loss of memory in its
silvery green
a drawbridge
7. So Long
butterflies
distort every mention of sand
you punctuate your feelings
with a puff
on your pipe
a thing or two will come up
around the edges
you can guess
the effort behind a red cloud
*
the house comes crowding round
to seduce us with
not quite oriental rugs
*
irrelevant patches
light mostly
elsewhere a joke and then
the white blouse
more sun and the girl selling ice cream
there on the beach
skirt caught
the wind
hugging its visibility
Psyche & Eros
for Harriet Hanger & Peter Craske
I. The Marriage
For all her beauty
worshipped
but unloved
what greater complaint
when the damp towels
curl up
in baby form
abrupt sense of home life
but marriage is certain
I believe
the girl wants to die
maturing
caught on a back stroke
finger language
she must have lain
down in a place of caves
as if wet earth
a resting place for blood
for the dark
swoop
strokes her body
into bird
II. The Crisis
That she should suffer
from happiness
its ambiguity
neither watching the time
nor making it contagious
the sisters: breaking the
blinds
punch waves of dust
and rainy fear
at any rate: they
cheerfull step on the brake
“it isn’t for taking
your pulse
(its panicky skid)
but a serious addition to knowledge”
so she says she can’t
that’s right
live
(say the sisters)
being in the
a foul
dark
venemous
sweet
snake
honey
with tangled coils exuding
eyes tucked in under
darkness
feathered lids that no
it rears
square of skin should escape
up for
his caress
you even
now
in short:
drowned
in a slick of pleasure
III. The Catastrophy
Not so dreadful, really, what
she does:
opens
more than her legs
but he
can’t take it
this eye to
eye encounter
when what he wants is a lay
the lamp scalds him the light
enlarges
his notion of hurt
the burn
and the bandage both
making memory
the earth doesn’t
turn
it’s deflected
it’s his back
turns
he walks off
the same
IV. The Labors
So it comes to this
(always?)
direction: labor
to get him
back
get him to
corn barley millet poppy
chickpeas lentils
beans in a heap all the
seeds in a heap the
seeds of the world a
promiscuous heap
and they laugh at her:
chaos is human what more
do you want
love you
as separate
a person
what woman dreams light
must face the sun
dreams fierce and blinding
dreams waiting for evening
dreams golden rams
a vestige of sun
you can love and live
but life
the river who could
contain it
stream of semen
in a hip flask
and the last and hardest:
the trip
down
where
the blood
slows
her feet are
dragging
they
won’t they won’t lift
no horses
whinny
she breathes
sleep it’s a journey
to death
it would keep her beauty forever
answer: she’s tempted
(to please her lover)
But he
a taste
of the past tense
has stretched his
one way grammar
now
he’ll rather have her
grow old
and comes to her aid
a happy ending: to love
love knowingly
body and soul
in the old story
they call it going
to heaven
Home Drown
1.
Bach on Sundays, again, in
so many churches. The
synagogue
a ruin. Also Gedächtniskirche.
Some chords, still, between scorched
arches, hold
my breath
though the air,
here,
is sealed
against seepage.
What
was it, mother.
More wishes
on the bone. Gold,
articulated
bars, warm, in your throat.
Or hand.
Baroque,
the space between
words and
what has “happened.”
Like, in 1749,
the Prinz von Anhalt
was struck by fascination
and “couldn’t
see anything as
it was.”
Your steel’s
caved in, mother, its
blue sheen
drowned.
2.
A place repeated
inhales
time
seeps through
the layers of years.
Enlarged river bed, eroded,
this,
my porous skin.
Half
of Pascal’s body
was glass. He always saw,
on that side, the abyss.
Crystal
nights.
If I
were sure I’m drowning. If
I could solve
my memories. They gather
to eat. But I’ve unlearned
pity. Mother,
always a li
ttle colder,
floats
among the algae, eyes
beginning to rust.
3. tell me about your illness, mother
“I’m so planned. And nearly
crying. No, no, I’m song, the smell of scales
doesn’t upset a widow.
But streets, their bubbles:
suddenly
the fish inside my head. Just
when I kneel
down on the curb to play
for my lost
keys.
You are unnaturally tall,
I nearly couldn’t seal you. We’ll
have to
grind
your parts into the score.
And now good night, my chill,
it’s time
to climb into my wishes.”
4.
This is where hands clutch at
a door, straw, wisp of smoke
pulls out my breath.
My eyes,
all my eyes tremble and
run from my head in long flight.
Be calm. Don’t forget.
Go tap the dark for unsuspected
switches, a way
its cold sheen,
to what? The furious
grief springs on your back, ardent
reproach, a reddish seal.
“O thunderweather,” swears Old Shatterhand. How
like frightened, trying
to relax his smallness
into the wild space of the West such as,
but this,
this anguish, think of seeing:
your mother
turned liquid.
Grey wash, warm, on the floor.
5. nightmare
Farther and farther
off key, this,
warm air, even
breathing. Mother
peals the skin back,
and a red sheen breaks,
sears
my lungs. I can’t
swim
against the dream.
Only a tight
layer of perfect pitch
could seal
my bloodstream against
Next
scene. The river,
present, and full up. Still,
bubbles from
deep years, and mother
pulls out a plaster cunt:
“This is
your flesh.”
The air
bursts with drowned fish
If I could solve my
memories
would I
awake?
6. leaving
“Only drowned souls
can’t
come back to haunt you
in the channels
of your body, a fire
goes out
in water.”
