Autobiomythography & Gallery
Poems by Joe Millar
Copyright © 2010 Joe Millar. All Rights Reserved.
Ebook ISBN 13: 978-0-9788257-6-8
Brooklyn Arts Press, LLC, 154 N 9th St, #1, Brooklyn, NY 11211
www.BrooklynArtsPress.com; info@brooklynartspress.com
Cover design by Underground Political Backlash Arts
Published by Brooklyn Arts Press, LLC in e-book format at Smashwords. License Notes: No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means existing or to be developed in the future without written consent by the publisher.
Joe Millar grew up along the Space Coast of Florida and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut collection of poems, Autobiomythography & Gallery, was named “Best First Book of the Year” after being short-listed for the Yale Younger Poets prize, the National Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. His work has appeared in such journals as Art World, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Glimmer Train, and the Greensboro Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Praise for Autobiomythography & Gallery
“Joe Millar’s Autobiomythography & Gallery is the best new book of poetry read by this reviewer this year. It is incredibly strong.” — Matt Soucy, Coldfront
"This is a dense and wonderful collection. More than any other collection I’ve reviewed this year, I can see myself returning to Millar’s poems." –CL Bledsoe Ghoti Magazine
"In his passionate response to Jonathan Franzen ("Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing...." Harper's), Ben Marcus outlines a new writer, one who is more concerned with tricking out his reader's Wernicke’s area—a part of the brain that processes language—than delivering anyone through a nifty but necessarily diminutive story. Marcus hails "writers who have pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode," who "bend the habitual gestures around new shapes." I celebrate every time a book with Marcus' sensibilities rolls off the press. Joe Millar's first collection of poetry...is such a book. Millar's sense of language is striking—nearly perfect, in some poems…Autobiomythography is remarkable as a response to that frustrated quandary; spending just a few minutes with the book promotes the sense that there is, in fact, something important to understand there..." –Adam Robinson, JMWW
Millar’s stunning debut explores and collides the dual experiences of self and world in a language and music superbly calibrated. There is an authority of voice and a sweep of experience that graces each of these beautifully made poems. —Stuart Dischell, authur of Backwards Days, Dig Safe, Good Hope Road and Evenings & Avenues
Inventive
and eclectic, Millar’s poems home in on the order in the chaos. —J.
C. Hallman, author of The
Chess Artist and The
Devil is a Gentleman
I
am especially moved by the series entitled “Memory of the Body,”
finding in each a living portrait of one cognizant and honest in the
minutes of his life. —Claudia Keelan, author of The
Devotion Field,
Utopic
and The Secularist
Table of Contents
Praise for Autobiomythography & Gallery
Self Portrait, as in Divisible
excerpt from The Smithsonian Guide to North American Shapes, Rhombus, the
The Second Fall (a character study)
Ghost of Gaudí Caught in a Tower of the Sagrada Família
Memory of the Body (III) The Micro-Pointillist, Devolved
excerpt from The Smithsonian Guide to North American Shapes, New Hotel Developed During Recession
Memory of the Body (II) The Child, as I Knew Her
The Sportsfisherman Responds to the Fish King with No Wishes
Memory of the Body (IV) The Indulger of Larger Anatomies of Self
You Know How it Feels to Inherit Tragedy
In Defense of Escapism as a Means to Express Free Will
excerpt from The Smithsonian Guide to North American Shapes Wright, Frank Lloyd (1867-1959)
& Such & Such, But Seriously, I Love You I’m Sure I Think Maybe
Memory of the Body (V) Memory of a Peninsula Bank on the St Johns,
Falling in Love, Surrounded by Flying Fish
Memory of the Body (I) Portage
Splitting the Lark to Find the Music
Immanence, which is Ever-Transcendence, Slowed
Memory of the Body (0) In Memoriam
All things being equal, I’d say the world
was most interested in its own piracy,
engaged in constant erasure. The February snow
a kind of performance art involving light
and weight dispersal, the wind hastening behind
like paparazzi in a celestial cover-up. The earth
immured, retracting. A neighborhood dog kennels
its muzzle in a dead tire, scavenging for warmth.
If death is natural, as we believe, then the death
of the world is natural. Nature’s mistake was creating
its own weaknesses, and all things are made in the likeness
of that divorce. The red truck sliding through a stoplight
near Governor Ave is a form of subtraction, the twin bars
of an equals sign narrated by tire tracks. It jumps the curb,
careening headlong through a chickenwire fence.
When the driver gets out, he is shaken. He cannot
articulate. This narrative should have ended in death.
The world retracts. Between conscious moments lies
these moments of stilled belief, of inquisitive imminence.
