A prayer is like a fishmouth,
opening dumbly onto just more
water at best or a hook
if it really wants an answer.
God (his blue holiness, his dry
drunk) is no real mystery,
unlike the wind-taut sail
and shining gulls and tiny souls
at everlasting work on the plain
brown boat in a bottle on the sea.
Streetlamps
The unplowed road is unusable
unless there’s no snow.
But in dry, warm weather,
it’s never called an unplowed road.
To call it so, when it isn’t so,
doesn’t make it so, though it is so
when it snows and there’s no plow.
It’s a no-go. Let’s stay inside.
And here we are again:
no cake without breaking
eggs, unless it’s a vegan cake
in which there are never any eggs
only the issue, the question,
the primacy of eggs,
which remains even in animal-free
foods, eaten by animal-free
humans in an inhumane world, lit
with robots breathing
powerlessly in nature.
O streetlamp,
wallflower clairvoyant,
you are so futuristically
old-fashioned,
existing in the daytime
for later, because it becomes
later eventually, then
earlier, then later again.
And a place is made
for that hope, if I call
it hope when half the time
is erased by the other half.
Light becomes itself
in the dark, and becomes
nothing when the real light
comes. It is enough to make
even the simplest organism
insane. Why did the chicken
cross the unplowed road?
Because it was trying
to beat the egg to the other side.
It wanted to be first,
at last, and to stay first,
at least until the day
breaks itself sunny side,
and the rooster crows.
The only snows are dark snows.
Liquid Flesh
In a light chocolatine room
with blackout windows,
a loud clock drowns in soft dawn’s
syllables, crisscrossed
with a broken cloudiness
I’d choose as my own bedcovers
but cannot. My choice of sleep
or sky has no music of its own.
There’s no “its own” while the baby cries.
Oh, the baby cries. He howls and claws
like a wrongly minor red wolf
who doesn’t know his mother.
I know I am his mother, but I can’t
quite click on the word’s essential aspects,
can’t denude the flora
or disrobe the kind of housecoat
“mother” always is. Something
cunty, something used.
Whatever meaning the word itself
is covering, like underwear,
that meaning is so mere and meager
this morning. Mother. Baby.
Chicken and egg. It’s so obnoxious
of me: I was an egg
who had an egg
and now I’m chicken,
as usual scooping up
both possibilities,
or what I used to call
possibilities. I used
to be this way, so ontologically
greedy, wanting to be it all.
Serves me right.
My belief in the fluidity
of the self turns out to mean
my me is a flow of wellwater,
without the well, or the bucket,
a hole dug and seeping.
A kind of unwell, where
the ground reabsorbs
what it was displaced to give.
The drain gives meaning to the sieve.
As I said: a chicken who still
wants to be all potential.
Someone who springs
and falls, who cannot see
how many of us I have
in me—and I do not like them all.
Do I like us? Can I love us?
If anyone comes
first it’s him, but how can that be?
I was here way, way first.
I have the breasts, godawful, and he
the lungs and we share the despair.
For we are a we, aren’t we? We split
a self in such a way that there isn’t
enough for either of us.
The father of the baby is sleepy
and present in his way, in the way
of fathers. He is devoted like
few fathers and maybe hurts
like I hurt, like no fathers.
I don’t know what someone else
feels, not even these someones
who are also me. Do they hurt
like I do? Why can’t they
tell me, or morse or sign: let
me know they know where and how
and why it hurts? Or something?
What is the point of other people,
being so separate, if we can’t
help a person get that pain
will stick its shiv into anything,
just to get rid of the weapon
and because it can? For if we share
ourselves then they, too, must
also be in so much pain.
I can hear it. Oh, my loves.
The wood of the crib, the white
glow of the milk (which must
have siphoned off the one
and only pure part of me, leaving
me with what, toxicity
or sin or mush?), the awful softness.
I’ve been melted into something
too easy to spill. I make more
and more of myself in order
to make more and more of the baby.
He takes it, this making. And somehow
he’s made more of me, too.
I’m a mother now.
I run to the bathroom, run
to the kitchen, run to the crib
and I’m not even running.
These places just scare up as needed,
the wires that move my hands
to the sink, to the baby,
to the breast are electrical.
I’m in shock.
One must be in shock to say so,
as if one’s own state is assessable,
like a car accident or Minnesota taxes.
A total disaster, this sack of liquid
flesh which yowls and leaks
and I’m talking about me
not the baby. Me, this puddle
of a middle, this utilized vessel,
cracked hull, divine
design. It’s how it works. It’s how
we all got here. Deform
following the function…
But what about me? I whisper
secretly and to think,
around these parts used to be
the joyful place of sex,
terror and squalor.
My eyes burned out at three a.m. and again
at six and eleven. This is why the clock
is drowning, as I said earlier.
I’m trying to explain it.
I repeat myself, or haven’t I already?
Tiny self, alone with a tiny self.
I’ll say it: he hurt me, this new
babe, then and now.
Perhaps he always will,
though thoughts of the future
seem like science fiction novels
I never finished read
ing.
Their ends like red nerves
chopped off by cleaver, not aliens,
this very moment, saving nothing for later.
He howls with such fury and clarity
I must believe him.
No god has the power
to make me believe anything,
yet I happen to know
this baby knows a way out.
