James Cagney
James Cagney is a poet and writer from Oakland, Ca. He has appeared as a featured poet at
venues throughout the San Francisco-Bay Area, Sacramento, Vancouver and Mumbai. His work
has been published on line and in print via Lime Hawk, Print Oriented Bastards, Five-Eighty
Split and Eleven-Eleven, among others. His book, Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos
Theory will be published in August by Nomadic Press. Visit his blog at https://thedirtyrat.blog/
Vigil For Vespers (Opus No. 38) – James Cagney
What if each star were a flame fountaining
beneath an onyx teepee
elder tongues / in an orbit of whispering of moth wings/
lick the flames with stories
the endless equations calibrated on nights chalkboard
the pulse point of planets scattered along the topographical
map of the sky’s arachnid body
spinning out combinations of constellations
a tarot of planets unlock abandoned and rusting memories
beneath the sweet
drizzle of attention
bet the coins between corpses teeth all the hoaxes
of love dissolve to moon dust back home
the milky way is here because i am here
and it is well worth crying over
I cannot stop offering my red swarm of tears
ghost peppers of dead stars
i am less a crumb on the lip of the lake
how its tongue sleepwalks a language
night often mistranslates in dreams
the harmonic choir of cutthroat trout
sounds cribbed from the pages of Rachmaninoff’s
lost rhapsody — a tragedy of silence
lulling me into this all-night vigil for vespers
and star-lights uneasy correspondence with gravity
its hard to lie quietly in the unmade bed of a prehistoric crater
with its sweet sheets of sage brush
and not consider love’s offices bankrupt and ridiculed back home
Holy Strata of Sweat & Skin – James Cagney
Pull up a blanket of topsoil
on the bank of this murmuring lakebed
and let the desert sing to us in the language
of sweet creosote and wild lavender
Thick gelatin of night carbonated with hot stars
remind us how dependent we are
on the milk of god’s silence
Phosphorescent thighs of the moon /
cross and re-cross
Despite the debt of morning (& her deputy of memory)
making love here is the right thing to do
…to subdue and splatter with whips of breath
the alternating current of pulses
beneath a bough of fingertips
Compared to myth and map of the tongue
beauty in the dark is useless
Stars watch us (with envy / as much as we do them)
then faint enchanted
out of the silent choir of the night sky
The galaxy above us a sugar sonnet rhyming in planets while Asterias’ fingers drip astrological omens…
Silver oyster toenails
zipping gravel
mirrored beneath the Braille sky
the sinking, the slipping, the listening
the smoothing, the sluicing, the lightning
The shifting dunes of an oceanic body
(its orchestra conducted by a tongue)
So many routes for times touch to take
Column of bone, cross of rubber
the smiling white ship of the bareback moon
stars drip from its cratered eyes
to shoot like dice across nights velvet floor