‘

COMING TO MYSELF AGAIN
March 28th

The richest blood, the first oxygenated, goes straight
to the pump. I run the Promenade and my shadow
in the bile light is wide. The city is dark for a global
observance of an unaccustomed penury, saving kilowatt hours
as in a futurist novel, so Gotham is a bank of dying
embers in the fog, and the jets come closer in the dropped ceiling
like cows in a blizzard, lowing— every two minutes, another flying cow.
The river boils by bile-light, its flat ambulating slicks
and its braided cables, the bleared city seeming to float
like a giant soup vegetable. My dark machinery watches
all the other dark machinery; so hard to tell what was designed
and what was not. My heart pounds home, looking for home.
It stutters, inside, outside, inside, outside as it once did
when I was very young, taken aback by psilocybin mushrooms
and going back and forth in a doorway, staring, finally, into
the mouth of a white petunia that answered my gaze
with a baleful note, a pale nocturnal trumpet. The petunia
was hustled off to a secret detention center, there to simulate
a petunia that was drowning. But they left me to my fates.
After years of repetition, what is real tastes always
like rain and iron, like blood, in fact, and I’m mostly
mute in front of these divisions, these cramped schemas
that show where I start and stop. Until I bite my cheek,
and then its not the flavor that delineates me, but the pain.


March 29, 2009

Thunder came and went, but I wasn’t as engaged
as I should have been, so it’s like waking in January,
anticipating Christmas, to remember that it’s gone.
More and more things are becoming like this, so that,
far from being old, I can yet see what it will be like,
what might be salvaged— not by the remaining possibilities,
but by a consideration of the whole pool of options
that are out there. For people. In the abstract.
All I do not indulge in, but that I am glad exists. Writers
should thus age well, since, famous or un, we exist
to buy rounds and watch the others drink them,
pretend to be in possession of secrets about existence
until we almost persuade ourselves, or rather,
any mailman knows the secrets of existence but
will he write them down? You can hardly be wrong.
Every speculative secret is actually being held,
somewhere. Such as divination by thunder.
I’m under constant attack by unlived life. I could
scarcely write fast enough, if I really chose words
to mop it up, all that unlived life replaced by
all that life we only phoned in. But I can’t complain.
Not a soul in my lineage has seen what I’ve seen,
and all my dead peer over my shoulder, listen
at the walls of my day with a inverted drinking glass.


PIG DISSECTION
April 1, 2009

Arteries and veins, a face. This tendency to feed and breed
and one day in the yard go still. Voilà, you, pig, the same
insides as me, and I’ve named the arteries branching
from your aorta, dorsal, caargpisu as mnemonic.
I will know us in another way, by the time I’m done:
something of the scaffold drilled with bits of ancient
acrid phonemes from the Greek that, like fifties welded
lawn furniture, dully ring when sounded. It’s a vintage
dry as steel, not helpful in itself. I will reference it
when something’s wrong with me, or if I plan a meal,
uh, to eat you. Otherwise what’s dark now will remain
that way, —this knowledge will not raise the ceiling
of our being, our wonder bounded not unbeautifully
by our constantly rebounding need, the mush and tickle of it.
I look at cirrus clouds and replay Bruckner in my head.
Wondering where I came from has not so far advanced me
even into knowing why I should, though I had the vaguest notion
—not original to me—that my origin is not the pigs.
Tonight I wonder why, assuming you aren’t burdened
with these queries, wouldn’t even note much less be kept
awake when screaming airlines drop all night below the fog-
gy ceiling, stowed away the côtes du porc inside the passengers,
uneasy for an instant about where they are and why—
even to ask a thing like that, oh, one is too far out and over nothing
while below and all around like stars, the lights of the confounded.







ALL YOU GET
April 2nd


It is either dark inside the body, or there is some ambient light
through the scrim of the integument, the color of a aging window shade
at supper time. I’ve never been swallowed, so I don’t know how dark
it gets there in the lymph or in the spleen, alongside the mesentery vein.
Once I knew a lust so sad and depthless I followed, for an instant, where it led,
squelched the impulse to blurt it out— my desire to be inside her absolutely—
but that’s a simple thing, not even Freud, just a kitten curling in a Kleenex box.
Who was that anyway? Someone who would have been unmoved
as perhaps she should have been. The shades are always drawn
on the man inside, reading the Gideon, stepping through a dappled woodland
in his mind, walls taped with glossies of Mbuti pygmies. When they mourn
the newly dead, even the smallest children flail and arc and bite the ground.
Their dark is populated with the voice of the molimo, a drainpipe merely,
dipped to drink in streams and sounding all night long from the rainforest
in wails of sacred fear. It’s not the drainpipe that is sacred, it’s the sound;
not the darkness, but how you have it situated in your scheme of tolerable
or pleasurable unknowing. And the ardor, too, was good enough.
It’s all you get. Not to keep, even, but to return, that lightform through the eyelids.




