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I'm losing something: my mind, or my limitations... injury is a loss, but so is sculpting. |
Thermopylae: A Eulogy (2011) I saw the delicate arrangement of sweatlets trickle dewy and bright from wrists to collarbone as the barbell hovered above Him like recent rain. Like a lamb He lay on the bench, softly supine under the flickering pale. God gave Him gravity, vanity and perspiration, and little else, it seemed. But here with His back on the cracked red vinyl He mixed His bitter gifts like Cy Twombly mixed primer and plaster with trash and fever. They both served Greek phantoms and I think they both chuckled when they looked at their hands. He was a kind of barber and subcutaneous fat fell to the floor without rustling. He sculpted by accumulation and He painted by taking away. He was a bloodless butcher, a body poet and a capitalist stranded on an island. Where was He? In his skin. When was He? I remember Him. What was He? This, and nothing else. For His name was stitched into His gymbag and there it stayed, unspoken. Stated simply, He kept no pictures in His wallet, only a faded membership card which was who He was. When the dumbbells danced in His hands He stared at the orange EXIT sign, at the gap between the E and the X that made a squat house. He fixed on it like a sailor on a star and moved with fullness and precision. Like Euclid He described an arc full of triangles. On Saturday morning He would run from Marathon to Athens with His headphones on. He listened to Christmas tunes by Vince Guaraldi, and midnight jazz that never resolved. He carried His Walkman fondly and never dropped it as He switched cds in the middle of a jog. He kept them stacked by the treadmill and they rattled as He ran. He studied the rippling tendons of other patrons the way Aristotle might study an argument. He seemed to favor structure over sheer bulk, continuous flow from finger to shoulder, from jaw downspine to hips to toe, bodies in balance and persuasive harmony. He silently scoffed the swollen tyrannosaur with groping grip, the five-second Hercules, the skeleton sprinter, and all the wanton brutes like hairy balloons without discipline or inspiration. Their bodies were careless and mute beside their betters: Galenus' Greeks, the staunch Venetians of Mercurialis, tribal warriors and folktale heroes, men that made gods in their image. But he never said these things, He held everything but the barbell close to His chest. Everything He did, He did to Himself and He left everything else exactly as He found it. Even with all the running and pushing and curling, He was really like a plant: His only motion was growth. Every day, rougher roots, leaner leaves and a stiffer stem. A flowerless plant that thrived on gravity, vanity and perspiration. On the day Twombly died He was listless and dull. Straightly He strode to the bench and loaded three hundred fifty American pounds. The old bar wrapped in His white knuckles ascended seven times, then came crashing down, crushing His sternum. His chest caved in, sucking the bar into Himself, right below His shoulders. As He bled out with His back on the cracked red vinyl, the artist finally refined Himself out of existence. Eight days later I followed His name to His grave and left a bunch of flowers cast in white plaster. Once I had asked Him what He believed in. His laconic reply: "I am willing to entertain absolutely anything." These Things Are the Things That I Think About When I Think About Thinking (2011) If there's one thing that I hate-- and there's a lot of things that I hate, I'm a hateful person-- but more than anything I hate... thinking. I think about trains and lakes, I think about women, I think about bruises, I think about where I am and my shoes, I think about the pattern in the carpet, bed bugs and coffee and cardiac arrest, I think about memories, about the things I wish I could forget, the things I wish I could remember, and I think about how neat it would be if I could barter with my unconscious, buy up all the nice memories, the practical memories, sell all the threadbare filthy memories at a garage sale, and I think about women and trains and bridges, and I think about my skin, my stomach, my justice, like I don't know what to do with them, like it's not in my control, and I think about strings and excuses and I think about what I am, I think about my face and my name and I think about the people thinking about me, when they think about my face, and they think about my name and they think about my thoughts, and I think about the things I say, I think about good days and bad days on good days and bad days, but the thinking makes