Alex Cohen

In all likelihood, they were the ugliest pants I had
ever seen. Something with the soft brush of velvet
but none of the right lay, huge hem with full break.

Repeating from somewhere once, I said “corduroy”
comes from cord du roi, cloth of kings. Obviously, B.S.—
I mean, who the hell ever saw Louis XVI in wools?
I picture him now in the pillory, in Levi’s, with his head
all spent, tumbled pale in the basket like an unripe berry.

I get pale-dry like that when I sleep funny. Those days
always seem so muffled, like a watch wrapped in cotton,
and viscous time contracts like a vein. Just like that, a day
can fold itself into three hours, skim milk in coffee.
The way it falls in on itself, then disperses. Now look,

I’ll be the first to admit: it’s been years since
I truly wanted something. A pair of fuzzy socks
with individual toes, the texture and color of moldy grapes.
So it’s not that I want you, this oil-slicked time, these pants.

More so, I want the feel of it, tight bands of corduroy,
packed like bamboo, Styrofoam-peanut seconds
pressed just-so to the minute, the easy sweep of skin

on skin. The feeling of everything suspended
at once, like how the light seems to honey
in Nan Goldin’s pictures, a looming sense
of awareness coming into a frail body,

like the husband walking in on his wife with the plumber
while John Lennon intones the “Day Tripper” chorus.
It’s such a steamy coincidence that I whip pan to the husband
as the words come down like hail: It took me so long to find out,
and I found out.

In the end, I don’t buy the pants, and nobody bothers
to fix the sink, which is a flood hazard. Which is to say,
nothing happened, and no one cared about it one bit.

After Magritte (1935) and Leone (1966)

Doctors promise it is not so, but I swear I am
going deaf in my left ear. Unequivocally, this is
more humiliating for them than it is for me.

After all, I have done the tests, snapped my fingers
on left and right, heard the difference in pitch
like the small slaps of waves under the hull.

Once, in a floating hotel, I was given no pillow,
told the sound of the river would be my cushion.

Still, I couldn’t fall out of time there, couldn’t still
the thrum of my pulse: something about sweeping
and ticking, the dull shush of the sand.

It’s like that sometimes on dim afternoons,
a slow wade into late lunch and oyster crackers,
when the real sense of small apocalypse creeps in.

It rolls by, the tumbleweed a minute before high noon,
the shrill, smoking, wild-west beat like boiling water.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, each passing like a hiccup
because the throat makes no such distinctions when parched.
It simply cries out, then sleeps.

In the Western, the cowboy hero. Drygulched
when he least expects it. Bandits rustle his steer. Revolvers pop
like whips. Again and again, owl eyes stare with apathy.

There is much in this world that is unspeakable,
and so much silence worlded by its thingness.

Like the leeward side of a mountain, which is deserted
by the rain, lying in its shadow. The silent rock as it stands.
There is only one thing in the universe that is like an ocean.

Somehow, it all spins like a quarter on the sticky bar counter,
the illusion of fullness, a silver berry, for a second. Then the drop.
Something about sweeping and ticking.