1999
1999
Before the acute
point of the severing
I wanted to see into my century’s
hinged and beveled mirror
clear of smoke
eyes of coal and ruby
stunned neck the carrier of bricks and diamonds
brow of moonlit oyster shells
barbed wire lacework disgracing
the famous monument
Behind it spread the old
indigenous maplandscape
before conquerorshorizon ownless
TERZA RIMA
1
Hail-spurting skysun
splashing off persimmons left
in the quit garden
of the quit houseThe realtor’s swaying name
against this cloudheap this
surrendered acre
I wouldso help metell you if I could
how some great teacher
came to my side and said:
Let’s go downinto the underworld
—the earth already crazed
Let me take your hand
—but who would that be?
already trembling on the broken crust
who would I trust?
I become the default derailed memory-raided
limping
teacher I never hadI lead andI follow
2
Call it the earthquake trail:
I lead through live-oak meadows
to the hillsidewhere the plates shuddered
rewind the seismic story
point to the sundered
fence of 1906the unmatching rocks
trace the loop under dark bay branches
blurred with moss
behaving like a guide
Like a novice I lag
behind with the little snake
dead on the beaten path
This will never happen again
3
At the end of the beaten path we’re sold free
tickets for the celebration
of the death of history
The last page of the calendar
will go upa sheet of flame
(no one will be permitted on the bridge)
We’ll assemble by letters
alphabetical
each ticket a letter
to view ourselves as giants
on screen-surround
in the parking lot
figures of men and women firmly pushing
babies in thickly padded prams
through disintegrating malls
into the new era
4
I have lost our waythe fault is mine
oursthe fault belongs
to usI becomethe guide
who should have defaulted
who should have remained the novice
Ias guidefailed
I as novicetrembled
I should have been strongerheld us
together
5
I thought I was
strongermy will the ice-sail
speeding my runners
along frozen rivers
bloodied by sunset
thought I could be forever
will-fulmy sail filled
with perfect ozonemy blades
flashing clean into the ice
6
Was that youth?that clear
sapphire on snow
a distinct hour
in Central Parkthat smell
on sidewalk and windowsill
fresh and unmixt
the blizzard’s peace and drama
over the city
a public privacy
waiting
in the small steamed-up copy shop
slush tracked in across a wooden floor
then shiveringelated
in twilight
at the bus stopwith othersa public happiness
7
Not simple is it to do
a guide’s workthe novices
irrupting hourly with their own bad vigor
knowing not who they are
every phase of moon an excuse
for fibrillating
besides the needin today’s world
to consider
outreachthe new thinking
—Or: love will strongly move you
or commerce will
You want a priest?go to the altar
where eternal bargains are struck
want love?
go down inside your destructible heart
8
In Almodóvar’s film
we go for truth to the prostitutes’ field
to find past and future
elegantbeaten-up and knifed
sex without gender
preyed-on and preying
transactionszones of play
the circling drivers
in search of their desires
theater of loveNinth Circle
there are so many teachers
hereno fire can shrink them
Do you understand?you could get your face
slashed in such a place
Do you think this is a movie?
9
She says: I gave my name and it was taken
I no longer have my name
I gave my word and it was broken
My words are learning
to walk on crutches
through traffic
without stammering
My name is a prisoner
who will not name names
She says:I gave my tongue
to loveand this
makes it hard to speak
She says:When my life depended
on one of two
opposite terms
I dared mix beauty with courage
they were my lovers
together they were tortured
10
Sick of my own old poemscaught
on rainshower Fifth Avenue
in a bookstore
I reach to a shelf
and there you arePier Paolo
speaking to Gramsci’s ashes
in the old encircling rhyme
Vivo nel non volere
del tramontato dopoguerra:
amando
il mondo che odio …
that vernacular voice
intimately political
and that was how you died
so I clasp my book to my heart
as the shop closes
11
Under the blackened dull-metal corners
of the small espresso pot
a jet flares blue
a smell tinctures the room
—some sniff or prescience of
a life that actually could be
liveda grain of hope
a bite of bitter chocolate in the subway
to pull on our senses
without them we’re prey
to the failed will
its science of despair
12
How I hate it when you ascribe to me
a “woman’s vision”
cozy with coffeepotsdrawn curtains
orleaning in black leather dress
over your chair
black fingernail tracing your lines
overspent Sibyl drifting in a bottle
How I’ve hated speaking “as a woman”
for mere continuation
when the broken is what I saw
As a womando I love
and hate?as a woman
do I munch my bitter chocolate underground?
Yes.No.You too
sexed as you arehating
13
Where the novice pulls the guide
across frozen air
where the guide suddenly gripsthe shoulder
of the novicewhere the moss is golden
the sky sponged with pink at suns
et
where the urine of reindeer barely vanished
stings the air like a sharp herb
where the throat of the clear-cut opens
across the surrendered forest
I’m most difficultly
with youI lead
and I follow
our shadowsreindeer-huge
slip onto the map
of chance and purposefigures
on the broken crust
exchanging placesbites to eat
a glance
2000
FOUR SHORT POEMS
1
(driving home from Robin Blaser’s reading)
The moon
is not romantic.No.It’s
a fact of life and still
we aren’t inured. You would think, it reflects
the waves not draws them.So
I’d compel you as I
have been compelled by you.On the coast road
between drafts of fog
that face (and yes, it is
expressioned) breaking in and out
doth speak to us
as he did in his courtliness
and operatic mystery.
