nobody showing up for months,
mother drunk under the vines,
redstart and bobolink, lover
of hayfields and grasslands,
oriole hardly ever away
from the nest, mass migrations
of blackbirds and other seed eaters,
songbirds, all gone from here.
The Casing
For years I sat in bars lying about everything,
concealing my limp, offering vinyl
suitcases for sale and proposing to women
who’d overlooked themselves. I gave away
folding tables and threatened
species like lopsided turtles and misused
harness bulls. I wasn’t as speedy as I claimed to be
or as galled by those without
a purpose in life. I sold three-day
vacations to resorts that existed
only in my mind. I liked to watch the breeze
take leafy boughs in hand.
The limits to man’s ability
to reach the stars were no problem for me.
I sank my nose in foreign papers
looking for tiny lots I might build
my dream house on. I said I owned
hotels and racks for smoking arctic char.
I claimed to notice something burning
in the kitchen. A leaf seemed at times to urge
a change in plans. Probably the winds
were coming from the other quadrant. I gave away
my watch and told the time by the degradation
of building materials. I spelled the stuporized.
The sun, an old friend, eased
onto the brickyard wall. I sensed an era
drawing to a close. Something told me,
so I said, to gather my things. Smoothed-
over ideas, frets, a capacity for change
unremarked by others, a boarding house
menu I used for a text, my bindle, palpebral musings,
a burial suit of lights
and a jar of brandied apricots—all these
I said I’d send a van back for and never did.
No Nonsense
split off for a sec
I thought I might say something
truthful
but couldn’t come up with it
and lingered in the rosy twilight
unpacking an old suitcase
I found under the stairs
sometimes I stay as still
as possible and tell myself
a limitless vista’s
opening up when it’s not
the rain pounded madly on the roof
afterwards we
sat on the porch shelling
peas and quoting scripture
the birds in the melaleuca trees
seemed tired
the sky
reopened like a grocery store
on a desert road
I came
away from myself
unstuck
and a sort of translucent
orderliness
like a small herd of gazelles
entered my mind
RAW EARTH
The Layout
Morning, knocked off the blocks, de-amplified
and clamped to daylight, the forests showing off their skinny bones
and the winterized animals brisk and shoveling messy leavings
down their gullets, the brandished bits in your mind like a vacation
in the tropics where at the cathedral the inventor of equipoise
loses his balance and falls flat. The damage is done. Carpenters
and light-fingered apprentices on their way to the arena, the careful
planning that’s supposed to make the lamps come on at the sound
of eagles screaming, these placements detailing frostbite
in the mountains might mean we’ll be back in the loggias
and fruit stands of our youth, someday. The gimmies, the shucked
superlatives like hosed-down relatives, the way she got on with it
after the tragedy, these secernate jump starts—
we get out early most days, wreathed in spumescence,
the basic compilations of a destiny transformed as we speak
into a vagueness of aspect like a murky rinderpest and invitation
to a crab boil on the beach. We escaped easily
the attitudinal ambiguities and hooted from the porch
at the passing armies. Bravery is after all a known quantity.
The getalong ways, conversationalists offering their cut rates
and specialized phrasing, the details of the fire traced with a blackened
finger on a placemat. It gets impractical you might say to go on.
Ithika
private disputes in the sweet apple
trees and a certitude
attested to by loquats and the hard-shell baptist
spiders
collecting rents
the way you look at me after you knock me
silly with kisses
and what’s up with the elementals I say
the dog
lurks in the cabana like Ulysses
shadowing his old lady
the calculations
fixing the tide
and the inexpressible surrounding the fort
these particulars
left over
when we boiled the affidavits
add up
to the spitting image
of true north
she says
covering her left eye with the hand
holding the deed
to the trailer
and a crushed floral tribute
and suppose—she says—
my typical effervescence was replaced
by an obscurity
heretofore unmentioned in the ranks
and the mock
voyage
turnd out
to be the voyage.
Stuff Your Cries into the Hamper and Hitch Up
Where the grass touches me I tremble
and phone Sister Mary Celeste
who’s breaking the hearts of weeds in a garden
like a battlefield, who says
“This modification, these tremors, my cross-eyed soul—
You get me, don’t you?”—and pretends
trucks are carrying her victuals away
and hangs up. This morning I woke to rain
spattered on the screen and silence along the rooftops
where on clear days you hear the starlings
preparing themselves for the inevitable. In the park
weeds writhe,
bolting already, and women,
clarified and promising themselves they’ll not be misled,
plus hawks, cranks, the fretful men at the edges
scared they’ll be picked off, the absolute courage
of anyone who hangs on until the end,
all add up, the point blank cavalcade you might say,
and pick up
where you left off last year, humming
or cursing under your breath, the small time gangsters of rectification
chipping away at their cells, the scars
right under your feet that the dust pats back into place,
proof of an ongoing perfection, and it’s been like this all day.
ASSISTED LIVING
September Flowers
we grow slightly tired of the reconstructive
lantana circles benday dots
and raster of echinacea daisies crowding the scene
dwarf maples
waving their brown used
tissues and the silver grasses that keep on fiddling
with the wind and the crepe
myrtles check their weapons at the door
and goldenrod and mocking asters
quiver slightly
and the sof
t-hearted
birches still climbing the mountain
of their interest
issue statements that so far
mean little and the morning glories
roll their soft blue
hips and the telltale secretly
crushed
hearts of loosestrife lobelia and hosta
dash off
letters they’ll never send
and gladioli speak frankly to the breeze
about what it means to be
alive and hushed up
in the dark and in the september crowd
get lost as fall sinks the last cuts
in summer’s fancy
life in cool water like a suicide
going down for the count.