good days bad days so I try not to think on good days, but that makes me think about not thinking on good days and then I'm thinking about thinking and how much I hate thinking and I think about hate and I think about skin and I think about women and then I think oh god, what am I? and I don't know how to answer that because the way that I think has a lot to do with coffee and food and the phases of the moon and I think I'm going to be sick when I think about how I think about things and I try to think about the last five thoughts I had and I try to think about what I thought about yesterday and I try to think about how I thought about it yesterday and the theories and themes and things I think are so alien every second until my thinking evolves back into the way I was thinking before and it's like a network of memories wakes up when I'm back in the way I was when I thought them and the rest go to sleep so the thinking starts to breed its own kind of thinking until I find myself thinking about trains when I'm nowhere near trains and I never thought I'd be the sort of person who thinks about trains and I think, what's wrong with me? and I think, it's the thinking that's wrong with me and if I didn't think so much I wouldn't think myself into bad situations where I think all across the city at night and I think at three in the morning and I think by the shore and on the platform and across the bridge and at the edges of lots of things and you'd think I could just train myself to think happy thoughts; well on a good day that's fine in theory but the rest of the days its all I can do to think about the things in front of me and then I don't mind the bed bugs and carpets and headaches and hunger because that ties me down but only until a woman walks by and my thoughts wander back to bruises and bridges and god, I wonder, god I don't think it's supposed to be like this and I remember I didn't always think like this and I think someday I'll be better and I think someday I'll learn to love thinking again and I'll learn to think loving again and sleep in peace again and walk with peace again and think of peace again and until then I think I should stay away from trains. Hard Wind, Bad Blanket (2011) [companion piece to Waiting Calls the Macabre Macaw] For the wistful drifting dogs who hung their muzzles in the sky; and Of the mellow molten snoring lightly lovely measured sigh; and If the dumbly tumbling bumbling in the valley lastly lie; why Then yet still perhaps a smile wryly while they diamond die. But How, if so the signs astounding flicker in the portent sky, should Be be so much vaguely weakly strangely til that diamond die, if Such be such as right and fine towards a measured heaven cry? But Why the crooked underwhelm? But why the hungry spasmodi? That the mellow molten snorer lightly love a mesmer sigh, and That the dogs adrift a-howling lick the trickles from their eyes, and That the bumbling mumbling bumpkins catch themselves and rub their thighs be All in all my merest beg of-- beg of you, you thumb divine! Has is what the sleepy landlord wears who rubs his sleepy eye; and Snatch is how the magpies swamped in glitter weakly alibi; and Hold is some vain inkling of the stubborn never diamond die; but Reach is all the humble bumpkin with his lips a-whisper sigh. Does this valley ever in the lofty lulling lastly lie? Ought-- is ought an even question in the final measured sigh? If we-- can we-- may we-- dream we bake this muddled picture pie? What if all the molten drippy lovely nonsense run awry? I'm sorry, wistful drifting dogs who hang your muzzles in the sky; Adieu, you mellow molten snorers lightly loving measured sighs; For all my dumbly tumbling bumbling all about this nasty lie, I've none a word, a flash, a smell to show for smiling diamond die. Entreaty to a Harsh Mistress (2011) I thought upon the murky glower of the moon behind her clouds. I sought-- an apology? No, I conceded her remotion. I was born too late, and by my body I had lied. And besides, the stars between us made an ocean, A populous and unforgiving ocean, And for all my mermish grace, I could not swim. But if she would only pass down by a pallid beam A map of her tortuous displeasures, And if that map might bear a legend To decode the awful mess of subtle human signs, Then maybe, by enlightened hindward witness Of those tender delicacies I had wrenched awry, I could come to know my sins Like Job knew God at last. Like a child or a pagan I prayed to that rounded moon To show some merciful knowledge on her face. In cloudy-headed desperation I even dared think The moon began to move in answer to my lunatic appeal... But then she, like a mystery, sank