He has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for
whichever you choose.
Sirach 15:16

Can it be thrift when math necessitates
you choose between power or a timer belt?

A car can run on hope, but LIPA dealt
its inky cut-off notice: thrift dictates

more making-do. Thus should we celebrate
your television-watching, latch-key kids,

who’ve never had a latch, much less a gate,
for saving you sitters. You took the lowest bid

from Xbox. Glory be to Lipitor,
your icebox chose no hericot, no plums!

We choose our nannies over a Nanny State,
the farmer’s market over your chain store.

You lack all thrift, unless you count the crumbs,
that art of making light from an empty plate.

Girls, boost your confidence.
The competition’s fierce. If you don’t glisten,
You’ll never have a chance.

My next pet peeve is leave the pre-Madonna
Attitude at home!
You wanna win, but not by stepping on

another girl. It bares
repeating: keep your social morays clean.
Be curtious! Who cares

Your sister’s fat and inappropriate?
Freestyle rap’s a talent
that beauty judges probably would hate.

No holes barred, and smile!
Extract unwanted body hair by waxing.
You’ll find it’s worth your wild.

The stuff on your head is amongst the first to shed
if you are stressed or wreckless.
Style is strategy. Relax. Be ready

to hire a pageant coach.
He’ll stir “spice” into your personality.
Drink skimp milk, lightly poached.

Losers should never cry, but winners should try to.
The interviewers like
to hear we value girls in our country.

The hungry who cling to the side
of bleak mountains, their stories
carried by black birds whose cries
are empty of promise.
The pale-faced couple, in the midst
of a swamp, too old to start again,
too tired. The small child in a bed,
bald, with epic eyes. The continuum
collapses into measures of time, each
hour holy in its unfolding,
each minute a shallow breath.

At the perimeter, the onlookers gaze,
curious, a little thrilled, as if proximity
might sling a net of protection. Some
may toss in something – money or spare coat.
Some may recognize there is only a tissue
of separation. Some may edge backwards
without a word. Some may spread
a clabber of lies. The forsaken continue
until they can’t, their skin cold,
their words swallowed,
their tenacious grasp released.

I grow halfway
into the gluttonous
sun. Gold
nimbus gives false
protection, but I’m content
to glory in the reach.
I would be
a blazing hand
surprising the gulls
as I forsake
roots and reason,
sip greedily
at light, nerves
firing, little flames
all along my skin.

The Modigliani women come to me in half dream,
offering comfort. Without brittle words or lies.
Sorrow knows sorrow in the tracery of bones.
The hands of the pianist are young birds and hungry.
Music melds with the elements of a body in motion.
And in repose, a flattery of death, which I have watched
and can tell you, is an ugly ruckus.

Every stick-figure boy stuck under pews
smiles, from low angles, looking up. Kind

of evil, eagerly lost or found, the struck
boy slinks past the sacristy, under the glass,

out of earshot of the choir. Wrapped
in pale silk, shook foil flowers the cross,

iridescent, lemon-oiled. The boy
shrugs heaven and sky, soil to pole.

Yards down which he longs to roll: green
in summer, green in winter. Glory the Lord.

How John Ruskin loathed that the rain
drove those so-Romantic poets to write
about the dregs of their despair, missed
moments, lost loves, altering nature to fit their idle
musings, and so, on this luminous morning,
I vow to be deeply unhappy

because, as we know, being happy
is hackney, overrated and it rains
a great deal in Great Britain, making mourning
a natural state if you liked to write
poems how and when Wordsworth did, idly
wandering through Wales’ picturesque mist.

Unlucky at love or money, poor health, missed
boats – Aeschylus said, call no man happy
until he is dead. Only then can the soul idle
without strife. Do you think it rains
a great deal in Greece? Those who write
(with only one cup of coffee in the morning)

(near a coast) spend time mourning
the loss of time as the marine layer’s mist
retreats too slowly to the sea, a rite
of passage for the weather, here. Oh, happy
day! When it seems wholly possible to rein
in – when the sun makes its cameo – idle

thoughts of sorrow that flaw our idyll,
if you exile them first thing in the morning,
take the winged chariot by the reins
and remind yourself not of what you’ve missed
but what you’ve managed. Happiness
(pursuit of) supposedly an inalienable right

versus privilege, and though I prefer being right
I spend most nights and days in the idle
pursuit of wrongness. Albert Schweitzer said happiness
requires a bad memory. As far as this morning
goes, I can’t remember what I ate – oh, I missed
breakfast altogether, I think. And it rained.