PRODIGIOUS
April 3rd

Along 4th Avenue, suddenly everything is prodigious: the slant jets
circle in a Twilight of the Idols sky, and after rain, the ceiling has been raised
leaving gold-tongued ramparts. My blood is redder
in the arteries, passing the heart five times as fast, like
a chase in Ruff and Ready: atrium right ventricle, lungs; left atrium,
left ventricle, then everywhere through the aorta, forced jet of iron-bound oxygen.
Prodigious, I tell you, and prodigious running toward me the young man
thirtyish but graying, legs and torso braided like a baldacchino,
every inch the youngish cardiologist, a menace on the handball court
who may be seen to breeze his way to eminence, but who sweat pints of blood
to become himself. Prodigious, and I’ll not nay-say him, not reflexively
as I might have as a younger man. How stale to have no praise inside you,
worse yet to kill it in a burst of insecurity. It is hard to be an arrow
in a landscape angled, curved and mirrored, without the jealousy of fathers,
or would be fathers, or men of twenty, thirty, forty already studying defeat,
or men like me whose prodigies are of a simpler kind.
He made it sing for him, the moment, several moments, and we cannot do less:
fresh with an instant cloudburst running home, I eat a salad of wild rocket.


MOZART
April 4th

Room of lead white, gold and robin’s egg, the blue of dawn there.
How the children are just up and waiting for the warm loaf under arm,
you only just returning home. The middle of your trio sections
have been going dark these last few symphonies, as though
in the audience chamber, warm with tallow flame, you opened
the French windows on small snow, the wind from Hungary sifting
face powder lightly on a hundred faces. You have them fingering
their painted beauty moles and looking stricken for a instant.
There is less thought in it all the time, as little as at billiards
which is really what your worktable is for. Young Karl has the ivory
balls all over anyway, and the housekeeper can’t find them. Stanzi
gets them in her poor, run-over pregnant lady shoes. You’ve
come to wear your world like new brocade, though in a way
you always did, the child celebrity, only the gnaw of keeping
florins flowing and your weird recurring fevers caving in
the rose light at the bottom of wine glass; the rising roar of friends amused—
amused when with you, whistling your tunes when you sleep in.
Now only the light converts to sound, and the notes look
to each other with a measurable logic. Unbidden, almost
an embarrassment, something newly terrible comes in, grave and imperious,
but comfortably framed into the whole. That’s what’s terrible
about it, en fait, those crepitating, those tender and those ordinary,
with snuffboxes and canes, that were always there, uncounted,
in squares on the parquée—that loitered absently eternal
because they looked the same, but… unrepeatable. And spent.

April 5th 2009
PALMS

You dry and rustling cousin of the lily, fellow monocot,
you seemed always about perfidy. This was what you
could expect from crowds, their darling on a Sunday
who will yet load you with a board on Friday, screaming
you to death. They came home with Dad, his suit on,
with that smell of wool and nicotine and cucumbers he had,
the smell of fathers. It fits somehow, his bearing home
that stalk of flimsy always hung above the clock, that spray
of choked hosanna. His was the realm of objects waiting
to be fitted to their purposes, obedient and amiable
in their hardware racks, but also that of politics,
his realm of jeering, and of disappointment.
But Dad was younger then than I am now, and in those days
they shot down nearly everyone worthwhile.
Had they born the Son of Man, mule-mounted, southward
down Division Avenue, my Dad would probably have stayed
and raked the winter spoor out of the grass, its salt
and gravel and dead mouse parts. He would have heard
the crowds through all the brown exurban yards just now
exploding with forsythia. Pilate might have washed his hands
while Dad wolfed down a ring baloney sandwich. Darkening
at three, just when the right thief speaks—or was it the thief
upon His left?—it managed all to pass, if no one quite knows how,
that ugly turn the world does saviors, and its workers.



April 6th
PENDANT

Pendant in the bud, blind weight, the green fire poised.
One night soon it races song-less up the boles of trees
covering the wood of flails, a beyond-hearing surge
softer than new midges in midair, the Easter pilgrimage
of brown ants from the window to the kitchen,
a long sentence spelling out your God is dead. No! wait, wait
now he’s not. This is the week when there are ragged holes
torn in the gray for Pan to enter in, or a zephyr like a match
lit underneath the nose, a week where somewhere low fires
have been lit, the earth beginning finally to scent itself,
birdsong columns rising before dawn, and complicated.
Whatever it may be, it will come up through the splayed
toes of our human cycles, penetrate the cracks, fill every
dwelling niche, not less than the true world, reeling with what
makes it different from all other worlds that we can see,
those far off and ammoniac, with atmospheres of frozen sulfur.

Inside your veins it will keep you breathing, or may take
another form and harry you to death. You are its proud-
est primate, you of the pinching thumb, singer of the song
that has you at the center, the noisy harpy on the furthest limb
of hominidae, whose gods resemble him exactly,
whose narratives distract him from his silent project
at the margins— central only to his shadow, watching.


April 7th, 2009
HOLY TUESDAY


What happened on Holy Tuesday? Knowing Tuesdays, it had some
administrative purpose in the narrative: Postpone the Galilean rabbi
until Friday…..leaving early to get bridgework done. Iscariot slept
later than the others who were up and out without him. He stared
at bundles left behind, absurd emblems for such men, that, in fact
made them seem faintly ridiculous, as enthusiasm when contrasted
with the mundane will— those lumps of linen blotched with wine
and who knows what other stains. Lazarus obscurely felt half dead,
feared for the safety of the only man who could complete the spell
that threatened hour by hour to come undone, and terrified
most everyone by his inability to blink. Two thieves were caught
by centurions patrolling after dark, robbing gravesites in Gehenna.
Some Celtic slaves hewed board and post on instructions from the barracks,
one three times longer than the other, its use no mystery to them.


April 8th, 2009
BLOOD

Blood owns the smell of tulip trees, since Tim Pothoven
was toppled from his bike and smeared along the road
some mid-May of my childhood. It is a living tissue,
something less than half of cells and platelets, a little more
than half of plasma, with its ionic salts and respiratory gases,
its nutrients and metabolic wastes. There is nothing
quite like blood, full of necessary ambiguities before which
some of us are faint. It should not be outside, we say, but stay
invisible, as shit is. There is the blood of gods and the cyclic
blood of women; we said that one was holy and the other not—
each in their way they cycle with the moon, like everything.
The blood of soldiers is never spoken of until its shed,
nor the blood of virgins until it touches linen. There was
a notion that the blood of those related was consanguine,
but now we know my brother’s is no better for me
than my neighbor’s, if my neighbor’s is O negative.

My father, when he had leukemia, like any peasant said
his blood had skate in it, which made his doctor wince.
Bartok died the same way that my Dad did, and my oldest brother
almost; I can’t help but see the petri dish all crazily alive,
triumphant with these jigging white cells flank to flank
when I hear the fibonacci series of Quartet number Five,
micro to micro, lymph to lily pad, the beneficiary
and the victim of the unarticulated will to never end.
Some types of blood are older than the others.
I like to think that I, a universal donor, have the blood
of cavemen in me— I’m told I’m better off if I eat
meat that’s lean, not hybridized—uncultivated foods,
like greens and rocket, sea-weed, maybe a bowl of grass.
My blood, like everyone’s, tastes much like steel,
and hangs back, a rusty, iron curtain of dull red, in curved
and ancient blessings of the sword and musket ball
and shrapnel wounds, though near arteries it is a scarlet
like no other, bright with oxygen where it blots.
I cut my finger on the frameless mirror in the bathroom.
I was looking in my young old red-rimmed eyes. Peeling off
dissection gloves, the scar is white—scar tissue, un-infused
with blood, describes the figure of a sickle moon.

April 9th,

MAUNDY THURSDAY, 1944


Low massed saxophones are an awful mournful sound,
even when they mean not to be, even when Johnny Hodges floats on top
like a gilded plume of smoke and lamplight.
My cigarette coils in the rented room in Brooklyn
an orange scar of sunset in the west over the skyline.
The radio, it’s the radio. Later, I’ll run a bath, take a walk
among the whores on Clinton street. The Duke is doing
a war bond drive from the bandstand of the beautiful Four Hundred
Restaurant at the corner of Forty-Thuhd street and Fifth Avenue
in New Yahwk, and the curtains plane a little, it’s unseasonably warm,
there’s a little unexpected crow call. Soft. There must have been sounds
like that to mourn dead kings, and when I later hear that white guy’s
String of Pearls, I see women dance alone, then not, with phantom airmen.
Duke says call him to buy a bond, his turn at the phones, Circle2-1377.
I had some supper, not my last, and I spooned it out,
some chicken, some potatoes, in memory of everything.





April 11, 2009

Ran/walked/limped to Prospect Park, stood companionably
with a duck and we monitored together what was left
of the sunset, discreet, a feeble orange nimbus after a day of rain
that quickened moths, and lined the mud with mirrors.
I had almost never failed to write a poem on Holy Saturday,
or failed to note what day it was, or how, as a child,
the covered tabernacle was alarming, as though God
were out, as though as they say, that ship has sailed.
The tentative gas-blue was pulled down quickly, a flutter
of gloves in a small alcove with a black curtain, and not even an aftermath.


XYLEM


They are dead at functional maturity, in plants, the hallways
where the water, drawn off by the Star, is pulled up through
by a deepening meniscus. Hover and cling, now, to the meta-
phor, up into bare light, that trope which says that maybe
we are larvae, maybe the dead have become so
at functional maturity, and are the conduits. I always
wondered. They named the streets. The rendering
of every object we use and own, more and more
of them, were drawn and filed somewhere by hands
now still: thinner, harder, sifting off in gloves.
There is war, I think, between the will of the corridor
and mine, a sometimes dirty little contest in these
chambered conduits where hours, clinging to each other
for dear life, are levitated skyward. I am not prepared
to follow through stomata, those who, trapped like me
in paradox, gave in to gravity to pull us onward
after them. Not by design, of course: most of them just
wanted more of what they knew, like me, at nightfall.
The dead, when dying, did not think too much of us.
But they built the stairwells where they run us out.
So the sidewalk, the subway, the corridor at school
are absent-made. Most of the architects and riveters
are not, and so the authors— their ordering of glyphs
is a whirring overhead, hand over hand, that pulls me from the leaf.






May 23rd

DUSK

The world is dying. You request its golden light
in sippy cups. Elsewhere, the frogs stop breathing
in your hands, and in the caves where bats lived
dead bats stare from ice stalactites. You lean forward
into signal, in your room, and into print—into your
pixel glass— to see millenniums as though the angel
that you wrestle with has finally blessed you.
The ballgame is on low, a long ellipse of crowd hum
and contentment, murmured Ordinaries of collapse.
Your eyes and mine arrived in time for die-off,
perhaps the greatest ever, but it doesn’t seem so.
Warm wind is blowing petals, the air alive with chirrup
of the most adaptable, the big, obnoxious starling
and the cowbird—all the robust holders of the current franchise,
us included, with our corkscrew library of virus,
mewling with pleasure and brigandry, anxious
pirates of the biosphere. We are the way the cosmos
knows itself, we think—its consciousness.
But what if consciousness is an accretion of the con-
sciousness of every creature? What then if that portion
of the picture begins to fade, contributory
to this feeling I’ve been having, doctor, disoriented
by the strangeness of that aquamarine shade,
a presentiment of dioramas dimming behind glass?
Not that it’s unpleasant to smother here
by increments beneath the glass, the big jets
hovering like lanterns over Brooklyn,
the south wind curling with the scent of kool-aid trees
we carted in from Neverland. It’s inelegant
to off your planet and yourself, still more so
without meaning to, only humping on its curves
for everything you’re worth— but this
is where it led: the parkland here at nightfall
like an Eden, and the sweetest of days spent.






