Most of what I’ve published is in lines, in verse–but not as strictly classifiable as “sonnets” (a form old as Petrarch, with a rich history) or “flash prose” (relatively recent as a genre, though everyone who cares should understand that “Flash Fiction” was an alliterative publisher/anthologist marketing term coined in 1991 to boost textbook sales, while Baudelaire’s “petits poemes en prose” was an individual’s modest descriptive term of a side project (to Les Fleurs des Mal) during the decade when photography was invented.
OK: lengthy periodic sentence, but designed to clarify that much of my work has not been predetermined by purely formal considerations. What follows are uncollected works published since the 1980s that are not sonnets or flash prose or intended to witness the damages of war.
From Rodger Moody’s occasional (now-retired) journal Silverfish Review (1997), “Like a Goblet:”
As though a hand were closing inside me
around something breakable and clear,
and tilting it slightly.
I stand on the back deck in the muslin
weight of summer air,
a few breaths of old fear
exhaled, taken from me in sips of evening,
in the small twitter-and-kiss
music of ruby-crowned kinglets making
a last foraging pass
overhead. Last light on the forehead
of Dillard Pass. The points of my firs and spread
of my oaks sink with me
in colors of forbearance,
in Velázquez grays and purples and leached
golds which pour over anyone old enough to believe
trees are to wait beneath, holding
one’s breath, letting it go, holding it
to better smell the chill—as of a good Riesling—
coming over the northwestern twilight.
It is straw-colored, and we sip at it.
Then color of pear-flesh, then burnished plums,
then black Santa Rosa plums.
We take it to our lips and test,
we sip with glassy, tentative kisses,
until it is emptied, and what’s left is
a transparent question tilted
in a hand the size of night. A kinglet
will sleep unafraid in the woods, a snowflake
knocks it at last to the ground. There are forty-odd
trees I’m responsible for, growing through this deck,
surrounding this house: the first stars pierce the black,
birdless canopy of oaks, and the firs
point me back to what is growing colder
but no clearer—
why did I step outside if not for this,
what was I waiting to hear?
From the North Carolina Literary Review (2002), “7240 Wrightsville Causeway” and “The Warehouse, 1970.”
7240 WRIGHTSVILLE CAUSEWAY
A house that once was filled with evidence
against me burned to the ground yesterday.
It stood empty for years. The fire made sense.
Shingled with cedar, knee-deep in wild mint
it overlooked the Inland Waterway.
Only a house. But once a self-evident
happiness to me—bare windows, white walls rinsed
with sun. I woke, drank tea, wrote poems all day,
then stood, empty. For years their fire made sense
in my mouth. Their pentecost of song like glints
of a great fire that would burn the world away
and all the houses furnished with evidence
of childhood. The moon lit my bedsheets, intense
as a magnesium flare; women would not stay,
could not stand my empty hours. Fire makes sense
the same way blue crabs burn red in a moment’s
scalding immersion. Their white meat became me:
a soul-house full of breath, a self’s evidence.
Magnolia blooms spilled their burnt-match stamens
on the porch. Heat-shimmer cooked the beach highway.
Who can stand empty for years? That fire made incense
of the cedar husk of my youth with one red glance,
like the sun closing its eye on the sea.
When a house that once was full of evidence
has stood empty for years, fire makes sense.
_____________________________
December prom, jukebox-powered in the blacked-out cafeteria—
everyone idles, preens,
twirls crepe flowers, and endlessly complains:
No smoke, no drink, no
getting stoned in that sea of pastel balloons.
The jukebox chokes down
quarters intended for condoms an hour before
the first hip-wiggle,
so I zip up my face and think about doing the Dog.
Everyone wants to dance the Dog because it’s animal
desire made social,
a full-dress rehearsal for the undressed Yes we want.
But our square steps
describe a warehouse of boxes in which we shuffle,
two to a box.
We want out bad, but it’s the guy with no partner
who twists free
of the conveyor-belt rhythm: the teen machinery stalls
as his body shakes
invisible flames from hair and fingers. Our boxes
bump a little more
joyfully as he leaps and limbos down to a spasm
on the linoleum, radiating
a heat that is shameless, impersonal, absolute
until the vice-principal
shoves his head under the water-cooler.
Only the last dance frees the rest to spin and grind
and throw off carnations,
shoes, aftershave stench, ROTC, home ec,
and be done with dancing,
and deliver our acne-bitten bodies down roads
home to nothing but pines
and crickets and stars, driving slow, slower, stopping.
Shifting into Park.
From each body still packaged in bright dance clothes,
the telepathic urge—
Unwrap this gift, take it out the box, use it—
then all the hands
start tearing at once, wild as Christmas morning.
From the Hudson Review, “Intertidal Zone” (1998) and “A Wound in Common” (2000).
What it’s like to lose the tag end
of childhood on the beach: a struggle
to jerk clean white rock-band-costume
pants past your knees, while your date—
older by years, not months, eyes painted
blue as the lip of an Egyptian
funeral vase—snap-rolls bikini panties
off her ankles, to toss in the sea-oats.
Midnight. On the town side of the dunes
your band, The Other End, breaks down
amplifiers and drum-kit, having winked
and dog-woofed you away, free, with her,
out of the explanatory zone of house-lights
through the black onshore wind where no one
goes, this late, into the teeth of the surf
except ones who want to leave their bodies
now, now, and she takes the iron pain
you push at her and plants it knowledgeably,
swift as like a rice shoot, in a place no stranger
than a kid’s feet bare in warm marsh mud.
Why then bare your teeth and jerk
like the one time you peed on an electric fence,
unless first sex is already addicted
to death, a practice stiffening and agony rictus.
I was The Other End singer, used, already,
to rehearsal on rehearsal, one more time
from the top. But this bargain was harder:
her callused heels kick-drummed my buttocks
and shoved my salivary dissolve
a half-inch deeper into her disease, which was
want, or need, or will: which was her last name.
About the first name, I’ll say this:
it was Roman, and once a goddess,
but got misspelled on her. No moon rose,
drenched, that night out of the sea for us.
The only light—as we lay there, misfit,
apologizing, drying our genital tears
in the sand—came from grimace after grimace
of surf, like a head arched back in extremity
so its teeth and sightless eyes were exposed
at us. The other light came from the scud
of cloud upon cloud on top of the black water:
another face, another mouth rehearsing
its last breath and seeing nothing
of the great liquid force it lay connected to.
Goodbye, I began to say in my head
to Dyan Will as she relaxed her pretzel grip,
moving away, as she was meant to,
the next day, inland with her professorial family.
She thought me lucky to stay so close
to nights at the beach but if I could meet her
now, twenty minutes, a table with nothing
but coffee and the thigh-riding skirt she wore
in the snapshot she left me to come to her
memory by, I’d say No—luck laid that night
on us together, only we knew too well how
to segregate those absolute minutes from all
the days of distant postmarks. So we lay a minute
watching sky and sea magnify and replay the brevity
that had made us old as the world. Then stood,
retrieving the wrinkled stuff we had to wear home,
and dressed, and linked arms around each other’s
child-thin waist, and walked over the dunes
where two cars idled, awaiting our separate versions.
______________________________
I was shot young—small bullet, small boy.
The .22 rifle was my father’s as it was
his father’s before him: it smelled of the century
of horses and telegraphs. The walnut stock
was smooth as an arm across a girl’s shoulder.
Its trigger guard, a scroll of iron around the sliver
that could squeeze me off at a bird,
two thousand feet per second. I was sleeping
with it in pine woods, the old rifle,
lying on dry straw in a long plaid bag—
it lay inside, with me. I was unwilling
to stand it against a pine in fire-shadows
for who knows who in the night.
I dreamed it, in no one’s arms, floating,
sighting in on me like an eye following
my struggle to crawl from the bag.
Then I seized up as though a copperhead
fanged me—a wire dipped in fire in my ribs.
That moment God came in a hurry
into my life, and I mean my body.
God entered me with his little finger,
laid it on my rib to let me know who was who.
In the biblical way I knew him, he came
with a pain to brand the dead and put that seed
in me, small as my trigger knuckle.
I limped home—deserting the bloody bag,
not the rifle—through a million dark pines
to mother’s nightgown horror, father shaking
with memory, woozy green noise of the ER
and the mask clamped on, like a fighter pilot
climbing through clouds a thousand feet per second.
He’d flown there twenty years earlier.
A 20-millimeter anti-aircraft shell burst
his cockpit, sowing his leg with shrapnel stars.
He clutched the Thunderbolt’s stick
like a short rifle made into a crutch, traced
the Moselle’s shiny meander back to his base
and accepted the black mask of ether they clamp on
to make you forget how deep they dig to retrieve
what glows whiter than baptism on the X-ray.
He awoke to the pelt of dry snow on his gurney,
the bagpipe drone of German bombers,
the long unwomanly wail of the klaxon.
The nurse pushed him into snow-dusted mud
under the drum of bombs. There he lay,
and there—he told me this on his deathbed
—he knew that being pierced makes you
a bride of God: Jesus wasn’t the first,
he wasn’t be the last. “He screws you once,”
my father swears, high on IV morphine,
“the rest is up to you—” as I shave him
in the Coastal Cancer Center, and swallows
wheel in the eighth-floor sunset
“—and you decide where each nail will go.”
And when you do—I finger a scar’s
exclamation on my rib as I utter this
in his voice—your father will bring you
a handkerchief dipped in black vinegar
that is the balsam of the dead, and touch it
to your lips as he passes out, in heaven.
“To an Uneaten Shrimp in a Sausalito Cafe” won the Balch Prize at Virginia Quarterly Review in 1999. You can also read it at VQR’s author archive.
TO AN UNEATEN SHRIMP IN A SAUSALITO CAFE
So, little prawn, what about your prana? where did it go
in this confection of butter and garlic
you’re half-dressed in, congealing on the Buffalo china?
Does wine embalm your shock
from the instant the net hauled you clear in a streaming crush
of squid, ratfish, cowfish,
all in a grip huge as God’s in catastrophe mode, all suffocating
in a waterlessness the lesser powers
and dominions—like me—can breathe? If death is not just
a beheader and deveiner
who ices us one way or another, discarding our sensitive apparatus
and love of dancing around
in whatever medium sustained our respiration and aspirations,
then I should drop to my knees
in this starched white-napkin temple to one of the three mysteries,
the middle one, that takes the hand
of life and the hand of death, and marries eater to eaten
and says, It is well, and says, Amen.
I will not kneel, but I can bow over you and whisper
what I paid for the frutti di mare,
how I relished each guzzle and bite and scrape of the spoon
in the last blood-colored sauce
clinging to the bone-china tureen. And I can tell you,
my boiled insect, how depression
and age insert invisible spoons into my eyes and china skull
and sup, and make some unholy
dinner-table chat which I hear only as a high whine and rumble
and which, the ear specialist assures me
(being eaten like me, yes, even while he pontificates,
in his starched-napkin jacket,
the jargons of symptom and syndrome that prove him
merely a true believer
in the Physician’s Desk Reference and New England Journal of Medicine
to explain the invisible world),
assures me is simply decibel damage, the after-effect of years
of trying to be a guitar god.
