Should blue air in its purity let you disdain
the stink of artificial pine
the gaunt architecture
of cheap political solutions
if there are philosophies to argue
the moment when you would
or wouldn’t spring to shield
a friend’s body or jump
into scummed waters after
a stranger caught submerging
or walk off to your parked
car your sandwich your possible orange
if theories rage or dance
about this if in the eventany
can be sure who did
or did not act on principle or impulse
and what’s most virtuous
can we not be nodding smiling
taking down notes like this
and of all places
in a place like this
I’ll work with you on this bad matterI can
but won’t give you the time of day
if you think it’s hypothetical
2006
VIA INSOMNIA
Called up in sleep: yourvoice:
I don’t know where I am …
A hand, mine, stroking a white fur surface
you as a white fur hat unstitched, outspread
white as your cold brancusian marble head
what animal’s pelt resembles you?
but these are my navigations:you don’t know where you are
Is this how it is to be newly dead?unbelieving
the personal soul, electricity unsheathing
from the cortex, light-waves fleeing
into the black universe
to lie awake half-sleeping, wondering
Where, when will I sleep
For Tory Dent
2006
A BURNING KANGAROO
leaping forwardescaping
out of rock reamed
on sky
in violet shadow
leapingscorched to the skin
toward water
(none for miles)
Who did
(and can you see
this thing
not as a dream
a kangaroo
and not in profile either
Frontal
in flameno halo
no auraburning meat in movement
Can
you see with me
(unverified
otherwise
(whoeverdid this thing
2006
EVER, AGAIN
Mockingbird shouts Escape! Escape!
and would I couldI’d
fly, drive back to that house
up the long hill between queen
anne’s lace and common daisyface
shoulder open stuck door
run springwater from kitchen
tapdrench tongue
palate and throat
throw window sashes up screens down
breathe inmown grass
pine-needle heat
manure, lilacunpack
brown sacks from the store:
ground meat, buns, tomatoes, one
big onion, milk and orange juice
iceberg lettuce, ranch dressing
potato chips, dill pickles
the Caledonian-Record
Portuguese rosé in round-hipped flask
open the box of newspapers by the stove
reread:(Vietnam Vietnam)
Set again on the table
the Olivetti, the stack
of rough yellow typing paper
mark the crashed instant
of one summer’s mosquito
on a bedroom door
voices of boys outside
proclaiming twilight and hunger
get food on the table
sitting with those wild heads
over hamburgers, fireflies, music
staying up late with the typewriter
falling asleep with the dead
2006
V
DRAFT #2006
i
Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions.
(What were you there for? Why did you walk out? What
would have made you stay? Why wouldn’t you listen?)
—Couldn’t you show us what you meant, can’t we get it right
this time? Can’t you put it another way?—
(You were looking for openings where they’d been walled up—)
—But you were supposed to be our teacher—
(One-armed, I was trying to get you, one by one, out of that
cellar.It wasn’t enough)
ii
Dreamfaces blurring horrorlands: border of poetry.
Ebb tide sucks out clinging rockpool creatures, no swimming
back into sleep.
Clockface says too early, body prideful and humble shambles
into another day, reclaiming itself piecemeal in private ritual
acts.
Reassembling the anagram scattered nightly, rebuilding daily
the sand city.
iii
What’s concrete for me: from there I cast out further.
But need to be there. On the stone causeway. Baffled and
obstinate.
Eyes probing the dusk. Foot-slippage possible.
iv
Sleeping that time at the philosopher’s house.Not lovers,
friends from the past.
Music the vertex of our triangle.Bach our hypotenuse
strung between philosophy and poetry.
Sun loosening fog on the hillside, cantata spun on the
turntable:Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.
Feeling again, in our mid-forties, the old contrapuntal ten-
sion between our natures.The future as if still open, like
when we were classmates.
He’d met Heidegger in the Black Forest, corresponded
with Foucault. We talked about Wittgenstein.
I was on my way to meet the one who said Philosophers have
interpreted the world:the point is to change it.
v
On a street known for beautiful shops she buys a piece of
antique Japanese silk, a white porcelain egg.
Had abandoned her child, later went after him, found the
child had run away.
Hurt and angry, joined a group to chant through the pain.
They said, you must love yourself, give yourself gifts.
Whatever eases you someone says, lets you forgive yourself,
let go.
America, someone says.
Orphaning, orphaned here, don’t even know it.
vi
Silent limousines meet jets descending over the Rockies.
Steam rooms, pure thick towels, vases of tuberose and jas-
mine, old vintages await the après-skiers.
Rooms of mahogany and leather, conversations open in
international code.Thighs and buttocks to open later by
arrangement.
Out of sight, out of mind, she solitary wrestles a huge
duvet, resheathes heavy tasseled bolsters.Bed after bed.
Nights, in her room, ices strained arms.Rests her legs.
Elsewhere, in Andhra Pradesh, another farmer swallows
pesticide.
vii
Condemned, a clinic coughs up its detritus.
Emergency exit, gurneys lined double, mercy draining
down exhausted tubes.
Drills and cranes clearing way for the new premises.
As if I already stood at their unglazed windows, eyeing
the distressed site through skeletal angles.
Tenant already of the disensoulment projects.
Had thought I deserved nothing better than these stark
towers named for conglomerates?—a line of credit, a give-
away?
viii
They asked me, is this time worse than another.