THIS LAST FEW THOUSAND YEARS OF DREAMING


My dreams keep pulling where I’ve been before in dreams,
a turning corridor of dream laid down by daylight halls

we think we know already. It’s accessible by closets. Asleep,
I squeeze into the smell of polished shoes, the netted hats my mother

wore to Mass, then pass through photographs were people
squint in front of cars. I’ve never left this house. I’ve been

dreaming of the same goddamn imaginary house since childhood:
the long stairway of linoleum that’s checkered red and white,

the corridors where, instead of walking, I’m hovering two feet
above the floor. Last night I dreamt a new room, never opened

to the light, with forties furniture, and rows of books that turn
to dust by looking at them. There my mother divvied up a pile

of Dum-Dum suckers on the floor. From behind, a toddler
in a jumper lumbered by, in that pounding way they have, but

you could see right through this child, who in the coming rooms
was nowhere to be seen. There is no wizard here to divinate

away above the freeway, a masklike face, with eyes set in like agates.
One blood corridor we own. A spawn of polypeptide ciphers running

in its time-lymph, that, like the tablets—bobbing, soapstone—of the Four Evangelists,
encode the susurration of the womb, hollow whispers of the plow.



June 1, 2009


I want to see it, the squat idol in the church
of my own limbic system. I might kneel here
to it, mostly because the woods are dark,
lit by a half wafer of moon like the body of god.
The white ciphers are tossed on the forest floor
primeval semaphores pre-dating speech,
the wheeling chatter of the backbrain lighting
at the smell of meat and fear, the knuckle-cracking
sanguinary lessons of the slow child animal inside.
What every fitted stone has learned is how
what was in front of us was not enough,
one god or another spun from clay was blown on,
mixed with spittle, to address all that had gone
unfinished, not adequate to our stated purposes.
The arrangement of one’s life events
as organized in memory cannot possibly sustain
a meaning, so they are condensed, and here
I drew the auroch near the pregnant horse,
who were never proximal in life. Here
in the cave my dead arrayed, by torch glow
tethered to tomorrow’s daylight as by definition
they are not. Having seen the world,
we wanted all its pieces, then none of its
provisional arrangement of them, thinking
with burned stick-end to re-cast and merge
our specificity with its lack of interest
in keeping us informed. We need it to be lovely
or coherent, for the ordinary drama of the glands
to own the grandeur of the amphitheatre.
It needs us not even to be quiet, or proceed
without disorder to senescence, but just
to come and bank our seed hill of futurity, and go.


June 2, 2009

Francis Bacon

Someone beautifully could not abide us. He detested us cordially, and learned
the contours of the furniture of dream, the shade and stiffness that loiters

in the bleared icing of the id, the tidal seep of blocked channels, the feedback
from our own intolerable funk. The Pope screams in the gilded cage of his higher function neurons,

anticipating pain, remembering the same, a splatter painting where he hemorrhages
all bile and blather. There, as on John the Baptists platter, the dead thing

is alive inside him in his yellow cage, something rounded like a baboon’s
ass but grinning like the bloated drowned, brazen as fuck there on the stainless trough.

He’ll be the coroner, and meet you at the meat couch, your mouth splayed for the egress
of your inexactitudes, your platitudes, your beatitudes, your lost cloacal paradise at two.



June 3, 2009


All day while you are doing what you’re doing
flags of light are inching over ceilings unseen by anyone
but you can hold them in your mind, as you can hold
the vast field edged by giant towers of the electric grid, and the insect
sound there, and the red-wing churr,
or in the evening the beacons of the radio towers winking on and off,
aligned with heartbeat or with breathing, the sweep
of floodlights in a city while in the country someone perches
on the coolness of the concrete steps and drink’s their children’s
Tang with Popov, and watch that roving.
Once mounted in the firmament, the Motherboard, it will never stop
until blocked by a celestial body. Someone on the shore
sees a stationary star on the horizon of Lake Michigan,
then, concentrating too intently, thinks they see maneuvering.
Someone, rapt, sees the Borealis at the end of an Airbus wing
a glamour slow and reticent above the Pole, a solitary pike
with spangled flanks, turning by and for itself.
Someone pauses in a room where curtains plane
soundless in the wind, a radio on low, so low, it could be in the house next door.
On Sunday, just, a barn door in New England, opened, shut,
all by itself, divining the intention of the gusts, getting it both right and wrong.

Come in. Come out. Look up. That space is sacred, where many watch
or almost none do. I love the hominid alert to signs
and watching, and respect it then, hands loosely curled, unweaponed,
head up, mouth parted slightly, taking signal in.


