"Pfalzblick" by Jasmin Bauer
Pursuit
1.
Two floors up in San Francisco,
I printed out your emails,
soaked with soap bubbles and—.
Pages sank to bathmat.
Submergence, your words--
my torn off blue jean pocket,
long kept—interspersed with
quotation, theories of mind.
Just feel, you wrote,
fucking feel. Is that right?
No. The tub was in Oakland;
I wasn’t happy. Neither,
I think, were you. Shards
of possibility. Clouded
costume jewels. That which
is fractured, as you said,
still cuts. Fucking feel--
make them feel it too.
2.
Lying atop you on
your black cloth sofa
(the one the dog would
one day piss all over)
listening to a CD,
Made in Canada,
by that New York band
that longed to be another
Joy Division.
One ear
pressed to your belly;
one, a tiny satellite dish
gathering half-chords
in a minor key, cold as television
snow, an exploration story--
3.
Redeye flight into ice,
snow heavy over
Pittsburgh—delayed
flight circling, invisible
hills, from there—dipping
down through gray cloud
cover, thick with snow
conifers outside the airport.
A half-mad cabby, ice-shouldered
roads. The river, the Mon,
the Ohio, brown churn, bits of
ice runoff breaking here and
there beneath yellow painted
rivets, girders. Soothing your
voice on a roaming cell phone.
Ten minutes from seeing you,
in your large woolen scarf.
Nothing else.
4.
Together in my first car,
four-door sedan, four cylinder,
overhead camshaft, automatic
transmission, driving south
to Northern California,
through redwood forests
moss-glow tinged, slipping
light through somehow
while one of several CDs
you’d lugged all the way from winter
became the soundtrack for your first
vacation in a decade.
When hills came and flora
shrank to expected sizes,
you took the wheel, and I taught
what little I knew of braking:
spotting the apex, accelerating
out of your turn.
5.
Shivering ever so slightly,
just enough to bunch
that long grey coat closer,
to tighten around the white lace
négligée later left errantly
somewhere in that attic hotel
room in Newport, Rhode Island,
where everything—from the painted
and repainted walls to the salt air--
shimmered with off-white
whiteness. That’s when--
as you paced the old-wood
balcony, looking out on
eye-white sails and dull
yellow hulls of bobbing
fiberglass skiffs—the locals
screamed in unison, and you
jumped ever so slightly, pulled
my arms closer, closer around
you, another new coat to match
your new name, and tilted
your face toward mine,
whispered (over the shouts,
the harbor lights): I guess
the Red Sox won,
then pulled me back to bed
and cold lobster pizza.
Les Kay
1.
Two floors up in San Francisco,
I printed out your emails,
soaked with soap bubbles and—.
Pages sank to bathmat.
Submergence, your words--
my torn off blue jean pocket,
long kept—interspersed with
quotation, theories of mind.
Just feel, you wrote,
fucking feel. Is that right?
No. The tub was in Oakland;
I wasn’t happy. Neither,
I think, were you. Shards
of possibility. Clouded
costume jewels. That which
is fractured, as you said,
still cuts. Fucking feel--
make them feel it too.
2.
Lying atop you on
your black cloth sofa
(the one the dog would
one day piss all over)
listening to a CD,
Made in Canada,
by that New York band
that longed to be another
Joy Division.
One ear
pressed to your belly;
one, a tiny satellite dish
gathering half-chords
in a minor key, cold as television
snow, an exploration story--
3.
Redeye flight into ice,
snow heavy over
Pittsburgh—delayed
flight circling, invisible
hills, from there—dipping
down through gray cloud
cover, thick with snow
conifers outside the airport.
A half-mad cabby, ice-shouldered
roads. The river, the Mon,
the Ohio, brown churn, bits of
ice runoff breaking here and
there beneath yellow painted
rivets, girders. Soothing your
voice on a roaming cell phone.
Ten minutes from seeing you,
in your large woolen scarf.
Nothing else.
4.
Together in my first car,
four-door sedan, four cylinder,
overhead camshaft, automatic
transmission, driving south
to Northern California,
through redwood forests
moss-glow tinged, slipping
light through somehow
while one of several CDs
you’d lugged all the way from winter
became the soundtrack for your first
vacation in a decade.
When hills came and flora
shrank to expected sizes,
you took the wheel, and I taught
what little I knew of braking:
spotting the apex, accelerating
out of your turn.
5.
Shivering ever so slightly,
just enough to bunch
that long grey coat closer,
to tighten around the white lace
négligée later left errantly
somewhere in that attic hotel
room in Newport, Rhode Island,
where everything—from the painted
and repainted walls to the salt air--
shimmered with off-white
whiteness. That’s when--
as you paced the old-wood
balcony, looking out on
eye-white sails and dull
yellow hulls of bobbing
fiberglass skiffs—the locals
screamed in unison, and you
jumped ever so slightly, pulled
my arms closer, closer around
you, another new coat to match
your new name, and tilted
your face toward mine,
whispered (over the shouts,
the harbor lights): I guess
the Red Sox won,
then pulled me back to bed
and cold lobster pizza.
Les Kay
Les Kay holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati's Creative Writing program. His first chapbook, The Bureau, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2015. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of literary journals including The McNeese Review, Redactions, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Whiskey Island, and Sugar House Review.
Jasmin Bauer is a German artist. She works with acrylic and her verity is a mixture of pop-art and photorealistic objects. Her art has been exhibited in several castles and newspapers in Germany. Besides being an artist, she loves good wine and traveling all over the world. www.trendculture.jimdo.com
