with little chirps of joy, sweet thing—now
gone that dark way none comes home.
For this I curse you, dark one, swallower
of beauty: for the dark deed which has made
my girl’s eyes red with weeping.
Catullus, Carmen VIII
Enough, Catullus! No more pleading!
What you thought went wrong went
wrong. When days were sunnier,
and when a girl was willing, you made love.
You loved her, let’s just say, as none
may evermore be loved. You gave her
all you had. She laughed, and what she gave
you took, and it was brilliant. Now,
when she wants nothing more, your
pleading least of all, stand firm. Say:
Goodbye, girl. Catullus is unmoved.
He does not care now what you do.
If no one cares, it serves you right,
you bitch! Now see who finds your teasing
sweet, who begs for it, who praises it,
who kisses you, who whispers you
your name…And whose lips are you biting?
Not mine. No: Catullus is unmoved.
Essential Tremor
for Daniel Moriarty
The black and gold stitch
from the upper gill of a brook trout
to the middle ray of the tail fin,
you once told me, houses hair cells
sensitive to the flow of the stream.
And the rest…that dark green
swath on the flank,
the spots of ocher, stipples
blood red ringed with cornflower blue…
the whole thing shimmering
with the most delicate scales,
to the fisherman’s eye
is a revelation. You too,
after you led me down at dusk
into a stream so cold
it made my ankles hurt,
and after we caught one each,
just big enough to keep
and cook on a little fire we made
at the foot of the mountain
under the Dog Day stars, you too,
when you smiled, freckles by firelight
trembling on the back of your hand.
To Josephine Chamberlain Ayres Haxton
From the end of the gravel road
we walked down into the woods
to look for a swimming hole in the creek.
You kept scanning the ground for trilliums
you said you wanted to plant
on the way to the house
where your father spent his childhood.
In the gulley we saw handprints
of opossums, and the pad marks from raccoon
and fox and rabbit, scribbled over
with mouse and bird tracks.
There were chanterelles at the foot of a beech trunk,
and in the cleft of a root a copperhead
rearing to strike, bands on her back
almost as orange as the mushrooms.
She came sidewinding straight at you, rattling
her tail in the fallen beech leaves, belly
big with eggs about to hatch inside her.
If I had written you this when you could read,
you might have reminded me that your friend
Bert came on our walk to the creek. I loved Bert.
She was delighted, as usual, by the woods and you.
It was a good day, though we found no swimming hole
or trilliums. None of us got bitten by the snake.
The creek lay sunlit in the deep woods,
brilliant, rippling over the sand and gravel,
with clear pools here and there to the knee,
where crawdads swam with little bream and catfish.
Under the Searchlight of a Robot Sub
Where the whale lay
on the floor of the canyon
hagfish came to feed in the dark
with shrimp and crab and sea pig.
Boneworms sent roots
into the whale oil
at the core of the bone.
Plumes grew,
microscopic mates inside them
shedding sperm over the eggs
which drifted nowhere
by ten thousands, settling,
some of them, onto another
whale fall miles away.
Inside a ship
with decks lit by the sun,
in the dim light
of a control room,
human brains in bone casements,
male and female, watched
the plumes pink
in the glow of their screens.
They watched—excitedly
scuttling over the keyboards,
tipping the joysticks,
with their delicate,
pink-palmed, flexible hands.
The Loving Essence of the Duckmole
Ornithorhynchus anatinus, a.k.a. tambreet, mallagong, & boonaburra
The jimmialong, tail plump with fat,
electrosensors tingling in his bill,
the swivel in his hips more like
the bearded dragon’s than like mine,
his four-tipped penis at the ready,
is not cute. He is himself. In courtship
having dug two tunnels, his and hers,
which she can close to lay and tend
their clutch of leathery, soft eggs,
by night he swims and sweeps
his bill where muck sparks everywhere
with insect larvae, worms, and crayfish
which the local crayfishers call yabbies.