This dark hole closing in on me
all around: he’ll show me
how to get through
the shock and the godlessness
and the rictus of crushed flesh,
into the rest of my life.
2. DOUBLE LIFE
Parallel
The dark cracks separating
the white boards
think they’re alone.
Why must I be burdened
with knowing
there are so many?
Or is this what god thinks?
Or am I what god thinks?
Or am I alone?
Visitor
I am dreaming of a house just like this one
but larger and opener to the trees, nighter
than day and higher than noon, and you,
visiting, knocking to get in, hoping for icy
milk or hot tea or whatever it is you like.
For each night is a long drink in a short glass.
A drink of blacksound water, such a rush
and fall of lonesome no form can contain it.
And if it isn’t night yet, though I seem to
recall that it is, then it is not for everyone.
Did you receive my invitation? It is not
for everyone. Please come to my house
lit by leaf light. It’s like a book with bright
pages filled with flocks and glens and groves
and overlooked by Pan, that seductive satyr
in whom the fish is also cooked. A book that
took too long to read but minutes to unread—
that is—to forget. Strange are the pages
thus. Nothing but the hope of company.
I made too much pie in expectation. I was
hoping to sit with you in a treehouse in a
nightgown in a real way. Did you receive
my invitation? Written in haste, before
leaf blinked out, before the idea fully formed.
An idea like a stormcloud that does not spill
or arrive but moves silently in a direction.
Like a dark book in a long life with a vague
hope in a wood house with an open door.
Why Should Only Cheaters and Liars Get Double Lives?
(a poem inside a poem)
That is, why should they get two stabs at it while the virtuous
trudge along at half-speed, half-mast, halfhearted?
If an ordinary human can pull the fattest cashwad
out of the slimmest slit,
and the fullest pudding out of the skimmest milk,
then it might be possible
to insert a meager life in Andromeda
into, at the very least, our wide pit of sleep.
Duplicity after all takes many, not merely two, forms,
and just the very idea
of doubleness, twinniness, or even simple, simpering
regret, or nostalgia, implies
a kind of Andromeda,
a secret world, the hidden draft, the tumor-sibling,
the “there-are-no-accidents” plane we could learn to fly.
to life on Earth:
The way some men won’t “talk that way” in front of women,
not wanting to astonish us with their secret man-ness,
as if there is another world bisecting ours,
living among us like an unspeakable mold.
The recent invention of the double-decker pill,
equally effective on sunny and rainy days.
On the wall, a plural mural: a diptych of Paula ’n’ Wally’s.
What fallopian and what fellatio! Like a Nan Goldin oldie,
but an impostor. Okay. Why not try to offer more
squalor no matter who the photographer?
When someone’s called a “lifer” it means that person is trapped.
A “lifer” has no real life but what do we call the rest of us?
How terrifying it is to try trying!
Which frying pan will best
kill the loved one? Which will
make the best omelet?
The books on the bookshelves are touching themselves
like virgins. But I’ve had them.
It Never Happened
Let’s just imagine that you are magical,
that no light would flicker and no battery
die and no lover or wife or other can claim
you while you are with me. Let’s imagine
that you shiver and shudder and eat
my lamb and my rice pudding and drink
the wine and the whiskey and the cognac
and the elderflower never taking your
eyes off me. Let’s imagine that I am also
magical and can cook lamb and rice
pudding and pour many drinks without
ever taking my hands off you. Let’s imagine
you are unable to control yourself when
we are together, that we are all thumbs
and soft mouths and terrible fingers
and eyes of moon and eyes of sea and that
we smell beautiful to each other for no
reason. Let’s imagine you drove to my
house and your headlights did not flicker
and your battery did not die and you
were able to control the car and so
are not on the side of the road, not dead
or hurt but not anymore on your way
to my house either, calling your lover
or wife or other to come pick you up
and bring you home instead of coming
here, where there is no lamb, after all,
and no more wine, either, after all
this waiting, imagining you’re magical,
imagining what you’d say to her: “Um,
I was on the other side of town to pick
up some wine for dinner” or “I was
meeting old buddy Tom for a drink, he’s
just in town the one evening. Might
be home late.” But you were never
coming over, never even invited. As if
I’d ever be so clever. In fact I was just
imagining you’re magical when you called,
roadside, nearby, a blown battery for
no reason, for a ride home to your lover
or wife or other. You were on your way
home to her where she was preparing lamb
and rice pudding and when I dropped you
off you invited me in and I said no, not
taking my hands off the wheel, though
I wanted to imagine that your eyes flickered
and shivered and you said you couldn’t
control yourself, couldn’t take your eyes
off me, that I smelled like beautiful wine,
like elderflower, like pussy willow,
that you called me lamb and kissed me,
knowing that this very last part is the story’s
only true part, in which you touched
and kissed me with your wheel of fingers,
your terrible lying mouth.
The Seven Deadly Sins of (and Necessary Steps toward) Making Art
Pure art is, in a sense, pure innocence.
But artists are, in themselves, putrid with paradox.
The following seven sins/steps should help the wretched
to remember: the pitfalls are the progress!
1. DEADLINES
Aka Avalanche Everlasting,
Opportunity Oppression.
“You will miss me then I’m gone…”