There in the snow the driver looks awkward, looks
skyward, looks down. He discovers only himself,
but that is a given.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
b. 1979
The stories of BD’JP.
Contents: Royce—Hollow—A Room Forever—[etc.]
1. West Virginia—Fiction. I. Title.
2. IA, NY—Wishful Invention of Life & Praise
PS0102.A100 2001 2007’.1 56-7681276
Silently he gouged the double-bark of pine
until it bled. Corralled by limestone ridge and hollers
the August weather seeped into the valley floor,
mercurial, the slate mist cupped and emptied from a palm,
suspending the glass song of a hermit thrush among
the canopies. Uncle Royce wiped the blade along his jeans
as the elder pine giggled out its sap. “You seen
a blue tick matted with this stuff? Best glue Nature
ever gave, pitch.” I was convinced we’d gathered there
for sport, to spy on sassy jailbait plucking fungus
from the wet earth, later skinny-dipping up at
Shawnee Creek. Wed myself to thoughts of near-conception.
“Fun’s plenty. But ass don’t pay the gas.” Later, skunk-drunk,
Royce climbed into a neighbor’s cage to spar a bear
chained to a stump, and lost. Pine glue held closed his casket.
Flat shoes fit on like gaskets—Uncle Royce in dreams.
Lilac, soot, corrosive agents. Words could
not describe the loss, his smells; what makes
a man? Identity’s a lozenge on the tongue
and once dissolved leaves but red words;want
not;man reduced to math/myth/moniker.
I worked the mines until the bank foreclosed
our home and level went the logging acres.
I prayed for chokedamp, swampgas, whatnot—come
what may. Come chariot of fire, come long drunk,
come factory and chemical, river
water blushed with nitrates, runoff from pig
farms further upstream. Gone Fishin. Gone Fuckin.
I couldn’t hold my alcohol or any job
and all was left you couldn’t shake a stick at.
Stuck it out a short while in a motor home splash indigo.
Rehashed a rubbished religion. Reduxed. Detoxed
in a truck stop shower stall: en route, one-way trip.
Left home to let my anchor float freely. Desired clemency:
a star released from orbiters. Dear God and whatnot,
Dear Royce. Spit-shined moon what waned above this helpless
ne’er-do-well, reflective. I hitched from a trucker name of
Harvey, let me knock off in his cab. Soon my thoughts of West
Virginia fell off a cliff and leapt at verdure foothills
where aphids circled crepe myrtle, snapped to apogee.
Heat glassing up the asphalt, whistling till my mouth
turned silt. He asked where I was headed, said
he would quit near Halifax, VA. The hills
were all I knew, I said. “Well bud,” he said, “You best
learn something new real quick.” I slept the death of colliers.
I longed for coal dusk, concrete street signs, jailbirds coiled
by newspaper stands, jaybirds hugging the dark phonewires.
I’d capped my upsets/insults in a bottle and chucked it
to the curb. Sunrise over Greensboro, NC— mopped up
and rung through thunderheads. THE BIG PICTURE gone blank.
Pumped gas for board. Barwoman’s belly
cause for breathlessness, grandeur of fleshy thighs
I clutched like death in my motel room; romped
on Frigidaire and foldout—plumb rocked her body
into cradle…but the womb unbuckled.
Here’s the heart performing Hide and Seek,
the heart memorial, like some airy portico
and ancient bust split through by invisible
weather. 2x2 we boarded the ark, and for what great hope?
Two souls arced—snuffed out like a rocket.
Twin aches like rocket boosters=Royce, Unborn.
You wake and have to rise because it’s what you do.
My honey’s note pinned to the lamp like a fresh outlook.
Blinds drawn, bath drawn. Bubbles like a thousand tongues
of regret. She asked me to forget her name so I tattooed it
to a kumquat rind and skipped it ‘cross the reservoir.
Days past, drew breath, upchucked. I went rowdy,
raucous. Wore my special hat. Lost a four eights draw
to four kings, and nearly killed. Were there a trophy
for self-deprecation, I’d have offered up my pose.
“Robber bees are born that way,” said Television.
That’s a mouthful, I replied, and quit my new construction job
for an art less on the level. I worked at making
every home seem emptier while I was there—I stole.
Deprived of all but profits. Depraved and sucking bottles.
Derivation of Fiasco—a bottle.
Corked—but screwed, at sea. No note.
Or one that no one wants to read at least.
I found the definition in this book
on the Italian language for beginners.
First Edition, stolen as I stole the rest
to sell online to bibliophiles/colporteur
dealers accessing the legalized
Black Market. Lady at the library desk
got me computer savvy; what duffered less
in cyberspace I bartered at the pawns.