My altar was a hundred-watt Marshall stack: I bent my head
close to those Celestion speakers
to find the sustained wail and explosion that would shred the veil
between myself and the higher gods,
who did not need us for meat and drink because they understood song
as the prime mover of rocks and trees
and stars and suns. I believed their dwelling invisible to killers
was open to any of us, crustacean
or biped guitarist, insofar as we were being killed, devoured breath by hour,
though only the suddenly murdered,
like you, would behold it entire, the paradise where life and death
are married in dance and song,
in whatever medium of thought or breath was most like
the one we had known.
And there, armored in gray, with blue stalk eyes, curved
in the near-questionmark shape
that makes you jerk and leap through the gray suspiring water,
you would dance in praise
at no longer needing to find, or to be, a meal. There, the guitar
would no longer howl
my blind deaf longing to shriek until waters parted to show me
the walls of the oldest temple,
ocean: where you died and returned a million million times
before my waterless gods existed,
before garlic and Goethe, before guitars louder than genocide,
before gillnet and purse-seine.
Deeper than all our religions you moved, with no desire
or even an eye for the sky,
like one nerve-pulse in a message being assembled across the entire
drowned sphere of water,
assembled cell by cell out of plankton and brine shrimp
and sand-dab and elver into us—
appetite evolved for dominion—, into our ten thousand recipes
for eating our way out
of death’s regard, in places like this, where windows let in the look
of water but not its smell or song,
where the crowded, prayerful noises of human hunger sound
like bottom-rocks grinding
inside a hurried current, where you go uneaten at last,
but not, like me, unprepared.
I wish I had known about California-based Runes before 2007: the first piece I ever sent them appeared in their final issue.
The problem lies, he writes,
in age: in being
a loose skin of aftermaths, decades past
the fabulous days and nights, still
trying to solve their original transit.
There was a white sky, he says,
and a woman’s feet
writing their path out of the sea
toward him. There were kisses of skin
and air and sun, and now he is reduced
to this summary white hair,
this sole quiet
in a snow-banked house where he bends
over late sentences and taps each pause
into place. No question of recovery,
he writes; his spine a black glow,
one leg deadwood.
For each face stranded in memory
he has written an afterword, an exit
sentence, to let each leave him before
cancer closes out memory.
Today he wrote
the woman’s walk back into the sea:
all his mistakes glistened in her hair,
his old nakedness was safe inside her.
* * *
Say love was a bribe, he writes.
A breast to stop
your mouth’s rainy muttering to itself. Say
her tongue twisted yours into a glossolalia
better than hymns, say friends poured midnight’s
black claret into the annealed
shape of clarity
you held. Enough, you say. And sleep stuns you.
Then hummingbirds initial morning with loops
of desire, iridescent over the field deer cropped
at night while you were being
confessed to, being
kissed. Morning comes too late for the young,
he writes: you’re wrapped in a sheet,
you smoke and yawn on a terrace, while trees
burst into starling wings and
fly past. All things
sing presentiments of vanishing, and you claim
you’ll take that singing down—later, after
whoever was in bed has stopped calling to you,
after the last bottle rolls
under the couch.
Open a file, he writes: Face the blank screen,
finger the zero key. Zeroes fill the white sky.
Say each zero equals one breath of a woman
who slept on the pillow
by yours for years.
Or press any key—question, exclamation, asterisk,
period—for the moment the friend spills the last
glass of wine on his shoes, relishing an old story
you wish he had not begun,
and now—its end
in view, like the night’s—you want never to stop.
A cipher for each time you breathed,
Let this night not end.
Watch the screen fill with black tallies again.
* * *
And his winter sentences?
They lie in a book
worlds later. Their list of closures matter
to no one he knew. To ones unknowably
young, with time to be finished by books,
to be impressed by the black
tattoo on the spine
of the man death has reduced to a book.
It compresses him to a few lines
and keeps coming. Out of his book it sings
to the young. Opens its mouth
in the moon shape
of a vowel, and they walk in, listening.
Consonants close over their heads.
The score is marked As Slowly As Possible.
* * *
Or say that when the book shuts,
it swallows no one.
It is no sea. Its consonants glitter
and have a salt taste, but are not green
in the day and black at night. Death
keeps coming, a wave, and love
walks in naked.
But the book, when it is shut, simply talks
to itself in a darkness it has made
out of the darkness it did not make—
as the man in his house of snow
chooses a word
for the woman’s belly, pillow, the night they lay
beneath the pier, and lowers his head to the page
as he laid his head upon her, their bodies striped
by light falling through planks….
The book closes
its eyes like a man, closure does not stop it seeing.
He saw the living walk overhead on a wooden road
that goes a brief way over the sea, then turns back.
Now the book sees them walk
toward the O
of the moon smearing waves at the fenced end
of the pier, over where he once lay pillowed
on the woman’s belly. They walk and turn back
and the moon, blank as an end-page,
watches them go.
Long after that night’s brief fact of love, the book
closes his mouth with hers. And the ones who
walked in the sea air over his head, oblivious?
They walk over him still. Now his
black glow is shut
in the grass. They walk to solve how his memory
made itself theirs while they were reading in bed,
and makes them variations on his aftermath.
In the beds where they lie,
the white zero
of the book’s moon looks past their faces—
on the lamplit way to sleep—while through the blinds
the original moon makes the sign of permanent
transience, a slow arc like
an hour hand.
The lines they read, falling asleep, included these:
The moon is earth’s headstone. From here, we cannot
see the names or dates cut into it, but they are ours.
* * *
In its largo calm, the book
clarifies want:
the desire to be swallowed up in this wave or that,
the nights poured into a glass and not recalled
in the late morning, the presentiments, the false
memories made true, almost,
by their measure
of self-denial and deprivation, their conviction
that the best lines we lay down in memory
of desire make us death’s death-song.
Open or closed, the book knows
its words will be
found wanting, desire reduced to winter sentences:
aftermathematics of breath, meant to remain—
like memory, or breath itself—the beloved problem.
And another shuttered little magazine, Taos Review, published the following:
The thousand and one nights of sex collapse
into one summer night: black sea, black sky,
they collapse on a spit of beach lit
by heat lightning, and the pier’s intermittent
neon urgings: —FISH— —EAT—
My hand arches her up from the sand, her hair
—black, red?—whips the dune-slope, she comes
and in coming dissolves to sand. The rest
I can’t restore: a green eye flutters, an opal
earring taps my teeth, but none of these pieces
amounts to one wholly memorized woman.
So I must go piecemeal, too, bits of mismatched
body and voice parceled through their memories.
My chest hairs will never whiten in the mind
of a woman long gone to Tennessee:
the rest of me has been rubbed out by her
husband’s palm on her breast, by the corrosive
balm of children’s laughter. Maybe my lips
open now in darkened rooms in Atlanta,
in Amsterdam: women kiss accustomed mouths,
but ask themselves, Is this his, his, or his?
The once-lovers all fall apart, their parts
are no longer private and keep rejoining,
blending into one body, one recurrent
night where no name comes first, no face is final.
I close my eyes, the black sea and black sky
resume, the angel rises out of the sand
and I struggle with her until she blesses me
with green eyes going brown, with sun-colored
hair reddening, blackening back into sand.
“Not Quitting the Choir” first appeared in The Cumberland Poetry Review in 1993. But in my faulty record-keeping I forgot I’d published it, and sent it to the North Carolina Literary Review in 2002. I have made this mistake only once (or twice).
Kyrie kyrie, the osprey shrieks
to the bluefish in its claws. Christe,
answer its pink-mouthed chicks.
I sang too many years in the church choir
to hear it any other way.
All that song about one death taught me
to keep hearing its requiem
grace-note everything else I heard—a harmony
that lasted past choir rehearsal,
that made a widening hymn
of tires on the wet beach highway, surf
against the pier, the cry that came
from fucking long and hard enough
and butter sizzling the morning after.
All of it somehow in Jesus’ name.
Beautifully efficient, how it filtered
cruelty, the surrounding cacophonies
of ordinary daily pain.
Pain’s accidental noise got altered
to fit my master score of epiphanies.
Blue crabs tossed live into
boiling water made this cracking sound.
I was middle-class, twenty-two.
My experience did not include a man
doused with gas, jerked off the ground
and burnt. No way I could
compare orgasm to someone gut-shot.
The inner oratorio stops when you read
enough history. I was part of the choir
too long—I still don’t want to quit
trying to believe the world prays
over each thing that kills us:
the Kyrie I still hear as the osprey
cuts the water open and claws
its silver tribute from the body of Jesus.
Another poem set on the North Carolina coast in the 70s, “Paolo without Francesca, Shell Island 1976″ appeared in Peter Drizhal’s San Francisco journal Urbanus in 1998.
PAOLO WITHOUT FRANCESCA, SHELL ISLAND 1976
Just above the horizon
floats an image of the lover who wanted to meet you
after her swim in the lagoon. Start walking.
The ferment of oyster flats stings your nostrils,
your shoulderblades glow. For a moment, you forget
her last name.
Her last name matters less:
her body heat answers yours, degree for degree.
On a dog day like this, elemental borders
blur: air you swallow is sopping, sand smolders underfoot.
The horizon dangles her image
like bait.
Like bait, you attract swamp flies,
a black mesh of hunger that would dismantle you
bite by bite if you stood still.
Start running:
they trail from you, black tatters.
Is she plagued by dog heat and the hunger
of flies, does she hurry this rendezvous simply
to escape them?
To escape them, you’d become a drop
of sweat vaporized up to some bluer, cooler
layer of late fall air, unseeable
above this Carolina steam canopy.
You’d abandon complexities of bone
and muscle and feeling to become the lagoon
that rises in the distance, silver, floating
over a beaten metal which cools, each night, to quartz sand.
A naked figure emerges from the molten blur
and simmers toward you.
Simmers toward you, waves.
Too late not to be seen, so you wave back,
but at what? Through heat’s film
you see only sleights of heat. The wavering arm
detaches, a comma of shimmer.
The figure dissolves.
* * *
Dissolves, a trick of weather
and memory, a vanishing point you imagined a destination.
A week ago she rocked you
in the hammock of her legs, yesterday her fingers
grew limp in your hand,
last night she faded in mid-sentence—
and now, no footprints lead
in either direction. Flies are eating you, and the wind.
The slightest wind, lifting
off the glass swells, lifts your regard toward a boat
in which a solo fisherman
raises a net of flashings and writhings, to be transformed
to flesh laid on ice
which other lovers will buy this evening, to grill and deliver,
bite by bite, into each other’s
newly acquired mouth—a hunger predisposing each mouth
to darker uses.
But you are done with lies and kisses for a month.
For at least a month
you are dissolution’s human cloud, a thing that will drift
after dark past lit windows
framing heads leaning into one another’s novel taste,
drift, and not break up
as it crosses the drawbridge to beach bars lipsticked with neon
—Wit’s End & Olympia—
and be asked by no one in the smoky aisles of this
shallowest circuit of hell
how a cloud can sit, can drink so much gin, why its eyes close
when it lifts each icy glass
of erasure. Why—if not to register this chorale of singles
singling out their new mirage,
the aleatory and polyrhythmic shriek which is the music
of a hundred wingless bodies
straining to couple, to be lifted by small mouth-winds of desire.
