The sheen of this, blood-loved as the wound in the haunch of a panther
Downed in an asylum of his own. No, there were no keepers there.
Yes, I am dissembling. In Sweden, the room to put you down was dim,
Candles of no-color held in brown sand-bottomed bags, lit
Like the crooked path on the way to an old sacrarium. After the offering
In a hammered copper bowl filled with big black grapes, I will let you go.
When I say yes, the streetlamp’s cylinder of light will come into the room.
It is the last light you will ever stand inside the perfect circle of.
Swallow swallow, deep as the skirts of lingonberries brambling in a blacker forest
And shallow, shallow, you will lay you down.
UNCOLLECTED POEM
There should be one spectacular of ruin, red, mid-tragedy.
In Normandy, in the common orchard,
A monk is born into a bottle made of mercury,
Spliced onto a single plum tree twig,
And lives inside the blown glass
He grew up into.
Dovetail two
Unlikely dreams. Unfold for me but do not leave me
Wise, or full. Do not leave me knowing, known.
Speak to me, not with the meekness of your middle years
Or with the mildness
Of a small-brained animal On its way to abbatoir.
Let me: marrow, let me not Know exquisite things—
Reveal your form, illusion
Stay—a cut sewn up by the quartet of sad-stringed
Instruments made of cat-gut ligatures still used
In certain open-hearted surgeries.
GOULDIAN KIT
What makes you think I’m an eccentric, he said, in London
To the brood of the reporters who had gathered to report
On his eccentricities—the tin sink light enough for traveling
But deep enough to swallow his exquisite hands in water filled with ice.
A budgerigar accompanies, perched atop the fugue of Hindemith.
You are quivering now like the librarian reading
To herself out loud in her Arctic room
Composed entirely of snow.
A broadcast (high fidelity) bound by the quiet of the land and
The Mennonite who told him
We are in this world, but are not of this world,
You see. From the notebook of your partial list of symptoms, phobias:
Fever, paranoia, polio (subclinical), ankle-foot phenomenon,
The possibility of bluish spots. Everything one does is fear
Not being of this world or in this world enough.
There is no world I know, without some word of it.
III
OF RICKEY RAY RECTOR
I. AMENDMENT SIX
If you expect this story to be in tact you shouldn’t have that
Faith in faith, not here, or in a loping place
Where Rickey Ray won’t be so frightened by the dark in Arkansas.
A folk’s story of unanswerable griefs—he told me
You will probably not see me anymore after I went home.
Already what was left of him
Was like a barncat leaving just the heart of it, the offering.
II. STAFF PERSONNEL REPORT JAN 22, 1992
inmate Rector reports guards are setting loose chickens in the holding cell
pork patty turnips jello muffins milk
pudding—says saving, for just before lights out
reports assorted characters are peering in his window by the towers light
Enough of possim and their teeth, the gold shag’s carpeting,
The chinaberry tree back home. inmate making holling sound
III. THE PORTABLE BAPISTRY
For you who was taking this down for him, he is all kind about his feeling
For you, you all dressed up like scarecrows Taken down by other birds.
In the Polaroid he is to his waist in water, plumpened,
Sitting huge and humped up forward, dazy, grinning wide.
This day shall you be with me in paradise.
IV. STAFF PERSONNEL REPORT JANUARY 23
inmate glimpses limousine cruising thru prison all those
he maybe hurt are huddled in the backseat there
6:46 am howling
7:07 am howling and dancing in cell
8:10, & thruout day barking while sitting on bunk
began noice’s with his voice like a dog
Years after her death, he told me, Mother visits him at night
In her tulip dress, clutching her crocodile pocketbook.
V. ON CLEMENCY
Miss Flowers, he said, Not to worry I’m still voting for your man Miss Gennifer.
Governor Clinton, in his mansion on that last frost night, from time to time
Was having hard time catching breath
Some say
You will be sleeping when you die.
VI.
They is my good ice cream, he said.
VII.
Touches hands of his sisters, first time without glass
—from Ledger, Visitation House
A silver canopy over the enormous Elm of him.
VIII. DEATH-WATCH LOG JANUARY 24
one steak real done
fried chicken w/ heavy gravy
brown beans three rolls
koolaid, cherry & he said, for later—
pecan pie for just after when he would went to sleep
IX. from the other side
Rows of folding chairs unfold, a brood of heavy winter coats settling in
Assembly for the witnessing, like pigeons Nurse in quiet shoes
Attending with sickness bags
Then a streak of gold light visible through the top of chamber
Where he is You can hear him helping out
X. from the other side
Velvety curtains for the viewing room pulled back, tell them
Pastor Motton, what it was like the vast bulk of Rickey Ray
Still bound in with straps of blue still breathing the lump
Of gauze holds in his fist his heart’s
Green light still fluttering
Pie still waiting where he left it there
XI. A LOT SEES—BUT ONLY A FEW KNOWS
I love you Mother in your queen Anne’s chair
Geraldo thank you for your company on TV
Bird of prey, waiting like a hearse outside when I’m alive
SALT LICK IN SNOW
That you would, one day, stop breathing before
My own breath was held.
