eyeballing the spawning from this cedar bridge.
As if they’re sure we will be cohorts
in the rapture about which the bumper stickers speak,
as if we really will ascend someday to swim among the fishes.
All of us: see how good we are,
so careful not to kick stones down into the creek.
I’m just trying to get a handle on how it would be
if we made love one time in our lives
(after days spent on the interstate)
before we lay down to die so publicly in shallow pools?
While the other forms pass by and point
to educate their frenzied children:
See the odd species. They chose love.
from
Inseminating the Elephant
(2009)
Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears
you out.
CHEKHOV
Virtue Is the Best Helmet
One of these days I’m going to get myself an avatar
so I can ride an archaeopteryx in cyberspace —
goodbye, the meat cage.
Pray the server doesn’t crash, pray
against the curse of carpal tunnel syndrome.
But then my friend the lactation consultant
brings up the quadriplegic who gave birth
(two times no less)
(motorcycle wreck)
just to make her body do
one thing the meat could still remember.
Somebody has to position the babies
to sip the breastmilk rivulets.
And the cells exude
despite their slumber. One minute
too much silence, the next there’s so much screaming.
Turns out Madagascar’s giant cockroach
makes a good addition to a robot
because the living brain adds up to more than: motor,
tracking ball, and the binary numeric code.
Usually the cockroach flees from light,
but sometimes it stands in its little coach unmoving,
stymied by the dumb fact of air.
And sometimes it rams into a wall
to force reality to show its hand.
Found Object
Somebody left this white T-shirt
like a hangman’s hood on the new parking meter —
the magic marks upon its back say: I QUIT METH 4-EVER.
A declaration to the sky, whose angels all wear seagull wings
swooping over this street with its torn scratch tickets
and Big Gulp cups dropped by the curb.
Extra large, it has been customized
with a pocketknife or a canine tooth
to rough the armholes where my boobs now wobble
as I roam these rooms lit by twilight’s bulb,
feeling half like Bette Davis in a wheelchair
and half like that Hell’s Angels kingpin with the tracheotomy.
Dear reader, do you know that guy?
I didn’t think so. If only we could all watch the same TV.
But no doubt you have seen the gulls flying,
and also the sinister bulked-up crows
carrying white clouds of hotdog buns in their beaks:
you can promise them you’ll straighten up, but they are such big cynics.
I should have told you My lotto #’s 2-11-19-23-36
is what’s written in front, beside the silk screen
for Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks™—
which means you can’t hijack my name;
no, you have to go find your own, like a Hopi brave.
You might have to sit in a sweat lodge until you pass out
or eat a weird vine and it will not be pleasant. Your pulse
goes staccato like a Teletype machine — then blam
you’ll be transformed into your post-larval being.
Maybe swallowtail, maybe moth: trust me, I know
because once I was a baby-blue convertible
but now I’m this black hot rod painted with flames.
Rebuttal
My quarrel with the Old Masters is: they never made suffering big enough —
that tiny leg sliding into the bay almost insults me,
that it should be all we get of the falling boy after the half-hour stunt
of his famous flying. Don’t you see
they are cartoons? the drunk hissed
in the British Museum, a drunk in a sport coat
that made him look credible at first, some kind of docent,
an itinerant purveyor of glosses that left me
confused. I studied Brueghel’s paintings, tiny
skaters, and hunters come home with tiny dead animals
gutted outside the frame, where the tiny offal
presumably had been left. I was looking for Icarus
but the Musée des Beaux-Arts is in Belgium you twit
and so I did not see the plowman wearing his inexplicably
dainty shoes, a cartoon you American sow,
and no one came to my rescue in that gallery vacated
even by its dust. Where I also did not see the galleon
anchored below the plowman’s pasture with its oblivious,
content-with-being-tiny sheep. But just wait
until that ship sails out
and encounters the kind of storm that’ll require Abstract
Expressionism to capture the full feeling of.
The giant canvases of the twentieth century!