fitfully into the sea. ...While a stranger found An answer to which he just Could not relate; shame... (2011) Fine and milky frail, The snowflakes fell like dandruff and died on the ground. Jacob bit his tongue Trying vainly to endure The bite of the wind. He peered down the track And the lateness of the train Appeared blackly back. Ten bundled persons Quivered in the pallid glow Of the starless light. He missed his fleece gloves. Curled up in fists, his fingers Huddled in his palms. (A long scarf, two hats, Three pairs of gloves, some headphones; he missed his missing things.) Alarmingly huge, A solitary snowflake Fell upon his thumb. Jacob rubbed his eyes. What snowflake ever flaunted Such sinuous curves? He held it up close. A map of an uncharted Woman glistened there. He blinked. She melted. He rubbed his hands. The train came, Iron and growling. White the Life as One (2011) When I was born my bed was splattered red. Through the window roared a dusk-rich orange and in my mother's eyes it glistened yellow. My father's eyes, I think, were misty green, though in this, my only picture, they seem blue under a dull blue sky with clouds of crumbling violet. White creases crackle through the fading violet where this photograph has folded in my fingers, and the red of his scarf and his ruddy smile against the blue is barely discernible, merely muddy orange, and only in my mind are his eyes still green, his heavy hands warm, his laughter soft and yellow. If it stayed in my wallet, the photo would not be so yellowed, but so many of our days fall like bundles of violets at his buried feet, piercing the gray and the green; the Mother Machine breaks down, her lights flashing red; and as the sun sets in its familiar orange hue, we fondle the photo, feeling, for lack of a better word, "blue". * * * At the ceremony my first wife wore a gown of dazzling blue, and I, in my lapel, a rose of creamy yellow that Mother had plucked from her garden that orange morning. I remember colors. I remember the violet vestments of the minister. And I remember our son all wet and red, and I cried when I saw that his eyes were grandfather green. In early spring, when everything is weakly green, and my son plays in the young grass, I dream of her dancing blue. We lost her, too. Late March, her hair so red, the night so hot, everything so wrong, her yellow face wasting on the pillow; with one last violet smile, she was gone. The dawn glowed orange. And I noticed how my son's sobbing face shared that orange in the waking light, but his eyes still glinted green, and I pulled out the picture, thumbed the violet clouds, stared into my father's eyes of fainting blue and realized they'd always been blue. My memory had yellowed. I wondered if my son would forget his mother's head of red. So I painted it roaring red with dashes of orange, her dancing on a warm yellow day in the green springtime with her dazzling blue dress, throwing violets; I painted her into a canvas, where I knew she'd never fade. Hark! the Hard-Eyed Hour! (2011) Holidays in the halogen sun, Flowcharts, artless white on white, Grey the days and grim the nights, Staples in our brains. *snap* Make like work when Argus comes, Stitch his eyes in close content. Hack that hand that hand relent! What? No flounders. Flounders... *snap* When were we unborn and free? Infant I were ripped from caul and Birthday bloody pinned to wall; Well, blow your cage of candles! *snap* Today is day the manger breaks! Sweep the smash-computered floor, Paint your name on faceless doors: "Hark! the Hard-Eyed Hour!" *snap* Fear me what, what nothing won? Heaven everywhere is light; Help me lay the dynamite-- Mace to face to power! *bang* timbre timbre O somber glamor (2011) Christmas is not green nor red but illustrations in old books on old shelves of the musky orange glow of iron lamps and candles blue shadows faintly brushed upon imagined snow raw lines around smooth cheeks (and the lamps like motes in his laughing eyes) also the sovereign gold of the ribbons around brash ful presents so round ly purple sparkling that preen and posture under the whisk--(ered tree) and the blizzarded girl with her matches ,like love's the burning boy, it's the manbetweenbridgeandsky (and maybe the angel) ((but often not)) and the carols carried on the heavy flakes of air, "Who saved us all from Satan's" and so forth and you remember Charlie Brown? O it's the jazzy tannenbaum and the treble cascade over the ice rink that goes ba di da di da da ba di da di da da ba di da di ba .. da ba .. da dum- ba .. dum dum .. Chicago, Chase Tower Lobby, 6:30pm "The voluptuousness of looking" and I knew exactly what he meant when the pane threw the