Parade Daniel Coudriet

Parade

Daniel Coudriet

Blue Hour Press

2012

Blue Hour Press • 641 Illinois St • Lawrence KS 66044 www.bluehourpress.com • editor@bluehourpress.com © 2012 Daniel Coudriet. All rights reserved. Book design by Justin Runge. Cover art by Joaquín Coudriet.

Contents

Expedition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11Lollipop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13Sleepers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14Care Must Be Taken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15Nudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17Making Hay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20How Many Pass an Evening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21Everyone Nightgowns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22Crosswinds Evaporation Gasping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23Which of You the River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25Imprint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35La azafata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36Breath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37Clumsy Wind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38Pregnant House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39Among My Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40Murmursleep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41Nudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42Allowances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44Citas con transeúntes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45Noche americana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of journals where several of these poems have previously appeared, often in different versions:

Boston Review: “Breath” “Lollipop”Court Green: “Making Hay”Denver Quarterly: “Clumsy Wind” “Everyone Nightgowns”Fourteen Hills: “Pregnant House”Handsome: “Among My Life” “How Many Pass an Evening”The Laurel Review: “Care Must Be Taken” Octopus: ‘Expedition” “Nudes” “Nudes”Ploughshares: “Crosswinds Evaporation Gasping”So and So: “Citas con transeúntes” “Murmursleep”Typo: “La azafata”Verse: “Allowances” “Noche americana” “Sleepers” “Which of You the River”

para Marielay

para Joaquín

11

PARADE

Expedition

In disembarkingthe tallest of them swallowed, now we use that gestureto refer to this country.When you swallowyou do it for us.The insects were birdsnesting beside our eyelids,at night their eggspressing like pregnanttearducts, the soil as we touch it peels into a tapestrytrailing behind us.We will never build a citybecause it would eat us.We need a use for cobblestoneswe’ve brought a legionof masons. Leaning on shrubsthey keep muttering how naturaleverything must look,they stack stone wallsany heath would envy,just now sheep nuzzling there.Except we’re in a cold forest.The masons practice angryhand signals, you can tell

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DANIEL COUDRIET

them by the crevicesin their knuckles.The sheep are soil we forgotto touch properly. The stones slide overeach other like a lover’s vertebrae that morningin winter. But how is itwinter when we disembarkedwe never had a ship?This doesn’t bother us.

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PARADE

Lollipop

The strawberry is a large enough temple.I clothe myself in doll-mirrors while the vehicles moveraindrops never touch each other.A door f loating towards shoreis where we’ll draw these maps.My wife’s belly is resembling somethingof us. Child like a strawberryswallowed & my mouth is a candle.When is the yard not spraypaintedanemones? You can tell by teasing themopen with your finger. My wife’s bellyis a clenched fist. If they are sleepingyou may never discover where you live.

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DANIEL COUDRIET

Sleepers

Whenever they’ve stopped you reaching your elbow and asking, don’t tell them you have no stomach for uniforms or the marching. Don’t tell them of afternoons spent dragging spades behind us,aimlessly dragging them through soil trampledinto sidewalks so deep that they may not be sidewalks. At night they’re out laying railroad tracks along the furrows we’ve made, without asking,without need for invitations to sleep and we’ve forgotten we were actually walking through a small town, a town now engulfed by railways. No one knows where any of them lead, or which of them might’ve hung there the f lags now beating themselves or urgingthe children to illustrate, repeatedly, a buildingand all of the drawings collected to build a façade, a larger version. Will you be there, as is expected,in the town square, nearly-naked and goose-pimpledjust after dawn, the shops closed, ridiculously waiting? Will you watch the too thin woman drop her cloakfrom her child’s stroller, stepping forward to claim it?“There ought to be a parade,” someone will sayand everyone else will look around for who said it. And we never know which of them are out in the nights,wandering the tracks, lying down between the railsto sleep, the blur of passenger windows, shut blinds,reading lamps a constant strip dim above the land,the motion of the wheels brushing just above their cheeks.

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PARADE

Care Must Be Taken

How many of them working to name the town squareafter you. We’re getting ahead of ourselves

remember that it might rain and snowas you are driving the road dissolves.

Mounting a f latscreen above the dessert traylike duct-taping a father-in-law to the yardarm

to keep lookout for unfamiliar townspeople.If I were twenty inches tall, we’d adjust

our dancing posture. They’d serve gazpachoand wine to exam-takers, a mannequin

with the evening gown portion of a violinist.Her apartment. The balcony. Naked people

across the way. Quiet as they ponderthe breadoven. There’s something to say

about giving birth into your hands, quietly.Something else about tugging the hair and slapping

during sobremesa. We’ll busy ourselves.If we dig up the garden and replant it

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DANIEL COUDRIET

we’ll appear to have the freshest displaywindows.No one will ever mention produce again.

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PARADE

Nudes

The skin in our hands we imagine connectingsomething green sprawling aliveor buried by our feet, naked feet.

Too many resemblances inside arteriesonly the pressures coal feelsor asphalt families scree to the coasts.Even vineyards sense salt in the air.

The horrible noise of footsteps in sand, undercut reverberations of wires and concrete,hitchhikings, Mar del Plata. Buzzsaw, buzzsaw.Our toes bivalve and fuse themselveslittle clampings. We suspend them in pools.

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DANIEL COUDRIET

“Ama solamente lo que queda,”written in spraypaint or blood in an overpass,an artery I’ve forgotten boundaries a glimpse of thighs brushing each other, gearshift, a skirt in the passenger seat.

What message does it send, washed laundry strewn these bucket seats?How small this fabric, how it fits around you there.O, that my eyes spheres nestled orbitingin softest fabric,sun’s heat through linen.

If I painted them, a soft voiceexclaims, “the f lower beginningthis moment” and begins tunnelinginto the wall with objects at hand.

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PARADE

Eventual sunlight in f lecks or lesions.I’d want to lick plasterdust from your skin,one who is shouting, who is a tongue of warm salt.

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DANIEL COUDRIET

Making Hay

The branches swelling in odd shapes & knivessprouting from the trees. The shadowsare letters folded unevenly into sharp edges.The local water won’t be safe until they findthe far shore. I remember streamers swellingwith humidity, music from a bandstandalthough the town never had a bandstand.Someone is cutting branches like swollen teeth. So many letters, I stopped caring about letters. I didn’t even open them. They kept piling up inside the mailslot. No one told me where I live.I only think of fires. The knives quiverwhenever anyone speaks. I wanted to love thembut they never stop moving. Inside the stalksthe hay waits with faces like typewriters.

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PARADE

How Many Pass an Evening

No avenidas leaning forward to sipher anklets.

A burst of trumpeta blossom beneath tonguea quaking, neon soft, departure.

The were, were, if you.Were, were if you.

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Everyone Nightgowns

The town square growing & people banging pots & singing to try to make it slow down. Beneath her nightgown villages began.Would every mouth on your skin feel the same? I’m holding a match inside my lungs when I speak as if a rainstorm boiled the leaves. People carving staircases into the trees, jacarandá f litting around dropping the sky everywhere. I am the dog following the stroller home.The nightgowns resting on doorbells.I’m making a shed around a staircase& not thinking the soft glow of doorbells.They are the f lowers I’m growing inside.I can see them from here.

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PARADE

Crosswinds Evaporation Gasping

If I bisect my head what grasslands might I find,what f lecks of plaster what walls. What genuflectscracks to these streets, vacant lots.

There was a sandal, a child standing in it, & dust.Each sequence a leather strap creasing. Each crossroadswith arrowsigns, distances, placenames crossed out.There was a tollbooth the water had overtaken.

“This is hardly the way to make a civilization,”she whisperstrains in the backseat, my handsheading where sweaty hands head.Which are the proper questions to ask.

What days might I find,the beginnings of if I bisect my head what grasslands.

Entire childhoods the crying at dusk & tasting mildew in pillows, swallowing,swallows & the beautiful air ballooningin lungs. Which part of the dirt might be leather.

If wilderness, I’d want rickety wheels, gypsy caravan& I’d sprinkle tiny earbones all over the soil.

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DANIEL COUDRIET

I’d string my guitar with water. Arc my footforward, lean into my solos.

I’d never eat before playing. You’d hear hunger.

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PARADE

Which of You the River

Empty the mouth of its air, quick handfulsof fronds. In the carnicería, no aprons f lutteraside the saw whirring. Why the butcher againcannot his handfuls bloodf lowers. A weddinghangs in the air.

The fish are small & f latwhen they wake in the square. We drink themthe water they bring us inside their bodies. We call them grass

& girls lounging small pools in yardslegs like fronds. An open mouth, an armaturethe air making its own sound a throat.Thin legs like smoke.

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DANIEL COUDRIET

Bicycles with rims worninf late warm balloons in our ears & when we stepwe don’t stagger. Hold this, what is it, a tongue & tell it the house broken & overgrown pulsesthe stars are lips we wish to open.

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PARADE

Windowthrushes. Rosario. Plaster. Fists f lattening breadcrumbs to meat. The last days,did they ever lift you on their shoulderscarrying you to the river to sing something?

Groups of little boys told to waitpeeking out at the water are pillars, the saws stones beneath benches, we know the shorelinebecause we stop there.

