Four Poems

Julianne Buchsbaum

[airplanes haunting]

an eternity of New Wave
Fridays, of the one perfect

airplane haunting the tinsel
town machinery undone

in a European junkyard—one
breath, say the Patriarchs,

their bodily vigor traumatizing—
one more, as evening & war

are inlaid with undiscovered
stars, a secret world like a

depression of clouds blown
down from above, your hair

in a European junkyard—one
hair, say the Patriarchs,

left long, slavishly following
le cinema du papa, facing

an eternity of New Wave
Fridays, of the one perfectly

rendered b&w angel in the
penetralia of Pineview Drive-In

[instead of being said]

you’ll see in
your tools an inverse you:

half fake-empire, half empirical
fact: a house of ambiguity lit

with cheap electric lights

instead of being said
in a simple email window

an emotion is turning
nouvelle vague in Antonio’s

stricken face—& in
the civic arena we

so enjoyed the opulence
of your gender

so self-

possessed in French
furs and leather’s

cold logic tied to
a simulacrum of

good taste and a circa

1950s banal
architect of a softly

rotting error known as auteur
theory thrown down

in a crepuscular ditch
(heroic on the outskirts

of Hitchcock)—however,

many days supply
Sodom unto themselves

& new prophets of never
enough

[do not disdain the face]

do not disdain the face of the blank page,
balk not, nor be balkanized—

on saying leave lay down a premier day in November

as addicts hurry through their matins, antsy
with quills, etudes, prescribed lays

on saying lave don’t at the outset
give us reason for leaving this couch

where love leers amiably from louvered blinds,
a lever of zephyrs, shades of a duke—

in a maze, encourage your guide, ill
but resplendently rent,

devour and lay down moans
prodigious from the lowered font

of autistic dreams

before whom the president is sterile, derailed,
merely an aide to dirigibles—

Journal of Evenings with Antoine

1.

Sky, you are all thatch, tarry, and strangeness today.
A motel, a tinted money-box. Antoine’s length fails
to stir me, yet he makes good his promises and finds
several charlatans pretending to knowledge of crimes.
The phraseology of sages throws dust on my stereo.
From modern dumps, damp modems, come the valentines
of my hirelings. Bats socketed in their moist stoup.

2.

As if this night could enter my Carnegie heart
or answer these petitions with stars, Antoine slants
in & ignites a change in ions. He does to sleep what
wind does to the tarn. Antoine is anyone who inclines
himself to instrument panels of broken machines.

3.

In between trips to rabbit island, chaos becomes this
low-speed honeybee. In the space of a week I’m
reduced to tokens, I skirt around the topic of modesty
and neglect my older brother. In the Offices of
Anesthesia, I wake up to a mouthful of rotten teeth
as Antoine softly repairs the inside of a hairnet.

4.

Tonight I’m willing to admit a need for vices like
this reason for crossing Nevada without crisis.
Brief epitome of a life, you’re not on the menus
of god, grow anemic in slits like the light of Italian
cinema. Only now a machine that comforts me
arrives in a box from the coast. Only now melted
peppermints, missed appointments, malice in a mosh pit.

5.

Ravishment in a dented van, a hamstring damaged
in the tenth inning. Antoine of the abnormal torso,
employee of the night, dirty in the retina
(not a Titan, not a Tibetan monk), whose impossibly
smooth unsmiling mouth assembles me.