Are given, not chosen, and the gods
Whose repertoire of change—from shower of gold
To carpenter’s son—is limited.
We need above all to distinguish ourselves
From one another, and ornament
Is particularity, elevating
By the latest bit of finery,
Pain, wardrobe, extravagance, or privation
Each above the common human herd.
The panniered skirt, dicky, ruff, and powdered wig,
Beauty mole, Mohawk, or nipple ring,
The pencilled eyebrow above Fortuny pleats,
The homeless addict’s stolen parka,
Facelift, mukluk, ponytail, fez, dirndl, ascot,
The starlet’s lucite stiletto heels,
The billboard model with his briefs at half-mast,
The geisha’s obi, the gigolo’s
Espadrilles, the war widow’s décolletage …
Any arrangement elaborates
A desire to mask that part of the world
One’s body is. Nostalgia no more
Than anarchy laces up the secondhand
Myths we dress our well-fingered goods in.
Better still perhaps to change the body’s shape
With rings to elongate the neck, shoes
To bind the feet, lead plates wrapped to budding breasts,
The sadhu’s penis-weights and plasters,
The oiled, pumped-up torsos at Muscle Beach,
Or corsets cinched so tightly the ribs
Protrude like a smug, rutting pouter pigeon’s.
They serve to remind us we are not
Our own bodies but anagrams of their flesh,
And pain not a feeling but a thought.
But best of all, so say fellow travellers
In the fetish clan, is the tattoo,
Because not merely molded or worn awhile
But exuded from the body’s sense
Of itself, the story of its conjuring
A means defiantly to round on
Death’s insufferably endless emptiness.
If cavemen smeared their bones with ochre,
The color of blood and first symbol of life,
Then peoples ever since—Egyptian
Priestesses, Mayan chieftains, woady Druids,
Scythian nomads and Hebrew slaves,
Praetorian guards and kabuki actors,
Hells Angels, pilgrims, monks, and convicts—
Have marked themselves or been forcibly branded
To signify that they are members
Of a group apart, usually above
But often below the rest of us.
The instruments come effortlessly to hand:
Fish bone, razor blade, bamboo sliver,
Thorn, glass, shell shard, nail, or electric needle.
The canvas is pierced, the lines are drawn,
The colors suffuse a pattern of desire.
The Eskimos pull a charcoaled string
Beneath the skin, and seadogs used to cover
The art with gunpowder and set fire
To it. The explosion drove the colors in.
Teddy boys might use matchtip sulphur
Or caked shoe polish mashed with spit. In Thailand
The indigo was once a gecko.
In mall parlors here, India ink and tabs
Of pigment cut with grain alcohol
Patch together tribal grids, vows, fantasies,
Frescoes, planetary signs, pinups,
Rock idols, bar codes, all the insignia
Of the brave face and the lonely heart.
The reasons are both remote and parallel.
The primitive impulse was to join,
The modern to detach oneself from, the world.
The hunter’s shadowy camouflage,
The pubescent girl’s fertility token,
The warrior’s lurid coat of mail,
The believer’s entrée to the afterlife—
The spiritual practicality
Of our ancestors remains a source of pride.
Yielding to sentimentality,
Later initiates seek to dramatize
Their jingoism, their Juliets
Or Romeos. They want to fix a moment,
Some port of call, a hot one-night-stand,
A rush of mother-love or Satan worship.
Superstition prompts the open eye
On the sailor’s lid, the fish on his ankle.
The biker makes a leather jacket
Of his soft beer belly and nail-bitten hands.
The call girl’s strategic butterfly
Or calla lily attracts and focuses
Her client’s interest and credit card.
But whether encoded or flaunted, there’s death
At the bottom of every tattoo.
The mark of Cain, the stigma to protect him
From the enemy he’d created,
Must have been a skull. Once incorporated,
Its spell is broken, its mortal grip
Loosened or laughed at or fearlessly faced down.
A Donald Duck with drooping forelock
And swastikas for eyes, the sci-fi dragon,
The amazon’s ogress, the mazy
Yin-yang dragnets, the spiders on barbed-wire webs,
The talismanic fangs and jesters,
Ankhs and salamanders, scorpions and dice,
All are meant to soothe the savage breast
Or back beneath whose dyed flesh there beats something
That will stop. Better never to be
Naked again than not disguise what time will
Press like a flower in its notebook,
Will score and splotch, rot, erode, and finish off.