A puppy-like, warm-blooded
duck-in-a-fur-coat seems, much
as Ronald Reagan’s smile, or Bundy’s
good-boy grooming, to suggest
what looks innocuous will do no harm.
But in the mating season he secretes from glands
in his hindquarters into the hollow spurs of bone
at either ankle venom so refined that
when a fisherman, let’s not say poacher,
tries removing him from a net,
the stab of pain into the man’s wrist
bathes him to the shoulder all at once
in fire. The burning arm throbs
everywhere. It swells. The man
in a delirium of pain falls vomiting.
For three days, arm twice normal size,
he writhes, and morphine does not quell
the pain. People stung may think themselves
the ones attacked, although the platypus
in the encounter often dies, the person never.
Observations from a Hillside Stairway on the Day of Atonement, Just Before My Wife and Daughters Break Their Fast
Under the hanging lights in a pool hall
at nineteen I read the table after the break
and followed a map in my head
to take beer money from older men
while, eight thousand miles under my feet,
boys I knew from high school,
some of them, learned to pray.
Now, at a table in Vegas,
holding maybe a rag and an ace,
my son is reading a voice, a glance,
and running probabilities
in his head. Sons of other men
are bivouacked at dawn in a desert
where Abraham
’s father worshipped
Babylonian gods. Everything wobbles
and spins. Here, in the little woods
a block from Erwin Methodist Church,
bottles drunken boys have shattered
over the brick steps flash
in wobbling streaks of sunlight.
Two hundred years ago, James Erwin
at the end of boyhood left his father’s house,
and walked into the local wilderness
to preach. Wolves appeared at dusk,
and the boy with a Bible sang.
He shouted God’s praise into the sky.
Here, the fox grapes hang from a guy wire
over the edge of the trees where a doe
and two fawns stand in poison ivy
to the hip. I never did learn
to pray or carry a tune, but I say
these words into my cupped palm
quietly, not to spook the deer.
Kropotkin and the Lake on Mars
Kropotkin worked by the flicker of a tiny oil lamp…During the short hours of the day he would transcribe his notes on a typewriter…Much of his leisure he spent at the piano.
—Emma Goldman, January 1921
Pyotr Kropotkin, scientist of anarchy,
once theorized that the weight of a glacier
must melt ice underneath it into a lake.
Fifty years after Kropotkin died, radar
showed at Vostok Station in the Antarctic
under a glacier two miles thick
one of the largest lakes on Earth.
Now they have found a smaller
such lake under the ice on Mars,
water, saltier than the Dead Sea.
After forty years in exile, and a few
in prison, Kropotkin came home
to a cottage he shared with his wife.
There, in conscience, he wrote
that taking hostages for the revolution
was wrong. When company came, watched
by the secret police, he would play
transcriptions from the Italian opera
so that his musical friends could sing.
Thanks to the Makers of Shells
Factory workers before I was born
cut and fitted eighteen pieces of oak wood
to construct the chair at my desk
where I have seated myself,
as a hermit-crab-tail might slip into the vacant shell of a conch.
Here I let my mind walk sideways,
fingertips tapping the keyboard in my lap more feelingly
because each outer shell of a fingernail holds
the tingling pad alert
around its inner shell of bone.
My laptop closes on its hinge,
the way the operculum of a twisted necklace snail might
pull shut at the approach of the hermit crab,
the spool of words, like the snail, enveloped then
in the nacreousness in the dark.
Inside my skull another operculum covers
the insular lobe
where consciousness takes place, as if the mind
were a shell for the flesh, or flesh were a husk
for the cosmic one.
Message, 1944
In Budapest, after the cherry blossoms fell,
a colonel in the SS asked a leader
from the underground
to carry a message abroad: the SS
would release one million Jews
in exchange for ten thousand trucks
and a thousand tons of tea, coffee, cocoa,
and soap for soldiers on the Russian front.
“Blood for goods,” he called the exchange.
