the legs the illusion of movement —
& I don’t understand: how the feet can lift
when the legs appear to have no meat in them
at all. Their carcasses
littered the park where I worked,
where the birds flew into power lines
that sliced across the marshes.
The legs took only a day in the sun
before becoming dry enough
to be set out in the nature center,
in a box where children stuck their hands
before they looked — a game
about what we imagine from forms that go unseen.
But before too long the legs were banished,
after a woman complained that her son
had been tricked into touching a dead thing
& could not be consoled for weeks.
2.
Now the era wants us working
in order to improve ourselves:
forget Coleridge wandering the upland
stoned out of his head, forget him
& his years in the spare bedroom
at the surgeon Gillman’s house
where Gillman doled the Black Drop out
to every day’s white page.
The Black Drop, cottage industry of widows:
opium dissolved in quince fruit juice —
& is it wrong to lament its passing
along with extinct words like quince fruit juice?
But the snowy egret’s not extinct, no matter
how dead it sounds that it should be.
For that you can thank the functional era
for having no patience with ornament:
so women give up fancy hats
& the birds return to the wayside marsh,
where they dot the green like clots of foam
bobbing among the empty bottles.
Once when she was really flying
my girlfriend bought a velvet hat,
a black pillbox with one white plume
shooting straight up from the forehead.
This she wore with rubber boots
to bang on my door at ten p.m.,
my friend plotched on cough syrup,
her mind wandering the upland.
Now that she’s dried out,
she fears for her liver; sometimes
(pressing the phone to it) she’ll ask,
long-distance, what I think (she thinks
the hat got left on a Greyhound bus).
I think, Yeah, but remember the fun
we had walking the stiff plumes of our hair
through fresh snow glowing lilac in the moonlight?
But she says no; those nights were tragic
& she can’t remember anything.
3.
Those years my friend gave to Robitussin
I spent chasing after men on bikes,
the loud machines they wore as ornaments
between their legs. They all had the long
black-clad legs of the egret —
spread, slightly bent, from the low-slung seat
& I would have liked to have been one myself
but part of me wanted to stay in the bed,
my spine a white curl replicating
the S-curves of the canyon road,
my plumage perhaps a camisole
with one torn strap. But the choice was either
him or her, looker or looked-at,
subject or object, you could not be both
& me being pigeon-toed & flighty, unable
to hold anything upright with my bad legs…
well, it figures I’d come to land here
where the cedars drip into Ellis Cove
& the long-legged birds stand stock-still
on the stumps: that’s how they disguise themselves.
As I’m likewise disguised in a porkpie hat,
binoculars my only ornament besides the clear drop
clinging to the bulb of my nose-tip.
Above the cove, the shoreline road
hugs the curl of the embankment
& the guys (who would be geezers now)
rumble along it on their Honda Gold Wings.
Audubon’s most famous painting
I must have looked at a hundred times
before I noticed the tiny hunter
approaching from across the marsh.
Meanwhile the bird keeps the black drop of its eye
steady on us, terrifyingly steady,
as if he accepts this one long moment —
Perfect Beauty — for whatever comes next.
Isn’t that why the guys all lit out
on their bikes: to stop time
while they were still in their best feathers?
Shaggy at the head and neck,
they let the whole world enter them —
the speed, the green, the trash-strewn marsh —
looker & looked-at blurred into one thing.
One time when I asked the bad-boy poet
to read his poem about the egret, which I love,
it was not his refusal that angered me
so much as the way that he’d aged
so much better than I had. Now that he’s dead
sometimes I’ll spot a beauty like his
riding crosstown on the stuttering bus,
like Coleridge on the deck of the Speedwell,
sailing toward Malta in his sealskin coat,
though in this case of course it’s a black leather jacket,
one of those portable black caves of sleep.
Look at him dozing, hunched into his collar.
Look at him hunched into his wrecked good looks.
If he looks out the window, I bet what he’ll notice
is the sky’s bearing down now, as if it might snow.
The crushed cans singing in the ditches
& the trash bags pinned to the cyclone fence.
But he won’t see the bird
in its grand bright whiteness —
hunkered like a foam-clot, luffing in the wind.
5.
Getting back, at last, to the salt marsh where I worked:
in the California summers, botulism
rampaged through the ponds.
