in a miniskirt, to make sure I see.
Cold Snap, November
That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
JOHN BERGER, The Sense of Sight
In 2006, in Ohio, Joseph Clark raised his head in the middle of his execution to say, “It’s not working.”
The salmon corpses clog the creek without sufficient room to spin:
see, even the fish want to kill themselves this time of year
the therapist jokes. Her remedy
is to record three gratitudes a day—
so let the fish count for one, make two the glaucous gulls
who pluck the eyes before they fill
with the cloudy juice of vanishing.
But don’t these monuments to there-ness
feel a little ostentatious? Not just the gratitudes,
but also what they used to call a hardware store
where you hike for hours underneath the ether
between the ceiling and the dropped-down lighting tubes,
muttering I need a lock-washer for my lawnmower shroud—
huh? You know
you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating
everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II
commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.
When even one giant marble Moses feels like a bit too much.
This year made it almost to December without a frost to deflate the dahlias
and though I stared for hours at the psychedelia of their petals,
trying to coax them to apply their shock-paddles to my heart,
it wasn’t working. Until one morning when
I found them black and staggering in their pails,
charred marionettes, twist-tied to their stakes, I apologize
for being less turned-on by the thing than by its going.
Not the sunset
but afterward when we stand dusted with the sunset’s silt,
and not the surgical theater, even with its handsome anesthesiologist
in blue dustcap and booties— no,
his after’s what I’m buzzed by, the black slide into nothing
(well, someone ought to speak for it).
Or it can come in white— not so much the swirling snow
as the fallen stuff that makes the mind continuous
with the meadow that it sees.
Auntie Roach
Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others.
PHILIP LARKIN
One day George Washington rides around Mount Vernon
for five hours on his horse, the next
he’s making his auspicious exodus
on the spectrum of possible deaths.
Rasputin was fed cyanide in little cakes
but did not slough his living husk,
and so Prince Felix sang to him, then mesmerized him
with a gaudy cross. And though he dropped when he was shot
he popped back up and ran outside: it was
Purishkevich who fired three times in the courtyard—
but even with his body bound
in the frozen Neva, one arm worked
its way free. Now, he must have howled
while his giblets leaked, though the cold
is reputed to be kind. Sliding his end
toward a numeral less horrible; it falls
say as a six on a scale of zero to ten?
Shakespeare went out drinking, caught a fever,
ding! Odds are we’ll be addled—
what kind of number can be put on that?
One with endless decimals,
unless you luck into some kind woman,
maker of the minimum wage, black or brown and brave enough
to face your final wreck? My friends horde pills
for their bad news, but I wonder if it’s cowardly
to be unequal to the future. Someone should write a book
for nursery school, with crucial facts like: how,
as the sun drops, shadows lengthen, including a sharp
or blurry one that is your own. And you scuttle from it
like a cockroach fleeing light— an anti-roach,
running from the dark. See my feelers, long and feathery:
I am more than well prepared.
Ulysses Grant lay in misery for half a year,
after eating a peach that pained his tongue.
Versus Ivan the Terrible, last heard singing in the bath,
who fainted dead while setting up the chessboard.
Another Treatise on Beauty
The boyish foreign tyrant wears faun-colored desert boots
hooked boyishly around the rungs of his chair
on this talk show where he speaks with the voice of a woman
who interprets from the ether. He’s smiling
like the naughty boy in school who picked his teeth
with a stiletto: mister, you may be despicable
but my boyfriend wore those same boots once,
and I loved him in them, despite the stolen tape deck
in his car. How small a blemish does your narco-trafficking
shrink to, what with that comely stubble on your cheeks,
your brocade cap and wool cape tossed
across your shoulder like a cavalier’s? Perhaps we need
to recalibrate the scale or set your crimes
in one pan of the balance, so when we set your beauty
in the other it will rise, as beauty does, instead of clunking down.
As beauty rises, even when it goes unseen. See
how many of the famous modern paintings
were made by men who have such vigor in old age?
And when I flip open the back covers of their books,
the famous lady poets all have shiny hair.
Bad French Movie
Isabelle Huppert in a peep show booth
with the wilted bloom of a used Kleenex,
and not her Kleenex, une mouchoir étrange—
this is not a promising get-go.
