in their caveman belt buckles and leather hats.
Whew. That we found in them a soulfulness, an architecture
of tempo changes and chord progressions
left us relieved. Childishly
we hummed along as the sun got gulped down like a vitamin
and boats of cheapskates gathered on the bay.
When the lightning started, it was fearsome and silent
as usual. We were older, we knew this,
but the past proved not to be all suicide and motorcycle accidents.
Here was proof the music had shown some finesse—
even if it pillaged the discographies of black men from the Delta
it did so honorably, erotically, meaning
“that which gathers.” So we held hands and drew near.
And the flashes lit us, when they lit us, in platinum flames:
then we saw, behold, below the bleachers,
a man whose rubber sneaker toe-tips
punctured the darkness as he spun.
He lurched and spun and lurched and fell,
a messenger from the ancient cults
until his stomach’s contents were strobed ruthlessly
once they splattered on the tarmac. Sky says: Rise,
feet say: Heavy. Body would say: Torn in two
if it weren’t already passed out
with all the good Samaritans busy remembering
the words to the tune about the rambling man. Oh
Bacchus, Dionysus, ye Southern rock stars
of antiquity: Thank you for shutting the black door
behind which he vanished, so we could resume
holding each other, like two swigs of mouthwash.
Then the brother who was not dead
played another of our childhood songs.
Tsunami Museum, Hilo
Because she comes here just a few hours a week, you are lucky
to have found her—
Mrs. Ito, who is ninety-four: you have to bend way down
and speak loudly in her ear.
To ask for the story she floats on these words: wreckage and sky,
the wreckage and sky,
when she tells how her house lost its moorings at dawn
to the shoulders of the surf.
How because she could not swim she clung to a door
and rode it the night
of April Fool’s Day, 1946:
the whole seaward part of town destroyed.
So the museum sits now in the lee of the headland
across from the bus station
where drunks sail to sleep on its wooden benches—
the sun outside has fried them through.
Wreckage and sky, the turmoil and the clarity:
timbers lobbed by the wave-crest
versus the constant stars. Or the wild hair of the drunks
versus this morning’s placid bay.
For sixty years she has sailed on the door
of her story, and now she is sorry
she cannot tell it well enough — she left school to work
in the hotdog plant
years before the wave. Yes,
there were others who survived,
but they were children, so they were quick,
outsprinting the surf—
they did not spend the night
all stretched out on the sea.
Which was a deeper black than you could ever imagine,
though what she says is:
All my friends are dead—
not the wreckage, just the clarity
when you get to be so very old—or in the hospital
with no brains left.
Only me, she says:
she’s the one who was saved.
And then she holds up her index finger, for you
to throw your life ring on.
Driving Home from the Conference like a Pill with a Thousand People Inside
We turned off the highway at Chuckanut Drive
(everyone told us to turn off at Chuckanut Drive)
where, when we finally slid from the cedars,
the ocean smacked us in the face.
Jane squints down into her steering and talking
(her voice like the hushing of the wet road)
about how her mother fled from the house
(one of the many times he beat her).
How they wore their pajamas into the store
after crossing the parking-lot stripes in their slippers—
see how easy it is to start over
after the hangers screech.
In the motel, there’d always be a picture of the sea
(as if all you needed was the idea of its rocking)—
(is what made Jane remember).
Our car crept like a grub on the country’s edge,
there on a cliff above Samish Bay:
mountains to the north, mountains to the south,
(& a life equaled)
the huge unbroken water in between.
The Garbo Cloth
Her daughter wrote back to say my friend had died
(my friend to whom I wrote a letter maybe twice a year).
From time to time I’d pictured her amid strange foliage
(and in a Mongol yurt, for she was fond of travel).
Why not a flock of something darkening the sky, so we would know
(ah, so-and-so is gone!)?
To a woman from the city, this might perhaps be pigeons
(blacking out the sun).
Or else a human messenger, as once when she was fabric-shopping
(bolt of green silk furled across her body)
Garbo passed, and nodded. At Macy’s years ago
(when I was not a creature in her world).
Of course she bought the cloth, but never sewed the dress
(“a massive stroke, and I take comfort in the fact she felt no pain”).
Logic says we should make omens of our Garbos and our birds
(but which one bears the message? which one just the mess?).