Old selves
seep through my
skin, no tenderness
in our mutual muscles.
Distance,
growing, drifts
between our words, the air
hard with motion,
even a song
can turn into a demon:
warm air, even
breathing, living, articulated
limbs,
and the window rattling
the whole time.
Try
to keep an eye
on your tears,
mother,
you’ve never
gone near water but to drown.
the reproduction of profiles
Facts
i had inferred from pictures that the world was real and therefore paused, for who knows what will happen if we talk truth while climbing the stairs. In fact, I was afraid of following the picture to where it reaches right out into reality, laid against it like a ruler. I thought I would die if my name didn’t touch me, or only with its very end, leaving the inside open to so many feelers like chance rain pouring down from the clouds. You laughed and told everybody that I had mistaken the Tower of Babel for Noah in his Drunkenness.
i didn’t want to take this street which would lead me back home, by my own cold hand, or your advice to find some other man to hold me because studying one headache would not solve the problem of sensation. All this time, I was trying to think, but the river and the bank fused into common darkness, and words took on meanings that made them hard to use in daylight. I believed entropy meant hugging my legs close to my body so that the shadow of the bridge over the Seekonk could be written into the hub of its abandoned swivel.
the proportion of accident in my picture of the world falls with the rain. Sometimes, at night, diluted air. You told me that the poorer houses down by the river still mark the level of the flood, but the world divides into facts like surprised wanderers disheveled by a sudden wind. When you stopped preparing quotes from the ancient misogynists it was clear that you would soon forget my street.
i had already studied mathematics, a mad kind of horizontal reasoning like a landscape that exists entirely on its own, when it is more natural to lie in the grass and make love, glistening, the whole length of the river. Because small, noisy waves, as from strenuous walking, pounded in my ears, I stopped my bleak Saturday, while a great many dry leaves dropped from the sycamore. This possibility must have been in color from the beginning.
flooding with impulse refracts the body and does not equal. Duck wings opened, jeweled, ablaze in oblique flight. Though a speck in the visual field must have some color, it need not be red. Or beautiful. A mountain throwing its shadow over so much nakedness, or a cloud lighting its edges on the sun, it drowned my breath more deeply, and things lost their simple lines to possibility. Like old idols, you said, which we no longer adore and throw into the current to drift where they still
Feverish Propositions
you told me, if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature, which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the cold, along with the restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to change the location of the sycamores. I expected reproaches because I had mentioned the word love, but you only accused me of stealing your pencil, and sadness disappeared with sense. You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands because, you said, it could not be contained in itself.
if we could just go on walking through these woods and let the pine branches brush our faces, living would still make beads of sweat on your forehead, but you wouldn’t have to worry about what you call my exhibitionism. All you liked about trees was the way the light came through the leaves in sheets of precise, parallel rays, like slant rain. This may be an incomplete explanation of our relation, but we’ve always feared the dark inside the body. You agree there could be no seduction if the structures of propositions did not stand in a physical relation, so that we could get from one to the other. Even so, not every moment of happiness is to hang one’s clothes on.
i might have known you wouldn’t talk to me. But to claim you just didn’t want to disguise your thoughts! We’ve walked along this road before, I said, though perhaps in heavier coats not designed to reveal the form of the body. Later, the moon came out and threw the shadows of branches across the street where they remained, broken. Feverishly you examined the tacit conventions on which conversation depends. I sighed as one does at night, looking down into the river. I wondered
if by throwing myself in I could penetrate to the essence of its character, or should I wait for you to stab me as you had practiced in your dream? You said this question, like most philsophical problems, arose from failing to understand the tale of the two youths, two horses, and two lilies. You could prove to me that the deepest rivers are, in fact, no rivers at all.
from this observation we turned to consider passion. Looking at the glints of light on the water, you tried to make me tell you not to risk the excitement — to recommend cold baths. The lack of certainty, of direction, of duration, was its own argument, unlike going into a bar to get drunk and getting drunk. Your face was alternately hot and cold, as if translating one language into another — gusts from the storm in your heart, the pink ribbon in your pocket. Its actual color turned out to be unimportant, but its presence disclosed something essential about membranes. You said there was still time, you could still break it off, go abroad, make a movie. I said (politely, I thought) this wouldn’t help you. You’d have to kill yourself.
tearing your shirt open, you drew my attention to three dogs in a knot. This served to show how something general can be recorded in unpedigreed notation. I pointed to a bench by a willow, from which we could see the gas tanks across the river, because I thought a bench was a simple possibility: one could sit on it. The black hulks of the tanks began to sharpen in the cold dawn light, though when you leaned against the railing I could smell your hair, which ended in a clean round line on your neck, as was the fashion that year. I had always resented how nimble your neck became whenever you met a woman, regardless of rain falling outside or other calamities. Now, at least, you hunched your shoulders against the shadow of doubt.
this time of day, hesitation can mean tottering on the edge, just before the water breaks into the steep rush and spray of the fall. What could I do but turn with the current and get choked by my inner speed? You tried to breathe against the acceleration, waiting for the air to consent. All the while, we behaved as if this search for a pace were useful, like reaching for a plank or wearing rain coats. I was afraid we would die before we could make a statement, but you said that language presupposed meaning, which would be swallowed by the roar of the waterfall.
toward morning, walking along the river, you tossed simple objects into the air which was indifferent around us, though it moved off a little, and again as you put your hand back in your pocket to test the degree of hardness. Everything else remained the same. This is why, you said, there was no fiction.