I don’t know whether we’ve a right to be happy
but in the rain, it is best to be idle.
I’m damn cheerful in a nice morning mist.

Reeds on the far shore needled the shallows
writing a subtext into palms of sunlight
alluding to trout and bass tunneling the deep,
to the early alphabets of mud and rock.

Mallards skirred the surface by day,
bats skimmed it by night, their wings
scratching brief calligraphies into the water.
There was always something to read,

a word or glyph to decipher: Canada geese
pausing in their long migrations,
or a dead fish with pierced armor
leaking his guts to the summer sun,

to flies unzipping the air
in busy gratitude, to those days
when my idea of heaven was so big
it contained even this.

This village is even dreamier than the original.
Who, for instance, would reproduce the old snakelike impressions of our bodies
In the amber grass, or reenact us, in a thunderstorm, flinging our undergarments
From a cliff? It was lifetimes ago, those times.
Now we cast no shadow over the plucked swans, and are left to sleep in corners

Like a mound of coats. The path to our rowboat is even narrower, dustier; gnats
Blot out the sun. I suppose we can float about
Twirling our parasols, singing “Night & Day,” but does anyone recall the lyrics?
Here: take my hand. These weeds are known to caress one into a witless reverie,
And we are dying for the goldenness of home.

Almost spring, & our dictator’s new order:
everyone in our country must
French-kiss the frozen utility poles—

the boulevards become maypoles
of muffled wailing, move too much
& you lose the mind,

to keep the tongue & the mind pick a
word to keep in your mind, blunt like
starve or trowel or cudgel,

say it will be coming up crocuses soon
those clouds not the shoulders of ice-storms,
say I love you, say don’t unstick me

say there’s no country around us,
that was a fable spelled out by a television,
& look—all the sensible disobedient bastards

loose & running, they’re swinging long stockings
filled with small change, they want
our eyes like pearls, a blind currency—

and how does that song go that starts
I didn’t choose you, that’s how
I know you’re mine—

O accent
I can’t lose without drawing blood,
make me naked again

For Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009)

The friend, the late formalist who slips into my last REM cycle—
whose new language I can’t get or hear in the swarming
dream-terminal, but it’s urgent to try, there’s something she must

tell me now, holding my wrist rougher than she means to—
leaving a mark I know you won’t believe. You’ll say I’m wrong,
it’s crazy, the wrist’s barely black & blue. As usual, you’ll say,

I’m reading too much into the explainable this February
morning when we step over the running puddle
where the snowman was. I won’t say what I see in it—

that it’s almost like any form, living or not, must be fled
the minute it won’t hold up to light—
& I won’t talk about the screech of sharpening knives

I hear when the cross-town train pulls up, & I won’t say
how, in the tunnel between Vernon & Grand Central,
commuter latte spilling into coat sleeves,

I’ll catch you trying to read the urban tags
scratched almost invisibly into the train’s
blackout windows. Why else do we endure (excuse

the euphemism) the inconvenience, if not for secret
messages—some hint it continues? I know the ancients
dropped coins on dead eyelids for some ugly boatman’s tip,

but could that money have been for a hoped-for,
can’t-be-wished-aloud reversal, however fleeting,
of that one-way, mind-wiping trip?

I won’t say my formalist’s hair is wilder now,
her clothes slept-in & stained, as if from some grueling layover
between terminals. You’ll say—and you’re right—a dream made me hurt

myself, & it’s just that it’s still the same winter—new
year, different decade—when she taped up every gap in her
Hudson-view loft, no more oxygen let in, not even an atom,

no book, not even the first-edition Auden, worth taking
or staying with, not the overphotographed skyline you & I pay
to go to & run from.

