the puppeteers stood right out in the open.
Yet how silently they moved, how easy
a thing they were to pretend we couldn’t see.
Foley
It is Harrison Ford who just saved the world,
but when he walks down a dirt road toward the ultralarge sun
what sound like his boots are really bricks being drudged
through a boxful of coffee beans. And the mare you’ve seen
clopping along those nineteenth-century cobbles —
she’s a coconut struck by a ball-peen hammer.
And the three girls riding in the hansom,
where the jouncing rustles their silk-and-bone:
that’s a toothbrush moving across birchbark.
Even the moment when one kickboxer’s perfect body
makes contact with the other kickboxer’s perfect body
has nothing to do with kickboxing, or bodies,
but the concrete colliding with the abstract of perfection,
which molts into a leather belt spanking a side of beef.
This is the problem with movies:
go to enough of them and pretty soon the world
starts sounding wrongly synced against itself: e.g.,
last night when I heard a noise below my bedroom window
that sounded like the yowl a cat would make
if its tongue were being yanked backward out its ass.
Pain, I thought. Help, I thought,
so at two a.m. I went outside with a flashlight
and found a she-cat corkscrewed to a tom,
both of them humped and quivering where the beam flattened
against the grass whose damp was already wicking
through my slippers. Aaah… love, I thought,
or some distantly cousined feline analogue of love,
or the feline analogue of the way love came out of the radio
in certain sixties pop songs that had the singer keening
antonyms: how can something so right feel so wrong,
so good hurt so bad… you know what I’m talking about.
And don’t you think it’s peculiar:
in the first half of the sixties they made the black girl-groups
sing with white accents and in the second half of the sixties
they made the white girl-groups sing with black accents,
which proves that what you hear is always
some strange alchemy of what somebody thinks you’ll pay for
and what you expect. Love in particular
it seems to me we’ve never properly nailed down
so we’ll know it when we hear it coming, the way
screaming “Fire!” means something to the world.
I remember this guy who made noises against my neck
that sounded like when after much tugging on a jar lid
you stick a can opener under its lip—that little tsuck.
At first I thought this must be
one of love’s least common dialects, though later
when I found the blue spots all over I realized
it was malicious mischief, it was vandalism, it was damage.
Everybody has a story about the chorus of these,
love’s faulty hermeneutics: the muffler in retreat
mistaken for the motor coming, the declaration
of loathing construed as the minor reproach;
how “Babe, can I borrow five hundred bucks?”
gets dubbed over “Goodbye, chump”—of course,
of course, and you slap your head but it sounds funny,
not enough sizzle, not enough snap. If only
Berlitz had cracked the translations or we had conventions
like the international code of semaphores;
if only some equivalent of the Captain Midnight decoder ring
had been muscled across the border. As it has
for my friend who does phone sex
because it’s a job that lets her keep at her typewriter all day,
tapping out poems. Somehow she can work
both sides of her brain simultaneously, the poem
being what’s really going on and the sex being what sounds
like what’s going on; the only time she stops typing
is when she pinches her cheek away from her gums,
which is supposed to sound like oral sex
though she says it’s less that it really sounds like oral sex
than that these men have established a pact, a convention
that permits them to believe it sounds like oral sex.
When they know
it’s a woman pinching her cheek and not a blow job,
it’s a telephone call and not a blow job,
it’s a light beam whistling down a fiber, for god’s sake,
we’re not all schizophrenics, hearing voices
that have been edited out of what calls to us
from across the fourth wall. I’ve heard
that in To Have and Have Not Lauren Bacall’s singing
comes from the throat of a man; also that Bart Simpson is really
a middle-aged woman; and last week not once but twice
I heard different women wailing
in public parking lots, the full throttle
of unrestrained grief, and both times I looked straight at them
and pretended nothing unusual was going on,
as though what I was hearing were only the sound of air
shrieking through the spoiler on someone’s Camaro.
That’s also part of the pact my friend’s talking about,
not to offer condolence, not to take note.
You don’t tell the men they’re sorry creatures,
you don’t ask the women what went wrong.
