THE ARGUMENT
BY
JOSEPH COOPER
“In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment
Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.
I rose as at thy call, but found thee not;
To find thee I directed then my walk…”
(Tr. Roy Flannagan, The Riverside Milton 477)
for love
There are so many things I shouldn’t tell you,
to keep light from passing through,
so many starving thoughts
left naked and unattended.
I wanted to tell you, without having to say you were
an afterthought, and that I am just a writer.
I wanted to fall through the fire covered sky
glittering everywhere like stars,
a naked hostage chasing desperation.
I no longer wish to scratch at the wrong wrists.
I want to close my eyes and hold my mouth shut
until all my thoughts become caskets
so I can climb over them
and invent new ways of being born.
There’s no easy way to say
that much of me was already
gone when we met
and that I was only a small glass room
divided by fists,
and that nothing you said or did
would replace each individual fraction of a kiss.
We bang on each other’s throats
so that we might be beautiful
once again, so that our hands
become the ugly bedspread
of a broken faucet love affair,
and so that we can say
once and for all
that we might never get used to it,
used to words forgotten and reinvented,
used to the resourcefulness of a literary plot,
used to believing in great escapes,
wishbones, and the lonely road home.
I know that this is only poetry
and that this introduction is inconsolable,
that if we touch with our eyes closed, the cold window
frosted with street lights and lullabies
we might leave the doorframes of dreams
holding our breath listening
to the roar of the freeway, confusing
it with the voice of God.
There are so many things I shouldn’t tell you,
Finding myself sleepless and wanting
to be wanted, knowing that my roots will end
somewhere, knowing that my bones
will run out of footprints.
There is no way to make this story beautiful.
I only wanted a white room without mystery,
a mouthful of ash, a better story for you
poor, sad, thing, yet here we are
without navigation in astronomical
light, the floor crumbling under us,
desperate violins trilling inside our bellies.
I want more seats reserved for the images of
destroyed lovers so that this story might think
of compassion, not the endless lamplights of
lonesome nights strayed
under the sputtering engine of beaten hearts.
Turn in your chairs and tongue the blades of cold
shoulders, mouths breathing fire in slow
motion young and beautiful.
What could you tell me?
What could you possibly say to conciliate the damned
dog burrowing in our words?
That tonight in bed you will use
my body like a matchbox
striking me with intentional music,
that our prayers will once again
run blind, stripped,
and screaming into the held
breath of a promising melody,
that tonight in bed I should let you
cradle my head
between your breasts
and rest my hand
between your thighs drunk
under the dock of pointless surrender.
I didn’t want to see you this way, profoundly wicked
using my cock as a gear shift asleep
at the wheel, reassuring me
that we’ll shake dreams
from the window seat of the next dull moment.
It would have been nice to hear once more the
immediate mathematics of broken glass,
another argument arrested by cruelty,
and to say that your love
was once mine, intentional,
wandering, wandering in slow motion.
I want to be born into new laughter,
larger than the usual romantic
love, more hysterical than panties
on the bathroom floor, legs
kicking with long division
to translate our dreams,
to have something to call our own.
Tell us life happens every minute,
orange juice and toast, alarm clocks
and punch clocks, and television dreams,
noise in the heating vent like a chainsaw
in the bathtub, and believe me
the speaker has his strategies
and a sink to wash away the blood.
We want to bend our heads
recklessly into each chapter,
shameful and half-remembered,
leaning against windowpanes in still-
life like the hands of thieves,
singing lullabies in confessionals.
Tell them that our hands are tied
and that pressing our
genitals into the moonlit riverbed
draws instead a lesson from anger
than suspense,
that we will make noise
and dance across the water
lilies of time so we always remember
clichés about karma and regret.
Our bodies possessed by the running
horses of lucid dreams
are among the dirtiest
thoughts you have,
wet as an uncomfortable silence
dismissed under another pretext.
The mystery is not in the sunlight
pouring across your skin
but the feeling of your breath against
my belt buckle.
I know where those bruises came from,
and I know you cried each time.
I was on the phone with you, sweetheart,
hurtling the unstoppable syntax
of frantic lists, and like you,
I am now eating my tongue on the
university lawn, confessing everything
to ephemeral divination.
If only we held our breath
a moment longer, radios
yearning for transmission,
first words coming
into mouth,
we could have burned down
straw houses
in lieu of something
invariable, unrepeatable
secrets called out
behind our backs.
I want you more than the story
of where the road goes,
the ripped up shirt and
the chain linked fence.
That is to say, don’t walk away
with clothes clinging to
nipples and groins,
laughing at the unlit map
of my naked chest,
don’t finger the flat, white wall
as if you are waiting for yesterday,
for an hour ago, for this very moment
as if to avert some impact,
some deadly connection with sheer,
manic improvisation,
names savagely shouted from basements,
swerving and crushed under panic,
becoming erotic and life-threatening
until poetry serves the awful
bondage of another disillusioned truth.
