explosive gifts into meadows of fog and crickets
there is the cuckoo and the tiny snake
there is the table set at every meal
for freedom whose chair stays vacant
the young men in their newfound passions
(Love along with them the ones they love)
Obscurity, code, the invisible existence
of a thrush in the reeds, the poet watching
as the blood washes off the revolver in the bucket
Redbreast, your song shakes loose a ruin of memories
A horrible day . . . Perhaps he knew, at that final instant?
The village had to be spared at any price . . .
How can you hear me? I speak from so far . . .
The flowering broom hid us in a blazing yellow mist . . .
2
This war will prolong itself beyond any platonic armistice. The implanting of political concepts will go on amid upheavals and under cover of self-confident hypocrisy. Don’t smile. Thrust aside both skepticism and resignation and prepare your soul to face an intramural confrontation with demons as cold-blooded as microbes.
The poet in wartime, the Surréalistes’ younger brother
turned realist (the village had to be spared at any price)
all eyes on him in the woods crammed with maquisards ex-
pecting him to signal to fire and save their comrade
shook his head and watched Bernard’s execution
knowing that the random shooting of a revolver
may be the simplest surreal act but never
changes the balance of power and that real acts are not simple
The poet, prone to exaggerate, thinks clearly under torture
knowing the end of the war
would mean no end to the microbes frozen in each soul
the young freedom fighters
in love with the Resistance
fed by a thrill for violence
familiar as his own jaw under the razor
3
Insoluble riverrain conscience echo of the future
I keep vigil for you here by the reeds of Elkhorn Slough
and the brown mouth of the Salinas River going green
where the white egret fishes the fragile margins
Hermetic guide in resistance I’ve found you and lost you
several times in my life You were never just
the poet appalled and transfixed by war you were the maker
of terrible delicate decisions and that did not smudge
your sense of limits You saw squirrels crashing
from the tops of burning pines when the canister exploded
and worse and worse and you were in charge of every risk
the incendiary motives of others were in your charge
and the need for a courage wrapped in absolute tact
and you decided and lived like that and you
held poetry at your lips a piece of wild thyme ripped
from a burning meadow a mimosa twig
from still unravaged country You kept your senses
about you like that and like this I keep vigil for you.
1996
Modotti
Your footprints of light on sensitive paper
that typewriter you made famous
my footsteps following you up stair-
wells of scarred oak and shredded newsprint
these windowpanes smeared with stifled breaths
corridors of tile and jaundiced plaster
if this is where I must look for you
then this is where I’ll find you
From a streetlamp’s wet lozenge bent
on a curb plastered with newsprint
the headlines aiming straight at your eyes
to a room’s dark breath-smeared light
these footsteps I’m following you with
down tiles of a red corridor
if this is a way to find you
of course this is how I’ll find you
Your negatives pegged to dry in a darkroom
rigged up over a bathtub’s lozenge
your footprints of light on sensitive paper
stacked curling under blackened panes
the always upstairs of your hideout
the stern exposure of your brows
—these footsteps I’m following you with
aren’t to arrest you
The bristling hairs of your eyeflash
that typewriter you made famous
your enormous will to arrest and frame
what was, what is, still liquid, flowing
your exposure of manifestos, your
lightbulb in a scarred ceiling
well if this is how I find you
Modotti so I find you
In the red wash of your darkroom
from your neighborhood of volcanoes
to the geranium nailed in a can
on the wall of your upstairs hideout
in the rush of breath a window
of revolution allowed you
on this jaundiced stair in this huge lashed eye
these
footsteps I’m following you with
1996
Shattered Head
A life hauls itself uphill
through hoar-mist steaming
the sun’s tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
When? When? cry the soothseekers
but time is a bloodshot eye
foreclosure
a bloodshot mind
finding itself unspeakable
What is the last thought?
Now I will let you know?
or, Now I know?