Were I to wake, muffled through the balsam
Woods, scent of myrrh and mineral.
Would that be tonight.
That we had conducted ourselves with no austerity all along.
Nearer then, a child was a child herself, thin thing
Offering a teaspoonful of civet to the likes
Of us. Beneath the low sky lowering, unclear this time
Of year, you cannot tell
The salt lick from the pale and mackerel
Air around it. That I did not promise. I will never sleep.
MOON RIVER
What is it exactly that you mean when you call me
Your “huckleberry friend”?
What if soon you, too, will go down
Like a sheepdog who has tasted blood on a gentleman’s farm
Far outside the coal belt, and I do not get to see your
Inflorescence one more time, what then?
Like a lantern-boat half on fire somewhere down
The crazy river of your mind,
Framed by endless strings of small whortleberry lights, ablaze,
Still, I go on crossing you in style. My affection has always
Had its girdled caveats—
A mushroom-colored cummer
bund sashing
The waist of another man, or my feeling formal knowing
When to take the fork out of the toaster, at the very moment of
The metaled tines contacting the one electric outlet in the barn.
Even though you will not speak to me again, not in this life,
Where fear accompanies you like a yellow buggy or a carnivore
With dark spots and a long-ringed tail
Unhitched to anything,
I forgive you—everything.
Besides,
You’ve always been such an odd uncanny half-genet of man.
OBSERVATIONS FROM THE GLASGOW COMA SCALE
EYE OPENING IN RESPONSE TO PAIN
Doctor, for the longest spell,
I was bordering on the inexorably humane, of a sudden—
A conspiracy of grace.
Whole summer in a blaze of gods.
PERSISTENT INAPPROPRIATE SPEECH
Not so much nattering please, says the impresario,
The nurse’s commandant on call.
Still others mumbling
About salted beans left soaking in brisket pots
At home. Some olden Jews are still compelled to hide
Their jewels in smallish alligator carry-ons.
DOES NOT OPEN EYES
A Weimaraner with its two invalid back legs
Tucked in a wheelbarrow rolls down the Avenue Calais.
His master pulls at this contraption with a leash.
Were I to wake
I would not be sanguine if my own hind legs were nulled.
SMILES OR COOS APPROPRIATELY
I was the center of my Mother’s world the moment I discovered she could die.
LOCALIZES TO PAIN
A half a century ago, the Nanny kicked our cocker spaniel,
Waldo, down the basement stairs, repeatedly.
When we cannot find the puppy we are told
The creature went, instead, to live the good life
On a skein of land they called “a Farm.”
CRIES, BUT IS CONSOLABLE
I believe that he was safe there. I am consoled.
The gravestone on my plot in rural Pennsylvania reads:
She Couldn’t Help It, Pals
INAPPROPRIATE RESPONSES, WORDS DISCERNIBLE
The heavy rains have been quite excellent for my composure.
I compose myself again in heavy rain.
The trees, stick-figuring, define the view from here.
The waves
Are pathographical, disquieting.
RUBY GARNETT’S ORNAMENT, CIRCA 1892
See, how she tucked her tiny spectacle,
A songbird, behind the chimney bricks
And sealed it shut inside her frayed blue purse,
Some silk grief ago
Against the indigo of company.
She wrapped his lemon-feathered form
In soft strips of newspaper wetted down
With powdered milk, gentle not to bend a wing
Or break a brittle claw. Her mummery.
In the Dumas Brothel Museum,
In your glass case now, canary, in your
Tin can purged of all its minerals,
You are beautiful, grotesque. I am in this
Freight and keep myself.
I write home from Butte in mercury.
I take it back from you. I am on my one.
THREE MEMORIES OF HEAVEN
FIRST MEMORY
It was before the harp, before rain or words
Before the ox waking in ice.
Before the great warmth turned down in the granaries.
Before the women carding the wool by its temperaments,
Spinning the flaxes away from the rusts, in the valley
Of the stitching in the dresses they will wear tonight.
SECOND MEMORY
Almost like a bird that knows it’s about to be born
Before the cut of cinnamon or the linnet-colored
Birthmarks marking with tarnish-scissors even paler things.
It was before I placed my body next to yours, longbone
To longbone making a kind
Of love that never curdled like the milk at mouths of caves.
It was a time when wren-boys
Were allowed (out loud) to cry.
THIRD MEMORY
It was all before the bleating or the tears
That I knew the animal must know, before his mistress does—
When she will cut the path toward where he is,
Must know the scent her footprints leave in straw
Must know no heaven, even if it’s there in its saffron
Slice, circled with thimbleberries, quick-silvering.