lights from inside upon the grid of faraway windows and the electrical bulb-specked trees and the 'behind me' lay over the 'before me' like the ridges of a charcoal rub. Here were all the Great Interests intersecting at odd angles. The black overcoats of the half-articulate silhouettes footstepping behind me made their motions perfectly transparent; their faces hovered above the light-carved spaces that flitted across the pane and revealed glimpses of the interior cells of the glistening office tower across the way. Black skies behind them shyly lay absolute and still. My knees wobbled back and forth in my stern leather chair. In my ears my music melded with the murmurous clatter of expensive soles; Dvořák and Giorgios in a giant granite chamber. I do not understand why the flags waved and wove at half-mast (which they did rarely; the wind was remarkably mild); perhaps someone had blundered? Below the buildings, below the light-encrusted trees and the mindful motions and a few blue shrubs (sinister blue like sophisticated military maps), the granite dove down into a steep courtyard plaza, like a sleek quarry. Green or dull gold dimly glowed the windows ringing the pit (or rather squaring it), about nine feet tall, the kind that frame you hat-to-toe, though no one walked down their exposed corridors. And in that pit, in the middle of it, sat a bold-eyed fountain whose ripples goldly shimmered like television static. Not too dramatically, not quite ecstatically, exuberantly dignified, the water waved to passersby. But their passing waned in passing time; a creeping decrescendo crept into the intermittent clatter; the fitful flags grew still. Drowsily, the business district drifted off to sleep. Behind the stolid lights, the night-black night remained absolute and still. Genius Loci: Tribute to Terribly Happy (by Erling Jepsen), "Punishment" (by Seamus Heaney), and swamps in general. (2011) We always solve our mysteries in the end. It's a small small town and the ladies are always watching, So there's only one place to hide things here: That's the big bog surrounding town. Lost cows float up from time to time, Bloated and pale muddy green, But so do murder weapons, Stolen cars, Bodies of inconvenient men And pretty missing girls And suicides. So nothing stays hidden forever, That's the point. Your children or grandchildren will know That someone did what you did, Though they won't know you did it, And it won't matter who did it, Not to anybody alive. So people also throw time capsules in the bog And confessions And coins And wishes. It all comes back. It comforts them to know That long after their names And dates Have been Erased The bodies and baubles remain In the collective unconscious, Coated in scum And soaked in slime. And She Cried Out (2011) Saw an ad today: CHICKEN IN A PIE IS GOOD I want you to know. Young American Plays With Waka (2012) sorry, Ron Were I the strong, sultry sun I'd lay my love like A hot lariat across Your gold-tanned, leathery hide The wind winds tightly Round the mountain like a spool. As the clouds, unraveling, Lose their fine delicacies The unwoven sky becomes A thread drawn unbearably taut; Time winding backwards The stars wink in shame As the bold, denuded moon Lets fall her coy sash In the lapping, leaping springs, In the nightengale's Ticklish trills and peeps, In the patter of soft rains, I am haunted by The tintinnabulation Of your faraway laughter Wrapped in a fine confusion I am snow and white blossoms; Could this heart at last Be awash with negative Capability, The stuff that resolves poets Into nightengales Like a dew from melted flesh? Like a hard gale in the night You batter my windowpanes Slip under my door And strangle me with kisses Caught in your tortuous web Of arms, legs, murmurs, A hopelessly happy fly Lies fixed against you. I confess! What fly am I Who scorn the fight and With susurrus submission Fall gasping, limp and conquered The Archaeology of Survival (2012) The surviving mind will wake to a warm breakfast with a limp bliss in the chest like the sound of an old woman softly speaking. That uncracked egg so dearly cradled will at last dissolve in a liquid attitude. These placid mirages rippling in the road: postcards from the surviving mind. In the beginning I was careening around the bend on a night dark as coffee and you a pink face stitched on a pillow a flashlight radio in the passenger seat Neal Cassady in one hand Virginia Slim in the other were a fountain of jazz you were a silver thread wound around every minute of every century and I could count you oh yes with a jar of marbles, of sand I was the boy with his teeth deep in the dog the rain stung but I licked it