In the Saloon of Last Reflections michael larrain

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In the Saloon of Last Reflections

michael larrain

The stars have gone out of their heads from drinking sea-water

The sea devours all our toys

particularly the stick-horses

The sun hurls us brutally against

the windows in one another

The confectioner's snow of the moon

spoils everything

Now close the sun & look at your eyes

then press it against me

that pearl that would partially exist

if every living creature on earth

were dreaming at the same time

If daylight were the only flower

ever to open at night

I would still go down to the plain

where bloodsmoke rises from your hands

& you venture out in a flannel nightgown

to strike a kitchen match against the sea

& hold it to the keyhole

of all the catacombs inside an orange

at dawn when the train slows down

& the sky slows down

& I lean down to pick up a pitcher

filled with your famished silence

Bring me these three things

the hinges of a dead ocean

the stolen documents of those extraordinary children

who for hours on end watch dust motes

floating in shafts of sunlight

& the mad hillbilly who built his still

in the shadow of what they have seen

I cannot seem to quit smoking

the erased tape of your hair in my sleep

the urge to become as large as my anger

or your voice with more sleeves

than falling back to sleep

For you are the Duke Ellington of Eyelids

My desire is for wings that fold in my sleep

like white paper around a cube of butter

only I would be so much better off

as constable in charge of the triangle

calling the monks of your order

to acts of arson & murder

Undoubtedly our own blood would slaughter us

if only it could get outside

Left-handed at the moment of death

I grow bored with my intensity

Bring me your clitoris

which the the lucky penny in the devil's new purse

the mind of god meanwhile

moving from the left-hand speaker to the right

strangled in between by the cool homicidal stream

known to fishers in these waters

as half-life-of-a-knife-stroke

No one can move their hips like that

It's impossible and I forbid it within the confines

of this kingdom called oh never mind

Who hires these dogs who come to howl at drownings

& later hustle free drinks all night?

How can I keep this taste on my tongue

without becoming a private eye

hired to follow lemons throughout the sea?

& lastly I must ask you

where else would a ladder ever lead except to fire?

Betrayed by the one ray of hope

we bop around between closing time & sunup

Wolves want your milk, baby,

Whales want the lining of your evening bag

I would like the smoke off your dice

or the spray from your orange peel

Listen to me

woman

for you I would be a parson

whose entire congregation is a single stone

I would be the watch chain of infinity

in the thoughts of some old dolphin

I would not be the world

not for all the world

Only the most followable fire

can abide by the moon's parquet floors

or as we say around here

Journey

& bring me this once

that rocking chair made of glass

whose runners instead of shadow-staves

distribute along the furrows of the earth

the curved lavender

of how we ever managed to become plural in the first place

When a spider sits upon this chair

it is reduced immediately to a tear

which falls into a begging bowl

belonging to my bannister

This bannister runs upriver beginning at the town

which only last night was passed by your carriage

& thereby rendered memoryless

Now the inhabitants all hold out their hands

as if they could not tell

which objects were their own children

until it arrives at the wheel-ruts filled with a bloodthirsty light

which has traveled this far

that it might reproduce

by virtue of touching your earring

Come over here

woman

so that I may watch you in that black velvet dress

squatting to pee in the long damp grass

somewhere down around midnight

I am not the dwarf under the porch

I am the one who could not love you

until you stepped out of the sunshine

& every empty decanter broke out in a cold dew

Come over here

woman

with your torso from which swords withdraw behind heavy drapes

in order to confer with their ministers

Wild Card/Mistaken Identity/Famine of Bells/

Inconsolable grief/Tomboy/Taste of Straw Late at Night

& the Unopenable Mail of the Snow

You see my darling

Knives are a way which water has

of washing its hands

You are a way that I have found

of something to do between meteorites

Never before has gold been ridiculed

by mezzo sopranos of satin

Never before has silver

declared a moratorium on silk

Listen to me

Your walk has destroyed its last drum-kit

I love you at least as much as these veins in your breast

would like to bring those boys up from the mines

but by now I've been thrown so far by my own shadow

that I had to walk all the way back

past a collection of cottages

in which the wallpaper can be used

to bribe the bee-keeper

knee-deep

in the swarm of your stretching

first thing in the morning

& past those black holes in space

being held for questioning

by the spots on a butterfly's wing

Your panties surrendered the cavalry to the Indians

& past the old women who sit in doorways

putting up jars of dust for winter

& the road is crooked exactly like

the missing half of the ticket

which will be torn in two

as soon as

I can draw my bow across your palomino rain again

Set me free and I'll head straight for the herb

which will force me to return to you

Come on over here

woman

while your dance destroys meaning for the bell of it

I awakened because somewhere you were kneeling

to make me hear

the grass growing through the pavement

over my grave

there in the rice wine of a prolonged rainfall

we did not know we had lost in common

I said

Bring me the bubble pipe of the Milky Way

Bring me your belly of diabolical lilies

which cover the tracks of convicts

In this exact thigh

night is about to dismurmur its first sea otter

& already you've taken the law into your own gestures

Bring me

the time-release starlight

which has parted your hair

Come on over here

woman

& say unto me the softest words your know

How I love you how I come what love you may I do

or oh I'll try to might be able to & where

are we off to now?”

Farmhand of fire Farmhand of snow

My daughter will give her love to one

& the other will bow

& weep like light broken against a mountain

Bring me the flame that eats the lining of its jacket

Bring me the thing that makes you who you are

the only wood-nymph ever to be lost at sea

Come over here

woman

The world is a birthmark that no one has ever seen

About the author

Michael Larrain was born in Los Angeles in 1947. He is the author of three collections of poems: The Promises Kept In Sleep, Just One Drink for the Diamond Cutter and For One Moment There Was No Queen. Rainy Day Women Press of Willits, CA, has recently released a CD of his reading of selected love poems called Lipstick: a Catalogue for Continuous Undressing. His novels are South of the North Star, Movies on the Sails and As the Case May Be.

He lives in Sonoma County (California) with his wife and two year old daughter, Wilder Kathleen the Rage of Paris Larrain and has long been a senior partner in the Way Up, Firm and High Tail It Bright Out of Town Detective Agency, a group of shady characters devoted to the discrediting of reality. www.sonomaunions.com