Inanimate Intimacy
Originally appeared in Heaven Bone, Issue #11, Spring 1994
In the defeat of sunshine I descend invisibly
To the dungeon of tourniquets and stripped lassoes
Where horses' legs are smashed into jackets after serving as stretchers
No one knows of my crying there
My hugging sinews of horror to slacken the anguish upstairs
Nor does anyone know of my memories mutilated in that lofty house
From which I should flee in final misery
To the tunnel of Martín Ramírez
That mountainside conduit of destiny
Scissoring through galvanic fibre
Where the steam locomotive will soon come screaming
Like a Gothic factory swinging with gaslight
Its lanterns clanging into high desert vertebrae
As Ramírez
Disembodied
Waves it onward
But I remember another vessel
A distant outpost of lost apartments facing
The deserted radio station cloaked in brambles
Where ponies graze in peace
Unmolested by roving truckers who neglect the highway in search of hideous relief
A gravel pit and tin shed are begging for moonlight
Like the old bridge clanking through its garnish of mistletoe and alligator trails
This is a locale swaggering with the nutmeg of dream
Saluting its own scaffold its own stadium of inanimate intimacy
Climbed by apartment stairs traversing sawhorses of time
The pages of its guidebook whip up the stars
A dictionary of glitter and daring
Sparkling with granules of salted ruby
Like an icehouse flouncing upon the jags of its transom
Its masthead is a tugboat captain who could pass for a watertower
Its index a honeycombed slate caressed by the nightwatchman's silhouette
The glycerine of its love
Silvered and rippling from the hearts of barometers
Secures station and apartments in a purple bow
And upholds them to otherworldly kisses
Transfusions of the transphysical
Beyond magnetism
Beyond the temporal
Beyond signals
Beyond
Oh darling identity
I'm ready
David Thomas Roberts (1990)
