snip
and am overcome by an Asian wash of sadness.
Because the washer spins so violently, like time—
perhaps its agitations can be better withstood
with the last-memory theory, which means that a dead man
reposes longest in the toddlers that he knew,
which often are not many,
children being afraid of old men,
what with their sputum-clearing rasps
and their propensity for latching on to cheeks,
though my father was not much of a child-cheek-pincher,
not that he had anything against them;
he had a grandson he tolerated
crawling under the table at La Manda’s
where between forkfuls of scungilli
as his kidneys chugged with insufficient vim,
he composed his other death poem,
the one that came in his own words, it went
Soon I must cross
the icy sidewalk—
help. There goes my shoe
Black Transit
Trees bare. Days short. And at dusk
crows pour through the sky in strands.
From a point in the east too small
to feed your eye on, they pop
into being as sharp dark stars, and then
are large, and then are here, pouring west.
Something chilling about it,
though they are birds like any birds.
What’s fishy is the orchestration, all of them
with a portion of the one same mind: they fly
as if the path were laid, as if
there were runnels in the air, molding
their way to the roost. Whose location
no one seems to know— if they did,
you’d think there would be chitchat
in the market about the volume
of their screams, as if women were being
dragged by the hair through the woods
at night. But everybody keeps mum—
it seems we’re in cahoots with them
without knowing what’s the leverage
they possess (though we can feel it)
to extract from us this pact, this vow.
Heronry
Now my body has become so stylish in the ancient way—didn’t Oedipus
also have a bloated foot? Yes,
I remember him tied by the ankle in a tree, after his father heard the terrible
prophecy and left him hanging
for the animals to peck and lap, same way the dog likes to lap my bloated foot
when I take off the special socks
meant to squeeze it down. He likes to eat my epidermal cells before they fly
off on the air that moves on through
the tallest trees one valley south, where great blue herons build their nests
and ride on small twigs up—then gently
do their legs glide down my binoculars’ field of view. The twigs they ride on
never crack; how do they calculate
the tensile strength of cellulose versus their hollow bones? I thought of this
at the hospital cafeteria
as I stared down an oldish woman’s half-cubit of shanklebone, exposed
between her sock and slack: it was
oldish skin I lapped until scowled at by her companion, who reached to the hem
of her pant-leg and for the sake of what
rule of decorum gently pulled it down?
Les Dauphins
The dogs of the childless are barely dogs.
From tufted pillows, they rule the kingdom.
They’d stand for their portraits
in velvet suits, if they had suits—
holding hats with giant feathers.
And ousting the question: who loves the dog more?
the question becomes: who does the dog love?
The woman says: you are the one who plays him
a drum, you tap the anthem on his head.
No, the man says, you debone him the hen,
you tie the bow of his cravat.
The dogs of the childless sleep crosswise in bed,
from human hip to human hip—a canine wire
completes the circuit. The man says: I wonder
what runs through his head
when he squeaks and snorls all through his dream?
And the woman says: out
of the dream, I’m in his dream,
riding the hunt in my lovely saddle.
When the masters are gone, the dogs of the childless
stand in the mirror with swords on their hips.
They’d stand for their portraits with dogs of their own
if we were kings, if they weren’t dogs.
Rashomon
Light passing through the leaves obliterates the subtitles
when the thief overtakes the swordsman
and forces his bride to submit. This is why
I need a new 42-inch flat-screen TV—
so I can read the dialogue of foreign films
that will improve me, though frankly it is horrible
to see the swordsman tied up and to watch him watch
the change in his wife’s fingers
on the thief’s (somewhat doughy) back. First
it looks as if she’s fighting him, but then
she seems to pull him close,
saying Now I am stained and must be killed or
How do whales strain such tiny krill—these problems
of interpretation can be solved by money:
we need larger words. I have not abandoned words
even if with trepidation I now enter
the kind of store where they sell plastic polygons
that hum and blink. As the swordsman’s wife
enters the forest on her pony, her trepidation draped
with a veil that renders even the biggest tv powerless
to show much of her face. But she shows the thief her foot
in its fancy flip-flop: that’s what rouses him
to rape her in the leafy grove, I’ll say what I saw
in the plainest words. I am not asking to be forgiven
for desiring 1080p, though I am asking
whether or not she asked for it: you’d think
we would have laid that one to rest (it seems
so strident, air-lifted from the 1970s
when I did not watch tv and also called myself a womyn—
a word it’s hard to dress in a kimono) but apparently
we will never. At his trial, the thief (Toshiro Mifune)
sits wigwam-style in tethers and laughs maniacally
as he tells his version, though in somebody else’s version
she’s the maniac who laughs. We ask, but the new machines
refuse to say much more than this: that everyone
will get their chance to laugh and everyone
their chance to wield the knife—
be careful, it is sharp and growing
sharper, the more I spend.
