she’s been reading Simone de Beauvoir and learning
words like patriarchy and oppression.
And these have been Mixmastered into her thinking
even about swimsuits — i.e., that not to wear one
is to rip the sign off the door and stomp it
underfoot. When she lies on a rock
the last thing she expects is the tingling
she feels now against her wrist, from a guy
peeing brazenly at her perimeter. This
is an impasse whose bud she thought she had nipped
by aggravating her muscles into interlaced mounds
so her body resembles a relief map of the Appalachians.
In whose northernmost range this story unfolds
& hence the much-delayed answer to item (a), above.
3.
“Naked woman dadadadada police”: not a story but words
at the end of a chain whose first link is her realizing
that the Puerto Rican kids across the lake
splashing and whooping are not having fun —
though this is the sign that she’d stuck on their door.
No, there’s another word for the kid
slapping his palms on the water:
Drowning. Even the urinater abruptly stops
his stream and stumbles back from her, ashamed.
And because she’s the one with the lifeguard build
and because all the guys are much too drunk,
without even thinking she finds herself paddling
toward the spot these kids are now screaming Julio! at,
where she draws a mental X upon the water.
Of course, it is a fantasy, the correspondence
that would make a drawing equal life, and so
you understand how amazing it is, when she dives
to the bottom and her hand happens on the child.
4.
Perhaps what she expected was for the men on shore
to pay her no mind, as in Manet’s Déjeuner…:
the naked woman sits among them, yet she is a ghost.
But the kids keep yelling Julio! even after
she’s hauled the wet one out, the one
she points to: Julio okay. No, they shriek,
Julio otro! words she knows just enough Spanish
to know mean there’s another Julio in the lake.
Whom she cannot save despite her next round of diving,
which lasts until the cops come hiking down the trail
in their cop shoes. Then she comes ashore
and stands shivering among them, telling the story
calmly enough until she ends it with: for Christ’s sake
can’t anyone give her a T-shirt? They’re staring
as if somehow she’s what’s to blame, seeing a naked
woman, not the miracle. Which is, of course,
the living boy, that with these words — Julio otro! —
we manage to make sense to anyone at all.
Serotonin
Let be be finale of seem.
WALLACE STEVENS
At year’s end, the news from here
concerns the new ordinance against couches: no couches
allowed on porches anymore, except for those designed
for outdoor use. The mayor thinks we’ll feel better
after the banishment of all that soggy misused foam,
corollary to the gray mood that shall be lifted
like a beached log by the tide. But you know me,
already worrying how to know this outdoor couch
now that a fifty-dollar citation rides on the difference
between velour and vinyl, rattan and wicker,
cushion and mat. Last night was the solstice:
I spent it shivering around a forty-gallon drum whose flame
we party creatures were to feed with slips of paper
inscribed with our woes from this year past.
But I wanted to burn nothing and stood there flummoxed
by my strange absence of regret… until I remembered
the nightly tablets reminiscent of moths, the white
generics the pharmacist swears are the same
as the yellow pills that January started with.
And I do feel better—though humbled, a bit foolish
to figure such heartsickness a matter of ions
merely orbiting a lobe of brain, much like the hydrangea
at the southeast corner of the house, how it becomes
a blue shrub if you bury old nails in its roots. This
I don’t get: how one day the tide marsh at sunrise
can make your blood overrun your chest, and the next day
it’s just a sweatshop for salt flies, the rain
a thorn nest on your head. Or how the eagle
detendoning a heron carcass
can be, for my friend up in Canada, just one
more emblem of America’s mawkishness & glop.
He calls them shithawks, having seen so many
galumphing bedraggled through the dump, where they slit
the mountain of shiny sacks in search
of undigested grease. And yet it’s the same bird
that made me drive into a fence post
while I gawked at the deluged field — amazed,
amazed I ever wanted not to be here. News flash:
what’s been walking around in my clothes all these years
turns out to have been a swap meet of carbons
and salts: what can be poured into the ground to make
the hydrangea red again. As the sadness inherent
in a wet clime’s winter might just be this same
image thing, a moldy beach ball smell that’ll disappear
once we straighten out the business with the couches.
