contents
Please note all poems are copyright
1996 metatronics communications.
Permission is required for publication
or other use.
Some of the above poems have been
previously published (r/w).
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He turned tripping on a polished stone of the surface of the pedestrian mall, he said earlier he's thirsting for experience, he reminded me of fountains and renegade buffalo raised for chattel in Japan, he thought he might be wistful, dreaming of spires and crazy Sagrada Familia spirals, the staircase ran only one way, the only way down was to jump. He reminded me of vague formations in the clouds, before cumulonimbus, in a different discourse from the rain, a hidden place that sees, another time, a wild place, indeterminate things happening, creeping in like ivy, forcing the issue and recriminating the evidence. He made me think of magic, and evaporation, and Thales. I thought he was crazy. That was the only word that didn't belie him, the unfortunate edge towards madness, the flip way he didn't care he was young, you knew the chain of heterogenous moments would return, it gets them again and again, when he too will be a mere postgraduate, you knew it wouldn't amount to much, this flirting with the unreal, dipping his foot in, dangling it, and then, what of it, putting toothpaste back into the tube. A few brief suggestions of proof, and all this at the pedestrian mall, him waving assertions in the air like flies, something organic creeping in like lichen, slaking itself silly on tomorrow's condensation, a direct result of yesterday's rain.
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As if curling linguine around a fork, my beloved coursed a comb through her hair and swung it out in every direction like a small boy flailing on a jungle gym. "These tired days," I said to her, "my words to you are as empty as coffins waiting around in a showroom." She didn't hear me, or didn't let herself, and instead found her things and got ready to leave: the day had been like the slow moving drift of icebergs in the Arctic ocean, north by northeast of Kamchatka. . . .
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1. I want to write something about a wraith: I've never met one personally. When I was in Ouerzazarte, Morocco, a dull place of ochre, burnt sienna, and crayola Bittersweet walls, I travelled southwards into nowhere, a barren, beautiful empty land of eroded hills and an occasional wandering, Wordsworth-Burroughs nomad, who was thinking about goats. I thought, seeing one of them, wrapped in a black silhem, a sort of Moroccan cape, that this was what a wraith would approximate in my own, dwindling experience. 2. A wraith. I last read about it in Tolkien. Morocco resembled Bertolucci. When I dreamed awake, I heard the Last Temptation of Christ wailing in my ears as at Busch Gardens, the Dark Continent, in Tampa, Florida, where I grew up and had a season pass. I wandered through Timbuktu and Morocco, Stanleyville and the Congo, collecting stuffed monkeys as I went. Still have the monkeys. Won them. Wraiths. 3. So the idea of wraith has always appealed I suppose. Past Ouerzazarte and Agdz, the town nearest South, there lies a string of towns and mud-fortresses. Every few days the tourist buses drive through, giving the passengers time to shop at the markets arranged for their benefit. But still, despite these invasions, I also saw at one market a goat slaughtered by hand and blade, left lying decapitated in a cement pen filled with flies, as its pool of blood mixed with the thousands before it. . . .
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The fields of browning grass stretched on for miles in this unblessed land under the stretching sky. No longer a kid, he walks and bikes and waits, he thinks less in the daytime than at night, but then, maybe he is a kid. Still. At night, a thousand unseen stars have sent their light for decades. They crown a pretender king with a dowager aunt, and not this kid nor any other sees the big affair. A moment of somewhere else intrudes -- a thought brings up the memory of something -- something somewhere far greater... daylight gives way nonetheless, that's why it's called dusk, this time, whereas elsewhere it is dimdummim, the slow turning into peace, night starting to stretch its inverse arms. . . .
