and disappeared.
One sleepwalking on the trestle
of privilege dreaming of innocence
tossing her cigarette into the dry gully
—an innocent gesture.
•
Medbh’s postcard from Belfast:
one’s poetry seems aimless
covered in the blood and lies
oozing corrupt & artificial
but of course one will continue …
This week I’ve dredged my pages
for anything usable
head, heart, perforated
by raw disgust and fear
If I dredge up anything it’s suffused
by what it works in, “like the dyer’s hand”
I name it unsteady, slick, unworthy
and I go on
In my sixty-fifth year I know something about language:
it can eat or be eaten by experience
Medbh, poetry means refusing
the choice to kill or die
but this life of continuing is for the sane mad
and the bravest monsters
•
The bright planet that plies her crescent shape
in the western airthat through the screendoor gazes
with her curved eye now speaks:The beauty of darkness
is how it lets you see.Through the screendoor
she told me this and half-awake I scrawled
her words on a piece of paper.
She is called Venus but I call her You
Youwho sees meYouwho calls me to see
Youwho has other errands far away in space and time
Youin your fiery skinacetylene
scorching the claims of the false mystics
Youwho like the moon arrives in crescent
changeable changerspeaking truth from darkness
•
Edgelit:firegreen yucca under fire-ribbed clouds
blue-green agavegrown huge in flower
cries of birds streaming over
The night of the eclipse the full
moon
swims clear between flying clouds until
the hour of the occlusionIt’s not of aging
anymore and its desire
which is of course unending
it’s of dyingyoung or old
in full desire
Remember me . … O, O, O,
O, remember me
these vivid stricken cells
precarious living marrow
this my labyrinthine filmic brain
this my dreaded blood
this my irreplaceable
footprint vanishing from the air
dying in full desire
thirsting for the coldest water
hungering for hottest food
gazing into the wildest light
edgelight from the high desert
where shadows drip from tiniest stones
sunklight of bloody afterglow
torque of the Joshua tree
flinging itself forth in winter
factoring freeze into its liquid consciousness
These are the extremes I stoke
into the updraft of this life
still roaring
into thinnest air
1993–1994
MIDNIGHT SALVAGE
(1995–1998)
I don’t know how to measure happiness. The issue is happiness, there is no other issue, or no other issue one has a right to think about for other people, to think about politically, but I don’t know how to measure happiness.
—GEORGE OPPEN, LETTER TO JUNE OPPEN DEGNAN, AUGUST 5, 1970
THE ART OF TRANSLATION
1
To have seen you exactly, once:
red hair over cold cheeks fresh from the freeway
your lingo, your daunting and dauntless
eyes. But then to lift toward home, mile upon mile
back where they’d barely heard your name
—neither as terrorist nor as genius would they detain you—
to wing it back to my country bearing
your war-flecked protocols—
that was a mission, surely: my art’s pouch
crammed with your bristling juices
sweet dark drops of your spirit
that streaked the pouch, the shirt I wore
and the bench on which I leaned.
2
It’s only a branch like any other
green with the flare of life in it
and if I hold this end, you the other
that means it’s broken
broken between us, broken despite us
broken and therefore dying
broken by force, broken by lying
green, with the flare of life in it
3
But say we’re crouching on the ground like children
over a mess of marbles, soda caps, foil, old foreign coins
—the first truly precious objects. Rusty hooks, glass.
Say I saw the earring first but you wanted it.
Then you wanted the words I’d found. I’d give you
the earring, crushed lapis if it were,
I would look long at the beach glass and the sharded self
of the lightbulb. Long I’d look into your hand
at the obsolete copper profile, the cat’s-eye, the lapis.
Like a thief I would deny the words, deny they ever
existed, were spoken, or could be spoken,
like a thief I’d bury them and remember where.
4
The trade names follow trade
the translators stopped at passport control:
Occupation: no such designation—
Journalist, maybe spy?