all up -- Silence hung his head out the window while we shouted ourselves hoarse and murmured each other dry Every word was a dream and all my dreams were memories ground up and stuffed in sausage that tasted funny and felt like venial sin But you were a ravenous dream-eater swallowing whatever came out of my mouth like a baby bird so on and on we on and on while the road and on grew solid under our years. The surviving mind here, as stationary animal there, as smiling bookshelf will call love to order or else swim in the tidal society of love or else survive love with the majesty of a water tower in an inferno. There they rose so holy I could cry the blazing spires of that daunting last April like the fingers of a storm come to shake me by the shoulders and shout mercilessly into a yawning fontanelle teeming with clumsy pubescent prose but I was "ready or not" and you were "here I come" and we tumbled down Highway 225 past the rotting cinema marquee of my first celluloid felonies (there I witnessed the deathlessness of American royalty) and we rolled out the dread carpet into the heavy-steeped night -- The moon was tall with a voice of cracking eggshells that fell upon the refineries gold with godfulness The lights encrusting them scintillated like a starry sky torn down around the earth like a blanket held close and tight like a mother with weary arms like a gravedigger in Dresden while we climbed their veiny towers unwinding from the bloody black heart below I was the first color that came to mind you were the mind or the guess or the progenitor but you kept asking questions as if they'd never been answered before and I'm sorry my laughter cut you off when Kerouac said "Charlie Parker looked like Buddha" but I swear it was just the most earnest thing anyone had ever said. The surviving mind a jade icon carved by rain and shame that guards the temple at the pinnacle of history. With a cool, creamy wind washing across the sand it draws the body back to the fretful balcony where every dilated vessel once heaved in the husky spring air. -- The mind that survives will not be the mind that tries to conquer the stifling bushel. The mind that survives will not be the mind that cries to see its own rent flesh. The mind that survives will not be the mind that lies beneath the loam in feigned repose. The mind that survives will be the mind that sighs unceasingly like the perennial exhalations of the earth. Do you remember the painted desert where we met? But One of many drowsy fancies under my slumberous eyelids. You were too finely fashioned not to drape in translucent blue silks like a classical mannequin so I stole you from Pygmalion and we eloped in the salty heat of invented days. But the years were lifetimes as every atom in us died and returned a stranger many times over. Like Caesar's last breath there was a tiny piece of you in everything. I, in my protean skin, I, quick and fluid like mercury, had no use for mirrors and often my arms grew like swords. -- Still we tangoed like the net and the fish, in the angry sway of kinetic dialectic. It seemed an even animistic dance, if you were indeed the flaxen mop and the iron table, a round red clown nose, my collection of hats, a tattered umbrella; also the tikka masala, the rhubarb fool and the dry salad; and if you were the first morning of the second decade, the yellowed poster of Audrey Hepburn and the long walk west of Logan Square then by God I was a shaman shaking my pen like a rainstick, dancing the frustrated ecstasy of an Orphic mystery. And here we are, Aquitaine Eleanor and Richard the Richard hand in hand ascending the hot narrow steps of this ludicrous cyberpunk refinery, misbegotten spawn in tow, come to see the King of Texas turn black blood into gold. The surviving mind waits for the welcome of a warm breakfast with thick smoky sausage and light buttery biscuits that crumble like an old woman softly sleeping. That weary egg so dearly cradled will at last sizzle on the skillet with a satisfied sigh. These fumy visitations wafting from the tarry oil; a sermon of the surviving mind that dauntlessly wages its five hundred year curriculum to hold a ripe Hanukkah breath in the pickling vat; to chew the whole thickness of the earth molar by mountain and spit the splinters and the flakes of the fading shed; and in the rippling madness of the tattered tapestries that dangle all around, to cherish the surviving faith that gathers fire-fangled feathers from the ground. Eternal Recurrence: An American Renga (2012) Hototogisu Dead by a pane of stained glass-- Good Friday sermon. The vines winding up the walls Of the chapel bear no fruit. My girl sinks her teeth Deep in a