From the kayak, I’ve seen pigeons nesting underneath the pier
(a dim ammoniated stink)
where one flew into my face. I read this as a sign
(that rancid smash of feathers)
but couldn’t fathom what it meant, the bird trapped in the lag time
(of an oracle’s translation).
Foolish mind, wanting to obliterate the lag and why—
(let memory wait to catch up to its sorrow).
In addition to the rattling of cellophane
What I remember about the famous writer is how
he took the English muffin sleeve from a high shelf,
how he mumbled his apologies
on finding only one stale white puck. How
he blew the cornmeal off
before he forked the halves apart, twisting to loosen them
the way my mother did.
How therefore came a little intermission of memory—
a patch of time he filled by pacing
in front of the toaster-oven window,
lacquered and leaded with grease
like the stained glass of a church.
How I was looking for wisdom, how he was no talker.
How he devoted himself instead to buttering,
palming the muffin-half close to his eye
while the golden glob vanished
into the craters.
How slowly he heaved it with his knife.
A Pedantry
Many of the great men — Buddha, Saint Augustine,
Jefferson, Einstein — had a woman and child
they needed to ditch. A little prologue
before the great accomplishments could happen.
From nothing came this bloody turnip
umbilicaled to the once-beloved,
only now she’s transformed like a
Hindu god
with an animal snout and too many limbs.
You’d rather board a steamer with chalk dust on your pants
or sit under a bo tree and be pelted by flaming rocks,
renounce the flesh
or ride off on a stallion—
there is no papoose designed for such purposes,
plus the baby would have to be sedated.
Sorry.
We don’t want the future to fall into the hands of the wrong — ists!
That’s how civilization came into being
for us who remained in the doorways of here,
our companions those kids who became chimney sweeps, car thieves,
and makers of lace.
By day we live in the shadows of theories; by night
the moon holds us in its regard
when it doesn’t have more important business
on the back side of the clouds.
Four Red Zodiacs
Because I’d drunk a lot of coffee on top of some antibiotics
strange ideas were already swimming in my brain
like sharks patrolling their aquarium walls
when I saw those strange rafts circling in the harbor.
Gatling was the word that came to mind
for the machine guns mounted on their turrets,
but Jim said I was wrong. And also:
Great, so now the war comes to Palookaville
while I stood too stymied for a superior thought.
Eventually we turned back from the window
to our task to prove ourselves
not easily deterred:
loading the truck with bags of garbage
so we could take them to the dump.
Styrofoam boxes from the Vietnamese restaurants
by which we are sustained.
We came back dirty, so we washed,
then lay down predictably.
And it seemed oddly synchronous
that I’d just been reading Baudelaire,
who couldn’t stand what sex did to the face. Meanwhile
a big ship slid into port
like a capsule sinking in the throat,
then some jeeps and earthmovers drove aboard.
And why not say we fucked right through it!—
an optimist might say that love prevailed.
But there is another way to look at it:
as greed, the body taking its cut first
(although I didn’t look, I never can stand to look).
Later I thought I saw a frogman in the bay,
but it could have been a seal.
I mean a real seal,
which is to say an animal.
Then, Infamous Reader, comes your turn to say: But we are all animals.
Martha
Nearly all the remaining quarter million passenger pigeons were killed in one day in 1896.
They named the last one Martha,
and she died September 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo,
she who was once one of so many billions
the sky went dark for days
when they flew past.
Makes me wonder what else could go,
some multitudinous widget like clouds or leaves
or the jellyfish ghosting the water in autumn
or the shore-shards of crushed clams?
Goodbye kisses:
once I had so many of you but now I note
your numbers growing slim—
yesterday a man stood me up in the sea
behind the big rock where the sand dollars live.
And when I said Now we should kiss
it seemed we’d grown too peculiar
and I thought: Oh-ho kisses, are you leaving too
like the man’s hair? Or like
the taut bellies we once had
or the menstrual period that was mine alone—
time flew its coop
our days did skid
and now see my commas going too—
art mimicking life’s mortal nature?
So I did no hem-haw with the man
I told him to grab hold of my ears
since daylight burned
the tide had begun to apply its suction then
the shotguns of our lips turned toward
what was perhaps the last of our wild flock.
Breaking News
for Hayden
They found the missing bride and she is living.
They found the boys floating on the ocean in their little yellow raft.
The ornithologists found the extinct woodpecker
when it flew over their canoe.
Not everyone is convinced, though.
One recording of its distinctive knock turned out to be a gunshot.