But her stronger-than-I-remember grip: maybe
they cover their tracks by leaving only what fades?
No, it was me doing it, my own clothes slept-in, my

own need for more than what the evidence gives.
You’ll say you know I’m wrong: my wild hair,
my own hands stronger than I remember.

That is how the last buffalo herd is culled. I read on, spilling drops of tea on the news
page, letters darkened in spots. Across

the road, a tree I can’t name buds red.
To squint at its branch spellings, to iterate its Latin root
does not tell the story quite. Time to relearn spring—

clover leaf or cherry blossom,
what arrives at first blush and second. And then the herds returning

each season. Rangers say they carry bronchitis. Inherited seasons of hunger allow no
decorum for slaughter, as the parterre of trimmed trees along the Champs de Mars.

Leverage or the blade,
what word for control we couch, what collapse

the lyrebird sings in branches above. The air and the sun in the end,

ours. How this eye is lovely, calibrating an ordered world nude to fruit bowl to street-
scene to finally landscape, reached with machete out or picnic basket.

Indoors or outdoors,
what is dirt what is soil. Height or reverence,

what is earth what is Earth, whether laying your hands in it you devour another

version of the prized purplish liver steaming
from the buffalo laid low. It is warm and my seat is padded with cotton.
I search my wallet for a buffalo I swear is on a coin.

The letters of the ruffled news page are distinguishable by tiny claws, horns,
and manes. I smooth the page to a plane. Again I try to name that tree.

I like the dark. It’s friendly.
—Simone Simon in “Cat People” (1942)

Heavy June rains, my birthday—mushrooms,
pleated death-caps, I pluck, from the roof gutters.

Born the day after the solstice, I used to
love this period, the longest days of the year.

Light like bravado! So many hours of light, & my
birthday; surely I must have chosen this, been meant for it.

But then I thought: you’d have to be dead
to have that much light, all at once.

In fact, that’s all the dying talked about—
that brilliance that tugged at you like a magnet

so you could never reenter the box of your body.
That’s when I learned to be like my mother,

to befriend the absence of light, welcome
blackouts like blue-moon guests: think of the power-outage,

post-hurricane nights, no school or TV, when she & I lived
in the glow of melting tapers—a controlled burning, only

milk & bread to eat, but consider all the good, endless books before us,
& death to be snuffed out whenever we pleased.

See the brown mutt bleed through
its garland of burrs, a torn
possum drooling dried streaks
of foam, lice-flecked raccoons

on the yellow line, split wide.
See how wholly they open to us
in death, to the moon, to the red elm
scabbed with mites. They open

to riverbeds and the song
of the wren, to flowering plums
and the barbed wire fence. Over
and over they open to carrion

birds catching scent, beginning
to rise. Even their skulls,
picked clean, look upwards, knowing
nothing of their missing eyes.

Download audio file (delirium.mp3)

Delirium [2]: I shiver until I’m under the sand at the bottom of the ocean. I’m in
the Howness not the Whatness where I taste the tense and wait for you
in your disparity, who cannot be sensed through my gills, cannot be clasped
or jawed. I’ve got eyes that can’t matter. Jelly is not a witness or strictly
a thing. And the territory is not your moony seas, said Elizabeth Bishop to me.

Download audio file (everybodywaswrong.mp3)

Everybody was wrong [although nobody is wrong], even Dickinson in her room
writing down her wrongnesses, her abdication [of me], her [in] justices, her [self]
punishments then sewing them and hiding them under the bed [so wrong]. Wrongness
has a voice [nobody’s voice] but wrongness has no audience [everybody’s devoted deafness].
I’m speaking for nobody when I say love and language kept her [me] alive and in error.

Download audio file (children.mp3)

The children want the eccentric genius [in the book] to be good, not a selfish prick
who happens to be a woman, a narcissistic, watery echo of themselves, real and wishful
in the way the children think of real: seldom, LCD instant jolt of never and dim
yet waiting in a windy uplift for an audience [just one] yet needing no audience.
The children want good or bad, but good [selfishly], no wobbling, no wind over water.

