To be so bruised:in the soft organsskeins of consciousness
Over and over have let it be
damage to otherscrushing of the animate core
that tone-deaf cutloose ego swarming the world
so bruised:heartspleenlong inflamed ribbons of the guts
the spine’s vertical necklace swaying
Have let it swarm
through uslet it happen
as it must, inmost
but before this:long before thisthose other eyes
frontally exposed themselves and spoke
2001
TELL ME
1
Tell me, why way toward dawn the body
close to a body familiar as itself
chills—tell me, is this the hour
remembered if outlived
as freezing—no, don’t tell me
Dreams spiral birdwinged overhead
a peculiar hourthe silver mirror-frame’s
quick laugh the caught light-lattice on the wall
as a truck drives off before dawn
headlights on
Not wanting
to write this upfor the publicnot wanting
to write it downin secret
just to lie here in this cold story
feeling ittrying to feel it through
2
Blink and smoke, flicking with absent nail
at the mica bar
where she refills without asking
Crouch into your raingarbthis will be a night
unauthorized shock troops are abroad
this will be a night
the face-ghosts lean
over the banister
declaring the old stories all
froze like beards or frozen margaritas
all the new stories taste of lukewarm
margaritas, lukewarm kisses
3
From whence I draw this:harrowed in defeats of language
in history to my barest marrow
This:one syllable then another
gropes upward
one stroke laid on another
sound from one throat then another
never in the making
making beauty or sense
always mis-taken, draft, roughed-in
only to be struck out
is blurt is roughed-up
hotkeeps body
in leaden hour
simmering
2001
FOR JUNE, IN THE YEAR 2001
The world’s quiver and shine
I’d clasp for you forever
jetty vanishing into pearlwhite mist
western sunstruck water-light
Touch food to the lips
let taste never betray you
cinnamon vanilla melting
on apple tart
but what you really craved:
a potency of words
Driving back from Berkeley
880’s brute dystopia
I was at war with words
Later on C-SPAN:Tallahassee:
words straight to the point:
One person, one vote
No justice, no peace
it could lift you by the hair
it could move you like a wind
it could take you by surprise
as sudden Canada geese
took us by the marina
poised necks and alert
attitudes of pause
Almost home I wanted
you to smell the budding acacias
tangled with eucalyptus
on the road to Santa Cruz
2002
THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS
1
Teaching the first lesson and the last
—great falling light of summer will you last
longer than schooltime?
When children flow
in columns at the doors
BOYS GIRLS and the busy teachers
open or close high windows
with hooked poles drawing darkgreen shades
closets unlocked, locked
questions unasked, asked, when
love of the fresh impeccable
sharp-pencilled yes
order without cruelty
a street on earthneither heaven nor hell
busy with commerce and worship
young teachers walking to school
fresh bread and early-open foodstalls
2
When the offensive rocks the sky when nightglare
misconstrues day and night when lived-in
rooms from the upper city
tumble cratering lower streets
cornices of olden ornamenthuman debris
when fear vacuums out the streets
When the whole town flinches
blood on the undersole thickening to glass
Whoever crosseshunchedknees benta contested zone
knows why she does this suicidal thing
School’s now in session day and night
children sleep
in the classroomsteachers rolled close
3
How the good teacher loved
his schoolthe students
the lunchroom with fresh sandwiches
lemonade and milk
the classroomglass cages
of moss and turtles
teaching responsibility
A morning breaks without bread or fresh-poured milk
parents or lesson plans
diarrhea first question of the day
children shiveringit’s September
Second question: where is my mother?
4
One: I don’t know where your mother
isTwo: I don’t know
why they are trying to hurt us
Three: or the latitude and longitude
of their hatredFour: I don’t know if we
hate them as muchI think there’s more toilet paper
in the supply closetI’m going to break it open
Today this is your lesson:
write as clearly as you can
your namehome streetand number
down on this page
No you can’t go home yet
but you aren’t lost
this is our school
I’m not sure what we’ll eat
we’ll look for healthy roots and greens
searching for water though the pipes are broken
5
There’s a young cat sticking
her head through window bars
she’s hungry like us
but can feed on mice
her bronze erupting fur
speaks of a life already wild
her golden eyes
don’t give quarterShe’ll teach usLet’s call her
Sister
when we get milk we’ll give her some
6
I’ve told you, let’s try to sleep in this funny camp
All night pitiless pilotless things go shrieking
above us to somewhere
Don’t let your faces turn to stone
Don’t stop asking me why
Let’s pay attention to our catshe needs us
Maybe tomorrow the bakers can fix their ovens
7
“We sang them to napstold storiesmade
shadow-animals with our hands
wiped human debris off boots and coats
sat learning by heart the names
some were too young to write
2001
THIS EVENING LET’S
not talk
about my countryHow
I’m from an optimistic culture
that speaks louder than my passport
Don’t double-agent-contra my
invincible innocenceI’ve
got my own
suspicionsLet’s
order retsina
cracked olives and bread
I’ve got questions of my own but
let’s give a little
let’s let a little be
If friendship is not a tragedy
if it’s a mercy
we can be merciful
if it’s just escape
we’re neither of us running
why otherwise be here
Too many reasons not
to waste a rainy evening
in a backroom of bouzouki
and kitchen Greek
I’ve got questions of my own but
let’s let it be a little
There’s a beat in my head
song of my country
called Happiness, U.S.A.
