Connie Mae Oliver
MILLIONS I
My baby holds me and says I am like Johannes Kepler because of my aberrant
spatiality.
There are millions of beds in Dade County. Dade County >> pink
in the 1985 HBO intro nobody there now everybody dead now teeth sloshing
in the moon crater between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island.
Crown molding in me gets bent around like a Lygia Clark critter.
My baby says he thinks he is losing his hair or will. He always says this or that about
what will happen to his hair. I walk over and grab it all in my hand like a kind of
dreadful wheat and kiss it.
MILLIONS V
You go to the night you pitched your novel to the cab driver.
You retreat into the upholstery, the back of your hand burning against your face. You
apologize to the driver and suggest that your novel has mysterious qualities. Get out, he
says, and you do, and Brooklyn, wide and ochre, receives you with its news of infants
and their tiny boredoms, of men up against woolen brownstones, holding themselves,
waiting for the rain to stop.
The absurd for them and for you is all one absurd in the aims of a deeper stricken voice
you want to strike.
&Johannes’s like, “I I I I I !
I watch the light spitting around the train as we totter through.”
MILLIONS VI
Johannes named wagons in this guy. Bears appendages hooks
like in that short story about the moon how it used to graze the earth
and because of gravity, I think, got all the earth’s shit on it.
Leaving the party,
J carries his glass to the portico and wavers in the hot night:
What was it that I said? What did I just now say? Do I know nothing? Have I not known nothing? Not for nothing do I know things, not for anything do I know nothing.
It’ll rain because you are loving blue ink bled all up on the paper cup because you
have loved the golden retriever bitch that barks at everyone lets you pass in silence
because you once loved hard to find the latch now hard to turn the key now.
