4
For recalcitrancy of attitude
the surgeon is transferred
to the V.A. hospitalwhere poverty
is the administrator
of necessity and her
orders don’t necessarily
get obeyed
because
the government
is paying
and the
used-to-be
warriors
are patients
5
Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain
remember Paul Nizan?
You thought you were innocent if you said
“I love this woman and I want to live
in accordance with my love”
but you were beginning the revolution
maybe so, maybe not
look at her now
pale lips papery flesh
at your creased bellywrinkled sac
look at the scars
reality’s autographs
along your ribs across her haunches
look at the collarbone’s reverberant line
how in a body can defiance
still embrace its likeness
6
Not to get up and go back to the drafting table
where failure crouches accusing
like the math test you bluffed and flunked
so early on
not to drag into the window’s
cruel and truthful lightyour blunder
not to start over
but to turn your back, saying
all anyway is compromise
impotence and collusion
from here on I will be no part of it
is one way could you afford it
7
Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment
the last domestic traces, cup and towel
awaiting final disposal
—has ironed his shirt for travel
left an envelope for the cleaning woman
on the counter under the iron
internationalist turning toward home
three continents to crossdocuments declarations
searches queues
and home no simple matter
of hearth or harbor
bleeding from internal wounds
he diagnosedphysician
without frontiers
2002
VII
FIVE O’CLOCK, JANUARY 2003
Tonight as cargoes of my young
fellow countrymen and women are being hauled
into positions aimed at death, positions
they who did not will it suddenly
have to assume
I am thinking of Ed Azevedo
half-awake in recovery
if he has his arm whole
and how much pain he must bear
under the drugs
On cliffs above a beach
luxuriant in low tide after storms
littered with driftwood hurled and piled and
humanly arranged in fantastic
installations and beyond
silk-blue and onion-silver-skinned
Jeffers’ “most glorious creature on earth”
we passed, greeting, I saw his arm
bandaged to the elbow
asked and he told me: It was just
a small cut, nothing, on the hand he’d
washed in peroxide thinking
that was it until the pain began
traveling up his arm
and then the antibiotics the splint the
numbing drugs the sick sensation
and this evening at five o’clock the emergency
surgery and last summer
the train from Czechoslovakia to Spain
with his girl, cheap wine, bread and cheese
room with a balcony, ocean like this
nobody asking for pay in advance
kindness of foreigners
in that country, sick sensation now
needing to sit in his brother’s truck again
even the accident on the motorcycle
was nothing like this
I’ll be thinking of you at five
this evening I said
will be clean of this poison
I didn’t say Your war is here
but could you have believed
that from a small thing infection
would crawl through the blood
and the enormous ruffled shine
of an ocean wouldn’t tell you.
2003
WAIT
In paradise every
the desert wind is rising
third thought
in hell there are no thoughts
is of earth
sand screams against your government
issued tenthell’s noise
in your nostrilscrawl
into your ear-shell
wrap yourself in no-thought
waitno place for the little lyric
wedding-ring glint the reason why
on earth
they never told you
2003
DON’T TAKE ME
too seriouslyplease
take the December goodness
of my neighbors’ light-strung eaves
take the struggle helping with the tree
for the children’s sake
don’t take me seriously
on questionnaires about faith and fault
and countryDon’t
take me for a loner don’t take me for a foreigner don’t
take me in the public
library checking definitions
of freedom in the dictionary or
tracing satellites after curfew
or in my Goodwill truck delivering a repaired TV
to the house of the foil’d revolutionary
2002
TO HAVE WRITTEN THE TRUTH
To have spent hours stalking the whine of an insect
have smashed its body in blood on a door
then lain sleepless with rage
to have played in the ship’s orchestra crossing
the triangle route
dissonant arpeggios under cocktail clatter
to have written the truth in a lightning flash
then crushed those words in your hand
balled-up and smoking
when self-absolution
easygoing pal of youth
leans in the doorframe
Kid, you always
took yourself so hard!
2003
SCREEN DOOR
Metallic slam on a moonless night
A short visit and so we departed.
A short year with many long
days
A long phone call with manypauses.
It was gesture’s code
we were used to using, we were
awkward without it.
Over the phone:knocking heard
at a door in another country.
Here it’s tonight:there tomorrow.
A vast world we used to think small.
That we knew everyone who mattered.
Firefly flicker.Metallic slam.A moonless night.Too dark
for gesture.
But it was gesture’s code we were used to.
Might need again.Urgent
hold-off or beckon.
Fierce supplication. One finger pointing: “Thither.”
Palms flung upward: “What now?”
Hand slicing the air or across the throat.
A long wave to the departing.