Put your hands
Into the sheets and tell me where the needles are.
RED THREAD
Ash-home. Sack of delicious apples.
Roof of mouth is keen but quiet now.
How is it I did not know the swath
Of you, rare, more rare.
Whole family decimated
As if in war.
Old wheat, color of ransack or curlew,
Jews wandering, coppering, each
In their croft. The pond, iced-over now,
Thinner yet for skating. Inside, a man
In his smoking jacket, smoking,
Withholding. Silvering of hair, most
Exigent of needs. In a vase, the red dust
Of gillyflowers aslant by the bed.
Thou shalt not be dead.
Last hour
Loving was the first one,
Cruciate as the wings of a dragonfly, at rest.
DEATH, XXL
Wisdom is ruin.
Dispatch in white chalk left out in the summer rain.
He is not gone, I asked.
Once (and this was long ago) in the cortège, milkmen wore their folding caps
And took them off, and workers bent their heads to bow.
The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain.
No matter what time it was, I will go on missing you again.
In your paddock you were folded like a carriage horse grown too large for his stall.
Also, there were no carriages left.
Please to find a goddamn other noun. Lie down in it; stay here.
As a young boy, some said, you had once been in heaven, a moment’s visit
Through a locked door constructed for the nonce.
Escutcheon in the shape of a boy in the Sun belt, holster round his narrow hips.
Two tin guns. Ephemera.
Villagers, wallflowers all, huddle under cotton quilts splotched with bougainvillea.
Here, come trespassing.
Prayer and Amen. Transistor radio.
He is not gone, I asked. Shot self. My love.
In the Rust belt, sleep deranges, rearranging our sister’s darker rooms.
In the sheepfold, the maid extinguishes her harp, puts her fingers in the felt glove
Of a persistent vegetative state.
LITTLE INDUSTRY OF GHOSTS
How is it you can explain their living here with me, leaning
On their cellos, doleful and plenty.
In my single person tax-bracket of one alive, there are more
Living here with me not alive
Than are. You are a good
Dog now. Rising, supposing, loom large for me.
Turn down all the rows of white sheets in the rows
Of white cots for your wounded
To settle in. Look, the boy with a cane walks
Three-legged down our Avenue, three-quarters
Of a cur, but he’s as gifted limping as the elegy you wrote
For me and I am still alive! It was a poem clear, here
In hindsight, as flounder flesh unwrapped from
Its bed of newspaper, unspoiled. Would that you come home
Now, healed and appalled.
; It could have been reparable; we would have gathered
Like a din of two nurses at the metal rails of vigil
At your impossible bed. Would that we, erstwhile, will.
Would that our Liam were living still.
SCARINISH, MINGINISH, GRIMINISH
You will not be a sepia hound in my dream at Trotternish, even
One more time. Not a lighthouse keeper
Landlocked in at Insch, not the deep sea diver with the metal
Brain in the icy umbraged waters of the Outer Hebrides.
Not at the Firth of Lorne, where each man downed is a tricycle
Turned over, most of his spokes blown off, not even, were
You luckier, in the heap of small black mussels
Washed up on the Isle of Skye, huddling but still whole.
You will come back as a starfish, two arms lopped off,
Scooped up by the mop-topped schoolboy, Fearghas,
Who will take you home to Dingwall when the blotted tide is low,
Collect you with his blush balloons, his tin Sienna soldiers,
Coloring your endoskeleton with a spot of Maize and Timberwolf
From his set of crayons, flattering you with a Thistle touch, then some
Dandelion flourishes until his suppertime, one last last dab of Fern—
After which he will go on to his maroon arithmetic and Dostoyevsky
And his other sullen Prussian Blue and Orchid arts.
THE MATADOR
The last I saw of him was on the final neurasthenic afternoon of his harmonica
When he lost his hair and said I did this to him with my grief,
As the pink halo of a monk’s scalp began to shine up through his own.
My grief can cause male-pattern baldness in a man!
This was his voyage, remember now, not mine.
In my own life’s journey, I once found him, many laters, bewitched
Into a tiny iron matador (he wore a hat) on the folding table at a yard sale
In a small New England town, holding out
His midge of scarf—ridiculous and red,
Now overwrought with aching from the wind in Spain.
When was it that you say I knew?
DOVE, ABIDING
I have heard
That you were living like a goat in solitude
And turning in the proxy and the mud of it.
Don’t be coy with me. You
Were mean and you were plump. Dove,
Mistaken. You are not good. Heart
The color of a tray of entrails in a Harlem shop
For meats. I have heard Miss X has had a vision
In her rooms. It was uncomely,
A mess of hungry colors, like the Rockettes
Singularly beautiful but all together hideous.
There is no single flower that is not singularly
Beautiful I’ve heard. I have heard you did not care