I said, for whom?
Wanted to show them something.While I wrote on the
chalkboard they drifted out. I turned back to an empty room.
Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough.Maybe it was too soon.
ix
The sheer mass of the thing, its thereness, stuns thought.
Since it exists, it must have existed.Will exist.It says so
here.
Excruciating contempt for love.For the strained fibre of
common affections, mutual assistance
sifted up from landfill, closed tunnels, drought-sheared
riverbeds, street beds named in old census books, choked
under the expressway.
Teachers bricolating scattered schools of trust.Rootlets
watered by fugitives.
Contraband packets, hummed messages.Dreams of the
descendants, surfacing.
Hand reaching for its like exposes a scarred wrist.
Numerals.A bracelet of rust.
In a desert observatory, under plaster dust, smashed lenses
left by the bombardments,
star maps crackle, unscrolling.
2006
VI
TELEPHONE RINGING IN
THE LABYRINTH
i
You who can be silent in twelve languages
trying to crease again in paling light
the map you unfurled that morningif
you in your rearview mirror sighted me
rinsing a green glass bowl
by midsummer nightsun in, say, Reykjavík
if at that moment my hand slipped
and that bowl cracked to pieces
and one piece stared at me like a gibbous moon
if its convex reflection caught you walking
the slurried highway shoulder after the car broke down
if such refractions matter
ii
Well, I’ve held onpeninsula
to continent, climber
to rockface
Sensual peninsula attached sostroked
by the tides’ pensive and moody hands
Scaler into thin air
seen from below as weed or lichen
improvidently fastened
a mat of hair webbed in a bush
A bush ignitedthen
consumed
Violent lithography
smolder’s legacy on a boulder traced
iii
Image erupts from image
atlas from vagrancy
articulation from mammal howl
strangeness from repetition
even thisdefault location
surveyed againone more poem
one more Troy or Tyre or burning tire
seared eyeball genitals
charred cradle
but a different turnworking
this passage of the labyrinth
as laboratory
I’d have entered, searched before
but that ball of threadthat clew
offering an exit choice was no gift at all
iv
I found you by design or
was it your design
or: we were drawn, we drew
Midway in this delicate
negotiationtelephone rings
(Don’t stop! … they’ll call again …)
Offstage the fabulous creature scrapes and shuffles
we breathe its heavy dander
I don’t care how, if it diesthis is not the myth
No ex/interior: compressed
between my throat
and yours, hilarious oxygen
And, for the record, each did sign
our true names on the register
at the mouth of this hotel
v
I would have wanted to say it
without falling back
on wordsDesired not
you so much as your life,
your prevailingNot for me
but for furtherancehow
you would move
on the horizonYou, the person, you
the particlefierce and furthering
2006
TONIGHT NO POETRY
WILL SERVE
(2007–2010)
SERVE (v.t.):
to work for, be a servant to;
to give obedience and reverent honor to;
to fight for; do military or naval service for;
to go through or spend (a term of imprisionment);
to meet the needs of or satisfy the requirements of, be used by;
to deliver (a legal document) as a summons
—Webster’s New World Dictionary
of the American Language (1964)
I
WAITING FOR RAIN, FOR MUSIC
Burn me some musicSend my roots rainI’m swept
dry from insideHard winds rack my core
A struggle at the roots of the mindWhoever said
it would go on and on like this
Straphanger swaying inside a runaway car
palming a notebook scribbled in
contraband calligraphyagainst the war
poetry wages against itself
•
Once under a shed’s eaves
thunder drumming membrane of afternoon
electric scissors slitting the air
thick drops spattering few and far
we could smell it then a long way off
But where’s the rain coming to soak this soil
•
Burn me some musicThere’s a tune
“Neglect of Sorrow”
I’ve heard it hummed or strummed
my whole life long
in many a corridor
waiting for tomorrow
long after tomorrow
should’ve come
on many an ear it should have fallen
but the bands were playing so loud
2007
READING THE ILIAD (AS IF) FOR THE FIRST TIME
Lurid, garish, gash
rended creature struggles to rise, to
run with dripping belly
Blood making everything more real
pounds in the spearthruster’s arm as in
the gunman’s neck the offhand
moment—Now!—before he
takes the bastards out
•
Splendor in black and ochre on a grecian urn
Beauty as truth
The sea as background
stricken with black long-oared ships
on shore chariots shields greaved muscled legs
horses rearingBeauty!flesh before gangrene
•
Mind-shifting gods rush back and forthDelusion
a daughter seized by the hairswung out to bewilder men
Everything here is conflictual and is called man’s fate
•
Ugly glory: open-eyed wounds
feed enormous flies
Hoofs slicken on bloodglaze
Horses turn away their heads
weeping equine tears
Beauty?
a wall with names of the fallen
from both sidespassionate objectivity
2009
BENJAMIN REVISITED
The angel
of history is
flown
now meet the janitor
down
in the basementwho
shirtlesssmoking
has the job of stoking
the so-called past
into the so-called present
2007
INNOCENCE
… thought, think, I did
some terrible
thing back then
—thing that left traces
all over you
your work / how your figure
pressed into the world?
Had you murdered
—or not—something if not
someoneHad blindly—or not—
followed custom needing to be
brokenBroken
—or not—with custom
needing to be kept?
Something—a body—still
spins in aira weaving weight
a scorching
However it was done
And the folks disassembling
from under the tree