Patient Zero - Tomas Q. Morin

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a peacock with his feathered hair

      that stayed immaculate

      even on the nights he lost to our hero

      Wahoo McDaniel who never played the heel,

      he who hailed from the lost tribes

      of Oklahoma, who made us want to be chiefs

      so much we wore pigeon feathers

      and circled each other inside a green square

      of water hose until someone finally rang the bell

      that was never there and we sprang

      toward each other like animals in love or at war.

      SAUDADES

      When that word, one part swine,

      one part evasion, first wobbled into my life

      I was eating pastrami and hiding in my office

      from students and I know Andrade was in the air,

      as was the samba, and how it’s almost impossible

      to translate either one, nor should you

      unless you’ve been a disciple of the rough grief

      that lovingly wraps you in its wings, which is warmer

      than one would expect, so much so that it’s easy

      to forget for a moment something trivial like pigs

      aren’t supposed to fly or that if you say saudades

      with enough pain and heart the pigs of your past will come

      trotting out of the dark, doing their little sideways dance

      around you, shaking their hips to the drum

      in your chest until you forget what a frown is

      or why we need them and oh they will remind you

      how delicious Carnival is, and how glorious

      it is to make the past present, and how

      easily one can sleep dressed in feathers.

      NUDIST COLONY

      Wind-whipped, ear-clapped

      by the rocky thunder of the coast,

      they cross the wet grass

      in burnished loafers, sandals

      twined on the grounds

      to drink and merrymaking.

      Inland, they face the empty

      hour between lunch

      and dinner in a frail

      building with a barking

      door and incandescent

      lighting that wraps the matte

      surface of their trunks

      in an amber glow. Sheets

      of paper shuffle, chalk

      boxes are laid out,

      oils are stirred, sharpened

      pencils line up in formation,

      hips swivel and settle

      on wooden stools

      legged in metal. She

      enters and her shoes click

      across the white tile

      as she assumes the center

      of the room in a pencil skirt

      and matching jacket, taupe

      blouse and run stocking.

      Her husband sets a flock

      of gooseflesh up his neck

      and starts to chalk her legs

      from memory: his first

      black dash and swipe

      might be an eel

      beached on blanched rock

      but for the second

      slash against the page

      that frames the long thigh

      and the knot of the knee.

      She shifts her weight

      from one foot to the next,

      scarlet-heeled, toe tips

      white with pressure.

      Soft rock in hand,

      he drags it slow

      on a fresh wall of white

      and applies the pressure

      necessary to make her

      more than a pool

      of smudges and parts.

      Wet clay in the corner

      begins to harden

      and blended watercolors

      matte the predrawn

      run of the ribs,

      the swaddled shoulders

      grained in autumn

      tones like the disrobed

      grasses in drains

      that suffer cold-scald

      and wind-jag.

      The wrists busy now

      lashing and hooking

      hair to the scalp,

      skin-cap to the face,

      drifting shallow wrinkles

      at the eye-pinch,

      southerly to the ear,

      leveled around the neck

      like the soft-piled lines,

      ruddy-pale-white,

      on the brassy cheek

      of the dusk-christened cliffs.

      WEEKEND HOME

      Not like any of the solemn ones on the cape

      sitting empty week after week on those

      ice-bitten January streets one can never find

      in summer magazines and I am tempted, as with

      so many things, to say a house can grow

      a conscience when no one is around to slam its

      wooden tongues and I wonder if it’ll miss

      the romantic declarations of our long nights

      spent sobbing and roaring, promising the end

      of the end of love, and how I so wanted to see

      the face it made when we slowly pulled out

      of the driveway for the last time I never

      shared out of meekness until now; was it a Garbo

      pleading for adoration or a wrinkled Rimbaud

      for melancholy, because with much effort

      we had done what we do best and put away

      another season of anger in the books, made healthy

      our tab with another debt we could never repay.

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