It made the birds’ necks fold
& their long legs double up
as they dragged their shaggy haunches
through the shoreline’s stinking dust.
The snowy egret I found
was long past hope — whenever
I found a sick bird on the trail
I was supposed to take it back to the office
where one of the men would break its neck
to keep the disease from spreading.
All right, then. That’s what I’d do.
I carried the egret clamped under my arm,
because I’d read that given a chance
it might spear me in the eye
with its black beak. Strange
how it knew the eyeball was soft
& crucial to its being seen, & knew
how the viewer produces the viewed
in a miracle of transference.
Black drop inside of yellow drop,
black drop inside of bluish-gray:
we studied each other while the trapped head twitched.
By the time I got back
all the men had gone home, so I killed the bird
the way they did, by taking its head
in the cave of my hand & making my thumb
& forefinger a collar around its neck.
Then I spun the body until it went limp —
this was easier than I expected.
The late sun was broadcasting
gold light on the marsh, & I did not think of Coleridge
& what the dead bird meant to him.
Instead, in that moment, I felt like a man,
or how I imagined a man might feel.
A delusion, of course, & soon the sun closed shop,
& then all I felt was sadness
for what the world had made of me.
after Larry Levis
On the High Suicide Rate of Dentists
It’s no surprise, when you think about what the teeth
are the ramparts of: slippery slope
leading to the gullet. Little jagged-edged ivory
makers of sameness, the Bolsheviks of the dining room:
take the lobster tail or the prime rib,
put in your mouth and chew them awhile
and all class distinctions — whether deep-fried or drowning in butter —
quickly become moot. But any actual tears
are hard drops to explain, especially coming from someone
like the one who played “novelty music”
when he chopped the fillings out of me.
Guitarzan. How lighthearted he seemed
as he chimed along with Jane’s falsetto yodeling.
And though you might think gastroenterologists
would wear the crown of their despairs,
at least they witness how bygones can be bygones
and how the burden can be released. Versus this
perpetual going-in, which is always the scariest part
of the story: Give up hope, all ye who enter here.
Even the radishes are doomed, cut so painstakingly into roses.
So maybe part of their sadness comes from the sushi
assembled to look like the stained glass at Chartres.
Or the crown roast whose bones wear those paperboy caps
while ever so eager the knife goes in.
Freshwater and Salt
When we were young girls and swam naked in Turkey Lake
we were like animals: our legs were thickly furred.
We took the trees’ rustling for a sign of their watching.
Even the limestone drooled from its mouth cracks.
But then I got real: it was only lake ledges, dripping —
rainwater, sweat of moss, and dew.
Maybe a man hid behind a birch’s pale skin
and I saw him, once. The rest, my ego running wild.
Still, it’s the roundabout way that I’m taking to the island
that is Indian land, where I lie down without my shirt.
This is years from the lake, and the water is salt
when a rockslide clatters off the bluff.
Make the clatter a sign of the watchers come forward —
in the calm that comes after, I can hear their feet.
But the trees have long since surrendered their trench coats
and gone back to being simple trees.
First thought, I’ve grown old; second thought is the cops,
but I keep my eyes closed to stall their skirmish
over me. Time clicks like their footsteps as they come close —
until a musty breath whelms down my face.
Now hold it there, freeze-frame, while I look up
at the sun’s corona on a mule deer’s chin.
Chewing some fox grass, regarding me only
because on this wild shore I am strange.
In the Confessional Mode, with a Borrowed Movie Trope
…and then there is the idea of another life
of which this outward life is only an expression,
the way the bag floating round in the alley
traces out the shape of wind
but is not wind. In a fleabag hotel
in Worcester, Mass., a man is dying,
muscles stiff, their ropes pulled taut,
his voice somewhere between a honk and whisper.
But float down through the years, many years,
and it’s us, meaning me and the man
as a boy upstairs in the house
where I’ve finagled my deflowering.
Maybe finagled. Hard to say if it’s working.
It reminds me of trying to cram a washrag
down a bottle neck — you twist and twist
to make it reach, but it does not,
and in the end the inside of me
was not wiped clean. Oh I was once
in such a hurry. The job had to be done
before the pot roast was, his stepmother
thumping the ceiling under us: Whatever
you’re doing, you better get out
of your sister’s room. But her voice
carried more of the wasp’s irritation
than the hornet’s true rage, so we forged on —
while our jury of trusty busty Barbies
perched on their toes, their gowns iridescent,
a sword of gray light coming through the curtain crack
and knighting me where I contorted
on the rug. And it’s clear to me still,
what I wanted back then; namely, my old life
cut up into shreds so I could get on
with my next. But the boy was only
halfway hard, no knife-edge there,
though the rest of him looked as if it were bronze,
with muscles rumpling his dark-gold skin.
Meaning this is a story about beauty after all.
And when the roast was ready, I slipped outside,
where November dusk was already sifting down
into the ballrooms underneath the trees.
It was time to go home to my own dinner,
the ziti, the meatballs, Star Trek on TV,
but how could I sit there, familiar among them,
now that I was this completely different thing?
Sweat was my coat as I flew from his house
while the brakes of my ten-speed sang like geese.
But now it’s his voice that resembles a honk
in a room where the empty amber vials
rattle underneath his narrow bed. Meaning
he’s trying hard to take himself out.
And while I have as yet no theory
to unlock the secret forces of the earth, still
I think there’s a reason why the boy and I,
when we grew up, both got stuck
with the same disease. Meaning the stiffness,
the spasms, the concrete legs —
oh I was once in such a hurry. Now
my thighs are purple from all the drugs
I’m shooting in, & I don’t even want to know
how the boy looks racked and wrecked.
Sometimes in the midst of making love
that kind of body will come floating in,
but quickly I’ll nudge it away in favor of
the airbrushed visions. But not him,
the young him, the brass plate of whose belly
would be more lovely than I could bear,
though in chaster moments I will visit
that alcove of me where his torso is struck
by all the dark-gold light that still slants in.
Oh we are blown, we are bags,
we are moved by such elegant chaos.
Call it god. Only because it is an expletive that fits.
His body, his beauty, all fucked up now.
God. Then the air cuts out, and then we drop.
Fubar
for Paul Guest
For starters, scratch the woman weeping over her dead cat —
sorry, but pet death barely puts the needle in the red zone.
And forget about getting brownie points
for any heartbreak mediated by the jukebox.
See the leaves falling: isn’t this the trees’ way of telling us to just buck up?
Oh they are right: their damage is so much greater than our damage.
I mean, none of my body parts have actually dropped off.
And when the moon is fat and handsome, I know we should be grateful
that its face is only metaphor; it has no teeth to chew us out.
In fact, the meadow isn’t s
pattered with the tatters of our guts.
But in last night’s hypnagogic dreamscape where I went
to collect some data. Where I was just getting into the swing of things
tranquillity-wise. Then this kid came rolling through the moonlight
in a bed with lots of Rube Goldberg traction rigging.
And it was a kid like you, some kid with a broken neck.
And maybe beauty is medicine quivering on the spoon
but surely you have noticed — the calf painted on the famous old Greek urn
is headed to the slaughter. And don’t get me started
on the wildflowers or they will lead me to the killer bees.
And that big ol’ moon will lead to a cross section of the spinal cord.
And the trees to their leaves, all smushed in the gutter.
And the gutter to the cat squashed flat as a hotcake.
And the hotcake to the grits, and the grits to the South,
where the meadows were once battlefields.
Where a full moon only meant a better chance of being shot.
But come on, the sun is rising, I’ll put a bandage on my head,
and we’ll be like those guys at the end of the movie —
you take this crutch made from a stick.
For you the South is a mess, what with its cinders and its smoldering.
And lookee, lookee here at me: I’m playing the piccolo.
Bulletin from Somewhere up the Creek
Luckily, it’s shallow enough that I can pole my rubber boat —
don’t ask what happened to the paddle. Anywhere is lovely
if you look hard enough: the scum on the surface
becomes a lace of tiny flowers.
In the space between cedars, a half-moon slides
across a sky colored like the inside of a clam.
Two terns slice it with their sharp beaks,
gape-mouthed and wheeling and screaming like cats.
See, nature is angry, I said to myself: Nature
is just an ice pick with wings. Then a weasel or something
poked its head through the muck, looked around for a while
before submerging again. And not even bumping
the ketchup squeeze bottle seemed to disturb it,