Permission to Emigrate
The light leans gracefully into oaks and whatever was about to stop: stops.
But nothing does. The whole rheotropism pushes
on as if that’s just fine, perfect, the explanatory
events canceled probably . . .
though this isn’t bad . . . and the little variances
in which we stay a while in Yuma or Santa Fe . . . important to everyone, you notice,
not us . . .
the soft mornings
when we wake from an old bony sleep and wander around thinking of the great odes—
all this replicated in moments when the agony lets up
temporarily and whoever that was at the door
stops knocking and . . . you can tell . . .
just stands there . . .
maybe thinking of a girl in Omaha. How would we know? This the secret
of course:
the mind,
if it’s the mind, refreshed by interception
of the composed and quickening universe . . . possible yet:
streets of Laredo, you say . . . and a feeling of plenty, like someone cornered . . .
still kind.
And so you go
on, like Schopenhauer,
temporarily free of indigestible self concern,
ratty cravings and such. Though nothing’s being gathered . . . really . . .
or put aside. We’re making it up: and using it as we go.
On the Whole
forced labor by now it seems for
ratty flowers, the few
wobbly
bees still at it, birches,
thinly dressed
myrtles, a wiry plant
tricked out in tiny
blooms
like red tear drops,
the whole outfit
stuck
with it,
every space shuttered,
self
untethered
gasping,
curdled yellow leaves
on the lawn,
each separation and elementary
episode
only a new version
of the same
ensemble, so
they say, but what about
these flowers, bristles, soft
pinks of mimosa,
gold crowns scattered in the lantana,
time, etc.,
not sleepy,
but enflamed at the edge of the hill,
glaring
as the sun carries
its red dog home.
Slumberland
down in slumberland the coldly available cattle bosses
get together, like the staff in a cheap hotel
for travelers blown in off the rainy desert says the old timer,
the blast of wind pounding the backs of downbeat ladies
and gents each with his own dead-bird smell,
the drainage a little off, thin tubes taped to their sides,
the bosses offering no explanation of why after living in this world without
a single desire to leave the scene we are thrown one day
into a box and shoveled into the swampy dark
to lie with dirt in our mouths for eternity says the old timer,
pulling a pistol-shaped lighter
from his coat made of bulldog hair. it’s slumberland out in the sticks,
the bill of cunning manufacture’s arrived, the astonishing
complicity with almost everything to hold on he says,
to the last breath, like small
town waiters with greasy hands who never returned your change,
even sadness faltering, the ring fingers of old women
deeply gouged . . .
TRAMWAY
Genuine Risk
Troubles like a set of webbed yellow duck feet
in the Chinese butcher shop,
emails printed out from my old lover
speaking of life in the coalfields, heaps of char
and chunks of substance everything useful’s extracted from—
nothing left at the end but piles of gray pocked
matter in brown rainwater puddles,
this way I have about now, I say,
of remembering the worn out flopped over
daffodils in soaked mountain fields
and the heavy bodies of old draft horses,
the bunched uselessness of their muscles
as they stand in the impound
awaiting slaughter, in these circumstances you can bring up
almost anything, she says, the badgering,
the infirmities of your parents,
the old man yelling
with a panicked, penetrating feebleness
as the sky darkened
under the coming cyclone, I say, and the palm fronds
clattering and shaking suddenly hard
as a woman will shake her long wet hair, she says,
disturbed and hating the argument,
the cold quiet sureness
after that when there’s a flatness in her eyes
as she looks at you
and you know nothing can be the same again, I say.
Backseat in Kinshasa
a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hills
or someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a cold
lobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrase
that explains everything and then you’re revoking
yesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattan
or you’ve just changed the name of your dreamboat and it’s time
for your pills or it’s time for a check-in with the vastness
and the preacher is crying over the dappled gray running last
in the fourth at pimlico and the bomb removal squad is just leaving
your apartment or you are unable to drop the loose talk outside
filene’s basement or spring is nowhere near this town
and the operators all reach home at the same time and you understand
everything means something else and weren’t told that cabbage roses
went out of style or the proceeds from the caper long ago were lost
No Claim
A tense obligato, the light comes up out of a shallow grave.
It was only resting. Sulphur butterflies, taking a holiday
in the garden, one in shades of yellow and orange, the other
the same plus chestnut spots, drift above
white-faced mallows, giving a sense of softness, richness
to the situation, paralleling the stinks and murder
poking up everywhere, each an elaboration of presence, minus
idea and will, the soul, we think, something like this,
gliding through the somatological world, airy, when maybe it’s not,
maybe just an overweight bumbler, clumsy sporting-goods salesman
of the spirit, slumped by the road in a used Eldorado with
the window down, sweating in the dog-day heat, one we pass
irritably, exhumaceously by
, as we hurry to the rendezvous.
FLEURETTE AMÉRICAINE
Issues with a Right-Hand Turn
Sometimes I’m issued a new head
and the old one drops
off and then I see the new one isn’t new
it’s a used
head, sometimes a bit moldy
or flushed
with rage, this head
filled with notes on what is wrong with the world
or carrying a list
of expendables or groceries
a head that remembers sunset casting
a golden shine
into the wheat
or the painting of a pig on a dinner plate,
or once I got
a head filled with memories
of snowy nights
when she dared me to love her, but I couldn’t
speak the part
and had to set this head down
beside the road
and go on for the rest of that episode
headless, heedless,
one you couldn’t hang for his crimes
if you wanted to.
This Far’ll Do
the coast along here smells
like a rusty washing
machine still in use. the sudsy
clouds are in on this. the sharks and flounders
know what’s going on.
old plaques and busted dance floors
teeter among brushy
trash. discolored boilers filled with
bullet holes rest