face in another direction
She wrapped herself in a flag
soaked it in gasoline and lit a match
This is for the murdered babies
they say she said
Others heard
for the honor of my country
Others remember
the smell and how she screamed
Others say, This was just theater
v
This will not be a love scene
but an act between two humans
Now please let us see you
tenderly scoop his balls
into your hand
You will hold them
under your face
There will be tears on your face
That will be all
the director said
We will not see his face
He wants to do the scene
but not to show
his face
vi
A goat devouring a flowering plant
A child squeezing through a fence to school
A woman slicing an onion
A bare foot sticking out
A wash line tied to a torn-up tree
A dog’s leg lifted at a standpipe
An old man kneeling to drink there
A hand on the remote
We would like to show but to not be obvious
except to the oblivious
We want to show ordinary life
We are dying to show it
2003
Alternating Current
Sometimes I’m back in that city
in its/ not my/ autumn
crossing a white bridge
over a dun-green river
eating shellfish with young poets
under the wrought-iron roof of the great market
drinking with the dead poet’s friend
to music struck
from odd small instruments
walking arm in arm with the cinematographer
through the whitelight gardens of Villa Grimaldi
earth and air stretched
to splitting still
his question:
have you ever been in a place like this?
No bad dreams. Night, the bed, the faint clockface.
No bad dreams. Her arm or leg or hair.
No bad dreams. A wheelchair unit screaming
off the block. No bad dreams. Pouches of blood: red cells,
plasma. Not here. No, none. Not yet.
Take one, take two
—camera out of focus delirium swims
across the lens Don’t get me wrong I’m not
critiquing your direction
but I was there saw what you didn’t
take the care
you didn’t first of yourself then
of the child Don’t get me wrong I’m on
your side but standing off
where it rains not on the set where it’s
not raining yet
take three
What’s suffered in laughter in aroused afternoons
in nightly yearlong back-to-back
wandering each others’ nerves and pulses
O changing love that doesn’t change
A deluxe blending machine
A chair with truth’s coat of arms
A murderous code of manners
A silver cocktail reflecting a tiny severed hand
A small bird stuffed with print and roasted
A row of Lucite chessmen filled with shaving lotion
A bloodred valentine to power
A watered-silk innocence
A microwaved foie gras
A dry-ice carrier for conscience donations
A used set of satin sheets folded to go
A box at the opera of suffering
A fellowship at the villa, all expenses
A Caterpillar’s tracks gashing the environment
A bad day for students of the environment
A breakdown of the blending machine
A rush to put it in order
A song in the chapel a speech a press release
As finally by wind or grass
drive-ins
where romance always was
an after-dark phenomenon
lie crazed and still
great panoramas lost to air
this time this site of power shall pass
and we remain or not but not remain
as now we think we are
for J.J.
When we are shaken out
when we are shaken out to the last vestige
when history is done with us
when our late grains glitter
salt swept into shadow
indignant and importunate strife-fractured crystals
abides in residue
long as there’s tenderness and solidarity
Could the tempos and attunements of my voice
in a poem or yours or yours and mine
in telephonic high hilarity
cresting above some stupefied inanity
be more than personal
(and—as you once said—what’s wrong with that?)
2002–2003
Dislocations: Seven Scenarios
1
Still learning the word
“home” or what it could mean
say, to relinquish
a backdrop of Japanese maples turning
color of rusted wheelbarrow bottom
where the dahlia tubers were thrown
You must go live in the city now
over the subway though not on
its grating
must endure the foreign music
of the block party
finger in useless anger
the dangling cords of the window blind
2
In a vast dystopic space the small things
multiply
when all the pills run out the pain
grows more general
flies find the many eyes
quarrels thicken then
weaken
tiny mandibles of rumor open and close
blame has a name that will not be spoken
you grasp or share a clot of food
according to your nature
or your strength
love’s ferocity snarls
from under the drenched blanket’s hood
3
City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker
whatever it can
casual salutations first
little rivulets of thought
then wanting stronger stuff
sucks at the marrow of selves
the nurse’s long knowledge of wounds
the rabbi’s scroll of ethics
the young worker’s defiance
only the solipsist seems intact
in her prewar building
4
For recalcitrancy of attitude
the surgeon is transferred
to the V.A. hospital where poverty
is the administrator
of necessity and her
orders don’t necessarily
get obeyed
because
the government
is paying
and the
used-to-be
warriors
are patients
5
Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain
remember Paul Nizan?
You thought you were innocent if you said
“I love this woman and I want to live
in accordance with my love”
but you were beginning the revolution
maybe so, maybe not
look at her now
pale lips papery flesh
at your creased belly wrinkled sac
look at the scars
reality’s autographs
al
ong your ribs across her haunches
look at the collarbone’s reverberant line
how in a body can defiance
still embrace its likeness
6
Not to get up and go back to the drafting table
where failure crouches accusing
like the math test you bluffed and flunked
so early on
not to drag into the window’s
cruel and truthful light your blunder
not to start over
but to turn your back, saying
all anyway is compromise
impotence and collusion
from here on I will be no part of it
is one way could you afford it
7
Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment
the last domestic traces, cup and towel
awaiting final disposal
—has ironed his shirt for travel
left an envelope for the cleaning woman
on the counter under the iron
internationalist turning toward home
three continents to cross documents declarations
searches queues
and home no simple matter
of hearth or harbor
bleeding from internal wounds
he diagnosed physician
without frontiers
2002
Wait
In paradise every
the desert wind is rising
third thought
in hell there are no thoughts
is of earth
sand screams against your government
issued tent hell’s noise
in your nostrils crawl
into your ear-shell
wrap yourself in no-thought
wait no place for the little lyric
wedding-ring glint the reason why
on earth
they never told you
2003
Screen Door
Metallic slam on a moonless night
A short visit and so we departed.