June 4, 2009

Protect yourself from story, being sure to veer from it,
deflecting outcomes morphologically aligned with all
past outcomes. You once allowed an elevator door
to close on someone for whom the door had only closed

in the opposite bank of elevators, not from spite,
but because, as you saw afterwards, it completed the story—
slightly rueful, slightly comic. Nowhere do these old
morphologies dictate outcomes more than in love,

where disappointment is as sleek and forgone
as a single trait from nose to tail. You must study
how to draw it new at intervals. You could even go
this far: you are overdue to run a pattern on the Fates,

advance a false salient, throw a feint to startle them.
They might take days to readjust to this, when maybe
you can again confound the bastards, the prognosticators,
the behaviorists who said you could not resist

the marshmallow. Even they are only predicating,
and do it with an expertise less than that of weathermen.
They are the House, which only bets on this:
that what you did today you will also do tomorrow.

If not natively ambitious, at least burn
to disappoint and frustrate unseen powers
with generosity and lightning raids of will.
.

La Dolce Vita

The memory lists top heavily with certain shapes,
such as standing on the seashore weakly drunk
and waving off the better angels of your nature. Meanwhile
your compatriots fuss over a leviathan hauled ashore by young men
who live more authentically than you. That was then. Then,
too, the night your father came to see you, played the gay blade
at the nightclub, then feeling ill and guilty, called off his liaison
with a call girl and insisted he go home and age. Your best friend
shot himself, and police photographers used step ladders
to photograph the beds of his two children, both red launching pads
disheveled with fresh silence. There were a series of brief and silly
musical tableaux, each prominently featuring the cha-cha
and you watched a drunken socialite, possessed by cornered
spirits, moan for more existence in a boarded villa. No one
remembers anymore but you, and finally even you are gone,
who left thick envelopes of vivid dreaming, All the life
that might be yours combines with mine in memory until
I can’t remember which was which-my life from birth,
or my sweet year, the year I was conceived.

JANUARY 17, 2009

Today, to Washington by rail, he measures out
our expectations with the sweetly gradual, shunning
the hallucination of transcontinental flight. It untethers
to be once here, then somewhere far. Worlds
that don’t come weed by weed, nor cirrus horsetail
strand by strand strike hollow, not as dense earth sounds,
packed snow, the rustle of the slag-bank cattails,
transcriptions from the heart and lungs.
Trains thread the culverts Krylon-tagged. Empty screw-
top pints blink on the tracks, coy with all that didn’t
come to pass. He is also bound to this untidy,
this provisional. He rounds to us so curiously,
as though from hallway closets littered
with old shoe trees, pennies, racing forms that shuffle
from our car coats. And he knows these things,
and we know he knows. Not turned by symbol,
he turns the wan daguerreotype of January sun
into the deepest groove of our collected dark
to balance trumpet fictions and black-
bordered funeral cards. RFK and FDR came thus,
went so. The Emancipator.
Sleep. Dream then, if you’ve forgotten who you are.
Then wave him southward into solar fire.




THE AGING PROVISIONAL

Six escalators at the World Trade Center site, those
that come up from the Path, now bip and chafe
like avant-garde trombonists, doing serial bits, chopped
Webern, Musique rubberette. Warped with delay,
the provisional turns objects inside out until they make
the music of uncovered wound, the squeal of therapeutic
sneakers on linoleum, wheelchairs doing wheelies. Not
to make light of it. But I live here, and I know Manhattan’s
deadlight, its salted stairs, its bleached night people like
familiar song. I saw the Pile when it was some square
miles of Tophet, charred a denser black than outer space,
and I saw it get that way, the sound of surf it made
when exiting the world of forms. The forms are tiring
of our industry. Fluorescent light reveals the streaking,
the granularity. Tuesday finds us wondering how to see
as whole a landscape so disorganized, Wednesday
finds us puzzled when we hear the light it bathes in
asking us to love it. But I do, I guess, the way I learn
to like the musty taste of delicacies that only prose
and custom sell me, thumbing known incisions. I ghost
the subway glass, as on many nights before, and I can see
my rind, its buckling, less efficient as a shielding to the core,
even while vertiginous construction, deep and high, internal
bio-fiilgree and high tech office space ticks on.


NEW YEAR’S DAY

Panorama of bleached amazement and doubt.
Here is the current state of dream and miracle by which
I’m scored under the eyes, stupefied
to no purpose: a silver dish of morning rays
toppled on the airport road, and mother drove, at
85, and pointed to it. Two long-lashed twins of
ten slept in the seat in front as we rose above
the cotton plains of first-issue clouds. Michigan,
a squashed straw hat, frosted with a dust of ice, rolled
by in squares of stubborn zoning error, the winter
branching of the dormant autotrophs a million
capillary deltas. Connecting A and C, a liquid
purple maw with moving sidewalks, flashing
walls, a large, intestine room—the future
that we saw in films. The big jet puffed across
the continent on cloud bed and I tensed against
the galley wall, 26 A, stomach hollow with the yaw
of it, thrusters contra dead wind, leaned,
divided, into my trajectory. The method of the hours
in our century, abrupt scene changes. Now,
again in Brooklyn, I may as well of dreamt as lived it all,
the hometown, and I say put up with it, the dream
that draws you on, an aging mammal frosting
at the muzzle, trussed on miracles— grateful
and not, doubtful, more faithful than you thought
you would be, pressed into the loose years
and their soft and unrelenting flicker
about which you can say nothing, though you will.
.

