Broken column, muddled
Inscription back when
Only half up, half done.
Now only the ruins are left,
A wall some bricks suggest,
A doorway into nothing,
Last year’s scaffolding.
By design the eye is drawn
To something undergone.
A single carving remains
The plunder never claimed,
And no memories of guilt
Can wear upon or thrill
This scarred relief of a man
And woman whom love will strand,
Their faces worn away,
Their heartache underplayed,
Just turning as if to find
Something to put behind
Them, an emptiness
Of uncarved rock, an excess
Of sharp corrosive doubt.
•
Now everything’s left out
To rain and wind and star,
Nature’s repertoire
Of indifference or gloom.
This French blue afternoon,
For instance, how easily
The light falls on debris,
How calmly the valley awaits
Whatever tonight frustrates,
How quickly the small creatures
Scurry from the sunlight’s slur,
How closely it all comes to seem
Like details on the table between
Us at dinner yesterday,
Our slab of sandstone laid
With emblems for a meal.
Knife and fork. A deal.
Thistle-prick. Hollow bone.
The olive’s flesh and stone.
JIHAD
A contrail’s white scimitar unsheathes
Above the tufts of anti-aircraft fire.
Before the mullah’s drill on righteousness,
Practice rocks are hurled at chicken-wire
Dummies of tanks with silhouetted infidels
Defending the nothing both sides fight over
In God’s name, a last idolatry
Of boundaries. The sirens sound: take cover.
He has forced the night and day, the sun and moon,
Into your service. By His leave, the stars
Will shine to light the path that He has set
You to walk upon. His mercy will let
You slay who would blaspheme or from afar
Defile His lands. Glory is yours, oh soon.
•
Of the heart. Of the tongue. Of the sword. The holy war
Is waged against the self at first, to raze
The ziggurat of sin we climb upon
To view ourselves, and next against that glaze
The enemies of faith will use to disguise
Their words. Only then, and at the caliph’s nod,
Are believers called to drown in blood the people
Of an earlier book. There is no god but God.
He knows the day of death and sees how men
Will hide. Who breaks His covenant is cursed.
Who slights His revelations will live in fire.
He has cast aside the schemer and the liar
Who mistake their emptiness of heart for a thirst
That, to slake, the streams of justice descend.
•
Ski-masked on videotape, the skinny martyr
Reads his manifesto. He’s stilted, nervous.
An hour later, he’s dropped at the market town,
Pays his fare, and climbs aboard the bus.
Strapped to his chest is the death of thirty-four
—Plus his own—“civilians” on their way
To buy or sell what goods they claim are theirs,
Unlike our fates, which are not ours to say.
Under the shade of swords lies paradise.
Whom you love are saved with you, their souls
In His hand. And who would want to return to life
Except to be killed again? Who can thrive
On the poverty of this world, its husks and holes?
His wisdom watches for each sacrifice.
ORCHID
Now that you are gone, you are everywhere.
Take this orchid, for instance,
its swollen lip, the scrawny stalk’s one
descended testicle
as wrinkled as rhetoric on the bar-scene stump,
jingling in its purse. How else signal the bee?
In my swan-clip now languish urgent appeals
from the usual charities
lined up to be ignored. But your flags are up:
I see the flapping petals,
the whorl of sepals, their grinning come-on.
Always game, again
I’d head straight for the column’s sweet trap.
Ducking under the puckered anther cap
to glide toward the stiff,
waxy sense of things, where male and female
hardly matter to one’s heady
urge to pull back the glistening lobes
and penetrate the heart,
I fell for it every time, the sticky bead
laid down on my back as I huddled there
with whatever—mimicking
enemy or friend, the molecular musk
of each a triggering lure—
wanted the most of me. Can I leave now too?
I have death’s dust-seed
on me. I have it from touching you.
CANCER
1.
And then a long senescent cell—though why,
Who knows?—will suddenly refuse to stay
In line, the bucket brigade of proteins meant
To slow or stimulate the tissue’s growth
Will stumble, so the cells proliferate
And tumors form while, deep within,
Suppressor genes, mutated, overlook
The widening fault, the manic drive to choke
On itself that fairy tales allot the gnome
Who vainly hammers the broken sword in his cave,
Where malignant cells are shed into the blood
Or lymph, cascading through the body’s streams,
Attaching themselves to places where we breathe
And love and think of what cannot be true.
2.
