THE LOST WORLD
No one speaks the words I need to know.
The name of the tree near the Ventura mission
that lopes and lurches like a drunken dragon
when the wind blows, exposing a sinewed belly
of branches, or the name for when you see the tree
from your car and lower the radio
as if to hear it better, wishing you could
stand still in the street as the car continued
without you, into town, obeying each empty light.
I don’t know the words for the wildflowers
that orgasm in this vacant lot, though they’ve coaxed
my tears with their yellow fingers, their violet mouths.
No one speaks the names of the four-petaled blue compass
or the golden clarinet that turns a man into
a honeybee, and few know. Though any child
will tell you the name of the blinking towers on the hill
or two roads crossing, no one knows
the word for crying and laughing at the same time,
or the verb for two people thinking the same
thought in the same moment — and variations
when it occurs with your lover on a cross-country trip
and you thought she was asleep; another name
when it rises in bed as she dips her chest
into the mirror-water of your face; another word
when you stand together in the kitchen,
slicing carrots and peppers and turn toward each other
in the same instant, and nearly knife each other,
and you start laughing and you do not speak
the thought, because it is everywhere like breath,
like protons, and you know lightning has struck you both,
but also everything — the room, the world. And it is
another thing entirely when you are with your dad
sitting on a mildewed wicker couch in a dark room,
and he is dying, and for a moment you both glow
remembering talks in the woods at night — a flash
of divine mercy, another name no one speaks.
The name of the tree near the Ventura mission
that lopes and lurches like a drunken dragon
when the wind blows, exposing a sinewed belly
of branches, or the name for when you see the tree
from your car and lower the radio
as if to hear it better, wishing you could
stand still in the street as the car continued
without you, into town, obeying each empty light.
I don’t know the words for the wildflowers
that orgasm in this vacant lot, though they’ve coaxed
my tears with their yellow fingers, their violet mouths.
No one speaks the names of the four-petaled blue compass
or the golden clarinet that turns a man into
a honeybee, and few know. Though any child
will tell you the name of the blinking towers on the hill
or two roads crossing, no one knows
the word for crying and laughing at the same time,
or the verb for two people thinking the same
thought in the same moment — and variations
when it occurs with your lover on a cross-country trip
and you thought she was asleep; another name
when it rises in bed as she dips her chest
into the mirror-water of your face; another word
when you stand together in the kitchen,
slicing carrots and peppers and turn toward each other
in the same instant, and nearly knife each other,
and you start laughing and you do not speak
the thought, because it is everywhere like breath,
like protons, and you know lightning has struck you both,
but also everything — the room, the world. And it is
another thing entirely when you are with your dad
sitting on a mildewed wicker couch in a dark room,
and he is dying, and for a moment you both glow
remembering talks in the woods at night — a flash
of divine mercy, another name no one speaks.