Download audio file (thebookofpoems.mp3)

The book of poems by award-winning X or a glazed magazine? I glaze and breeze
through, float in to find cleavage or a length of leg arched by a red bustier or a glossy shame
article, a smut article about money and its trickle down to not me, Señor,
and yet the currents fill that part of me [that part of you] with rage, like a lock
until the water’s even with the other part of me [you] and so the sleek vessel sails on.

We were to know we would never know
as much about it as he did. He knew
we didn’t care and believed his knowing
was evidence. He was a scholar,
a critic, a wielder of wit for it,
its minutiae and mysteries,
which, for him, were no mystery at all.
Machinery, maybe. Cogs and pistons,
the pinioned heart in the heat of it.
Someone asked about love, the fool.
Our backs ached. The sun was relentless.
He leaned on his hoe as though
it were a podium, drew a kerchief
from his pocket and wiped his face.
He pointed at the sky, where a hawk hovered,
awaiting the mouse that would bolt
from our work. One mouse was just
like another, and we were more or less
the same, except for what we’d never know,
which we knew, even without his saying so.

The inquisitive look on the dog’s face
makes me happy, suggesting not only her intelligence
but my own, for having such an intelligent dog
in the first place. Although what it is
she wonders about I do not know. Seated in my chair,

a book in my lap, I looked up and there she was,
regarding me, as though she wondered
what this book from the library, so redolent
of others like myself, might offer me
that she herself could not. But now she seems

less inquisitive than wry, as though the compendium
of sense I find my way through, she, via the scents
only she is capable of apprehending, knows. Perhaps
someone shed a tear on a page I am yet to reach,
someone freshly washed, although the robe

she wore was not and gave traces of someone else,
someone she, the weeping woman, also sensed
in its folds, which the dog reads just as I read
the words, which at this point in the volume
are not the sort anyone would cry over.

Do you want out? I ask her, and walk to the door
and open it, but she only looks up at me,
less inquisitive or wry than perplexed now,
and I begin to understand we’ll never understand
each other. Even when I sit on the floor

and call her to me, she seems uncertain
but allows me to stroke her head and neck
and soothe her, as she also soothes me,
although soon I rise and go back to the book,
each of us, in our own way, unhappy.

There is too much here, the sapphire, the thistle,
the oregano blooms in June, everything extravagant –
the rich peat of what decays, the ruins that don’t decay,
these especially are too much, the temples and statues
in their stark marble glow, that simplicity which is not simple at all.
This sheen of time, the wear of wars, the famine years
of Occupation, lucent as the columns standing stoic, Doric –
their weight has whittled the people: the weight of that antiquity,
of those stones, the grandeur and pride – too much
in this moment, this present crushed by the evidence,
the result of living with beheaded gods, and maimed still
beautiful torsos, the muscled limbs in chipped robes.
They plague our dreams, what was once achieved is now
incomplete, these pieces of the golden age aging
in the midst of traffic, too much, the yelling and honking,
the protests in the middle of everything – people are impatient;
how can anyone be patient, overwhelmed as they are.
Even the oregano’s thick perfume, the sapphire sea, remind people
of extravagant loves and sacrifice, while here, now,
ghosts live on as gods and their impossibility.

I wish the month had one more day, or even two,
or that, in truth, I might live it again, if only
so that Lola might be with me a little while longer.

Not that the month has been anything special
in regards to her. Most of it I spent
away, and even the time with her,

in the light of her devastating sultry gaze,
the fabulous black teddy, the sheer pink
negligee, the one visible garter snap,

the black hose, the carmine garter belt itself,
and the high-heeled pink mules, to say nothing
of the way she is seated on the golden

sheen of the loveseat, or the way the right
cup of the teddy creates the most perfect
ripple of flesh at the side of the breast

it lifts just enough to cast a slender shadow
between it and the other one, nor even
the way her left leg is tucked under the right

thigh or the way she holds the heel of that mule
in her right hand as though bracing herself
against herself. Even in all this glory,

the time I spent with her consisted of nothing
more than the occasional glance
until today. Tomorrow I’ll move on

to the beauty of next month, which like every one
but this one, is nameless, in a special way.
Four weeks ago, Firebelle; tomorrow, A Warm Welcome.

