips, I swore. My local
dreams poured from the ears of my unwashed laundry,
emptied by delirious travel. Other dreams broke clear

like sensitive eyes on the beach. Either way, I stood
stubborn
on another effort, in corners where the sulfurous
glimpses revived -
for gravity, and each its multitudes. For gravel, a
waltz of her own
costume, a dress asked for by the hour,
like a grave of thunder in the distinct evening mist.

Which road to the wedding? Which sequence since the
worm?

The choir in robes as bright as milk in an obscene
limerick. The gardens
prepared, devotional, strewn with fingernails of
strawberry scarlet
chords of pollen foundering hexes of archaic desire.

You hear the tango handing like breasts from the
splash,
the shock of skin along another cliff to frame.

B.
Their romanticism was rhapsody and sunspots, nudist
picnics
and landmarks of trivial fanfare. Then it rained until
nothing
could surrender but the weeds which had their own
slender afternoons
to alleviate. The bride and groom didn't dare discuss
how simultaneous the colors were in this promised
sleet, this age
of ages. Stacey returned, breathing hoarsely and
attracted to sinister
April music of which I remembered foghorn notes from
another lesson.

The ballroom dances figured one night in the
silhouette choir was game.
After that I got some espresso and stroked her coat.
This was so often the line of regression from which a
new world arrives.
The heavy unshaven chins of summer grew shade.



Rigoletto

That was the opera choosing the higher pitch of detail
and the country outside was no tougher than a postcard
stained with coffee
and pigeon shit. The political life of Rome was beyond
counting,
though count I did, hoping the numbers would decode
the tails of fire
which would be the subject of today's argument.

In the apartment, outside the hotel, in the photo
albums
of gray hills and fallen ice-cream...
from the plainest realism to the homeliest carpet
the white wall ran. The temperature coarsened so many
faces on the stage.
Bare breasts panting.
Red eyes swore in divine whispers.
Beards stripped.
Hips dreamt of thighs.
The party finagled, scurrying past the lurking
midnight staircase.

That was the aria that didn't choose and the trains
that did.
That was the countryside, in a briefcase full of
napping tube socks and signatures.
Rome, and then the Vikings, and then peripheries
of an American fever -
history beginning one day at noon, shortly after
breakfast, as trees shook
loose their flocks. I'm sick of the dreams about the
starving zoo with human mouths,
and bad tidings have left their calling-card under
your door again
which meant the windows were thinking of night all
these decades now
while the rest of us pretended to drowse in the nude.

And though I love you, the bathtub with its heaves of
gin floats the skulls
of some nocturnal inevitable which is not pretty or
hideous but terribly alive
and aspiring. In this recumbent graze of weeds, the
dawn is all dark miracle
in its gloves and silken wig - as if the butterflies
were scratches where the explosions
fled fast, awakened from the flattering position.