A century of Ozark fishermen
said they saw the bird when they were stranded
on their hummocks in the swamp.
Nobody believed them but the catfish in their pails.
Those boys thought their muscles strong enough to paddle against the squall.
And the bride only wanted a bus trip west
before the rest of her life downed her like an olive.
Sometimes survival strikes us dumb
with the improbable story of resurrection;
we see the blossoms smutted on the ground
turning back into a flowering tree. Next year
there’ll be new nettle stalks
to sting your fingers, which you’ll drag
through the serrated leaves to prove
the world has not lost the consolation of its old pain.
For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive in Our State
For a long time you lay tipped on your side like a bicycle
but now your pedaling has stopped. Already
the mosquitoes have chugged their blisterful of blood
and flown on. Time moves forward,
no cause to weep, I keep reminding myself of this:
the body will accrue its symptoms. And the manuals of style
that warn us not to use the absolutes, are wrong:
the body will always accrue its symptoms.
But shouldn’t there also be some hatchlings within view:
sufficient birth to countervail the death?
At least a zero on the bottom line:
I’m not asking for black integers,
just for nature not to drive our balance into the dirt.
What should we utter over the broken glass that marks your grave?
The bird books give us mating calls but not too many death songs.
And whereas the Jews have their Kaddish and the Tibetans
have their strident prayers, all I’m impelled to do is sweet-talk
the barricades of heaven. Where you my vector
soar already, a sore thumb among the clouds.
Still I can see in the denuded maple one of last year’s nests
waiting to be filled again, a ragged mass of sticks.
Soon the splintered shells will fill it
as your new geeks claim the sky — any burgling
of bloodstreams starts when something yolky breaks.
And I write this as if language could give restitution for the breakage
or make you lift your head from its quilt of wayside trash.
Or retract the mosquito’s proboscis, but that’s language again,
whose five-dollar words not even can unmake you.
Not Winter
after reading Anne Carson’s Sappho translation
How sad it must be in Greece when winter comes,
like Coney Island but with a less-brutal sea,
and what is sadder than a hot dog or souvlaki for that matter
when the last nub of meat slips through the bun
and the girls cover up their gowns so like translucent grocery sacks
caught spookily in trees and I think they’re olive trees
only because I don’t
know much about Greece,
how do you expect me to know anything
when the papyri are in such tatters?
In all we have of Sappho’s poems, the silences
come rolling forth like bowling balls:
blank after blank after blank after blank
[to remind us of what’s missing].
Then comes a word like Gongyla or Gorgo,
which sounds like the name of a Japanese movie monster
instead of a girl too lovely
to be eating a hot dog made of useless lips.
But there is no food in Sappho’s poems,
which makes me wonder about every other missing else,
who cooked the meat and carted off the chamber pots
so Sappho could stroll under the olive boughs so unencumbered
by her body, her reputedly squat wrestler’s body,
thereby left free to strum her lyre? I am not saying
it is an easy thing to write a poem that will be remembered
for three thousand years, but it is a harder thing
to build a temple out of rocks. A temple
where the girls will party all-nite
until their gowns start flying off
and into that ferocious silence:
[ ].
Then comes two words intact—
I want
Love Swing
The new guy bought it as a present for his wife
(this a story Jim is telling)—
like a love swing like I think of as a love swing?
Jim uh-huhs: she’ll ride it Christmas morn.
So let us stop to praise the new guy’s paunch,
the dimpling in his wife’s thighs,
though when I ask if I could ride a love swing
Jim says, “I’m afraid your love swing days are through.”
In case of fire, strike chest with hammer
and wind up all the dogs in the neighborhood,
while I zen out trying to remember the name of… ah…
not Leland Stanford but Stanford White:
architect of Madison Square Garden,
where the famous velvet swing hung in his tower studio—
tapestries, sketches, photographs, a hive
of mammoth work and mammoth pleasure
all mashed together in one place.
But it was the swing
that drove jurors wild at the trial
where the killer named Thaw got off the hook
because his young bride Evelyn had ridden it,
laughing and kicking her dainty feet. And I think:
Maybe everybody in America has a love swing,
maybe it’s as common as a jungle gym,
a secret no one has let me in on
until now, when it’s too late. And my next thought
is that I have been all my life a tad repressed,
I mean I prided myself on having been around the block
but I never rode a love swing. Okay: