• • •
(Knotted crowns of asparagus lowered by human hands
into long silver trenches fogblanched mornings
the human spine translated into fog’s
almost unbearable rheumatic beauty flattering pain
into a daze a mystic text of white and white’s
absolute faceless romance : : the photographer’s
darkroom thrill discerning two phantoms caught
trenchside deep in the delicate power
of fog : : phantoms who nonetheless have to know
the length of the silvery trenches how many plants how long
this bending can go on and for what wage and what
that wage will buy in the Great Central Valley 1983.)
• • •
“Desire disconnected meetings and marches
for justice and peace the sex of the woman
the bleached green-and-gold of the cotton print bedspread
in the distance the sound of the week’s demonstration
July sun louvered shutters off Riverside Drive
shattered glass in the courtyard the sex of the woman
her body entire aroused to the hair
the sex of the women our bodies entire
molten in purpose each body a tongue
each body a river and over and over
and after to walk in the streets still unchanging
a stormy light, evening tattered emblems, horse-droppings
DO NOT CROSS POLICE BARRIER yellow boards kicked awry
the scattering crowds at the mouth of the subway
A thumbprint on a glass of icy water
memory that scours and fogs
nights when I threw my face
on a sheet of lithic scatter
wrapped myself in a sack of tears”
• • •
“My thief my counsellor
tell me how it was then under the bridge
in the long cashmere scarf
the opera-lover left
silken length rough flesh violet light meandering
the splash that trickled down the wall
O tell me what you hissed to him and how he groaned to you
tell me the opera-lover’s body limb by limb and touch by touch
how his long arms arched dazzling under the abutment
as he played himself to the hilt
cloak flocked with light
My thief my counsellor
tell me was it good or bad, was it good and bad, in the
unbefriended archway of your first ardor?
was it an oilstain’s thumbprint on moving water?
the final drench and fizzle on the wall?
was it freedom from names from rank from color?
Thieving the leather trenchcoat of the night, my counsellor?
Breathing the sex of night of water never having to guess its
source, my thief?
O thief
I stand at your bedside feed you segments of orange
O counsellor
you have too many vanishing children to attend
There were things I was meant to learn from you they wail out
like a train leaving the city
Desire the locomotive death the tracks under the bridge
the silken roughness drench of freedom the abruptly
floodlit parapet
LOVE CONQUERS ALL spelled out in flickering graffiti
—my counsellor, my thief”
• • •
“In the heart of the capital of Capital
against banked radiations of azalea
I found a faux-marble sarcophagus inscribed
HERE LIES THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE
I had been wondering why for so long so little
had been heard from that quarter.
I found myself there by deepest accident
wandering among white monuments
looking for the Museum of Lost Causes.
A strangely focused many-lumened glare
was swallowing alive the noon.
I saw the reviewing stand the podium draped and swagged
the huge screen all-enhancing and all-heightening
I heard the martial bands the choirs the speeches
amplified in the vacant plaza
swearing to the satellites it had been a natural death.”
Six: edgelit
Living under fire in the raincolored opal of your love
I could have forgotten other women I desired
so much I wanted to love them but
here are some reasons love would not let me:
One had a trick of dropping her lashes along her cheekbone
in an amazing screen so she saw nothing.
Another would stand in summer arms rounded and warm
catching wild apricots that fell
either side of a broken fence but she caught them on one
side only.
One, ambitious, flushed
to the collarbone, a shapely coward.
full at the lips, absent at the core.
One who flirted with danger
had her escape route planned when others had none
and disappeared.
One sleepwalking on the trestle
of privilege dreaming of innocence
tossing her cigarette into the dry gully
—an innocent gesture.
• • •
Medbh’s postcard from Belfast:
one’s poetry seems aimless
covered in the blood and lies
oozing corrupt & artificial
but of course one will continue . . .
This week I’ve dredged my pages
for anything usable
head, heart, perforated
by raw disgust and fear
If I dredge up anything it’s suffused
by what it works in, “like the dyer’s hand”
I name it unsteady, slick, unworthy
and I go on
In my sixty-fifth year I know something about language:
it can eat or be eaten by experience
Medbh, poetry means refusing
the choice to kill or die
but this life of continuing is for the sane mad
and the bravest monsters
• • •
The bright planet that plies her crescent shape
in the western air that through the screendoor gazes
with her curved eye now speaks: The beauty of darkness
is how it lets you see. Through the screendoor
she told me this and half-awake I scrawled
her words on a piece of paper.
She is called Venus but I call her You
You who sees me You who calls me to see
You who has other errands far away in space and time
You in your fiery skin acetylene
scorching the claims of the false mystics
You who like the moon arrives in crescent
changeable changer speaking truth from darkness
• • •
Edgelit: firegreen yucca under fire-ribbed clouds
blue-green agave grown huge in flower
cries of birds streaming over
The night of the eclipse the full
moon
swims clear between flying clouds until
the hour of the occlusion It’s not of aging
anymore and its desire
which is of course unending
it’s of dying young or old
in full desire
Remember me . . . . O, O, O,
O, remember me
these vivid stricken cells
precarious living marrow
this my labyrinthine filmic brain
this my dreaded blood
this my irreplaceable
footprint vanishing from the air
dying in full desire
thirsting for the coldest water
hungering for hottest food
gazing into the wildest light
edgelight from the high desert
where shadows drip from tiniest stones
sunklight of bloody afterglow
torque of the Joshua tree
flinging itself forth in winter
factoring freeze into its liquid consciousness
These are the extremes I stoke
into the updraft of this life
still roaring
into thinnest air
1993–1994
Midnight Salvage
* * *
The Art of Translation
1
To have seen you exactly, once:
red hair over cold cheeks fresh from the freeway
your lingo, your daunting and dauntless
eyes. But then to lift toward home, mile upon mile
back where they’d barely heard your name
—neither as terrorist nor as genius would they detain you—
to wing it back to my country bearing
your war-flecked protocols—
that was a mission, surely: my art’s pouch
crammed with your bristling juices
sweet dark drops of your spirit
that streaked the pouch, the shirt I wore
and the bench on which I leaned.
2
It’s only a branch like any other
green with the flare of life in it
and if I hold this end, you the other
that means it’s broken
broken between us, broken despite us
broken and therefore dying
broken by force, broken by lying
green, with the flare of life in it
3
But say we’re crouching on the ground like children
over a mess of marbles, soda caps, foil, old foreign coins
—the first truly precious objects. Rusty hooks, glass.
Say I saw the earring first but you wanted it.
Then you wanted the words I’d found. I’d give you
the earring, crushed lapis if it were,
I would look long at the beach glass and the sharded self
of the lightbulb. Long I’d look into your hand
at the obsolete copper profile, the cat’s-eye, the lapis.
Like a thief I would deny the words, deny they ever
existed, were spoken, or could be spoken,
like a thief I’d bury them and remember where.
4
The trade names follow trade
the translators stopped at passport control:
Occupation: no such designation—
Journalist, maybe spy?
That the books are for personal use
only—could I swear it?
That not a word of them
is contraband—how could I prove it?
1995
Midnight Salvage
1
Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I
sought the light of a so-called heavenly body
: : a planet or our moon in some event and caught
nothing nothing but a late wind
pushing around some Monterey pines
themselves in trouble and rust-limbed
Nine o’clock : : July : the light
undrained : : that blotted blue
that lets has let will let
thought’s blood ebb between life- and death-time
darkred behind darkblue
bad news pulsing back and forth of “us” and “them”
And all I wanted was to find an old
friend an old figure an old trigonometry
still true to our story in orbits flaming or cold
2
Under the conditions of my hiring
I could profess or declare anything at all
since in that place nothing would change
So many fountains, such guitars at sunset
Did not want any more to sit under such a window’s
deep embrasure, wisteria bulging on spring air
in that borrowed chair
with its collegiate shield at a borrowed desk
under photographs of the spanish steps, Keats’ death mask
and the english cemetery all so under control and so eternal
in burnished frames : : or occupy the office
of the marxist-on-sabbatical
with Gramsci’s fast-fading eyes
thumbtacked on one wall opposite a fading print
of the same cemetery : : had memories
and death masks of my own : : could not any more
peruse young faces already straining for
the production of slender testaments
to swift reading and current thinking : : would not wait
for the stroke of noon to declare all passions obsolete
Could not play by the rules
in that palmy place : : nor stand at lectern professing
anything at all
in their hire
3
Had never expected hope would form itself
completely in my time : : was never so sanguine
as to believe old injuries could transmute easily
through any singular event or idea : : never
so feckless as to ignore the managed contagion
of ignorance the contrived discontinuities
the felling of leaders and future leaders
the pathetic erections of soothsayers
But thought I was conspiring, breathing-along
with history’s systole-diastole
twenty thousand leagues under the sea a mammal heartbeat
sheltering another heartbeat
plunging from the Farallons all the way to Baja
sending up here or there a blowhole signal
and sometimes beached
making for warmer waters
where the new would be delivered : : though I would not see it
4
But neither was expecting in my time
to witness this : : wasn’t deep
lucid or mindful you might say enough
to look through history’s bloodshot eyes
into this commerce this dreadnought wreck cut loose
from all vows, oaths, patents, compacts, promises : :
To see
not O my Captain
fallen cold & dead by the assassin’s hand
but cold alive & cringing : : drinking with the assassins
in suit of noir Hong Kong silk
pushing his daughter in her famine-
waisted flamingo gown
out on the dance floor with the traffickers
in nerve gas saying to them Go for it
and to the girl Get with it
5
When I ate and drank liberation once I walked
arm-in-arm with someone who said she had something to teach me
It was the avenue and the dwellers
free of home : roofless : : women
without pots to scour or beds to make
or combs to run through hair
or hot water for lifting grease or cans
to open or soap to slip in that way
under arms then beneath breasts then downward to thighs
Oil-drums were alight under the freeway
and bottles reached from pallets of cardboard corrugate
and piles of lost and found to be traded back and forth
and figures arranging themselves from the wind
Through all this she walked me : : And said
My name is Liberation and I come from here
Of what are you so afraid?
We’ve hung late in the bars like bats
kissed goodnight at the stoplights
—did you think I wore this city without pain?
did you think I had no family?
6
Past the curve where the old craftsman was run down
there’s a yard called Midnight Salvage
He was walking in the road which was always safe
The young driver did not know that road
its curves or that people walked there
or that you could speed yet hold the curve
watching for those who walked there
such skills he did not have being in life unpracticed
but I have driven that road in madness and driving rain
thirty years in love and pleasure and grief-blind
on ice I have driven it and in the vague haze of summer
between clumps of daisies and sting of fresh cowflop odors
lucky I am I hit nobody old or young
killed nobody left no trace
practiced in life as I am
7
This horrible patience which is part of the work
This patience which waits for language for meaning for the
least sign
This encumbered plodding state doggedly dragging
the IV up and down the corridor
with the plastic sack of bloodstained urine
Only so can you start living again
waking to take the temperature of the soul
when the black irises lean at dawn
from the mouth of the bedside pitcher
This condition in which you swear I will
submit to whatever poetry is
I accept no limits Horrible patience
8
You cannot eat an egg You don’t know where it’s been
The ordinary body of the hen
vouchsafes no safety The countryside refuses to supply
Milk is powdered meat’s in both senses high
Old walls the pride of architects collapsing
find us in crazed niches sleeping like foxes
we wanters we unwanted we
wanted for the crime of being ourselves
Fame slides on its belly like any other animal after food
Ruins are disruptions of system leaking in
weeds and light redrawing
the City of Expectations
You cannot eat an egg Unstupefied not unhappy
we braise wild greens and garlic feed the feral cats
and when the fog’s irregular documents break open
scan its fissures for young stars
in the belt of Orion
1996
Char
1
There is bracken there is the dark mulberry
there is the village where no villager survived
there are the hitlerians there are the foresters
feeding the partisans from frugal larders
there is the moon ablaze in every quarter
there is the moon “of tin and sage” and unseen pilots dropping