V. DREAM #1
He dreams that a giraffe is eating his toes, he dreams of emolument, lucre, a jar of balm.
VI. DREAM #2
He dreams of espionage, a set of codes and tasks too complex to understand, even in the dream it is clear how pointless it all is, and he dismisses that dream, and moves on.
VII. SLEEPWORK
Heart’s calibration,
soul’s equivocation,
harmonic incandescence,
the proving of axioms,
tightening the weave,
stacking bales,
concourse with whales,
cavern travel
lantern trimming,
ore refining,
dream-mining.
VIII. WAKING
This is what I get paid for, he thinks—rising from bed to jot down in his notebook the poem streaming like a ticker tape through his dream—except for the part about getting paid.
IX. PROPAGANDA OF THE FRAGMENT
The recalcitrance of stars
in their medicinal bathwater, the ego
swaddled in power like the capsule
of the rocket borne on a pillar of flame,
narrative loosed within the text
like Cossacks upon the steppe.
The myth of junction is coterminous
with the dream of desired form,
a world in which parrots fly
into the wallpaper to complete its design.
Rivets replaced by carbon bonds,
women willowy as T’ang dynasty reeds,
trade wind carrying the sound of gunshots—
I’m awake now, I’m wide awake.
X. DREAM #3
He dreams of falling asleep, and waking up ravenous, and falling asleep again, and wonders within the dream whether he really did wake up, and if so, what he ate for breakfast.
XI. MY LIBRARY
Assembled with such care over the decades, with its shelves of well-thumbed Collected Poems, its ponderous chronicles, tea-stained chapbooks, and paperbacks asterisked with mildew, after all these years my library slips its anchor and sails ever more certainly into the past. Soon even the methods and substance of its origin—paper and ink, the printing press—will resemble fragments of ash and animal bone in an ancient digging, yet I feel no particular sense of regret that I will not live to see our futuristic tropes put to the final test, whatever dire exigency that might consist of. All I have ever wanted is to write a poem as ineradicable as the sun, singular as a wolf in its kingdom of moonlit ice. But who has time, anymore, for idle tasks? Why should anyone bother to adjudicate the petty crimes of language, border disputes between synonyms, lexical transgressions opaque as tax legislation? Pea vines are climbing the neighbor’s trellis, the kids are looking for a surfboard behind the garage, wind rustles the branches which respond with shrugs and apologetic bows. In the shelter of their anthologies, the poems talk softly in the darkness, huddled together for warmth, waiting.
XII. DREAM #4
He has never seen the river he is dreaming but it is full of nuclear submarines and his kayak is full of holes.
XIII. LINES
front lines credit lines bread lines / lines of demarcation / blood lines punch lines / lines of broken glass / lines of trees in windrows across a far field / blue hills in broken lines on the horizon / blurred lines white lines / lines in the sand lines of questioning / life lines tag lines stat lines / lines of code / stress lines fracture lines fate lines last lines / lines of birds flying south against the frost / lines of golden tiles in an unfinished mosaic
XIV. JAPANESE EGGPLANT
What was learned in the garden is not a dream
but a tactile memory, a prickling in the fingertips
at the border between waking and sleep—
that the leaves of the Japanese eggplant
hide in their profusion a host of invisible thorns.
XV. DREAM #5
He tries to name the city he is dreaming and when he smells tahini and poppy seeds he thinks, Atlantic Avenue, so this is Brooklyn.
XVI. A CONTINENT
Kids in Nebraska dreaming of volcanoes,
kids on the shore of Lake Managua
dreaming of jobs in shiny convenience stores—
go ahead, you can
walk there,
it’s a continent.
XVII. HONEY
O, muse, wake me now from troubled dreams.
Take me one more time into your salt
and kelp-entangled arms before the storm arrives.
Make me greedy.
Make me sop up spilled honey with your crusts.
XVIII. DREAM #6
He dreams of the old Italian restaurant in Washington with Chianti bottles covered in red wax, a jukebox of arias from Aïda and Don Giovanni, the courtyard fountain of Poseidon in which he floated boats made from corks and toothpicks with his brother, brackish water alive with black eels served to favored customers, swish of their tails below the surface like prehistoric creatures drowning in tar, like the downstroke of a dozen bows as the violins commence the second-movement adagio.
XIX. TERMITES
Look, the window of the dream is closing—
goodbye, monumental room
of snow globes and animal tusks.
Strip away the walls and what’s left:
strakes and laths of old wood against plaster
oozing like stale frosting between them.
Let the termites take it all.
XX. MY JUSTICE
will not be found in a bullet
or a bottle
or the paper ark of any poem.
Hives can’t hold enough bees
to pollinate all the wildflowers
watered by human tears.
