d a v i d    g o l d s t e i n

 

Stuyvesant Town

Office by the Sea
















Stuyvesant Town

Rained for three months        under porticoes of memory        umbilical rain        columns of cells in thick migration        suspended state held in place by threads of jobs        
and grappa        The bildungsroman was delicious        I ate it for breakfast as Neapolitan students hargled        “You live! You learn! You live! You learn!”        on the floor below


Sometimes one has to live the past to get to the present        it’s in the congressional record and in spring’s terrified green        leaving us equivocally at sea         telling stories about the land        I am happy when I am with you under the mosquito netting        reaching for each other’s alveoli        lustily playing what might be rummikub       


englishing each stream        (somewhat hampered by        the way something        moves across bodies        the globe of anxiety        that makes a copse of poplars        where no poplars ever were)        But we are past the mudbrick martini        and the friends’ plebiscite        skipped those steps        now knee-deep         in the other’s groundwater


Within reach is a tapestry        of leaves and grown ink        musical skin of the wrist        letting go of the past’s        fourth hour and its fifth        Waking to nudegreen you        lascivious bucket of breakfast cereals        shall we daze through the survey       
of wild aquifers        or the book of light wanting        today or tomorrow

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Office by the Sea

High in the office by the sea, we traded promises of chivalric fealty and worked through the agenda our parents had left for us. We were naive, having no knowledge of the virtue that lies in the mallow or the asphodel. The snowy plovers on the beach knew us for what we were, and rejected our forays during protracted coffee breaks into their nests.


In those days I never went without handfuls of soap, another thing you understood. The line for pharmacopoeia and the one for deceit were each as long as a line of dunes, and we held each other’s place in them until evening, learning five seamless ways to inflict love. We were offered mandrake, but it left us headachey and unyielding, like life.


The taste of self was on my tongue, your teeth capped with gold accusations. All you really wanted was the steel of my blood against your nails, and I knew that, so perhaps my love for you was a little bit crazy. But it worked, down to the bruised soul and your swelling breasts which I refused to acknowledge, knowing you wouldn’t keep the baby.


After the forest fire, everything was different between us. Wooden fences ran at our approach and the lakes went orange. Gone were the tulips, the old country’s abbreviations, those lovely dinners of forced meat. You told me you’d die a spinster with beautiful legs, then promptly got married, still fighting for custody over our abandoned flesh.

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DAVID B. GOLDSTEIN’s poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Epoch, Shampoo, Zeek, Watchword, and other journals, and is currently online at Dusie. He teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at the University of Tulsa, where he is currently completing a book of poems and a critical work about digestion and originality in early modern England.