Stargazer
When first I was given the one lily
chaperoned by two green pods,
I strapped myself in like a cosmonaut
to absorb the whoosh of seeing
its pods open one by one.
Because what mind cooked up such extravagance,
spot speckle pinkstripe smudge—
someone call a fire truck
somebody call a bomb squad
somebody call a pharmacist
for a Valium prescription.
Because the beauty of the world is soon to perish;
everything is burning up too fast—
lily number two goes off like a bottle rocket, leaving
the bloom and withering on the same stiff stalk
and the heart torn between them as the petals drop.
Oh, I might have asked for a simple daisy, something
to inflict a subtler vanishing…
without all this ocular pyromania
and the long-bones-dressed-up-in-a-coffin
scent. Plus there’s one pod yet to detonate,
which the yellow pollen grains are trying to defuse
by lying scattered on the table,
precisely scattered on the wooden table
in a manner calibrated to this trapezoid of winter light.
The Unturning
for Ben S., 1936–2010
My friend said: write about the dog in The Odyssey—
four hundred pages in. I found him lying on a dungheap
where ticks sipped his blood, though in his youth
he’d taken down wild animals, eager to kill
for a man the gods favored! Who comes back
in disguise; you expect the dog to give him away
with a lick or a yip, but this is not what happens.
Instead we’re told that “death closed down his eyes,”
the instant he saw his master after twenty years away.
And I wondered if my friend had played a trick—
setting me up with this dog who does not do much
but die. When the gods turn away, what can we do
but await their unturning? That means: don’t think
that after so many years of having such a hard pillow,
the dog wasn’t grateful. But I wonder
if, for the sake of the shape of the plot,
the author ought to have let him remain
for another line or two, if only to thump again his tail.
Wild Birds Unlimited
Because the old feeder feeds nothing
but squirrels, who are crafty and have learned
how to hang so it swings sideways until
gravity takes the seed—I bumble down
to this store of bird knickknacks and
lensware for the geeks, and while
the clerk is ringing up my Mini
Bandit Buster ($29.95), spring-loaded
to close the seed-holes when a heavy animal alights,
I read a pamphlet about bird-feeding, which I had not thought
was complicated, but turns out
is. Yes I bought the costly mixture
—not the cheap stuff full of milo—
which the birds kick to the ground, where it becomes
an aggregate of shit and chaff.
But I’d not known you must sweep it up
so as not to spread the pathogens, and space
your feeders far apart and dump
the seed each week and clean the feeder tube with bleach.
And you should whitewash the windows of your home
so the birds won’t crash—you’ll live in twilight
but your conscience will be clear. Otherwise
it’s best not to feed the birds
at all: your help will only kill them, has killed them,
I killed them says Wild Birds Unlimited—thanks,
now let me tell you that your wind chimes
turn this place into a gong-tormented sea.
Outside, it’s just another shop in the strip mall;
used to be that this place was a grove
of cedars where I knelt in the purplebrown duff
while something holy landed like a lunar rover
on my shoulder. But listen
to what sings in the grove’s bright stead—
computer chips provide what you would hear here
if they weren’t—mechanical birds
on plastic boughs, always flowering.
Bats
Light leaves the air like silty water
through a filterpaper sieve:
there is a draft created by its exodus
that you might think that if you rode
you too could slip away quite easily.
Is this why they call to mind the thought of death?
Squeak squeak, their song: I want to go
but I am stuck here, it is a mistake
being incarnate; I should be made
of the same substance as the dark.
If they must stay, like us they will be governed
by their hungers, pursuit
without rest. What you see in their whirling
is not purity of spirit. Only appetite,
infernal appetite—driving them, too, on.