But can’t my hopes be phototropic
as I sit in the front row with my head cocked back
like a newly fractured dicotyledonous bean
uncurling on its sprout?
The popcorn here is not just bad—
for years the hopper has accrued its crud
so that sometimes you crunch down on what
tastes like a greasy tractor bolt
and are transported to a former Soviet republic
instead of some seedy part of Paris.
You have to swipe the burned nib off your lips
before scuffing it back, toward the lovers who’ve come
to make out in this habitat, upholstered
in the velvet mode of tongues. And when
I turn to see if they’ve noticed
their ankles’ being pinged by my scorched old maids
all the hardware bolted in their faces
glints like moonlight on the road after the crash is cleared away,
as the projector beam keeps on doggedly charging
through a googolplex of twitching motes.
Giving us Isabelle unclothed again,
Isabelle in the tones of the wood of a cello,
Isabelle if you’re trying to save us now
all your skin is not enough.
Proximity to Meaningful Spectacle*
Monday
Wednesday
Friday,
I swim with the old ladies, hurry:
the synchronized swimming team arrives at three.
We ride the wacky noodles
through blue pastures
lit by chemicals—
I like to go under in my goggles
to watch their them-ness bleed
into my me
until we are evi
cted by the lifeguard, Danielle.
In the locker room, some retreat into the changing stalls
to sequester their mastectomies,
but your walker will not fit there, no;
you have to peel your swimsuit in the open
with the girls on the team. I’m staring
at one long strip of mostly leg,
daring her to
reciprocate:
but all this future-flesh has made her shy—
the way the belly sometimes flabs from having kids
and doubles down.
I thought this was a them-trait, not a me-trait,
but was mistaken about the boundary—
which turns out not to be a wall, but a net
in which we each hang like a sausage
in a shop window, liquefying in the sun.
Good luck synchro girl, trying to wriggle
into your spangly suit
without taking off your bra—
not wanting any of your you to bleed into your me
as you reach around yourself to pull out what you pull out
by the scruff of its neck:
your limp blue animal
of lace.
* Joe Wenderoth
Hokkaido
War Emblem, the famous stallion,
will not mount a female rump
on the island of Hokkaido
in a pasture near the sea.
It is hard to imagine anyone not being overcome
by the sight of two dozen mares
surrounded by volcanoes (is the problem
that the metaphors are too direct?), and yet
War Emblem is still not in the mood.
A thousand years ago the courtesan Shikibu
the references to sex made tasteful through concision
and the image of their kimonos intertwined.
Either her heart was broken or it was full,
either way required some terse phrases to the moon.
Was that all it was? Dumb animal hunger?
All those years when I thought I was making Art
out of The One Important Thing?
And how to apologize now for my lack of adequate concision?
Once I was so full of juice and certain of its unending.
At the Hatchery
The woman who wears dark glasses large as goggles
has her hand wrapped around the elbow of the young woman
who is beautiful. Where does it come from,
this compulsion not just to know their thinking
but to live inside her for a while, the one
whose eyes are hidden as she looks
down into the impoundment where the salmon who’ve swum upriver
end their travels? It must sound large to her, the clang
a loose piece of metal makes against the cement wall
whenever a fish leaps in its fury, I am claiming
the privilege to impute its fury as we listen to them
thrash. Dozens were killed an hour ago
because their future fate is better if the eggs are stripped
than if they’re left to their fandango
in the frothing of the creek. I have tried to live inside them too,
these fish who strain against the world, or into it, why
am I not so intent on battling my way into the young woman
who moves from one thing to another without hurry?
I would eavesdrop, but they talk in Spanish,
thwarting my attempt to learn if the blind woman can detect
the coolness radiating from the pile of slush, all that remains
of the ice in which the dead were packed
before being trucked off to the food bank: if she could see
she’d see the vapor rising, as from a fire not quite put out.
Victor the Shaman
I feel the need for more humanity
because the winter wren is not enough,
even with its complicated music emanating
from the brambles. So I relent to my friend
who keeps bugging me to see her shaman,
tutored by the Indians who live at the base
of Monte Albán. Tutored also by the heavy bag
at Sonny’s Gym: Box like heaven / Fight like hell
his T-shirt says; the graphic shows an angel’s fist
buried to the wrist in Satan’s brisket, while the prince
of dark jabs the angel’s kisser. Victor
has sandpiper legs, his ponytail a mess of webs,
but he has eaten the ayahuasca vine
and chanted in the sweat lodge
and entered the fight-cage in a bar in Tucson,
Adam’s apple jiggling his Star of David
when he writes me out a prayer.