But today, dark already at four-thirty in the afternoon,
a snowstorm blowing in, Wednesday,
the thirtieth of Lola, 2011.

Not just a crack but a chasm in the floor
Not just a room but a helix of rooms
Not a hall to follow but a hallucination of halls
Nor a load-bearing wall but the Great Wall of China
Not one mountain between us but a range of mountains
Not one sea but generations of seas
Not just the harbor of Harbortown
but the Gulf of Aqaba
Not just bread to share but flour and salt
Not a cold mug but a mortuary of teacups
Not the abdominals but the whole washboard
of muscles or one limb but the weapons of all limbs
Not just a spear but a storeroom
of swords and mallets for your selection
Not one wound to lick but a ward of blisters and sores
Not this mouth to open but a horde of mouths
Not one hand to pray for but a braid of hands
Not just this body but this skin, these nerves
Not one joy but a cauldron of joys, a season
of grief, a year of crossed tides, years of seasons
Not one man but several men bonded in one suit,
a coal blue shirt, a pair of khakis, a complex look
Not one woman but a relief of women, profile
after profile in a continuous silhouette
Or one child, one dog or one song to praise
but a litany of music and children
Or one house, one chamber, one window, one box
Or one fence or pump or an apparition
in the attic, a face in the flames,
Or doubts or deliria or furies to heal,
Wire hangers, shoes lined up in the closet by size.
Not one heart but a riot of hearts.

Dogs fetch an unthrown ball
and children smash softly together.
Finches twitch in the upper branches,
antennas for the soul of winter.
I lie down rib by rib across the sled’s
hard slats and kick into the terror
of the hill. The horizon ridge
holds out an unstirred cup
of gray.

Words I’d nurtured surge
past me, faces, situations.
The glow beneath what’s spoken
ravishes like an orchid blossom
on a browning stalk. My body
disobeys me, turns brittle in
the hill’s cracks but the snow
conducts me through
its falling. I am a passenger
on its narrowing track.

The bottom drops away,
the meadow rises, the road
travels the other way.
A frozen pond stares me
toward it. I was a skater
once on its knuckled back.
In those spirals, my neck
and head angled back,
I never thought my face
would be as broken
as the figured bark of
a sugar maple tree.

That world was the ivory v, flush with the basketball
floor of the pinball machine—I could open a door.

The landscape was painted in that Bad Day at Black Rock
matinee poster style with counters ringing tens

of thousands of points with the same springing bell
sound the Esso gas pumps made all the way to L.A.

My father would have found a percentage in the way
half of the quark’s globe spins backward in time, back

just that touch into the twinkling past while the other half
spins with the rest of us into the future’s dark. Durango’s

not much given to the Who—got much more George
Jones and Dolly and Johnny Cash. But this one particle

made it through the mountains. I could push the lab’s door
and toddle in where the yellow pollen of the future pulsed

dull as gold dust on a poker table. The technician would bellow
and someone would come sweep me like a spill, flipper me out

the door again. Oh yes, they wanted to keep me far, far from the score.

The hayloft doors were wide as they’d go and the shining
snow on the ground outside crowded the barn ceiling
with projected light that rose into those inhabited rafters warm

against the slotted wind pouring frost like a hard mist
through chinks between the back wall’s warped planks. Shining I
entered—ladder, trapdoor—to bow and scrape among my old shivering

shadows: myself against the wall, self thrown careless across
many pale prone selves dead along the granary floor. Self
squared, baled, divided, reached, consumed by the beasts lounging

red and speckled in the dark down there. My father would have
loved this: the glare, the sheer Wallace Stevens “Projection
A,” “Projection B” Sheeler modernism of it, that math/

myth/mmm/mothlight something. But he never saw it. He
was wrapped up with his Key West crew and Jersey intelligentsia.
I got out of all that soonest and to stay. But don’t think I don’t still hear,

through the snow’s quiet, boom as of the breakers crashing, boom
breakthroughs long since, hear shades in ancient conversation
flicker war through our heavy air like sound motes. Fork

fodder down to the cows and wince at my too-bright dream of him. Work
myself out, myself loose, my—Ahem, ha! the dust! ha! That’s it, then! Hum.
We’re finished here for now, ladies. Coming down. Hack myself free of him.

