western edge on cloudless days, you see tall peaks
tinted by distance, with nothing else in the landscape
to match their shades — the purples and salmony orange
and full-blown, flamingo pink almost too
too lavish, as though whatever god made them were running
for a city council seat. Of course
when you get there, the mountains are never purple,
and come evening the mist slides down the couloirs
to settle in the back crease of your neck. But from here
doesn’t there look romantic, aren’t you shanghaied
by its Shangri-La, and don’t you start thinking
about the Kennedy administration, doesn’t it make you feel
like being kissed? Nearby the city council’s commissioned
a concrete man and woman to do just that: kiss
till kingdom come while her knee rises underneath
her dress. It’s a civic-minded embrace, though: one woman
and one man oblivious to her breasts, quite different
from what’s going on by the pay phone, where one man
grapples with another. Not lovers, their bodies big
with the scent of dead leaves turned. The heavier man
leans back against the ice freezer while the smaller man
kneels before him like a supplicant, their drunkenness
a lifeboat swamped by words. And I hear something
about five dollars missing, which makes the bigger man
take down his pants — to prove what he has, which is nothing
but the lumpy glands pooled in his hand, a gesture
whose earnestness in another context might seem almost
touching. But the friend is touching, isn’t touched,
bug-eyed with scrutiny and stern outrage as he pokes
through what is offered like a nest of pale blue eggs
— though friend is probably too strong a word
to link these men who only happen to be trapped together
when a pie-piece of the world shears off: my slice
between parking spot and doorway in. Already a woman
is directing traffic away while I stop to look.
My guess is that these guys come from the lean-tos
of corrugated metal scavenged along the chop,
about which there are letters in the paper every day
that go: How come these lowlifes get to live by the inlet
while the rest of us have to shell out every month
for crummy solid walls? And they’re made out of what —
Sheetrock? Cardboard pancaked with chalk? Ten years ago
I’d have said people live by the inlet because
the human creature, even in its trials, seeks beauty out.
But now I think that come nightfall the beautiful place
is often simply darkest, where if you keep your fire small
the cops aren’t likely to come. As it’s unlikely
these guys — if they can locate their money —
will find on aisle 6B that good Napa cabernet on sale
before suction-stepping their way back across the mud
to a nice burl of driftwood they’ll straddle to drink
and discourse on the astounding chromatograph produced
by the sun’s sliding down the back side of the world.
But who am I to say? Me here making another slice
by taking those men and, as we say, “using them,”
using the names I liked best — Mantegna, Ghirlandaio,
Pollaiuolo — though there were so many paintings
of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom to choose from, all
with some place in the background where the river goes
about its business and the hills are ripe with sheep.
Countryside that’s lost on Saint Sebastian, who’s already
tied up and arrowed through. But it’s there
if you need it, if you want to tell yourself
another life is not so far away, just a few days
by donkey. And if, when you get there, the rocks
don’t suit your taste, you’ll find another landscape
right behind — another mountain, another river
falling one after another like old calendar pages.
Too pretty, their colors too perfect, these places
you would never believe in. But still you would go there.
The Salmon underneath the City
What are they doing down there but unsettling me,
swimming through that seamless dark:
passing into the culvert and under the boat shop,
Under the backyard, under the parking lot
where milk trucks are bedded down with dogs; at night
electricity floods the wires above the chain-link.
And sometimes I study the garden’s broken dirt
to detect the groundswell of their passage.
Or I walk out to the cedars where the culvert
feeds them back to Moxlie Creek. But so far,
nothing. Except one I saw leap
from the water in a perfect, frizzled crescent,
there where the stub of silver pipe ungutters
in the bay. The guy who’d hooked it
showed me the telltale black gums in its mouth,
after I’d watched him palm a rock and bring it down
hard on the skull, watched the fish relinquish
then sigh all its living out. That was weeks ago
and ever since I’ve listened for the wilderness
they make of their compulsion, of their one idea:
Against. Under the milk yard, where the dogs’ chops
quiver, and the wires sing with what moves through
and makes them full (on rainy nights,
even the hardware glistens). And sometimes I find myself
stalled under a streetlamp, snagged by the curb
like a yellow leaf. Crouched there to look
where a storm grate opens over these dark waters.
