taken from the top
of the bullet-notched ziggurat, each click
an exhibit of the I was here, desert cam
lost in silhouette against the level,
ochre panorama of sand.
Impagliato
(Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros briefly addresses the tiger shark from Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living)
I’ve been trying to get you
out of my mind, a rival to the crown
as art’s most iconic
image of an animal.
With a half-millennium
head start, I’ve preened on countless
woodcut prints, a cathedral door in Pisa,
a Medici emblem,
and still am featured on tourist T-shirts,
my splayed, unlikely toes
outside the British Museum.
It’s the same way
you’ve got presence, kid,
loitering in that cabinet,
injected with 5 percent formaldehyde,
your serrated grin
trademark to an appetite so wide
you’re nicknamed trash can
of the ocean for gulping tires,
oil-drum lids and licence plates.
Hirst raised such a royal fuss.
Outrage hooked the media as neat
as the gaff that hooked you
off Australia, cultural status landed
by all that commission money.
Dürer never saw a real rhino;
I’m his vision of one they lost
en route to Rome
as a showpiece in the pope’s menagerie.
A storm sucked the ship down,
the trapped beast
shackled to the deck.
The artist played the facts a little
fast and loose, sketched my hide
in absentia with scales and plates,
mounted a stunted horn
on my riveted nape
like a hairy twist of ice cream.
Hardly accurate, but it shocked the crowd,
half the battle in making a name.
I guess raw profit’s why
the master from Nuremburg
wrought a woodcut,
not a painting, guessing sales
from copies wouldn’t be outcharted
until the advent of Farrah
Fawcett. And to compensate
for investors’ losses
when the carcass washed up
against the Ligurian coast,
they put it on display
‘stuffed with straw.’
Talk
I thought I’d see you at one
of the shows this summer. If so,
talk might have gone in a million
directions, and been awkward, as we’d likely
keep it small, complaining of the lineups
at the beer tent, then finding
a break in the crowd to slip away.
Talk was never our problem;
all those late-night think-tanks
after closing the bar, cooking up
subtleties on invented games,
rules to ‘Quick Drinks’
or ‘Etch-a-Sketch Portraits.’
Though most talk was art – what might
be good and where to find it –
while we watched the floor dry,
squashed in the booth
with the lights turned low.
I know you,
so was less and less surprised
when you sidestepped
issues people tried to raise,
and worse, twisted them
into betrayal by your stubborn,
bottled-up imagination. They
were trying to show they cared
even while you bulldozed into rooms,
grim as a defeated army.
Meanwhile, work is work,
late home, five hours sleep,
coffee, then a nap. You’ve missed
a birth or two, the filled and emptied diapers
of friends’ burping offspring,
and I’ve moved, so if you ever
picture me, I don’t know where.
Mostly, when I think of you, I see
you angry and mistaken.
Almost daily, I bike past
your old studio
and the re-rented house,
rooms where our unsuspecting ghosts
still drink and smoke, contra Yeats,
imperfect on every count.
Silkworms
Home-grown for extra income,
they’re warmed in the watts
of a standard light bulb
till the egg forms a worm, small
like a hair. Each one feasts
on mulberry, a month-long course
of shiny leaves, chubbing themselves
into a pale, lazy wiggle.
They wish to be a kimono cloud,
ball of fog, white
shrouds spun for their own ghosts
as they nod off to a creaking dream
of legs and wings. They wish
they were metaphor.
To let them stretch would tear
sleek work, so each cocoon
is dropped in a rolling boil, their
lives pinched out like fingers
on a match head.
The strands are reeled on a row
of spools,
and the cocoons jig and iridesce
until the corpse is undressed.
‘There’s Where the American Helicopters Landed’
Sixtyish, wrinkled, Ling Quang’s hard look
lifts from the gravel where we’ve stopped,
the Honda’s kickstand staked
to the road’s thin shoulder,
our helmets laid like eggs on the leather seat.
