& I wasn’t myself in a kingdom
of unnamed animals & totem trees,
but never wished to unsay my vows.
From the salt-crusted timbers
I could only raise a battering ram
or cross, where I learned God
is rhythm & spores. If I am
Ulysses, made of his words
& deeds, I swam with sea cows
& mermaids in a lost season,
ate oysters & poisonberries
to approach the idea of death
tangled in the lifeline’s slack
on that rolling barrel of a ship,
then come home to more than just
the smell of apples, the heavy oars
creaking the same music as our bed.
THE RELIC
In Saint Helena darkness falls into a window.
Napoleon tells the doctor to cut out his heart
& send it to the empress, Marie-Louise,
but not one word is said about his penis.
Had an auctioneer or bibliophile known
the weight or the true cost of infamy?
After his body was shipped home for burial
in a great hall of clocks & candelabra
few could reign over imperial silence.
One was Vignali, paid in silver forks, knives,
& 100,000 francs to curate the funeral,
whose manservant, Ali, confessed the deed.
Now, we ask time to show us the keepsake,
to let us see the proof in blue morocco
& velvet locked in a glass case.
I wonder if the urologist in Englewood,
New Jersey, wrapped it in raw silk
& placed the talisman under his bed.
Or if it became a study for a master of clones
rehearsing doxology & transubstantiation,
not even a murmur covered by swanskin.
It’s a hint of the imagination awakened,
a shoelace, a dried-up fig or sea horse
awaiting the gallop of soundless waves.
ET TU, BRUTE?
They left the Second City
after years of stand-up & improv,
& came here to search faces
in crowds, on boulevards
& subways, & audition
for roles at a level of slow
pain that pulled them apart,
though they both perfected
Jerry & Peter before learning
betrayal doesn’t always taste
like metal. Walking the same
street, one went to Red Hook
to live in a fifth-floor walk-up
where he burned sandalwood,
& the other to a girlfriend
he met on the set of a soap
living across from Central Park.
They would see each other
at galleries in SoHo & Chelsea,
& joke about days of free wine
& bread, or meet in a lobby
or the toilet at the Public,
reading the faintest graffiti
over the urinal, & one wanted
to point out to the other how
it was usually the businessman
in a suit or Judas in a top hat
who didn’t wash his hands.
They were in Game of Thrones
on HBO, but one fell in love
with Jack Daniel’s & the other
began working comedy clubs,
& seldom spoke of life & death
floating between them. One
afternoon in mid-September
they sat across from each other
in Washington Square Park
as strangers strolled & a quartet
played “My Favorite Things,”
& one said to himself, No,
that can’t be him, because
he’s two years older than me,
& the second said to his mutt,
I knew the day would come
when one of us sees the other
dead on a foreign street.
THE GOLD PISTOL
There’s always someone who loves gold
bullion, boudoirs, & bathtubs, always
some dictator hiding in a concrete culvert
who mastered false acts & blazonry,
the drinking of a potion after bathing
in slow oils of regret, talismans, & amulets
honed to several lifetimes of their own,
the looting of safes & inlaid boxes of jewels,
moonlight on brimstone, fires eating sky,
& this is why my heart almost breaks
when a man dances with Gaddafi’s pistol
raised over his head, knowing the sun
runs to whatever shines, & as the young
grows old, there’s always a raven
laughing on an iron gatepost.
THE CIRCUS
A war’s going on somewhere, but tonight
a forest glows beneath the big top,
calling for the sword swallower & contortionist,
the beautiful high-wire walker who almost dies
nightly, the fire eater, the lion tamer, the believer
of sage & sleeping salts who wears a money belt
against her Icelandic skin. A drunk wants to be healed
by contagious laughter or a shot through the heart
by an old lover who lives in King of Prussia.
Three months ago, before Caldonia’s body
was found by the police in waist-high weeds,
birds sang here. Maybe her killer is now
throwing a baseball to knock a dummy
into the water barrel, or buying cotton candy
for his daughter, or circling a bull elephant.
Who can remember the woman, the sirens,
her mother fainting next to this beaten tree?
Nighthawks work a lit thread through the evening.
The calliope makes the air tinny.
The strongman presses six hundred pounds,
his muscles flexed for the woman
whose T-shirt says these guns are loaded.
But one minute later he’s on the ground,
a petite bystander giving him mouth-
to-mouth. A cop blows his shiny whistle,
trying to clear a path for the paramedics.