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When you were a grandmother, did you rest the candy-cane children on your quilted rocking-chair knee, and spin yarns about the twenties? Some dilettante looking at a Rembrandt imagined you as a dutchwoman, paddling through Amsterdam with alebrot; he knew that your figure in a corset would delight the chauvinists of the Continent. When you left your homeland with a sewn-up knapsack, like kudzu flung to a new tree, did you look behind you once more than you should've? Did you open your belongings to make sure you had your comb-- did you eat an apple while waiting for the boat? Did they have apples in the Old Country? I saved up all these beads, in the wooden box you gave me, do you still want to see the collection? My brother has an assortment of stamps-- I sent him one from Liechtenstein, I bet he didn't have one from there. Liechtenstein is between Switzerland and Austria. . . .
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1. A sudden drop in temperature, everything outside somehow smells like smoke, a desire to trample something moist underfoot, a padding through the woods, molting, decomposers wiling away the hours, a demeaning dollop of centipedes, more desire to become enslaved again, while things circle back and while some hours pass, smoke blends in with the sky with the air full with coolth, in with a sudden drop in temperature, like an incantation. 2. Inside the cursed cave, you wandered like a fogged spirit, penetrating arafel darkness. The stones sang and my relatives died, and I blew out the measly candle, and was thoroughly alone, for a moment. And then it grew noticeably cold, and I thought, hell resembles an aquarium without water. It needs a soundtrack: a woman singing. Further down the cave's mouth, a wind blew through it, and I thought, the spirits ran, and my thoughts began to wander, through the cursed cave like a spirit in fog. 3. Sloping toward the empty hills rises a chattering overflow, with a direct reflection, of every tree, in the glass of water, this lake of mirage, framed against the window-frame. Our job is not to frame forever but to frame the sky which never remains. . . .
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Where did you get off to, like some coffee swirl telling you the milk was spoiled, a handsome gesture of smoke pushed by your hand over the chinese menus, you had the spicy tofu: I want you to call me up and say, hey the crowds all here but you won't you come back and we'll go back to the same chinese place, the lunch special will still be on, but I won't eat the soup for dietary reasons, you'll get the eggplant instead, it's not on the special, and that would ruin it all--you're right again, of course, better let the wolves lie, they're not sleeping, they're growling. I want to be in the snow again, taxis skidding like Dorothy Hamill, the ice raining down over the Riverside highway, man they just ruined this place for a pupfish, you holding something you bought at the drugstore, it wouldn't fit into my grey ski-jacket's pocket. All the details left out you remember. Won't you come back and let me remind you, but you're not the one who left are you, and forget about where I've ended up, because things are never looking that way, you've got to remember the drivers are animals, and you are just potential prey. Sorry if it becomes like a distant tune that you've heard someone humming to herself It's just that when I remember the way it used to be, Even though I know it never was like this: gleaming at 3:30 in the morning, the silent hour as the city sleeps, only a quick odd cab looking for a fare, some wind blowing as I look at you while you don't notice. That's the way it was just once, in between the shuffling of papers and feet: like that sign on the subway asked: Foot Pain? They'll solve it with lasers, I never copied down the number, I can't remember it now, it had a mnemonic device. . . .
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Something is greatly disturbed and grieved over scrubbrush, viewed from atop it looks like someone with a crewcut, last night I was drunk enough to vomit- I didn't bother, because I thought of African Violets fuzzy like the underbellies of bees buzzing in increasing velocity until you are clinically insane. Tragedies, like being buried alive, are: being declared insane and not being able to prove otherwise, if there's nothing to the world but material coincidence, various tortures, some of which are interesting, realizing late in life that most decisions were wrong, the senseless waste of mass, etc. Darling cuddle me like a Pez dispenser, worship me like a strange Egyptian deity, the one with the nine-foot penis preferably, won't you offer supplications to me, like Dagon the god of the philistines, like he did I mean, to the Ark of the Hebrews, prostate on the ground, imagine a whole fucking nation with the clap. Now that sucks, darling. Won't you cuddle with me and toast marshmallows on our bright blue bug-fryer. I love to sit late at night and listen to their annihilations. Something's wrong, it's rotten, I'm disturbed, like I wasn't before, like when I was crawling to get the soccer ball and I lay prone in an anthill. Something's awry in my area of focus, and something is wrong in Seychelles, some islands which I bet are beautiful, before they drown, before I die, before the end of the next century. If they had natives, imagine what they'd think. Say something primitive to me, sweet, remind me that we're all pagans at hormone-secreting organs. Whisper something in Sanskrit or Phoenician, or Ugaritic, I don't even know who speaks that nowadays, I'd like to learn Akkadian myself, I wonder how you say "I'd like a hotdog" in Akkadian. What do you mean? What did I--? What do you mean, was it the Akkadian remark? Well just flay me like a carrot. Say do we have asparagus in the house Demons haunt our every breath Come on, we'll watch Doris Day together. . . .
