one figurebacked away
unspeakable
(If that one moved—)
but the I you knew who made
you once can’t save you
my blood won’t even match yours
4
“The dead” we sayas if speaking
of “the people” who
gave up on making history
simply to get through
Something dense and nullgroan
without echounderground
and owl-voiced I cry Who
are these dead these people these
lovers who if ever did
listen no longer answer
: We :
5
Called in to the dead:why didn’t you write?
What should I have asked you?
—what would have been the true
unlocking code
if all of them failed—
I’ve questioned the Book of Questions
studied gyres of steam
twisting from a hot cup
in a cold sunbeam
turned the cards overlifted the spider’s foot
from the mangled hexagon
netted the beaked eel from the river’s mouth
askedand let it go
2007–2008
V
BALLADE OF THE POVERTIES
There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted
toilet bowl
The poverty of to steal food for the first time
The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck
The poverty of sweet charity ladling
Soup for the poor who must always be there for that
There’s poverty of theory poverty of swollen belly shamed
Poverty of the diploma or ballot that goes nowhere
Princes of predation let me tell you
There are poverties and there are poverties
There’s the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at immigration
Poverty of the turned head averted eye
The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex
The poverty of the bounced check poverty of the dumpster dive
The poverty of the pawned horn of the smashed reading glasses
The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty cleaning up
the puke
The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed out on
pavement
Princes of finance you who have not lain there
There are poverties and there are poverties
There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door
And the poverty of stories patched up to sell there
There’s the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate
And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war
There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket
And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble
There’s the poverty of coming home not as you left it
And the poverty of how would you ever end it
Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war
There are poverties and there are poverties
There’s the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you
Can’t get to the poverty of bodies lying unburied
There’s the poverty of labor offered silently on the curb
The poverty of the no-contact prison visit
There’s the poverty of yard-sale scrapings spread
And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street
Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words
There are poverties and there are poverties
You who travel by private jet like a housefly
Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties
Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words
Here’s a mirror you can look into:take it:it’s yours.
For James and Arlene Scully
2009
EMERGENCY CLINIC
Caustic implacable
poemunto and contra:
I do not soothe minor
injuriesI do
not offerI require
close history
of the caseapprentice-
ship in past and fresh catastrophe
The skin too quickly scabbed
mutters for my debriding
For every bandaged wound
I’ll scrape anotheropen
I won’t smile
while wiping
your tears
I do not give
simpleheartedlove and nor
allow you simply love me
this will be different
Iodine-dark
poem walking to and fro all night
un-gainly
unreconciled
unto and contra
2008
CONFRONTATIONS
It’s not new, this condition, just for awhile
kept deep
in the cortex of things imagined
Now the imagination comes of age
I see ourselves, full-lipped, blood-flushed
in cold air, still conflicted, still
embraced
boarding the uncharter’d bus of vanishment
backward glances over and done
afterimages
swirl and dissolve along a shoal of footprints
Simple ghouls flitter already among our leavings
fixing labels in their strange language
But
up to now we’re not debris
(only to their fascinated eyes)
2009
CIRCUM/STANCES
A crime of nostalgia
—is it—to say
the “objective conditions”
seemed a favoring wind
and we younger then
—objective fact—
also a kind of subjectivity
Sails unwrapped to the breeze
no chart
•
Slowly repetitiously to prise
up the leaden lid where the forensic
evidence was sealed
cross-section of a slave ship
diagram of a humiliated
mindhigh-resolution image
of a shredded lung
color slides of refugee camps
Elsewhere
(in some calm room far from pain)
bedspringsa trunk empty
but for a scorched
length of electrical cord
how these got here from where
what would have beheld
Migrant assemblage:in its aura
immense details writhe, uprise
•
To imagine whatBecome
present thén
within the monster
nerveless and giggling
(our familiarour kin)
who did the scutwork
To differentiate
the common hell
the coils inside the brain
•
Scratchy cassette ribbon
history’s lamentation song:
Gone, friend I tore at
time after time
in anger
gone, love I could
time upon time
nor live nor leave
gone, city
of spies and squatters
tongues and genitals
All violence is not equal
(I write this
with a clawed hand
2008
WINTERFACE
i. hers
Mute it utters ravageguernican
mouth in bleak December
Busted-up lines of Poe:
—each separate dying ember
wreaks its ghost upon the floor
January moon-mouth
phosphorescence purged in dark to
swallow up the gone
Too
soon
Dawn, twilight, wailing
newsprint, breakfast, trains
all must run their inter-
ruptured course
—So was the girl moving too fastshe was moving fast
across an icy web
Was ice a mirrorwell the mirror was icy
ii. his
Someone writes asking about your use
of Bayesian inference
in the history of slavery
What flares now from our burnt-up
furniture
You left your stricken briefcase here
no annotations
phantom frequencies stammer
trying to fathom
how it was inside alone where you were dying
2009
QUARTO
1
Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over
The map of my battlefields. Marathon.
Wounded Knee. Vicksburg. Jericho.
Battle of the Overpass.