succulent plum-- Deep in a brown worm! Do you remember the night We shared berries by the moon? I sprinkled kisses Across your delicious face Like powdered sugar. Too hot now for picnic love-- We'd languish on sweat-soaked sheets. Insects! All cruel kinds! Menagerie of monsters Biting me mad! Bugs! But for the lake-shore breezes I'd die-- but oh, those kind winds! The day's restless breath Howls and plows and does not move The cross-legged monk. Sun, with a little lemon: Pale comes-- brown. Brown comes-- blonde. Lies? When the light turns low And the blaze withdraws, all the Hues come out to play. She sets her easel down by The groaning oak, and she waits. When autumn's sun sets, It throws its leaves in the air: Red, gold rays of leaves. The season's shades disappear In the cool moon's phthalo gaze. November nineteenth; The whole world ripe and heavy, All seems fit to fall. No one witnessed the last leaf Vanish in the mounting snow. Axe tight in his hands, The docile monk does violence To the helpless cord. The mute frost stiffens the earth. We cannot bury our dead. Leave your bitter chores At the door. Together we'll Sip tea by the hearth. By the drone of crackling pines We slowly slip into sleep. Reed raft drifting on Seas of jumbled memory; Faces in the waves. Once in a vision I saw Dawn and doom in the branches. She never walks wild Or lingers long; brief, cryptic, Pregnant with meaning. Origami unicorn: Who put this strange dream in me? Phantasms fall away And I am left with a cat Warm upon my chest. The omnipresence of fur, stale fish odor, frayed curtains. In this filthy shack I can abide no longer; Great spaces beckon. Perhaps this empty doll's house I've left will amuse the youth. Aching along on The narrow, supperless road, I miss all my toys. Squirrels and hares congregate about my grass-pillowed head. Tap tap tap tapping With his stick, a blind pilgrim In tattered sandals. Winding between two mountains, I look up: an old stone king. The mountains' saddle Feels like the seat of the world Riding into dusk. Turning to leave this hated Terrain, still I shed a tear. When the road is gone, Riverbanks lead me across The tangled miles. The tall, tall grass calls his name; "Kaze, Kaze," calls his name. This great thrashing koi Like Bishop's unconquered bass Demands his release. The purling, popping patter Carries a lively language. Two boys drift downstream On a thick bed of bound reeds Seeking adventure. The game is up at the lip Of the sea; the trial begins. Tall schooners, sleek sloops, Galleons and kayaks alike Speckle the vast plane. The sky takes a baleful tinge, And the sea roils and belches. Ten thousand tons washed Ashore, the dusty beach ruins Of burned out vessels. She haunts the skeleton frames Crooning for some lost sailor. I've asked for her hand But her heart has wandered far And long lost its way. Can pining eyes be pried From the morass of the past? The wide earth is thick With stale feelings and glances At faraway lights. Moon, you devil, blight the eyes Of the sleepless vigilant! Triviality Had consumed our days until Mother passed softly. Spring is no spring in the lap Of a naked, hollow nest. Broken bird in hand, The cross-eyed child submits A plea to the Dawn. The shining breath of April Stirs the feathers of the heart. Hanging uselessly The garlanded bough mocks me Like a dreamcatcher. I am entangled in the Baffling bounty of Springtime! A mess of blossoms Encrusts the fields, dizzy in The fumes of rank grass. How swiftly the flowers flee, The green gone in a chill gasp. Still the heavy sky, Still the snow, still the placid Days wait for a storm. How this hard blizzard explodes Hungrily into my home! Alas, this hermit’s Carefully cultivated Peace lost in the frost. And so unceasing, creeping Loneliness nibbles away. One stubborn leaf hangs Flapping, cursing in the wind; To live too, too long. In those ochreous days they waned With dignity and clear hearts. Five men on the porch Listen to the pine crickets. Four men on the porch. How do you fare, a cloud now Over this rich canopy? Would you smile if I Should pluck this crysanthemum To tuck in your ear? How sweetly bashful the shade, How coy in the brilliant noon. Magnolias teeming With perilous seeds bound in Petals white as death. His hands make a lariat Around the trembling calf. On these sweltering days The madness seeps from a man Like an evil sweat. God bless and keep the children. Every stone is an angel. Full of bright crystals Locked in a rough edifice, The earth is a man. The sparkling clouds miss us. When they weep, our rivers swell. “How heavy the fish!” Cry the fishers’ straining lines. Does the sea complain? They long for a home where the Deer and the antelope play. When the shot rings out And a thousand hooves scamper We hold tight our breaths. Even the servants join us To feast upon this great beast. Her chapped, ruddy hands Folded meekly in her lap: Dishwasher woman. Traces of pine-scented soap Linger on her laced fingers. To love a poor girl Despite catalpa’s twang is To have a rich heart. What could have been in his mind? Who might have been on his mind? My lord wastes away With a strange name on his lips: “Oh, darling Rosebud...” We raced down the daunting hill In those early, happy days. In the eyes of boys Like tigers, the day is full: Treasure everywhere. This sky, with its fine diamonds, A jeweler's velvet midnight. Its black skin opens With a raw, tender moon like A gash in its chest. Pain seeps out, leaving only A cold, lucid indifference. Night and I draw still As dew trembles in the air: Anticipation! There it lands on petals, twigs; There it lands on lips, hips, thighs. The blossoming dawn Rises to greet them. They wince, and they laugh. Love is a long, long day and The sun never moves til it sets. What week in what world Is filled up with sweet minutes? No time for poets. We make our grand mosaics With the shards of precious things. When these grave-robbers Pry up weather-beaten bones, They turn the soil. What a rich harvest they yield, Our restlessly scheming minds. The poet's conceit: To call God a cicada, To live in God's skin. These trappings itch-- oh, pity. The air is stale-- oh, pity. The implacable Imperial lyricist Cooks sugary moons. This is why children still laugh: The saint, the courageous clown. When the warm spring comes The folk awake from dank dreams And play in the park. Small against the spreading sky A bird made whole in the dawn. The Handsome River (2012) digging up tubers from the lurid earth with careful hands brushing the clung loam and gently reburying a pink writhing worm murmuring perhaps a small chthonic lullaby then laying the pale meaty stalks like bricks in the basket side by slender side silent and still careful hands tucking a stray sprig of nut-brown hair back under the faint blue bandana wrapped around her head to keep the nut-brown hair away from her busy eyes her vacant gray cloudy bleary busy eyes gently attending to a pink writhing worm gathering up her basketful of tubers and a wide squat crate of mean little tomatoes and a tin of blackberries and her spade and savage taloned trowel and retiring to the tremulous shed to bathe the lean crop in the gray basin beside the pitted cutting-board * * * It was an easy adjustment once the crying had ceased. The peace was massive like an overcast frontier and fixed as the stars or the salt in the sea. Without books or voices things ceased to carry names every pepper and mouse was a sign unto itself and ontology faded into obscurity. The air was clean the way space is clean clean as an empty cupboard and mealy grass began to overtake the blasted fields while feathery seeds of ruderal swarmed on the wind like flies. In the quiet light of dawn the worms gingerly poked up their blind round heads among the dewy blades. * * * naked roots rinsed upon the rocks and a toad floating with its fat legs in the frothy air bushels of swampy millet seeping and slopping along the coursing ecstatically violent--- ten million oozing tons of puffing millet drooling down the iron river and a dribbling camera lapped by little testimonies of seared skin and lolling tongues and bubbling eyes vacant bleary wasted eyes a sofa married to mildew sporting a single wicked spring winding and winding up and sharp and slim and winding a damp little bit of flannel dangling at the tip like meat on a meat hook nocuous spheres of ants bobbing in the dull water bursting against rocks flinging nightmares of dispossessed chelicerae flickering down the iron river a cake of depleted cores a ravaged failsafe twenty-four cascading switches akimbo wheels treads limbs organic chambered fire darlings huddled in their surface-to-air cocoons wings damp with profane oils an electric nest sizzling the shadow of an absent mother rippling down the iron river green strands of the last great album filtering through the torrid air an upended bottle of No. 7 a plastic bin of old mix tapes carefully labeled by thin red pen that runs in the surging flood a cabinetful of spices and dried garden herbs spilled to soggy ruin a chipped and stained action figure with a tiny plastic grenade in his tiny plastic hand and a toy mare with a broken comb tangled in her dirty mane * * * a red-tongued steak knife wielding a buttery melody a round chocolate box and, lasciviously suckling of the sweet funny dew, the magnanimous, the