It is as if, the stench intensified
And strong or weak alike now swept away,
The plague in Athens hurried its descent
By fear, a symptom leaving the stricken loath
To fight for life who had defied the great
Spartan ranks themselves, the sight of skin
Inflamed, the thirst, the dripping anus took
Hold of them until, in tears, they broke.
The dead in piles around them, a hecatomb
To gods who, like those mongrel dogs who crave
A corpse they drag to safety through the mud
To feast upon, had disappeared, their dreams,
According to Thucydides, seethed
With images of forsaken, drowning crews.
3.
She had lost the bet, and in her sunken eyes
The birthday she had over and over prayed
To die before was offered like a present.
(Dressed in a party hat, I sat with both
My parents by the bed.) A toast was made.
Through the pleated, angled straw she took in
A burning mouthful of champagne, and rebuked
Her son-in-law for his expensive joke,
Drawing, hairless, an imaginary comb
Through memories of what pleasure anger gave,
Then smiled, “I’d stop all this if only I could.”
Even at ten I sensed that she had seen,
Staring at me, what would be bequeathed.
My mother slowly closed her eyes. We knew.
PENIS
Years of sneaking sidelong glances toward the o
ne
At the next urinal’s gaping mouth—
Between classes, between buses, between acts,
In dorm or disco, rest stop or Ritz—
Assemble them now in a sort of line-up:
Bald, one-eyed, red-faced, shifty suspects,
Each generic, all so individual—
Hooded, lumpish, ropy, upcurving,
Anchovy or shark, the three-inch alley cat
Or blood-choked panther whose last droplet,
Back-lit by porcelain, is wagged free to fly
In a bright sterile arc, its reversed
Meniscus shattered by the soon swirling flush.
But that slice-of-life in the Men’s Room
In retrospect seems an idle pantomime,
Old desires or anxieties
Projected onto a stranger’s handful
Of gristle, the shadowy dumb show
Our schoolroom puppets once swooped and wiggled through
Back when any sense of difference
Posed as curiosity’s artless cut-outs.
Only years later was I haunted
By a premonition of something I thought
I didn’t have, or have enough of
—Poor Punch, fingered, limp, flung back into his case.
•
Who knows what early memories are redeemed,
What primitive rites re-enacted,
By our masculine version of mother-love?
What daily unconscious tenderness
Is lavished here, such fastidious grooming
Rituals for the wrinkled baby
Capuchin. Each man’s member every morning
May be gingerly held and jiggled
Inside his Jockey shorts or lazily scratched
Through silk pajamas—in any case,
Fondled, its crimpled, sweat-sticky, fetid skin
Lifted off the scrotal water-bed
And hand-dried as if in a tumbler of air.
Later, tucked behind the clerk’s apron
Or the financier’s pinstripes or the rapper’s
Baggy jeans, our meek little Clark Kent
Daydreams at his desk of last night’s heroics,
Hounded by a double life blackmailed
By grainy color shots of summer-cabin
Or backseat exploits that had won praise
From their pliant, cooing co-conspirators.
But now, absently readjusted,
As if fresh from cold surf, his ideal is just
The bud of classic statuary.
The marble is hard, the soulful cub withdrawn.
•
So, the old questions linger on unanswered.
Why in the fables on Greek kraters
Do those of the ephebes always stick straight out?
Why is it the last part of a man’s
Body to age? Though function may no longer
Follow form, its chthonic shaft and crown
Retain maturity’s rugged majesty.
What Ovid might once have figured out
As a shepherd who’d struck a king in disguise,
Or Plato have thought in an aside
The haphazard tail of white in the pot where
His abstract egg was hard-boiling into halves
Soon in search of some way to resume the shell
Of an identical privacy,
Scientists today measure as Anyman’s
Lowest common denominator,
A demonic’s tutorial in the means
Of his being manipulated
By unpredictable powers far beyond
His knowing but not his sad sensing.
Do I wish my own rose at will, and stayed put,
And was just, say, two inches longer?
Sure. So who doesn’t think he’s inherited
An apartment too small for his plans?
Do I cancel the party, or gamely shrug?
•
“But why,” Jane asks, “is something silly at best
And objectively ugly at worst
The focus of so much infatuation?”
Cults thrive on cloying contradictions.
Shrewd and aloof, women are thought to enjoy
What it does, the petulant master
They devour, or the wheedling spongy slave
They finally love to rub the wrong way.
And men? Men! Men are known to appreciate
What it stands for. History books have this
In common with off-the-rack pulp romances.
Small men with big ones, big men with small,
Lead lives of quiet compensation, power
Surging up from or meekly mizzling
Down to the trouser snake in their paradise.
If love’s the religion with the god
That fails, is it because blood goes to his head?
No, it’s that after the night’s tom-toms
And fire-dances are over and he’s sulking
In his shrine, sadness beats him hollow.
Asked by nagging reporters once too often
Why, despite the count of body bags,
We were in Vietnam, LBJ unzipped
His fly and slapped it on the table.
“Gentlemen, this is why,” he barked. “This is why.”
TATTOOS
1.
Chicago, 1969
Three boots from Great Lakes stumble arm-in-arm
Past the hookers
And winos on South State
To a tat shack. Pissed on mai tais, what harm
Could come from the bright slate
Of flashes on the scratcher’s corridor
Wall, or the swagger of esprit de corps?
Tom, the freckled Hoosier farmboy, speaks up
And shyly points
To a four-inch eagle
High over the Stars and Stripes at sunup.
A stormy upheaval
Inside—a seething felt first in the groin—
Then shoves its stubby subconscious gunpoint
Into the back of his mind. The eagle’s beak
Grips a banner
Waiting for someone’s name.
Tom mumbles that he’d like the space to read
FELIX, for his small-framed
Latino bunkmate with the quick temper.
Felix hears his name and starts to stammer—
He’s standing there beside Tom—then all three
Nervously laugh
Out loud, and the stencil
Is taped to Tom’s chest. The needle’s low-key
Buzzing fusses until,
Oozing rills of blood like a polygraph’s
Lines, there’s a scene that for years won’t come off.
Across the room, facedown on his own cot,
Stripped to the waist,
Felix wants Jesus Christ
Crucified on his shoulder blade, but not
The heartbroken, thorn-spliced
Redeemer of punk East Harlem jailbait.
He wants light streaming from the wounds, a face
Staring right back at those who’ve betrayed him,
Confident, strong,
With a dark blue crewcut.
Twelve shading needles work around the rim
Of a halo, bloodshot
But lustrous, whose pain is meant to prolong
His sudden resolve to fix what’s been wrong.
(Six months later, a swab in Vietnam,
He won’t have time
To notice what’s been inked
At night onto the sky’s open hand—palms
Crawling with Cong. He blinks.
Bullets slam into him. He tries to climb
A wooden cross that roses now entwine.)
And last, the bookish, acned college grad
From Tucson, Steve,
Who’s downed an extra pint
Of cut-price rye and, misquoting Conrad
On the fate of the mind,
Asks loudly for the whole
nine yards, a “sleeve,”
An arm’s-length pattern of motives that weave
And eddy around shoals of muscle or bone.
Back home he’d signed
On for a Navy hitch
Because he’d never seen what he’s since grown
To need, an ocean which …
But by now he’s passed out, and left its design
To the old man, whose eyes narrow, then shine.
By dawn, he’s done. By dawn, the others too
Have paid and gone.
Propped on a tabletop,
Steve’s grappling with a hangover’s thumbscrew.
The bandages feel hot.
The old man’s asleep in a chair. Steve yawns
And makes his way back, shielded by clip-ons.
In a week he’ll unwrap himself. His wrist,
A scalloped reef,
Could flick an undertow
Up through the tangled swash of glaucous cyst
And tendon kelp below
A vaccination scallop’s anchored seaweed,
The swelling billow his bicep could heave
For twin dolphins to ride toward his shoulder’s
Coppery cliffs
Until the waves, all flecked
With a glistening spume, climb the collar-
Bone and break on his neck.
When he raises his arm, the tide’s adrift
With his dreams, all his watery what-ifs,
And ebbs back down under the sheet, the past,
The uniform.
His skin now seems colder.
The surface of the world, he thinks, is glass,
And the body’s older,
Beckoning life shines up at us transformed
At times, moonlit, colorfast, waterborne.
2.
Figuring out the body starts with the skin,
Its boundary, its edgy go-between,
The scarred, outspoken witness at its trials,
The monitor of its memories,
Pleasure’s flushed archivist and death’s pale herald.
But skin is general-issue, a blank
Identity card until it’s been filled in
Or covered up, in some way disguised
To set us apart from the beasts, whose aspects