You, a two-year-old with a Goldwater button on your nightstand,
better that the television isn’t color, better that you grab the pull string of your
duck on wheels and toddle to the playroom, dragging a rose-print Turkish towel
down the stairs and across the sculpted carpet, stop to study
the particular green-brown sludge of its color and manage an
alley-oop past the coffee table with the sharp edge that will have its
way with your baby brother’s lip in a couple of years. What are you
lookin’ at? You seem to sneer when Mother steps into the dining room
for a minute to check on her firstborn, the girl she named for a newspaper poem and
a spoiled little sister from a famous book for girls. For a moment it’s just you and her, since the
New One is sleeping upstairs, he’s always sleeping or laughing or eating, but when he cries—this
friend you’ll love like a brother, I swear—she runs, wiping her hands on her apron and scuffing the
linoleum with her rubber-tipped heel, to lift him up, hold him, hum into his neck.

“What will survive of us is love”
Philip Larkin

December, 1971. A light snow. The Taft Hotel.
Our room across the street, overlooked
the Winter Garden stage door. I was green
and this was to be my first taste of Broadway.
By the time the lights and trumpets

lifted on the “Loveland” number,
I was lost in years monogrammed
across silk sashes, wigs, and in the follies
of relationships — only a few going right.
Are we ever awake, or is all of this dream?

Not a tiny fleck of foreshadowing that,
given a handful of years and a little
more seasoning, this city would become
my home, the anvil of my art, the abode
of my glorious ghosts for over thirty years.

2011, primed with anticipation and an
entirely new gaggle of friends, I rustle
in my seat through “the revival;” –– cast,
lose, and reel, myself back in; once again
in the bars of “…spend sleepless nights….”

Rollerbladers cocooned
in earphones occupy the site.

A photographer busily shoots
a lanky, posing model

sporting a clear and extravagant
tattoo. I shoot them

from overhead; from the platform
where the Führer

and his industrious cronies stood
and spoke, were photographed.

A creative break from my own
taking in of the expansive scale.

Like miniature, the imagination
creates vastness. Millions

snapped their crisp salutes
like guillotines. The result

of the romantic
madness still hangs

profound and murderous
in the air: train cars, camps,

sequentialling tattoos, gas,
and reels of propaganda.

Swans glide and dip between
the dark silhouettes of trunks;

the sky and pond are
opalescent. Hardly concealed

systemic cruelty contains
the urban Turkish neighborhoods

not far away. Let the concrete edges
of this field continue to crumble.

We’re thirsty. Time to drive back
to the power station building—

Source of light, to make
transparent part of what it was

that was being ambitiously
designed, stoked, and rallied.

I will cajole someone to take
a series of photographs of me

posing outside the converted
plant. Me: sated, victorious

and mocking; a ridiculous,
cheesy pin-up model—

the latest to strut and plug
for the kingdom of fast food.

It wasn’t a marriage, you said on the phone, because we didn’t always live together.

A decade together, a decade ago. Now why should it matter?

Still I hadn’t fully understood the complexities of subtraction.

Take away Capri, where you convinced me they filmed blue Il Postino.

Forget that you asked me to go there to marry you. Cancel the grave Don Antonio

who consented, without all the documente, to join us in Santo Stefano,

the gold throne chairs at the altar, Umberto’s Marlboro box

on the railing, the soar of Ave Maria. Cross off

the knee-high nun who hugged my waist, saying auguri, auguri,

the arched doorway that rained candied almonds.

After we came home and made it legal,

a clerk came out from behind the bulletproof window.

Shred the card he extended, which gave the exact, atomic clock time of our union.