Teenagers slurp root beer floats
& munch corn dogs, after they’ve leaned
into each other’s arms in the flipped-over,
high-spinning rides, & have fallen in love
for the second time in three weeks.
MINOTAUR
He circled the roundabout
of bullheaded desires, lost in the maze
among broken icons, traces of blood
& sunflower seed left on numbered stones.
He was taller than a man,
tall as a honey locust at the end of an alley.
He slipped a knot, a sword at the equinox,
& entered the village plaza, hooking the air
& wheeling in circles.
The night dropped her cape,
& then artisans were ordered
to strike the figure onto a coat of arms
& gold coins. His cock & nose ring.
The triple-six tattooed on his rump.
Roses etched their scent on the night.
TORSION
He was in waist-high grass. An echo of a voice
searched for him as he crawled along a ditch,
the greenhorn’s blood reddening the mud, & the scent
of burnt Cosmoline. What’s the spirit of the bayonet,
soldier? His mind the mouth of a cave, the horizon
was nitrate as he walked on his hands,
a howl in the crosshairs, rain tapping his helmet.
He had been tapered, honed, & polished in AIT,
& then pointed toward grid coordinate
s on a ragged map,
his feelings cauterized, & now a glint of wet light
touches the sniper’s rifle in a grove of jackfruit.
Silence, a stone in his belly, an anvil on his head.
What’s the spirit of the bayonet, soldier? He dove on the pig
& his body became part of the metal, tracer rounds
scorched the living air, the dirt & sky, & the edges of night
approached. Only his fingers would recall threading
another belt of ammo. He didn’t wish to know how many
shadows hugged the ground. No, he couldn’t stop
firing as he rode the M60 machine gun to a primal grunt
before he buckled & spewed vomit over the barrel,
the torsion a whiplash of hues. What’s the spirit
of the bayonet, soldier? After medevac choppers
flew out the badly wounded & the body bags,
three men in his squad became two tigers at sunset
& walked through the village. They kicked a pagoda
till it turned into the crumbly dust of cinnabar,
& then torched thatched roofs. The captain’s citation
never said how fear tussled him in the paddy ditch,
& the star in its velvet-lined box was a scarab
in a pharaoh’s brain. The dead visited nightly.
The company chaplain blessed him, but he’d sit hours
gazing out at the sea & could never bless himself.
The battalion saluted but he wished to forget his hands,
& the thought of metal made him stand up straight.
He shipped back to the world only to remember blood
on the grass, men dancing on a lit string of bullets,
women & children wailing among the flame trees,
& he wished he hadn’t been trained so damn well.
What’s the spirit of the bayonet, soldier? He was back
now, back to where he brandished fronds as swords
to guard their tree house, his mama at church
singing hallelujah, his daddy in Lucky’s
swigging Falstaff. He kept thinking of his cousin Eddie
who drove his girl to Galveston in a Chevy pickup,
“California Dreamin’” looping through the cab.
He could still see round fishing boats on the edge
of the South China Sea, a woman’s long black hair
falling in a rising wave, moonlight on the skin
of sappers, their bodies wound in concertina.
He switches off his blue transistor radio
& walks straight into pines along the Black Warrior,
searching for arrowheads, bagging rabbit & quail.
He’s back to the Friday his draft card came, when he first
mastered a willful blindness, back to outsmarting prey,
& he duckwalks across the clearing under power lines.
Now ashamed of something naked as a good question
redbirds flash in a counterambush. Thou shalt not kill
echoes across clay hills miles from his loved ones,
& he slouches deeper into the Choctaw’s old growth,
through a hoop of light, away from a face stealing
his brother’s, so deep he can hardly hear himself plead
to shiny crows in a weeping willow.
FORTRESS
Now I begin with these two hands
held before me as blessing & weapon,
blackbirds in fierce flight & instruments
of touch & consolation. This sign means
stop, & this one of course means come forth,
friend. I draw a circle in the red iron clay
around my feet, where no evil spirit dares
to find me. One’s hands held at this angle
over a boy’s head are a roof over a sanctuary.
I am a greenhorn in my fortress in the woods
with my right eye pressed to a knothole.
I can see a buzz in the persimmon tree,
its ripe letting go—a tiny white cross
in each seed. The girl’s fiery jump rope
strikes the ground. I see the back door
of that house close to the slow creek
where a drunken, angry man stumbles
across the threshold every Friday.