Meanwhile someone tell Wallace Stevens he was wrong about seem:
Seem is good. Seem is everything.
Lament in Good Weather
So would this be how I’d remember my hands
(given the future’s collapsing trellis):
pulling a weed (of all possible gestures),
trespassing the shade between toppled stalks?
A whole afternoon I spent chopping them back,
no fruit but a glut of yellow buds, the crop choked
this year by its own abundance, the cages
overrun. And me not fond of tomatoes, really,
something about how when you cut to their hearts
what you find is only a wetness and seeds,
wetness and seeds, wetness and seeds.
Still, my hands came gloved with their odor
into this room, where for days I’ve searched
but found no words to fit.
Bitter musky acrid stale — the scent
of hands once buried past the wrist in vines.
The Oldest Map with the Name America
1.
In Martin Waldseemüller’s woodblock, circa 1507,
the New World is not all there.
We are a coastline
without substance, a thin strip
like a movie set of a frontier town.
So the land is wrong and it is empty
but for one small black bird facing west,
the whole continent outlined with a hard black edge
too strictly geometric, every convolution squared.
In the margin, in a beret, Amerigo Vespucci
pulls apart the sharp legs of his compass —
though it should be noted that instead of a circle
in the Oldest Map with the Name America
the world approximates that shape we call a heart.
2.
The known world once stretched from my house
to the scrim of trees at the street’s dead end,
back when the streets dead-ended instead of cleav
ing
into labyrinths of other streets. I was not
one of those who’d go sailing blithely
past the neighborhood’s bright rim:
Saturdays I spent down in the basement
with my Thingmaker and Plastigoop…
Sunday was church, the rest was school,
this was a life, it was enough. Then one day
a weird kid from down the block pushed back
the sidewall of that edge, spooling me
like a fish on the line of his backward walking
fifty yards deep into the woodlot. Which
was barely wild, its trees bearing names
like sugar maple, its snakes being only
garter snakes. Soon the trail funneled
to a single log spanning some unremarkable
dry creek that the kid got on top of,
pointed at and said: You fall down there,
you fall forever. And his saying this
worked a peculiar magic over me: suddenly
the world lay flat and without measure.
So that when I looked down at the dead leaves
covering the ravine they might have
just as well been paint, as depth
became the living juice squeezed out
of space: how far
could you fall? Then the leaves shifted,
their missing third dimension reconfigured
into sound: a murmuring snap
like the breakage of tiny bones that sent me
running back to the world I knew.
3.
Unlike other cartographers of his day,
Waldseemüller wasn’t given to ornamenting his maps
with any of Pliny’s pseudohuman freaks,
like the race of men having one big foot
that also functions as a parasol.
Most likely he felt such illustrations
would have demeaned the science of his art,
being unverifiable, like the rumored continents
Australia, Antarctica, which he judiciously leaves out.
Thus graced by its absence, the unknown world
floats beyond the reach of being named,
and the cannibals there
don’t have to find out yet they’re cannibals:
they can just think they’re having lunch.
4.
My point is, he could have been any of us:
with discount jeans and a haircut made
by clippers that his mother ordered
from an ad in a women’s magazine.
Nothing off about him except for maybe
how tumultuously the engines that would run
his adult body started up, expressing
their juice in weals that blistered
his jaw’s skin as its new bristles
began telescoping out. Stunned
by the warped ukulele that yesterday had been
his predictable voice, the kid
one day on the shortcut home from practice
with the junior varsity wrestling squad
knocked down a little girl in the woods
where what he did was nameless & terrible
& ended with something written on her stomach.
Bic pen, blond girl: the details ran
through us like fire, with a gap
like the eye of the flame where you could
stick your finger and not get burned.
By sundown the whole family slipped,
and the kid’s yellow house hulked
empty and dark, with a real estate sign
canted foolishly in its front yard.
Then for weeks our parents went round
making the noise of baby cats
stuck up in trees: who knew? who knew?
We thought they were asking each other
what the kid wrote with the Bic —
what word, what map — and of course
once they learned the answer
they weren’t going to say.