A cloud like yours
drinks to bring itself down, to collapse into a smooth
inertia of wet quartz sand.
But for now, inside the cloud you keep floating toward
the lagoon that floats
and recedes, a fixed distance from thirst and the end of thirst,
just above the horizon….
From Manoa (1999), this summer portrait of young girls (including my daughter) at the summer swimming pool. The title is taken from Randall Jarrell’s “Protocols.”
The pure pleasure of girls slicing into water,
lifted up by it, to climb out streaming
and slice in again. Eight year old girls, white
as white peach flesh, gold as pear flesh,
in one-piece sunflower wrappings, in millefiori
on night-blue backgrounds. Black hair,
gold hair between their shoulder blades,
and the golds and the blacks streaming
clear from their water-combed ends, clear
as the streams off the girls’ limbs. To be
embodied and colored so like fruit and yet
plunge through this substance that shines
brighter than any blade. So cleanly they cut
into it, this beckoning, yielding thing
that solves the question of iron. This most
patient thing, nothing as thoughtlessly clear
in meditative action, nothing on earth
more capacious. The fruit of them going
into it, pure pleasure now and pleasure again,
their fruit grows and is not eaten in a day,
but is bathed in the thing it cuts through,
is nourished by what will drink it at last.
Between these neutral infinities, the girls go
as shrieks, as exultings. They laugh and call
and lengthen underwater, they are magnified
and faceted, they disappear, rise and shed
this streaming skin of preservation
and dissolution. They dry hair and shoulder blades
on the grass, dry their bands of flowers
planted in night blue, night black. For an hour
they impose on themselves their best pantomime
of the poise death takes in the old books—
stretched out, still, eyes closed, the peace
of blades, of cut pears, drying in the grass.
Another poem in which my daughter (even younger) appears, tied to events and memories from earlier decades: Marlboro Review (1998).
The fantailed goldfish is losing the marvel
of ribbed, translucent satin that rippled it
through a twenty-gallon world. A fungus
the color of aspirin has eaten it to a rag:
the belly of the fish is all impediment
now, no longer the round gold midair
floating of a Rubens belly. For a week,
a girl I knew put pennyroyal, each day,
into her herbal teas—chamomile, mint—
with the sort of dropper you stick into
a baby flying squirrel’s mouth, hairless,
blind, after your cat named Tiger has killed
the mother. White drops of cow’s milk, no good,
they run down the pink stub shivering
in your palm. To treat the fish I squeeze
twenty drops a day of something blue
and distilled as the idea of equatorial depths
into the black-graveled tank. Maybe the tail
will come back; it has once before. The girl
was not yet showing when I stopped by last—
on her knees among pineapple mint
and lemon verbena. She thought she knew
where the bleeding would confine itself.
I thought she was wonderful in her teardrop
print skirts. Her breasts, against white muslin,
seemed to study the tansy and boneset
and approve the work of her hands in the dirt.
Later the neighbor found her leaning into
her arms on the round oak table where we
used to drink tea and talk about everything
but one small, looming, private fact
which must have cycled nonstop in her head:
a song, whose needle grooved her heart over
and over. There was blood—not much—
coming out of all her nine openings,
the news account said. That was fact, too.
It is Ophelia who gives herself to the water,
singing the derangements of herbal simples.
Her name was Linda. It was a good name
for what she did best: hanging cut herbs
to dry head down in her rooms, their stems
tied with primary yarns. The cat delivered
the dead squirrel to our door, a headless
parachute of fur, and an hour later the wind
blew down her nest, as though it knew
we would want to make up for our animal.
My mother was nursing my baby brother then,
so when the refrigerator milk failed
I asked for some of hers, and she squeezed it
into the saucer without a word. How ordinary
she made it seem, to lend her thin, bluish
miracle to the only babies I wanted to save.
The woman who found Linda said it was
the next day that she realized the music
had been one song repeating itself through
the window lit all night. I said the word fact
when I meant fate. The goldfish isn’t mine,
I bought the tank as a living night-light
for my daughter. Her fish swims round
and round, inhaling blue medicine that seeps
down while she sleeps. It isn’t her only one.
From Evansville Review (2004), a piece titled after a French folk song given a marvelous treatment by Canteloube in his Chants de l’Auvergne. There are spellbinding versions of this old story of pastoral betrayal by Dawn Upshaw and Renee Fleming.
Somewhere a crumhorn, peeping like a broken-winged
ground bird. Like a killdeer dragging its new
motherhood away from the nest already rifled
by snake or yellow-eyed owl. Somewhere the end
of the Middle Ages hangs on in the voice of that
outmoded instrument. The shepherd daughter
is kissed by her throat to the ground of the hill,
crying out so suddenly the sheep scatter away
from her fall like bursts of smoke. South of this
solo for two voices, another pope is named
in white smoke. Killdeer and cicada, crumhorn
and tambour, when sheep girls stray out past
kissing range, goatherds enforce their two-edged
desire with hoof-trimming knives laid next to the head
of hair filling with burrs and beggar lice. Ah me,
the hair sings, Ah me on granite ground littered
with thorny fleece and owl pellets full of baby
bird skulls. A girl’s throat, imagine, straight
as a wooden pipe—to hold such notes when all
its stops are fingered, its mouthpiece forced
by desire. But the knife lies near, it was always
near as an inquisition tool to end an age
the minute he’s done wiping his mouth on the rag
of her childhood country. Ah love, he sings, rising,
codpiece and swagger, Let me fly, and scatters
her father’s scattered sheep farther with a laugh
aimed at the high-walled stone amphitheater
where such duets are played out a cappella,
one voice then the other. The garden
and the running away from the garden, knife
in hand. The agony moment of pleasure taken,
and the whistling after, walking home to his
mother’s hut where the rooster sleeps. One desire,
many denials. The pope was invented to deal
with him, this rock, this Peter who understands
nothing but drink, eat, fuck, sing, who pulls out
his manhood like a little horn he does not know
how to play. So he makes everyone’s daughter
he can catch alone show him another tune.
End of evening in the Auvergne, the last blond
of sun grazing the highest rim of his emptied
theater, and he takes it for gold better than any
pope’s hoardings. The sheep let him pass,
they coronate his little triumph with bleated
puffs of fear, of dependence. By the stream
that points past mother to the cities he begins
his song: My love, your hair is like Ireland
on fire. The Renaissance will dawn in his
footprints tomorrow, the crumhorn evolve
into cor anglais and oboe, camels
and leopards and flamingoes brought across
the Mediterranean, astonishing as polyphony
with no gods in it, as the massed quiver of violas
understood as a storm about to break. The hut
swallows his laughter, and his mother is glad,
though once it was so hard on her—the ground
dirtying her back, too, the hay which spun
her hair to straw as she pushed his rude force
out of her bloody instrument. The Vatican
swallows another century of pastoral bulls
while he brags how the girl sang the shirt off
his back; its treasury fills with tusk
and rhinoceros horn, with gold torques
twisted off the necks of bare-breasted islands.
The mother knits listening into an art
that will turn the city into a series of theaters,
her patience will fill opera seats with lovers
who attend but do not quite comprehend
the tongue of the heroic tenor. And this girl—
who pulls herself up into the heavy sack
of the dress she’ll hike up, later, to drop
her fatherless burden from, lungs full
of the first song that is the lighting of pain—
she calls the sheep around her again,
and they come. They must all follow the same
stream down, though now it is nothing but a dark
continual sobbing she has always known,
outside her window, on its way to lose
itself in rivers bound for the cities on the plain.
Mes yeux, she sings to herself, almost as though
it is a prayer to her eyes to go blind
and make her depend on the alto sob
of mountain water to guide her back to what
will never again be the hearth it was
to the lullays and carols of first communion.
But there is the corner of a smile in the words
somehow, a mouth whose lips know they belong
to the white smoke that says Yes like a face
at night, and the darker smoke that says No
the next day. Mes pauvres yeux, she says,
and the stars seem to listen more closely—
gathering their constellations over her
in stories faithful to her upturned face—
as the sheep follow her night-whitened feet home.
From 1997 in David Wagoner’s venerable Poetry Northwest, a reimagining of the transformations of warriors in Elysium.
In the afterlife, the war heroes are easy
to spot: their arms end in pincers now
and they crouch to shield their faces.
It is the famous old meadow of rewards.
Endless pillowing of white asters. Somewhere a pan-pipe.
The sky a close, unfocused shimmer, like a snug harbor
seen from its sunlit shallows. Once they flew
Avengers and Phantoms. They stood with flamethrowers
before a hardened, stuttering mouth to the underworld
and silenced it. In the moment of letdown
after the great, the selfless act, it is possible
to imagine them imagining themselves centaurs
or winged victories. But here a shadow glides
across the sun and they scuttle sideways. The eyes
have slid to the top of their heads, they lie
unblinking on stems short as asters, and face
a blue vanishing that looks like heaven heights
but is heavy depths: there they react to the plunge
and clack of iron tongs, to cages enclosing
dead little heads, lowered on rope yellow
as a sun ray in a child’s book. Their pincers,
like their flattened skulls, are blue to say No one
knew this would be the bottom of the sky. They do
a dance of aversion, as though with castanets
crossed over their heads, among star-colored
flowers they cannot pluck or eat. In the brief
blue waterless weight of an afterlife
which even the least skeptical doctors call sleep.
From 1997 in Green Mountains Review,a poem titled after a Paul Bowles phrase:
THERE IS ONLY ONE MOUNTAIN, RIGHT ABOVE YOUR HEAD
And it uproots and inverts
when you no longer expect disasters or miracles,
the point shaking loose
rodents and warblers and snails, white fungi,
deadfalls rotten
as an old god’s teeth, the loose marble-bag
of glacial scour
and dandruff of the endless brown organic slough,
all falling at a distance
far enough to be apocalyptic, like history
come to a retrograde point,
or like poetry which, long before history, said everything
it needed to say
and has since simply accumulated amendments and renovations,
so that when its totals are shaken
and the echolalia of epic and romance and lyric
in various tongues
mushrooms up in a radical draft and, slow as the Dark Ages
comes back to earth, it settles
its confetti leaves and wings in a rubbish pyramid corresponding to
the geometered pile of death,
a heap of redundance about any number of nameable
loves and wars and deaths
which everyone comprehends too well, so no one
comprehends at all.
* * *
And that is why even a painted mountain overwhelms,
whether inverted
in a Bosch sky full of disrupted torsos and flying scissors,
or parked in the blue distance
behind a Renaissance half-smile, Platonic, allusive.
That is why one real mountain’s regard
is enough to suck the breath right out of you
and make the consideration
of anything other than it—planting mint, washing blue tempera out
of a daughter’s fingernails—
seem worthless, because now you have to strain your neck to see it,
and why not drive up
to its foot, and park, lace your good boots tighter, be the one
who will hike up today
and make it the emblem of your unspeakable life, worthless
as a dollar bill and common
as any mountain, and there are seventy or eighty mountains
in any human life
promising the same useless vision at the peak,
your one good eye
like a hazed-out sun straining to focus, and not understanding,
finally, any more than it could
at the top of last year’s bare common mountain.
