UNDER HEAVEN

Under the covers, or under the moon and the stars,
Those high-toned, exclusive lights
Towards which blue and lonesome cars,
Either on bypass or backstreet, didn't travel,
O wishful town, you blinked your lights
Like candles blown out in a circle.

And under your red and green planets,
Your radio towers, red-eyed, transmitted downtown,
From above and beyond, dizzying secrets.
At stoplights, in bedrooms, everyone tossed and turned.
Look, some won't ever make it uptown.
And the towers' eyes, insomniac, burned.

Abed, in that place, while my white nightlight
Persisted, miniature, stellar,
When startled awake by beaming, golden headlights,
Restive, I spun in vicious circles, thinking
How, town, you wished on fixed stars.
And the world (lights out) wouldn't stop spinning.


Jack Hayes
© 2010
This poem originally appeared in Timbuktu

HEAVENLY BODIES

Everybody, seemingly, reached out
For a door knob, one significant button, the sky;
And everyone, I think, had their doubts.
As for me, at times I visited where
Puzzled, dizzy, grinning, apparently in mid-air,
Reaching for his whiskey, wishing to fly,

Noel laughed on his balcony.
Teased, let's say, by heaven's stark
Naked and hypothetically sexy body,
Which, move as me might, he couldn't touch
Any more than my cigarette's smoke that looped up, vanished,
He asked me once, "Am I whistling in the dark?"

Everyone, back then, wanted out of this world
And made phone calls, or love, or flicked their lighters,
Etc.  Noel had in mind a girl
Who lived crosstown or further even
Than that pinned-up Miss December heaven.
He tied red string around unsent letters.

"It's," I told him, "catch as catch can."
Satellites, shooting stars, and UFOs,
Like the ritziest diamonds, or anyway, zircon,
Decked high heaven coldly out.  The shine beguiled
Noel, glassy-eyed, who stared like a poor man's child.
"Everybody, someday, goes,

And mystically," he blurted, "finds someone."
Two stories down, pedestrians moved apart
As Noel giggled, "We are not alone."
Out in the cold, only my cigarette lit,
I hunched on the balcony, kept quiet.
Later, he named the sky Miss Lonely Hearts.


Jack Hayes
© 2010This poem originally appeared in Timbuktu

THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN

That night that poured out blacker than black coffee,
When the new moon (down the drain) outside my kitchen window
Ciphered its message,
I counted, abstracted, penny after penny,
The bits I'd saved.  Poor Richard was in the know.
And I fretted for daily treasures I couldn't salvage.

It was, I think, a Monday,
And Cosmo, my friend and mathematician,
Dropped by to gulp strong coffee and pernoctate.
I said, "There's bound to be hell to pay."
And he, low-voiced, "you're using the wrong equation,"
Said, and blew a smoke ring.  "You opt for fate."

Night tried to solve its problem
In time, as I inventoried savings and groceries,
And, like last week's leftovers, spent, I stewed
At this week's start, and swept up crumbs.
"It goes," I said, "to waste in complacencies,
And the unknown's lost."  He continued,

"We range, as differentials, free and available,
Elegant across infinite space,
Existing as our own specific solution."
He left his overcoat on.  Toward my kitchen table
The new moon showed a darker face
Than a kid who's stumped by a logician.


Jack Hayes
© 2010

ANOTHER ST. LUCY

We kept, our time grown short, our lives shadowed
Through smallish and buzzing rooms
Whose walls were, by few low-watt bulbs, yellowed.
And, sicklier than the faint sun,
Those bulbs (in silhouette, like spoons)
Kept Lucy's head, in chiaroscuro, haloed.

In those days, the pale sun, cut-down, sank,
And that Saturday. pre-empted, out of mind,
Through a sky transparent as a high-proof drink
The sun drowned like a rind.
And Lucy, then, got herself blind.
I thought it was daylight, not gin, she drank

As the afternoon blacked-out.
In shadow alone, she and I spoke together,
And she said, "A light bulb hurts, like a thought,
And thoughts fry you like pleasure."
I, also under the weather,
Slouched and muttered, "White light knocks me out."

Her few lamps, untouched and cornered, survived
Barely, and buzzed.  Their power, unpaid for, faint,
Winced.  What's turned off can't be revived.
"I feel I'm safer absent,"
The by-now eyeless saint
Lucy murmured as larger shadows writhed.

 
Jack Hayes
© 2010

MOVING PICTURES & OTHER CONCEPTIONS

What could I, those blank nights (besides nothing) picture?
Like, the coming attractions, like any future…
Black & white photos tacked across each wall—
They seemed utterly real;
& all those scissored-out prints & icons
Were windows, & weren’t embellished with curtains,

Were frames cut into in my house,
Were scenes I came to, face-to-face.
Life & lovers captured in 8 x 10 squares
And I contemplated them, darkly, from a hard-backed chair.
They embodied, across my off-white walls, fictions.
But were they premonitions?

Beyond both the real & the made-up windows
Existed (as in these later days I know),
Somewhere else,
Where someone else (though between my house
And yours was space like the minutes inside a theater
When everything’s suspended in whispers

Until the curtain rises)—
You, Emily, as you  prayerfully washed your dishes.
Above you was pinned a postcard of the Virgin,
Mailed from somewhere organic & Latin.
Late nights, over the phone, you told stories,
Off-color, and heisted from movies—

Like “house dick,” like “high windows,” like “a mother…”
But I couldn’t get the picture.
Instead I watched my walls unreeel vignettes
While you said your prayers to chipped plaster statuettes
You brought home from dime stores.
Meantime, the future projected a double feature

Up against the wall, as if through a window
We might have come through whole.
Picture this… in either home
We might, in the flesh, have called each other by name,
And not like onscreen lovers.  Then it would matter;
This picture would move.  Bear with us, Vivid Mother.


Jack Hayes
© 2010

THE HOLE IN THE DOUGHNUT

I bided my time, as thin air stays, empty,
Empty as restaurants after hours,
Uselessly lurking.
Once upon a time I bedded down hungry.
Later, as my fridge moaned, I locked the front door,
And through this city

Ventured in good hope.  Our Father's vacancy
Loomed larger (though immaterial) than a dirigible,
A macrocosmic doughnut hole
With which my stomach could identify.
But gleaming down the miracle mile
Waited an all-night bakery,

Where red-faced bakers, on night-shift, labor.
They're qualified in terms of pity,
Through contorting, punching out, and racking dough,
To serve to those, in spirit, poor,
And through roasting zeros
(Countless) to discharge such duty.

Our Father Who... Are you our breadwinner?
When, then, will we sit and eat?
I doubletimed it, okay, to soak a doughnut
In coffee two bits paid for,
But after still saw heaven blackly cut out,
And I returned, an empty sleeper.


Jack Hayes
© 2010

THE PATIENCE SONG

The sky and all's unpeopled, so I mark time,
As though, marooned in an airport lounge,
Tallying swizzle sticks and membranous limes,
I were wasting myself on a binge.
And Muzak, I think, would smugly hum.
You have to wait, man, unreal, for shame.

Or words to that effect.  But stranded in this bar
In similitude (actually, on the wagon)
I'd peruse clear bottles' labels and not hear
Piped-in subliminal slogans.
I'm waiting, like, for visitors out of the air.
You have to wait, man, unreal, for shame.

And the air's entirely, from where I sit, empty,
As if never from the clouds
Into this metaphysical airport would taxi
A plane transporting, among its airborne crowd,
Anyone remotely as sky-blue as Mother Mary.
You have to wait, man, unreal, for shame.

And as though, through inclement weather, no one came
From the real world to me in the terminal,
No heavenly arms to take me home,
As though all flights, I mean, had gotten canceled,
I'm aground, like wrecked to Muzak, killing time.
You have to wait, man, unreal for shame.


Jack Hayes
© 2010