The craftier angle is to hear them: hover
in the doorway, in total darkness, hands
held behind your back. She takes a stand
against him in the shadows, as her lover
flails, barefoot on carpeting: jabs, another—
these two miserable adolescents, tokens
of the dirge that was this tepid Philly 'burb,
clown choruses pining for images, curbed
words replaced with scripts, minds unbroken
finally meeting ends in winter rain, soaking,
drenched with venom against the solid.
What to look for: register his life-force
energies against hers, for the first course
her rhetoric takes against him, her stolid
defiance, sharply defined, against knowledge
that she's veered over into eerie wilderness.
It's true, the abyss laughs around her, & him,
but she's slightly more bound up in it, thinned,
bruised beneath surfaces to embrace the abyss,
all he needs is a caress given really, a kiss—
he won't get it. What he'll get is the meaning
of the surface she's chosen: bone, dust, webs.
Yet they stand exalted as they taste the dregs—
someone's watching elsewhere, & scheming.
Transmutation must happen, past dreaming—
that spirit, against the animal, is real in them.
The doorway is hinged to show you two souls—
unvarnished, electric, whether riddled with holes
or not, & love of a kind is being made, & gems.
The craftiest angle is not you, if you will, but them—
Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA): "Run Away with Me"
for Dani Diendorf
I was thinking as I listened to her about Byron’s relentless nihilism,
that only found out in intoxication any kind of remedy for the things
she was telling me about abortions, forced entries, deaths, and how no I won’t go
home with you, and how Byron alone among the Romantics dealt
overtly with sex, not just love like Shelley or fantasy like Keats or Nature
like Wordsworth the dull sheep, and all the blokes in the bar were
staring at her— green eyes, red hair, bust, you know the kind that blokes
will stare at, and I thought Byron really caught something a seed,
a kernel of what Nietzsche ran away with (recurrence!), so I said please run
away with me and she laughed, looked down into her beer and was finished—
Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Starlight II"
What starlight means to someone sober, such
as I was not in the old days— it would have to be
the sense of lives lived not uselessly. As in, who
we were had a burning sense of purpose, even
amid the ecstasy of moments we lived through—
gossamer ones to hold onto. It was not for nothing
who we were, what we did. How the grass-plots,
yellow-leaved autumn trees, other foliage, informed
us, heedless as we were, was that we would gradually
ripen into a long life no matter what. If that life
would have to begin with me, so be it. The sense
of sexual union, crescendo, orgasm, was in our
brains too, about what had moved us, & made
all the libidinous business resonate on a double level.
We were in each other’s bodies, and in each other’s
brains, I dare say, the right way. If an odder family
has never been seen, a family we were. The starlight
which could descend on Mary’s room— eastern
exposure, lavishing the long wooden dresser with
flat countertop surface, Mary’s various paraphernalia—
has now transmuted into a knowing stripe. Assured,
also, of enterprises, personal and otherwise, coming
full circle, just as Abby used circular forms to out-
Klimt Gustav himself, and of eternity borne out
through trust in nature, long patience. So I leave
myself with Mary there, doing what we always did,
but precocious about vindication, passages, reality.
The starlight finds a little place for us, for this.
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