Then he inverted the phrase
for effect, “goods for blood.”
Almost no one herded onto the trains in Budapest
knew what the leaders of the resistance knew.
In June, on a typical day at Auschwitz, more
Jews died than soldiers in both armies fell
in Normandy on D-Day, which was the sixth.
On the seventh, British intelligence met
the Hungarian messenger’s train at Aleppo.
He was trying to help his people, they thought,
but the German offer had to be a trick.
From Aleppo the British took him
to Cairo where they questioned him
for four months. The diplomat
in charge of refugees asked,
“What shall I do with those million
Jews? Where shall I put them?”
The British thought the exchange
of blood for goods would be
collusion against their ally Russia.
Transports of prisoners might be
deployed as human shields for the enemy.
Confusion, involving the demand
for medicine, shelter, and food,
would prolong the end of the war
and undermine negotiations to follow.
Churchill declined the offer. Experts,
some of them, thought that the murder
of Jews, exaggerated in propaganda,
was already reaching an end.
From mid-May into mid-July,
in fact, the SS murdered four hundred
thousand more Hungarian Jews,
more than the total number of American
soldiers killed from the beginning
until the end of the war.
The messenger upon release
joined the resistance in Palestine,
and fought to overthrow British rule.
Later, secret police from Israel kidnapped
in Argentina and brought him
to Jerusalem for trial. He pleaded
innocent. Found guilty, he was put
to death by hanging, this in a prison
near where eyeless scorpions
live in limestone caves.
The messenger believed at the end
of his life that the British assessment
of “blood for goods” was correct.
He regretted his part in the offer.
Blut gegen Ware, at any rate, still
describes the logic of money and war.
Unlit Kitchen, 5 A.M.
After the rain
an old man saw
through the spider web
on a fogged window
far down under the cedars
a cloud on the pond
lift into the daylight.
To Floyd, Louisiana
ca. 1807–ca. 1918
In the Second Great Awakening
Moses Floyd, a Methodist preacher,
came from Pennsylvania
to the swamp, and a few years later
here you were, a town with a dry goods store,
a church, a courthouse, and saloons.
Young men staggered into the dusty street
where guns were a kind of law,
like the hanging tree, and the documents
stating who owned what and whom.
But the steamboats quit their run
on the bayou, and the railroad
and the highway left you, church
and courthouse, store, saloons, and all,
abandoned. Buildings downtown
disappeared. Now there’s only a crook
in the two-lane through the level
corn and cotton fields slowly
giving up your name to oblivion,
like the forgotten name of the mounds
nearby on Bayou Macon, where the people
who gathered hickory nuts, persimmons,
scuppernongs, and mayhaws, cast
their weighted nets for catfish, cooked
in covered pits, using ceramic stones
to set the heat. One of them carved
a bannerstone in the shape of wings,
another made a throwing stick for a spear,
and all of them died three thousand years ago.
A few days’ walk southwest
is another circle of mounds, these
from before the reign of Gilgamesh.
The people who built them
fished for the drum which Frenchmen
taught me as a boy to call the gaspergou.
Near there, Floyd, when you were young,
children huddled among their elders
on a steamboat called the Cleopatra.
On a river through deep woods
sheathed in ice they were passing
into another world, taken by strangers
out of the only world they knew
in a kind of boat that trembled
with a guttural moan. And near you,
Floyd, under trees far larger
than any alive now in that region,
another party of Choctaw came on foot,
young men, old men, women, and children
following lost guides in the swamp where limbs
snapped under the weight of ice and toppled.
Sunset, Mare Spumans
The dust on the floor
of the Foaming Sea
is barren in all directions.
One last spark at the uppermost
limb of the Sun blinks out
into a seemingly
infinite swarm of stars,
and the dust cools
in the next Earth day
from the boiling point
of water down to the freezing
point of gasoline.
From the Journal of Dr. Beaurieux
Witness to an execution by guillotine, June 28, 1905