the last gash of light abruptly bandaged in darkness
•
1799, Coleridge to Wordsworth:I wish
you would write a poem
addressed to those who, in consequence
of the complete failure of the French Revolution
have thrown up all hopes
of the amelioration of mankind
and are sinking into an almost epicurean
selfishness, disguising the same
under the soft titles of domestic attachment
and contempt for visionary philosophes
A generation later, revolutions scorching Europe:
the visionaries having survived despite
rumors of complete failure
the words have barely begunto match the desire
when the cold fog blows back in
organized and disordering
muffling words and faces
Your lashes, visionary! screening
in sudden rushes this
shocked, abraded crystal
•
I can imagine a sentence that might someday end with the word, love. Like the one written by that asthmatic young man, which begins, At the risk of appearing ridiculous … It would have to contain losses, resiliencies, histories faced; it would have to contain a face—his yours hers mine—by which I could do well, embracing it like water in my hands, because by then we could be sure that “doing well” by one, or some, was immiserating nobody. A true sentence then, for greeting the newborn. (—Someplace else. In our hopes.)
But where ordinary collective affections carry a price (swamped, or accounted worthless) I’m one of those driven seabirds stamping oil-distempered watersmaimed “by natural causes.”
The music’s pirated from somewhere else: Catalan songs reaching us after fifty years. Old nuevos canciones, after twenty years? In them, something about the sweetness of life, the memory of traditions of mercy, struggles for justice. A long throat, casting memory forward.
•
“it’s the layers of history
we have to choose, along
with our own practice: what must be tried again
over and over and
what must not be repeated
and at what depthwhich layer
will we meet others”
the words barely begin
to match the desire
and the mouth crammed with dollars doesn’t testify
… the eye has become a human eye
when its object has become a human, social object
BRECHT BECOMES GERMAN ICON ANEW
FORGIVEN MARXIST IDEAS
… the Arts, you know—they’re Jews, they’re left-wing,
in other words, stay away …
•
So, Bo Kunstelaar, tell us true
how you still do what you do
your old theories forgiven
—the public understands
it was one thing then but now is now
and everyone says your lungs are bad
and your liver very sad
and the force of your imagination
has no present destination
though subversive has a certain charm
and art can really do no harm
but still they say you get up and go
every morning to the studio
Is it still a thrill?
or an act of will?
Mr. Kunstelaar?
•
—After so long, to be asked an opinion? Most of that time, the opinions unwelcome. But opinion anyway was never art. Along the way I was dropped by some; others could say I had dropped them. I tried to make in my studio what I could not make outside it. Even to have a studio, or a separate room to sleep in, was a point in fact. In case you miss the point: I come from hod-carriers, lint-pickers, people who hauled cables through half-dug tunnels. Their bodies created the possibility of my existence. I come from the kind of family where loss means not just grief but utter ruin—adults and children dispersed into prostitution, orphanages, juvenile prisons, emigration—never to meet again. I wanted to show those lives—designated insignificant—as beauty, as terror. They were significant to me and what they had endured terrified me. I knew such a life could have been my own. I also knew they had saved me from it.
—I tried to show all this and as well to make an art as impersonal as it demanded.
—I have no theories. I don’t know what I am being forgiven. I am my art: I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I still get up and go to the studio—it’s there I find the company I need to go on working.
•
“This is for you
this little song
without much style
because your smile
fell like a red leaf
through my tears
in those fogbound years
when without ado
you gave me a bundle of fuel to burn
when my body was utterly cold
This is for you
who would not applaud
when with a kick to the breast or groin
they dragged us into the van
when flushed faces cheered
at our disgrace
or looked awaythis is
for you who stayed
to see us through
delivered our bail and disappeared
This little song
without much style
may it find you
somewherewell.”
•
In the dark windowglass
a blurred face
—is it still mine?
Who out there hoped to change me—
what out there has tried?
What sways and presses against the pane
what can’t I see beyond or through—
charred, crumpled, ever-changing human language
is that still you?
1997–98
FOX
(1998–2000)
For Michelle, again, after twenty-five years
Y in alto cielo, su fondo estrellado
Y en las multitudes, la mujer que amo
VICTORY
Something spreading underground won’t speak to us
under skin won’t declare itself
not all life-forms want dialogue with the
machine-gods in their dramahogging down
the deep bushclear-cutting refugees
from ancient or transient villages into
our opportunistic fervorto search
crazily for a hosta lifeboat
Suddenly instead of art we’re eyeing
organisms traced and stained on cathedral transparencies
cruel bluesembroidered purplessuccinct yellows
a beautiful tumor
•
I guess you’re not aloneI fear you’re alone
There’s, of course, poetry:
awful bridge rising over naked air:I first
took it as just a continuation of the road:
“a masterpiece of engineering
praised, etc.”then on the radio:
“incline too steep for ease of, etc.”
Drove it nonetheless because I had to
this being how—So this is how
I find you:alive and more
•
As if (how many conditionals must we suffer?)
I’m driving to your side
—an intimate collusion—
packed in the trunk my bag of foils for fencing with pain
glasses of varying spectrum for sun or fog or sun-struck
rain or bitterest night my sack of hidden
poetries, old glue shredding from their spines
my time exposure of the Leonids
over Joshua Tree
As if we’re going to win thisO because
•
If you h
ave a sister I am not she
nor your mother nor you my daughter
nor are we lovers or any kind of couple
except in the intensive care
of poetry and
death’s master planarchitecture-in-progress
draft elevations of a black-and-white mosaic dome
the master left on your doorstep
with a white card in black calligraphy:
Make what you will of this
As if leaving purple roses
•
If (how many conditionals must we suffer?)