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Tousle your hair backwards, she remarked, make yourself into the cookie box, label yourself 'truth' between your foreheads, suffuse yourself with fudge and butterscotch. Carvel magic: the old man and the cookiepuss at one hundred thirty eight. Beware, she said, of what Eduardo said, you know what Eduardo said? She wore bright blue pink lace cotton candy suspenders the birth of cool, labor pains and maniacal grins, minimal repetition and "Walking." She suddenly changed into a war bound demon, fangs jutting out from her face, let darkness fall where it may, she said, beware, she reminded again, of what Eduardo said, you know what Eduardo said? In a twisted way, I'm sure she likes you, the way a cuckoo loves the nest it steals into, or the way a sudden explosion into the inevitable of something beyond our scheme of recognition can just love, I mean L-O-V-E, fella, love the blue stuff it rips into like an eggshell. Pretty soon it's all over, she said, and you gotta remember, she said, you gotta think about what Eduardo said, you know what Eduardo said? In the catacombs outside Rome, with the guide speaking in hyperbolic English, with the ground moist with the treadings of tourists, with the epic run aground like a tired whale, she thought of you, I'm sure, she beckoned with her hand, folding it fully back like a guru biathlete, fresh from sculpting for the Venice biennial, she told me to tell you what Eduardo said, you know what Eduardo said? . . .
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These bangles for you remind me of a shop in a
place I've never been
like Kashmir or the Cote d'Ivoire,
or small candied fruits in pimento loaf,
or pop songs playing like that crazy woman's
hat,
Chita Rivera in tweeds, my love.
In the Chateau of Chillon, where "Byron" is written
clumsily, like a club foot,
the pillars in the dungeon are moist, smooth.
Even the graffiti is worn, and I remind myself
of them,
as I caress you, thinking of the plunging Tokyo
stock market,
looking not at you but at the painting on the
wall behind you,
as your lovely flowing intricate and stupid jewels
get tangled in my hair,
as a plane begins to land and we hear it from
your room,
the separation and regret between each of us,
as in that movie, with a heroic effort by Gregory
Peck
to save two-thousand GIs from senseless death.
It also starred David Niven and Anthony Quinn,
who portrayed, respectively,
a sarcastic English professor and a vengeful
Greek.
Greek: the miracle of the ancients, my love,
remember--the problem about circumcision?
But what lovely statues of ruddy youths,
and beauty and Thucydides,
and the speech Peracles gave,
and all of this, my love,
in the simple flesh we share, my love,
and the vanity in which we engage ourselves,
one to another in twisted arguments,
like rabid dogs foaming like surf and waves noisily
crashing
up against the shore and the sand and the rocks.
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Written for Caren
A snowfall in Andorra,
over a cracking lake between Spain and France,
the ice like a piston shoving off winter.
A lake teal with frostbite
Musing on you is like sitting quietly.
Just as migraines are like yellow chainsaws,
and nerve endings like overripe peaches.
But you yourself are like the plunge into the water,
that reminds me so much of birth.
You my love are a dimension incomprehensible to all but Stephen Hawking.
Where did I get to feeling this way about you?
Can I have another drink,
it's like in those damn sands of Kelt--
I was sweating so fucking hard, and the goats shat in the river,
we couldn't drink it anyway, that's sort of how my throat feels
because I've been telling you about this for hours.
