Today, it’s our pleasure to bring you four centos by Eduardo C. Corral, all revisiting the work of Tim Dlugos.
TO TIM DLUGOS (CENTO)
I thought I was incapable of love. The year
I could not find a pen.
When you stop to think, it’s quite the bargain.
We were supposed to
drop a quarter
in this story. The horizon drops. All winter the sky gets higher.
It used to be more fun to be a poet.
I want a Pepsi for breakfast.
When I’m this blue,
I wash
the city and the continent.
Masturbate.
I really ought to carry a notebook.
Don’t know why.
TO TIM DLUGOS (CENTO)
In the latest field guide, they don’t rate
your small hands, your
postcard from Gardone where a fascist poet
in college drag (not
Barry Davidson) is finishing Remembrance of Things Past.
I don’t want to tell you that I kept
one minute. You can be in
my fantasy: walking hand in hand
in a bar in Philadelphia. Once, someone thrust a bottle of poppers
underneath your skin, your heart.
This will be the last time I set down
white petals.
Someone said your teeth are capped.
Part of me is growing.
TO TIM DLUGOS (CENTO)
I used to love an architect.
Let’s take a walk along the walnut-colored wharf.
In your eyes
it’s after midnight. Your fat friend
(precocious w/ missile-age glitter)
fell asleep stoned. Second
in the world! The world:
new numbers in your address book. I looked
luminous.
I see you in an airplane, in a
mad doll.
We both got tired.
Each year I forget the simple fact:
the wooden pier goes far out in the sea.
TO TIM DLUGOS (CENTO)
An afternoon of steady light.
Somebody up there is brooding. I think
I should apologize.
Within the yarn, the needle:
the lovemaking grows more intense, not less.
I’m afraid of the country.
Strange to see the river through the window.
As a white male Republican
I was a mess. I felt like crying.
The river fills with shining rain, the way
sky gets light.
There used to be a better reason.
Everybody tells me I’m crazy because I walked around.
Little birdie footprints. Then a rush.
——
EDUARDO C. CORRAL is a CantoMundo fellow and the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.
