And if your brain offends you…
If Christ offends you, tear him out,
or if the earth offends you, skin her
back in rolls, nailed to dry
on barnside, an animal skin in sunlight;
or the earth that girl’s head,
throwing herself from the asylum roof,
head and earth whirling earthward.
Or if we reoccur with death our humus, heat,
as growths or even mushrooms; on my belly
I sight for them at dead-leaf line –
no better way – thinking there that I hear
the incredible itch of things to grow,
Spring, soon to be billion-jetted.
Earth in the boy’s hand, the girl’s head,
standing against the granary; earth a green
apple he picked to throw at starlings,
plucked from among green underleaves,
silver leaf bellies burred with fine white hairs;
the apple hurled, hurtling greenly with wet solidity,
earth spinning in upon herself,
shedding her brains and whales and oceans,
her mountains strewn and crushed.
II
In the Quonset shed unloading the fertilizer,
each bag weighing eighty pounds,
muscles ache, lungs choke with heat and nitrogen;
then climbing the ladder of the water tank
to see in the orchard the brightness of apples,
sinking clothed into the icy water, feet thunking
iron bottom, a circle of hot yellow light above.
The old tree, a McIntosh:
sixty-eight bushel last year,
with seventy-three bushel the year before that,
sitting up within it on a smooth branch,
avoiding the hoe, invisible to the ground,
buoyed up by apples, brain still shocked,
warped, shaved into curls of paper,
a wasps’ globe of gray paper –
lamina of oil and clouds –
now drawing in greenness, the apples
swelling to heaviness on a hot August afternoon;
to sing, singing, voice cracks at second sing,
paper throat, brain unmoist for singing.
Cranking the pump to loud life,
the wheel three turns to the left,
six hundred feet of pipe lying in the field;
the ground beneath begins shaking, bumping
with the force of coming water, sprinklers whirl,
the ground darkening with spray of flung water.
After the harvest of cabbage the cabbage roots,
an acre of them and the discarded outer leaves,
scaly pale green roots against black soil,
to be forked into piles with the tomato vines;
a warm week later throwing them onto the wagon,
inside the piles the vines and leaves have rotted,
losing shape, into a thick green slime and jelly.
III
Or in the orchard that night
in July: the apple trees too thick
with branches, unpruned, abandoned,
to bear good fruit – the limbs
moving slightly in still air with my drunkenness;
a cloud passed over the moon
sweeping the orchard with a shadow –
the shadow moving thickly across the darkening field,
a moving lustrous dark, toward a darker woodlot.
Then the night exploded with crows –
an owl or raccoon disturbed a nest –
I saw them far off above the trees,
small pieces of black in the moonlight
in shrill fury circling with caw caw caw,
skin prickling with its rawness
brain swirling with their circling
in recoil moving backward, crushing
the fallen apples with my feet,
the field moving then as the folds
of a body with their caw caw caw.
Young crows opened by owl’s beak,
raccoon’s claws and teeth,
night opened, brain broken as with a hammer
by weight of blackness and crows,
crushed apples and drunkenness.
Or Christ bless torn Christ, crows,
the lives of their young
torn from the darkness,
apples and the dead webbed branches
choking the fruit;
night and earth herself
a drunken hammer, the girl’s head,
all things bruised or crushed
as an apple.
THE SIGN
I
There are no magic numbers or magic lives.
He dreams of Sagittarius in a thicket,
dogs yipe at his hooves, the eye of the archer
seaward, his gaze toward impossible things –
bird to be fish, archer and horse a whale
or dolphin; then rears up, canters
away from the shore across a wide field
of fern and honeysuckle brambles
to a woods where he nibbles at small
fresh leeks coming up among dead leaves.
Strange creature to be thought of,
welded in the skull as unicorn,
hooves, bow, quiver of arrows and beard;
that girl sitting at cliff edge
or beside a brook, how does he take her?
He lifts her up to kiss her,
and at night standing by a stream,
heavy mist up to his flanks,
mist curling and floating through his legs,
a chill comes over him;
she in restless sleep in a small stone cottage.
