two books, one called Raging Beauty
another Lettera Amorosa, on this table
of drafts arguments letters
Her fine bony fingers go on calmly typing
the years at her turquoise-blue machine
(I say her but who knows death’s gender
as in life there are possible variations)
Anyway he or she sat on your desk in Tucson
in the apartment where you lived then and fed me
champagne, frybread, hominy soup and gave me
her or him Later at the 7-Eleven we bought
a plastic sack of cotton to pack Death safe for travel
vagabond poet who can work anywhere
now here and of course still working
but startled by something or someone
turns her head fingers lifted in midair
for Joy Harjo
2009
Powers of Recuperation
i
A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—
is writing history backward
her body the chair she sits in
to be abandoned repossessed
The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,
second world, third world,
cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,
infectious, maiming, class
war lives on
A done matter she might have thought
ever undone though plucked
from before her birthyear
and that hyphen coming after
She’s old, old, the incendiary
woman
endless beginner
whose warped wraps you shall find in graves
and behind glass plundered
ii
Streets empty now citizen rises shrugging off
her figured shirt pulls on her dark generic garment sheds
identity inklings watch, rings, ear studs
now to pocket her flashlight her tiny magnet
shut down heater finger a sleeping cat
lock inner, outer door insert
key in crevice listen once twice
to the breath of the neighborhood
take temperature of the signs a bird
scuffling a frost settling
. . . you left that meeting around two a.m. I thought
someone should walk with you
Didn’t think then I needed that
years ravel out and now
who’d be protecting whom
I left the key in the old place
in case
iii
Spooky those streets of minds
shuttered against shatter
articulate those walls
pronouncing rage and need
fuck the cops come jesus
blow me again
Citizen walking catwise
close to the walls
heat of her lungs leaving
its trace upon the air
fingers her tiny magnet
which for the purpose of drawing
particles together will have to do
when as they say the chips are down
iv
Citizen at riverbank seven bridges
Ministers-in-exile with their aides
limb to limb dreaming underneath
conspiring by definition
Bridges trajectories arched
in shelter rendezvous
two banks to every river two directions
to every bridge
twenty-eight chances
every built thing has its unmeant purpose
v
Every built thing with its unmeant
meaning unmet purpose
every unbuilt thing
child squatting civil
engineer devising
by kerosene flare in mud
possible tunnels
carves in cornmeal mush irrigation
canals by index finger
all new learning looks at first
like chaos
the tiny magnet throbs
in citizen’s pocket
vi
Bends under the arc walks bent listening for chords and codes
bat-radar-pitched or twanging
off rubber bands and wires tin-can telephony
to scribble testimony by fingernail and echo
her documentary alphabet still evolving
Walks up on the bridge windwhipped roof and trajectory
shuddering under her catpaw tread
one of seven
built things holds her suspended
between desolation
and the massive figure on unrest’s verge
pondering the unbuilt city
cheek on hand and glowing eyes and
skirted knees apart
2007
New and Unpublished Poems
* * *
Itinerary
i.
Burnt by lightning nevertheless
she’ll walk this terra infinita
lashes singed on her third eye
searching definite shadows for an indefinite future
Old shed-boards beaten silvery hang
askew as sheltering
some delicate indefensible existence
Long grasses shiver in a vanished doorway’s draft
a place of origins as yet unclosured and unclaimed
Writing cursive instructions on abounding air
If you arrive with ripe pears, bring a sharpened knife
Bring cyanide with the honeycomb
call before you come
ii.
Let the face of the bay be violet black the tumbled torn
kelp necklaces strewn alongshore
Stealthily over time arrives the chokehold
stifling ocean’s guttural chorales
a tangle
of tattered plastic rags
iii.
In a physical world the great poverty would be
to live insensate shuttered against the fresh
slash of urine on a wall
low-tidal rumor of a river’s yellowed mouth
a tumor-ridden face asleep on a subway train
What would it mean to not possess
a permeable skin
explicit veil to wander in
iv.
A cracked shell crumbles.
Sun moon and salt dissect the faint
last grains
An electrical impulse zings
out ricochets
in meta-galactic orbits
a streak of nervous energy rejoins the crucible
where origins and endings meld
There was this honey-laden question mark
this thread extracted from the open
throat of existence—Lick it clean!
—let it evaporate—
2011
For the Young Anarchists
Whatever we hunger for
we’re not seagulls, to drop things
smash on the rocks hurtling beak-down
Think instead the oysterman’s
gauging eyes, torqued wrist
hand sliding the knife into
and away from the valve hinge—
astuteness honed through
generations to extract
the meat Cut out it can slip
through your fingers Kicked in the sand
forget it Only every so often will
diver rise up from stalking grounds
lifting this creature into daylight and
everyone standing around
shrinks or think they want some We’ve
fumbled at this before trammeled
in fury, in hunger Begin there, yes
—only fury knowing its ground
has staying power—
Then go dead calm remembering
what this operation calls for—
eye, hand, mind Don’t
listen to chatter, ign
ore all yells
of haphazard instruction And
when you taste it don’t
get too elated There’ll be grit
to swallow Or spit to the side
2010
Fragments of an Opera
Scene One: Ales, Sardinia, 19——
Child’s voice (Antonio):
from this beam
the doctors think
I can hang straight
in this har
ness dang
ling
dai
ly
grow how
I
should be
Explicator’s voice:
Village doctor on a southern island
Treating one of seven
Children of a
Father in prison
For smalltime
Pecuniary
Crimes, maybe
Framed
Mother’s
Heroic measures:
Knee presses, releases
Presses again the lever
Of a machine
Fingers push
Cloth
Under the needle
A woman stitches
Years months weeks days pass
In this way
Six children
Run and scream
Antonio must hang
From a beam
Recitativo: Neurosurgeon’s voice:
It would have been a kind of traction. Who knows how it might have been done differently, elsewhere, in another era of medical intervention? Another country? Other family? It was a kind of childhood. Perhaps rickets? spina bifida? scoliosis?
Explicator’s voice:
A kind of mind
That would address
Duress
Outward in larger terms
A mind inhaling exigency
From first breath
Knows poverty
Of mind
As death
Whose body must
Find its own mind
Recitativo: Prosecutor’s voice: from the future:
We must prevent this mind from functioning for twenty years.
Scene Two: Turin, Northern Italy
Industrialist’s voice:
Turin, Turin makes tractors for FIAT
Makes armored cars and planes
We’re making, we’re taking,
We’re raising our goals
We can use immigrants
We can use women
Illiterate peasants from the South
There’s a war out there
A World War and it’s buying
Who’s crying?
Liberté
Ankles shackled
metalled and islanded
holding aloft a mirror, feral
lipstick, eye-liner
She’s
a celebrity a star attraction
A glare effacing
the French Revolution’s
risen juices vintage taste
the Paris Commune’s
fierce inscriptions
lost in translation
2011
Teethsucking Bird
Doves bleat, crows repeat
ancient scandals
mockingbird’s flown to mock
some otherwhere
Listen, that teethsucking bird’s
back up on the telephone wire
talking times and customs
naming the dead to the half-alive
hardship to lyric and back again
to the open road of the toll-taker’s
booth at the last exit
to skateboarding boys of body bags
to the breaker of hearts of the old-age motel
to the would-be weird of the scalded woman’s
escarpment of a face
And this is the now the then the gone
the means and ends the far and near
the news we hear
from the teethsucking bird
2010
Undesigned
i.
It wasn’t as if our lives depended on it—
a torrential cloudburst scattering
mirrors of light :: sunset’s prismatics
in a Tucson parking lot
then the desert’s mute inscrutable
way of going on
but it was like that between us :: those
moments of confrontation caught in dread
of time’s long requirements
. . .
What’s more dreadful than safety
you’re told your life depends on
a helmet through whose eyeholes
your gun is seeing
only what guns can see
—a mask that wove itself without your
having designed it
ii.
On video :: a man exploding
about being sick for no reason
though he knows he knows the reason
:: a video that will travel
around the world
while the man sickens and sickens
. . .
You say we live in freedom
Have you watched the ceiling overhead
descending like Poe’s pendulum
moving down slow and soundless
lower and closer for longer
than we’d thought
The last word in freedom
The first word
2011
Suspended Lines
Scrape a toxic field with a broken hoe
Found legacies turn up in splinters blood-codes, secret sharings
Cracks of light in a sky intent on rain
Reading our words from a time
when to write a line was to know it true
Today your voice :: you can make from this
One-string / blue / speaking / guitar
2011
Tracings
This chair delivered yesterday
built for a large heavy man
left me from his estate
lies sidewise legs upturned
He would sit in the chair spooked by his own thoughts
He would say to himself As the fabric shrinks
the pattern changes
and forget to write it
He would want to say The drug that ekes out
life disenlivens life
I would see words float in the mirror
behind his heaped desk
as thought were smoke
• • •
The friends I can trust are those who will let me have my death
—traced on a rafter salvaged
from a house marked for demolition
Sky’s a mottled marble slab
webs drift off a railing
There were voices here
once, a defiance that still doesn’t falter
Imagine a mind overhearing language
split open, uncodified as
yet or never
Imagine a mind sprung open to music
—not the pitiless worm of a tune that won’t let you forget it
but a scoreless haunting
2011
From Strata
1
Under this blue
immune unfissured autumn
urbs et orbis pivot and axis thrashing
upthrust from strata
deep under : silences
pressed each against
another : sharpened flints
pulverized coral stoneware crumblings
rusted musket muzzles
chips of China-trade
porcelain shackled bone
no death unchained
Here at eye-level the new
news new season new
moment’s momentary flare :
floodlit abstractions
root-riven scrambling
for adulation
Yes, we lived here long and hard
; on surfaces stunned by the wrecking ball
where time’s thought’s creature only
and when all’s fallen even
our remnant renegade selves
—let this too sleep in strata :
the nerve-ends of my footsole
still crave your touch as when
my earlobes glowed between
your quiet teeth
2
Say a pen must write underground underwater so be it
The students gather at the site :
Come over here and look at this
Looks like writing yes that’s how they did it thought it
into marks they thought
would outlast them
it would take patience to do that Anyone
recognize the script?
Could it be music? a manifesto?
3
Rescuers back off hands lifted open as in guilt
for the ancestors no one is rescued from :
curated galleried faces staring
off from behind long-stiffened bandages
but who would meet those lookaway eyes
maybe they’re metal blind reflectors
maybe only who choose to look can see :
thought finding itself in act
violet olive brush strokes speaking of flesh
leaps diagonals pauses : a long conversation
with others living and dead
palpable and strange
4
Viscous stealth, brutal calm : subterfugal, churning
encrypted in tar sending expendable
bodies to underworlds unseen until
catastrophe blows apart
the premises a spectacle hits
the TV channels then in a blink
a dense cloth wipes history clean :
but never in beds never to warm again
with the pulsing of arrival shudder of wordless welcome
the body heat of breadwinners and lovers
5
My hands under your buttocks your fingers numbering my ribs
how a bow scrapes, a string holds the after-pluck
astonishing variations hours, bodies without boundaries
Back into that erotic autumn I search my way defiant
through passages of long neglect
6
Throw the handwritten scraps of paper
into the toilet bowl
to work their way spiraling down
the open gullet of advanced barbarism
So : if you thought no good came from any of this
not the resistance nor its penalties
not our younger moments nor the continuing on
then, I say, trash the evidence