Joshua Weiner   WEEGEE: CONEY ISLAND BEACH AFTER MIDNIGHT No moon is good. I take off my shoes And go silently so as not to lose The shot I know is lurking there— ............American made ............Is my stock-in-trade, As whatever's in the frame I choose, I chose, though it's like I wasn't there. What's out there? Why, sweethearts in love Making love out where it's dark enough. I wouldn't disturb them for the world. ............Each kiss, what's left ............Between each breath— Hard work, but the kind that makes you laugh. There goes a match. What's that I heard? There, in the lifeguard station lookout, Lovers exhausting each other's doubt. I'll catch them fast without a flash: ............To make it clear ............How they appear Like drags inhaling their way to ash, Or a mouth getting ready to shout... Too dark to have used the range finder there, It's like scooping yourself, your feeling, where Trying to find the way, you're caught ............(The frame in which ............Your subjects twitch) Alive, exposed, and as if too near: The lens opens and you take the shot. Why they were up there near the sky I thought I'd see as the fluid primed The image into a final shape; ............But all I found ............Was a kind of sound, A woman up there like a lie, Alone and bewildered after the rape. You can read the "Lifeguard Only" sign She leans against. There's no clear line Between her hair and where the night ............Begins to fan ............Out in a plan Expanding further than stars can shine, And outside my frame to make it right. What did she choose, which choice was deferred As she waited for the bus without a word No matter where she sat to wait? ............All that is there: ............The apparent stare Out to the wave that can't be heard That she readies herself to contemplate.   TRAMPOLINE The kids next door who bought it for their mom ............................on Mother's Day—a joke?— play it like palms on a marching drum, ............................a rhythmic coital creak ............that carries clear across the open yard to call my son like a Barnum top-hat bard. He runs out in his socks, my turn my turn! ............................They haul him up so he might bounce and stamp and lift his legs to learn ............................how little one can weigh ............up there, the moment when the body peaks and hangs, becoming what the body seeks: weightlessness and weight; self launching beyond self; ............................before the theory, fact. Yet as he flies he drops down like a leaf ............................the earth tries to give back. ............He tumbles, caught at last in the canvas sheet, then feels again through socks the warm concrete.       EPITAPH He can't remember what they bought, two corner mausoleum plots or two in the center, but he doesn't trust those bastards, they'll take your money and who knows what, he wants to go back, watch the deposit, make sure he gets what he paid for— he wants the right spot, the one they picked out together, not in the corner, in the center, because they planned it all, and with his heart he was going to die first, and she'd remember where to put him.     ART PEPPER Scared boy, he even fled a cloud reminding him of what might happen when his father returned from sea, wasted, to find him perhaps again locked out in the cold, waiting for other drinkers to come home (his mother, her lover)—the catalysis of routine violence passing close like a storm cloud insisting rain; until the rain did fall and the father left, returning though once with a clarinet... And when the cloud came back in the sound of a memory the boy had grown, had learned to let it swell into the note he now holds in me as a laser reads his tone mastered for fidelity— sweet prismatic splinter and swing, a double-timing scrape aiming for my ear alone in a rented chamber. Nowhere, ...................and I'm with him, fully in tune as if he stood hot before me, his life seeming no more dear to him than the sax he hawked for any kind of syrup he hoped might creep into his heart like fucked-up love that felt like love in the belly meadow warmth of his measured joy. Hungry Art, Art of wind, of lips upon the reed; Art of blue, foolish Art, would you be so nice to come home to?— Bragging his genius for a time turned rancid in San Quentin, swaggering with a ripped-off thuggery honor and sick with the terror of not seeming criminal... White man junky thief whose skin glowed narco-green with the sound of Keats amped through Pound I repeat his name jacked-in to the straight blowing of a life clarifying like butter over flame: what's home, where's harm; how to fix; how praise— Lover, come back to me. Why are we afraid?     POSTCARD TO THOM Addressed, it lately sits propped on my desk with no reason now to go—you're gone, somewhere behind the snow screen, though I think you'd laugh at this lucky charm from Herculaneum suspended by a chain in opened doors even the bravest might have fled through— a gladiator, and in both raised fists a knife to strike himself, his own huge leaping cock curving up with a snarling panther's head to savage the source of its awakening: the mind, alarm of want ringing the blood as appetite grows to feel itself grow longer, twisting back on the hot stone of the heart. And dangling down from panther cock, each foot, the muscled back and swollen scrotal sac— a little bell provoked by the cooling wind.     Joshua Weiner, winner of a Whiting Writer's Award and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of two books, The World's Room and From the Book of Giants. He lives in Washington, DC.   Published in Volume 8, Number 3, Summer 2007.   To read more by this author: Joshua Weiner: DC Places Issue credits