Cities Hidden by Rain

by Edgar Cage

Four Elegies for Mike Bauer

1.

The
slutty
daffodil
I tempted
from
a wordsworth
childhood

with
bribes
of jim beam,
its
sometimes
gripping
stupor,

emotionally
gray
ninth
grade
wilderness,

to heal
an
obituary
that
included
no
listed
summers,

blooms,
for
mike bauer,

dead
of
“a short
illness”
at 41,

a
stargazing,
rice-grain nipple.

2.

From a lost room
in a book of windows
he gives back his birthdays,

his voyage
to the nurse-drunk

hospital,

its trilobite trances
and long white halls

and EKGs
where half the sunlight
now is

gone.

3.

He prays to you,

here
by
memory

among the dandelion strokes
of June.

He prays to you
from
his
hospital
ark

pushing past
undocumented
sleep
blockages.

Here by grief
in the wedding arousals
of June,

you
welcome
his antlered murmurs

that made it
to you

from
a bone cell sighting
of a Marlboro’s
still-thriving
winter.

He asks only
that your entrance to Paris
stay prom-wet,

here by heart-skip inside
his prayers to you.

4.

In
the
slaughtering
stillness,

where
white-
coated
farmers
plow
the
insides
of
a
coma,

the
grandmother
fawns
drift
through
an
IV
drip’s
mansions.

They
watch
the
twitching
bodies
of
rain
scrape
each
other
of
all
bird
tremors,

the
nurses
checking
for
shadows
and
arrhythmias,

crushed
aspirin
footsteps
on the floor
by the man’s bed,

one
gasp
shattered
into
many
gasps

slipping inconsolably
away.

Paxil Species Nursing Home

I held the moth
all night until it died
gently, one wing
during the dark,
the other at dawn.

The Weather's Dictatorship

Summer heat that won’t
go away—twenty deer
missing from October.

New Year’s Day—
among the patches of sickened snow,
shovels fucking.

Each word passing
its fear to the next
until the page is dry,

meaning without words,

all sound eliminated
from the map of sound.

The sand buddhas
revealing
nothing but sand
in a scarab’s
distant Sanskrit.
*

Surrounding
a cockroach’s temple,
I sleep in someone else’s rage,
sharpening a grass blade
to lure the dawn closer.
*
Shiver
the way each
unspoken
fern
        shivers,
leading you
to the fifth silence
where they buried
the statues
        of the twitching forest.