Ugly heads are raised against our end.
If others are unnerved, why not death itself?
If unique, then why not immortal?
Protected by totem animals that perch
Or coil in strategic locations—
A lizard just behind the ear, a tiger’s
Fangs seeming to rip open the chest,
An eagle spreading its wings across the back—
The body at once both draws death down
And threatens its dominion. The pain endured
To thwart the greater pain is nothing
Next to the notion of nothingness.
Is that what I see in the mirror?
The vacancy of everything behind me,
The eye that now takes so little in,
The unmarked skin, the soul without privileges …
Everything’s exposed to no purpose.
The tears leave no trace of their grief on my face.
My gifts are never packaged, never
Teasingly postponed by the need to undo
The puzzled perfections of surface.
All over I am open to whatever
You may make of me, and death soon will,
Its unmarked grave the shape of things to come,
The page there was no time to write on.
3.
New Zealand, 1890
Because he was the chieftain’s eldest son
And so himself
Destined one day to rule,
The great meetinghouse was garishly strung
With smoked heads and armfuls
Of flax, the kiwi cloak, the lithograph
Of Queen Victoria, seated and stiff,
Oil lamps, the greenstone clubs and treasure box
Carved with demons
In polished attitudes
That held the tribal feathers and ear drops.
Kettles of fern root, stewed
Dog, mulberry, crayfish, and yam were hung
To wait over the fire’s spluttering tongues.
The boy was led in. It was the last day
Of his ordeal.
The tenderest sections—
Under his eyes, inside his ears—remained
To be cut, th
e maze run
To its dizzying ends, a waterwheel
Lapping his flesh the better to reveal
Its false-face of unchanging hostility.
A feeding tube
Was put between his lips.
His arms and legs were held down forcibly.
Resin and lichen, mixed
With pigeon fat and burnt to soot, was scooped
Into mussel shells. The women withdrew.
By then the boy had slowly turned his head,
Whether to watch
Them leave or keep his eye
On the stooped, grayhaired cutter who was led
In amidst the men’s cries
Of ceremonial anger at each
Of the night’s cloudless hours on its path
Through the boy’s life. The cutter knelt beside
The boy and stroked
The new scars, the smooth skin.
From his set of whalebone chisels he tied
The shortest one with thin
Leather thongs to a wooden handle soaked
In rancid oil. Only his trembling throat
Betrayed the boy. The cutter smiled and took
A small mallet,
Laid the chisel along
The cheekbone, and tapped so a sharpness struck
The skin like a bygone
Memory of other pain, other threats.
Someone dabbed at the blood. Someone else led
A growling chant about their ancestors.
Beside the eye’s
Spongy marshland a frond
Sprouted, a jagged gash to which occurs
A symmetrical form,
While another chisel pecks in the dye,
A blue the deep furrow intensifies.
The boy’s eyes are fluttering now, rolling
Back in his head.
The cutter stops only
To loop the blade into a spiralling,
Astringent filigree
Whose swollen tracery, it seems, has led
The boy beyond the living and the dead.
He can feel the nine Nothings drift past him
In the dark: Night,
The Great Night, the Choking
Night, the All-Brightening Night and the Dim,
The Long Night, the Floating
Night, the Empty Night, and with the first light
A surging called the War Canoe of Night—
Which carries Sky Father and Earth Mother,
Their six sons borne
Inside the airless black
The two make, clasped only to each other.
Turning onto his back,
The eldest son struggles with all his force,
Shoulder to sky, straining until it’s torn
Violently away from the bleeding earth.
He sets four beams,
Named for the winds, to keep
His parents apart. They’re weeping, the curve
Of loneliness complete
Between them now. The old father’s tears gleam
Like stars, then fall as aimlessly as dreams
To earth, which waits for them all to return.
Hers is the care
Of the dead, and his tears
Seep into her folds like a dye that burns.
One last huge drop appears
Hanging over the boy’s head. Wincing, scared,
He’s put his hand up into the cold air.
THE AGAVE
The villa’s switchback garden path,
between the potted railing and the sea
and under the canopy of overlapping pines,
winds through what can grow under them:
plants from a moon orbiting Venus maybe,
brambly fig, yucca, holm oak, firethorn,
and silvery, bloated succulents—
The Penitent, Dead-Child’s-Fingers,
Mother’s-Stool, Chapel-of-Solitude.