* * *
But here you stand,
gnats and yellow-jackets competing for your warm exhalations,
here you kneel, cooling palms
among tiny continents of basalt and moss, a little dizzy, yes,
that’s all you’re sure of
in this middle passage of compulsion and vertigo,
that your life turned
somehow upside down and is doing its best to shake you loose.
A poem about the onset of rainy winter in western Oregon, published in Chelsea 63:
No brilliance in the sweetgum this year. A fall so mild
the crickets that should have stopped last month
still send radio pulses to the stars: appeals
to the race of giant, super-intelligent insects
they feel must be out there pitying these signals
that weaken in slow cold. No coronal colors
for this trash tree dying from the top down,
only stunned browns like blank paper held
just far enough above a flame to not burn
but to grow dry and useless for anything else.
Soon to let go, letting go now—on the sidewalk,
on lawns in the floating world, their stars
blacken and exhausted crickets crawl aboard.
Insect-sized arks, which founder in a dew
wider than all the black violin music of stellar
prophecy; these five-fingered palms, making
the universal sign for goodbye to the sun.
The crickets draw up their black instruments—
part fiddle, part crutch, part beacon to every
unanswerable star—and wait for the next
clear signal to come down, as it will, one
wet note at a time until time is a million
cold notes at once, forever, sending their
star-boats into the gutter flood. Downhill
in a whirl, as their ancestors sang,
and through the grated entry of the underworld,
where they will not have to sing summer
into miracle any more. Where ancestors wait
in strange completion, an achieved silence
black as space between the stars. Black
of the singing skeleton, rain-packed black
of the earth which never asked or promised,
but stood ready to open, and take them in.
From the Oregon State journal To Topos, two poems–one of which (the documentary poem about the young homeless man trying to sleep in my backyard) where they failed to print the crucial ending:
He meant to sleep there—beneath the rug drying
on the back porch railing: he hadn’t slept yet.
Maybe he was hunting my courtyard for
something more than the green cushions
he’d lifted from the iron glider: blanket
or pillow, child’s wind-up lullaby-toy.
God knows what gift he expected
rummaging outside the unlocked rooms
where I put off sleep with a guitar:
quiet chords, quiet stars. He possessed quieter
magic than both, maybe he was listening
to me, or my fountain aim its singular note
heavenward through its muted spout, or he
was testing the bedroom’s screen-door latch
because he wanted in, to the still-lit warmth
of a queen bed, all those pillows
faintly illuminated through the screen.
All I know is this: when the dog whimpered
for her final sortie to pee, he leapt out
of my hedge to the sidewalk—“Yo,” he said,
“I’m searching for my cat, maybe she crawled
into your bushes—she might be hurt.”
Beneath the all-night carriage light he poised,
jumpy with adrenalin, shirtless, tatted
on pecs and shoulders, jeans, boots, a wool cap
clamped to his earringed skull. The dog startled,
retreated, barked behind my silly bathrobe.
I judged his age: a son’s. But my voice cracked.
“There’s no cat here, boy—you better get going.”
I slid toward him, he balanced on a crack
in the sidewalk—unmenacing, radiating
appeal—then ran round the corner, heading west.
I called the dog in, dialed nine one one, stood
at the locked door, an antique kukhri in hand
until the black-and-whites cruised up to commence
their flashlight search.
“You should see this,”
they said, and lit me through the garden gate.
On my hijacked cushions, his ransacked backpack:
a flannel shirt, change of pants. Expensive
pomade, hydrogen peroxide, toothbrush.
Folded paper—emergency hotlines,
local, for crisis, and the Salvation Army’s
next free breakfast, highlighted green. No ID.
Backpack pristine as a middle-schooler’s,
first day in sixth grade. And when I saw
the athlete’s-foot spray, value-sized, like mine,
I said, “That’s so hygienic,” I said, “I guess
all he wanted was a patch of grass, some sleep.”
One a.m. The latex-gloved officer unscrewed
the “most suspicious” canister. What
was it? unchewed tobacco. “You know,
I’ve quit these three months,” he said. Chilly,
getting chillier, after the great heat
of the autumn day in which no one can hide.
I thanked them, asked that they leave the backpack
on my car hood, where I’d last witnessed
his retreating ghost.
Three a.m.: backpack gone,
car hood clean. By now he’s reached the river
in whose thickets many sleep, the Swiss Army knife
the police spotlighted at the bottom
of the pack curled up, probably, in his fist.
I could have packed a sandwich, an apple
for his next class in the school of hard nights,
or this knife—antique, curved, foreign—that lies
across my journal to hold the page down
while I finish a portrait he’ll never read
nor own. Quiet stars, quiet chords.
I’d want a knife this sharp, pillow this soft,
grass this luxurious if I slept out. I’d want
green cushions, the sudden excuse of a cat.
If all he wanted was a grass bed I could have
presented him this rug—Herati, a worn
prayer rug from Afghanistan, the women
who wove it had men who were used to sleeping
on stones before the next day’s war. He could
have laid it under the cushions and prayed
in whispers for that invisible cat to emerge
from the hedge, to locate him and in its small,
hungering way warm two souls until dawn’s call:
return the cushions, the rug, mouth goodbye
to no one, and—neither driven away nor
forbidden return—leave a father’s house in peace.
_____________________________
A yard taken over by Queen Anne’s lace,
blackberries, wild peas.
Summer, droughty as usual—the peaflowers withered,
the tiny lace doilies
clenched into fists. She left this house fifty years ago:
the shed and fences,
long fallen to ruin. Still, no one has broken a window.
Her husband’s grave
is five hundred miles south. He called on her
at that nailed-up door
to go dancing and when the dance was over, they eloped
to California. Ripe blackberries
peer from the unruly hedge like neighbors did when she first returned,
to see her father
open his door to her but not the new husband, though running away
had been her idea.
She steps toward her bedroom window, lifting her dress
to avoid thorns.
When she looks up again, a transparent old woman faces her,
hand to the glass
from inside the empty room. Behind her, her husband’s gaze
has joined the black eyes
fixed on her, impassively awaiting her dissolution beneath
a host of clenched doilies,
thorns, dehydrated nosegays. Fifty years the wife
of a sanitary engineer—
so he joked—cleaning toilets in the laboratory where others
perfected the end of the world.
If I told you what’s in their trash I toss into the incinerator, he’d say,
they’d throw us both
in jail forever. So when he came home from work at dawn,
he liked a slice
of cold berry pie, and for her to lay a wet washcloth
on his eyelids
fluttering in the bed, the draped room.
Fifty years to forget the end of the world is a flat stone
attended by grasshoppers,
a house subsiding among the thickets of what could produce
a world of pies.
She makes for the hedge, reaches in, begins eating the useless,
sweet eyes of the dead.
Cleveland has been good to me–in particular, my editors at Cleveland State University Press: Leonard Trawick, David Evett, and the late Alberta Turner. I wrote this poem after receiving the CSU Poetry Center Prize for The Work of the Bow and enjoying one my few visits there. The title is a line from the Brahms Requiem, to which Leonard and Kirsten Trawick treated me in Severance Hall. The poem was published in U-Montana’s Cutbank in 1998.
BUT WE SHALL ALL BE CHANGED
The minor devil wears a leather bomber
and overshoes to push through night-slush and sleet
to the house of two retiring angels assigned
to distract him in Cleveland. He’s handed a plate
of delicacies, like local angels; bookcase speakers
hymn them in with piano jazz; the white-haired hosts grind
coffee beans; angels talk poetry beneath a watercolor
of a green cantaloupe sunning apples on a brass tray.
When the host painted it, his wife and New York City
were young, he tells the minor devil, were more
devilish. The host’s green fruit will never decay.
The devil envies this hospitality
that beams, through the snow, a homing signal to all
the locals practicing short-winged flights across
Cleveland. His own flight pattern is a free-fall
sideways across America, homeless
as a cloud. But the same clear signal homed in
on him. Here he stands, almost human for one
night in this house where the difference between
what he is and what he could be closes in,
angel after homely angel. This fresh drink
pressed into his hand, this seeking of his opinion—
hell blows away outside, and who can he blame?
The hosts insist on thanking him for flying
into Cleveland; for permitting them to take him,
dressed like a bound heretic, to the Brahms Requiem.
Blessed be the dead, the chorus was singing
in Severance Hall. I thought I’d have to die
to be done with this devil pose, he tells his protector:
I didn’t guess I could lose it simply by
flying to Cleveland. Have another deviled egg,
the hostess says. He does. He wants to kiss her
for feeding him like an angel among
snow clouds; her bright cloud hair makes his gray young.
He could thank them all for ignoring his big
ingrown horns, his slightly sulfurous breath.
Narcissism is hell, however minor
its mirror, however invisible. In this air
of tiny crystal wings cleaving to Cleveland
his heart is squeezed as though by a gold band
that marries him to a strange idea that death
and hell can simply be canceled anywhere
he pronounces the unlikely mantra Cleveland.
The painted cantaloupe shines like a green sun
while angels bid him goodnight and step, one
by one, into the knife wind. Just one minute more,
he says. Cleveland, he says, and opens the door.
From Fireweed (1996), a western Oregon summer poem. From the same period as the Cleveland poem above, it uses a similar devil/angel trope.
These clarifying June days, after the slate of rain
that was valley winter
falls back into the deeper slates of the Pacific,
and the sky from dawn
until dawn is one god-sized blue eye,
my job wakes me,
shines my walking shoes and reminds me to take
my sun hat.
I like a wide-brim, open-mesh raffia, good for working
a garden all day
and not getting red-necked, though gardening’s an evening
luxury, not my job:
my job is walking up and down on the earth,
one of the fallen angels,
charged with reporting on a very small quadrant.
I like what the hat does
on the ground with my shadow: it becomes a nimbus
of shade eaten through
by moth bites of light above my body foreshortened
like a della Francesca resurrection,
one of the barrel-chested soldiers trawled up in the risen
Christ’s gathering gesture—
somewhat lazy and devilish, somewhat of the wrong party.
My morning report
to Big Blue Eye confirms the ripe magenta condition of clover heads,
accounts for the cooing
emitted from the specialized day care at this end of town—
the little mistakes
of genetics are happy on the monkey bars for now—,
and sums up the neighboring
cicada-noises of brushcutters and blowers, emergent
joyful noises we make
mowing, tilling, grooming all that lay disheveled
by winter rains,
refining space for tomatoes and roses to console us
for not being winged creatures.
Lord Blue, the blackberries need no help
to spread their exuberant,
soon-to-be-sweet-in-the-mouth rankness everywhere,
and self-heal’s ruby candles
and the pea vines and the vetch vines lift their flames
perpetual as June
below the cherries, which mime a song red with whole notes
to flocks of grosbeaks and juncos.
Lord, you didn’t even buy my hat, and the sun provides
a halo as ordinary courtesy,
but I make report anyway: as your proxy I blessed the man
loading a leaky boat on a trailer,
and the woman spraying gold—ridiculous!—on wicker chairs;
blessed cats sleeping on car hoods
in pine shade, cats sprawled in sunny driveways, treating
old spines to heat;
and juniper berries, Lord, and squat Mugho pines, I blessed
their aroma, acrid and tonic,
plus two masons singing in a trench, a hatless carpenter banging nails home—
and now if you don’t mind
I’m going in to pour a tall glass of mint water, take off
my sandals and yes, my hat,
and put my legs up until afternoon, when I promise
to resume transmitting.
Two poems from Richard Long’s 2River Review:
WHERE DELIVERANCE COMES FROM
I will lift up my eyes to the oaks where a thousand
starlings bitch and jubilate and connive. And down
to the boulevard fragrant with two-ton metal predators.
Racing each other’s dioxide stink. Digesting each human
in their idiot stomachs. And I will say: Why me?
Why again? As though the oaks would lean down
and hand me the answer etched in tannic acid.
As though the ground should raise its grass dress
to show me what I’m made of. So I will be grateful
for being a witness: a pile of dirt with eyes. A stunned blink.
And a mouth, such a mouth. Lips that once were fat
kiss-pillows, now thinning, hardening. Throat
that was full of the hum and lull and wail of Hendrix
now dry with gloat and derision. A faucet whose water
is red with rust. Why shouldn’t I want to look away?
The world waits for us with its maw open. We flee in herds,
armored against it, along boulevards. And from what?
Back where we switched on the escape ignition
there’s a yard where a girl makes a dandelion tiara.
Where a boy lies down and sings to ants.
Everywhere we go abandons them. And drives us
faster toward the mouth that will shell,
crack, and swallow us in heart-sized morsels.
Look past the singing oaks and shaved hills.
That huge yellow mane, see? Those long yellow teeth.
No choice, then, but to shrug, and go, and try to sing.
Like the starlings, happy that it’s grown overcast.
No choice but to stand it until you’re plucked and bitten.
Like this mushroom, Agaricus campestris, I lean down
to pluck, to bite. Is that a maggot in the pink gills?
It falls in my palm—helpless as me before the size
of the sun—a squirm, half question, half exclamation.
How to atone for nearly eating what was not eating you?
The mushroom is full of tunnels. I aim the small white
life into one. And lay the mushroom on the ground.
_______________________________________
At 45 degrees latitude, the dead devolve
in record rains: a hundred inches this year,
rains deep enough to drink me, if they want.
This year graveyards are awash, they’re sinking.
When I was twelve, I shivered in a winter treehouse
with a friend whose great-uncle had just croaked
raving, drooling, the works. It rained while we talked.
“If I live past sixty-four,” I said, “I’ll shoot myself.”
I’d lifted Dad’s .45 Colt down from his closet
earlier that day, cradled it, heavier than a baby
for all I knew, unswaddled it from its gun-oiled T-shirt
and put its cold to my ear, all idiot bravado.
1:30 a.m. I sit on the back deck pierced by leafless
oaks that shiver, like I shiver in the rain winds
of my middle-age passage. Slave to what, bound
to whose profit? I’m smoking to summon my father
and his brothers to answer for me. Smoke brings the dead
nearer in the rain; like prisoners, they tap code
on deck-roofing adorned for Sukkot with branches
fallen from oaks and firs. Idiot age, they’re telling me,
that’s what browns the oak leaves, what withers them.
But suicides are thrown torn green branches to sweep hell.
Father, the smoke of you blows out my mouth
to the corner of the house, sucked around its floodlit edge.
Smoke is all Uncle Ben managed to make himself
at sixty-one; Uncle Tommy at sixty-two. What did I want
at twelve from the smoke-colored metal in my hands?
To sit on a wet chair and freeze, rain answers, on the deck
of rain’s night vessel going nowhere. On slave ships,
sometimes, a hobbled necklace of men would wake
and see it was never going to be over, this capture,
not with the end of a mere ocean, and they would walk
off the ship, a spiraling molecule, singing as they chose
unsounded depths. Some had to be fathers and sons,
ending the shackles together. Father, shackled by rain
to your brothers, why does no one get out simply
by imagining a death he deserves? I flick the barrel
of the cigarette away. My black dog peers through
the storm door, anxious. Remember that painting
of the black dog swimming hard, swimming faithfully
toward something Goya kept outside the frame?
Father, you should know now: show me
the other side of the rain. You’re slave to nothing
but a boy’s fear, the rain taps. Slave-boy, depression’s dog,
what are you in middle-aged night, this far north,
this far west? In imagination you want to leap—
why keep your animal head above water? Because
I want to sing how unjust it is that we’re chained
together, father and son, in death’s immortal mistake.
Is that reason enough? The rain won’t say. I’m the age
of my latitude, I’m freezing. A hand like my father’s
opens the storm door again, and the black dog
guides me through all the blinded rooms to bed.
Originally a sequence of 17 unrhymed sonnets, “An Indefinite Sentence of Exile in Florence Massachusetts” came out in Zyzzyva in 1996. Funny thing: I could never publish anything about Massachusetts while I lived there, but once I came west the only things Howard Junker would take at Zyzzya (limited to West coast writers) were Massachusetts pieces. Go figure. This poem, which is faithful to a number of Florence establishments, enjoyed a funny, laugh-happy debut reading of the draft in Amherst, 1991–the year we moved to Oregon. I’m pleased so many years later that I seem to have prophesied my son Seth’s real, abiding interest in Pinot Noir in a casual allusion near the end of the poem. It might well be categorized among War Works for all the allusions (comic here) to traumatized Vietnam vets. Is there a syntactical trick? yes: in deciphering the title.
AN INDEFINITE SENTENCE OF EXILE IN FLORENCE MASSACHUSETTS
At the butcher block in Everybody’s Market,
behind the meat saw, Dom laughs at Cosmo’s
old hard-on joke while stuffing kielbasa
I’m buying for backyard barbecue to show
the vegetarian neighbors my family’s not deserting
serious meat, no matter what they hiss
in bean-and-tofu-tainted gossip—
so loading the frayed Nigerian jute sack
(Peace Corps, 1976) with salsa verde,
malt vinegar, garlic matzoh and sausage,
I fetch Magnolia, our hundred-pound Samoyed,
whose ancestors include White Fang and other
Jack London-style dogs, and who will eat
BBQ kielbasa but prefers vegetarian cats,
and am hailed by our postman Mr. Ronald Ragan
(Ron to friends) outside the P.O. to defend
a position I took in my new commercial poem,
that if flamingos ate grass, not shrimp,
they’d be grass-green, not shrimp-pink,
causing a crisis (admittedly minor)
for manufacturers and owners of lawn flamingos,
but the poem has been rejected by Life,
Redbook, Woman’s Day, and Ebony,
Ron chuckles, handing me
freshly slit SASE’s as he skips into
Pizza Factory to announce that their
application for tax-exempt status has
also been rejected, though A-1 Pizza
and Attila’s Pizza have been awarded
multimillion dollar contracts by
the Department of Defense to manufacture
freeze-dried pizza to spiff up the morale
of homesick Marine paratroopers stuck
on Third World missions—and it’s true
that the many ex-Marine outpatients
from the local VA relieve symptoms
of post-trauma stress at A-1 or Attila’s,
never at Pizza Factory, though one vet
calling himself Nebuchadnezzar
seems to eat nothing but grass he plucks
from cracks in the village fountain,
which once spouted water from the Mill River,
which rich Yankees wanted to rename
The Arno—having already upgraded
the village name from Pleasant Meadow
to Florence—honoring Tuscan silkworkers
who emigrated here to hatch silkworms,
labor communes, and revolutions,
and to fornicate with married Yankee women
on the pretext of supplying them with camisoles
and silk teddies, while the rich doctor—
and lawyer—husbands sipped from
the fountain, humming “Down by the old,
not the new but the old, mill stream,”
thinking Yankee money plus Italian labor
equals more Yankee money, only to see
their kids end up squandering inheritances
on pizza slices, pizza-counter girls, and, finally,
pizza franchises (Ciao Yale medicine,
arrivederci Harvard law)—so the Yankee
elders tried to forbid private use of silk,
public consumption of pizza, mentioning
the Arno, saying Ciao! to the postman,
but when they voted to strike the name
Florence, they were barred from
the Miss Florence Diner (specializing in
veal parmigian and New England boiled dinner)
with a jukebox in every booth,
and every jukebox stuffed with concertina,
mandolins, Sinatra and Como! so they
(the Yankee elders) had to confine
their persecution to Sacco & Vanzetti,
whose photos hang cold and perpetually
fresh in Miss Flo’s pie safe, though Miss Flo
likes to keep everything cold—especially
the coffee, and me drinking it with windows
open to a late April snow—because
Miss Flo knows cold customers drinking
cold coffee need to buy hot veal and boiled
cabbage to regain strength and wit
enough to skip the bill, and slip
on a still-icy street, and be just barely
missed by the Volunteer Pumper Truck
on its way to douse Nebuchadnezzar
setting his matted beard afire to protest
how the endless New England winter
interferes with convalescence from
the bone-shaking nightmares brought on
by a year of jungle fighting—but Magnolia
my snow-dog has already knocked him
down to lick out his would-be Buddhist
self-immolation, and though dazed
he allows me by way of apology
to escort him to Sandy’s Vietnamese Cuisine
for lemon-grass tea and lichee-nut pizza,
which Sandy the dragon lady serves,
lamenting in French the pizza franchises
she left behind in Hue and Saigon—
but my errands take me back to Florence Center
to Bird’s Store Since 1867
Your One and Only Stop for Indonesian
clove cigarettes (me), Italian silk
underthings (my wife), and Vermont
maple syrup (two kids), plus a stop
at Computer Farm to check their progress
on my idea for software that generates
terrific commercial poems to break open
a monster poetry market in Cosmopolitan
and TV Guide and get my face into
supermarkets, and out of these tweedy
academic quarterlies that bury my poems
on the shelves of college-library basements,
but it appears the local programmers have
applied my concepts to the random generation
of freeze-dried pizza recipes because,
as one jests, “What’s one flabby poet
next to a DOD contract?” so I leave,
saddened that Marines will keep on
parachuting all over the world,
bellies full of computerized pizza,
instead of deserting to write poetry
and drink lemon-grass tea with me
in the pleasant meadows of Florence,
with its three dozen graveyards
and its library full of Puritan hymnals
and its one-room museum with screeching
door and screeching floor and one
passenger pigeon stuffed under
a bell jar, not to mention the tricentennial
witch-hunt festival, and crowds waving torches
outside Miss Flo’s when she threatens
to throw Sinatra out of all her booth-sized
jukeboxes in favor of the Dead Kennedys
—yes, the Florentine air I breathe is rich
with the burnt-earth odor of exile
that made Ovid weep by the Black Sea
and Mandelstam cough in Vladivostok,
and that makes the vet outpatients sneeze
in memory of body hair seared by friendly
napalm strikes or attempted self-immolation,
a measure that would solve nothing for me,
since my exile includes children who
need me to fix boiled dinner, pour syrup,
apply Band-Aids and teach them something
besides the notion that Adam invented
alphabet soup and kielbasa, while Eve
invented multiplication, teacup etiquette,
and needlepoint, and that black men
make good athletes while white men make
good presidents, and women of whatever
color make good wet-nurses, as I’ve gathered
from their social studies primer
that my wife wants to burn though as a Jewish
Marxist-feminist she’d get tied to a Maypole,
doused with gas and lit while PTA
members prance around it, chanting passages
from Hawthorne and Jonathan Edwards,
which reminds me to save some BBQ
kielbasa to take down to the cellar
(last used by the Underground Railroad)
where my better half has been in hiding
since that riot at the VFW Friday Night Beano,
when she stood to demand that they send
a ton or two of their used kidney-bean
game pieces to Vietnam, Nicaragua,
or at least Grenada, and got us both
pelted with dry beans and chased home
through one of the newer graveyards
by a bunch of one-legged,
one-armed, one-eyed drunks—
nevertheless, I cherish her Red-Diaper-baby
ferocity that drove her to move us
from the gossipy dogwood haze
of Chapel Hill, where our socialist-surrealist
fervor had rooted and spread like kudzu,
although North Carolina no longer
required two arthritic hippies in its
political-poetic avant-garde, leading
my wife to declare “In Massachusetts,
we can end the witch-burning tricentennials,
the indiscriminate use of villanelles,
and the conspiracy to make the Third World
safe for freeze-dried pizza, while our kids
can learn to drink syrup straight
from the maple, and we can commute
to work and political rallies
on cross-country skis!” and now she’s
shivering and dirty in the cellar,
with only mice and spiders and the frowning
ghost of Harriet Tubman for company,
so I stop by Moriarty’s Drugs to get her
a quart of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap,
which brings All-One-God-Faith and Moral-ABC
to anyone who can read while shampooing
by candlelight on a dirt-packed cellar floor
—yet what other soapmaker writes poetry
and prints it in impossibly tiny characters
on every bottle of soap he ships out,
this blind Essene rabbi, master chemist,
whose cousins were rendered into Nazi soap?
