After Sneaking Into The Museum of the Moving Image In Queens

for Patrick McNamara and Tommy Two Times

L’Arrivéê [d’un train en gare] was a visual tour de force, and audiences are said to have stampeded at the sight of the locomotive barreling toward them from a distant prospect into the foreground of the screen.

—David A. Cook/A History of Narrative Film

Where are the days of the lone harlequin juggling knives passed hand to

    hand with a bookkeeper’s precision?

The cadenced bend to unbend in his left knee (a retraction into the push

    up of retrace) completes the aesthetic line

of the whirring steel arc, knighting our jester with a counterpoint sharpness

    of his own. Here’s an amazing thing:

on the museum’s third floor the phenakistoscope slowed, I think I

    remember wondering if the, it was

only for a second, knives might fall, the ceased whirring spawning its own

    second sequence, some melodrama

involving a severed thumb, his left foot run through by a falling blade, a rumbling

    ambulance of some kind, enter the mumbling

ringmaster pissed-off at the compensations coming out of his pocket. The wheel

    slowed, the fool’s knee straightened and bent again a

last time. And the knives rested mid-toss, any notion of their capacity

    for brutal amputation remained only a stored potential

energy per square inch per square inch. The sign beside the display can explain

    better than I can how animation works. I read

it then but I’ve semi-forgotten what it said. We’d smoked a lot of marijuana

    that morning and I was convinced I was losing my front tooth.

On the F train home, we talked about taking a headshot of either you or me,

    done right complete with the noir

of a glamorous hollywood chiaroscuro, framing it, adding it to the empty slot

    I saw in the floor to ceiling mosaic of movie

stars lining the entry hall on the second floor (the spot just to the left of Dana

    Andrews), just to see how long it might stay

there. You thought it would be a week before anyone noticed. I thought

    it would only take minutes, some woman, some

valued East Side donor, walking in, her quick double take, and then her boast to the

    curator four minutes later:

“I knew all along that one was missing something. I could tell all along

    it was lacking that certain magic.”

After a Drunk Reading of Pablo Neruda, I Walk Along the Beach and Think of You

I would recite “Buscar” for you but I’ve

forgotten the first two lines. My drunken

words make tra lalas! I’ll find a trunk and

force them inside! I will send them by night

by waves coursing the ocean to islands

far away! Where idle birds nest in silence,

where along the sweat troughs of your ribcage,

my mouth, a slow kettle exhaling fire-

salt and rain and dumb laughing desire,

will spell an actor’s fright. Somewhere offstage

to his gone alchemy beats a clear vision;

its sounds make our hero cough his admission:

“Dithyramb, loneliness, both held within her.

The motion in sex swerves poems to splinters.”