Alan Watts, old guru of ghosts
& folksingers, I can still two-step
& do-si-do to Clifton Chenier.
But, in no time, this philosopher
will be going down the drain, baby.
Look at how a finely honed razor works.
I may be a taxi driver, but I know time
opens an apple seed to find a worm.
See, I told you, my word is gold,
good as making a wager against
the eternal hush. The older I get
the quicker Christmas comes,
but if I had to give up the heavenly
taste of Guinness dark, I couldn’t
live another goddamn day. Darling,
you can chisel that into my headstone.
FROM
THE EMPEROR OF WATER CLOCKS
THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE
A drowned kingdom rises at daybreak
& we keep trudging on. A silhouette rides
the rope swing tied to a spruce limb,
the loudest calm in the marsh. Look
at the sinkholes, the sloped brokenness,
a twinned rainbow straddling the rocks.
See how forgiving—how brave nature is.
She drags us through teeming reeds
& turns day inside out, getting up
under blame, gazing at the horizon
as a throaty sparrow calls the raft home.
A wavering landscape is our one foothold.
Are we still moving? This old story
behind stories turns an epic season
a tangle of roses moved by night soil.
The boar, congo snake, & earthworm
eat into pigweed. The middle ground
is a flotilla of stars, a peacock carousel
& Ferris wheel spinning in the water
as vines unstitch the leach-work of salt,
thick mud sewn up like bodies fallen
into a ditch, blooming, about to erupt.
Water lily & spider fern. I see the tip
of a purple mountain, but sweetheart,
if it weren’t for your late April kisses
I would have turned around days ago.
THE WATER CLOCK
A box of tooth wheels sits on an ebony hippopotamus
made to count seasons. I show you a sketch of the float,
how it steals wet kisses out of a mouth, the bulbous belly
swollen with hours, my left hand at the hem of your skirt.
How many fallen empires dwell here triggered by a sundial,
revolutions & rebirths? I’m in a reverie again, my face
pressed against the rounded glass wall of the city aquarium
as hippopotami glide slowly through water, in sync to a tune
on my headphones. Why can’t I stop intoning the alchemist
who used the clock to go between worlds & turn lead to gold?
A replica of this in a brothel in Athens once counted off
minutes each client spent in a room. If this is a footnote
to how one defines a day, no one knows this timepiece
as well as the superintendent of water debiting farmers.
The dark-green figs ripen under moonlight. Migratory
birds lift from shoulders of scarecrows at sunrise & arrive
in a new kingdom at sunset, true as the clock’s escapement
mechanism. The bridge of zodiac signs moves across the top.
A lifetime poises in my fingers on the silver clasp of your bra
as spring’s rapaciousness nears. Your slip drops to the floor
& ripples at our feet as a day-blooming cereus opens.
All the sweet mechanics cleave heaven & earth,
& a pinhole drips seconds through bronze.
THE EMPEROR
The tablet he inherited was encased
in leather, & in sleep he whispered
a decree to conquer the hermaphrodite
on the throne. Acacias touched yellow
to the night & peace reigned a decade.
When he ordered his brother to serve
as his double, his mother said, Son,
your father would have banished you
to the salt mines. The look in his eyes
was what Grotowski tried to capture
at La MaMa, a looped robe at his feet
& baroque notes echoing in his head.
The three double-jointed stuntmen
& master of props were his friends,
& he learned all the pressure points
from the third guard. He was emperor
before a script, a taste for honeycomb
at birth, long before the abominable
oath was tattooed on his forehead.
His brother would face the throng
mornings outside the marketplace
across from the old sacred abattoir
to sing bygones & lines of succession.
This was a place of drawn daggers
& acts of sedition, renown for blood
on stones & laments scribed on air,
& also for wheels drawing water
up rocky inclines to his garden.
He was born to claim his father’s
flame trees & the white rhinoceros.
In another life, he could have been
an illustrious actor, a kind word
even for dumb brutes of the forest.
He mastered sublimity & decorum
bathed in the glow of a leading lady,
& the peach brandy & plum bread
he loved was always first tasted
by his double. Questions of fidelity
& bloodline, honor & dishonor, all
went back to Hagar & a gold scepter.
His brother was forbidden a name.
From his court he could see faces
lined up to praise his terraced garden
of shrubs, herbs, ornamental grasses,
& hues to bribe the raven to his door.
He said, Mother, time will forgive me
because I have always loved beauty.
THE FOOL
C’mon, Your Majesty, her brother?