Autothalamium
On my wedding night I drove the white boat,
its steering wheel a full yard wide. The dress
bellied out behind me like a sail
as I gripped the lacquered wood
and circuited the bay. The poem
by Akhmatova having already
been read, the calamari and cake
already eaten, I stood alone
in the wheelhouse while my friends
danced to the balalaikas outside
on the deck. I could not speak
for the groom, who left me
to the old motor’s growl
and the old boards’ groan; I also
couldn’t speak for the moon
because I feared diverging
from my task to look. Instead I stuck
my eyes to the water, whose toxins shined
with a phosphor that I plowed and plundered.
And no matter what has happened since,
the years and the dead,
the sadness of the bound-to-happen,
the ecstasy of the fragile moment,
I know one night I narrowed my gaze
gave me more serious work than either love or speech.
Red Hat
I followed your red stocking hat
down the river of summer snow
until you carved the turn that stopped us both
with a spray of crystals. A prosthetic leg
lay on the ground, wearing a red
running shoe; we almost took it
to the Lost and Found, but skiing on,
we found more legs
perplexed the mountain. Leg
with thermos, leg with scarf, tableaux
with legs like bowling pins
struck down, though some were propped
erect, against a rock. Art installation
or object lesson?—first the body loses,
then it loses what it puts in place
of what it loses?—I thought
Mount Hood had come to life
to hammer this in. But I kept on
after your red hat and soon was overtaken
by one-legged men, a human wind
I whirled among for just a human minute.
Below, I saw them swallow you, then leave
you with the mountain shadowed on your back,
your red hat wagging, happily, it seemed,
despite the tons of rock you wore.
This Red T-shirt
was a gift from Angus, came with his new Harley
which no ladies deigned to perch their buttocks on
and was therefore sold minus the shirt—
net cost: three thousand dollars, I wear the money
in my sleep. The black braid flowing from the man
herding dice at the Squaxins’ Little Creek Casino
cost me two hundred thirty-five, well worth it
for the word croupier. Work seven months on a poem,
then you tear it up, this does not pencil out
especially for my mother who ate potatoes
every day from 1935–41. Who went to the famous
Jackson Pollock show after the war—sure, she was a rube
from across the Harlem River, snickering
at the swindle of those dribbles until death squelched the supply
and drove the prices up. I’ve known men
who gave up houses worth half a million just to see
the back of someone whom they once bou
ght diamonds.
And I’ve known women to swallow diamonds
just to amplify the spectacle of their being flushed.
The Gutenberg Bible—okay, I get that:
five-point-four million dollars for a book of poems
written by God on the skin of a calf. A hundred years ago
the Squaxins could tell you easily
who the rich man was. He’d be dressed in a red robe
made of epaulets from redwing blackbird wings.
The Wolves of Illinois
When I stopped along the road and climbed the platform that the wildlife people built, I saw the dead grass moving. A darker gold that broke free from the pale gold of the field.
“Wolves,” said the man who stood beside me on the platform. On his other side stood his wife and children, I assumed, dressed as if they’d come from church,
a boy and girl, her scalp crosshatched with partings from her braids. Note that this is my way of announcing they were black
or African American, I am shy not only of the terminology but of the subject altogether
compounded by the matter of words, black being strong
if not so precise a descriptor—
and my being torn about the language makes me nervous from the start. “Look at the wolves,” he told his children
before dropping a quarter in the scope, which I didn’t need because I had my own binoculars
and know the names and field marks of the birds
(like the white rump of the marsh hawk),
so I include “the white rump of the marsh hawk” as it flies over the field.
“Those are coyotes,” I said
with pity for the man’s foolishness? is there a correlation between my knowledge and my pity?
(an inside joke: the marsh hawk’s having been renamed the northern harrier,
though marsh hawk is stronger).
Plus what about the man’s pity for the white girl with coyote in her mouth
— coyote in two syllables, the rancher’s pronunciation,
when wolf is stronger. I wondered whether he was saving face before his family when he said, “No, those are wolves,”
or did he only want his kids to feel the dangerous elation of the word?
I could not tell because they did not look at me, they who had come from praying to a God in whom I don’t believe, though I am less smug about that not-belief
(could be wrong, I oftentimes suspect)
than I am about the wolves. Because I know the wolves were coyotes;
the wolves were coyotes
and so I said, “There are no wolves in Illinois.”
“No, those are wolves,” the man said, turning toward his wife who offered me her twisted smile, freighted with pity or not I couldn’t tell, the pity directed toward me another thing I couldn’t tell, or toward her husband
the believer in wolves
(at least he was sticking by them, having staked his claim).