Alloy Sun

Alloy sun.
The sun breaks on the rocks.
Sunkist™.

I sob in my black bean soup.
The rope that parts on the tilt of dark.
The sky fills with more

lovely and bankrupt
we abscond. Come off it.
In a moment we invent the dream
to explain our jerking awake.

Root system of stars,
the elms that open their umbrellas of night.
O September, O October, O November –
You can take this job and shove it.

City of the Big Bang

A scope sun till unfurled
throat shaft
a drowned in shadow

willow camphor string
of colored lights around the yard

Of what are made the hopes
and fears of Kristy Yamaguchi?

First the wish for rain
in humidity
then rain and hail

damaging the blossoms
and fine cherry harvest
You’re undressing in the dark

You’re undressing in the shotgun light
of a Coors can
What tides await us

Sincerely, Hokusai

from Poems for Pitchers

Dear Fidel Castro

We will build our past to fit any myth.
Scouted by the Senators,
Rhapsodic as shirt sleeves.
Yellow hammer.
Yellow sickle.

History is a poor eternity.
I am thinking of the cool shaded rooms of Havana,
the opulent ruin,
Built for its own obsolescence.

Hey, Coca-cola!
Rain in the bottom of the sixth.

North Front

The orange municipal trucks back up,
dead grass, waist-high, ruffles in the parting wind
Many years in the wish of darkness.
The parade of labor spreads salt in the new streets.
Two days indoors,
My mind is the Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl,
the running game of Ole Miss.
How sweet from the shower you steam
after a haircut. The New Year
is orange. Lentils the color of money.
River-boat captain, you are beautiful
by starlight—
crumbs in your wake for the birds, and for the moths,
a winter porch-light.

Weekend in the Century

1.

The bees are waking up.
The bees are flying slowly
in the air.
I don't want to die.

The rum interior of spring.
I have taken to the streets
in my bathrobe.
Trees are popsicles

which is filled with music as
green is vigorous—stinging
is what hurts
where your hands are.

If tears are vows
I have been disabused
all this time—
Her hair smells like a spent match.

2.

Every squalor of plaster
is moss covered, which despite

in spring mists, evokes a red feeling.
Now each night is nothing

like the rest. There is a stream
of air. There is a light bulb in every window.

The neighbor's curtains have been taken down,
and the mercury is cloud's fluorescence.

Five fingers are to the State Police
as poison to the eye.

Spectacles too are their own light.
Baseball on television.

Kansas City 8 Toronto 3
Boston 3 Baltimore 1
New York 4 Seattle 9

On the east side
the avenues unfurl in order:
Lexington, Madison, Park, Fifth.

And the sky is white
over Simone Weil tonight.

3. Epithalamium

School bus yellow my teeth
hurt. Everyone is getting ready:
the Lakers are out in six,
July is rose like the ocean,
the mountains are golden like
Suzanne Lucci's daytime Emmy.

It is an amber morning:
bees to their hive, rum
to their bottle, trombones
to their dusky voice.

Even the bride is playing
Pick Six. Grime on the sill,
song in my heart:

California, California,
O California, California.
California, O California,
California, California.

The Mingulay Boat Song

Abrupt and foxglove. The wind scales back.
Dragonflies sprout from bow
to gunnel; bluebottles pour from every seam.

The body pierced by a small hole,
or the lampshade, invents you.
Speaking of the Hebrides,

a schooner like a dark smudge on a dark
sea hauls to windward.
The way you wring the ropes of your hair.

The way a deserted village spoils
on its hinges. The way sheep
graze among the cobblestones.

A larynx stems its chords.
Coax, wrack and sigh, threshing of sun—
And the door, to the wind, blown in.

Batting Cleanup for the Los Angeles Dodgers

That same old feeling,
a pop song.
Sky choral.
Difficult what slow
it is. I grind
my teeth in my sleep.

It is wrong
to want to punt
the child that wails
in the night. I remind
myself, it is wrong
to want

We are out of doors
goes the sales pitch
for spring
like the Home Depot.

Soft blue trees stain
the edges of the afternoon.

Conviction Want

Each day is everything
like the rest
By threes undoes us.

Thrush eve’s thunder,
surf of traffic from the west
Side Highway.

Seashore machine
By sevens, by threes.
The high metallic whine

of katydids or a neighbor’s
air conditioner.
This hammer heart

Snow white, bone white,
cloud white, stone white
Empathy is divisive.

Ryan Murphy is the author of Down with the Ship from Otis Books / Seismicity Editions as well as the chapbooks The Gales, Ocean Park, and On Violet Street. He has received awards from Chelsea Magazine and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art as well as a grant from The Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City.

Poems courtesy of the author and Otis Books.

Bridget Cross chats with Ryan Murphy.