nor are we lovers or any kind of couple
except in the intensive care
of poetry and
death’s master plan architecture-in-progress
draft elevations of a black-and-white mosaic dome
the master left on your doorstep
with a white card in black calligraphy:
Make what you will of this
As if leaving purple roses
If (how many conditionals must we suffer)
I tell you a letter from the master
is lying on my own doorstep
glued there with leaves and rain
and I haven’t bent to it yet
if I tell you I surmise
he writes differently to me:
Do as you will, you have had your life
many have not
signing it in his olden script:
Meister aus Deutschland
In coldest Europe end of that war
frozen domes iron railings frozen stoves lit in the
streets
memory banks of cold
the Nike of Samothrace
on a staircase wings in blazing
backdraft said to me
: : to everyone she met
Displaced, amputated never discount me
Victory
indented in disaster striding
at the head of stairs
for Tory Dent
1998
For This
If I’ve reached for your lines (I have)
like letters from the dead that stir the nerves
dowsed you for a springhead
to water my thirst
dug into my compost skeletons and petals
you surely meant to catch the light:
—at work in my wormeaten wormwood-raftered
stateless underground
have I a plea?
If I’ve touched your finger
with a ravenous tongue
licked from your palm a rift of salt
if I’ve dreamt or thought you
a pack of blood fresh-drawn
hanging darkred from a hook
higher than my heart
(you who understand transfusion)
where else should I appeal?
A pilot light lies low
while the gas jets sleep
(a cat getting toed from stove
into nocturnal ice)
language uncommon and agile as truth
melts down the most intractable silence
A lighthouse keeper’s ethics:
you tend for all or none
for this you might set your furniture on fire
A this we have blundered over
as if the lamp could be shut off at will
rescue denied for some
and still a lighthouse be
1999
Regardless
An idea declared itself between us
clear as a washed wineglass
that we’d love
regardless of manifestos I wrote or signed
my optimism of the will
regardless
your wincing at manifestos
your practice of despair you named
anarchism
: : an idea we could meet
somewhere else a road
straggling unmarked through ice-plant
toward an ocean heartless as eternity
Still hungry for freedom I walked off
from glazed documents becalmed
passions time of splintering and sawdust
pieces lying still I was not myself but
I found a road like that it straggled
The ocean still
looked like eternity
I drew it on a
napkin mailed it to you
On your hands you wear work gloves stiffened
in liquids your own body has expressed
: : what stiffens hardest? tears? blood? urine? sweat? the first
drops from the penis?
Your glove then meets my hand this is our meeting
Which of us has gone furthest?
To meet you like this I’ve had to rise
from love in a room
of green leaves larger than my clitoris or my brain
in a climate where winter never precisely
does or does not engrave its name on the windowpane
while the Pacific lays down its right of way
to the other side of the world
: : to a table where singed manifestos
curl back crying to be reread
but can I even provoke you
joking or
you in long-stiffened gloves still
protector of despair?
for H.C.
1998–1999
Architect
Nothing he had done before
or would try for later
will explain or atone
this facile suggestion of crossbeams
languid elevations traced on water
his stake in white colonnades cramping his talent
showing up in
facsimile mansions overbearing the neighborhood
his leaving the steel rods out of the plinths
(bronze raptors gazing from the boxwood)
You could say he spread himself too thin a plasterer’s term
you could say he was then
skating thin ice his stake in white colonnades against the
thinness of
ice itself a slickened ground
Could say he did not then love
his art enough to love anything more
Could say he wanted the commission so
badly betrayed those who hired him an artist
who in dreams followed
the crowds who followed him
Imagine commandeering those oversize those prized
hardwood columns to be hoisted and hung
by hands expert and steady on powerful machines
his knowledge using theirs as the one kind does the
other (as it did in Egypt)
—while devising the little fountain to run all night
outside the master bedroom
1998–1999
Fox
I needed fox Badly I needed
a vixen for the long time none had come near me
I needed recognition from a
triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes
fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail
I needed history of fox briars of legend it was said she had run through
I was in want of fox
And the truth of briars she had to have run through
I craved to feel on her pelt if my hands could even slide
past or her body slide between them sharp truth distressing surfaces of fur
lacerated skin calling legend to account
a vixen’s courage in vixen terms
For a human animal to call for help
on another animal
is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth
come a long way down
Go back far enough it means tearing and torn endless and sudden
back far enough it blurts
into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child
pushed out of a female the yet-to-be woman
1998
Messages
I love the infinity of these silent spaces
Darkblue shot with deathrays but only a short distance
Keep of course water and batteries, antibiotics
Always look at California for the last time
We weren’t birds, were we, to flutter past each other
But what were we meant to do, standing or lying down
Together on the bare slope where we were driven
The most personal feelings become historical
Keep your hands knotted deep inside your sweater
Whil
e the instruments of force are more credible than beauty
Inside a glass paperweight dust swirls and settles (Manzanar)
Where was the beauty anyway when we shouldered past each other
Where is it now in the hollow lounge
Of the grounded airline where the cameras
For the desouling project are being handed out
Each of us instructed to shoot the others naked
If you want to feel the true time of our universe
Put your hands over mine on the stainless pelvic rudder
No, here (sometimes the most impassive ones will shudder)
The infinity of these spaces comforts me
Simple textures falling open like a sweater
1999
Fire
in the old city incendiaries abound
who hate this place stuck to their foot soles
Michael Burnhard is being held and I
can tell you about him pushed-out and living
across the river low-ground given to flooding
in a shotgun house
