talkingyou smokinglight and shade
on the deck, here in California
our laughter, your questions of translation
your daughter’s flute?
2002–2003
RITUAL ACTS
i
We are asking for books
No, not—but a list of books
to be given to young people
Well, to young poets
to guide them in their work
He gestures impatiently
They won’t read he says
My time is precious
If they want to they’ll find
whatever they need
I’m going for a walk after lunch
After that I lie down
Then and only then do I read the papers
Mornings are for work
the proofs of the second volume
—my trilogy, and he nods
And we too nod recognition
ii
The buses—packed
since the subways are forbidden
and the highways forsaken
so people bring everything on—
what they can’t do without—
Air conditioners, sculpture
Double baskets of babies
Fruit platters, crematory urns
Sacks of laundry, of books
Inflated hearts, bass fiddles
Bridal gowns in plastic bags
Pet iguanas, oxygen tanks
The tablets of Moses
iii
After all—to have loved, wasn’t that the object?
Love is the only thing in life
but then you can love too much
or the wrong way, you lose
yourself or you lose
the person
or you strangle each other
Maybe the object of love is
to have loved
greatly
at one time or another
Like a cinema trailer
watched long ago
iv
You need to turn yourself around
face in another direction
She wrapped herself in a flag
soaked it in gasoline and lit a match
This is for the murdered babies
they say she said
Others heard
for the honor of my country
Others remember
the smell and how she screamed
Others say, This was just theater
v
This will not be a love scene
but an act between two humans
Now please let us see you
tenderly scoop his balls
into your hand
You will hold them
under your face
There will be tears on your face
That will be all
the director said
We will not see his face
He wants to do the scene
but not to show
his face
vi
A goat devouring a flowering plant
A child squeezing through a fence to school
A woman slicing an onion
A bare foot sticking out
A wash line tied to a torn-up tree
A dog’s leg lifted at a standpipe
An old man kneeling to drink there
A hand on the remote
We would like to show but to not be obvious
except to the oblivious
We want to show ordinary life
We are dying to show it
2003
POINT IN TIME
If she’s writing a letter on a sheet of mica
to be left on the shelf of the cave
with the century’s other letters each
stained with its own DNA expressed
in love’s naked dark or the dawn
of a day of stone:
it’s a fact like a town crosshaired on a map
But we are not keeping archives here
where all can be blown away
nor raking the graves in Père-Lachaise
nor is she beholden or dutiful
as her pen pushes its final stroke
into the mineral page
molecule speaking to molecule
for just this moment
This is the point in time when
she must re-condense her purpose
like ink, like rain, like winter light
like foolishness and hatred
like the blood her hand first knew
as a wet patch on the staircase wall
she was feeling her way down in the dark.
2003
IV
Alternating Current
Sometimes I’m back in that city
in its/not my/autumn
crossing a white bridge
over a dun-green river
eating shellfish with young poets
under the wrought-iron roof of the great market
drinking with the dead poet’s friend
to music struck
from odd small instruments
walking arm in arm with the cinematographer
through the whitelight gardens of Villa Grimaldi
earth and air stretched
to splitting still
his question:
have you ever been in a place like this?
•
No bad dreams.Night, the bed, the faint clockface.
No bad dreams.Her arm or leg or hair.
No bad dreams.A wheelchair unit screaming
off the block.No bad dreams.Pouches of blood: red cells,
plasma.Not here.No, none.Not yet.
•
Take one, take two
—camera out of focusdelirium swims
across the lensDon’t get me wrongI’m not
critiquing your direction
but I was theresaw what you didn’t
takethe care
you didn’tfirst of yourself then
of the childDon’t get me wrong I’m on
your side but standing off
where it rainsnot on the set where it’s
not raining yet
take three
•
What’s suffered in laughterin aroused afternoons
in nightly yearlong back-to-back
wandering each others’ nerves and pulses
O changing love that doesn’t change
•
A deluxe blending machine
A chair with truth’s coat of arms
A murderous code of manners
A silver cocktail reflecting a tiny severed hand
A small bird stuffed with print and roasted
A row of Lucite chessmen filled with shaving lotion
A bloodred valentine to power
A watered-silk innocence
A microwaved foie gras
A dry-ice carrier for conscience donations
A used set of satin sheets folded to go
A box at the opera of suffering
A fellowship at the villa, all expenses
A Caterpillar’s tracks gashing the environment
A bad day for students of the environment
A breakdown of the blending machine
A rush to put it in order
A song in the chapel a speech a press release
•
As finally by wind or grass
drive-ins
where romance always was
an after-dark phenomenon
lie crazed and still
great panoramas lost to air
this time this site of power shall pass
and we remain or not but not remain
as now we think we are
•
For J.J.
When we are shaken out
when we are shaken out to the last vestige
when history is done with us
when our late grains glitte
r
salt swept into shadow
indignant and importunate strife-fractured crystals
will it matter if our tenderness (our solidarity)
abides in residue
long as there’s tenderness and solidarity
Could the tempos and attunements of my voice
in a poem or yoursor yours and mine
in telephonic high hilarity
cresting above some stupefied inanity
be more than personal
(and—as you once said—what’s wrong with that?)
2002–2003
V
If some long unborn friend
looks at photos in pity,
we say, sure we were happy,
but it was not in the wind.