(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue
mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)
Shattered head on the breast
of a wooded hill
laid down there endlessly so
tendrils soaked into matted compost
become a root
torqued over the faint springhead
groin whence illegible
matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt
volumes of sporic changes
hair long blown into far follicles
blasted into a chosen place
Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)
revenge on the mouth
packed with its inarticulate confessions
revenge on the eyes
green-gray and restless
revenge on the big and searching lips
the tender tongue
revenge on the sensual, on the nose the
carrier of history
revenge on the life devoured
in another incineration
You can walk by such a place, the earth is made of them
where the stretched tissue of a field or woods is humid
with belovéd matter
the soothseekers have withdrawn
you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus
when that place utters its worn sigh
let us have peace
And the shattered head answers back
I believed I was loved, I believed I loved,
who did this to us?
1996–1997
Letters to a Young Poet
1
Your photograph won’t do you justice
those wetted anthill mounds won’t let you focus
that lens on the wetlands
five swans chanting overhead
distract your thirst for closure
and quick escape
2
Let me turn you around in your frozen nightgown and say
one word to you: Ineluctable
—meaning, you won’t get quit
of this: the worst of the new news
history running back and forth
panic in the labyrinth
—I will not touc
h you further:
your choice to freeze or not
to say, you and I are caught in
a laboratory without a science
3
Would it gladden you to think
poetry could purely
take its place beneath lightning sheets
or fogdrip live its own life
screamed at, howled down
by a torn bowel of dripping names
—composers visit Terezin, film-makers Sarajevo
Cabrini-Green or Edenwald Houses
ineluctable
if a woman as vivid as any artist
can fling any day herself from the 14th floor
would it relieve you to decide Poetry
doesn’t make this happen?
4
From the edges of your own distraction turn
the cloth-weave up, its undersea-fold venous
with sorrow’s wash and suck, pull and release,
annihilating rush
to and fro, fabric of caves, the onset of your fear
kicking away their lush and slippery flora nurseried
in liquid glass
trying to stand fast in rootsuck, in distraction,
trying to wade this
undertow of utter repetition
Look: with all my fear I’m here with you, trying what it
means, to stand fast; what it means to move
5
Beneaped. Rowboat, pirogue, caught between the lowest
and highest tides of spring. Beneaped. Befallen,
becalmed, benighted, yes, begotten.
—Be—infernal prefix of the actionless.
—Be—as in Sit, Stand, Lie, Obey.
The dog’s awful desire that takes his brain
and lays it at the boot-heel.
You can be like this forever—Be
as without movement.
6
But this is how
I come, anyway, pushing up from below
my head wrapped in a chequered scarf a lanterned helmet on this
head
pushing up out of the ore
this sheeted face this lanterned head facing the seep of death
my lips having swum through silt
clearly pronouncing
Hello and farewell
Who, anyway, wants to know
this pale mouth, this stick
of crimson lipsalve Who my
dragqueen’s vocal chords my bitter beat
my overshoulder backglance flung
at the great strophes and antistrophes
my chant my ululation my sacred parings
nails, hair my dysentery my hilarious throat
my penal colony’s birdstarved ledge my face downtown
in films by Sappho and Artaud?
Everyone. For a moment.
7
It’s not the déjà vu that kills
it’s the foreseeing
the head that speaks from the crater
I wanted to go somewhere
the brain had not yet gone
I wanted not to be
there so alone.
1997
Camino Real
Hot stink of skunk
crushed at the vineyards’ edge
hawk-skied, carrion-clean
clouds ranging themselves
over enormous autumn
that scribble edged and skunky
as the great road winds on
toward my son’s house seven hours south
Walls of the underpass
smudged and blistered eyes gazing from armpits
THE WANTER WANTED ARMED IN LOVE AND
DANGEROUS
WANTED FOR WANTING
To become the scholar of : :
: : to list compare contrast events to footnote lesser evils
calmly to note “bedsprings”
describe how they were wired
to which parts of the body
to make clear-eyed assessments of the burnt-out eye: : investigate
the mouth-bit and the mouth
the half-swole slippery flesh the enforced throat
the whip they played you with the backroad games the beatings by
the river
O to list collate commensurate to quantify:
I was the one, I suffered, I was there
never
to trust to memory only
to go back notebook in hand
dressed as no one there was dressed
over and over to quantify
on a gridded notebook page
The difficulty of proving
such things were done for no reason
that every night
“in those years”
people invented reasons for torture
Asleep now, head in hands
hands over ears O you
Who do this work
every one of you
every night
Driving south: santabarbara’s barbarous
landscaped mind: lest it be forgotten
in the long sweep downcoast
let it not be exonerated
but O the light
on the raw Pacific silks
Charles Olson: “Can you afford not to make
the magical study
which happiness is?”
I take him to mean
that happiness is in itself a magical study
a glimpse of the unhandicapped life
as it might be for anyone, somewhere
a kind of alchemy, a study of transformation
else it withers, wilts
—that happiness is not to be
mistrusted or wasted
though it ferment in grief
George Oppen to June Degnan: “I don’t know how
to measure happiness”
—Why measure? in itself it’s the measure—
at the end of a day
of great happiness if there be such a day
drawn by love’s unprovable pull
I write this, sign it
Adrienne
1997
Seven Skins
1
Walk along back of the library
in 1952
someone’s there to catch your eye
Vic Greenberg in his wheelchair
paraplegic GI—
Bill of Rights Jew
graduate student going in
by the only elevator route
up into the great stacks where
all knowledge should and is
and shall be stored like sacred grain
while the loneliest of lonely
American decades goes aground
on the postwar rock
and some unlikely
shipmates found ourselves
stuck amid so many smiles
Dating Vic Greenberg you date
crutches and a chair
a cool wit an outrageous form:
“—just back from a paraplegics’ conference,
guess what the biggest meeting was about—
Sex with a Paraplegic!—for the wives—”
In and out of cabs his chair
opening and closing round his
electrical monologue the air
furiously calm around him
as he transfers to the crutches
But first you go for cocktails
in his room at Harvard
he mixes the usual martinis, plays Billie Holiday
talks about Melville’s vision of evil
and the question of the postwar moment:
Is there an American civilization?
In the bathroom huge
grips and suction-cupped
rubber mats long-handled sponges
the reaching tools a veteran’s benefits
in plainest sight
And this is only memory, no more
so this is how you remember
Vic Greenberg takes you to
the best restaurant
which happens to have no stairs
for talk about movies, professors, food
Vic orders wine and tastes it
you have lobster, he Beef Wellington
the famous dessert is baked alaska
ice cream singed in a flowerpot
from the oven, a live tulip inserted there
Chair to crutches, crutches to cab
chair in the cab and back to Cambridge
memory shooting its handheld frames
Shall I drop you, he says, or shall
we go back to the room for a drink?
It’s the usual question
a man has to ask it
a woman has to answer
you don’t even think
2
What a girl I was then what a body
ready for breaking open like a lobster
what a little provincial village
what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells
what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore raincloud
what a gone-and-come tidepool
what a look into eternity I took and did not return it
what a book I made myself
what a quicksilver study
bright little bloodstain
liquid pouches escaping
What a girl pelican-skimming over fear what a mica lump
splitting
into tiny sharp-edged mirrors through which
the sun’s eclipse could seem normal
what a sac of eggs what a drifting flask
eager to sink to be found
to disembody what a mass of swimmy legs
3
Vic into what shoulder could I have pushed your face
laying hands first on your head
onto whose thighs pulled down your head
which fear of mine would have wound itself
around which of yours could we have taken it nakedness
without sperm in what insurrectionary
convulsion would we have done it mouth to mouth
mouth-tongue to vulva-tongue to anus earlobe to nipple
what seven skins each have to molt what seven shifts
what tears boil up through sweat to bathe
what humiliatoriums what layers of imposture
What heroic tremor
released into pure moisture
might have soaked our shape two-headed avid
into your heretic
linen-service
sheets?
1997
Rusted Legacy
Imagine a city where nothing’s
forgiven your deed adheres
to you like a scar, a tattoo but almost everything’s
forgotten deer flattened leaping a highway for food
the precise reason for the shaving of the confused girl’s head