I don't, I can't fit it in to my --
Loosen it, thanks, just a touch.
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Red Stars
Happiness is a weird thing, like a severed head,
it's great, it's got some buoyancy to it.
After a while flies come, but in the meantime,
is an interesting mantelpiece.
Here, Max Roach's drum solo, the crowd wild with it,
can he go any faster? It doesn't seem the world
can split into firecrackers any more perfectly--
a dream of place, and a new haircut,
he might look in the mirror and look perfect--
the mystical shape of the godhead is studied
elsewhere by friendly souls in relaxed suits.
Cards are thrown, trump is played, and to be terse,
the skits of life go on, and the scenery wins Caldicott awards,
like Brian Wildsmith: how about a crouch of herons?
They take off into the sky as soon as dawn looks about done with,
flapping their beautiful wings--they agree in concordance
to look for some fish--and into the clear present,
tangible and precise.
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Warm Peace
Opposite a wall of medals hangs a head in triumph
mounted on a polished shield of wood.
Beneath it burns a fire of contentment
dangerously close to the persian rug and sofa.
Something in teak. A drink.
You can't swing on a hammock forever,
said the man with the weathery face,
as if preparing to use a pitchfork and sweat.
In the distance over the tan hills,
a few birds were soaring.
A chimpanzee learned to use a stick to fish,
someone understood Chaucer.
He just relaxes his head a little bit,
and it's incredible.
A knowing glance comes over his face, slowly.
Inside an outside fire,
God is smiling.
A boy traces the outline of a metal fire truck,
made in other times, and races it
along the surface of the rug. A fire crackles.
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love poems
Wonder
She sipped the delicious chocolate liqueur
which ran smoothly down her chin,
and onto the splendid carpet.
The infinite intruded into the finite,
packing itself into letters like these,
like a patient in a smoke-filled
operating room, ready for gas.
Praise uttered from the singing lips of an enchanted woman,
soaring to the conception of the virgin,
and whether consciously or not,
transcending it utterly and rising further
above the convention he uses and the image
of mother and child
to the ultimacy that is higher than vaulted ceilings,
and purer than the stained glass beneath them.
During the pauses it grows so beautiful,
that the aesthetic certainty, the pele of it all,
the hills' rolling cantabile,
and delight and the way her eyes smile,
and the wonder and the excellence,
the richness like bittersweet,
the cleanness of the sanded, uncarved altarpiece
in the middle of the wood.
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Long and sometimes clear
Your skin is like transparent polyester,
a leopard's pure one-color fur.
The night coats it and seals it from wetness
your candlous hard heart a burning blue duraflame,
reaped from nature, enhanced, alight afloat.
But you let your skin go to seed in the summer,
washing only when you're in a river.
And you let your hair grow long and tangle,
and you have that pumpkin-seed hardness
around the edges of your temples.
A paganism without all the dancing,
just sitting there, with your hair that way,
over some sort of corned fireball scene at campside,
watching small crackles of spark dance,
nothing new.
Summer, I've heard, falls into winter and so on,
and back round again until you're back here longing,
your eyes shining a difference,
because every year you shift your stance.
Sped up you'd look so uneasy,
back and forth and forthwards back again.
In the winter, you're chrome and red polyethylene,
your demeanor hides your face like a chrome bumper
shades the Caravan from insects.
Now they're made of fiberglass,
and you too will change each day,
and next time this happens next year,
that seedy granola face of yours
will be all the different same anew.
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Miriam
when you get tired--
you know how tired you can get miriam--
everything gets tired along with you,
like rumpled corduroys in rain
miriam, I think of you sometimes when I'm very tired,
why haven't you sent me a letter--
I'd like to hear from you, miriam,
I hate to say it but they're playing our song,
I just put it on; it sounds so much better on CD,
miriam we ate so many meals together,
that was then and this isn't,
everything just misses
hmm miriam I remember what it was like
and when I get very tired like tonight,
I can only get six hours if I sleep now,
but my head's still turning around on itself
a little like a french cruller. shit
I digress, miriam, where are you to keep me in line?
