in the small steamed-up copy shop
slush tracked in across a wooden floor
then shivering elated
in twilight
at the bus stop with others a public happiness
7
Not simple is it to do
a guide’s work the novices
irrupting hourly with their own bad vigor
knowing not who they are
every phase of moon an excuse
for fibrillating
besides the need in today’s world
to consider
outreach the new thinking
—Or: love will strongly move you
or commerce will
You want a priest? go to the altar
where eternal bargains are struck
want love?
go down inside your destructible heart
8
In Almodóvar’s film
we go for truth to the prostitutes’ field
to find past and future
elegant beaten-up and knifed
sex without gender
preyed-on and preying
transactions zones of play
the circling drivers
in search of their desires
theater of love Ninth Circle
there are so many teachers
here no fire can shrink them
Do you understand? you could get your face
slashed in such a place
Do you think this is a movie?
9
She says: I gave my name and it was taken
I no longer have my name
I gave my word and it was broken
My words are learning
to walk on crutches
through traffic
without stammering
My name is a prisoner
who will not name names
She says: I gave my tongue
to love and this
makes it hard to speak
She says: When my life depended
on one of two
opposite terms
I dared mix beauty with courage
they were my lovers
together they were tortured
10
Sick of my own old poems caught
on rainshower Fifth Avenue
in a bookstore
I reach to a shelf
and there you are Pier Paolo
speaking to Gramsci’s ashes
in the old encircling rhyme
Vivo nel non volere
del tramontato dopoguerra:
amando
il mondo che odio . . .
that vernacular voice
intimately political
and that was how you died
so I clasp my book to my heart
as the shop closes
11
Under the blackened dull-metal corners
of the small espresso pot
a jet flares blue
a smell tinctures the room
—some sniff or prescience of
a life that actually could be
lived a grain of hope
a bite of bitter chocolate in the subway
to pull on our senses
without them we’re prey
to the failed will
its science of despair
12
How I hate it when you ascribe to me
a “woman’s vision”
cozy with coffeepots drawn curtains
or leaning in black leather dress
over your chair
black fingernail tracing your lines
overspent Sibyl drifting in a bottle
How I’ve hated speaking “as a woman”
for mere continuation
when the broken is what I saw
As a woman do I love
and hate? as a woman
do I munch my bitter chocolate underground?
Yes. No. You too
sexed as you are hating
this whole thing you keep on it remaking
13
Where the novice pulls the guide
where the guide suddenly grips the shoulder
of the novice where the moss is golden
the sky sponged with pink at sunset
where the urine of reindeer barely vanished
stings the air like a sharp herb
where the throat of the clear-cut opens
across the surrendered forest
I’m most difficultly
with you I lead
and I follow
our shadows reindeer-huge
slip onto the map
of chance and purpose figures
on the broken crust
exchanging places bites to eat
a glance
2000
Four Short Poems
1
(driving home from Robin Blaser’s reading)
The moon
is not romantic. No. It’s
a fact of life and still
we aren’t inured. You would think, it reflects
the waves not draws them. So
I’d compel you as I
have been compelled by you. On the coast road
between drafts of fog
that face (and yes, it is
expressioned) breaking in and out
doth speak to us
as he did in his courtliness
and operatic mystery.
2
We’re not yet out of the everglades
of the last century
our body parts are still there
though we would have our minds careen and swoop
over the new ocean
with a wild surmise
the bloody strings
tangled and stuck between
become our lyre
3
Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played on a parlor grand piano
in a small California town by a boy from Prague
here for a month to learn American
This is not “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
This is one who startles the neighbors with his owning
of the transmissible heritage one evening
then for the whole month droops over the Internet.
