AUTUMN AS CARMINE ON A COLLAR
Autumn leaves
no memory of you
drifting through what
might be a field,
but isn’t my feelings.
The bluish notes I do feel
want to distinguish chords
from these shifting shapes,
but not the cursive
loops of your nicked name,
At least not in this key.
The moon remembers
the gloss on each of your lips—
naked or painted—and how
they remained in constant ratio.
I may remember how
constant the harmonic minor
of your deliquescence would
modulate into a subdominant chord—
no matter how much
you claimed that wasn’t
in the score—and how
the handwritten music
on the sheets implied
a loco motion in the waver
of your contralto
might salt any broth
into a brothel—
as if salt was somehow
as much texture as flavor—
as if touch might wish
to sometimes leave a taste.
Carmine can’t of course
mean only the shade
of autumn leaves turning
like handcuff keys
into a semi-annihilation
of the self—or
even a quick taste of it
unless my facial expression
and your limbs relax
towards what, precisely?
Still, let’s not recall how
Little Red Corvette meant
the shade of a lip gloss
repeating on a hidden playlist.
Why did I doubt your choices,
especially given that I
was among them?
The truth is the rudiments
of my moods had little
to do with roots or undertones
unlike those wild traces
of blue in your hair.
So let’s pretend that
no tubes of carmine,
glossy or matte, were harmed
in the furious making
of those memories.
Even so, the overtones
of our touches never
formed a chord chart
of longing—not mine
I mean—even if
outlined in dark pencil.
The collar of memory
could involve one of us
being a bulldog,
or maybe just a bull,
tho not one with horns
lowered, or nose flared
as if enraged, unless
all the black bulls
I’ve ever been or was
supposed to be never found
any release from their rings—
nose or otherwise—
except in bewilderment.
I don’t actually know
what deliquescent means.
Autumn leaves may know
how things silken as secrets
might change hands or keys
or even the topography of touch
which—I still believe—
we tried to learn,
just not as any gospel
chanted in a church or brothel.
You’re gone—I get that, so
let's not consider which chords
minor or major might
reharmonize into your hue.
Surely not the suspended jay
which initiates my name.
And yet, and yet,
this unfinished fifth
of train whistle—real or imagined—
tracing the moon’s ear . . .
