What we said then, our breath remains
otherwhere: in me in you
2
Sonata for Unaccompanied Minor
Fugitive Variations
discs we played over and over
on the one-armed phonograph
Childish we were in our adoration
of the dead composer
who’d ignored the weather signs
trying to cross the Andes
stupidly I’d say now
and you’d agree seasoned
as we are working stretched
weeks eating food bought
with ordinary grudging wages
keeping up with rent, utilities
a job of living as I said
3
Clocks are set back quick dark
snow filters past my lashes
this is the common ground
white-crusted sidewalks windshield wipers
licking, creaking
to and fro to and fro
If the word gets out if the word
escapes if the word
flies if it dies
it has its way of coming back
The handwritings on the walls
are vast and coded
the music blizzards past
2004
In Plain Sight
My neighbor moving
in a doorframe moment’s
reach of her hand then
withdrawn As from some old
guilty pleasure
Smile etched like a scar
which must be borne
Smile
in a photograph taken against one’s will
Her son up on a ladder stringing
along the gutter
electric icicles in a temperate zone
If the suffering hidden in plain sight
is of her past her future
or the thin-ice present where
we’re balancing here
or how she sees it
I can’t presume
. . . Ice-thin. Cold and precarious
the land I live in and have argued not to leave
Cold on the verge of crease
crack without notice
ice-green disjuncture treasoning us
to flounder cursing each other
Cold and grotesque the sex
the grimaces the grab
A privilege you say
to live here A luxury
Everyone still wants to come here!
You want a christmas card, a greeting
to tide us over
with pictures of the children
then you demand a valentine
an easterlily anything for the grab
a mothersday menu wedding invitation
It’s not as in a museum that I
observe
and mark in every Face I meet
under crazed surfaces
traces of feeling locked in shadow
Not as in a museum of history
do I pace here nor as one who in a show
of bland paintings shrugs and walks on I gaze
through faces not as an X-ray
nor
as paparazzo shooting
the compromised celebrity
nor archaeologist filming
the looted site
nor as the lover tearing out of its frame
the snapshot to be held to a flame
but as if a mirror
forced to reflect a room
the figures
standing the figures crouching
2004
Behind the Motel
A man lies under a car half bare
a child plays bullfight with a torn cloth
hemlocks grieve in wraps of mist
a woman talks on the phone, looks in a mirror
fiddling with the metal pull of a drawer
She has seen her world wiped clean, the cloth
that wiped it disintegrate in mist
or dying breath on the skin of a mirror
She has felt her life close like a drawer
has awoken somewhere else, bare
He feels his skin as if it were mist
as if his face would show in no mirror
He needs some bolts he left in a vanished drawer
crawls out into the hemlocked world with his bare
hands, wipes his wrench on an oil-soaked cloth
stares at the woman talking into a mirror
who has shut the phone into the drawer
while over and over with a torn cloth
at the edge of hemlocks behind the bare
motel a child taunts a horned beast made from mist
2004
Archaic
Cold wit leaves me cold
this time of the world Multifoliate disorders
straiten my gait Minuets don’t become me
Been wanting to get out see the sights
but the exits are slick with people
going somewhere fast
every one with a shared past
and a mot juste And me so out of step
with my late-night staircase inspirations my
utopian slant
Still, I’m alive here
in this village drawn in a tightening noose
of ramps and cloverleafs
but the old directions I drew up
for you
are obsolete
Here’s how
to get to me
I wrote
Don’t misconstrue the distance
take along something for the road
everything might be closed
this isn’t a modern place
You arrived starving at midnight
I gave you warmed-up food
poured tumblers of brandy
put on Les Barricades Mystérieuses
—the only jazz in the house
We talked for hours of barricades
lesser and greater sorrows
ended up laughing in the thicksilver
birdstruck light
2005
Long After Stevens
A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains
more modern than the will
to be modern The mountain’s profile
in undefiled snow disdains
definitions of poetry It was always
indefinite, task and destruction
the laser eye of the poet her blind eye
her moment-stricken eye her unblinking eye
She had to get down from the blocked train
lick snow from bare cupped hands
taste what had soared into that air
—local cinders, steam of the fast machine
clear her palate with a breath distinguish
through tumbling whiteness figures
frozen figures advancing
weapons at the ready
for the new password
She had to feel her tongue
freeze and burn at once
instrument searching, probing
toward a foreign tongue
2005
Rhyme
Walking by the fence but the house
not there
going to the river but the
river looking spare
bones of the river spread out
everywhere
O tell me this is home
Crossing the bridge but
some planks not there
looking at the shore but only
getting back the glare
dare you trust the river when there’s
no water there
O tell me is this home
Getting into town seeing
nobody I know
folks standing around
nowhere to go
staring into the air like
they saw a show
O tell me was this my home
Come to the railroad no train
&nbs
p; on the tracks
switchman in his shanty
with a great big axe
so what happened here so what
are the facts
So tell me where is my home
2005
Hubble Photographs: After Sappho
It should be the most desired sight of all
the person with whom you hope to live and die
walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight
Should be yet I say there is something
more desirable: the ex-stasis of galaxies
so out from us there’s no vocabulary
but mathematics and optics
equations letting sight pierce through time
into liberations, lacerations of light and dust
exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous, gorgeous
beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream
beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death
or life, rage
for order, rage for destruction
—beyond this love which stirs
the air every time she walks into the room
These impersonae, however we call them
won’t invade us as on movie screens
they are so old, so new, we are not to them
we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze
of our tilted gazing
but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them
for Jack Litewka
2005
This Is Not the Room
of polished tables lit with medalled
torsos bent toward microphones
where ears lean hands scribble
“working the dark side”
—glazed eye meeting frozen eye—
This is not the room where tears down carven
cheeks track rivulets in the scars
left by the gouging tool
where wood itself is weeping
where the ancient painted eye speaks to the living eye
This is the room
where truth scrubs around the pedestal of the toilet
flings her rag into the bucket
straightens up spits at the mirror
2005
Unknown Quantity
Spring nights you pillow your head on a sack
of rich compost Charcoal, your hair
sheds sparks through your muttered dreams
Deep is your sleep in the starless dark
and you wake in your live skin to show me
a tulip Not the prizewinning Queen of the Night
furled in her jade wrappings
but the Prince of Darkness, the not-yet, the X
crouched in his pale bulb
held out in the palm of your hand
Shall we bury him wait and see what happens
will there be time for waiting and to see
2005
Tactile Value
from crush and splinter
death in the market
jeering robotic
dry-ice disrupt
to conjure this:
perishing
persistent script
scratched-up smeared
and torn
let hair, nail cuttings
nourish the vine and fig tree
let man, woman
eat, be sheltered
• • •
Marx the physician laid his ear
on the arhythmic heart
felt the belly
diagnosed the pain
did not precisely write
of lips roaming damp skin
hand plunged in hair bed-laughter
mouth clasping mouth
(what we light with this coalspark
living instantly in us
if it continue
2005–2006
Director’s Notes
You don’t want a harsh outcry here
not to violate the beauty yet
dawn unveiling ochre village
but to show coercion
within that beauty, endurance required
Begin with girl
pulling hand over hand on chain
only sound drag and creak
in time it becomes monotonous
then must begin sense of unease produced by monotony
repetitive motion, repetitive sound
resistance, irritation
increasing for the viewers
sense of what are they here for, anyway
dislike of the whole thing how boring to watch
(they aren’t used to duration
this was a test)
Keep that dislike that boredom as a value
also as risk
so when bucket finally tinks at rim
they breathe a sigh, not so much relief
as finally grasping
what all this was for
dissolve as she dips from bucket
2005
Rereading The Dead Lecturer
Overthrow. And make new.
An idea. And we felt it.
A meaning. And we caught it
as the dimensions spread, gathering
in pre-utopian basements figured shadows
scrawled with smoke and music.
Shed the dead hand,
let sound be sense. A world
echoing everywhere, Fanon, Freire, thin pamphlets lining
raincoat pockets, poetry on walls, damp purple mimeos cranking
—the feeling of an idea. An idea of feeling.
That love could be so resolute
And the past? Overthrow of systems, forms
could not overthrow the past
neglect of consequences.
Nor that cold will we misnamed.
There were consequences. A world
repeating everywhere: the obliterations.
What’s surreal, hyperreal, virtual,
what’s poetry what’s verse what’s new. What is
a political art. If we
(who?) ever were conned
into mere definitions.
If we
accept
(book of a soul contending
2005
Letters Censored
Shredded
Returned to Sender
or Judged Unfit to Send
Unless in quotation marks (for which see Notes on the Poems), the letter fragments are written by various imaginary persons.
“We must prevent this mind from functioning . . .”: words of the prosecutor sentencing Antonio Gramsci to prison, June 2, 1928.
—Could you see me laboring over this
right arm in sling, typing left-handed with one finger—
{On a scale of one to ten what is your pain today}
• • •
—shall I measure the split atoms
of pleasure flying outward from the core—
• • •
—To think of her naked every day unfreezes me—
• • •
Banditry, rapes, burning the woods
“a kind of primitive class struggle
with no lasting or effective results”
—The bakers strike, the needleworkers strike, the mechanics strike,
the miners strike
the great machine coughs out the pieces and hurtles on—
• • •
—then there are days all thought comes down to sound:
Rust. August. Mattress. Must.
Chains . . .
—when consciousness + sensation feels like/ = suffering—
• • •
—the people, yes, as yet unformed—deformed—no: disinformed—
• • •
—What’s realistic fantasy?—Call it hope—
• • •
—heard your voice on the news tonight, its minor key
your old-fashioned mindfulness—could have loved you again—
• • •
—Autumn invades my body, anger
wrapped in forgiving sunlight, fear of the cold—
• • •
—Words gather like flies above this carcass of meaning—
• • •
“this void, this vacuum”
• • •
—You think you are helpless because you are empty-handed
of concepts that could become your strength—
• • •
—we’re told it’s almost over, but we see no sign of it yet—
• • •
“caught between a feeling of immense tenderness for you
which seems . . . a weakness
that could only be consoled
by an immediate physical caress . . .”
[We must prevent this mind from functioning for twenty years]
“ . . . and these inadequate, cold and colorless words”
• • •
—What I meant to write, belov’d critic, then struck it out
thinking you might accuse me of
whatever you would:
I wanted a sensual materialism to utter pleasure
Something beyond a cry that could sound like a groan—
• • •
—Vocalizing forbidden syllables—
• • •
—our mythologies choke us, we have enthralled ourselves—
• • •
[Writing like this for the censors
but I won’t hide behind words]
• • •
“my body cells revolve in unison
with the whole universe
The cycle of the seasons, the progression of the solstices
and equinoxes
I feel them as flesh of my flesh
and under the snow the first violets are already trembling
In short, time has seemed to me a thing of flesh
ever since space
ceased to exist for me”
• • •
—History = bodies in time—
or, in your language:
H = T
b
• • •
—to think of the one asleep
in that field beside the chimney
of the burnt-out house
a thing of flesh, exhausted—
• • •
—this flash is all we know . . . . can we shut our eyes to it . . . ?—
• • •
—more and more I dread futility—
• • •
“The struggle, whose normal external expressions