Drowns out bouzouki
drowns out world and fusion
with its Get—get—get
into your happiness before
happiness pulls away
hangs a left along the piney shore
weaves a hand at you—“one I adore”—
Don’t be proud, run hard for that
enchantment boat
tear up the shore if you must but
get into your happiness because
before
and otherwise
it’s going to pull away
So tell me later
what I know already
and what I don’t get
yetsave for another day
Tell me this time
what you are going through
travelling the Metropolitan
Express
break out of that style
give me your smile
awhile
2001
VARIATIONS ON LINES FROM A CANADIAN POET
I needed a genre for the times I go phantom. I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence. I needed a genre to pry loose Liberty from an impacted marriage with the soil. I needed a genre to gloss my ancestress’ complicity. . . .
—Lisa Robertson, XEclogue (1993)
I need a gloss for the silence implicit in my legacy
for phantom Liberty standing bridal at my harbor
I need a gauze to slow the hemorrhaging of my history
I need an ancestor complicit in my undercover prying
I need soil that whirls and spirals upward somewhere else
I need dustbowl, sand dune, dustdevils for roots
I need the border-crossing eye of a tornado
I need an ancestor fleeing into Canada
to rampage freedom there or keep on fleeing
to keep on fleeing or invent a genre
to distemper ideology
2002
DELIVERED CLEAN
You’ve got to separate what they signify from what
they aredistinguish
their claimed intentions from the stuff coming
out from their hands and headsThe professor of cultural dynamics
taught us thisThey’re disastersin absentia
reallywhen supposedly working
Look at the record:
lost their minds wrote bad checks and smoked in bed
and if they were men were bad with women and if they were women
picked men like that or would go with women
and talked too much and burnt the toast and abused all
known substancesAnyone who says
they were generous to a fault putting change
in whoever’s cup if they had it on themalways room for the friend
with no place to sleeprefused to make what they made
in the image of the going thing
cooked up stews that could keep you alive with
gizzards and onions and splashes of raw
red winewere
loyal where they loved and wouldn’t name names
should remembersaid the professor of cultural
dynamicswhat
messes they made
The building will be delivered vacant
of street actorsso-called artists in residence
fast-order cooks on minimum wage
who dreamed up a life where space was cheap
muralists doubling as rabble-rousers
cross-dressing pavement poets
delivered clean
of those who harbor feral cats illegals illicit ideas
selling their blood to buy old vinyls
living at night and sleeping by day
with huge green plants in their windows
and huge eyes painted on their doors.
For Jack Foley
2002
THE EYE
A balcony, violet shade on stuccofruit in a plastic bowl on the iron
raggedy legged table, grapes and sliced melon, saucers, a knife, wine
in a couple of thick short tumblers cream cheese once came in: our snack
in the eye of the warThere are places where fruit is implausible, even
rest is implausible, places where wine if any should be poured into wounds
but we’re not yet there or it’s not here yetit’s the war
not us, that moves, pauses and hurtles forward into the neck
and groin of the city, the soft indefensible places but not here yet
Behind the balcony an apartment, papers, pillows, green vines still watered
there are waterless places but not here yet, there’s a bureau topped
with marble
and combs and brushes on it, little tubes for lips and eyebrows, a dish
of coins and keys
there’s a bed a desk a stove a cane rocker a bookcase civilization
cage with a skittery bird, there are birdless places but not
here yet, this bird must creak and flutter in the name of all
uprooted orchards, limbless groves
this bird standing for wings and song that here can’t fly
Our bed quiltedwine pouredfuture uncertainyou’d think
people like us would have it scanned and plannedtickets to somewhere
would be in the drawerwith all our education you’d think we’d
have taken measures
soon as ash started turning up on the edges of everything ash
in the leaves of books ash on the leaves of trees and in the veins of
the passive
innocent life we were leading calling it hope
you’d think that and we thought thisit’s the war not us that’s moving
like shade on a balcony
2002
THERE IS NO ONE STORY AND ONE STORY ONLY
The engineer’s story of hauling coal
to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
The flight attendant’s story murmured
to the flight steward in the dark galley
of her fifth-month loss of nerve
about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen
The story of the forensic medical team’s
small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
of the body in the bag they had to drag
over the ice like the whole life of that body
The story of the man driving
600 miles to be with a friend in another countryseeming
easy when leaving but afterward
writing in a letter difficult truths
Of the friend watching him leave remembering
the story of her body
with his once and the stories of their children
made with other people and how his mind went on
pressing hers like a body
There is the story of the mind’s
temperature neither cold nor celibate
ArdentThe story of
not one thing only.
; 2002
II
USonian Journals 2000
[Usionian: the term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired architecture. Here, of the United States of North America.]
Citizen/Alien/Night/Mare
A country I was born and lived in undergoes rapid and flagrant change. I return here as a stranger. In fact I’ve lived here all along. At a certain point I realized I was no longer connected along any continuous strand to the nature of the change. I can’t find my passport. Nobody asks me to show it.
Day/Job/Mare
… to lunch with K., USonian but recently from a British university. Described as “our Marxist.” Dark and pretty, already she’s got half the department classified: She’s crazy … He’s carrying the chip of race on his shoulder … she’s here because he is, isn’t she? … He’s not likely to make it through … Ask her about current Brit. labor scene; she talks about the influence of the industrial revolution on Victorian prose. My aim: get clear of this, find another day job.
As we left the dark publike restaurant the street—ordinary enough couple of blocks between a parking lot and an office complex—broke into spitting, popping sounds and sudden running. I held back against the wall, she beside me. Something happened then everything. A man’s voice screamed, then whined: a police siren starting up seemed miles away but then right there. I didn’t see any blood. We ran in different directions, she toward, I away from, the police.