I tell you a letter from the master
is lying on my own doorstep
glued there with leaves and rain
and I haven’t bent to it yet
if I tell you I surmise
he writes differently to me:
Do as you will, you have had your life
many have not
signing it in his olden script:
Meister aus Deutschland
•
In coldest Europeend of that war
frozen domesiron railings frozenstoves lit in the
streets
memory banks of cold
the Nike of Samothrace
on a staircasewings in blazing
backdraftsaid to me
: : to everyone she met
Displaced, amputatednever discount me
Victory
indented in disasterstriding
at the head of stairs
For Tory Dent
VETERANS DAY
1
No flag heavy or full enough to hide this face
this body swung home from homesewn into its skin
Let youentrusted to close the box
for final drapingtake care
what might be due
to the citizen wounded
by no foreign blast nor shell(is this
body a child’s?if?why?)
eyes hooded in refusal—
over these to lower the nation’s pall, thick flutter
this body shriveled into itself
—a normal process they have said
The face?another story, a flag
hung upside down against glory’s orders
2
Trying to think about
something else—what?—when?
the story broke
the scissor-fingered prestidigitators
snipped the links of concentration
State vs memory
State vs unarmed citizen
wounded by no foreign blast nor shell
forced into the sick-field
brains-out coughing downwind
backing into the alleyhands shielding eyes
under glare-lit choppers coming throughlow
3
In the dream you—is it?—set down
two packages in brown paper
saying, Without such means
there can be no end
to the wrenching of mind
from body, the degradation
no end to everything you hate
and have exposed, lie upon lie
I think: We’ve been dying slowly
now we’ll be blown to bits
I think you’re testing me
“how vitally we desired disaster”
You say, there can be no poetry
without the demolition
of language, no end to everything you hate
lies upon lies
I think: you’re testing me
testing us both
but isn’t this what it means to live—
pushing further the conditions in which we breathe?
4
In the college parlor by the fireplace
ankled and waisted with bells
he, inclined by nature toward tragic themes
chants of the eradication of tribal life
in a blue-eyed trance
shaking his neckbent silvering hair
Afterward, wine and cake at the Provost’s house
and this is surely no dream, how the beneficiary
of atrocities yearns toward innocence
and this is surely a theme, the vengeful rupture
of prized familiar ways
and calculated methods
for those who were thereBut for those elsewhere
it’s something else, not herds hunted down cliffs
maybe a buffalo burger in the
tribal college cafeteria
and computer skills after lunchWho wants to be tragic?
The college coheres out of old quonset huts
demolition-scavenged doors, donated labor
used textbooks, no waste, passion
5
Horned blazing fronds of Sierra ice
grow hidden rivulets, last evening’s raindrop pulses
in the echeveria’s cup next morning, fogdrip darkens the
road
under fire-naked bishop pines
thick sweats form on skins
of pitched-out nectarines, dumpster shrine
of miracles of truths of mold
Rain streaming, stroking
a broken windowpane
When the story broke I thought
I was thinking about water
how it is most of what we are
and became bottled chic
such thoughts are soon interrupted
6
about historywent on stubbornly thinking
though history plunged
with muddy spursscreamed at us for trying
to plunder its nestseize its nestlings
capture tame and sell them or something
after the manner of our kind
Well, was it our secret hope?
—a history you could seize
(as in old folios of “natural history”
each type and order pictured in its place?)
—Back to the shambles, comrades.
where the story is always breaking
downhaving to be repaired
7
Under the small plane’s fast shadow an autumn
afternoon bends sharply
—swathes of golden membrane, occult blood
seeping up through the great groves
where the intestinal the intestate
blood-cords of the stags are strung from tree to tree
I know already where we’re landing
what cargo we’ll take on
boxed for the final draping
coming home from homesewn into its skin
eyes hooded in refusal
—what might be due—
1998–1999
FOR THIS
If I’ve reached for your lines(I have)
like letters from the dead that stir the nerves
dowsed you for a springhead
to water my thirst
dug into my compost skeletons and petals
you surely meant to catch the light:
—at work in my wormeaten wormwood-raftered
stateless underground
have I a plea?
If I’ve touched your finger
with a ravenous tongue
licked from your palm a rift of salt
if I’ve dreamt or thought you
a pack of bloodfresh-drawn
hanging darkred from a hook
higher than my heart
(you who understand transfusion)
where else should I appeal?
A pilot light lies low
while the gas jets sleep
(a cat getting toed from stove
into nocturnal ice)
language uncommon and agile as truth
melts down the most intractable silence
A lighthouse keeper’s ethics:
you tend for all or none
for this you might set your furniture on fire
A this we have blundered over
as if the lamp could be shut off at will
rescue denied for some
and still a lighthouse be
1999
REGARDLESS
An idea declared itself between us
clear as a washed wineglass
that we’d love
regardless of manifestos I wrote or signed
my optimism of the will
regardless
your wincing at manifestos
your practice of despair you named
anarchism
: : an idea we could meet
somewhere elsea road
straggling unmarked through ice-plant
toward an oceanheartless as eternity
Still hungry for freedomI walked off
from glazed documentsbecalmed
passionstime of splintering and sawdust
pieces lying stillI was not myself but
I found a road like thatit straggled
The ocean still
looked like eternity
I drew it on a
napkin mailed it to you
On your hands you wear work gloves stiffened
in liquids your own body has expressed
: : what stiffens hardest?tears? blood? urine? sweat? the first