He points at the place
near the silk factory where
the craters are almost overgrown,
green tangles scanned
through his knock-off Ray-Bans.
On the bike, I forget to lean
through curves, tires
eating the steep grade back to town,
past the bridge again
where a man stands fishing,
nylon net like a smudge of mist
that skims his catch from the creek,
their fins struggling in the killing air.
End Times
In the tangled field, our boots catch.
Barns wedged in thick weeds
are beached container ships
wrought in rusted brick, dust, rot whiff
of hay bales. A black stork
rigs straw on a transmission post
that sags with dead wire.
A wolf curls on a park bench,
sneers through cleft lips.
There’s a trace of skew
in the oak leaves’ lost symmetry.
The pond is hummingbird green.
•
The car’s waved through; a triangle
signs the split where we yield
to nothing but silence. On the bridge,
corroded guardrails
fence the phantom view
of burning graphite.
Eleven flagpoles spoke
the drive at the only hotel.
The air rings, metal
lashed by slack chains.
Pine and spruce glut the playground,
split the ball court, sprout roots
in lobbies and rooftop gravel.
School floorboards
warp and rake. The pool
fills with ceiling tiles
and flaking paint.
•
There are many of us here. A whole street.
They went off just as they were, in their shirt sleeves.
Around it, burdock, stinging-nettle, and goose-foot.
I’m not supposed to be talking a
bout this.
Everywhere we used shovels.
Get rid of the topsoil to the depth of one spade.
Changing our masks up to thirty times a shift.
I would see roes and wild boars. They were thin and sleepy,
like they were moving in slow motion.
Something glistened.
It came off in layers – as white film … the colour of his face.
There it was – and there it wasn’t.
Safer than samovars.
What we saw.
The wind blows the dust from one field to the next.
Dresses, boots, chairs, harmonicas, sewing machines. We buried it
in ditches. Houses and trees, we buried everything.
There lie thousands of dogs, cats, horses, that were shot. And not
a single name. What remains of ancient Greece?
The myths of ancient Greece.
On the one hand, it’s disgusting, and on the other hand – why don’t you
all go fuck yourselves?
We heard that something had happened somewhere.
So you can picture it: a lead vest, masks, the wheelbarrows
and insane speed.
The ants are crawling along the tree branch.
‘In several generations’
‘Forever’
‘Nothing’
They brought me the urn. I felt around with my hand,
and there was something tiny, like seashells in the sand,
those were his hip bones.
Everyone became what he really was.
‘Walking ashes.’
When I got here, the birds were in their nests, and when I left
the apples were lying in the snow.
That was the worst. All around, it was just beautiful.
I would never see such people again. Everyone’s faces
just looked crazy. Their faces did, and so did ours.
We buried the forest.
We buried the earth.
We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces
and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves.
They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it.
You can imagine how much philosophy there was.
I felt like I was recording the future.
We’re its victims, but also its priests.
When I die, sell the car and the spare tire, and don’t marry Tolik.
You should come into this world on your tiptoes, and stop at the entrance.
This person will be happy just to find one human footprint.
•
There’s a fecund smell,
grenadine sweet,
remnants of mutant hemlock,
chestnut and wildflowers,
or it could be
cotton candy.
The Fun Fair rusts.
Stark as a double helix
of DNA, unused scaffolds
of the Tilt-A-Whirl
lean and shriek
in the refrigerated calm.
•
I don’t know what I should talk about –
A ruined building, a field of debris;
I’ll remember everything for you.
Sing Song
One day all those kittens and pups
we drowned in a sack
will come crawling back.
They’ll drag up shit
from L.A. to the Moscow underground.
They’ll claw through our exhaust,
oil and grease
that’s decanted into sewer grates
by generations of squeegee kids.
Their scratches will resound
like some turntablist’s retro stack
that doo-langs
as it’s tipped from a milk crate.
They won’t be fucking around.
They’ll hunt us down.