FACE THE WORLD WITH A SMILE/
LIFE IS ALWAYS WORTHWHILE
WE LIVE GOD’S LAW TODAY/
WE WIN FREE SPEECH OK
I chant Dr. Bronner’s bubbly praise
for the 96 billion fruit trees that will sway
in the ruins of Beirut and Tripoli,
for Abraham-Isaac-Moses-Buddha-Hillel-
Jesus-Spinoza, and add my own ad-libbed
praise for Marines who forsake
grenade launchers to read O’Hara,
drink lemon-grass tea, and bathe
multi-cultural babies in mint soap—
but seeing his other customers flee
the aisles when I chant ALL-ONE-OR-NONE
the badly rhymed label of the entire bottle
at the top of my voice, Moriarty (sly
American druggist) starts playing his
78 record of Harry Truman’s Happy Birthday
Variations for Piano & A-Bomb
—so this vision, like most visions of peace
I have, collapses under the boogie-woogie
weight of Truman’s left hand and the soundtrack
of bombs that bracketed the day of my birth
in the early fifties, when Moriarty claims
to have held a block party for McCarthy,
distributing 8×10 glossies signed
God Bless—Joe, plus plans for a backyard
bomb shelter of Moriarty’s design
and barbiturate samples, in case the canned
soup ran out before the bombs did,
but Moriarty’s the village liar
and the only way to discourage him
is to buy nothing he sells, so I put back
the soap, and steal some ipecac to help me
throw up the kielbasa casing later
and head home to Corticelli Street,
named for the silk-mill foreman,
a well-known socialist and little-known
surrealist, who forged a batch of letters
from Rimbaud to Dante, erotic letters,
which he preferred to read aloud under
the skirt or between the breasts of whatever
rich anemic Yankee wife he was taking
advantage of that afternoon, before strolling
home to piss away his soul into the narrow,
sluggish Mill River that tried (and failed)
to be transformed into the wine-dark
Arno, and it’s in Corticelli’s honor
that I step through the ruins of poison ivy
and stinging nettles to the river bank,
to translate my own homelessness
into a prismatic arc of piss, a short, brief
rainbow that is my covenant with Ovid,
Dante, Rimbaud, and Mandelstam,
who stood drunk with lethal exile
and longing at the edge of that last river,
into which all rivers and seas empty themselves,
as I try to empty myself of myself,
and fail, and stand, ruefully, shaking my dick
and my head, whistling up into a white pine
where four crows have alighted and hop
from branch to branch, full of the rust
of crow-mockery: Ovid, Dante, Rimbaud,
Mandelstam, Hello, glad to see you again!
I call, inviting them to my kielbasa cookout,
since I know only the burnt odor
of serious meat and a beakful of red wine
will allow them to croak out their human memories—
But are those crow-tears I see? spurts
of pure black bile, making a quietus
of their laughter as they gaze past me,
and at what? —my children! my blond,
sugar-lipped angels, curled together
in their hammock that is stretched
in the paradise shade between two towering
sugar maples, of course, what else
can strike tears from the great flying dead
but an intimate glimpse of this simple
mortal heaven their bargain with immortality
forbade? “Children!” I cry in a surprising
access of tears, sending my fingers through
their hair to wake them to this visitation
of crow-poets, “My great and eternally
childless mentors, this is Seth, this is Sarah,
these two are heaven’s reasons why
I remain happy as a minor asterisk
of a poet, why my heart has not collapsed
into a white-dwarf cinder beneath your fixed
and unattainable lights—” then Sarah says,
“Hey, blackbirds!” and Seth extends
a sleeved boy-angel wrist as a perch,
and, wisely, I think, while my feet are
underfoot, so to speak, and not in my mouth,
I go set up the barbecue and drinks—
so while the children stroke his mournful
plumage, Mandelstam begins reciting
in trochaic tetrameter the ingredients
of Siberian gruel: toenails of wolves,
whiskers of cockroaches, dissolved in a broth
of Stalin’s tears, how the train to Vladivostok
rattled loose the one black tooth
in his mouth, how he composed his last poem
on a garbage heap, with a bit of barbed wire,
on a scroll of his own skin the size
of a postage stamp, one rhyming couplet
begging the labor-camp warden for a pair
of used swallow wings (I lay meat out
on shining grass, the crow-poets harry it;
the sun, almost gone, fires the crowns
of our maples to green torches; Ovid sips
Pinot Noir from the saucer of Seth’s cupped palms)
—then Rimbaud scratches his head
with one claw and describes the army ants
which feasted on his mules, overloaded with rifles
and dying en route to the King of Ethiopia,
how he coaxed the ants to haul the rifles
by promising to show them Paris,
then betrayed them to the King’s anteaters,
for which crime he lost his love of poetry
and ended up a poor bitter shopkeeper
on an island in the Indian Ocean, contracting
gangrene from an ant bite and dying
before he got to see Paris again
(stars salt the rain-barrel, Mandelstam,
isn’t that right, on your revolutionary earth
moving closer to truth and to dread,
above the lemon-colored Neva at night—
or are the stars, as Rimbaud believes,
lice infesting the heads of fallen boy-geniuses,
white bites of hell that crack under
a mother’s murderous nails?)
—then Ovid, waving his wings, shouts,
No more poetry, who wants magic?
and the kids shout, Us! so he changes Sarah
into a laurel tree and Seth into a swan,
and, as soon as I protest, I find myself mooing,
drooling hungrily at the dewy, starlit lawn
I forgot to mow yesterday, but when I bend
my bull-heavy head down for a bite,
Dante says, Ovid, that’s enough, and Poof!
the children become sleepy children
again in my arms (they’re my heroes,
Ovid, and I’m theirs, with no wish to be
morphed out of our lamp-lit constellation
of rooms among the maples, no compulsion
to hype our love’s claims to a size
that strains to move the sun and all the stars,
as Dante drove himself to do, and so
broke his voice), and suddenly it’s late,
and Dante, perched on my lawn-chair,
takes umbrage at my thought, clacks
his hooked beak and caws something sharp,
like Curfew! or Ecce Homo!
and the crow-poets fly after him, back into
their star-charted exile, leaving four feathers,
which are tickets, I guess, good for
a one-way family trip to the underworld,
so sticking the feathers behind my ear
I head to the cellar door, kicking it lightly
three times (all-clear signal to wife),
and look up at the stars (goodnight,
good-bye, who knows which?) before carrying
the heavy sweetness of children underground.
:: :: ::
What follows? In general, much earlier works–things written and published before I decided what would be part of my first collection, The Power to Die. These are some of the orphaned works: a mix of 20-something experiments and voices, apprentice- and journeyman-work from the 1970s to mid 1980s. They’re not in chrono-order.
From Juggler’s World in the 1980s:
SIMPLE HOLDINGS
I own a pear
and two pecans
enough grass
to stuff three pillows
a ceiling
that weeps on my face in bed
plenty of nails
but no paintings
my mother blames
herself for this
visiting us she frets
that my family will go hungry
how can I tell her
we no longer worry
whether we are happy
or unhappy
we have neither too much
nor too little
nails to hang our clothes on
when we tire of wearing them
the costless smell of grass
while we sleep
and when my son cries
and refuses to eat
I produce two pecans and a pear
and juggle for him
I am not very good
But he claps delightedly
even mother
has to hold her breath
at the pecans
passing swiftly hand to hand
at the pear weightless
as a sun in mid-air
:: :: ::
The earliest version of the title “The Work of the Bow” appeared in The Sun in the late 1970s. It’s a completely different poem than the title poem of my 1997 book, though based on the same proverb of Heraclitus (“The name of the bow is life, but its work is death”—a pun on the Greek bios, which mean “life” or “bow” depending on which syllable you accent):
THE WORK OF THE BOW
I love how the bridge is strung
to sing like a harp
suspended in strong gales;
I love the nerves
pegged over your ribs
like a zither tuned to my fingers;
and most of all I love to stand
still as the center
of a straw target
and await
the single note of the long bow
arrowing through all things.
:: :: ::
The Bloomsbury Review in Colorado published a few short poems of mine in 1981, when I lived in western Colorado:
MOUNTAINEER
I hear a wolf on the ridge
reach from his pulpit of bones
each step is a shallow grave
and my bone-marrow shivers Amen.
Below, the wind hones itself
on my remnants: meat on a foxtooth,
skin stuck to rock, boot in a crevice.
I owe these peaks more than one death:
the hands fuse asking absolution,
eyes freeze open in the highest pass:
whatever lasts will climb until
it finds and opens the last gate of ice.
________________
The following is based on the character thanatos (Θ), the title of one of Bryant’s best-known poems, and emblematized in the last two lines of this poem:
THE HOME OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
Dry rot has closed the poet’s home.
Visitors sign in on dusty windows.
Myrtle petals crowd the stoop
of the door no one answers—
a skeleton key would unlock it.
Termites restore a blind kingdom
beneath the eaves; I dawdle
with old petals, letting them fall.
At last a boy who knows a way in
offers me a glimpse of the deathbed
through a keyhole.