Swaths of color with no figures in them at all!
How immense the drowning when you’re the boy who drowns.
Between the fireball on your back and the water in front
all gray and everywhere and hard as concrete when you smack down.
A Romance
As a child, I saw a child set down her binder like a wall
through the candy bin at the Corner Luncheonette
so she could shoplift gum while she spoke to the clerk —
and from that moment was in love: Oh theft.
College was supposed to straighten me
like a bent tree strangled by a wire,
but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat.
How the red muscle gleamed in its shiny wrap,
a wedge that had once been the thigh or the loin
of a slow brute’s body, sugar-dirt and clotted grass
to be snatched in an instant
and zipped into the crone-y-est of pocketbooks.
Radiance housed in rawhide again, as when it was living.
A steak can be stuck in your jeans when you’re skinny,
a rump roast is right for a puffy down coat,
small chops will fit under a thin peasant blouse
where it falls off the breasts
like a woodland river
with a limestone amphitheater underneath.
Ancient city, ancient sublet, ancient wooden fire escape —
with my other bandits I learned to say how-de-do in French.
We were yanking on the cord that would start the motor of our lives
though we did not have the choke adjusted yet.
Sometimes it seemed I floated in the dregs like a tea bag
bloating up with facts.
Until a girl ran in the door, panting hard, face red,
slab thudding
from her snowflake-damasked waist onto the table,
and we stood around it gawking at the way it seemed to breathe.
from Notes from My Apprenticeship
THE CHAMBER
As does the poem by William Blake, this involves a poison worm,
a worm that would make the blackbird who ate it
flap and squawk in distress
while at regular intervals I played a tape of a bird
also squawking in distress, so you see
there was this salt-box-girl regression going on
while I took notes: Now the bird is squawking in distress,
my job being to watch on closed-circuit TV
and record the bird’s death, were that to occur
in the chamber made from a gutted fridge
rigged up to a button in the next room
where, when I pushed, I’d hear a musical plink
over the loudspeaker as a mealworm dropped
from a crown of vials that sat on the chamber,
the crown rotating as the glass vials tipped,
one worm per plink, though I sometimes plinked twice
if the worm got stuck
or if the bird failed to squawk
from birds scritching in cages
I’d been filling for weeks,
my truck full of traps I set on fence posts at dawn,
when the redwings clung
to tall blades in the ditches
and sang shuck-shreeek as the dirt road fumed
behind me in the mirrors, unveiling a rising
red-winged sun that I drove into
feeling immortal,
how could I not feel immortal
when I was mistress of the poison worm?
SUPER 8
There were so many black birds I could not count,
homing on this patch of dusk. My boss’s idea
had been to spray them with spangles
so that, if found, the finder would know
the bird had stopped here at this cornfield
behind the Super 8 motel. That is,
if he could imagine the helicopter
with its tank of glue and light.
Otherwise, he might just wonder at a spangled bird.
We untangled them from the mist nets
and brought them into the bathroom’s white tile grid
thirty feet east of the blacktop stripe,
where I counted the spangles, a soldier
in the tribe of useless data. Afterward
I walked them back outside two at a time
and opened my fists, where the birds paused
just long enough to leave their own data on my palms.
Here’s what we think of
your spangles, your starlight. Then the night flushed
them up into its swoon — however faintly,
the corn glittered as the birds resumed their ravening.
Incubus
While the spectacular round butt of the fat junkie sitting on the curb
rotated upward from his belt —
the legs of the skinny junkie wriggled upward from a dumpster.
And when he stood, I saw
his familiar figure, thinned —
two times he’d snipped my kitchen with the scissors of his hips
while he directed stories from the rehab clinic toward us
ladies in our panty hose,
our fingers sliding up and down our wineglass stems.
