JEN TYNES
LONELY SAILORS PASS THE TIME AWAY & TALK ABOUT THEIR HOMES
If you are a landlubber then I am the carpenter’s inherited level
whose hazy-white cross-eye, balanced between ruby hairlines,
shot toward the empty heavens to the crooked fiberglassed roof
and eaves and decided by the moment in hallowed oak it spent not moving
that you live here with your whiskey and your swimming fins, figurative
language and short-lived, bachelor animals, your shower cap and face
directed toward every wind. Wake up late and look the super in his face;
he owns me and will sing a song with your name in it, on the level
of your bathroom floor he will crawl and hunker, make figurative
suggestions for your rehabilitation: elbow fixtures, hairline
fracture spackle, caterpillar bindings for your maps, u-haul moving
your ass out of here. He will smoke stout cigars on your roof,
a mighty, generational bearcat who is treed on your roof
singing until the street also calls your name, asks you to face
your noisy, emotional dilemma, the floor beneath you is moving
and your lover-to-be, the garrulous super, has climbed up another level,
is bellowing his admiration for several salty waters including the hairline
distinction he spies between the Atlantic ocean and your figurative
bayside view, a bay of stolen cars, shanghai deportation, a difference
figurative
only to out-of-towners and the dew-eyed bearcat balanced on your roof,
the heavy-laden animal you’ve grown to love despite your dark hairline
which is peaked like a widow, like a quick wiper blade cuts your face
into a tabernacle, a craggy stone of a deeper metamorphic level,
a fat black rock on a fenced-in housetop walkway—you aren’t
moving
your tears for anyone. I am an accomplice, the heirloomed tool moving
you, via the lovelorn, in blindness, to call this doorway straight, this
figurative
ledge a ledge at all, because all our eyes can mist. If I could be on the
level
with you we’d both know our female sides by now, belting whiskey on
the roof
of this oppositional, out-of-whack, sherbert-colored complication whose
face
is tall and warbled as a hurricane, made up of death glitches and hairline
litigations, strangers fallen on salty ice. Sailor, you are merely a hairline
on the warted, woolen hand of my bearcat, the super who is moving
me, tactile solace, back and forth in his metal toolbox, his face not a
face
you want to meet again in a dark alley across the world, some figurative
lover’s lane where sadness stands. There is no glass ceiling, no crooked
roof
to keep the tools, sailors, and drunken animals from floating off this level
into dead space. Level with me, navigator. If all the figurative
hairlines in all the world were stone-serious, crackling through this roof
tonight, what would be the first thing moving across your long face?