:: :: ::
From Sy Safransky’s The Sun in the mid-1970s, two pieces:
THIS POEM
This poem calls attention to itself
as goldenrod pollen blown in overnight onto your pillow
calls attention to itself
this poem is slight
as lichen that cracks a stone bench and holds the cracks together
is slight
this poem is weak
as pine logged hauled sawn pulped beat into erasable paper
is weak
this poem is dispensible
as a plainly dressed child laughing on a crowded playground
is dispensible
this poem is blind
as tears climbing into your eyes when rain ages to snow and snow to ice
is blind
this poem is deaf
as a diamond rough in the shovel fine in the watch of a dying man
is deaf
this poem is dead
as the sand wherein ghost crabs and rising sun clams have buried themselves
is dead
this poem is reborn
as I all my nerves restrung by your hands strummed in the new sun
am reborn
______________________
AND RESURRECTION
Again a rattling alarm
in all the pits of the body
the limbs seize up
the house dodders over
the brink of silence wings sagging
on a lwn of sand
like an angel when it has lost
the strength to hover
hoarse from another night wasted
shouting warnings at sleep
dawn’s surf crawls back under the porch
after a night ringing the buoys like church deadbells
it stretches out by the pilings
and digs
the sun scrawls up
the milky slate of the sky
chalk in a palsied hand
sentenced to write
until it gets it
right
and ever shall be
world without end amen
amen
great sheets of dew thrown up to dry stiff
will they ever come clean
of their bridal stain
while the needles of jets
mend north to south
where those blue patches wear and tear
where we shiver awake
cold in a draft
:: :: ::
From the mid-80s, in the defunct Carolina Literary Companion, a persona poem:
MISSING AT SEA
Nothing but white noise on the shortwave,
the telephone heavier each time I answer—
tiny, helpless voices. If I let them
touch me I’ll turn into a widow.
This is the hour your trawler would slide
into view, gulls thrown up in its wake.
The storm waves are white flags: Give up.
The weather monitor mutters to the kitchen wall
From Cape Lookout to Cape Fear,
visibility poor. Upstairs, the shape we pressed
into the sheets stirs as I open the window.
Upstairs, it’s still the night before
you go: your shirt slipping to the floor,
your body pungent and mackerel-smooth
against mine—let the black phone
keep ringing,the mattress moves like a groundswell
beneath us, your breath keeps rising,
rising, and falling in mine.
:: :: ::
From 1977, several poems from the Davidson Miscellany:
THE MUSICOLOGIST READS BACK SATCHHMO’S ADVICE ON HOW TO IMPROVISE JAZZ
Ahem. Ahem—
“now you get you a watermelon tote-boy
look here I don’t mean no highyellow
no highsteppin quadroon
they kiss the shit on a white man’s walkin stick
I mean black like delta mud
nobody gone stepping on
now you heat him up about creole pussy
till you see the white of his eye
and his neck poke out like a king snake
when it seen a rattler slide out of its skin
now you set him in the front seat with a dollar cigar
drive on downtown to the basin
simmer his tongue in turtle stew
till it so hot
it scald fuzz off a green peach
now you let him alone in the wharf cathouse
shut them windows hot and tight
except that one high over the river
open it wide as the bell of my horn
then you light you a stick of boo
strut your stuff on across the bridge
now when that panther wail come
slidin low along that black water
blow it back if you my man
squeal for squeal
yowl for yowl”
_____________________
ONE ACT SCENES
1.
This man walks halfway
across a bridge, see,
stares a minute at the coat
of algae the creek wears these days,
where no reflection will ever again
show him up,
and no rings of refreshed water
spread their support beneath him
where his spit hits flat.
But he can still go back to
whoever he has been, and does, sauntering
back wherever it was.
2.
That man pulls
a gun from a grocery bag.
It’s all meat, he yells, waving,
pointing at them, all of it.
Like Baptists bells on Sunday
protesting Episcopal chimes
the gun quarrels disconcertingly
with the cash register, so
the heads of the checkout clerks
strike No Sale: bang/ching, bang/ching.
That man locks himself
in the meat freezer
so you can’t hear
who or what he prays to
before the alarm triggers
his cornered amen,
but you can hear the flies
gather for a warbling love feast
against the automatic
unalarmed glass doors.
__________________
I’LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS
Angels weep tinsel
from the radio tower.
The disembodied carolers
have sustained their full-throated ease
since Halloween.
Charity is a fluent cause.
Frosted jars of bacon grease, old newspapers rolled into logs,
purchase domestic appeasement in the ghetto.
The firebells make a joyful noise there.
In all the homes of the deaf and old
are marvelous adaptations: the wise men
played by puppets, hymnings, aluminum trees,
a manger scene where everyone stands very still.
Soft eggnog and cookies afterward.
Component stereos we have
turned on high. Santa
lends an ear to the shy and small
and importunate at each shopping center,
his promises muffled in spun white fiber.
And for those unsatisfied
with an electric candle in the window,
the television shows a nuclear submarine
splitting the North Pole apart,
flying a red neon star
from its periscope.
_________________
FRIENDS
Grown brittle and sharp as pencil
Points in graduate departments, Eliot,
Schoenberg, Lorenz, Marcuse,
undressing mannekins in the blank
pitiless window of fashion malls, Izod,
Cardin, Gucci, St.-Laurent,
stuffing carpetbags with a salesman’s
rainbow of remnants and samples, Electric
Ocher, Flamingo Flame, Bicentennial Dapple,
stuffing briefcases with the fine
print of protection and security, Life,
Fire, Hospital, Earthquake,
making a killing underselling
cuttings in forcing houses, Impatiens,
Purple Passion, Spider Plant, Joseph’s Coat,
dispensing the New Age in twelve
uneasy lessons to progressive aliens, TM,
Tai Chi, Kundalini, Zazen,
I hear the door of their Volvos
slam: wallets swollen with hunger
cling to them like spoiled orphans:
now they have built their first house
of credit cards, persuading the trees to give up
their great solitudes and begin new lives
as vacation houses, doctoral theses, sanitary
napkins, news bulletins and reproductions, Klee,
Picasso, Matisse, Klein;
now their barbed grass establishes itself,
the secluded lots gain interstate access,
checks are written to cover everything
and soon the invitations will make everything plain:
Dear friends, colleagues, classmates, members,
in a short while our conventions are to take place…
cocktails will be served wherever the sun goes down.
___________________
STRONG TOILS OF GRACE
Driving off the open road into a rest area,
aching with the continual pulse of headlights
I caught a migrant worker stuffing a wailing baby
into the urinal: Hey! I wanted to shout but
some silence, harder than the pulsing of pity
or anger, shook between us like huge compacted hands:
before I turned to wash my hands he slowly flushed,
stooped, and began to clean the feet of his son.
:: :: ::
From the Davidson Miscellany in 1973: first poem I placed in a nationally-circulated /peer-reviewed journal. Very much a teenager’s apprentice work, straining to summon nostalgia and irony and set them against each other like Rockem Sockem Robots….
THE LUMINA
They’re tearing down the old beach pavilion
shortly: business has been waning for
some time: condominiums inch skyward at a deliberate pace
nearby. Going up the blistered steps, memories
flit by and sting like sand.
Orphan corners of the ballroom contain
faint echoes of Glenn Miller and Gene Krupa, but
they’re dead & hard to recall amid
the tolling pinball machines & flat beer. Out
of the haze, out on the wind-worn promenade,
a local band stumbles through radio tunes
like a clumsy-needled jukebox, where
fashionable ladies once lingered beneath parasols,
watching the persistent, chameleon Atlantic.
The skating rink is long since shuttered,
locked like Bluebeard’s door, secret: skating
is out of style.
I used to scamper and dig in that cool
shaded sand among the brown picnic tables
while tourists bought flip-flops and ate
sandy hotdogs in the breezeway; I imagined
I owned the frolicking place—curator
of skates & dancebands, dispenser of cokes
and surfmats, bronze lifeguard supreme.
Termites mostly own the place now. Rusty cans
rattle through the breezeway, an empty pickle jar
rests on the saltwarped counter.
The beach shudders beneath throbbing, cold waves
and fishermen dot the pier, lines askew.
They’re tearing down the old pavilion.
And at night below the rampant moon,
a rough sea-wind rakes slats & shutters,
forcing each wooden nerve
to groan out its mildewed pain and love,
pleas lost like a sigh
in the ocean’s dullish roar.
:: :: :: ::
From a 1978 Davidson Miscellany:
JOURNAL ENTRY
Lying on my belly on limestone bluffs
since 7, waiting for pilot whales to migrate
past the cape. Cloudless: sun wanders;
limestone reflects stovetop heat. I keep
my hands drowsing in a spring’s bowl, cool.
Overwhelming thresh of waves below: doze…doze…
12:10 pm
Waking I find I’ve been briefly delivered
into the next life: chest, belly, legs stamped
with their mature likenesses—pebbles, fossils,
clinging dirt; eyes drained colorless, a promise
to keep; back burnt red and dry and any maple leaf;
hands wrinkled white—drenched, unpacking sprouts.
1:20 pm
Glimpse of far spouts—a large pod bearing south—
reminds me the salt breath between us freshens,
blows, and dies down the same; we are each a life
bearing other lives with us, within us, always
toward the wonders of the sun, which all migrants follow,
where all promises are delivered.
:: :: ::
Same year/different issue:
THE PRAYER OF NARCISSUS
Cattail be my wand:
when I break your ripe head, fly
seed along this valley
to anchor the pond
that’s aged to a bog.
Black willow be a thicket:
follow the wrinkled streambed,
surround that strange child’s face
forever unwound
into sphagnum, flytrap, and sundew.
:: :: ::
Same journal, 1976 (RHL = 23):
THE BOOK OF CHANGES
We quarrel now even while she dreams.
Squatting by the windprickled pond
she opens the Book of Changes:
I hear the faint clatter of yarrow stalks
scattered, scooped, and counted.
The sand rasps as she draws the breaking lines.
Opening the paper to world news
I read how a mild tremor in Mount Etna
shivered walls in forty-nine Sicilian homes,
and how monks in the Capuchin catacombs
found two hundred skeletons—bishops, infants,
lovers—shaken down, scattered across the dim floors.
:: :: ::
From a mid-70s Davidson Miscellany, 2 pieces from a cycle of “businessman” poems. I was working at a job with an IBM Selectric and a big clock and very little to do when I wrote these:
BUSINESSMAN SETTLING DOWN
The bonded eyes blear over an edge of his mahogany world,
evading the calendar, the wire gates IN/OUT,
swimming the shag wall to wall, between hungry dragons of hangover,
then begin the graded ascent: file cabinet, shelf, shelf,
diploma, certificate, hunting those trophies of order
indispensable to his position: Ceiling: the fuses never slouch there,
they are in order: suns humming whitely through their tubes,
conditioned wind from all four ducts,
muzak to manicure the ball of dictating nerves.
On go his electric typists, serving up yesterday’s stale memos.
Morning. Affirmative. The eyes drop clockwise,
where there’s time to set up a buffer zone against noontime nausea,
time to walk the minute hand around its imposing plaza till coffee.
3 EPITAPHS FOR A BUSINESSMAN
i.
His telephones blink,
stammering anguish.
Stockholding relatives
weep and retire.
A raise is not forthcoming.
ii.
His pocket calculator
hums an unrelieved cipher.
Crepesleeved lilies hang out
sallow cupped palms, late wellwishers
to this unpaid overdue extended
vacation.
iii.
The office percolater
regularizes commiseration
for a market open wide
just as he got away from it
all. Nothing in his dictaphone’s voice
intimates reappraisal, void as it is
of relevant memoranda.