That the books are for personal use
only—could I swear it?
That not a word of them
is contraband—how could I prove it?
1995
FOR AN ANNIVERSARY
The wing of the osprey lifted
over the nest on Tomales Bay
into fog and difficult gust
raking treetops from Inverness Ridge on over
The left wing shouldered into protective
gesture the left wing we thought broken
and the young beneath in the windy nest
creaking there in their hunger
and the tides beseeching, besieging
the bay in its ruined languor
1996
MIDNIGHT SALVAGE
1
Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I
sought the light of a so-called heavenly body
: : a planet or our moon in some event and caught
nothing nothing but a late wind
pushing around some Monterey pines
themselves in trouble and rust-limbed
Nine o’clock : : July : the light
undrained : : that blotted blue
that lets has let will let
thought’s blood ebb between life- and death-time
darkred behind darkblue
bad news pulsing back and forth of “us” and “them”
And all I wanted was to find an old
friend an old figure an old trigonometry
still true to our story in orbits flaming or cold
2
Under the conditions of my hiring
I could profess or declare anything at all
since in that place nothing would change
So many fountains, such guitars at sunset
Did not want any more to sit under such a window’s
deep embrasure, wisteria bulging on spring air
in that borrowed chair
with its collegiate shield at a borrowed desk
under photographs of the spanish steps, Keats’ death mask
and the English cemetery all so under control and so eternal
in burnished frames : : or occupy the office
of the marxist-on-sabbatic
al
with Gramsci’s fast-fading eyes
thumbtacked on one wall opposite a fading print
of the same cemetery : : had memories
and death masks of my own : : could not any more
peruse young faces already straining for
the production of slender testaments
to swift reading and current thinking : : would not wait
for the stroke of noon to declare all passions obsolete
Could not play by the rules
anything at all
in their hire
3
Had never expected hope would form itself
completely in my time : : was never so sanguine
as to believe old injuries could transmute easily
through any singular event or idea : : never
so feckless as to ignore the managed contagion
of ignorance the contrived discontinuities
the felling of leaders and future leaders
the pathetic erections of soothsayers
But thought I was conspiring, breathing-along
with history’s systole-diastole
twenty thousand leagues under the sea a mammal heartbeat
sheltering another heartbeat
plunging from the Farallons all the way to Baja
sending up here or there a blowhole signal
and sometimes beached
making for warmer waters
where the new would be delivered : : though I would not see it
4
But neither was expecting in my time
to witness this : : wasn’t deep
lucid or mindful you might say enough
to look through history’s bloodshot eyes
into this commerce this dreadnought wreck cut loose
from all vows, oaths, patents, compacts, promises : :
To see
not O my Captain
fallen cold & dead by the assassin’s hand
but cold alive & cringing : : drinking with the assassins
in suit of noir Hong Kong silk
pushing his daughter in her famine-
waisted flamingo gown
out on the dance floor with the traffickers
in nerve gas saying to them Go for it
and to the girl Get with it
5
When I ate and drank liberation once I walked
arm-in-arm with someone who said she had something to teach me
It was the avenue and the dwellers
free of home : roofless : : women
without pots to scour or beds to make
or combs to run through hair
or hot water for lifting grease or cans
to open or soap to slip in that way
under arms then beneath breasts then downward to thighs
Oil-drums were alight under the freeway
and bottles reached from pallets of cardboard corrugate
and piles of lost and found to be traded back and forth
and figures arranging themselves from the wind
Through all this she walked me : : And said
My name is Liberation and I come from here
Of what are you afraid?
We’ve hung late in the bars like bats
kissed goodnight at the stoplights
—did you think I wore this city without pain?
did you think I had no family?