Between the scorpion and goat,
three signs –
winter in Cancer and this love of snow.
And contempt for all signs, the nine
spokes of the sun, the imagined belt
of dark or girdle in which night
mantles herself. The stars guide
no one save those at sea
or in the wilderness; avoid what stinks
or causes pain, hate death and cruelty
to any living thing.
You do not need the stars for that.
II
But often at night something asks
the brain to ride, run riderless;
plumed night swirling, brain riding itself
through blackness, crazed with motion,
footless against the earth,
perhaps hooves imagined in lunacy;
through swamps feared even in daytime
at gallop, crashing through poplar
thickets, tamarack, pools of green slime,
withers splattered with mud, breathing
deep in an open marsh in the center of
the great swamp, then running again
toward a knoll of cedar where deer feed,
pausing, stringing the bow, chasing
the deer for miles, crossing a blacktop road
where the hooves clatter.
On a May night walking home from a tavern
through a village with only three streetlights,
a slip of moon and still air moist with scent of first grass;
to look into the blackness by the roadside,
and in all directions, village, forest,
and field covered with it:
eighteen miles of black to Traverse City
thirteen miles of black to Buckley
nineteen miles of black to Karlin
twelve miles of black to Walton Junction
And infinite black above;
earth herself a heavy whirling ball of pitch.
If the brain expands to cover these distances…
stumbling to the porch where the cat
has left an injured snake that hisses with the brain,
the brain rearing up to shed the black
and the snake coiled bleeding at its center.
III
Not centaur nor archer but man,
man standing exhausted at night
beneath a night sky so deep and measureless,
head thrown back he sees his constellation,
his brain fleshes it and draws the lines
which begin to ripple then glimmer,
heave and twist, assume color, rear up,
the head high, the chest and torso gleaming,
beard glistening, flanks strapped with muscle,
hooves stomping in place, stomping night’s floor,
rearing again, fading, then regaining terror,
the bow in hand, a strung bow, and arrow fitted,
drawn back, the arrow molten-tipped.
Slay. He only still “slays.”
And when the arrow reaches earth I’ll die.
But in morning light, already shrill and hot
by ten, digging a well pit, the sandy earth crumbles
and traps the legs, binding them to earth; then digging
again, driving a shallow well with a sledge,
the well-tip shaded as an arrowhead, sledge hitting
steel with metallic ring and scream; the pump head
and arm bound to pipe, sitting in damp sand
with legs around the pipe pumping the first water
onto my chest and head – head swollen with pain
of last night’s sign and leavings of whiskey.
On another morning, the frost as a sheet
of white stubbled silk soon to melt into greenness,
partridge thumping ground with wings to call their mates,
near a river, thick and turbulent and brown –
a great buck deer, startled
from a thicket, a stag of a thousand stories,
how easily his spread antlers trace a back and bow
not unlike your own, then the arc of him
bounding away into his green clear music.
WAR SUITE
I
The wars: we’re drawn to them
as if in fever, we sleepwalk to them,
wake up in full stride of nightmare,
blood slippery, mouth deep in their gore.
Even in Gilgamesh, the darker bodies
strewn over stone battlements,
dry skin against rough stone, the sand
sifting through rock face, swollen flesh
covered with it, sand against blackening lips,
flesh covered with it, the bodies
bloating in the heat, then hidden,
then covered; or at an oasis, beneath
still palms, a viper floats toward water,
her soft belly flattened of its weight, tongue
flicking at water beside the faces of the dead,
their faces, chests, pressed to earth, bodies
also flattened, lax with their weight,
now surely groundlings, and the moon
swollen in the night, the sheen
of it on lax bodies and on the water.
Now in Aquitaine, this man is no less dead
for being noble, a knight with a clang
and rasp to his shield and hammer;
air thick with horses,
earth fixed under their moving feet
but bodies falling, sweat and blood
under armor, death blows, sweet knight’s
blood flowing, horses screaming, horses
now riderless drinking at a brook, mouths sore
with bits, sweat drying gray on flanks,
noses dripping cool water, nibbling
grass through bits, patches of grass
with the blood still red and wet on them.
