Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Man Called Aerodynamics

The sky is probably blue and white or gray
or has gotten to be night by a nautical process
of removing stripes and blending the results
with a nonchalant air and all social spaces
about the same age as a dim body,
fierce looks travel shorter distances
and the two are left stranded on the square.
Partly because it is waiting for songs
the light changes or is overlooked
so that if it is Tuesday one wakes up
in the mind of a worker, numb and irritated
and it seems the clouds are all wrapped the same
or that there will never again be
open air on an open day, perfume
in the corridors, or else it is
an overworked sky that sleeps all day
though for a long time it simply wasn't
and then it was the capital of September,
systems of departure lordly and dead bright
then content to stay where it's going,
probably blue and white or gray but always
a cottony uselessness returning without
having taken leave, nor is there
any money to be had, but the sunshine
smells like flowers if there are flowers nearby
and the flowers smell like the clashing of rocks
because it was so wished by the man
I have not come to be, a representation
of open air or weak radio station
at night, lengthening until it resembles
the sky, the old intemperate song
that everything is for us, about us, but leaving us
and not of us though the opposite is true
as is shown not by clouds but the case of their progress,
never do they turn around, worsen or ignite,
an absence of people rendering them perfect
for riding above sleep and several policemen
in the dream last night, shining like dark blue
sunshine, they're the new kings
of just walking around, an endless search
for the man called aerodynamics
beautiful because he isn't theirs to see,
making the world immediately around them
somewhat dreamier as they walk, morose
and with a slight displacement of the hip
caused it is thought by their little dogs of gold.

Life in Those Days

And so the aspiring singers entered the field
and spread out as they'd been instructed to do
until they were only a harm to the fainter senses
like flowers or guitars, and still they went
even as far as the river and stone bridge,
across those tactical melodies, stopping only
at the forest's edge as young singers will,
before the military aspect of the woods,
the white-tailed fact pattern flitting through,
and then they began to climb as they had been
instructed to do, scaling at different speeds,
the loose parts in a mechanism, aspiring singers.
From the treetops they looked out
and saw the well-cut places of their youth
crowd together in the distance and die
for the day was angry that day my friends,
light to which nothing else is alien,
and we saw (I was by then among them)
a fake cemetery in a fake town
and behind and almost on top of it
another one, the insect village of sleep.
And it is to be confessed the aspiring singers
did not confine their gaze to the ground but looked up
to watch the sky as it darkened, and for them it seemed
to relent in the later hours and without bodies
they continued to roam that mauve continent.
We came down out of the trees to stand
in the dark by the ground, not having learned to sing,
and we saw ourselves and not at all.
Then back across the stream and over the fields
as instructed, the aspiring but dejected singers
flowing home, each to the bed one knows.
In the morning no folded note on the pillow.
It said "If you want to sing, you must tame the sun.
But look, someone has done it for you!"

The Premiere of Reappearance

It is passionately in our lives, the smell of rain,
radiation of an oil through the middle of the day,
the taste abides, old fruit on a plate
but after so long the rind is clear
and the knife an ignorant hiss of traffic
in which a girl feels the value of her picture
loosening and now there are many of her
moving prematurely in the fumes
as the town goes into darkness a closed shop,
a field, and several clouds of workers at a time,
and if they're found to be angry the state suggests
they are hung from the sky by their fists.
Has it just happened or was it always
a bearded skull of perfume has been brought about
to load the streets with gray opera
and, wet, to never stop really beginning,
to loom within the interest like a poison?
The house is cleaner, if also colder,
a wound that one is happy to have, the mist
is silent in the first of the rain, the guards are seduced,
looking up through a beaded mask
the dirty white sky beats with a thought
that only from a distance are the stars idle
and burning most truly when wet and obscured.
All that fails is for walking out again
to be set in the failing light of bells,
the easy money of their moistly falling
along a parapet gray enough to feel
but not to see. His ghost had come there
but so had hers and they had never met
though often photographed together
in lush black and white, intimate and slow,
a humid model of how it had just been,
and now they would meet in one invisible figure
made of thoughts in the promising rain,
the silver milk which is all they ever were
rising and falling in the suddenly heavy air.
All objects are about to be replaced
but they stay that way, poised on a chronic edge,
it is the vaguest of times, the heart of a wave,
and a sheet of water settles on an unmade bed,
the street shines, deepened by conversation.
It has become its own guest, casting lights
up to the surface it then abandons
and the water preserves them there for awhile.
It is passionately in our lives, the smell of rain,
the small wet mortal road it makes
within a sound of far-off bells,
annotations from the next year of sleep,
no map of how it falls though once more
the many daughters of it are here, bearing away
an unmailed letter of the way back,
and though it comes as a drift of absent faces
its girls are also sons, by which we lose them.

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Geoffrey G. O'Brien's first book, The Guns and Flags Project, will be published by The University of California Press in February 2002. contents | next