I know the scent of belladonna
can poison a mind, even a king’s,
but would you dare to behead
your own nightmares? Now,
I hope you are more than pewter
& pallor. Where is the early heart
I gladly remember from the days
I hailed as your father’s cutthroat?
I know hearsay can undo a kingdom.
I never cursed your tower guards
& I dare translate their foofaraw.
I double-swear on the good book
though I could be our Shagspere
or William Kempe paying his tab
with a proud penny & a plug nickel.
Your Highness, only a horsewhip
could heal my unnatural tongue,
that is, if you consent to be the first
flogged up & down the castle steps.
After the guillotine & a coronation,
you would think a king too weak
to properly father a son & heir,
in the unholy days of the masque.
My queen, today, my lovely queen
singing wildly behind an iron door,
her head ready for your oak block,
holds now her lame bird in a box
of twigs, a toy against eternity.
THE KING’S SALT
The miners dressed in monkish garb
led horses deep into briny catacombs
hewn by ancient rain. The horses crunched
green apples while paced through a maze
of looped ropes, & the huge wooden pulleys
& winches began to groan, moving blocks
& barrels of salt. The men were handpicked
by the king, & the dark horses soon forgot
the pastures, walking circl
es, never to know
the horizon again, wet grass under hooves.
If a miner died at home in bed beside his wife
could another hand holding an apple or two
draw the horse into the rote, winding circle,
obedient & unthinking? The penitents
held long poles with flame to burn off methane
in the ceiling, the others pushed daylong
squat carts called the Hungarian dog.
Faces & shapes rose from the monolith.
Here’s a gnome, the guardian of miners,
& this St. Kinga’s Chapel, chandeliers
hanging—carved from a threefold silence.
Wooden gutters drained off centuries
before shadows of German warplanes
floated on the lakes of brine, hidden
by imperial weather. Now one stands
wondering if a king, for the hell of it,
touched royal crystals with his tongue
down in the dank half darkness,
or gazed within, to have seen firsthand
the moment when one carefully places
a small lamp behind a bust of salt.
TURNER’S GREAT TUSSLE WITH WATER
As you can see, he first mastered light
& shadow, faces moving between grass
& stone, the beasts wading to the ark,
& then The Decline of the Carthaginian
Empire, before capturing volcanic reds,
but one day while walking in windy rain
on the Thames he felt he was descending
a hemp ladder into the galley of a ship,
down in the swollen belly of the beast
with a curse, hook, & a bailing bucket,
into whimper & howl, into piss & shit.
He saw winds hurl sail & mast pole
as the crewmen wrestled slaves dead
& half dead into a darkened whirlpool.
There it was, groaning. Then the water
was stabbed & brushed till voluminous,
& the bloody sharks were on their way.
But you’re right, yes, there’s still light
crossing the divide, seething around
corners of the thick golden frame.
SKULKING ACROSS SNOW
The shadow knows. Okay. But what is this, the traveler’s tail curled like a question mark, a tribe on her back? Snow falls among the headstones. The fat flakes curtain three worlds. In Southern folklore, they exhume the old world before skulking out to a new frontier of city lights. They live by playing dead. Bounty of lunacy. Bounty of what it seems. No, I’m not talking about lines stolen into a rock ’n’ roll song. No, arch- sentimentalist, I’m not speaking of moonlight or a girl of wanderlust in a desert. But that’s not a bad guess. I’m lost in your obscure imagination. Speaking of the dead, you know, Yeats also knew a little something about the occult. Sleepwalking is another story. Yes, the blank space says, Wake up, knucklehead, & listen to this: You might be getting onto something here. If I had different skin, would you read me differently, would you see something in the snow that isn’t in the snow, something approaching genius? Would you press your nude body against the pages & try reading something into the life of the speaker? Would you nibble at the edges of my nightmares, & wake with the taste of death in your mouth, or would you open your eyes, lost in a field of hyacinth? Well, on a night like this, snow has fallen into my dreams. Lithium or horse could be a clue, but not necessarily so. Or, think of the two men aiming their dueling pistols—the years of silence between them— Alexander Pushkin falling into the January whiteness of history.
SPRUNG RHYTHM OF A LANDSCAPE
Charles, I’m also a magpie collecting every scrap
of song, color, & prophecy beside the river
in the lonesome valley, along the Trail of Tears,
switchbacks, demarcation lines, & railroad tracks,
over a ridge called the Devil’s Backbone,
winding through the double-green of Appalachia
down to shady dominion & Indian summer.