Victories turned inside out
But no surrender
Cemeteries of remorse
The beaten champion sobbing
Ghosts move in to shield his tears
2
No one writes lyric on a battlefield
On a map stuck with arrows
But I think I can do it if I just lurk
In my tent pretending to
Refeather my arrows
I’ll be right there! I yell
When they come with their crossbows and white phosphorus
To recruit me
Crouching over my drafts
Lest they find me out
And shoot me
3
Press your cheek against my medals, listen through them to my heart
Doctor, can you see me if I’m naked?
Spent longer in this place than in the war
No one comes but rarely and I don’t know what for
Went to that desert as many did before
Farewell and believing and hope not to die
Hope not to die and what was the life
Did we think was awaiting after
Lay down your stethoscope back off on your skills
Doctor can you see me when I’m naked?
4
I’ll tell you about the mermaid
Sheds swimmable tailGets legs for dancing
Sings like the sea with a choked throat
Knives straight up her spine
Lancing every step
There is a price
There is a price
For every gift
And all advice
2009
DON’T FLINCH
Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver
when you lift your eyes.It’s the glare.Don’t flinch
The news you were reading
(who tramples whom) is antique and on the death pages you’ve seen
already
worms doing their normal work
on the life that was:the chewers chewing
at a sensuality that wrestled doom
an anger steeped in love they can’t
even taste.How could this still
shock or sicken you?Friends go missing, mute
nameless.Toss
the paper.Reach again
for the. Iliad.The lines
pulse into sense.Turn up the music
Now do you hear it?can you smell smoke
under the near shingles?
2009
BLACK LOCKET
It lies in “the way of seeing the world”: in the technical sacredness of seeing that world.
—Pier Paolo Pasolini, of his film Accatone
The ornament hung from my neck is a black locket
with a chain barely felt for yearsclasp I couldn’t open
Inside: photographs of the condemned
Two
mystery planets
invaded from within
•
Pitcher of ice water thrown in a punched-in face
Eyes burnt back in their sockets
Negative archaeology
•
Driving the blind curve trapped in the blind alley
my blind spot blots the blinding
beauty of your face
•
I hear the colors of your voice
2009
GENEROSITY
Death, goodlooking as only a skeleton can get
(good looks of keen intelligence)
sits poised at the typewriter, her locale, her pedestal
two books, one called Raging Beauty
another Lettera Amorosa, on this table
of drafts arguments letters
Her fine bony fingers go on calmly typing
the years at her turquoise-blue machine
(I say her but who knows death’s gender
as in life there are possible variations)
Anyway he or she sat on your desk in Tucson
in the apartment where you lived then and fed me
champagne, frybread, hominy soup and gave me
her or himLater at the 7-Eleven we bought
a plastic sack of cotton to pack Death safe for travel
vagabond poet who can work anywhere
now here and of course still working
but startled by something or someone
turns her headfingers lifted in midair
For Joy Harjo
2009
VI
YOU, AGAIN
Some nights I think you want too much. From me. I didn’t ask
to parse again your idioms of littered
parking lots your chain-linked crane-hung sites
limp once more your crime-scene-festooned streets
to buildings I used to live in.Lose my nerve
at a wrong door on the wrong floor
in search of a time.The precision of dream is not
such a privilege. I know those hallways tiled in patterns
of oriental rugs those accordion-pleated
elevator gates. Know by heart the chipped
edges on some of those tiles. You who require this
heart-squandering want me wandering you, craving
to press a doorbell hear a lock turn, a bolt slide back
—always too much, over and over back
to the old apartment, wrong again, the key maybe
left with a super in charge of the dream who will not be found
2010
POWERS OF RECUPERATION
i
A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—
is writing history backward
her bodythe chair she sits in
to be abandonedrepossessed
The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,
second world, third world,
cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,
infectious, maiming, class
war lives on
A done matter she might have thought
ever undone thoughplucked
from before her birthyear
and that hyphen coming after
She’s old, old, the incendiary
woman
endless beginner
whose warped wraps you shall find in graves
and behind glassplundered
ii
Streets empty nowcitizen risesshrugging off
her figured shirtpulls on her dark generic garmentsheds
identity inklingswatch, rings, ear studs
now to pocket her flashlighther tiny magnet
shut down heaterfinger a sleeping cat
lock inner, outer doorinsert
key in crevicelisten once twice
to the breath of the neighborhood
take temperature of the signsa bird
scufflinga frost settling
… you left that meeting around two a.m.I thought
someo
ne should walk with you
Didn’t think then I needed that
years ravel outand now
who’d be protecting whom
I left the key in the old place
in case
iii
Spooky those streets of minds
shuttered against shatter
articulate those walls
pronouncing rage and need
fuck the copscome jesus
blow me again
Citizen walking catwise
close to the walls
heat of her lungs leaving
its trace upon the air
fingers her tiny magnet
which for the purpose of drawing
particles together will have to do
when as they say the chips are down
iv
Citizen at riverbankseven bridges
Ministers-in-exile with their aides