Later, in the cloak of his jean jacket,
he slipped upstairs and stole my pharmaceuticals,
my legitimate pharmaceuticals! —
so an awkwardness descended on the realm of gestures
there in the alley behind the YMCA, where I looked at any alternate —
pothole, hydrant, not buttocks,
don’t look at buttocks, don’t look at dumpster, don’t. Look:
I would have been a crone to him,
and he would have been my pirate son,
my son who sleeps beneath the bridge
in the cloak of his jean jacket, dabbed with fecal matter now.
Still, when he comes at night,
brass button by button
and blade by blade — his skinny thighs —
I open myself like a medicine cabinet
and let him take the pill bottles from my breasts.
First Epistle of Lucia to Her Old Boyfriends
Not infrequently I find myself wondering which of you are dead
now that it’s been so long since I have had a boyfriend
for whom this wonder would be a somewhat milder version of
the way our actual parting went — i.e., with me not wondering
but outright wishing that an outright lightning bolt
would sail sharply into your thick heads.
Can I plead youth now over malign intent?
And does my moral fiber matter anyhow
since I have not gone forth and et cetera’d —
i.e., doesn’t my absent children’s nondepletion of the ozone layer
give me some atmospheric exchange credits under the Kyoto Protocol
to release the fluorocarbons of these unkind thoughts?
Anyhow what is the likelihood of you old boyfriends reading this
even if you are not dead? Be assured your end is hypothetical.
Also be assured I blush most furiously
whenever that tower room in Ensenada comes to mind
about your Alford pleas and your ex-wives who turned out not ex at all.
Anyhow the acid rain has caused my lightning to go limp
over bungalows where you have partial custody of your teenagers
and AA affirmations magneted to the fridge
from which your near beers sweat as you wonder if I’m dead,
since the exchange for this-here wonder is your wonder about me.
Even though it shows my nerve — to think you’d think of me at all —
I await word of your undeadness
PS: along with your mild version of my just reward.
Raised Not by Wolves
The family sank into its sorrows —
we softened like noodles in a pot.
Whereas the bicycle’s bones were painted gold
and stood firm against the house
no matter how hard it rained.
Beneath the handlebar mount, it said ROYAL in red letters
unscathed despite the elements;
this was the bicycle’s first lesson,
to be royal and unscathed —
I pressed my ear-cup to the welds.
Pedal furiously, then coast in silence.
You will need teeth to grab the chain.
Exhortations with the stringent priggishness of Zen,
delivered by a guru who hauls you off and wallops you
in answer to your simple question.
Though its demise is foggy,
I can conjure with precision its rebukes, the dull sting
when the boy-bar bashed my private place.
Then no talking was permitted
beyond one stifled yelp.
You could, however, rub the wound
with the meat of your thumb — so long
as you did this stealthily, pretending you had an itch.
Job Site, 1967
Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s
downward stroke, another brick set
then the flat side of the trowel moving
across the top of the course of bricks.
My father stepped from the car in his brown loafers,
the rest of him is fading but not his loafers,
the round spot distended by his big toe.
Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s
downward stroke, the silver bulb of the door lock
sticking up as I sat in the car,
the kid in the dress. Newark burned
just over the river, not so far south
as the South of their skin — deepening
under the ointment of sweat, skin and sweat
they’d hauled from the South
brother by brother and cousin by cousin
to build brick walls for men like my father
while Newark burned, and Plainfield burned,
while the men kept their rhythm, another brick set,
then the flat side of the trowel moving
across the top as my father crossed the mud.
I sat in the car with the silver bulb of the door lock
sticking up, though I was afraid,
the kid in the dress, the trowel moving
across the top of the course of bricks.
You can’t burn a brick,
you smashed a brick through a window,
the downward stroke, another brick set,
but to get the window first you needed a wall,
and they were building the wall,
they were building the wall
while my father, in his brown loafers,
stepped toward them with their pay.
Postcard from Florida
After paddling out, I found the manatees
in canals behind the pricey homes,
as I once found the endangered Hawaiian goose
beside the hulks that once were dream cars.
So the scarce beast gets its camouflage
at the farthest outpost of our expectations: