I’ve bought a costume or two at the department store
that also sells chopped meat and pineapples
where you hide the impractical straps and struts
between gardening gloves and a ream of typing paper
as they roll along the checkout’s conveyor belt
where the bra gets dinged with grease.
But nothing requiring tools, nothing with such
ramifications: the kids pouncing on their bunk beds
while you’re hammering away, I mean hanging it up
so you can kick a paper parasol like the one that Stanford White
hung from the ceiling: fiddle dee dee.
What about the giant hooks?
and Jim says you get two decoy ferns
in silk or plastic, so as not to get dirt on the carpet
and because you don’t want to hang your love swing by the window
where a true living plant could grow.
The new guy bought it at the fantasy emporium
down by Pike Market, choosing the swing
over the hand-stitched ribbon underwear
sold in the boutique next door,
which cost a week’s wages. Jim held out his arms
to indicate the way she’ll hold the ropes—
a posture that made me think of Jesus,
forgive me for saying. But I’m so far gone
I can say anything: Hello Mister Death,
let’s run this bar code through.
Ouch—
that love swing sets you back more than a hundred bucks,
but hey it’s cheaper than the ribbons
and will give you years of sailing back and forth,
hanging from nothing but graveyard fog.
Mounting instructions are included
though they be written in Japanese,
and it even comes in a discreet black shopping bag
to match your — whatever you call it—
your robe your gown.
Altered Beast
You were a man and I used to be a woman
before we first put our quarters in
the game at the gas station, whose snack-chip display
wore a film of oil and soot
beside which you turned into a green gargoyle and then
a flying purple lynx—
whereas I could not get the hang of the joystick
and remained as I began
while you kicked my jaw and chopped my spine,
a beating I loved because it meant you were rising
fast through the levels — and the weak glom on
via defeat, which is better than nothing—
insert sound effects here: blip blat ching ching
…and when they stopped, your claws gripped the naked
— looking pink lizard that I was,
blood-striped and ragged, as if being a trophy
were the one reward the vanquished get—
which is why, walking home through the curbside sludge,
when you held my hand with your arm outstretched
as if you were holding a dripping scalp or head,
I hummed with joy to be your spoils.
Motorola
Silver moth whose wings flap before landing on the ear—
you stir the air with voices
and then a cloud swirls on the jet stream,
causing a typhoon a world away.
I am not happy about having to become a cell phone person,
even though I see the other cell phone people walking
with their necks bent so the sun can reach that lovely place below their ears.
I feel superior, listening to the juncos’ aggravations
with you squirreled in a pocket on my breast
where you beep your ultimatums. That you have a molten look
makes me think that you could seep
into my body, so I’d contain multitudes
like Walt Whitman, all my friends alphabetized
along with the pain clinic, all ruled by that prim mistress
who asks for the codes and is so firm in her denials,
firm in her goodbye. I’d renounce her altogether
did my bones not have their exigencies—
when I fall, you give a little yawn as you unfold,
and then a fireman comes to lift me, muscles rumpling his rubber coat,
and I think that he will never age.
Why can’t the mind simply roll around on its own wheels?
Why can’t the body be rewired like a lamp?
The other cell phone people draw a thread through the world and stitch it close
whereas I go around huffing in a state of irritation
that I take to be the honest state of nature,
which is why I listen to the juncos, though it’s difficult to decode their words.
And though I hold you, Moth, in my contempt, I’ve spoken through you
for enough minutes from what the corporation calls my plan
that your numbers have become infused with my mouth’s smell.
It is not the junco’s bird-smell of vinegar and berries
but that person-smell of roasted meat and sweat,
and I could spray you with disinfectant but that would fry your circuitry—
to wipe away the human would make you go kaput.
On the Chehalis River
All day long the sun is busy, going up and going down,
and the moon is busy, swinging the lasso of its gravity.
And the clouds are busy, metamorphing as they skid—
the vultures are busy, circling in their kettle.
And the river is busy filling up my britches
as I sit meditating in the shallows until my legs go numb.
Upstream I saw salmon arching half into the air:
glossy slabs of muscle I first thought were seals.
They roiled in a deeper pocket of the river,
snagged in a drift net on Indian land.
Trying to leap free before relenting to the net
with a whack of final protest from the battered tail.
They’ll be clubbed, I know, when the net’s hauled up
but if there were no net they’d die anyway when they breed.
You wonder how it feels to them: their ardent drive upstream.