I don’t remember how many times,
caught between one divine spirit & the next
detour, I wanted to fly home the old way,
around contours of doubt, tailspins
I’d learned to gauge so well, voices
ahead, before, not yet born, & beyond,
doubling back to the scent of magnolia.
Whatever it was in the apparitional light
held us to the road. But your early sky
was different from mine, as I drifted up
from bottomland, snagged by grab vines
& bullfrog lingo in a bluesy grotto. One way
or another, a rise & fall is a rise & fall, a way in
& a way out, till we’re grass danced-down.
I, too, know my Hopkins (Lightnin’ & Gerard Manley),
gigging to this after-hours when all our little civil wars
unheal in the body. I shake my head till snake eyes fall
on the ground, as history climbs into the singing skull
to ride shotgun. Our days shaped by unseen movement
in the landscape, coldcocked by brightness coming
over a hill, wild & steady as a palomino runagate
spooked by something in the trees unsaid.
The redbud followed us into starless cities
& shook us out like dusty rags in a dizzy breeze.
But we’re lucky we haven’t been shaken down
to seed corn in a ragged sack, looped & cinched tight,
lumps of dirt hidden in our coat pockets.
Charles, we came as folk songs,
blues, country & western, to bebop & rock ’n’ roll,
our shadows hanging out bandaged-up & drawn
on a wall easing into night melody of “Po’ Lazarus”
at the top & the bottom of day. Each step taken,
each phrase, every snapped string, fallen arch,
& kiss on a forgotten street in Verona or Paris
transported us back—back to hidden paths,
abandoned eaves, & haylofts where a half century
of starlings roosted, back to when we were lost
in our dream-headed, separate eternities,
searching till all the pieces fit together,
till my sky is no bluer than your sky.
ROCK ME, MERCY
The river stones are listening
because we have something to say.
The trees lean closer today.
The singing in the electrical woods
has gone dumb. It looks like rain
Guardian angels, wherever you’re hiding,
we know you can’t be everywhere at once.
Have you corralled all the pretty wild
horses? The memory of ants asleep
in daylilies, roses, holly, & larkspur.
The magpies gaze at us, still
waiting. River stones are listening.
But all we can say now is,
Mercy, please, rock me.
ISLANDS
An island is one great eye
gazing out, a beckoning lighthouse,
searchlight, a wishbone compass,
or counterweight to the stars.
When it comes to outlook & point
of view, a figure stands on a rocky ledge
peering out toward an archipelago
of glass on the mainland, a seagull’s
wings touching the tip of a high wave,
out to where the brain may stumble.
But when a mind climbs down
from its lone craggy lookout
we know it is truly a stubborn thing,
& has to leaf through pages of dust
& light, through pre-memory & folklore,
remembering fires roared down there
till they pushed up through the seafloor
& plu
mes of ash covered the dead
shaken awake worlds away, & silence
filled up with centuries of waiting.
Sea urchin, turtle, & crab
came with earthly know-how,
& one bird arrived with a sprig in its beak,
before everything clouded with cries,
a millennium of small deaths now topsoil
& seasons of blossoms in a single seed.
Light edged along salt-crusted stones,
across a cataract of blue water,
& lost sailors’ parrots spoke of sirens,
the last words of men buried at sea.
Someone could stand here
contemplating the future, leafing
through torn pages of St. Augustine
or the prophecies by fishermen,
translating spore & folly down to taproot.
The dreamy-eyed boy still in the man,
the girl in the woman, a sunny forecast
behind today, but tomorrow’s beyond
words. To behold a body of water
is to know pig iron & mother wit.
Whoever this figure is,
he will soon return to dancing
through the aroma of dagger’s log,
ginger lily, & bougainvillea,
between chants & strings struck
till gourds rally the healing air,
& the church-steeple birds
fly sweet darkness home.
Whoever this friend or lover is,
he intones redemptive harmonies.
To lie down in remembrance
is to know each of us is a prodigal
son or daughter, looking out beyond land
& sky, the chemical & metaphysical
beyond falling & turning waterwheels
in the colossal brain of damnable gods,
a Eureka held up to the sun’s blinding eye,
born to gaze into fire. After conquering
frontiers, the mind comes back to rest,
stretching out over the white sand.
LATITUDES
If I am not Ulysses, I am
his dear, ruthless half brother.
Strap me to the mast
so I may endure night sirens
singing my birth when water
broke into a thousand blossoms
in a landlocked town of the South,
before my name was heard
in the womb-shaped world
of deep sonorous waters.
Storms ran my ship to the brink,