BILL RASMOVICZ

VARICOSE

Beneath the face is a ball peen hammer.
Beneath that, core of iron ore.

A face is a guise not unlike an empty barge.
A barge, not unlike a block of lead.

It is thought the fist can squeeze itself
into a bloody pulp, that the body itself is a
Guernica, the sphincter of the lips

a tourniquet for screaming where the tongue
is borne from an annihilation of graces.
If anything it's a centrifuge we're in,
the starling's skin mostly blacktop.

There are degrees of overcast in which
you could drown. Should.
Too, ancestral lines whose bones wither to
the consistency of milk.

Light can be the barber's razor stroking your
cheek, a foreign country
of gyroscopic spires and flaming azaleas,

and sometimes it is not enough
to feel the wind's holy tenor in an empty
lot, that even the sun coming up

through its shock of silence sounds
as though someone were pushed
through a window. This is that window.



IN THE HEMISPHERE BETWEEN QUEST AND CONQUEST

Dew makes the green swell and pop, humble architect
of the psyche.
The bumble bee debates between horseshit
and lilac, and bronze we come to find

is not a metal or color but a mood.
Surrendered here, the congress of our emotions, the parentheses
of skin too permeable to mosquitoes, infrared.

This morning the goldfinch at the foot of the house
mistook the reflection of birch trees in the wind for
birch trees in the wind. I get to thinking

that these silly appendages are but the spirit's prostheses,
that the tanker anchored in the harbor only espouses

the firmament of meaning
because there is none. Every morning a man ascends the hill
to strike the noontime bell. The church
emotes in the scent of honeysuckle.

That their attributes might continue with us, once they consumed
the dried powder of the dead.
Now, candles are passed to every table at dusk,
the jacket without its body there on a hook.

To feel god-like, like a box of nails, a salt lick
the inhabitants' itinerary remains: carry a flower in the wind,
stare at the sun without going blind.



DESTINY STREET

Much more than being cold or wet, it is the loss
one feels in the event of rain, as though someone went out
and painted everything a darker shade
of its own lingering sentiment.

On the contrary, there are people like fire for example,
who exist solely for the rapture of their own consumption.

Known is that we are foreign in our bodies.
In terms of a hammer or nail or dead wood, which do you think
the heart? I have always thought
a lawn mustn't resemble a gold course necessarily.
But people do, just as

there are those who covet a sunburn once in a while.
Most of us would enjoy a shiny silver envelope in the mail
regardless of its contents,
would argue tattoos and pedicures are real sustenance.
Most contend the act of genuflecting is inherently genuine,

while standing on a chair imparts a kind of liberation,
not so much for the better view as its unlabeled usage.

Beneath the umbrella of a lit downtown,
the language of the moon on the brownstones' crawling vines
resides these days at a frequency to which only bats are attuned.

Astronomy, they say, is a dying culture anyway, reality
at best a tertiary experience.

That we are walking around
in the footsteps of at least a thousand people every day, that
we too are ghosts, already ancient.
While the room with the highest concentration
of art in most homes is the garage.



THE LOVELIEST CITIES

A tree hides in the shiver of its leaves
while vines take to its scaffolding to suffocate it.

The dead offer us their sympathy which is to say
their silence. The dead are a lot like the living
except they don't say much. And what is the heart

if nothing but a telephone fluttering with a bomb threat,
love being if you carry the cross of my affection
I'll carry yours.

I recall shouting down into the mine's air shaft
to hear myself. What rose was exponential in size
and someone else entirely.
There were days whose sweet musk was the warm body
of a violin's, the wind

a girl whispering through the parish yards for her cat.
Now it's consecration by hail, the beaming effrontery
of the wrecking ball.

At the core of the mind is an obelisk dreaming you into being.
Jumping off the roof, I still think an open umbrella would
save me. And we wonder:
whose shoes were found behind

the rest stop? Murk, the barrel of a rifle--
to peer where you can't see bottom, witness something
solid as earth liquefy. There is no discerning

a sparrow from sky really, each of which
without the other would fall. While the loveliest cities
have civilizations compounded into geologic strata

topped with screaming police lights and children
separated from their parents. Which is to say we are
phantoms of each other, that the end is always happening.