6
Past the curve where the old craftsman was run down
there’s a yard called Midnight Salvage
He was walking in the road which was always safe
The young driver did not know that road
its curves or that people walked there
or that you could speed yet hold the curve
watching for those who walked there
such skills he did not have being in life unpracticed
but I have driven that road in madness and driving rain
thirty years in love and pleasure and grief-blind
on ice I have driven it and in the vague haze of summer
between clumps of daisies and sting of fresh cowflop odors
lucky I am I hit nobody old or young
killed nobody left no trace
practiced in life as I am
7
This horrible patience which is part of the work
This patience which waits for language for meaning for the
least sign
This encumbered plodding state doggedly dragging
the IV up and down the corridor
with the plastic sack of bloodstained urine
Only so can you start living again
waking to take the temperature of the soul
when the black irises lean at dawn
from the mouth of the bedside pitcher
This condition in which you swear I will
submit to whatever poetry is
8
You cannot eat an eggYou don’t know where it’s been
The ordinary body of the hen
vouchsafes no safetyThe countryside refuses to supply
Milk is powderedmeat’s in both senses high
Old walls the pride of architectscollapsing
find us in crazed nichessleeping like foxes
we wanters we unwanted we
wanted for the crime of being ourselves
Fame slides on its belly like any other animal after food
Ruins are disruptions of system leaking in
weeds and lightredrawing
the City of Expectations
You cannot eat an eggUnstupefied not unhappy
we braise wild greens and garlicfeed the feral cats
and when the fog’s irregular documents break open
scan its fissures for young stars
in the belt of Orion
1996
CHAR
1
There is bracken there is the dark mulberry
there is the village where no villager survived
there are the hitlerians there are the foresters
feeding the partisans from frugal larders
there is the moon ablaze in every quarter
there is the moon “of tin and sage” and unseen pilots dropping
explosive gifts into meadows of fog and crickets
there is the cuckoo and the tiny snake
there is the table set at every meal
for freedom whose chair stays vacant
the young men in their newfound passions
(Love along with them the ones they love)
Obscurity, code, the invisible existence
of a thrush in the reeds, the poet watching
as the blood washes off the revolver in the bucket
Redbreast, your song shakes loose a ruin of memories
A horrible day … Perhaps he knew, at that final instant?
The village had to be spared at any price …
How can you hear me? I speak from so far …
The flowering broom hid us in a blazing yellow mist …
2
This war will prolong itself beyond any platonic armistice. The implanting
of political concepts will go on amid upheavals and under cover of self-
confident hypocrisy. Don’t smile. Thrust aside both skepticism and
resignation and prepare your soul to face an intramural confrontation with
demons as cold-blooded as microbes.
The poet in wartime, the Surréalistes’ younger brother
turned realist (the village had to be spared at any price)
all eyes on him in the woods crammed with maquisards ex-
pecting him to signal to fire and save their comrade
shook his head and watched Bernard’s execution
knowing that the random shooting of a revolver
may be the simplest
surreal act but never
changes the balance of power and that real acts are not simple
The poet, prone to exaggerate, thinks clearly under torture
knowing the end of the war
would mean no end to the microbes frozen in each soul
the young freedom fighters
in love with the Resistance
fed by a thrill for violence
familiar as his own jaw under the razor
3
Insoluble riverrain conscience echo of the future
I keep vigil for you here by the reeds of Elkhorn Slough
and the brown mouth of the Salinas River going green
where the white egret fishes the fragile margins
Hermetic guide in resistance I’ve found you and lost you
several times in my lifeYou were never just
the poet appalled and transfixed by war you were the maker
of terrible delicate decisions and that did not smudge
your sense of limitsYou saw squirrels crashing
from the tops of burning pines when the canister exploded
and worse and worse and you were in charge of every risk
the incendiary motives of others were in your charge
and the need for a courage wrapped in absolute tact
and you decided and lived like that and you
held poetry at your lips a piece of wild thyme ripped
from a burning meadow a mimosa twig
from still unravaged countryYou kept your senses
about you like that and like this I keep vigil for you.
1996
MODOTTI
Your footprints of light on sensitive paper
that typewriter you made famous