ABRAHAM

Lincoln. Air of trees, turned fields,
turned graves. Wooingly the smell
of human-host bacteria and lye.
Woodsmoke. In a long, odd-looking boy,
sheltered from the rime the kernel
of what had to happen. Will tuber’d
in the dark where absence moved.
The father was a blight. In the canopy
coughed wind tuned to futurity, thick
with blood and blossom. Light eyes
retreat into the firemark of what came.
It cannot be believed how firm
the graves of others are as foundation, seem
they so much otherwise. Burned wood
mocks fire. Who lost can’t be
mislaid. Faculties he has, but hath borne
them meek, so clear in every office
that none waylay him almost, but the worst,
himself. Nothing halts the idiot design
of fore-drawn dreaming, wavering
the moonpath through the microbe forest,
the shining I would have it so
drowning all the hypo would-nots inside
screaming, almost to the marble seat. Trumpet-
tongued the deep damnation. Absence
sets the seal on indivisibility. Union
is the forked wand, advancing in night corridors alone
that taps at this door…this, bent.


FATHER’S FATHER’S FATHER


Amerika. Sailed over to camp, provisionally, set
tilted forests of amber lights upright, by endless strops
of tar. Berriboned, ribboned, drained, I die in a bib
tied at the back that exposes my privates. The habit
of flesh, it’s greed against lack, and by God we would
never, never lack. What I did to the snow owl after
my ducks: a silly death of Wild in the outhouse.
I gripped him by his talons, as gnarled as an old woman’s
and swung him like a weighted scythe, then tossed
him in the shit hole. Was it him, was it a widow
owl? She rose again next morning, her wings
spread to escape, and with her lard from my children’s
mouth. She flapped down at my gun’s mouth
as surely as Tecumseh. I’ve dropped hard wives
into harder holes, but just to leave one thing clear
undone, as a reminder, one purple thicket
on the land remains uncleared, one great oak
fired by lightning that finished what I started
just by girding. First, there were denuded poles,
dead boles just staring, blinking in the light
as though worshipped by tall silage sprung there.
Cribs filled. The west sky caged bled a yellow,
inward bruise. The Esso sign is grinning on the ridge
a clown, you say; but it all tallies, all connects.
All had a weave— you say dire. I could show
each feeding, lighting knot tied. Tied when it was good.

APACHE DUSK

A moving spirit makes no man happy says an Apache
in a TV movie at the gym, an orange Saturday
in winter. Brooklyn is laved in sunset, the edges
stark and molten in sub-freezing air. De Chirico, ok?
If I’m haunted by a moving spirit (or many
moving spirits) I’m haunted just like other men,
and women. We’re all the same, by God, I see that now,
for now. I don’t mean the same in general, but in particular,
down to the articulation of the thigh hair, the foot’s louche
ventral arc, the riverine green dorsal veins. The way
four naked men are sinewed but still frail, expectant:
one beautiful, three frumpy, each picking at the skimpy
towel that hides the loaded mandrake crotch—
tired, and, straight or queer the focus of so much
frowning thought, the problem of its twanging need,
the plectrum waiting to be sounded by a message
from the sugars of the mind still quaintly feared
or monitored as an emblem of the vital, a message
from what is gallant and heraldic almost, if only for being realer
than the balance of the dream; the rasping of our blood
and dust a dance of starlings, not to be confused with dream,
though dreamed of all the time. It is a moving ghost, watching
while we’re joined in that chimera that each fights
to separate from dream, and fails.

Be still, in your ice set, and look.
In full sodium dark, she is upside down:
the stone barred owl,
the dead lamb over the town,
the snow fruit,
the dust coot,
the pitted mold melon,
the shattered mallet head,
the masticated golf ball,
the earth stalker,
the morto ornament,
the tide jiggler,
the would-be cheese planet,
the month divider,
the farmer’s almanac
the menstrual ballet master,
the trans-world window ornament,
the poet killer.

February 2,2009

You are supposed to see deeper. When there is a burgeoning list
of things to do, you stop seeing at all, entranced by the list, the tiers
slipping in and out of place, the cantilevered shelves lined with cold,
nutritive activity, what congeals and announces, chiefly to itself,
that it has a life. The others take it on faith, assuming that if you're knit
and present, shaped like the requisite x, you must be doing what you're
supposed to do: writing the checks, cooking and eating the beans
and fish, conjugating the verbs, tearing apart roses with razorblades
to number all their naughty bits. The day was hard with small snow
and last night’s poem is hours late. No, you cannot do all your work
laying down. No, you cannot stop and watch the dump trucks
and pile drivers. Saturday’s Bonnard is a memory of sunlight.
But the route to the train is a windblown film set, full of harlequins
and Punches, and don’t you dare nervously count the windows, the steps.
There’s always more, and you can slow down in place, and look,
still take your slot in the language lab to conjugate those verbs
that signify all you would be doing today, were it done in France.
It’s all hurtling by, and you have not, in point of fact, seen it all before.