The Ghost Shirt
Museum of Natural History, NYC, 5/1/92, the first day of the riots
The blue whale swam through blue air in the basement
while upstairs the elephants twined together tusk by tusk,
and the enormous canoe was being rowed by the Tlingit
as they have rowed without moving for years through the dusk
in the Hall of the Americas. Empty space
was brocaded by schoolkids’ shrieks
as teachers pantomimed in front of each glass case,
and I turned a corner and came up smack against the ghost shirt
worn by a mannequin with no legs and no face —
at first
it almost didn’t register;
it was not what books had led me to expect: no beads
no ornament no chamois leather
or those shiny cornets made from rolled-up snuff-tin lids.
Instead it was just a cotton shift
negotiating grimly between blue and green and red,
with some glyphs scrawled amateurishly across the breast
in ordinary pen: a thunderbird and some lightning,
a buffalo and a hoofprint,
one tree, one little man puffing
on a flume-size pipe. Pentagram stars formed a cloud
atopside a smaller species of stippling
that I had to stare at a long time before I understood
meant bullets. Then I found myself checking for broken threads
to see if any of the holes were rimmed in blood —
but no: time or moths or bullets, it was anybody’s guess.
A quote on the wall from the Paiute messiah
said Indians who don’t believe in the ghost dance
will grow little, just about a foot high,
and
stay that way. Then some of those
will be turned into wood and burned in fire —
and I left the museum wondering about which was worse:
to display a man’s blood here
so every kid can practice crumpling as if falling off a horse
(& the kid knows exactly how to clutch the new air
entering his heart). Or to clean the shirt
as if the ghost blood had never been there.
This is the kind of story you could carry around
like a beaded keychain from a tourist trap:
how the ghost dance became a thunderstorm
that even summoning Buffalo Bill out
to the Standing Rock agency could not slake —
until the schoolhouses were empty
and the trading stores were empty
and the winter wheat went bony in the field
and the War Department had no idea what it meant
and that Yellow Bird wore a peculiar shirt when he chanted
Your bullets will not go toward us right before they did.
From the museum, I take the subway downtown
and change trains where the tunnels all converge
below Times Square, in one dank cavern underground
whose darkness seems so large it does not have edges.
Even at midafternoon, the shade there seethes
with people marching in a lockstep through that passage;
sometimes, when directed back over a shoulder, a mouth
on someone’s profiled face will drop
and I’ll see the tongue dart nervously along the teeth…
then the march becomes a gallop
when the walls begin to pound with an arriving train,
its riders rushing toward us in a yellowness crushed up
against the glass. And we board like cattle, one person
driving an elbow into another’s gut
as we jam in (and we jam in…)
and coming up at Grand Central, I find it likewise knotted
with people ranged in single-files,
shuffling toward the ticket counters in fits and stops
that give them time to paw the vast floor with their heels.
But what strikes me most is how loudly the silence
murmurs off the marble tiles
as if we were all underwater, hearing backward our own breath.