2
We’re not yet out of the everglades
of the last century
our body parts are still there
though we would have our minds careen and swoop
over the new ocean
with a wild surmise
the bloody strings
tangled and stuck between
become our lyre
3
Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played on a parlor grand piano
in a small California town by a boy from Prague
here for a month to learn American
This is not “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
This is one who startles the neighbors with his owning
of the transmissible heritage one evening
then for the whole month droops over the Internet.
4
From the new crudities, from the old
apartheid spraying ruin on revolution,
back to Du Bois of Great Barrington and Africa
or Kafka of the intransmissible
tradition
the stolen secrets in the cleft
resideand this, beloved poets
is where our hearts, livers and lights still
dwell unbeknownst and vital
For Elizabeth Willis and for Peter Gizzi
2000
RAUSCHENBERG’S BED
How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes
unsleepable site of anarchyWhat body holes expressed
their exaltation loathing exhaustion
what horse of night has pawed those sheets
what talk under the blanket raveled
what clitoris lain very still in her own subversion
what traveler homeward reached for familiar bedding
and felt stiff tatters under his fingers
How a bed is horizontal yet this is vertical
inarticulate liquids spent from a spectral pillow
How on a summer night someone drives out on the roads
while another one lies ice-packed in dreams of freezing
Sometimes this bed has eyes, sometimes breasts
sometimes eking forth from its laden springs
pity compassion pity again for all they have worn and borne
Sometimes it howls for penis sometimes vagina sometimes
for the nether hole the everywhere
How the children sleep and wake
the childrensleep awake upstairs
How on a single night the driver of roads comes back
into the sweat-cold bed of the dreamer
leans toward what’s there for warmth
human limbshuman crust
2000
WAITING FOR YOU AT THE MYSTERY SPOT
I sat down facing the steep place where
tours clambered upward and others straggled down, the redwoods
outstanding all
A family, East Asian, holding a picnic at their van:
“We are always hungry,” the older sister said laughing, “and we
always bring our food”
the redwoods
We’d gone into the gift shop while waiting for your tour
found Davy Crockett coonskin caps, deerskin coin purses
scorpions embedded in plastic, MYSTERY SPOT bumper stickers
and postcards of men you wouldn’t be left alone with
a moment if you could help it, illustrating
the Mystery Spot and its tricks with gravity and horizon
Your tour was called and you started upward.I went back
to my redwood bench
“The mystai streamed”
toward the
mystery
But if anything up there was occult
nothing at ground level was:tiny beings flashing around
in the sun secure knowing their people were nearby
grandfathers, aunts, elder brothers or sisters, parents and loved friends
You could see how it was when each tour was called and gathered itself
who rode on what shoulders, ran alongside, held hands
the languages all different, English the least of these
I sat listening to voices watching the miraculous migration
of sunshafts through the redwoodsthe great spears folding up
into letters from the sun deposited through dark green slots
each one saying
I love you but
I must draw awayBelieve, I will return
Then: happiness! your particular figures
in the descending crowd:Anne, Jacob, Charlie!
Anne with her sandals off
in late day warmth and odor and odd wonder
2000
ENDS OF THE EARTH
All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken
television set.
Coarse-frosted karst crumbling as foam, eel eyes piercing the rivers.
Dark or light, leaving or landfall, male or female demarcations
dissolve
into the O of time and solitude. I found here: no inter/
ruption to a version of earth so abandoned and abandoning
I read it my own acedia lashed by the winds
questing shredmeal toward the Great Plains, that ocean. My fear.
Call it Galisteo but that’s not the name of what happened here.
If indoors in an eyeflash (perhaps) I caught the gazer of spaces
lighting the two wax candles in black iron holders
against the white wall after work and after dark
but never saw the hand
how inhale the faint mist of another’s gazing, pacing, dozing
words muttered aloud in utter silence, gesture unaware
thought that has suffered and borne itself to the ends of the earth
web agitating between my life and another’s?
Other whose bed I have shared but never at once together?
2000
THE SCHOOL AMONG
THE RUINS
(2000–2004)
For Jean Valentine
I
CENTAUR’S REQUIEM
Your hooves drawn together underbelly
shoulders in mudyour mane
of wisp and soil deporting all the horse of you
your longhaired neck
eyesjaw yesand ears
unforgivably human on such a creature
unforgivably what you are
deposited in the grit-kicked field of a champion
tender neck and nostrilsteacherwater-lily suction-spot
what you weremarvelouswe could not stand
Night dropsan awaited storm
driving in to wreck y
our path
Foam on your hide like flowers
where you fellor falldesire
2001
EQUINOX
Time split like a fruit between dark and light
and a usual fog drags
over this landfall
I’ve walked September end to end
barefoot room to room
carrying in hand a knife well honed for cutting stem or root
or wickeyes open
to abalone shellsmemorial candle flames
split lemonsroses laid
along charring logsGorgeous things
: : dull acres of developed land as we had named it:Nowhere
wetlandburnt garbage looming at its heart
gunmetal thicketmidnightblue blood and
tricking masksI thought I knew
history was not a novel
So can I say it was not Ilisted as Innocence
betrayed youserving (and protesting always)
the motives of my government
thinking we’d scratch out a place
where poetryold subversive shape
grew out of Nowherehere?
where skin could lie on skin
a place “outside the limits”
Can say I was mistaken?