2003
VIII
Tendril
TENDRIL
1
Why does the outstretched finger of home
probe the dark hotel room like a flashlight beam
on the traveller, half-packed, sitting on the bed
face in hands, wishing h
er bag emptied again at home
Why does the young security guard
pray to keep standing watch forever, never to fly
Why does he wish he were boarding
as the passengers file past him into the plane
What are they carrying in their bundles
what vanities, superstitions, little talismans
What have the authorities intercepted
who will get to keep it
2
Half-asleep in the dimmed cabin
she configures a gecko
aslant the overhead bintendrils of vine
curling up through the cabin floor
buried here in night as in a valley
remote from rescue
Unfound, confounded, vain, superstitious, whatever we were
before
now we are still, outstretched, curled, however we were
Unwatched the gecko, the inching of green
through the cracks in the fused imperious shell
3
Dreaming a womb’s languor valleyed in death
among fellow strangers
she has merely slept through the night
a nose nearby rasps, everyone in fact is breathing
the gecko has dashed into some crevice
of her brain, the tendrils retract
orange juice is passed on trays
declarations filled out in the sudden dawn
4
She can’t go on dreaming of mass death
this was not to have been her métier
she says to the mirror in the toilet
a bad light any way you judge yourself
and she’s judge, prosecutor, witness, perpetrator
of her time
‘s conspiracies of the ignorant
with the ruthlessShe’s the one she’s looking at
5
This confessional reeks of sweet antiseptic
and besides she’s not confessing
her mind balkscraving wild onions
nostril-chill of eucalyptus
that seventh sense of what’s missing
against what’s supplied
She walks at thirty thousand feet into the cabin
sunrise crashing through the windows
Cut the harping she tells herself
You’re human, porous like all the rest
6
She was to have sat in a vaulted
libraryheavy scrolls wheeled to a desk
for sieving, sifting, translating
all morningthen a quick lunchthick coffee
then light descending slowly
on earthen-colored texts
but that’s a dream of dust
frail are thy tentshumanity
facing thy monologues of force
She must have fallen asleep reading
7
She must have fallen asleep reading
The woman who mopped the tiles
is deliquescenta scarlet gel
her ligaments and lungs
her wrought brainher belly’s pulse
disrupt among others mangled there
the chief librarian the beggar
the man with the list of questions
the scrolls never to be translated
and the man who wheeled the scrolls
8
She had wanted to find meaning in the past but the future drove
a vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer
rearranging the past in a blip
coherence smashed into vestige
not for her even the thought
of her children’s children picking up
one shard of tile then another laying
blue against green seeing words
in three scripts flowing through vines and flowers
guessing at what it was
the levantine debris
Not for her but still for someone?
2003
TELEPHONE RINGING
IN THE LABYRINTH
(2004–2006)
For Aijaz Ahmad
and
in memory of
F. O. Matthiessen
1902–1950
Poetry isn’t easy to come by.
You have to write it like you owe a debt to the world.
In that way poetry is how the world comes to be in you.
—Alan Davies
Poetry is not self-expression, the I is a dramatic I.
—Michael S. Harper,
quoting Sterling A. Brown
To which I would add: and so, unless
otherwise indicated, is the You.
—A.R.
I
VOYAGE TO THE DENOUEMENT
A child’s hand smears a wallthe reproof is bitter
wall contrives to lingerchild, punisher, gone in smoke
An artisan lays on hues:lemon, saffron, gold
stare hard before you start covering the whole room
Inside the thigh a sweet moleon the balding
skull an irregular islandwhat comes next
After the burnt forestssilhouettes wade
liquid hibiscus air
Velvet rubs down to scrimiron utensils
discolor unseasoned
Secret codes of skin and hair
go dimleft from the light too long
Because my wish was to have things simpler
than they werememory too became
a smudgesediment from a hand
repeatedly lying on the same surface
Call it a willful optimism
from when old ownerships unpeeledcurled out
into the still namelessnew imperiumCall it
haplessness of a creaturenot yet ready
for her world-citizen’s papers
(Across the schoolroom muralbravely
small ships did under sail traverse great oceans)
Rain rededicates the exhumed
African burial ground
traffic lashes its edges
the city a scar a fragment floating
on tidal dissolution
The opal on my finger
fiercely flashed till the hour it started to crumble
2004
CALIBRATIONS
She tunes her guitar for Landstuhl
where she will sit on beds and sing
ballads from when Romany
roamed Spain
•
A prosthetic hand calibrates perfectly
the stem of a glass
or how to stroke a face
is this how far we have come
to make love easy
Ghost limbs go into spasm in the night
You come back from war with the body you have
•
What you can’t bear
carry endure lift
you’ll have to drag
it’ll come with you the ghostlimb
the shadowblind
echo of your body spectre of your soul
•
Let’s not talk yet of making love
nor of ingenious devices
replacing touch
And this is not theoretical:
A poem with calipers to hold a heart
so it will want to go on beating
2004
SKELETON KEY
In the marina an allegro creaking
boats on the tide
each with its own sway
rise and fall
acceptance and refusal
La Barqueta, My Pelican
barometer in the body
rising and falling
•
A small wound, swallow-shaped, on my wrist
ripped by a thorn
exacerbated by ash and salt
And this is how I came to be
protector of the private
and enemy of the personal
•
Then I slept, and had a dream
No more
No màs
From now on, only
reason’s drugged and dreamless sleep
•
Creeps down the rockfaceshadow cast
from an opposite crag exactly at that moment
you needed light on the trailThese are the shortening days
you forgot aboutbent on your own design
•
Cut me a skeleton key
to that other time, that city
talk starting up, deals and poetry
Tense with elation, exiles
walking old neighborhoods
calm journeys of streetcars
revived boldness of cats
locked eyes of couples
music playing full blast again
Exhuming the deadTheir questions
2004
WALLPAPER
1
A room papered with clippings:
newsprint in bulging patches
none of them mentions our names
none from that history thenO red
kite snarled in a cloud
small plane melted in fog:no matter:
I worked to keep it current
and meaningful:a job of living I thought