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Your saving grace
Your saving grace isn't in your breasts,
whose perkiness always bothered me.
I thought close-knit 1960s-style sweaters were made just for them.
Your poise, your elegance, your savoir-faire,
they're all meaningless to me--I'm not sure I know what
savoir-faire is exactly.
I like the way you hold a wine glass
while laughing insincerely at some corporate half-wit, his shiny
dome glistening in the cocktail-hour light.
Your neck reminds me of a string of pearls
gleaned from the choicest oysters in the North Pacific,
and your nose is the shape of simple magic.
Your teeth, which glisten when you grin like the pearls I mentioned,
your eyelashes: you thought I was directing my penetrating gaze
to peer into the depths of your soul,
but I was looking at your eyelashes, the way they open and shut and
open and shut and clean your eyes of irritants.
You have something in you, that perhaps is mineral.
I lose track of the words you are saying, my dear,
but I'll love you forever if you love me back.
Shall we go then, you and I,
to the buffet table, with this great spread,
out against the pies and crepes and neatly-baked quiches
through the punches and whiskies and apples and peaches,
between pigs in blankets, and bagels, spread and lox,
out to our auto, waiting by the curbside,
to speed us both homewards, where we'll sit by the fireside,
and think about graces and places we'll visit
when you've got the time--and just what time is it?
Your saving grace is like the non-stick
surface of a useful and graceful saucepan,
its curves, its ergonomics,
the delicious pesto that can be made within it,
the alleviation of the burden of cleaning,
how, like the solar paneling of a communications satellite
circling the earth in the void,
it conducts heat so efficiently and evenly.
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Crown
something about gideon at this moment,
through your running reconnaissance of sandal-shaped waves,
humming in tune with the whitest pure black sound,
not breaking through through the inflection of transition,
the point at which we cannot speak,
and throughout there is like wonder breathing,
a networks of veins and rolling quiet,
and the largest ladder reaches the bluest view,
where the blue characterizes itself with a skin of form,
a convention that is real, and breathed through with silence.
and your own life is this,
as well as your being
something that is only itself when it is not,
and what there is behind your unborn head,
some halo dreaming of becoming larger,
through the pendulating of worlds.
or as if a swimming swayer,
calling up the worship of a perception
of a dream, as if a cloud's line,
undimmed by the horizon
and you even still are inside of it
and next over all of it,
so it goes.
the whitest grows into the maroon and black together,
a burnished flame of the square
with a foot in the real,
ten lights and glories,
singing panoplies and similar designs,
stronger and louder and
then even when you recognize
that to say there lies here nothing
is only one way of misunderstanding,
you newly become aware out of the corners
of your howbeit darkened glass,
of something more deeply interfused,
a motion and a spirit rescuing and
quieting, closest through the emptiness, beyond
even the paring of ultimates, untrapped by resultants,
and back, still, through all the similar sides,
of the resonating wholeness of null humming mmmmm.
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Everything
Everything creeps by unnoticed,
like a small spider.
Yet how good to hear the crickets,
at night, when you are alone.
Sound is quiet,
and no man is there,
beating against his heart
his sins in time with the crickets.
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Speechless love poem
I remember a cartoon with a black stuttering duck,
whose beak was blown clear off with a shotgun,
but miraculously kept chattering on in the dirt.
I can't figure out whether you're the Fudd with the gun,
or whether someone did this to you,
and your words are pain chattering.
Your anger is bleached, your praise
tastes like a metallic water fountain.
But peace isn't your mettle,
it's some thing more like a wide, green space,
roaming agricultural sprinklers,
atop wagon wheels.
Now I'm not reaching for rose-rimmed glasses,
plaids or interesting floral ties.
But you leave me speechless,
like an omniscient narrator suddenly finding his book
a subplot of someone else's.