I see forgiveness, unbearable twilight,
& these two big hands know too much
about nail & hammer, plank & uneasy sky.
Hewn stone & mortar is another world,
& sometimes a tall gate comes first.
Then huge wooden barrels of grain,
flour, salted meat, & quicklime before
twenty-eight crossbows in four towers.
LONGITUDES
Before zero meridian at Greenwich
Galileo dreamt Dante on a ship
& his beloved Beatrice onshore,
both holding clocks, drifting apart.
His theory was right even if
he couldn’t steady the ship
on rough seas beyond star charts
& otherworldly ports of call.
“But the damn blessed boat
rocked, tossing sailors to & fro
like a chorus of sea hags
in throes of ecstasy.”
My whole world unmoors
& slips into a tug of high tide.
A timepiece faces the harbor—
a fixed point in a glass box.
You’re standing on the dock.
My dreams of you are oceanic,
& the Door of No Return
opens a galactic eye.
If a siren stations herself
between us, all the clocks
on her side, we’ll find each other
sighing our night song in the fog.
DAYTIME BEGINS WITH A LINE BY ANNA AKHMATOVA
The round, hanging lanterns,
lit faces in a window of the Marble Palace
Catherine the Great built for a lover,
with the Field of Mars below,
snow falling inside two minds.
One translated Babylonian folktales
so the other could stand in line early morning
for bread at the House of Scholars.
A touch of dawn was again nightfall,
their room furnished with scattered papers,
rare books, a couch with springs poking out,
a bookcase, a floral pitcher, a china cabinet,
a naked light bulb dangling over a table.
Did the two poets learn it took more
to sing & reflect the burning icy stars
of poetry where privilege & squalor
lived beneath the same ornate ceiling?
Did they tiptoe from the wintery dusk
of the servants’ wing, follow the pseudo-
Gothic stairs up to the forbidden aromas
of Turkish tobacco, sugar, & exotic teas?
Sometimes, they kept themselves warm
with talk of the empress’s love of horses
as they galloped another century. Then,
sketches of their time at the Stray Dog
lit the air around those neoclassic nights,
& maybe they also spoke about “Venice
rotting with gold” near the Arctic Circle,
& anger almost kept them warm on days
they bent over pages of snow blindness
where tears brought them to laughter.
MICHIO ITO’S FOX & HAWK
Ito ran to a window. He danced.
He howled. He cursed the moon,
interned in a camp before he was
carted on a ship back to Tokyo.
Hadn’t he almost died for art
the evenings he ate bread soup?
If he wished to forget those days
& nights dancing in drawing rooms
in London, or translating Fenollosa’s
notes on Noh, he’d have to unbraid
himself from At the Hawk’s Well,
& then let go of the Egyptian
mask Dulac painted him into—
claws, beak, feathers, & legend.
Why did that silly boy tell a story
about his grandmother weeping
when she first saw him dressed
in his grandfather’s samurai armor
to hold the gaze of Lady Cunard?
He was again studying the fox
holding a biscuit in his hand,
saying, “I went to a great hill
in Hampstead & I made my soul
into the soul of the fox.” Finally,
he would let go of his Europe,
& not think of those he loved
& taught, Isadora lost. Now,
powerless & alone, he dances
his ten steps again & again,
wanting to know if a hawk
could peck the eyes out of a fox.
CAFFE REGGIO
They clink glasses of Merlot & joke
in a metalanguage among friends
about early autumn in a gulag
of lonely washes. Then one says,
Ivan the Terrible was a teenage vampire
who fell in love with art & soothsayers,
& another says, If he had only ridden
a gondola through the canals of Venice
once or twice, they could have civilized
the madman dreaming of the Baltics.
Then, one of them says something
about sentimentality being the death
of imagination, metaphor, & foreplay.
They are one small republic of ideas,
three good friends, & almost one mind
when they lift their eyes to greet
a woman walking in from the day’s
blinding array of disorder & chance.
She finds a table at the corner window,
orders a bowl of fruit & cappuccino,
opens a copy of Watermark, presses
down the pages, breaking the spine.
The three sit, smiling at each other,
& Derek says, I wonder if she knows
Joseph still picks up his mail here.
KRAR
We have this to call to the dead
among the living, this wooden triangle,
its belly a gourd-resonator
the size of a man’s cupped hands
inverted, in prayer & war.
It throws sorrow & laughter
against the eardrum
till the silent motion of the hills
finds us in the city.
Water trembles at the taproot