CLEAN

I.

Listen! I’m not talking a cake walk of “strong men”

tottering as giant toddlers in car-shell dresses;

I’m not talking soft on the inside like Schwarzeneggy

when he punched that camel in the face as Conan;

I’m not even talking the perforated industry of bees.

No, I’m talking Lidia who proves beauty’s never been

a floaty form that fits a concept with disinterest.

Beauty is a muscle of held breath lifting roots

of itself until a quantity of words or metal, say,

is made a personal best. 
II.

I don’t know if it’s a bit of death or some lost

cause that I’ve been grieving, but I’m taking heart

from the slo-mo asylum of your arms,

powering a sound-track of turbines, sirens

and creaking keels, as you thrust up

through the air’s water before squatting

down in your own element and cradling

the bar to yourself. Now that’s what I call

the beauty of under-standing: seeing a human

primed to burst free inside its own cells.
JERK

III.

So we’re also talking anti-Tantalus:

not grapes or water out of reach, but causes

fleshed out and pushed to the level of effects

so a body may show how the surprising pauses

or lipstick it begins with may turn out to be “will

to power” or a portrait by Gerhard Richter.

That’s what I call the beauty of up-bringing:

surging to stand still as a war that’s made

a monument from all that time running out

of you and into other people. 
IV.

It makes sense to exchange something absent

for something really solid and heavy,

and what a strange set of movements

you have to make to execute this present! –

one foot forward and one foot back,

arms raised victorious in surrender until

you can gather yourself to stand for it

and finally give it up. Watching you

I fucking love my life – and so it drops

back into place, falling happier once again.