from WORKS & DAYS, or Industry & Idleness

Not that my abstinence has helped in any way
I try not to want
what you want
a sleep not mine
but the kind you pay for
empty of black but full of green
at a bend in the road treating the hill
as a pillow in our separate synchronized
accounts The hills
by the way have eyes filled
with images of hills whose
resident birds pontificate
on a great many topics As always
we arrive by boat but
suck at the tit
of other options as do chicks
in a dark corral or soft aspirations lobbed
into the opposing center-fielder’s glove
Haven’t we all parsed the wonderful totem:
crocodile, penis, bird, breast?
Jailbait
maybe not
but my yielding changes everything
nested indoors where
I am of course inconveniently naked
although this lends a certain amorousness to the sensorium

                    (Day 23.4)

In our clamor for action
we were necessarily on the verge of great things
not Things as They Are
but memory’s proleptic re-up
I was telling someone about going out
with the guy with big hair
(to begin at the beginning)
to a club in Dayton
after which
on the dark interstate (it wouldn’t be the first time)
we hitchhikers only feared
seeing how far we could get
with this thus
not machines of living
correctly but units
that should have been perfect
at least as morning happinesses
that might have gone on nearly all
day You will remember
keeping those feelings in play
ear to the rifled ground
bucked up on venison and pie
having heard it said
by those in neighboring trees
We’ll eat you for breakfast
without a trace of hurry

                    (Day 22.5)

Is that what you tell yourself ?
With difficulty orienting self to sun?
The demonstration of love
whose object I am
involves a discrepancy (occasion
for laughs, according to Rae) eluded in sleep
whenever sleep does not
elude us It was a great day when you
detailed the practices of your people
but do those habits endure
when what I see
conceals from me
the blip on your arterial spot? As if
there were no such thing as subclinical vernacular
in the driveway crows joke
in Golum’s rasp
sentimental no doubt
over this year’s gross
of acorns But have we not asked that question*
of the person in spandex
kept under wraps as distinctly
uncool for one who
not yet solo
will join us any minute
on the pavement? So
much of flowering is imitation

*Are you the man I am?

—

JEAN DAY lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has worked in the literary trades since the mid-1970s. The author of six books of poetry—most recently Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium (Adventures in Poetry, 2006)—her work has also appeared in many anthologies, including Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology (Drawing Center/Roof, 2007) and The Best American Poetry 2004 (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

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