He says he flew here to visit his grandma,
only she died before the plane touched down—
the dead leave yard sales to the living,
who shoot staple guns at telephone poles
and soothe their eyes with slabs of meat.
No matter how many rounds you go in practice,
he says you always come out unprepared
om ah hum
vajra siddhi padma hum
for the mountain of junk inside the house: cedar canoe
in the rafters and the box of Kotex he found
from her last menstrual period in the 1950s.
Wheel
I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake—
after crawling through the rotting milfoil on the shore.
At first
the materials offered me were not much—
just some cattails where a hidden bullfrog croaked
and a buckhouse made from corrugated tin—
at first I thought I’d have to write the poem of its vapors.
But wait
long enough and the world caves in,
sends you something like these damselflies
prickling your chest. And the great ventriloquist
insists
you better study them or else:
how the liquidmetal blue gleams like a motorcycle helmet,
how the markings on the thorax wend like a maze,
their abdomens ringed like polecat tails,
the tip of his latched
to the back of her neck
while his scrawny forelegs wipe his mandible
that drops and shuts like a berth on a train.
But when I tallied his legs, he already had six—
those wiper-legs belonged to a gnat
he was cramming in his mouth. Which took a long time
a gnat-size idea of the darkness
once the mandible closed.
Call me bad gnat: see how every other thing strives—
more life!
Even with just two neurons firing the urge.
Then the she-fly’s abdomen swung forward
to take the sperm packet from his thorax,
and he finished chewing
in this position that the field guide calls The Wheel.
Call me the empress of the unused bones,
my thighs fumigated by the rank detritus of the shore
while the meal
and The Wheel
interlocked in a chain
in the blue mouth of the sky
in the blacker mouth beyond
while I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake
where sixty thousand damselflies
were being made a half-inch from my heart.
After Reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead
The hungry ghosts are ghosts whose throats
stretch for miles, a pinprick wide,
so they can drink and drink and are never sated.
Every grain of sand is gargantuan
and water goes down thick as
bile.
I don’t know how many births it takes to get
reborn as not the flower but the scent.
To be allowed to exist as air (a prayer
to whom?)— dear whom:
the weight of being is too much.
Victor Feguer, for his final meal,
asked for an olive with a pit
so that a tree might sprout from him.
It went down hard, but now the murderer is comfort.
He is a shady spot in the potter’s field.
But it must be painful to be a tree,
to stand so long with your arms up.
You might prefer to be a rock
(if you can wear that heavy cloak).
In Bamiyan, the limestone Buddhas stood
as tall as minor mountains, each one carved
in its own alcove. Their heads
eroded over time, and the swallows
built nests from their dust,
even after zealots blew them up.
Now the swallows wheel in empty alcoves,
their mouths full of ancient rubble.
Each hungry ghost hawks up his pebble
so he can breathe. And the dead
multiply under the olive tree.
The Black Rider
There are blows in life, so powerful…
I don’t know!
CESAR VALLEJO, TRANS. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN
Driving past the Masonic graveyard, I see a boy
skateboarding down the new asphalt of the walk
that he veers off so he can jump
and slide along a tombstone.
He has such faith in the necklace of his bones
he will not let a helmet wreck his hair—
why does the brain have to be buried
in the prettiest place? You little shit, don’t you know
someone slaved at the brewery to pay for what was
supposed to stand as shiny as your hair
two centuries or three, when all your ollies
will no longer stir a moth or midge?
But what kind of grump would rather be eaten
by wind and rain than the glissando of a punk
riding off with a whump to the door of the oven
with a few bright flakes of someone else’s death?
Pioneer
Let’s not forget the Naked Woman is still out there, etched
into her aluminum plaque
affixed to her rocket
slicing through the silk of space.
In black and white, in Time, we blast her
off to planets made of gases and canals,
not daring to include, where her legs fork,
the little line to indicate she is an open vessel.
Which might lead to myths about her
being lined with teeth,
knives, snakes, bees— an armament
flying through the firmament. Beside the man
who stands correctly nonerect, his palm
upraised to show he comes in peace,