The agave beside the stone bench,
where I have sat heavily all day,
reaches out in all directions,
its meaty, grizzled leaves each
the length of a man, each edged
with back-turned venomous thorns,
thumbnail billhooks in ranks down
from the empurpled spike at its tip.
The largest leaf, right next to me,
has so bent under itself, the spike
has come around and gone up through
another part of itself—the heart, say,
or whatever comes to as much as that.
Yesterday the gardener told me
it could take thirty years for the spike
slowly—never meaning to, thinking
it was headed toward the water-glare
it mistook for the little light that kept
not coming from above—slowly
to pierce its own flesh, to sink its sorrow
deep within and through its own life.
It only took me a month.
THE FEVER
The fever has lasted three days.
Layers of skins and weavings
were first heaped on the bed
but nothing kept out the cold
that shook my body
like a crackhead mother
angry because her baby
won’t stop crying.
Then another body crawled in
beside me, held me—
she throws the blue baby
down the furnace chute,
the ceiling hisses at
the ice pack’s beaded apathy,
the hidden air, the voices,
the voices all too calm.
I’m hauled up, they listen
to my back. What can it say?
They listen to my front.
So much I can’t answer.
They ease me back down.
The one beside me slips away.
I can hear him in the next room.
He’s laughing. He’s given up.
This is how love feels, they write.
So which one am I in love with?
THE INFECTION
In those days I used to refuse the medicine
because the infection then made it hurt so
when I came, hurt so that the pain—
its intolerable scalding contractions,
the knot choked by appetite, desperate
to advance and retreat, to thrash further
inside its own swollen sentence,
the little useless gash, the bitter spasm—
each night left me frightened and smiling.
The tears had rinsed my eyes, the whining
stilled any desire to repeat myself.
I thought of it as a kind of mutilation,
less of my body than of my longing not to have one.
Afterwards, I would limp to the bathroom
for a hot washcloth and hold it to myself,
and then to my face. The cloth smelled
of the rotten hyacinths, their stalks snapped,
their milky petals gone brown and sticky,
I would pass each weekend, thrown to the back
of the stalls, pots of them, at the flower market.
I went to the window, put the cloth on the stone
ledge. Until it dried, it would be my standard,
my scorn and seamark, my flag of surrender.
LATE AFTERNOON, ROME
Down the street, on the path to the oratory,
the stations of the cross—huge bronze slabs,
their ordinary agonies modernized to poses
on a fashion runway—have been wired shut.
A river of swallows sheers off course again
around air-locked spurs of warmth or chill.
The sun is out late, panning for gold
in the silt of our ochre upper floors.
Everything is looking up for a change.
Isn’t that white capsule o
n the blue tablecloth
the daily jumbo jet? It’s so far beyond
the cross and thorns, beyond the drawstring
of birds, beyond the last light down here.
And there’s already a glass of water on the table,
for the pill I was meant to take hours ago.
THE BOOKCASE
My empty bookcase yawns and rises
from its paint job, white asphalt
newly laid over a grid of back streets,
the chill of what assurance supports it all
still in the air, no music, no voices.
Who wants to live with what he knows?
While I sit on the storage boxes,
my double’s slowly making his way
among shop windows and bloody altars,
holding pages to the light, changing
sex to distance himself from force
or faithfulness, the household demons.
It’s late. Opportunities are multiplying.
I am what I did? I am what I wait for?
I feel something returning, like a book
put back on the shelf, slid between
names like mine, my story, my fault.
HOTEL BAR
The saxophonist winds up “My Romance,”
the song with a scar. In the red lacquer ceiling,
the night’s raw throat, I can just make out
lampshades the color of a smoker’s breath.
One is at our table. Across sits a woman
in tiny furs from before the war, the mouth
of one gnawing on the tail of the other,
like comets. A sudden brightness onstage,
a flaring spot, flashes on the nodding brass.
The little thud at a nova’s heart predicts
the gradual, dimming ebb and flow
of light—or love—soon enough burnt out,
remembered only as desire’s afterglow.
So which one has the room key? Neither of us
wants to guess what won’t ever be opened.
Something is found in a galactic pocket.
Something is left behind on a chair.
The elevator doors close soundlessly.
A constellation of numbers rises in order.
Again, the argument from design’s invoked.
Tomorrow we’ll get to go back over it all,
what’s partially false and almost always true,
as in “My romance doesn’t need a thing but you.”
A TOUR OF THE VOLCANO