II
I sing sixty-seven wars; the war now,
the war for Rapunzel, earth cannot use
her hair, the war of drowning hair
drifting upward as it descends,
the lover holding his cock like
a switchblade, war of
apples and pears beating against the earth,
earth tearing a hole in sky, air to hold
the light it has gathered, river bending
until its back is broken, death a black
carp to swim in our innards.
Grand wars; the final auk poised
on her ice floe, the wolf shot
from a helicopter; that shrill god
in her choir loft among damp wine-colored
crumpled robes, face against a dusty
window, staring out at a black pond
and the floor of a woodlot
covered with ferns – if that wasp
on the pane stings her…
cancer to kill child, child to kill cancer,
nail to enter the wood, the Virgin
to flutter in the air above Rome like a Piper Cub,
giraffe’s neck to grow after greener leaves,
bullet to enter an eye, bullet
to escape the skull, bullet to fall
to earth, eye to look for its skull,
skull to burst, belly to find its cage or ribs.
Face down in the pool, his great fatty
heart wants to keep beating; tongue pressed
to rug in a chemical hallway; on a country
road, caught by flashbulb headlights,
he wishes suddenly to be stronger than a car.
III
The elephant to couple in peace,
the porpoise to be free of the microphone;
a page with the flesh melodious,
to bring her up through the page, paper-shrouded,
from whatever depth she lies,
dulling her gift, bringing her to song
and not to life.
This death mask to harden before
the face escapes, life passes
down through the neck – the sculptor
turns hearing it rub against the door.
Mind to stay free of madness, of war;
war all howling and stiff-necked dead,
night of mind punctuated with moans and stars,
black smoke moiling, puling mind striped as a zebra,
ass in air madly stalking her lion.
Fire to eat tar, tar to drip,
hare to beat hound
grouse to avoid shot
trout to shake fly
chest to draw breath
breath to force song,
a song to be heard,
remembered and sung.
To come to an opening in a field
without pausing, to move there in a full circle of light;
but night’s out there not even behind the glass –
there’s nothing to keep her out or in;
to walk backward to her, to step
off her edge or become her edge,
to swell and roll in her darkness,
a landlocked sea moving free –
dark and clear within her continent.
AMERICAN GIRL
I
Not a new poem for Helen,
if they were heaped…
but she never wanted a poem,
she whose affections the moment aimed.
And not to sing a new Helen into being
with t’adores, anachronistic gymnastics,
to be diligent in praise of her
only to be struck down by her.
Sing then, if song,
after bitter retreat,
on your knees,
as anyone who would love.
My senses led me here
and I had no wit to do otherwise.
Who breathes. Has looked upon. Alone.
In the darkness. Remembers.
Better to sit as a boy did in a still
cool attic in fall, tomatoes left to ripen
in autumn light on newspapers,
sucking his honeyed thumb, the forbidden
mag
azine across the lap and only
the mind’s own nakedness for company;
the lovely photo, almost damp,
as supple and pink to the eye,
a hot country of body
but unknown and distant,
perhaps futureless.
A child once thought the dead were buried
to bear children: in the morning from his loft
in the fumes of wood smoke and bacon
he watches them dress, their bathing suits drying
by the stove. The water will fill them up.
II
He dreams of Egypt in Sunday School,
the maidens of Ur-of-Chaldea, Bathsheba bathing
on her rooftop, the young virgin brought
to David to warm his hollow bones. And the horror
of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s frenzy
with his daughters; women railed against
in Habakkuk and Jeremiah, Isaiah’s feverish
wife and Christ and the woman at the well –
to look in lust is to do without doing;
eyes follow the teacher’s rump as she leaves the room.
At sixteen his first whore, youngish
and acrid, sharing with her a yellow room
and a fifth of blackberry brandy;
first frightened with only his shoes on,
then calmed, then pleased, speechlessly
preening and arrogant. They became
blackberry brandy but never sweetly again –
vile in Laramie before dawn through
a darkened bar and up the long backstairs,
on Commerce St. in Grand Rapids shrieking
with gin. He craved some distant cousin