If you’re being mugged or raped or even killed
you have to scream “Fire!” instead of “Help!”
to get someone to help you. Though soon, if not already,
all the helpers will have caught on
and then you’ll have to start screaming something else,
like that you’ve spotted Bacall or Harrison Ford on the street,
Bart Simpson even—no wait a minute, he’s not real,
though I remember a time when even the president talked about him
as if he were human. It’s not the sleaziness
of phone sex I bristle at, but rather the way it assists
the world in becoming imprecise
about what is real and what is not, what is a blow job
and what is only my friend jimmying her finger
in her mouth or making a sucky noise
against the back of her hand. Which is oddly exactly
how the professor of the ornithology class I took my junior year
taught us to lure birds in, because birds
would think these were the sounds of other birds.
And in that other life of mine,
when bird-watching was something I did for a living,
I remember packing high into the mountains
before the snow melted, when the trail couldn’t be followed,
so mine would be the only soul for miles.
One reason I went up there was because at sundown
when the wind climbed the backs of the mountains
along with the spreading violet light,
you could hear the distinct murmuring that the Indians said
was the collective voices of the dead. And I’d lie there,
just my sleeping bag and pad set down on snow,
and I’d look hard at the sky, as though
the wind were something I could see if I looked hard enough,
listening equally hard to convince myself
about the voices of the dead, though always
I was tugged back from true belief
by the one side of my brain that insiste
d: Wind.
And also I remember
how once at the trailhead a man popped out of his motor home
and pointed a camcorder at me, asking
where I was going, what I was doing—though of course,
alone, I wasn’t going to say.
But even as I turned away, I heard
the whir of the movie being made
and the man making up his own narration: see this little girl,
she says she’s going to climb a mountain,
and briefly I thought about pulling a Trotsky on him
with my ice ax. But as the New Agers say I
“let it go,” and I left,
and he didn’t follow me, and nothing bad ever happened,
though from time to time I think about strangers watching that movie
in the man’s living room, his voice overdubbing
(see this little girl, she says she’s going to climb a mountain)
the sound of me, of my boots walking.
Air Guitar
The women in my family were full of still water;
they churned out piecework as quietly as glands.
Plopped in America with only the wrong words
hobbling their tongues, they liked one thing
about the sweatshop, the glove factory,
and it was this: you didn’t have to say much.
All you had to do was stitch the leather fingers
until you came up with a hand; the rest
they kept tucked to their ribs like a secret book.
Why, was not said, though it doesn’t seem natural
the way these women ripped the pages out
and chewed them silently and swallowed — where
is the ur-mother holding court beside her soup pot,
where are Scheherazade and the rest of those Persians
who wove their tragedies in rugs?
Once I tutored a Cambodian girl: each week
I rolled the language like a newspaper and used it
to club her on the head. In return she spoke
a mangled English that made all her stories sad,
about how she’d been chased through the jungle
by ruthless henchmen of Pol Pot; for months
she and her sisters mother grandmothers aunts
lived in the crowns of trees and ate what grew there
and did not touch down. When she told the story,
the way her beautiful and elaborately painted face
would loosen at each corner of her eyes and mouth
reminded me of a galosh too big for its shoe.
It was rubbery, her face, like the words
that sometimes haunt me with their absence,
when I wake up gargling the ghost of one
stuck like a wild hair far back in my mouth.
This morning it took me till noon to fish out
cathexis, and even then I did not know
what this meant until I looked it up.
As it was not until I met her sister
that I learned what the girl was telling me
was not the story she was telling: there were
no women in trees, no myrmidons of Comrade Pot,
their father was, is, had always been,
a greengrocer in Texas. Cathexis:
fixing emotional energy on some object
or idea — say the jungle, or the guy
getting rubbery with a guitar that isn’t there.
Yet see how he can’t keep from naming
the gut that spills above his belt Lucille —
as music starts to pour from his belly
and the one hiked-up corner of his lip. This
is part of the legend we tell ourselves about the tribe,
that men are stuffed and full to bursting
with their quiet, that this is why they’ve had to go
into the wilderness, searching for visions
that would deliver up their names. While women
stayed in the villages, with language at their center
like a totem log tipped lengthwise to the ground.
And they chipped at it and picked at it,
making a hole big enough to climb in, a dugout
in which they all paddled off to hunt up
other villages, the other members of the tribe.
