cento 

Self Portrait (no. II)

Night after night, 

I will come back to this world 

on the back of a black panther, 

speckled with the gold 

of the cold and distant stars. 

Stars like courtesans. I will go on 

worshipping the mens room, 

Ypsilanti, the odor 

of sweet grass, Super Deluxe, 

his pretty mouth, tornadoes, 

dim lights of sleeping buildings, 

dark gray water, the cows, the stars 

like sisters. My horse’s mane. 

The rooster. Sisters like trees 

on a faraway island. 

When I raised the gun 

to my own head 

I recalled the 

Willamette River. 

Pink Floyd on the M-80 

and stolen blush wine, 

fields and fields 

of yellow flowers, 

how beautiful they were, 

how often I stopped 

to pick them, twine them 

in my horse’s mane. How I 

danced, midnight after midnight, 

on dynamite: a Jessica, 

a neverending rain— 

the afternoon 

I bent to stroke the dying horses 

as dew bathed my feet. 

Piles of wet leaves, 

the veins pressed together. 

Until oxygen. 

Until Christmas. 

Until I wake, 

falling through the sky. 

I don’t need a name.

I will always be mercurial, quick, 

luminescent, inconceivable. 

I’m James Dean.

When my Porsche

slams into that Ford, I’m doing 

one-hundred eighty-six thousand miles 

a second, but I’m healed 

by air. 

I stand up like Lazarus, 

walk home 

across the water.