Jalousie

Rocklike in the blinds’ bright–dark dyad,

I intervene. Elegiac couplets cross one cheek,

the other tilts from its own cool splotched against sunlit floor.

Six days I’ve been indoors, wearing this sweatshirt.

I tire of it and wear it inside out.

Would that I could turn my very skin and call on all things

to bear their linings as a second face.

Orpheus in profile; Orpheus in profile the other way.

In a dream I’m clothed in dirt and ether wet by famous tears.

Mud mask from the underworld’s rivers dries in Blue Velvet’s lamplight.

Heroes weep as often as they fight on the Aegean,

where the sand is ground by telling.

Repetition on geologic scale spreads a version of the Rockaways

under my Achilles, who sulks then grieves.

Would that there were a third side to flip onto.

I tan, I burn ... until death, this object lesson in presence.

As a kid, I’d look across a clean cement courtyard

to TVs constellated in the next building’s windows—

NewsHour’s blue at six, like an orchestra tuning.

I want from the shade not jealous guarding but a medium.

A slat beheads my landlord’s swan-shaped planting pot,

and I resolve the view, unstriped and entire.