And when the men returned they found no one home,
just cold fire pits that would not speak — an old
old forsakenness they bring to the bar stools
while the jukebox music washes over each of them
like a tricolored light wheel on a silver tree.
Though someone might argue that none of whatever
I’ve just said is true: it was men who made boats
while the women sat clumped in private guilds,
weaving their baskets tight enough to trap
the molecules of water. You can see
that the trail from here to the glove factory
would not be terribly long or hard to read,
and how it might eventually lead to the railroad flat
where, alone at night for many years, my grandmother
works deep into her privacy with a common nail
that she scratches across the backs of copper sheets.
She is making either the hands clasped in prayer
or the three-quarter profile of Jesus.
As far as I know there is nothing
the radio can play now that will make her sing.
Pomegranate
How charitable to call it fruit, when almost nothing
inside it can be eaten. Just the gelatin
that thinly rinds the unpalatable seed.
The rest of it all pith, all bitter,
hardly a meal, even for a thin girl. But food enough,
at least in the myth, to be what ties Persephone
half the year to hell — though it’s never clear
this future isn’t the one she wants,
her other choice being daylight, sure,
but also living with her mother. In some versions
she willingly eats the tart red seeds, signing on
with the underground gods and their motorbikes
and their dark shades. Oh... all right —
no motorbikes. And “eats” is not right either.
But what, then — “sucks”? “Strains the seeds through her teeth”?
It would have made more sense for Hades to tempt her
with something full of juice: a grapefruit, say,
or peach. But only a girl like Eve
could be so blank a slate as to ruin herself
with a meal as salutary as the apple. Give her instead
the kind of nourishment that takes its own
equipment to extract, like the pomegranate or the spiny
asteroid of the Chinese chestnut. Or the oyster,
from which, between the shell and shucking knife,
there is no exiting unscathed: a delicacy, we say,
though the hand hangs out its little flag of skin.
But doesn’t the blood that salts the mouth somehow
make the meat taste sweeter? And if she’d turned
toward us in the moonlight with the red pulp
mottling her teeth: wouldn’t our innards
have started to sing? I know that’s what mine did
those nights when our girl got called out of the junipers
where the rest of us hid her — all it took
was his deep voice, and she stepped out.
Then came sounds that, instead of carrying words,
carried punctuation’s weight: the exclamation
when she had the air knocked out, and the question mark
that was her sudden inswept breath.
And the parentheses when time went on forever,
when there was no sound because he’d got her by the throat.
Her boyfriend seemed to like our
watching, his imperiousness
lecturing on what we didn’t know: the jelly
sluiced inside the mouth or the seeds
rasped across the palate… until it ended sometimes
when he strolled her off, steering
as if she were the boat and her skinny arm
were its tiller. But just as often
he’d have somewhere to get to, or lose interest
as if so much activity had pushed him to the brink of sleep,
and that’s how she came back to us kneeling
in our patch of stunted trees, whose evergreenery
pressed its crewelwork in our haunches.
Even by mere moonlight it was hard
not to see the art in what he’d done:
her lip iridescent, her chin gleaming
like the hemisphere of a tarnished spoon.
And didn’t the leaves seem brighter then,
if it can be said that junipers have leaves?
As our hard panting rattled through
…but no. Stop here. No of course it can’t be said.
Crash Course in Semiotics
1.
“Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way
to start the poem. But would she mean anything
devoid of her context, in this case a lushly
late-August deciduous forest, some maple,
mostly oak? She carries no prop—for example,
no bike chain, which the cops could be sawing
from the tree trunk that she’s wedded to her body.
But let’s start with her pure, and untranslated,
as the famous cartoon of the door is a mystery
until we post the word ladies at a point that would be
four feet up from the ground if this door
were not drawn two inches tall—it’s us,
you see, who make believe it corresponds
to a “true-life” human door. Does it help
if I say the naked woman is “really” my true-
life friend, she of the tangled dago surname
we don’t need to get into here? And if I say next
that she has been swimming — in Lake Tiorati —
2.
you can see how straightaway the tangling subdivides
into (a) where the hell is Lake Tiorati?
and (b) why naked? — to the last let me answer
that it’s 1978 and she is twenty; at college