After I got off the phone, I dug out the album, flipped through the pictures

of nothing: the one in which you clutched me under the tower, the one of the famous ceramic

chapel floor of Adam and Even in the garden.

The one of impossible rocks in the background between us.

Elbow in elbow, treasure in deskwell,
object in perfect embrace of your subject,

Beloved. You fasten tumbled sheets, pell mell
with dailiness, ordering the old wrecked

destiny of hearts. The stubborn staple
bites with prongs; undressed corners join one fold

as if pretense alone can hold them stable. Your clasp stays firm, or slips off, as you’re told.

My paragon, remain. You may unbend
your shape, an L or V, to fish lost rings
from drains, pry out a crumb inbetween keys.
But stripes and gaudy colors make an end
of mere display–their hard enamel clings

like taint. Repeat pure elegance. Fix me.

The humid shadow of nightfall blankets the grass
as the stem of the daffodil bows
to the weight of the dark:

yellow as butter, its perfumed head
bends to the ground as in prayer,
as if to baptize its petals
in the slow-coming dawn,
as if the promise to stand anew
were not as vaporous as the dew.

(The Old Guitarist, 1903)

Why viejo, bow your head
to the morning of the century?
Your age? the Age? The sad
crush
of the hand-hewn past caught
in the racket rush of a new Now
proclaimed by the turn of a calendar’s
page?
Each stroke of the brush
colors your music with a hint of rose, yet
still your song plays more blue
than La vie, more
grim than any dream dulled
by absinthe
or the clutter of the scraps of Le jou…
(Even the brown of your guitar is a rosy-hued
blue.)
How seek
with that dark slit of eye?
Your dry lips apart in song
as if singing were the same as a sigh.
But strum you on without pick or fret—
what chord can be struck to
paint how you grew
Greco-long and bent? broke-
necked and torn,
legs folded as if to fit their length like
notes played low, en
coda and brought, oil-on-wood,
to rest.

In a parallel
universe, expanding not so very
fast, Robert Frost is petrified
of mowing his own

grass, owing
to certain seasonal allergies,
and the fidelity of blades

making a fragrance he longed
to know, and chew

on every
moment turning
ceaselessly

into the past.

“You’re interrupting
my radio,” she said,
as I fell into my easy
chair, turned on TV,
seeking respite
from noise in images.
Divorce: Ours
more like slow
tearing of limb
than surgical amputation,
more drifting
apart than cataclysm.
Was it ever
passionate attraction
that tightens chest,
magnetizes eyes? Rather,
more moving
together gradually
to soothe needs, as if
burying head under
comforter on blustery
dark December night
awaiting dawn’s
inevitability.

The nineteen-fifties number counters clacked
as I waited for my father in the Fairmont Co-op.
The heater blasted, and the man behind the counter
lifted his Mycogen hat to wipe a stubble of sweat.

Out of the window, I glanced at my father, wicking
streams of light off our windshield with a squeegee.
He glowed under the streetlights, his arm flashing
like a low flame straining to stay lit in the gusts.

Impatient, I kicked at the scuffed-up floorboards
and thought of farmers who’d meet to sell their crops,
the most productive strains the county would see
gathered here in the hands of the local farmers.

The antique sleighbells ducktaped on the door
jangled when he entered. As he opened his wallet,
his hands flushed a bitter red from the heater.
It helps us all to shop here, he would tell me years after.

And I remembered how late in the season grain trucks
would pull in, spilling bright slips of kernels
above the iron grate in the ground at the elevator—
then open a rushing, golden heat from their chests.

But if danger is inevitable, lets throw a hootenanny,
celebrating the agents of our own destruction.

Beyond the field. Beyond.

(“Upon Imagining the Field where Matthew Shephard was Murdered”)

Granted, he was stranger than the lot of us.
I walked his dizzy plank once in Manhattan.

Tell me now can I find peace here underneath
This crazy quilt of pipe and restful waste,
Not giving a tinker’s dam for a skyline view,
Designing my dream house one fever-night at a time?