MEMORIZE THIS
i
Love for twenty-six years, you can’t stop
A withered petunia’s crispthe bud stickyboth are dark
The flower engulfed in its own purpleSo common, nothing
like it
The old woodstove gone to the dump
Sun plunges through the new skylight
This morning’s clouds piled like autumn in Massachusetts
This afternoon’s far-flung like the Mojave
Night melts one body into another
One drives fast the other maps a route
Thought new it becomes familiar
From thirteen years back maybe
One oils the hinges one edges the knives
One loses an earring the other finds it
One says I’d rather make love
Than go to the Greek Festival
The other, I agree.
ii
Take a strand of your hair
on my fingers let it fall
across the pillowlift to my nostrils
inhale your body entire
Sleeping with you after
weeks aparthow normal
yetafter midnight
to turn and slide my arm
along your thigh
drawn up in sleep
what delicate amaze
2002–2003
THE PAINTER’S HOUSE
Nineteen-thirties Midwestern
—the painter long gone to the sea—
plutonic sycamore by the shed
a mailbox open mouthed
in garden loam a chip
of veiny chinaturned
up there where he might have stood
eyeing the dim lip of grass
beyond, the spring stars sharpening
above
Well since there’s still lightwalk around
stand on the porch
cup hands around eyes peering in
Is this the kitchen where she worked and thought
Is that the loft where their bodies fell
into each otherThe nail where the mirror
hungthe shelf where her college books
eyed her aslant
Those stairs would her bare feet have felt?
In the mute shed no trace
of masterworksoccult
fury of pigmentno
downslash of provocation
no whirled hands at the doorjamb
no lightning streakno stab in the dark
nosexnoface
2003
AFTER APOLLINAIRE & BRASSENS
When the bridge of lovers bends
over the oilblack river
and we see our own endings
through eyes aching and blearing
when the assault begins
and we’re thrown apart still longing
when the Bridge of Arts trembles
under the streaked sky
when words of the poets tumble
into the shuddering stream
where who knew what joy
would leap after what pain
what flows under the Seine
Mississippi Jordan Tigris
Elbe Amazon Indus Nile
and all the tributaries
who knows where song goes
now and from whom
toward what longings
2003
SLASHES
Years passand twowho once
don’t know each other at all
dark strokes gouge a white wallas lives
and customs slashed by dates :October ’17/May ’68
/September ’73
Slash across livesmemory pursues its errands
a lent linen shirt pulled unabashedly over her naked shoulders
cardamom seed bitten in her teeth
watching him chop onions
words in the airsegregation/partition/apartheid
vodka/cigarette smokea time
vertigo on subway stairs
Years passshe pressing the time into a box
not to be openeda box
quelling pleasure and pain
You could describe something like this
in gossipwrite a novelget it wrong
In wolf-tree, see the former field
The river’s muscle :greater than its length
the lake’s light-blistered blue :scorning
circumference
only when
underground aquifers are fathomed in
water table rising or falling
beneath apparently
imperturbable earth
music from a basement session overheard
2002
TRACE ELEMENTS
Back to the shallow pondsharp rotting scatter
leaf-skinned edge therewhere the ring
couldn’t be sunk far out enough
(far enough from shore)
back out the rock-toothed logging road
to the dark brook where it’s droppedmudsucked gold
(sucked under stones)
that’s another marriagelucid and decisive
to say at last:I did, I do, I will
(I did not, I will not)
Snow-whirled streetlamps under a window
(a bedroom and a window)
icy inch of the raised sashblizzard clearing to calm
outlined furniture:figured mirror:bedded bodies:
warm blood:eyes in the dark:
no contradiction:
She was there
and they were there:her onlynowseeing it(only now)
Bow season:then gun season
Apricot leaves bloodsprinkled:soaked: case closed
Memory:echo in time
All’s widescreen nowlurid inchoate century
Vast disappearing actsthe greatest show on earth
but here are small clear refractions
from an unclear season
blood on a leaf
gold trace element in water
light from the eye behind the eye
2003
BRACT
Stories of three islands
you’ve told me, over years
over meals, after quarrels,
light changing the spectrum of your hair
your green eyes, lying on our backs
naked or clothed, driving
through wind, eighteen-wheeler trucks
of produce crates ahead and behind
you saying, I couldn’t live long
far from the ocean
Spring of new and continuing
war, harpsichord crashing
under Verlet’s fingers
I tell you I could not live long
far from your anger
lunar reefed and tidal
bloodred bract from spiked stem
tossing on the ocean
2003
VI
Dislocations:
Seven Scenarios
1
Still learning the word
“home”or what it could mean
say, to relinquish
a backdrop of Japanese maples turning
color of rusted wheelbarrow bottom
where the dahlia tubers were thrown
You must go live in the city now
over the subway though not on
its grating
must endure the foreign music
of the block party
finger in useless anger
the dangling cords of the window blind
2
In a vast dystopic space the small things
multiply
when all the pills run out the pain
grows more general
flies find the many eyes
quarrels thicken then
weaken
tiny mandibles of rumor open and close
blame has a name that will not be spoken
you grasp or share a clot of food
according to your nature
or your strength
love’s ferocity snarls
from under the drenched blanket’s hood
3
City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker
whatever it can
casual salutations first
little rivulets of thought
then wanting stronger stuff
sucks at the marrow of selves
the nurse’s long knowledge of wounds
the rabbi’s scroll of ethics
the young worker’s defiance
only the solipsist seems intact
in her prewar building