5.
In 1516, Martin Waldseemüller
draws another map in which the King of Portugal
rides saddled on a terrifying fish.
Also the name “America”
has been replaced by “Terra Cannibalor,”
with the black bird changed to a little scene
of human limbs dangling from trees
as if they had been put up there by shrikes.
Instead of a skinny strip, we’re now
a continent so large we have no back edge,
no westward coast — you could walk left
and wind up off the map. As the weird kid did —
though the world being round, I always half-expect
someday to intersect the final leg of his return.
6.
Here the story rides over its natural edge
with one last ornament to enter in the margin
of its telling. That is, the toolshed
that stood behind the yellow house,
an ordinary house that was cursed
forever by its being fled. On the shed
a padlock bulged like a diamond,
its combination gone with all the other
scrambled numbers in the weird kid’s head,
so that finally a policeman had to come
and very theatrically kick the door in
after parking one of our town’s two squad cars
with its beacon spinning at the curb.
He took his time to allow us to gather
like witnesses at a pharaoh’s tomb,
eager to reconstitute a life
from the relics of its leaving.
And when, on the third kick, the door flopped back
I remember for a moment being blinded
by dust that woofed from the jamb in one
translucent, golden puff. Then
when it settled, amid the garden hose
and rusty tools we saw what all
he’d hidden there, his cache
of stolen library books. Derelict,
lying long unread in piles that sparked
a second generation of anger…
from the public brain, which began to rant
about the public trust. While we
its children balled our fists
around the knot of our betrayal:
no book in the world had an adequate tongue
to name the name of what he did.
7.
Dying, Tamburlaine said: Give me a map
then let me see how much is left to conquer.
Most were commissioned by wealthy lords,
the study of maps being often prescribed
as a palliative for melancholy.
In the library of a castle of a prince
named Wolfegg, the two Waldseemüller maps
lay brittling for centuries — “lost,”
the way I think of the weird kid as lost
somewhere in America’s back forty, where
he could be floating under many names.
One thing for sure, he would be old now.
And here I am charting him: no doubt
I have got him wrong, but still he will be my conquest.
8.
Sometimes when I’m home we’ll go by the house
and I’ll say to my folks: come on,
after all these years it’s safe
just to say what really happened.
But my mother’s mouth will thin exactly
as it did back then, and my father
will tug on his earlobe and call the weird kid
one mysterious piece of work.
In the old days, I assumed
they thought they were protecting me
by holding back some crucial,
devastating piece. But I too am grown
and now if they knew what it was
they’d tell me, I should think.
Home
In Renaissance paintings, it’s somewhere apart
from the peopled scene. A somewhere whose trees
grow in spires or in cordial tufts, and each rock
is deliberate, a fragment of the chipped world
washed, tumbled, reset. At least that’s what we see
through the window in Ghirlandaio’s painting
of the grandfather with his famously warted nose:
the trees and the river horseshoeing toward
the purplish, symmetric butte. A pastoral elsewhere.
Someplace to offset this man and his blebs
buckling one on the next. When we know what’s really
outside the window — Florence’s open sewers,
beggar-child X and Signor Y’s ulcered foot —
after all, this is the fifteenth century, every rat
packing off its plague-fleas to the next new town.
No wonder Ghirlandaio puts that town someplace
the rats could never get to from here, not without
scaling a glacier or paddling through water
whose current would be the weir that strains them out.
Even Saint Sebastian, in frescoes by Mantegna
and Pollaiuolo, becomes foreground to a river
that runs from mountains jacketed in snow.
But lacking shadow, depth… as if to ask us
what good perspective is in dire circumstances,
like here, now, Saint Sebastian with an arrow sticking
through his head. Ghirlandaio, Pollaiuolo —
it took a trip to the library to rekindle the names,
and on my way home to write them down, I stopped
to buy some bread at Bayview Grocery. It’s a place
that reminds me of those paintings: something
about how the dust congeals into a yellow varnish
gilding the labels on the cling-peach tins,
but here, outside, the Sound also plunges a foamy arm inland
beside the dumpster. And if you stand at the parking lot’s