The stone of your pain, no matter how tightly
you squeeze it, will never yield enough
to quench anybody’s thirst.
Go on now, go back to bed,
get back to work,
return to the dream-swarm harvesting the nectar
of whatever it is you love enough
to have risked
this journey into darkness for.
The Red Dragonfly: After Shiki
In Memory of David Dubrow, 1992–2013
1.
The red dragonfly
knows the way to the grave site—
one-year unveiling.
One-year unveiling,
out past the airport—Tile Works,
Oasis Dream Spa.
Sound of the airplanes
taking wing does not disturb
the red dragonfly.
Yellow butterfly,
late summer in Miami,
no sign of autumn.
No sign of autumn,
the greens and blues of summer
too bright for our eyes.
Too bright for our eyes,
the red dragonfly’s shadow
falls on David’s stone.
2.
The red dragonfly
watching, darting, hovering,
thinking of David.
Thinking of David—
honor the dead by living—
thinking of Shiki.
The mockingbird sings
all day without noticing
tears falling on stone.
Tears falling on stone
as butterflies flutter from
flower to flower.
Flower to flower,
hour to hour and day by day,
thinking of David.
The red dragonfly,
the yellow butterfly, the stone
bearing David’s name.
3.
Little lizard, hide
from the mockingbirds with us,
summer’s survivors.
Yellow butterfly,
honor the dead by living
like grass in sunshine.
Like grass in sunshine—
even by g
rief, mockingbird,
the soul is nourished.
Summer sun at noon,
and still autumn comes too soon,
even here, too soon.
Too bright for our eyes,
the greens and blues of summer,
tears falling on stone.
O, red dragonfly,
hover here, above his grave,
after we have gone.
Four Elegies
1. LYNDA HULL
What was the name of that bar beneath the El
in a neighborhood of matadors and jade-sequined fur?
Who dined with us in the district of thrashing eels
in bright blue buckets along cobblestones near a river
of sangria we could not for all our willingness drown
in or drink dry? Who taught the alchemical moon to ignite,
who spray-painted stars on the roof of the night?
Which room of the dream are you dying in now
that your hotel is filled with candy canes and broken glass?
Which horses, which alphabets, which strangers, which dawns?
Which triumph, which circle, which keyhole, which rhyme?
Avenues we swam through, a bride we traipsed past,
skeletons of syntax, a dagger, a mute swan.
Which room of the dream, Lynda, which room?
2. TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
Clouds on the horizon, liturgical scrivening,
their shadows like ink stains on the sea.
Half a glass of wine, pale irises
declining to parchment,
rust which erupts
through the white paint of the lawn chairs
like a map
to the labyrinth of regret: that time passes,
that the kingdom of each instant
arises and vanishes, this is the essential,
the abiding enigma
of our existence, but not the only one.
How tedious to be born
into a world
with just one mystery.
3. C. K. WILLIAMS
His poetry arrives like a message in a bottle
from the Age of Reason,
the meditations of an Enlightenment polymath
with a Freudian grasp
of the ego
and its discontents
found on a beach somewhere along the coast
of an insular, self-satisfied nation
proud to be ignorant
of what lies beyond its shores, godless
monsters, marvelous beasts,
and other such tomfoolery. If only there was a way
to remove those poems
a man might
find some use for a bottle like that.
4. FRANZ WRIGHT
The moment, at dusk, after
the mirror shatters,
there is another moment
when
it assembles
the falling darkness
into a puzzle of the falling darkness,
and then it falls.
My Moods
My moods are many,
oh my many, many moods,
my fits, my jags, my blues,
my ahhs, my ohs, my oohs,
my highs and lows,
my downs and ups,
my under-the-mistletoes,
my in-his-cups,
my here and now,
my now and then,
my if not, why not,
my if-not-now-when,
my blood feuds, my sodality,
my lone-wolf ideology,
my birds-of-a-feather flock,
my steady-as-a-rock,
my swings and swerves,
my bundle of nerves,
my bliss, my blah, my glum, my glee,
my beck and call,
my call-and-response,
my Viennese waltz, my hoedown, my line dance,
my quicksand, my pedestal,
my saltwater crawl,
my acupuncture needle,
my thimble, my awl,
my Dremel, my ripsaw, my shock and awe,
my each and my any,
my silver dollar, my lucky penny,
my sickness and health,
my man and wife.
So there you are
at last, my dear,
struggling for breath,
my compass rose, my one and only,
my shining star,
my life and death,
Elizabeth.
And all I feel is fear.
Tools
Wheels sigh with longing for the horizon.
Hunger moans in the spoon’s hollow belly.
Tools recount the needs from which they arose
and so comprise a history of human desire.