He dusts and does windows
comparison shops
can bake a cherry pie
served warm right from the sill

His whites are white
His colors sing opera

In his daydreams a jewel thief of hearts. . .

Dinner on the table promptly or else
And a piquant aroma it is
Smell those bay leaves
Cover and simmer
Arrowroot thickens the sauce
A mad dash of Parmesan
Voila!

Dates glance sidelong in vain
for signs of disarray
and leave early, feeling
outflanked? redundant? what?

While he was out his mother did not call

Like a sand dab surfing the Discovery Channel
he follows the stock market tides
all the while scratching at
his existential itch

Without surgery or prosthesis,
loin of his fragrant loins,
coupon clipper, redeemer extraordinaire—
he has become his own Little Woman

Hardbound books on either side of a double bed:

The Courage To Be Intimate
Shoot The Wounded, Hold The Guilt

I need an ornate new alphabet to say what I mean,
a pull-down eye chart, a small Midwestern city known
for its homicides, a window that only I can open,
a foreign museum dedicated to magpies, a woman just back
from there climbing naked into bed, and all around us,
dipping and soaring, the vibration of wings.

1
Men are arrested overnight with nothing of mine in their pockets. I sleep late, while the morning, face full of gray stubble, waits downstairs. In another kind of world, I might have had my name and occupation detailed on a window in gold lettering.

2
The music is keeping secrets, but also telling stories. And I quote: Winning doesn’t feel as good as losing feels bad. Come autumn, the fog lingers longer, clocks fall back an hour per hour. I left a raincoat somewhere. Please let me know if you happen to see it sitting in the library, breath made visible.

3
All light is interesting, she says, waving a brush loaded with cadmium red. I have too few teeth left to smile freely or I would. There is no darkness as dark as the darkness of man.

What weather! We hang around the house all day, increasingly restless, like assassins for hire without an assignment. On one channel, there’s a question about who invented the combustion engine; on another, the start of a celebrity death watch. You and I were friends before we were a couple, but unreliable narrators before we were either. Light gathered us to itself, and I think I could hear, if you turn down the TV just a little, the music said to reside in the silence between notes.

Still, still hidden
Behind old shirts and pants
Like an inflated sock
Hung on a slanting coat hanger

With a prophecy stuck in its throat
Probably too dark or ominous
To yaw, even to breathe

No one knows when or how
It will fly out of the closet, and call

South:

not unlike a raindrop
on a small lotus leaf
unable to find the spot
to settle itself down
in an early autumn shower
my little canoe drifts around
near the horizon
beyond the bare bay

West:

like a giddy goat
wandering among the ruins
of a long lost civilization
you keep searching
in the central park
a way out of the tall weeds
as nature wraps new york
with mummy blue

East:

within her beehive-like room
so small that a yawning stretch
would readily awaken
the whole apartment building
she draws a picture on the wall
of a tremendous tree
that keeps growing
until it shoots up
from the cemented roof

North:

after the storm
all dust hung up
in the crowded air
with his human face
frozen into a dot of dust
and a rising speckle of dust
melted into his face
to avoid this cold climate
of his antarctic dream
he relocated his naked soul
at the dawn of summer

The reader closes the book and whispers, elfinbone.
Joyce in Finnegan leaping oceans and continents of language.

He wants to hold a thin bone in air, release it to hollow wind.
The way he wills it to float, to fly beyond understanding.

A large foot stamps on the savannah; fleas let go each other, jump onto that
shadow crossing the moon.
Skeleton and Elfenbein under the cold glow.

The way an eagle anchors itself on a dry tree to refuse sleep.
Vapor dreaming a liquid song of sky and pebbles shining equal joy.

While clouds, that expected surprise, change the horizon again, rain dimpling the world
the way elves were said to play.
Or the elephant’s tail, swiping back and forth, back and forth, like time, like
Elephantenbein bleaching in the sun.

Kalzium drifting freely for deposit anywhere a nose is;
anywhere death drops a tooth to tempt the toothless.

Like the desert tortoise lifting its belly off the hot sand.
The way it believes in someplace better.