What I Came to Know of Daybreak
From an Unnumbered Room
Her Night Out at Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro, New Orleans
Tide Daughter
Cape May Coastal Footpath
A Trans Siren Fails to Sing the Man Wandered and Lost
Diorama for the End of Summer Along the Mohawk River
All the Venice You Need Summon
Second Fragment: Just Beyond the Port of Chesapeake
First Fragment: Just Beyond the Port of Chedapeake
What I Came to Know of Daybreak
The clock attains the hour
when my spine
wakes its caravan of nerves.
I unstitch daybreak
from a troubled dream.
I fear light creeps the window
to gage me less than a woman —
a being begrudged from sin
into its own rendering
of bearable light.
Nighthawks quit hideouts,
become fugitives of the sun
ever pleading innocence.
Vanishing points absolve
each car leaving town.
Unguessed miles of good intentions
where headstones drift
like waymarks in the wilderness.
The girl next door never was.
And her already gone.
Nightbirds sing in the dusk above roofs.
Maybe birdsong at this hour is ghost-ballads
heard only by lives passing away —
elegies all they can escape with now.
Landscape in a single room comes down to a bruised sun.
In the pierglass, her visage turns back her gaze:
Décolletage. Maquillage.
Perhaps tricks of darkness test each affection:
affairs of mercy, countermoves of sorrow
where grace and rust are twinned
as sure as death and sleep.
Like all who love and all who sin.
What flesh, she prays,
must bring to music all this damaged light.
Her Night Out at Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro, New Orleans
She tells her boyfriend
whose faithfulness treads thin ice,
not to start drama
he can’t finish,
her eyes fixed on him
as though he were a figure
who’d appeared in uneasy dreams.
Uncrossing her legs,
her red stilettoes
hit the floor
like a slap.
But her bright talk
breaks his malaise —
his choked spirit,
and they watch malbec
pool itself into dark ponds
in their glasses.
Now she shuts her eyes,
puts the workday behind her —
its collapsible facts, droll hours
and takes in the slow Blues
that wash up her spine
like a tremor of soft smoke.
That night, she’ll massage
her aged father’s shoulders,
their ache like legends now.
His sole caregiver,
she’ll hear him rustling
bedsheets, think of a swingset
in a far-off field of summer.
She wakes in the boarding house to the scent
of a stranger’s unseen cigarettes
and freezer ice dropping
so loud it shakes her from a dream.
She knows it’s only ice,
but it sounds like frantic footfalls.
Perhaps it’s best to slumber longer
under the depth of quilts.
Their down’s as indulgent
as the peacoat her father wrapped
her twelve-year-old frame in
when she stood at the lip of the sea.
When she watched him
row further into the winter tide.
The phone startles her out of a threadbare dream
in a room that held the quiet of a city under curfew.
She stretches, her image shifting in the nightstand mirror
as she tells the unguessed caller, I can only touch myself now.
*
Along the footpath, she inhales the coddle of a piney breeze.
Shreds of gull cries lift above the trundle of the surf.
The deepening sky shifts beneath the threat
of thunder and small craft warnings.
*
The wind’s salty stride summons the disquieting taste
of a stranger’s kiss, a perfume at the hollow edge of recall,
a woman’s name to misremember.
That ringlet of hair holding the fresh glisten of rain.
A Trans Siren Fails to Sing of the Man Wandered and Lost
I was the enchantress
who failed Olympus
my whims an indulgence
whittling the resolve
of sailors —
a game of the gods
but I came to my end
between the breakwater
and spindrift
of Ionian surf
the sea swallowing
my wail to Odysseus —
There is no Ithaca
even as I begged
to be cradled ashore
in a now dead language
where I too
was a rumor
a song hemorrhaging
for the lost.
Diorama for the End of Summer Along the Mohawk River
Crows churn in a troubling sky. Their desolate screed
knows what winds will deny them.
Blackberries are down to thorns spiking the ditchbanks.
A woman blows on newly painted nails as if she’d burned them.
For at least one lover, she’s a falling barometer
of the heart, a raingauge that told him the road home
abrades fast in hard weather.
She drifts back to the last time she unclipped her hair,
the dark strand that swam down to a man’s fingertips,
holding a hand to his lips, whispering I don’t want to hear it.
From a chair by the bay window, she studies finches
building pallid homes beneath the eaves,
watches wind on the river come faint at dusk,
a sandal tossed in the tide like a wounded animal.
The blue of her walls compliments the rains
that will sweep autumn into the year.
In his bedroom down the hall, her youngest son
twitches in a dream. His feet run without a sound.
All the Venice You Need Summon*
New Orleans nights kick in
like Calvino’s musky Cities of Desire.
The senses wake all at once to fluid wants,
your eye not settling on a single image —
treacherous or otherwise, on festive streets
where broken stories are put on hold
and neoned glee is never passé,
bodies refusing to rust in all this laughter,
feeling their own wild regale, hard falls from grace,
even as no one on these streets
will ever call your name, and even,
as in Calvino you become the city’s slave,
immersed in these fugitive hours
to sing her darkness beautiful.
* Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities speaks of fifty-five imaginary cities, one of them depicted sensually in a chapter titled Cities of Desire, each city bearing a woman’s name, each a beautiful and baroque stand-in for Venice.
Second Fragment: Just Beyonf the Port of Chesapeake
A storm leaves its hazy torpor
over the coast
like the breath of someone
sleeping too close.
And this is what stays visible
in the shoaling light
that slides over spindrift and jetty:
scavenger tracks that run like a map
drawn with a palsied hand.
Breakwaters probe the tide,
the embankment but a relic
of the fading summer.
A woman stands listening
to the surf’s muffled wash,
stares seaward as if it’s her past,
the soft wind and warm quiet
a clemency only this shore can offer.
Saline air scrims the salt of her sweat.
Her bones ache and creak
like tethered hawsers.
Just offshore, a swimmer
breaststrokes hard and fast
like someone quenching rage,
a soft white wake churning behind them,
a sight that turns her mind back
to her daughter who’d owned a stallion
with a white forehead. A proud beast
they last saw in grasslands out west,
fleeing through a field of lightning.
First Fragment: Just Beyonf the Port of Chesapeake
Tell me it’s not a complex beauty when sidewalks
buckle from elm roots. Towns bear the names
of lovers you once knew. Night air erupts
with the wing-dust of gypsy moths.
Jagged seams of crumbling brick bloom with the sallow taint
of ragweed. Bluestem lies flat along the tracks
of the last Norfolk Southern that trundled loud enough
to bruise your skull, and abandoned rail spurs
are feral with broomsedge and cordgrass.
Nightbirds will soon burn their accents into the dark.
Fog sweeps past in a light wind,
like the ghost of a woman’s slip. A radio station
at its limits of reception will pitch static through the air.
I take a room alone in a motel so vacant
it seems alone itself — adrift, suspended above the earth,
holding the animal heat found in crowded ports and flophouses,
the floral alchemy of sweat and mignonettes.
A door creaks like teeth gritting in a bad dream
and I wonder if I’m to feel sadness,
like a mourner hired for a funeral in a potter’s field.
Maybe I should phone a lover I’ve ignored
to the point of impudence. She’s a portside busker by day
and by night scrubs butterflies from truckstop windshields,
bringing the brightest wings home to her daughter
who puts them on her bedside table
that catches the white spark of the moon.
JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published in 2020. Journal credits include The Brooklyn Review,Faultline, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, and Vassar Review. They are also a collage artist after the styles of Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville, and Katrien De Blauwer.