The following batch of constitutes the end of apprenticeship. They were complex narratively, formally, philosophically, according to my liberal education. Written when I was 21, they appeared in the winter 1975 Davidson Miscellany:
FOUR SONGS FROM GESCHLECHTSLIEDER:
Death hoho took love for a tumble
in driveins drab and alleys whooping
‘hot honeypie!’ O now they but touch
when alack crawl the creeping willies
1. SONG OF THE YOUNG WIFE
Tonight I dreamed I was a butterfly:
I shed the careweaved chrysalis of sleep,
and white wings bloomed behind my eye.
I danced—O sun!—sucked bright flowers dry;
I never kissed your mouth so long, so deep.
Tonight I dreamed I was a butterfly!
Caressed by sweetfingered winds, I soared, I
swooped—I laughed so loud to see snails creep!
And white wings bloomed behind my eye.
Then my back snapped, wings snagged. I—that cry!
my flesh fed squalling swifts, a shredded heap.
Tonight I dreamed I was a butterfly.
Sleepless, sore where beaked flesh hammered my thigh,
I groan; you snore. Barren! The thought won’t sleep:
And white wings bloomed behind my eye.
I swell to wean: nested until I die
I’ll squeeze this out and teach it to weep.
Tonight I dreamed I was a butterfly.
And white wings bloomed behind my eye.
…her sweat trickled
through stiff stacked tinder
into clay.
“Might God,” muttered the preacher,
‘forgive, for our sins shackled
to hewed tree.’
Straw, harvest-dry, shaken
at the stake, crumpled blackly and burst:
Lucifer’s brittle yellow nails
searched her thigh.
Scrubbed children, sternly clapped to fencerails
facing, unlike elders left uncursed
her tremor flaring into ecstasy, all stricken
with woe.
Wriggling into the devilsred gown
as thongs hissing split,
she wrestled him down to seal
their seizure in the embers.
Wheezing ‘I—do…’
she leaked from the corpse; from the coals’ ambers
her odor infringed the town.
Turning, the elders converged on the rail
where her leashed boy foaming bit
his arms and fists:
Searing skin bowels very soul
this deviance wanton after the calf
such our Lord utterly slew; the riotous soul
seeps under rocks or skitters chaff
from His just hands Who loving taught us to pray:
So uttered father clasping him breathless untethered
while one drew from the corpse two long sooty bones;
his brow blistered, they pushed him away,
singing as he leapt and whimpered across the stones
which women in their skirts briskly gathered.
Zooming even closer now the camera
gloats on those fluoristained
teeth which take their rigorous prey
like a fine fierce retriever and shake
limp what life remains: gulping
gasping cinemascopically into that dark
starless air your sacrifice shines
on contorted faces, legs in leghollows mingled
in the roaring of stags whores on holiday
glittering cowboys who compare niceties
of come-encouraging, antiphonies confused and multiplied
in the balcony the gilt niches like summercrowd chatter
in Mammoth Cavens as shoving they spill
through grottos, eddy amazed around
gross stalagmites, and pause stupidly
at any deadending gorge.
Linda as you lay
somewhere else now doing what’s done off
camera, cinematic seed since burnt in your belly
or passed through suave porcelain into sewage,
do you wonder at the endless circuit
of heads haloed briefly by your Klieglit flesh,
who abandon the cartoon’s absurd epilogue
the weltering aisles for familiar, yawning air
they call fresh, surging eager and stupefied
around the blighted sidewalk trees the branches
swinging spoiled and bare?
4. SONG: TO CELIA’S YOUNGER SISTER
Broken glasses, farewell toasts:
apologizing parents crowd the door.
Clutching a watery julep
the final debutante unzips her Dior.
Molting, bedding: legs like scissors spreading
to shear the thread that tangles core with core, unraveled–
on the miles of backroads rutting out tomorrow,
car-enclosed, retrace your forehead’s sunworn furrow,
shaping any smile relief from thought might borrow.
The bloodless moonround faces
of children you claimed you knew
flap after you like kitetails
into a washed-out gauze of blue—
drifting, shifting, if once then always sifting
through cedar chests, mildewed cardboard for a locket—
The sun sprouts flowerweeds from its carious hero,
the halfmoon drops her blunt blackshafted arrow;
the bristling sow snaps bone to suck out marrow.
The junebug’s whir, the locust’s cant
smother under August’s sweaty sheet;
your breasts yield to my knuckles
like hot sand to the pelican’s feet—
teasing, dozing, dawn impels the choosing:
what you dreamed we were betrays what we are.
Change your name the next time we meet.
In the next curve’s crook is slung
a circular pond, you’ll pass there—
into the next curve’s crooked loveless arm.
The next two poems, published when I was 22 (Spring 1975 Davidson Miscellany), seem to me to belong to the next period of craft: not mastery but moving toward it. (The first, “Patrol,” was awarded a prize by Donald Hall though he never read the whole poem—someone failed to give him the last two stanzas).
Seven letters,
anagrammatic fatalist,
spent between two suspended mirrors.
Evanescent pools, tang of wet air.
Seven years.
How were the valentines scrawled?
I luv u. xxxx xxxx…
Seven.
Nostalgic drivel through yearbooks.
A plump cursive hand sprawling over lovers’ beachscapes.
Recurrent snapshots, recurrent promises.
And seven more.
The bridge sunken,
steeped in green sheets of kelp,
the ferry drydocked.
Seven rainy months,
spring split at the seams,
oyster shells piling up to bleach;
the muttering roof sags, the heavy pelicans
swing southward.
Listless September drizzles manhood down,
scouring lifted eyelids. The floodtide receded.
Stargazers, searobins gape, stranded:
picked eyeless by whispering claws.
Winter gathers diminishing gusts
up the waterway. Boarded windows, sealed pores,
shortwave solicitations twice a month. Anticipating
what little needs to be memorized, or planned for.
The door will lapse open, lisp shut: the vigil
creak out nights on an only chair, frost
smooth the hair of the marsh, power lines drag. Today
a man: rain brims and smears a long line of footprints.
Seven miles to the breakwater.
Meshed in by gilt unicorns
gelded, elephantiasised
enchantress (flawless in the parlour
arts) quiring twelve androgynous
buffoon, wigs blown askew, flourishing
fluegelhorns and tympani, whirls
the oaken canopy plastered with zodiacal
motifs, gargoyles, lion and lamb
spitted on maypoles, streamers acrack
in the high luffing moorwinds and raucous
whine of overdriven fission–Aum! I
am realised! rejoiiced swarthy Rupa Singe, slamming
home the perpetualisor switch, gyring us
over that green terrific land, Klaxon
wauls, M. Dumaurat & his calliope
jettisoned–leaflet of Rachmaninoff,
Schoenberg and Coward borne down
the west wind–goldllimned respirators,
antigrav umbilical sheaths speedily
secured, M.B.E.s and postcards of Torremolinos
dispersed, addressed, honourably lowered
slung in a weighted hammock, crew mustering
manly chagrin as G-forces bare our teeth, guardrail
fuses, a string of flames–Yoyo effect, grimly
nods the nonEuclidean emeritus and our stays
and trousers burst into confetti,
who are called upon to ratify this overload–Arcadian
spirit-ditties piped in–yonder
all before us deserts of vast
forgetful peace–contrita sunt for who
knows the revolutions of dust,
can endure the radiant glory
and live? We shall
be required to forfeit lives,
women, and children. God save
the Queen. –Praise God!
cries Rupa the Sikh tearing off his mask:
Who is a coloured man! cueing the reassembled
host to kneel in dire alleluia as the fiery
wheel yaws into the black astral
oubliette.
:: :: ::
I spent a year and a half in he mid-70s working with poets in Bloomington, Indiana–chiefly Richard Pflum and Roger Pfingston and Frederic Brewer, who were kind but sharp about my 20-something presumptions. Here are a few of the pieces they approved (Stoney Lonesome, 1977):
POEMS WTH BIRDS AND TREES
Stripped and tanned a pine
totters through a windless field
spitting woodpeckers
* * *
It is my first fall as a man:
doves who never took the nesting branch in their beaks
are brought down
in nets of lead and air,
spinning in the arc of the maple key
sent to unlock the turned earth.
* * *
Whatever you pronounce
at the sunless beginning
of a sloping forest
is smoke.
Black thoughts swerve
into nerves of your hand
like starlings swarming the bare valley sycamore.
* * *
The sea oats blended seeds to grow taller.
Sparrows ate them.
The parakeet sang to the bamboo You are a tree not a grass
so it was shut behind dry slatted bamboo hung in a garden
where monks walked pondering the song in the empty willows.
The diving loon searched for a deep tree in which to rest
and found the hanging branches of the man-of-war.
* * *
Because water moccasins prowled the elder and sweet bay
the chickadee perched on a slick knee of the oldest cypress
twittering beneath the hawk’s nest.
* * *
Horned owl has chosen the arrowheaded fir
to wear his necklace of feathers and pellets
and quiver with his hunger.
Now, in thick afternoon, lowing like a fresh cow
it calls me across the hill to gaher balsam
that drips from the lightning ark along its shaft.
* * *
Boiling quail eggs and sassafras root
I do not forget:
lying down in a hewn oak bed and feather pillow
I am no startled by regret;
I close my eyes
and open my wings and the wind
makes a sweet trail
out of my ashes.
Wheels chocked
tight, wings sag
gloved in ice: no
green flag scratches through
hard tundra urging me
Go: propeller seesaws stiff
as a head shaking No, I rock
my skin gone ice blue in a hollowed
igloo whose one eye sees white like sheets
of lime stretched across a mass grave: the air
slams down gray as a blind canyon,
wind will draw me through its sharp
die, control wires and eye
crusting, corroding,
envisioning
absolute
zero
The International Poetry Review (1978) printed 3 poems based on North American Indian oral pieces:
How can I help it, hearing him call me
a red wildflower?
His house is turquoise.
Tomorrow I will cross the slopes to catch
that flower for my hair.
After I wilt between his hands he will find me
a bag of crabshells,
marrowbones, a cracked figurine.
As he shuts me out he will say to a servant
Bring me my turquoise vase.
TO BE CARVED ON A STRING OF CROW CHARM BEADS
During spring walks when we stretch out under cherrytree shade,
grass greening in the four directions, sun soaring overhead,
we feel like dozing, don’t we?
In autumn when a little breeze hones its knife on the leanto
where we squat, hearing weeds rub each other dry,
we lean back drowsily, don’t we?
On days when a drizzle speaks through the sod roof
with a muffled voice, and we warm our soles near the embers,
we nod and drop off, don’t we?
Those nights when we sit smoking, breathing long slow clouds
as the warm wind pushes mist heavily through the trees, we forget just when
we start to snore, don’t we?
After hiking all day through huddled pines, we find a hollow
for a fresh camp and cut boughs while the wind freshens.
Fatigue covers all our limbs like a heavy dew. We go in,
the needles rasp as we lie down. Pine cones loosen overhead,
they drop like swooping owls, but we will be asleep before
they hit the roof.
_________________
Stamp your feet in pollen,
jab and slash through pollen,
scatter your curses in pollen,
fall down and rage in pollen–
now pollen rubs your back,
pollen sheathes your knife,
pollen smoothes your face,
pollen sweetens your breath,
polllen coats your shadow,
its mantle swirls over you,
rising, slowly settting.
Be still.
:: :: ::
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