4
From the new crudities, from the old
apartheid spraying ruin on revolution,
back to Du Bois of Great Barrington and Africa
or Kafka of the intransmissible
tradition
the stolen secrets in the cleft
reside and this, beloved poets
is where our hearts, livers and lights still
dwell unbeknownst and vital
for Elizabeth Willis and for Peter Gizzi
2000
Rauschenberg’s Bed
How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes
unsleepable site of anarchy What body holes expressed
their exaltation loathing exhaustion
what horse of night has pawed those sheets
what talk under the blanket raveled
what clitoris lain very still in her own subversion
what traveler homeward reached for familiar bedding
and felt stiff tatters under his fingers
How a bed is horizontal yet this is vertical
inarticulate liquids spent from a spectral pillow
How on a summer night someone drives out on the roads
while another one lies ice-packed in dreams of freezing
Sometimes this bed has eyes, sometimes breasts
sometimes eking forth from its laden springs
pity compassion pity again for all they have worn and borne
Sometimes it howls for penis sometimes vagina sometimes
for the nether hole the everywhere
How the children sleep and wake
the children sleep awake upstairs
How
on a single night the driver of roads comes back
into the sweat-cold bed of the dreamer
leans toward what’s there for warmth
human limbs human crust
2000
Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot
I sat down facing the steep place where
tours clambered upward and others straggled down, the redwoods outstanding all
A family, East Asian, holding a picnic at their van:
“We are always hungry,” the older sister said laughing, “and we always bring our food”
Roses clambered a rough fence in the slanting sun that speared the redwoods
We’d gone into the gift shop while waiting for your tour
found Davy Crockett coonskin caps, deerskin coin purses
scorpions embedded in plastic, MYSTERY SPOT bumper stickers
and postcards of men you wouldn’t be left alone with
a moment if you could help it, illustrating
the Mystery Spot and its tricks with gravity and horizon
Your tour was called and you started upward. I went back
to my redwood bench
“The mystai streamed”
mystery
But if anything up there was occult
nothing at ground level was: tiny beings flashing around
in the sun secure knowing their people were nearby
grandfathers, aunts, elder brothers or sisters, parents and loved friends
You could see how it was when each tour was called and gathered itself
who rode on what shoulders, ran alongside, held hands
the languages all different, English the least of these
I sat listening to voices watching the miraculous migration
of sunshafts through the redwoods the great spears folding up
into letters from the sun deposited through dark green slots
each one saying
I love you but
I must draw away Believe, I will return
Then: happiness! your particular figures
in the descending crowd: Anne, Jacob, Charlie!
Anne with her sandals off
in late day warmth and odor and odd wonder
2000
Ends of the Earth
All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken television set.
Coarse-frosted karst crumbling as foam, eel eyes piercing the rivers.
Dark or light, leaving or landfall, male or female demarcations dissolve
into the O of time and solitude. I found here: no inter/
ruption to a version of earth so abandoned and abandoning
I read it my own acedia lashed by the winds
questing shredmeal toward the Great Plains, that ocean. My fear.
Call it Galisteo but that’s not the name of what happened here.
If indoors in an eyeflash (perhaps) I caught the gazer of spaces
lighting the two wax candles in black iron holders
against the white wall after work and after dark
but never saw the hand
how inhale the faint mist of another’s gazing, pacing, dozing
words muttered aloud in utter silence, gesture unaware
thought that has suffered and borne itself to the ends of the earth
web agitating between my life and another’s?
Other whose bed I have shared but never at once together?
2000
The School
Among the Ruins
* * *
Centaur’s Requiem
Your hooves drawn together underbelly
shoulders in mud your mane
of wisp and soil deporting all the horse of you
your longhaired neck
eyes jaw yes and ears
unforgivably human on such a creature
unforgivably what you are
deposited in the grit-kicked field of a champion
tender neck and nostrils teacher water-lily suction-spot
what you were marvelous we could not stand
Night drops an awaited storm
driving in to wreck your path
Foam on your hide like flowers
where you fell or fall desire
2001
Equinox
Time split like a fruit between dark and light
and a usual fog drags
over this landfall
I’ve walked September end to end
barefoot room to room
carrying in hand a knife well honed for cutting stem or root
or wick eyes open
to abalone shells memorial candle flames
split lemons roses laid
along charring logs Gorgeous things
: : dull acres of developed land as we had named it: Nowhere
wetland burnt garbage looming at its heart
gunmetal thicket midnightblue blood and
tricking masks I thought I knew
history was not a novel
So can I say it was not I listed as Innocence
betrayed you serving (and protesting always)
the motives of my government
thinking we’d scratch out a place
where poetry old subversive shape
grew out of Nowhere here?