baronic, the consequential, the rare the handsome iron river * * * wiping the broad knife across her apron and sliding it back tenderly into the ripe skin wiping the juice and the seeds away as they squirt across her hand she finally lays the tomato slices and the cucumber slices across the dense little bun of bread and spreads an oily clove of baked garlic she raises the fork to her lips and she can almost taste Ballad of the Closed Hotel (2012) Man O Man is won to thee or live at least; that's fine but what is mine to me? My mind, and every door of a grand hotel. Monty is not lost to me but M-O-N-Y is not enough to rub together and a tawny distance falls across the ragged windows of the gold hotel. The bibles in the nightstands are mine, but the fine pashmina neglected upon the knob of the bureau belongs to no one only. 123 is almost vacant. Sylvester stole the pestilent spring and when the gestures of her small hands infiltrate his skin, finally the briny maid Saint Molica will lay a pall across his chest and gaze into the doom: “Slyvester, Sterling Sylvester my faintly faun, wax bright in the womb and dream and kiss me for your mother's sake. You were a babe when you waddled away.” It was August in the a.m. His aching mother wore an oriental shawl. Monty lost his ring behind the bureau but Man has come to mean what the Politic means Man to mean so when the green finger beckons the ring defects to the corporate knuckle and Man has Won what Monty Lost. Love is the elliptical orbit of a stone in a sling; (Political) Love is a planet on a string; the point is the eternal return to the prime banker. Gratitude is a green finger. Sylvester was a mean looter. Sylvester belongs to the bible now and Monty's ring is strung on a cosmic string. The bibles and the pallid breasts of the briny mare belong to me. Molica never mentioned when she bare Sylvester, where or by whom, how she found him swelling in her manger amongst the sweets and greens of the hysterical deity, the mystery of his plump skin and the pale glow of his small hands; told me nothing of these things. She is dutious, a daughter of de Paul and Thomas and her son is dead and she departs tomorrow. If only the dust would do likewise. This House is Fallen without her, Monty or no Monty. Besides, he's hardly got two M's to rub together. What's mine are the doors, the windows and nothing within. The tenants need me, beyond the aching walls lie only the tawny wastes exceeding my mind; but I cannot buy them. And when Monty wastes away I cannot buy his body; I cannot buy back Sylvester or repair the ring of comings unwrought by the rage of goings; and when the dust has eaten the words from the pages of the bibles in the bureaus and every John Jacob Mary Mark and Malachi has slipped into the distance on a silver ship, then what is won when naught is live to me but the secret of the trinket behind the bureau and I am too feeble to grasp it? all will be well (2013) "And what time that man was fallen into sorrow and pain... our Lord Father would prepare Himself no other place, but would sit upon the earth abiding mankind, which is mingled with earth..." Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 51 if I could bending down reach your body in the garden grass I would not with my fingers pry up your crumpled color and cuddle dirt around your stem I would not tend with a trowel or a spade or call anything mine or imagine the green world is a garden I would not collapse or squat but kneel and my hands on my knees and my knees sinking in the dirt I would feel them moisten not to notice but just feel while watching you breathing a little on the ground and we would not be kneeling or lying in any garden on any grounds of any estate and we would be the way it was and wait for rain If I could then bend even further and snap my body falling on the sodden grass beside you I would see your eyes across the level distance and I would not look at them or look into them or look deep into them or peer into them or gaze upon them I would simply see your eyes between coarse blue shafts of blades buried in their own shadows I could not then pretend to kneel I would not tend to anything and from beneath the blades I could see the pale patch of sky that you would dim if you were kneeling above me waiting laying your hand on my back watching me breathing beneath you and trying to get up struggling under your shade instead I would see that patch of sky full of light like the rest of the sky and I would lie crumpled under the grass my cheek pressed to the earth with you and be glad you had knelt beside me for so long while I knelt beside you and we would be the way it was and wouldn’t wait |