February 1, 2009


They are dead at functional maturity, in plants, the hallways
where the water, drawn off by the Star, is pulled up through
by a deepening meniscus. Hover and cling, now, to the meta-
phor, up into bare light, that trope which says the maybe
we are larvae, maybe the dead have become so
at functional maturity, and are the conduits. I always
wondered. They named the streets. The rendering
of every object we use and own, more and more
of them, were drawn and filed somewhere by hands
now still: thinner, harder, sifting off in gloves.
There is war, I think, between the will of the corridor
and mine, a sometimes dirty little contest in these
chambered conduits where hours, clinging to each other
for dear life, are levitated skyward. I am not prepared
to follow through stomata, those who, trapped like me
in paradox, gave in to gravity to pull us onward
after them. Not by design, of course: most of them just
wanted more of what they knew, like me, at nightfall.
The dead, when dying, did not think too much of us.
But they built the stairwells where they run us out.
So the sidewalk, the subway, the corridor at school
are absent-made. Most of the architects and riveters
are not. If not their ordering of glyphs on a page,
the ordering of sounds and concepts are a whirring
overhead, hand over hand, pulling me from the leaf.

January 31, 2009

I

Bonnard at home, not leaving, during the War. No sugar and no butter. No croissants. Plenty
of haricots and garden produce, but no chickens and no coffee. Bonnard with his paints

and a good deal of fruit, windows, sun. Bonnard in this room, then that. Inexhaustible, a villa
in the sun when you are a painter and you don’t go out. Regarde! The saucers, gold lipped.

Les cerisses as waxy as a car hood. Regarde! The dog under the bananas and the towels, each thing rapt in ding
an sich,in the essence, that, inexplicably, makes Sartre sick. Sartre could live in Bonnard’s

house, but he could not live in a Bonnard, harried by vermilion, insulted by a supercharged bouquet,
Cezanne’s apples as seen by Saints alone. I am trying to do what I have never done, give the impression

one has on entering the room. One sees everything and yet sees nothing, he says. What
could this mean? Perhaps an interior before it has been assigned meaning— just before— and full

of naked things, only clothed with sun—before they’ve been assigned memory or utility. Voila, ma femme,
dans la salle du bain. Another way to love her, maybe, more than her particularity. And then oneself

in the bathroom mirror, a clerk, perhaps, looking tired and featureless without your glasses, smooth as baby,
not ripe for death but not quite living either, just an eye, a hand, une brosse.

II

It was a day so cold and clear the wind was like a flame, wavering and sharp and variable,
Dry as tinder, unimpeded. It was now dark. Drained by looking, un-willing to go out, you

wandered aimlessly into halls of period interiors, as empty as old convents. The Metropolitan,
near closing, on a winter night. Vienna, Paris, Montpellier and Grasse. You didn’t need the pictures

and the paneling, but some had windows. No, one palace chamber in Vienna had not only windows,
but the sun of some late morning weekday, an hour before noon precisely, flooding in the large and airy

room, the mouldings white with hint of teal or celery, the pale and fruity carpet; light and clean, worn elegance.
A harp stood by a chair at one end, next to a settee. So tired you are. So tired with looking, studying, conscious

ness in real and in the abstract. There was a barrier of plex, waist high. A eurotourist watched you vault it, probably
decided to say nothing. The settee creaked, strained the pins of two-centuries old ash, old pulp and xylem. When

next you woke the room was whole, the curtains wafted out into the room. Your heard low voices, street calls,
fleisch and brot, and then, much louder still, This is the last stop on this train. Everybody off the train!

January 30, 2009


The dinner hour. Were I a cinematographer, I would shoot it all
in grey and subdued violet. Cars and car radios. My dad home
from work, taking off the Russian hat he favored in the winter
smelling like metal and snow. My mother turned the paper
on the table, her single beer snowing upward, and they talked.
My Dad made fun of my kindergarten teacher’s name, and rubbed
my tiny ears with jocular violence. I set the table with all
the flatware, the parfait glasses, even, that we used then, the sauce
dishes for the stewed tomatoes. The meal was whole, and generally
included the potato in some form, at Dad’s insistence. There
was always Grace. Often the TV was on in the other room
a blond wood model, on which newsmen were seen to duck
projectiles, bullets— tell, with cigarettes visibly pluming from
the bottom of the screen— of shattered worlds. They all
regathered— the worlds— for me at least, for a few others,
for most of us with time to hear of splintered worlds. For
the rest, behind Tom Petit, reporting from Phnom Penh,
there’s just a bums rush, then a circle of barrels, or perhaps,
a single, shiny gun. No one to tell us what comes next,
how it goes, not eroded day by day at eventide, but in a vortex.

January 29, 2009

There was sleep to be made up, thus dream-debt to repay.
I’ve brushed my teeth, cleaned my glasses, and returned
to the scene of the crime with my laptop. I was rolled
by the unconscious, run over, embedded like a fossil
in black licorice, by the sheet. In last night’s film, I grew tired
of the old cast. In the dream’s waking extension
I hoist these pink creations like blimps at the Macy’s parade—
not the people, god love them, who, gone white
or grey or dead only haunt their rooms— but their oneiric
counterparts: the old bosses, teachers, the cast of secondary
authoritarian figures, good and ordinary people after all
who play other roles in other people’s dreams, all well
and good humanity. I would grind them, but I can’t.
I would recycle their prop wardrobes, and grind
their polystyrene in a mill, melt it in an oven, but I can’t.
We’re through, in any case. Finally, I’m firing you all.
Your services are no longer needed. You may shuffle off
in a trailing little group, blinking at each other and the world,
emerging from the airplane hangar of my unconscious
wondering and new and cast off, as I have so often been,
into the cold day, to endure the aerial surveillance of your fates.