Drifting apart into dead space, not empty nor full,
little blurts of information we are, you and I,
and there isn't a reason we are together,
we just happen to be.
In the end past metal, trees, and fields,
there's trying to live as if it's true.
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No irony for leftovers
The cadaver of our wretched evening spent over glass tabletops began
slowly to sting my eyes and I turned away-
for this I apologize, you thought I was turning away at you.
Not in the slightest - I was turning away because I couldn't look
at your eyes without irony,
and all those games I remember about this image of you or that one,
all the rickety constructions I put up around you,
they wore down with too many postings, like one of the construction
barricades near Union Square covered with rock concert posters
and advertisements for the latest bands.
I had that night to look at you directly across the glass tabletops
and the padded wallpaper of one of another countless restaurants,
whatever you means now.
Every myth can only tolerate a certain amount of mythologizing,
every actor can take just a limited number of poses.
That night you wouldn't even touch your wine, your sadness wasn't
the stuff of which poems are made, although mine apparently was.
But mostly it was me looking across the table like through the slats
of imperfectly closed venetian blinds,
seeing part of you divided by horizontal lines.
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concluding poems
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January remembers June
It's been months now
since flora bloomed in these hills
over your shouts
the smell of this place
now vacant.
The taste of memory
is a mysterious squirrel,
this song,
these sounds,
this light still dimming
these lights shining
slightly,
ever so slightly fading, slightly and
quietly in the wintertime.
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Wet and dry together
Now, in quiet days, with daring but an anatomy of suicide,
with some repeated pattern slinking northwards under the influence of magnets,
dripping like condensation becoming too heavy for the ceiling,
in an undesirable neighborhood, with some stereo cheaply beating,
with someone's hair growing greasier,
and the weight of boredom hanging over the dirt...
But remember what it was like a couple of years ago,
when we were young, with nasal Bob Dylan idealism,
in the letters we exchanged, when we were ready to feel the world,
rushing against us as if we were driving a convertible
in the endless, mesa'd west of America.
You're happy that time has gone,
but at moments like these, how good it feels to feel bad,
amidst the pile of toys left lying in barren plains,
and how it takes me back to when that was the only feeling I knew,
and takes me back to the topics we used to discuss
with all the earnestness of someone with time to spare.
So I put on one of those Dylan albums you haven't really heard of,
which doesn't have any of the songs on the tapes you made me,
but it's good to know that you can keep on keeping up with things past.
And in recollection they become like Omar Sharif,
when he rides into Lawrence from a small speck in the distance,
a particle startling the shimmering waves
of sand and heat and sun.
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Old, comfortable ideas
I like the way it is today,
the smell of a fire burning somewhere, like Winter,
back from a vacation, listening to a Coltrane record.
It used to be very recent that I was always discontented,
now it's as if that time is finished for.
The train has left the station.
Youth is an embrarrasing thing, curling smoke like it does.
It's like the bright red leaves on the light wood tree,
growing up in the country, never seen the city.
It makes it all anew.
I've reinvented my own wheel,
hammered it out smooth and brought it back,
a souvenir on the blue train, I'd say, if I were Coltrane.
Or I'd just suggest it, you know,
the circling round of things to where they were before,
through sorrow, and joy, and other old, uninvented ideas.
The train has left the station.
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A bird knows nothing of poetry
The bird here with pole-long legs,
lives up to its name,
& cranes its neck down to scoop out the fish from the bank.
It walks, I'd say hesitantly, through the mud
at the shore of the lake. Does a bird know from rest?
Suddenly, it's off.
Enormous grey wings stretching even bent many feet,
legs tucked under like a seven twenty seven,
feathers flapping, noisily, yet noiselessly.
A commotion, but hardly any sound at all. It's off.
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Purim 5756
And trailing behind all that green din and tumult,
like some forgotten kite's tail, left floating with the mylar
in the sky moving over the trans-ams and mopeds,
past, flailing, almost, wanting to digress into a flourish--
came this slowly spinning red, drifting less purposefully
than the days I spent when I was young,
when there was no time to speak of, when it was all quieted,
not in some mystic vein bulging blue into the tendons
of this world,
but in the dull white interlocutions of the television set,
its chatterboxes turned to anthems and then to rainbows
and then to this.
Somewhere the blood in his veins has spun counterclockwise down the drain,
rinsed off the latex gloves of the chaver kadesh,
having sorted through these hairs and this flesh,
and determined,
with the latest scientific technology,
the amount that goes where, and to whom, and to her, and to him,
as the faucets runs thick like a snake in some half-forgotten myth
speaking, not babbling as they're said to do, shouting a language
that asks not to be understood, as the interpretation
of a color makes itself trite, bland with balding innuendo,
reminding its audience of a pale old playboy, slapping the
tight figure of a giggling girl. Quiet, then!
So it moves counterclockwise, like these phrases circling around the
dead, a vulture with a beak like an Israeli crow,
peering from the top of a bauhaus building,
at the overabundant cats screeching at each other, each one lunch.
These lines try to devour the dead, but the dead always gag back.
It moves counterclockwise, the day turned opposite, the masks worn
but not undone, the burial shrouds turned into party togas,
this wine and bread turned well enough to chips and beer,
a drinking, drooling fraternity boy giving a eulogy,
the girls all are wearing tuxedos,
a truck driver nurses his baby boy,
the ice-cream vendor has taken over the shoestore,
raising his empire among the pumps and tongue-pads,
a shrewd, calculating salesman, high on his hat at last.
Willy closes up shop while Yitzhak mops the floor,
Abram's wife rests with bits of rock and soil,
what God has given, the janitor sweeps away into the fuming dustpan,
and carries into the glad bag, incinerated, or buried, or both.
A watch's gears, frozen at 6:45 one morning, the hands moving backwards
like Mickey Mouse, pointing towards a broken wrist, grasping another,
for just a second, did they know? Did they have a moment to look
at each other before it all went backwards?
So many questions, save them for tomorrow, rest your tired eyelids.
You can count on tomorrow not being yesterday before, you can trust
in the second law, the arrow may miss the target but it won't jump back
at you, nothing you to undo it, a crumpled failed photocopy,
overblack with toner, coming off on your hands,
thrown in to be recycled, its words smeared and unreadable.
They may read right to left, or have left to write, or they may be white
fire on black, they will be washed away and turned to pulp
and then carry sales orders, slips, balance sheets,
binding them like tendons by a wrist with a watch on it.
The blood washes off too, and carries words on it, phrases that
snap at each other like snakes suddenly biting the hands that
hold them, recycling protein into protein. Their tendons also
hold together paper, binding books with glue, an old man's hand
shaking as he does it, in Jerusalem.
You can buy his product at the gift shop, and give it to your grandmother
waiting back in a warm, wet climate. She will keep it past its usefulness,
putting it away for safekeeping, like the thousands of pitchers and
sets of silver in major museums, doomed to never be used, always waiting.
Or you can think of him as finally not waiting anymore,
not relaxing on the bridge of a canoe, not waiting for more time
to attack the day and live an iamb or trochee, the wait is over.
No, he has all the time in the world and nothing to wait for.
And firing after all this green and tumult and red and spinning,
and after all the quicksand poured like white paint on the heads of
fixed-place settlers, after all this corroding turpentine, all this
acrid-smelling bleach, the day turned itself on its head,
fifty more went to somewhere else, the enemy held the day,
and the day spun around like a young Michael Jackson, still black,
still dancing his virgin-pure form around, the day became a clown,
dressed in red and blue motley, smiling obscenely like a born-again
Christian, inviting every passing Loman in with a grin and
a southern drawl. Bozo's bright red hair sticking straight
out sideways like payot plugged into an electrical outlet,
the payot of the man of the chevra with his latex,
which keeps his hands condom clean of the blood and crushed teeth
he scrapes up from the side of a building,
careful not to let his long beard become clotted in with the rinsing
blood in the sink, or wet from the faucets shouting white noise at him,
his long-accustomed eyes still hesitating a tear.