They’ll get a fix and calibrate
like the Hubble’s squint staring in,
one eye a plaster cast
from Pompeii, the other in decay
like Chernobyl.
They’ll raise a din,
their yips like drone strikes, their howls
a martyr’s mother on CNN,
their meows the opinionated crap
we generated in chatrooms
so easily after the fact. Just you wait.
They’re no Mutt and Jeff.
On their tags there’s WTO and IMF
engraved in gold. And when we’re found
on the business end of their GPS,
they’ll say, ‘Did you really think
you’d give our sins the slip
by filling up some burlap
and tipping us in the drink?’
They’re coming around, crammed
up the yingyang
with talking points and spreadsheets
on every bailout,
g8 summit, profit bonus
and offshore bank we ever had.
Doo-lang, doo-lang.
How I Wrote
You must change your life, but first,
from castle to château for a decade before
his internal mood ring shifted to purple
and signalled the muse. He finessed this later
as creative possession: an impulse so focused
he’s said to forget the time of day,
though Wikipedia claims he never missed
a meal at Duino. Big deal. Whatever
it was, he could direct the spirit’s surges
and knew how to work a crowd in its wake.
Imagine him on Facebook. LOL.
Precious, yes, but how not to be
when you’re born in Prague and write
about angels. In any case, you won’t catch me
mooning along parapets and sea walls;
not because I wouldn’t, but so far
there’ve been no offers. I booked a week
at Banff in a forest studio,
ate scones, startled a ground squirrel,
kept forgetting to bring a jacket,
and one night heard blues harmonica
drift from the aboriginal arts lodge nearby.
I texted a friend who’s Ojibwa. WTF?
He wrote back ‘Why don’t you go
over there and ask them what they’ve got
to be blue about?’ Touché.
So I managed some edits, and through
the skylight watched yellow leaves
parachute the branched heights to amass
as ground cover. No thought-fox
raised its rusty snout, or gifted prints
across the page, though a few fingers
of cask-strength Scotch made
the waiting a little easier. Paradox:
to be perfectly here, you must
stop thinking about it, then it’s on.
Most days I leaf around trying to sidle
out of the peripheral sight of myself,
so when I focus again, I might
be astonished, do something real, feel
like Jarrett at Köln, overtired
and saddled with the wrong piano,
forced to work the corners we get
backed into. It might be a thunderbolt,
but mostly a mule I keep thinking of
when I picture myself in the grind between
the start of some work and its end result,
but like an apprentice before the koan,
I’m afflicted by the absent revelation,
never sure if it’s better to change the light bulb
or stare into the dark.
Memento Mori
A mariachi band has just begun;
the cantinero muddles lime, ice and mint.
Is it industry, folly or perverse fun
to lounge here, behind my glasses’ darkly tint,
reading elegies in the sun?
Charles ‘Old Hoss’ Radbourn, 1886
(Boston Beaneaters)
Crouched in the back, the official team
portrait, his gesture above a teammate’s shoulder:
who is he giving the finger to?
Players, those fielders from New York
maybe, who taunt their league rivals with snorts,
bored with delay in the April
dugouts while waiting to pose for their own team
photo. Or maybe it’s Radbourn’s
scorn for these ‘pictures’ that’s lifted his digit so
snidely, irate at the tripod and bellows
holding the game from its opening pitch. Or
managers maybe, or press who reported drunken
brawls and philandering.
Maybe it’s time with a capital T that faces Radbourn’s
finger, a signal he’s sent from his age to ours,
showing he knows we’re all stuck in a world
made by palookas who dream the fast buck while
playing each other for suckers,
so why not break the measure this once
just to say Fuck You
and So What, it might be the only
thing that’s left worth doing,
the only thing we’re any good for
in this unexamined life.
Fruit Fly
So slight, no weight, a non-bug,
it wafts past
like an ash flake bobs
above a bonfire’s heat,
its shape
an ephemeral asterisk.
Do fruit flies ever die of old age?
At what moment are they living
and then they’re dead?
The only times I’ve seen them die