Octopi Are Suturist

Daikichi Amano

Tennis Bracelets

Tender Is the Night rises
from a desk drawer and I
catch up with you there.
This is a boom time for the manic
depressive memoir (you too bought
a spree of snakebite kits), the kind
you were writing when I knew you,
before you stopped and I went back
to red desert and gas-green lights.

Let’s remember how quickly we came
under neon-streak firefly trajectories,
dead like a story we already knew.
A story that wishes us one more
go around—you call by accident and I
pick up the phone and a tennis racket,
swing backhands, slice you away.
You come through the space
in the catgut anyway.

There is clay and a too tight smile
strung across my face as you pinpoint
that day defined by the sun gilt-edging
storm clouds, every elongated slide
a frictionless shot of memory.
The baseline side to side blurs
to nighttime bracelets of light in the town
below the sanitarium, I know
they’re interlocking, getting closer.

I touch my wrists and you touch your wrists.

Spring Is Sprung

Last Time

The door left open

Your car parked in the drive

My last invitation.

You looked right in the heart of my eye

As if you were trying to memorize

My face indefinitely

And I did the same with yours as we faced

At the entrance.  A sad long gust swept through

Hushed around the back of my neck and ears

The way your hands once did.

Outside, I looked for indication from the day the sun

Blending with the clouds the grass

On your front lawn neither dull nor shine.

I didn't hear you walk away.

I half expected you to be there, half hoped.  Watching me go

Casting me off to face the rest of the world without you

But I'm glad you didn't.

I could never have left

In the dark, your sad eyes roam towards me in dreams.  

Dreams of Eurydice

I dreamed last night of you in a crowd

walking with a rose, the pink one I bought you, pulling

away its petals letting them fall to the ground.

You were looking for me, you were with someone else.

I was gone.

I had another dream of an eerie street of brownstones

dark except for the sole decayed light bleeding orange

leading to a basement structured in steel painted in dripping black

a Man inside, sitting at an empty wooden table

in there alone, brooding with a crimson face

He turned

and His eyes shot through me as if to say

she is gone and there is nothing.

A car on the street pulled up to the curb, a brown rusted Cadillac

and the window rolled down smoke pluming out and I couldn't see in.

Eurydice, the wind whispered, and the car took off.

Through a fence with barbed wire I watched lightning strike

the ocean, a flash of a wave being surfed by a man under gunpoint.

In a wet jungle, lightning shone on the path as I searched for you

stealthily maneuvering around guerillas, winding trunks and 

slapping leaves to sinking mud and walls of trenches.  

Crawling through this never 

ending maze I cried out to the wind, rain 

pouring into my mouth.  

The wind didn't answer.

The rain stopped 

and not another bolt of light.  

Then, I woke up.  

She

Strong first encounter

A planted kiss with beer on his breath

Vodka on hers

Leading the way hand holding down the pier promenade on a t-shirt warm night

The ocean a lake of radio silence letting them tune in to one another

Who pays for what

One night stand bluffs did you did I

On the brick wall he leaned against her at closing time, the crowds 

crookedly walking watching their beginnings through a film of yellow 

poisoning but not, just

alcohol.  

They didn't fuck that night.

A whirlwind of in between

Youth and adult love that we're told

Exists

Where past lovers are forgotten

And friendship becomes the basis before sex.

Instead, they shake each other and pop the corks exploding 

Out, and up the rickety elevator as high as they can

Hoping for the penthouse

Not the roof where all they can do is look down,

A dread remembrance of their ride.

They should have taken the stairs. 

A Change of Season

Before, at the end of Spring

There was an open sky

Limitless and forever

The days would end in a brilliant blaze

A bright smile before

The tender breeze of night.

In waking, the day rose in a soft yellow

Everything full of green vigor.  

A brush of sweet air would wrap around me,

Your voice.  

There was feeling then.

Now, the coldness begins to reach my bones.

The ocean slaps angrily against itself.

The wind torments loose leaves and then ceases–-

Abandons--

Once they fall.

There is no pleasure to your giving.

A routine like the appearance of a forgotten sun

Lifted and dying, blocked by an irrational gray haze.

Only a noise now, a mechanical drone

The huff and rupture from a monotony of cars

Taking the same routes, hoping for the earth to crack.

A pencil scratching against a calendar.

Erase.

Fill in.  

I look out at the sea slush, the white peaks

Waiting for stillness.

The seasons have changed

I accept

And I know as a whip of wind smacks down against me

The season will change again.

But as I grow resilient to your cold,

I wonder if I will feel the same.