The Gift - Eliot Cardinaux

The Gift

Dried corn husks on a summer table,

shown in yellow sunlight

in an echo out of autumn,

the distant pulse of the city throbs,

my headache, longing,

wiling ecstasy of some stranger, pause

to think of it:

Here in my room, the walls laugh.

There in his room,

he laughs at his walls stained with dirt,

and you are filled with some story

about the cause and effect of bodies against each other.

They can soothe that one to sleep

while a whine escapes your lips.

the sunlight fading lightly,

sunrise on your empty pockets, stubborn joy,

and as days pass on to weeks span out like names

drifting out of themselves, forever constant in their vagueness

like dreams, that cannot share themselves.

A Letter - Eliot Cardinaux

A Letter

Wide, short, narrow,

            closed, long.

You said you were close

to that other dimension.

I need a cave with substance

narrow and obtuse –

the Deerfield flooding

captures thieves, apathetic glances.

Is this really a letter about true stories,

Or is it a letter about misconceptions, treatises, lies?

No, it is a letter about one thing.

I need a sun that delegates the mischief from misfortune,

And is it laughter that will hold it up – well,

they call it a drop in the bucket.

If it’s that glad to swallow it, what is your pride in calling them to roost?

The Hilton (EPC)

The Hilton

Two years ago, I was standing outside a nightclub,

across the street from the town square in Northampton,

MA, and an old drunk told me about the Hilton hotel

they were going to build, right there in the middle of

the square.  Two years later, I remembered the story,

sitting on a town square bench, and thought of the

twelve-ton brick of metal squatting there.  I still don’t

know if it was true. 

It is to be large and white

with tourists milling all around it, fallow

decadance. And oh such soft and whiter sheets

as it grows old and dirt

from summer’s lack of shoes

for walking sticks – call it

Metropolitan. (The buses will grow dense).

And old Brigadier General

Pulaski won’t have known,

he’s too tied up in new

revolutionary thinking

as a stone

that sits, a monument –

first waking in the fields there in Elysium

to know his country’s made!

To be swallowed up, and people still are

talking.) Earnesty prides itself too much

on its own man’s thinking.

The square, peopled with benches

is a turning point, to pivot all this

weight, and people trying to make their

turns of it

find themselves turned,

wide-eyed, deer in the headlights, drunk.

But the Hilton will be large and white,

though it is no great metal moth

that spins its silk in loss.

            The tawny brick wing-walls about it

            are tarnished,

                                   not yet fall’n on.

The Dance - Eliot Cardinaux

The Dance

A view of my shoelace,
widened and clear like a flaxen sun,

bent in the bridge of cool summer.

I have been here,

the rock is rough,

I hear dancing,

smile of another.

I went in the children’s chatter

to where the air feels warm

and waits in pockets

for the dancers’ push.

There my eye widened

on another journey;

I will follow, join the dance,

these fingerprints are mine.

Your invitation

passes like a shadow

whose wings are wide.