A short year with many long
days
A long phone call with many pauses.
It was gesture’s code
we were used to using, we were
awkward without it.
Over the phone: knocking heard
at a door in another country.
Here it’s tonight: there tomorrow.
A vast world we used to think small.
That we knew everyone who mattered.
Firefly flicker. Metallic slam. A moonless night. Too dark
for gesture.
But it was gesture’s code we were used to.
Might need again. Urgent
hold-off or beckon.
Fierce supplication. One finger pointing: “Thither.”
Palms flung upward: “What now?”
Hand slicing the air or across the throat.
A long wave to the departing.
2003
Tendril
1
Why does the outstretched finger of home
probe the dark hotel room like a flashlight beam
on the traveller, half-packed, sitting on the bed
face in hands, wishing her bag emptied again at home
Why does the young security guard
pray to keep standing watch forever, never to fly
Why does he wish he were boarding
as the passengers file past him into the plane
What are they carrying in their bundles
what vanities, superstitions, little talismans
What have the authorities intercepted
who will get to keep it
2
Half-asleep in the dimmed cabin
she configures a gecko
aslant the overhead bin tendrils of vine
curling up through the cabin floor
buried here in night as in a valley
remote from rescue
Unfound, confounded, vain, superstitious, whatever we were
before
now we are still, outstretched, curled, however we were
Unwatched the gecko, the inching of green
through the cracks in the fused imperious shell
3
Dreaming a womb’s languor valleyed in death
among fellow strangers
she has merely slept through the night
a nose nearby rasps, everyone in fact is breathing
the gecko has dashed into some crevice
of her brain, the tendrils retract
orange juice is passed on trays
declarations filled out in the sudden dawn
4
She can’t go on dreaming of mass death
this was not to have been her métier
she says to the mirror in the toilet
a bad light any way you judge yourself
and she’s judge, prosecutor, witness, perpetrator
of her time
‘s conspiracies of the ignorant
with the ruthless She’s the one she’s looking at
5
This confessional reeks of sweet antiseptic
and besides she’s not confessing
her mind balks craving wild onions
nostril-chill of eucalyptus
that seventh sense of what’s missing
against what’s supplied
She walks at thirty thousand feet into the cabin
sunrise crashing through the windows
Cut the harping she tells herself
You’re human, porous like all the rest
6
She was to have sat in a vaulted
library heavy scrolls wheeled to a desk
for sieving, sifting, translating
all morning then a quick lunch thick coffee
then light descending slowly
on earthen-colored texts
but that’s a dream of dust
frail are thy tents humanity
facing thy monologues of force
She must have fallen asleep reading
7
She must have fallen asleep reading
The woman who mopped the tiles
is deliquescent a scarlet gel
her ligaments and lungs
her wrought brain her belly’s pulse
disrupt among others mangled there
the chief librarian the beggar
the man with the list of questions
the scrolls never to be translated
and the man who wheeled the scrolls
8
She had wanted to find meaning in the past but the future drove
a vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer
rearranging the past in a blip
coherence smashed into vestige
not for her even the thought
of her children’s children picking up
one shard of tile then another laying
blue against green seeing words
in three scripts flowing through vines and flowers
guessing at what it was
the levantine debris
Not for her but still for someone?
2003
Telephone Ringing
in the Labyrinth
* * *
Voyage to the Denouement
A child’s hand smears a wall the reproof is bitter
wall contrives to linger child, punisher, gone in smoke
An artisan lays on hues: lemon, saffron, gold
stare hard before you start covering the whole room
Inside the thigh a sweet mole on the balding
skull an irregular island what comes next
After the burnt forests silhouettes wade
liquid hibiscus air
Velvet rubs down to scrim iron utensils
discolor unseasoned
Secret codes of skin and hair
go dim left from the light too long
Becaus
e my wish was to have things simpler
than they were memory too became
a smudge sediment from a hand
repeatedly lying on the same surface
Call it a willful optimism
from when old ownerships unpeeled curled out
into the still nameless new imperium Call it
haplessness of a creature not yet ready
for her world-citizen’s papers
(Across the schoolroom mural bravely
small ships did under sail traverse great oceans)
Rain rededicates the exhumed
African burial ground
traffic lashes its edges
the city a scar a fragment floating
on tidal dissolution
The opal on my finger
fiercely flashed till the hour it started to crumble
2004
Calibrations
She tunes her guitar for Landstuhl
where she will sit on beds and sing
ballads from when Romany
roamed Spain
• • •
A prosthetic hand calibrates perfectly
the stem of a glass
or how to stroke a face
is this how far we have come
to make love easy
Ghost limbs go into spasm in the night
You come back from war with the body you have
• • •
What you can’t bear
carry endure lift
you’ll have to drag
it’ll come with you the ghostlimb
the shadow blind
echo of your body spectre of your soul
• • •
Let’s not talk yet of making love
nor of ingenious devices
replacing touch
And this is not theoretical:
A poem with calipers to hold a heart
so it will want to go on beating
2004
Wallpaper
1
A room papered with clippings:
newsprint in bulging patches
none of them mentions our names
none from that history then O red
kite snarled in a cloud
small plane melted in fog: no matter:
I worked to keep it current
and meaningful: a job of living I thought
history as wallpaper
urgently selected clipped and pasted
but the room itself nowhere
gone the address the house
golden-oak banisters zigzagging
upward, stained glass on the landings
streaked porcelain in the bathrooms
loose floorboards quitting in haste we pried
up to secrete the rash imagination
of a time to come