January 28, 2009

We’re living in a fool’s paradise, and it’s not even
Paradise. You could talk of your own life, or the earth’s
and it would come out the same. If you could achieve
the proper distance from the ground, the correct relation
what would it be? A savannah dweller, with culture. Berries
and seeds and small rodents, and advanced philosophies.
Heroism but no bloodletting. A nice, solid Antarctic shelf.
But everything would be approximate, wouldn’t it, even
if with spells you could turn your life and the world’s life
to an imagined purpose. Edenic fantasies as a sort
of spiritual hygiene. Everything with a design. Where can
it be found in the rain-smeared blinking city, where
you’ve no where to go but home. No one to see. Ask
again, and in a years time you can record how many
times you asked. What am I doing here? Your day took
a turn that prompted the question, but there’s no remedy,
no answer for it, but one. Turn the light out. Roll over.

January 27, 2009

Xylem and phloem. If some one could see water through bark
and cork, they would see it shooting up and down trees,
and leaves stiffen and subside. Sometimes the water moves
15, 65, miles an hour, and trees become tumescent,
measurably expand at the bole, straining into atmos
pheric gases, palms up to the Star.My Dad had
a hierarchy of trees: Dutch Elms and Tree of Heaven
were just junk, and not many disagree. Dutch elms were pulp
fleshed and they twisted. One had horizontal branches
low to earth. We cracked the switches of the ailanthus
and the milk poured out. We called them popcorn trees
because they smelled that way, or maybe like a dusty
child. I never anthropomorphized them, but maybe
they were more than giant weeds-a supervisory
capacity, I think, but non-judgmental. Another
tree presided both over my seventh birthday party
and my high school graduation, a companionable
silver maple that might well be dead now.
I can check on google earth, zero in from the sun down
to 700 meters, like a dipping raptor or a wraith, or
good old Bob Monroe, seizuring or out of body.
It was a reedy, slow child, that tree, an impaired
uncle with the best intentions, who wouldn’t touch,
but might suffer you to stand in his hair or yank
a clump off in seething petulance. I played cigarette tag
under the canopy, watched the moon for signs
of the lunar module, the hovering mother-ship. To
the east, over the Old Airport, winked Kohoutek,
near the sunrise, where a star would make no sense.

January 26, 2009

A nipple, a harness, a collar for the rose, a halt
to the day’s intransigent, steel shoes that say, yes,
you could do otherwise— that, is the first poem.
Just prior, immersion in water, then the draught
of an acrid flower that wakes you. Restless already
to have it done with, you had not much
glide today. So much would have to be done
in pieces, the old game of what time is it, Mr. Fox?
This is the one you have always complained of,
not willing to admit that the contest contents you.
It was a day of movement, the mind gently stuttering
and putting like a vintage outboard over the vast
sub-pond tracts of millefoil, cool orchards of ignorance.
It’s called school, and is usually offered to the young,
padding in their soft, sportif, parti-colored mucklucks,
denim flowers with gum and phones. Sometimes you
smell the varnish on these, still tacky to the touch,
so new to notions. You can see how some might
love them, but also hate them, bend to dip some
morsels in their sometimes open mouths, but pull
back at the rawness, and a doughy staleness
they are now ripe for for. The imminent
death of the notion that otherwise could still
be done. This is not the fault of ideas, or even
the messenger. It’s only a course of protective
detachment, administered by light, (though on
the way today, the East was orange conflagration,
and the pigeons morphed in flock-flight like a tear.)

January 25, 2009


Your heels clicked on the cold pavement, after 11,
on a Sunday night. You walked from a warm party
into known chill, familiar caked ice and squad cars,
random pigeons at the Q train stop, and your known pace
from one end of the platform to another, back again.
Now there is music, and this screen, but little
of any oceanic feeling. Instead the prattle of the brain
trying to distract itself from the discomforts
of relative solitude, the uncertainties of morning,
cash, the availability of some companionship
in some kind of future, the possibility of yellow
lamplight and a round of known faces. What
the hell are you doing here, what does it mean alone?
Other people are a distant rattle of chimes
over a lowing choir of spent days looking for some
reason to have lent themselves to you. They brought
you many who are not here, but you wait on.
It may be that in their inner dusk, now palpable
in their pink and gray and sleeping brain,
coordinates brace you. You’re holding
in the net of their knowledge of you, a piece
of the flickering planet they know.

My mind is elsewhere, but what is it doing there,
turning in its own brine, essentially an alien planet,
a first trimester fetus that matures at odd moments
but reverts by lunchtime? For an instant, then, it’s
a new planet, like Formalhaut B, and Ground Control
is under an enchantment. Evidence of actual being
not inferred by indirection, that method where they
carom signals off a sun and see if it runs into
solid objects when it ricochets. A complex
but consistent internal narrative that has nothing to do
with the life lived, but with its misgivings,
its rehearsals. Sex is the least of it. Why do I always
dream I’ve lost my car, and cannot even remember
if I have a car, in dreams. Did it get towed away?
Always this unknowing about fundamentals.
An ad in the New Yorker councils me:
Never lose your place in the world and it bothers
me all day, with the same feeling as the dream-
that I have, am in the process of, or can be
expected to do, just that. Of course, they’re
selling insurance, and fundamentally I’m an oaf,
in overalls, looking through the railroad cut
for one tarnished beam. I know
one thing from this two score and seven interlude
between two slices of black bread: if I only
look, the day after I lose my place
in the world will be much like the day
before, and the day before that.