Palimpsest
I smell the time travel in your hair. The all fall down consternation
catches in the zipper of your sweater. Call it chrysanthemum snow,
a simultaneous Scranton unknown to you.
Two guys walk into an alley where a prostitute has bitten
her pimp so deeply they make someone call an ambulance. The afternoon light
hanging in your dress has already set the clocks back.
The tongue will never taste itself;
the ear never hear itself. Thus the tragedy
of going forth, you say, of being broken into so many places.
Drawbridge up, three men up to their bare waists fishing.
Lust reels out to a limit just as a cormorant
feels his delicate necklace. Unlatching time,
one foreskin after another. Change into something that travels,
you say, the radio pressed to your belly. Two girls in tube tops
wrestle over a purse. A construction worker strips off his shirt
to sun himself on the shelf of a modernist sculpture.
You are watching the slow sedimentation. Burying things
for the amazement of retrieving them.
Tinsel shorts out the railroad track under the Christmas tree.
Call it spider web snow, it lifts like Indra’s jeweled net.
The times in the midst of sex you wanted to cum/not cum.
Stripped off and piled on the bed, sweat-soaked t-shirts
measure the hours to morning. Palimpsests. Moving to the night side
of your body. Hair caught in your zipper—the awkward
construction of your question. Silver duct tape patches
the screen door. Draw-bridge down. Intervals called
Athens, Wilkes-Barre, Tokyo. I hear the time travel in your hair.
Judson Evans is an enthusiast for bonsai and horror films, Guerilla Opera, and the Japanese art of Chindogu (or absurd inventions). He teaches courses on utopian societies, keeps reef aquariums, and has been involved in a wide range of collaborative experiments with composers, choreographers, dancers, and most recently, video artists, as well as other poets at The Boston Conservatory where he teaches poetry workshops, a class on cave painting and origins of religion and philosophy, and acts as Director of Liberal Arts. He has published poetry most recently in Laurel Review, Cutbank, and Volt.