The match recalls fear in the fireless night,
the saw’s oiled teeth plead for perfect order,
the pen cannot imagine life without ink.
Even that technology employed by the soul
in its perilous escape from the prison of the body
is exhibited here, in these letters, in words.
Words
Messages dwell within words
like shadows inside dimly lit houses.
How did Rilke envision Innerweltraum?
What does Nietzsche mean by will?
No matter how we flood the night
darkness builds a nest beneath the eaves
and draws us inward. Otherwise
we might never have opened the door
or dug the foundation
or shaped the bricks to build the house,
abandoned now
to the immaculate webs of spiders.
Two Nocturnes
1.
He tries to sleep but the night is too complexly fraught, too many echoes, too many absences, too much nothingness to relinquish oneself to, elastic resistance of the void catapulting the mind back toward the surface and marooning it there, rejection disguised as rescue. In the living room the TV broadcasts mute images to nobody, faces of the little space-alien cancer kids, saucer-eyed, bald as cocoons, blinking their frail and elegant lashes like erotic manga ghosts. Cool air in the window, sea grape leaves scattered like desert islands across the courtyard and something tender in the bottom of his foot, a thorn, encysted now, painful to the touch.
A dusting of scent, barely discernible—not jasmine, not camellia—late blossoms of the lemon tree.
Fog off the ocean painting the pine needles with salt.
Two chameleons beneath the porch light: they know that moths will come if they wait, so they wait.
The limbs of the lemon tree, once bright with flowers, are heavy with infant lemons, nuptial fruit amid the thorns.
Staring into the yard he remembers, for no good reason, a story he heard the day before.
Someone had brought silver glitter to the birthday party. They tossed it into the air on the pool deck and it was an exploding blossom and then it was a scattering of ashes and then it was everywhere, like grit, even the cake covered with it. Some worried that it might be toxic, others hoped it might serve as an antitoxin against the loneliness circulating in their bloodstream.
Either way, it was a celebration: they had no choice but to eat.
2.
Transformation, disintegration, entropy, loss,
fragments of song
carried from hotels along the ocean on a wind tasting of oysters, pine resin, and brine.
Feldspar and mullein, sprigs of parsley, days of ether in a field of wild rye under Russian skies, imperial figurines carved from antique elephant ivory, wave-worn seashells and old scarred plastics—the marble-hard artificiality of bowling balls hurled so long the bowling alley has become a tavern, then a Laundromat, then a pawnshop in a section of the city once up-and-coming now spiraling inexplicably into terminal destitution or postindustrial malaise, no one seems sure which, no one wants to risk a guess, t
here is no one even to ask on that street of silvery northern sunlight, amid the gutter-collected leaves of autumn.
How do you know where any path will lead, which rock the salamander hides beneath?
Everything vanishes, but where does it go?
Here is the flower seller with her cart, the policeman chewing gum, the spotted puppy, bees at the gates of nectar, slender branches castigated by wind. You can smell the lingering fragrance of flowers from the lemon tree but you cannot touch them—where are they now, in which index or chronicle is that precise configuration of atomic vibrations recorded—when the boyish policeman greets the flower girl as a bumblebee alights on a bloodred chrysanthemum—that instant erased like steam from a mirror?
Not to resolve the conflicts, not to reconcile the narratives: set down the questions, side by side, and do not fear.
Before dawn the wind calms, the fog begins to lift.
Now the deep calculus of words surrounds him and he loses his way, as one awakening to find there is no door in the wall he stumbles against in the darkness, willing his dream to overmaster the reality of a long-familiar room.
My Estate
The meanings I make inevitably make me.
As of chalk or apricots, of nouns and verbs.
The meanings I forsake cascade to the sea
in floods, in spasms. As the commonwealth of words
enfranchises its constituents in perpetuity,
so the interpreted world remains a diamond mine,
a cornucopia of semiotic superfluity.
Of gems, then. And stone fruit. And slant rhyme.
Releasing the Sherpas
The last two sherpas were the strongest,
faithful companions, their faces wind-peeled,
streaked with soot and glacier-light on the snowfield
below the summit where we stopped to rest.
The first was my body, snug in its cap of lynx
fur, smelling of yak butter and fine mineral dirt,
agile, impetuous, broad-shouldered,
alive to the frozen bite of oxygen in the larynx.
The second was my intellect, dour and thirsty,
furrowing its fox-like brow, my calculating brain
searching for some cairn or chasm to explain
my decision to send them back without me.
Looking down from the next, axe-cleft serac
I saw them turn and dwindle and felt unafraid.
Blind as a diamond, sun-pure and rarefied,
whatever I was then, there was no turning back.