What message is delivered when the eggs release.
A heron sums a theory with one crude croak; the swallows
write page after page of cursive in the air. My own offering
is woozy because when their bodies breached the surface
the sun lit them with a flash that left me blind.
Number One
for Ben
Animal attack is Number One in the list called
“Ways in Which I Do Not Want to Die”—
wait, Ben says knock it off with the death-talk;
you’ve already talked death to death.
But the Number Ones don’t need our speech
to claim their cool dark storage place: my sister said
hers was falling down the stairs, after her husband left
and every riser turned into El Capitan.
Sleeping on the sofa did nothing about the steps
connecting the world to her front porch. Three is more
than enough, given a new moon and tallow on the instep
and the right force-vectors applied to the neck.
I said Relax, you should join a health club
so my sister rowed until she withered to a twig,
and when the office microfiche clerk did fall down the stairs
all that hemoglobin on the cellar floor
sent my sister’s paw back to her popcorn bowl
as she asked the darkness from a fetal pose
about the safety of a pup tent
set up in a housing tract.
Thus do our Number Ones sit on our chests
like sumo wrestlers
in lifeboats — rowing rowing.
And some nights in my phantasmagloriland
I am supped by shark or dingo dog or a cannibal king.
Then I am a movie star (if not your classic movie star),
just one of the shriekers who is always beautiful
when her head spins suddenly
and her hair fans.
And what could Numbers Seven or Twelve offer by compare:
those falling-elevator dreams
the fire dreams
the riptide dreams
the dreams of death as a mere phenomenon of weather?
I know my celebrity is fleeting as I thrash and holler and yet
see the moviegoers prick up in their seats:
see the good it does,
how it is not so grim or tragic
when the boy-hand spiders across girl-shouldermeat
and she curls against him
like a pink prawn thawing from the freezer.
Then his hand goes tumbling to her breast—
you see what magic I am giving them
astir in frumpy velvet seats arrayed in front of my disquiet
at this brink this moment when she lets it stay.
Bert Wilson Plays Jim Pepper’s “Witchi-Tai-To” at the Midnight Sun
Don’t look up, because the ceiling is suffering
some serious violations of the electrical code,
the whole chaotic kelplike mess
about to shower us with flames.
I think I can render this clearly enough—
Bert’s saxophone hanging between his knees,
propped against the wheelchair’s seat
where his body keeps shape-shifting—
he’s Buddha then shop-vac then Buddha again,
formlessness floating on top of form.
The problem is backstory, how to get it all in,
not just Bert’s beanie and tie-dye T-shirt,
but polio too, and the tune itself, concentric ripples
widening. So now I send dead Jim Pepper
rippling out, as well as his grandfather,
fancy-dancing and chanting. How to tender
the lead-in, would phonemes do any good
(the signature DAHH, the doon doons down-marching)—
or just call it a prayer to simplify things
as Bert sends the melody way out
beyond the tidiness of circles?
Then he puts the mouthpiece aside
to bring up the words from the floor of his soul
or say from the pads of his spud-shaped feet
spraddling the footplate, if soul is too hokey
for all the misty goo inside us.
First comes the Creek part of the song
and then comes the English, when Bert throws back his chin:
his underbeard raised in a coyote salute
to the water infusing the warehouse roof.
Here, take a seat on these rickety risers
inside my head, though your life isn’t mine,
still, I have hope for your hearing
the gist of this refrain
about how glad he is that he’s not dead.
Accidental Dismemberment
From Hartford, from Allentown, they used to send their letters—
the corporate stationery featured the word LIFE.
Somewhere radio towers twinked
and garters held up the socks of men
whose fine print said that if I ever lost my arm in a buzz-saw accident—
boy, that would be the day my ship came in.
So I pictured myself shopping for produce with my feet,
a melon riding on my tarsal bones and money
smoking in my pocket. But this dream-trafficking gave way
to wondering what it took to land in jail—
for steady meals and solitude
and a tin cup to play the bars like a marimba!
You might need enough time to write a book as long as Proust’s,
yet not so much to fire up the chair they call Ol’ Sparky:
so we’re talking a fine calibration here. To elsewhere
my love and I will be speeding in the car
when he’ll clap his ears: Stop I can’t stand any more this Looosha talk!
leaving the steering wheel dangerously unattended
though I tell him many writers think about the hoosegow
as a meditative place. Especially now
when the junk mail comes in photon blips,
say from Mrs. Mobutu Sese Seko needing a little cash to tide her over
and spokespersons for the penis you have to wind on a wheel
like a garden hose. What insurance executive
walks to work anymore while dreaming
up fine print for my lost feet?