his mother working for a hospital
or restaurant dumpsters she said a restaurant
hospital cafeteria who cares
what story
you bring home with the food
I can tell you Michael knows beauty
from the frog-iris in mud
the squelch of ankles
stalking the waterlily
the blues beat flung across water from the old city
Michael Burnhard in Black History Month
not his month only he was born there
not black and almost without birthday one
February 29 Michael Burnhard
on the other side of the river
glancing any night at his mother’s wrists
crosshatched raw
beside the black-opal stream
Michael Burnhard still beside himself
when fire took the old city
lying like a black spider on its back
under the satellites and a few true stars
1999
Grating
I
Not having worn
the pearly choker
of innocence around my throat
willed by a woman
whose leavings I can’t afford
Not having curled up like that girl
in maternal gauze
Not
having in great joy gazing
on another woman’s thick fur
believed I was unsexed for that
Now let me not
you not I but who ought to be
hang like a leaf twisting
endlessly toward the past
nor reach for a woman’s skinned-off mask
to hide behind
You
not I but who ought to be
get me out of this, human
through some
air vent, grating
II
There’s a place where beauty names itself:
“I am beauty,” and becomes irreproachable
to the girl transfixed beside the mother
the artist and her mother
There must be a color for the mother’s
Otherness must be some gate of chalk some slit or stain
through which the daughter sees outside that otherness
Long ago must have been burnt a bunch of rags
still smelling of umbrage
that can be crushed into a color
there must be such a color
if, lying full length
on the studio floor
the artist were to paint herself
in monochrome
from a mirror in the ceiling
an elongated figure suspended across the room
first horizontal
then straight up and naked
free of beauty
ordinary in fact
III
The task is to row a strong-boned, legally blind
hundred-and-one-year-old woman
across the Yangtze River
An emergency or not, depending
Others will have settled her in the boat with pillows but the arms
wielding the oars will be yours
crepitus of the shoulders yours
the conversation still hers
Three days’ labor
with you . . . that was torture
—to pilot through current and countercurrent
requiring silence and concentration
There is a dreadfulness that charm o’erlies
—as might have been said
in an older diction
Try to row deadweight someone without
death skills
Shouldering the river a pilot figures
how
The great rock shoulders overlook
in their immensity all decisions
1999–2000
Noctilucent Clouds
Late night on the underside a spectral glare
abnormal Everything below
must and will betray itself
as a floodlit truckstop out here
on the North American continent stands revealed
and we’re glad because it’s late evening and no town
but this, diesel, regular, soda, coffee, chips, beer and video
no government no laws but LIGHT in the continental dark
and then and then what smallness the soul endures
rolling out on the ramp from such an isle
onto the harborless Usonian plateau
Dear Stranger can I raise a poem
to justice you not here
with your sheet-lightning apprehension
of nocturne
your surveyor’s eye for distance
as if any forest’s fallen tree were for you
a possible hypotenuse
Can I wake as I once woke with no thought of you
into the bad light of a futureless motel
This thing I am calling justice:
I could slide my hands into your leather gloves
but my feet would not fit into your boots
Every art leans on some other: yours
on mine in spasm retching
last shreds of vanity
We swayed together like cripples when the wind
suddenly turned a corner or was it we who turned
Once more I invite you into this
in retrospect it will be clear
1999
If Your Name Is on the List
If your name is on the list of judges
you’re one of them
though you fought their hardening
assumptions went and stood
alone by the window while they
concurred
It wasn’t enough to hold your singular
minority opinion
You had to face the three bridges
down the river
your old ambitions
flamboyant in bloodstained mist
You had to carry off under arm
and write up in perfect loneliness
your soul-splitting dissent
Yes, I know a soul can be partitioned like a country
In all the new inhere old judgments
loyalties crumbling send up sparks and smoke
We want to be part of the future dragging in
what pure futurity can’t use
Suddenly a narrow street a little beach a little century
screams Don’t let me go
Don’t let me die Do you forget
what we were to each other
1999
Terza Rima
1
Hail-spurting sky sun
splashing off persimmons left
in the quit garden
of the quit house The realtor’s swaying name
against this cloudheap this
surrendered acre
&nb
sp; I would so help me tell you if I could
how some great teacher
came to my side and said:
Let’s go down into the underworld
—the earth already crazed
Let me take your hand
—but who would that be?
already trembling on the broken crust
who would I trust?
I become the default derailed memory-raided
limping
teacher I never had I lead and I follow
2
Call it the earthquake trail:
I lead through live-oak meadows
to the hillside where the plates shuddered
rewind the seismic story
point to the sundered
fence of 1906 the unmatching rocks
trace the loop under dark bay branches
blurred with moss
behaving like a guide
Like a novice I lag
behind with the little snake
dead on the beaten path
This will never happen again
3
At the end of the beaten path we’re sold free
tickets for the celebration
of the death of history
The last page of the calendar
will go up a sheet of flame
(no one will be permitted on the bridge)
We’ll assemble by letters
alphabetical
each ticket a letter
to view ourselves as giants
on screen-surround
in the parking lot
figures of men and women firmly pushing
babies in thickly padded prams
through disintegrating malls
into the new era
4
I have lost our way the fault is mine
ours the fault belongs
to us I become the guide
who should have defaulted
who should have remained the novice
I as guide failed
I as novice trembled
I should have been stronger held us
together
5
I thought I was
stronger my will the ice-sail
speeding my runners
along frozen rivers
bloodied by sunset
thought I could be forever
will-ful my sail filled
with perfect ozone my blades
flashing clean into the ice
6
Was that youth? that clear
sapphire on snow
a distinct hour
in Central Park that smell
on sidewalk and windowsill
fresh and unmixt
the blizzard’s peace and drama
over the city
a public privacy
waiting