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Hands love thingsas snails. When her lips open my skeletonis a warm balloon.

When I say shorelineI’m meaning an arm falling across somethinglips, brushing a sound a snail’s brushing. I want to say tonguing. I want to know something touching f lesh inside my moutha careful bird, a tongue afraid of being crushed like smoke, even a crumbling of shutters, a tattered gate a mother’s house when a girl her footsteps leaving cloudless mornings a box of sifones on the doorstep.

There are gardens behind short walls, beetlescollecting shreds of plastic, def lated tomatoestheir water f litting over the Andes, & whatever we bury& wait for churning a swarm to sting us.

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PARADE

The children’s impossible locationswill mothers recognize them by the breadcrumbsspread over the f loorslats?

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DANIEL COUDRIET

All of us crouching to the ground & slurping it to sand & greetingthe company with sifones hanging from the raftersin every room of the house.

We never meant for a city to happen.

For our mouths to clean themselves, feverishly, when we open. I taste you.

I taste you in small swallowsgasps. I taste you are not a country, I see it now, smaller greener from the window. An Argentina, a texture in swallowing beside a window is the rain as close to us as it feels the streetlamps shimmering through it a skirt, thin legs.

31

PARADE

The children find their fingersby opening the fish, the resting ribs. Candies bobbingin the vinegar cruet. Cutting boards retain boundaries. My tongue is the rain.

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My tongue with nightclothes with crocheted slippers. Cloudless my tongue shivers. It doesn’t know better. My tongue stains wallpaper & is painted over.

Which of you, in the crosswalk, carries this songon your shoulders? Your footsteps are a bloodstreamentering and exiting my body. Pebbles from the Andesclug through my arteries & small stones left outsideeach doorstep.

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PARADE

Groups of girls told not to touchthe railings. Each time a house is built waitingfor a birth.

The first a child sees is through water.

If the city falls asleep it will wake as water.

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Girls crossing their arms are damp cigarettes& a lamp lit late at the panadería. My tongueswarms.

An arm resting around shoulders, hips,a hand holding a photo of this gesture with streetlampsshimmering through it. Thin legs cigarette smokethrough teeth. I am tasting

the air holds voices as tiny stringsreverberations. This is how a voice encloses us. The girls touching the railings.

The cobblestones we walk on bulgelike eyes with wheels inside them.

Little things try to nibble us.

The nights we move througha warm breath around us. Your ribs risingcollapsing—

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PARADE

Imprint

I come from several hills. I am horrifiedto have just said this. The landscape digeststhe ends of everything I am thinking.Detached sweater arms knitted togetherare an esophagus. We find our way homeby patterns in our skin. I can experience youlaughing this way to another corridor,glass walls surrounded by sleet. Let’s stop tongue-kissing the radio voiceslong enough to hear the etching. A valet carpark, a held door, a glimpse of skin.They never mention binding, only pages sifting off balconies, slick and sticking wet, the alleyway a throatful of branches and wires.We learn the pages’ lungs by their landings.

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La azafata

The new terminals are enormous daycribsthat keep unfolding with padding and covers

for the bars. The contracts callfor a rendezvous in the gazebo

overlooking the asylum’s streams.The university purchased the streams

decades ago and relocated them.The streams drink profusely

and then whimper to whomever listens.When la azafata smiles her teeth

are milk in the rain. Wanting heris like rain. Or the fog forming

on the conservatory walls. Her handsteasing me to taste her disheveled hair.

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PARADE

Breath

The tiny dirigibles we cannot see, a soft f luttering over lips, have the most ornate wrought-iron lattice work, are beautiful in their curvatures as the edges and spirals place pressures on balloons like lips’ pressures. And the nightnoise of all of the whittling, those hands carving marionette versions of the dirigibles, the shavings we sense as nightgown slips sense lungs, the stillnesses of faces they paint. The intricacies of strings, the machinations of each silk, are the intricacies of reaching soft against the dirigibles’ f luttering fabric, the edges, the kiosks, dangling spiral sidewalks of Recoleta, the artisans whittling, the nightnoise nightgown f lutters, all of it beneath the pressures of the trees’ leaves, beautiful lungs in thin-strapped gowns wandering, their eyes, the strings, the streets beneath wrought-iron balconies, fabrics wandering the curvatures of bodies like lips.

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Clumsy Wind

It fell over, a heaviness like dyein the wax used by sobbing ambassadors radio sounds like tips of your hair insideanything being said. A face.Its skin. Its musculatureevaporating the second it touchesthe grassblades roiling on tiny gurneys.Everything started bubbling.It became awkward to be naked.We began calling ourselves a familyto calm down. The air we neededto speak was lost in the bubblesour mouths moved as the sunwould move if it were hairy& had a need for shade. A touchlike lights going out at the hospital.

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PARADE

Pregnant House

There’s something sexual about the confectionary sugar speckled everywhere, the way it makes lip-prints over the pastries. I never imagined this a bakery. And such a damaged house, the walls crinkling and curving outward. Clearly those nuzzling vegetables, something sexual about them. Look at the eggplants, as if for a moment they don’t make you want to jump in a pan of oil to fry yourself. And such a beautiful wound, a gaping bus-shaped hole in the wall. The newest bus vrooming by blank fields at night.

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Among My Life

Her fingertips aggregations of alreadiesa skin a pucker a nipple a puckerof alreadies crowding sidewalkswith rucksacks, attaché casesthe however of scantyclothingand hips I’m wanting skintones in this light of casements, easements, lightswitch then skin. Bodiesare whatever we’ve seen before.Skywriters signal the momentsyou are naked I am not with youwhen I see them. Power lines crossingover streets. Everyone wondering to even speak. I am not with you.

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PARADE

Murmursleep

The sky is drunk.It wants to breathe on us.The clouds the hands of late phonecallsmy fingers pastry paperfolds into pink gladioli birthmarking my tongue.In a green night, I could be your bootprints in the siltof Río de la Plata. A processionof def lated parade balloonsI’ve named my face afterthe river’s enormous pregnancy opening to swallow us.New mornings the same ripe bedroomslike closed mouths hanging over the street.I have the wrong hands.Río de la Plata has its fingers down your pants.The hidden ramps bringing out trafficlights, meats grilledat every corner. Trees spilling themselves to neon.I would convince them it is a marvelous machinethat helps raindrops search for us.How it is to drink this light a child fallinginto a bedframe, dried dried blood and eyes.You should not marry a river.Because you will have too many faces inside you,you will never.They’d beat me.I can feel this already.

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Nudes

There is a small hole I cradle myselfinside the wall of my stomach, no one hearsme and the gestures only I can feel themthere, it’s one now.

My stomach is a bird, see her, see her envelopingthe tiniest rare birds with namesor commonness, dozens of canaries darting an oil slickmelted into concrete.

As repetition, there were never answers ankledeepas we are the suddenness of currentwhen our ankles— can burrowingbe a gesture of affection, starbursta swallow’s touch in landing, ovendoorclosing. Never answers.

What we find is ours,we say to whoever is listening, youthe pointlessness of my touch, horneros humpingvigorously, unabashedly on the playground,

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PARADE

are my stomach, the children shielding eyes,covering ears from frenzied moansthere are never enough hands, hollowed mud sounds.

I’m washing your skin I cannot, this image, I cannot. Handfuls of dirt into my mouth, & still the croquettes.A mouth around fingers feels bones.

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Allowances

I’ve spoken water many timesnever certain of its gender.It may be normal to rend garmentsin the lake. It is always night

when you’ve offered to walk& I’ve not gone. Daffodils never had a chance to be naked & squirming. It may be normal

to rend garments in the lake& find a set of mirrors, smalldoll-like. I’d want the facesthey’ve held in small envelopes.

I once made a body from bread& placemats. I remember parking lotsas lakes I’ve neglected you,stitching the dresses together.

Always the rain as corridors of daffodilswe’d find dresses in envelopes. The moon is inside my head. We are inhaling a bindery of petals.

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PARADE

Citas con transeúntes

Each footstep a given birtha dry scarf knitting itself corners.They’ve ground far off rocks to mistfor us to stand on. I’ve no explanationfor why wet leaves are not our shoesor why we don’t gather themas envelopes for our documents.The tree is a face licking meso that all the café’s patiotablesare uneven. I still think of the brickswith open mouths. Taxis give birthnoisily. Anything about a trainthe carfuls of commuters having sexwith each other. Headlights cluster as raindrops being swallowed, and pause.Each passing hand adjusting your scarfmoments a different family you might’vetucked in, kissed lightly. Wandered.

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Noche americana

To the water belowthere’s a saxophonelow melody frozenbelow somewhere elseto the water. If you were& if you were streetlamp restingincandescent eyelinermy eyelids are childmouths

like an apartment swallowingitself like her voice reupholstering ceilings.Even in photos the lips leaving make their own mornings of unfamiliar nudities. No way to get a moutharound city, how you cityme.

Daniel Coudriet lives with his wife and son, and the family divides time between Argentina and the United States. He is the author of Say Sand (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010), and his translations of Argentinean poetry have appeared in many journals.

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Text is set in Adobe Garamond Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach and released in 2000. Adobe Garamond Pro is a contemporary typeface family based on the roman types of Claude Garamond and the italic types of Robert Granjon.