There is much to envy in that woman
who flaunts her perfect body on the Key West shore—
yet five thousand dollars still seems like a lot of money,
especially for one of these fingers I don’t use much.
Inseminating the Elephant
The zoologists who came from Germany
wore bicycle helmets and protective rubber suits.
So as not to be soiled by substances
that alchemize to produce laughter in the human species;
how does that work biochemically is a question
whose answer I have not found yet. But these are men
whose language requires difficult conjugations under any circumstance:
first, there’s the matter of the enema, which ought to come
as no surprise. Because what the news brings us
is often wheelbarrows of dung — suffering,
with photographs. And so long as there is suffering,
there should be also baby elephants — especially this messy,
headlamp-lit calling-forth. The problem lies
in deciding which side to side with: it is natural
over the twisted human form,
but is there something cowardly in that comic swerve?
Hurry an elephant
to carry the bundle of my pains,
another with shiny clamps and calipers
and the anodyne of laughter. So there, now I’ve alluded
to my body that grows ever more inert — better not overdo
lest you get scared; the sorrowing world
is way too big. How the zoologists start
is by facing the mirror of her flanks,
that foreboding luscious place where the gray hide
gives way to a zeroing-in of skin as vulnerable as an orchid.
Which is the place to enter, provided you are brave,
brave enough to insert your laser-guided camera
to avoid the two false openings of her “vestibule,”
much like the way of entering death, of giving birth to death,
calling it forth as described in the Tibetan Book.
And are you brave enough to side with laughter
if I face my purplish, raw reflection
and attempt the difficult entry of that chamber where
the seed-pearl of my farce and equally opalescent sorrow
lie waiting?
For the Mad Cow in Tenino
I don’t know where you rank in my list of killers:
my viral load, my sociopaths, my inattention
on the interstate, where I crane my head after the hawk
and the windshield splatters
into diamonds. Not just thinking about the hawk,
or even merely watching it, I always have to be it for a minute,
just as my mind enters the murderers
for one long flash before it stumbles out.
From your postmortem, you held us fast
while a man said It’s enough as his lungs filled
after being stabbed here near the playground,
before they milled his limbs with power tools
and scattered him beyond retrieval. Too late
to recall your brain, and the fatty white part of your spine,
already delivered to the rendering plant
and melted down into the slurry.
That night is gone and cannot be reassembled
despite my re-imagining the car
with a man dying in its trunk, a car otherwise like any other,
as we could not verify your affliction
for days after you fell. Which left the land in chaos
except for Scatter Creek’s flowing past,
wending without hurry though the coastal range
before it empties rain and blood into Willapa Bay.
Garfield’s Dream
Should we not know that James Garfield suffered from crippling writer’s block and simply could not finish his speech until 2:30 on the morning of the inaugural? As the day approached, he had an anxiety dream in which he fell off a canal boat and was suddenly standing naked in the wilderness during a wild storm. After finding a few pieces of cloth to cover himself and embarking on “a long and tangled journey,” he found his way to a house where “an old negro woman took me into her arms and nursed me as though I were a sick child.” Comforted, he awoke to face his presidency.
TED WIDMER, The American Scholar, WINTER 2005
Start with one cell, call it a zygote,
call it a diploid that turns into me — fool, petunia, witch.
Samaritan and crow. Endless nouns
I could plug in. And yet my eye
can be told from the world’s other billions of eyeballs
by machines that map the galaxy
of specks and glints that make up its blue ring.
Then how to account for Garfield’s dream
being the same one I’ve dreamed,
except the old woman had a child and the child held a doll
who was a replica of the child?
I think there’s a me in a black veil
who has dreamed it, too
(because the crow is a fool because the witch will presume),
as well as a me who’ll strap explosives to his chest
tomorrow, when he’ll blow himself back
into the disarray of cells.
Dear Assassin:
stay here with me in the dream—
we have only a few more hours of night
to be held together by neither our wife’s nor our mother’s arms.
Sylvia Plath’s Hair
for Marianne Boruch
In Bloomington, Indiana, the librarian lugged it from the archive
in a cardboard box, the kind that long-stemmed roses come in —
there was even tissue paper she unfolded
like someone parting a lover’s blouse
or like the skin of a corpse being peeled by a pathologist,