where skin could lie on skin
a place “outside the limits”
Can say I was mistaken?
To be so bruised: in the soft organs skeins of consciousness
Over and over have let it be
damage to others crushing of the animate core
that tone-deaf cutloose ego swarming the world
so bruised: heart spleen long inflamed ribbons of the guts
the spine’s vertical necklace swaying
Have let it swarm
through us let it happen
as it must, inmost
but before this: long before this those other eyes
frontally exposed themselves and spoke
2001
Tell Me
1
Tell me, why way toward dawn the body
close to a body familiar as itself
chills—tell me, is this the hour
remembered if outlived
as freezing—no, don’t tell me
Dreams spiral birdwinged overhead
a peculiar hour the silver mirror-frame’s
quick laugh the caught light-lattice on the wall
as a truck drives off before dawn
headlights on
Not wanting
to write this up for the public not wanting
to write it down in secret
just to lie here in this cold story
feeling it trying to feel it through
2
Blink and smoke, flicking with absent nail
at the mica bar
where she refills without asking
Crouch into your raingarb this will be a night
unauthorized shock troops are abroad
this will be a night
the face-ghosts lean
over the banister
declaring the old stories all
froze like beards or frozen margaritas
all the new stories taste of lukewarm
margaritas, lukewarm kisses
3
From whence I draw this: harrowed in defeats of language
in history to my barest marrow
This: one syllable then another
gropes upward
one stroke laid on another
sound from one throat then another
never in the making
making beauty or sense
always mis-taken, draft, roughed-in
only to be struck out
is blurt is roughed-up
hot keeps body
in leaden hour
simmering
2001
The School Among the Ruins
Beirut.
Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.
1
Teaching the first lesson and the last
—great falling light of summer will you last
longer than schooltime?
When children flow
in columns at the doors
BOYS GIRLS and the busy teachers
open or close high windows
with hooked poles drawing darkgreen shades
closets unlocked, locked
questions unasked, asked, when
love of the fresh impeccable
sharp-pencilled yes
order without cruelty
a street on earth neither heaven nor hell
busy with commerce and worship
young teachers walking to school
fresh bread and early-open foodstalls
2
When the offensive rocks the sky when nightglare
misconstrues day and night when lived-in
rooms from the upper city
tumble cratering lower streets
cornices of olden ornament human debris
when fear vacuums out the streets
When the whole town flinches
blood on the undersole thickening to glass
Whoever crosses hunched knees bent a contested zone
knows why she does this suicidal thing
School’s now in session day and night
children sleep
in the classrooms teachers rolled close
3
How the good teacher loved
his school the students
the lunchroom with fresh sandwiches
lemonade and milk
the classroom glass cages
of moss and turtles
teaching responsibility
A morning breaks without bread or fresh-poured milk
parents or lesson plans
diarrhea first question of the day
children shivering it’s September
Second question: where is my mother?
4
One: I don’t know where your mother
is Two: I don’t know
why they are trying to hurt us
Three: or the latitude and longitude
of their hatred Four: I don’t know if we
hate them as much I think there’s more toilet paper
in the supply closet I’m going to break it open
Today this is your lesson:
write as clearly as you can
your name home street and number
down on this page
No you can’t go home yet
but you aren’t lost
this is our school
I’m not sure what we’ll eat
we’ll look for healthy roots and greens
searching for water though the pipes are broken