Then I remember that I bought a return on my way in
and hurry back down two flights of steps
to the lower level, where the train for Croton
sits almost full, though not scheduled to leave for half an hour
yet. Soon all the seats are gone
but the train keeps filling, arms and legs the mortar
in a wall of breasts and double-breasts. I avoid the gaze
and glare of those who hang on straps over
my head, and it isn’t until the train begins to wheeze
from its hydraulics and slowly labors
past the gate that everyone around me will unfreeze
enough to speak: about a city bus and its passengers
rocked onto its flank and set aflame, a hundred black
and Spanish kids aswarm with Molotovs and crowbars…
which is the story we sow along the darkness, until the track
rises into daylight above Ninety-Seventh Street,
where the broken windows have been boarded back
with plywood, each painted with its own domestic scene
— curtains gathered primly or potted geraniums on the sills —
though otherwise, everything looks to me as it has always been,
with the same nimbuses of spray paint on the trestles,
the alphabet stuffed like heavy furniture
reciting its addition on the same brick walls
…until we cross the East River
where everybody lets their breath go with relief,
the wheels droning their steady whuckerwhuckerwhucker
as the train settles into its top speed
and we skitter along the Hudson, where nothing is except
water on one side, on the other side a ravine
overstudded with junk: a Cadillac sunk axle-
deep a shopping cart the front wheels of a stroller
menacingly airborne like the forelegs of Tyrannosaurus rex —
and it’s here the train zippers
to an abrupt stop (though we haven’t come to any station),
steeping us anxiously awhile in quiet, until the whispers
blossom like umbrellas opening before the rain:
first they’re blocking the engine then they’re lying down
on the tracks, rumors that ripple through the train
like a wave sweeping upstream, then back down,
by which time the muttering has escalated to a shout
that goes Keep going! and We’ve got to run those fuckers down!
Between the train and whoever lies down in its path,
you could say there’s a ghost shirt,
whatever it is that makes the locomotive stop
if the engineer can see far enough ahead.
I think it is a dotted line
looping the outskirts of our being human —
ghostly because of the ease with which
its perforations can be ripped. Also
because the sole proof of its presence
lies in the number of days we go unhurt,
a staggering number, especially when you consider
how much bigger the world is than a train.
And how something even as small as a bullet
can pick out of elsewhere’s 359 degrees
one shape, and suddenly everything is changed,
though the calx of what didn’t happen
remains in curiously enduring traces
like the stone casts that larval caddis flies
leave behind them in the stream
(& larva: from the Latin word for ghost).
What you have is always less
a history of a people, any people,
than a history of its rocks: first a heap
then a cathedral and soon a heap again,
while the names get amortized like money.
Like Damian Williams, the one they called Football,
who held his bloody cinderblock aloft
and danced as if he were stomping out a hundred
baby flames: Rodney King, Reginald Denny,
William Cody, Stacey Koon. And Black Coyote,
who refused to give up his Winchester
after Yellow Bird danced the first few steps
before Colonel Forsyth’s pony soldiers
broke all hell loose. And Black Coyote,
who Turning Hawk said was crazy,
“a young man of very bad influence and in fact a nobody.”
I want to say that we all weren’t white on that train,
but mostly we were —
and when without explanation the engine started up again,
those who weren’t fell away to the edge of the herd
and got off where the conductor squawked out Spuyten Duyvil,
Marble Hill and Yonkers…
and as we rolled I strained to imagine the sound a wheel
would make as it milled through someone’s ribs,
listening for them bedded down in every mile
until I got off way out in the suburbs.
From the station I called my father to come pick me up
and waited for him half-hidden in some shrubs
so that when he arrived I could make my usual leap
into his Mercedes so no one sees me getting in.
I remember what it was like in that town, growing up
so out of it I didn’t even see the affluence back then —
and how we kids rolled our eyes whenever ou
r parents
started in on the WPA and the Great Depression
and being glad for a day’s honest work even if that meant
no more than laying a stone and piling another on top
— part of a war we waged in serial installments,
mostly over what we put on our backs, or feet, or not:
the tattered clothes we wore to ape a poverty
about which our folks claimed we did not know shit
(though like every kid in that town I toted around my copy
of a gospel that one week was Soul on Ice
and the next week Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee)
— which maybe explains why it still makes me nervous,
though twenty years have passed: to be riding around in a car
that cost more than, elsewhere, someone’s house,
while I’m trying to explain to my old father
what it meant to me to see the ghost shirt
just before Wall Street shut down and every broker
fled. And not just fled, but reverted,
as if what made us human had only been a temporary crust
on our skins, as if there were no way to stop the backward
march into the swamp. Pretty soon we’d all be just
like rats but bigger, and combat ready…
but here again my father claimed I didn’t know whereof
I spoke: all day the television had showed the city
eerily at peace. And the only fires were the tiny flames
of candles people held, outside the public library.
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