Did they have just a second in that backwards moment, on their
way to the bus south past the Dead Sea and rose-red Petra,
to look just long enough to turn their heads towards one another,
one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, matching unison with itself,
just for one second--so they knew?
Fifty or more, with the dread of children gone,
thousands aright the tilting canoe by the bridge
and deliver a right, a left, backwards in mechanical motion,
like the woodsmiths chopping upwards in the swiss clock in the square,
pantomiming the furious noise from the gears and bells and springs.
So much for the concantations of bliss, so much for Robert Browning,
so much less remains than what was red and glistened before.
So much life and time and past and bookmarked sources
for passover stories, Purim spiels and random lots
had long since stormed the stage.
He'd taken their victory from them, he'd forced the show again.
The fool elects himself general, the boy wears a flowered dress,
a dead cousin on a motorcycle, a gold and green hill, charred a little now,
with a pair of olives high on pedestals and a kid throwing a rock
and a large painting saying 'this is not a rock, this is not a kid,
these are not olive trees, this is not tomorrow backwards' in backwards
alphabetical acrostic, listing thousands of names of God sung out of
the gaping mouths of old angels, in low Tibetan voices, not a harp
to be found, a lizard rises in eastern Pennsylvania, the fork runs
off with the nails, flies stop moving, shuttling back and forth, another
old seasoned political machinist visits a tent out of Lawrence of Arabia,
invoking King David and his love of Jonathan, and begins to speak as he
drills, sounding like a faucet spouting arbitrary holy water from the
overwalked Galilee that washes down the plasma of God's most devoted,
off the gloves of a nearsighted man with sidecurls, the fool assassinates
the learned, the boy wears a flowered dress, the day is backwards again.
The bed is turned upside down and no pebbles are found,
it was something else that was bothering her,
as she hadn't won the beauty contest this time:
she wasn't there in time to save the good guys.
He is so stoned he doesn't know Haman from Marduk and life,
he hangs by fishing line, a sinner in the hand of an angry god,
and builds a small gingerbread house in his spare time.
The rock, the paper, the dinosaur and scissors, all turn to each
other and say good evening, morning light. The blood runs
counterclockwise at six in the morning, on a mistrodden wet field,
twenty kids running laps around a baseball field from home to third
to first, the commentary is read before the primary source:
Rashi says this word must remain unexplained.
After all this irony and discontent, swirling itself in
a forest green pool, after all this flying shrapnel
that does not cohere,
the red tail thinks it has caught onto something going somewhere,
a ball hit by a cricket bat,
held by a white Englishman who views it with favor,
flying through the air like a mylar balloon,
but as he delivers a right it swerves to the left, and as he grabs
with his left it just slips out his grasp --
did they have just long enough to say "I"
or even long enough to think it --
did he wonder if it was worth it, the long hours,
the living for something, which it had to have been,
if only for this fourteen year old child
who wears his uniform to a party, like a burial shroud,
and vows that he too, will dare to be a poem,
written in verses not pointing backwards like snakes
but in short pure words that shine like radiant blue,
the brightness of the firmament,
that he too will do this, and to know that he can,
in his counterclockwise motion,
bring past to bear on the yet to become,
and honestly set back the clocks to straight again
and redeem this spilled red counterclockwise blood
to describe a path aright again anew.
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Trees Like Fire
Take these trees around this reddened lake,
make of them a cradle or a hearth.
Make of them matchsticks if you must.
Only once become for their own
do they reflect the sky into the land and home.
Circling round in the air becoming autumn,
a place that I call mine.
This air, these hills, they invite their own combustion,
these woods are tools.
And for themselves, and for tomorrow's separate minutes,
this lake, these skies,
these trees like fire.
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