Fiasco—night. The luminous waters batwinged
upside a houseboat docked near lakeside villas,
my hands full with stereo equipment: then
someone flipped a switch to start the motor.
I flip out. My brain: rack and pinion/piston:
misfires. Pretty soon I’m drifting at lake’s center,
listening as the motor cuts, still unwilling
to move an inch. I stay that way an hour, till dawn
polishes a door frame, slants between the shutters.
On some Great Chain of Tension, gravity upscales muscles
and the stereo loses its life for it. The wind
cries through a porthole. Time unhinges and drifts like so
many gulls and still nobody comes to check
the noise. It’s cold. I want whatever is going to happen
to happen, so I rub my arms and walk upstairs.
The fibroid dawn, pinks and yelloworanges, smeared
in the reality of dream. On deck a black man
in blue jeans glares hard from beneath a baseball cap.
A gun balloons one hand like a fiddler crab’s.
Befuddled—gone and worn my guardian angel out.
The shore was too long away on deepish water,
so I propped an elbow on the rail and spit.
Him: “What’s your name son? Where you from exactly?”
I give you that, I give it all away.
Him: “Way I see it, you got two choices. None good.
What was that I heard you bust inside?”
A stereo, but it was junk. Old hi-fi.
Him: “There’s nothing inside that’s junk. You notice
everything’s baroque?” It looked okay to me.
Him: “Not broke, you idiot. Fancy. Paid for.”
He laughed and I was sure he’d kill me.
I’ll do what it takes to make things right. Whatever.
Him: “I know you will. The Sheriff’ll see to that.”
Hey now, let’s talk. How’s ’bout I pay you back in books?
I wasn’t booked. I spilled my guts, hoping for
some leniency. Mister R. P. Warren Whittier
was proud, middle-aged, and kind. A writer, he understood
the mind’s not strong enough to kill a heart for good, nor
hold it long before it starts to struggle with the cage.
“Everyone can find a problem,” he said. “But few
can find solutions.” Pawned my near everything for cash,
him waiting in my truck. When we returned he offered
me a job as he pocketed what all I owed and owned,
including books, which he filed in his library.
I did groundswork/gruntwork: supersaturated
particles in his solution. Slept in a spare room
and read most often. No TV. We fished, swapped
whopper stories of our famous aches and loves;
our nightly walks a kind of peripatetic poetry.
He got me penning nightly my elemental haunts—
brainturf, loinache, deathdrive—drop my guard,
put it all on paper. Said life was less for my
ignoring it. Made me search out over the land,
asked what I saw. Pretty stuff, some. He said “Man is
wolf to man, son, and all alike.” Said, “Parcel out
the newly missing from the freshly lost. Repopulate, Deucalion.”
I read his books and craved my own, my land and place,
my voice. Set out again in quietude: charted the past
from recall: Coffindaffer crosses crowning hilltops,
frying ramps with molly moochers, coal dust, plantlife,
the glass factory, rivers and union church. Soon Royce.
Royce arrived with nightmares, brought the Unborn.
Wrote that. Wore that. Swore and wept that. Won that rebirth.
And buried myself in our tragedies and hopes, mining life.
Self Portrait, as in Divisible
Passing a book on Feng Shui in the mirrored hallway
I instead open another on the paintings of Botero
where the purity of deformed spheres seems
to both mock and praise reality’s
obesity, while attempting to stir
an argument on the multiplicities
of life: that we are only alike as
the likeness of some original.
Ocelot, my cat,
is a woolsucker. His large yellow-chipped green eyes
slandering, splintering, muscles contracting orgasmically
as he grips the riverrock-colored afghan
and draws out the empty milk of a memory, and is fed by it.
He has learned this from no one.
He folds up and sleeps in the opulence of brain.
Is he an occurrence of form
or its ghost? Seeming both the pattern
and the thing itself, he is even more
than that, being also an idea, which survives
within me, snatched however briefly from extinction.
This is how we are changed and made new.
We are the idea of ourselves driven into being.
Our bodies fit to form as we create the patterns.
All mirrors are wrong. There is no such thing as imitation.
It seems that everything is moving
away from me, boxy compacts
driving beyond the last fenceposts,
pool balls dropping into pockets.
A kind of theft, really, how the small dog
inhales my breath as I reach down
to pet it before it scampers away.
Even my most insidious poker face
has seen my well-earned dollars
drift southward in the arms of friends harvesting
their shiny cranberries from the money bog.
Wanna go another round? Hell, hit me.
Vector formulas and stratagem of battle,
pickup lines and names for faces, stout
and slippery as language. There is nothing
so silent as soup mopped up with wheat bread,
a cat eclipsing pages from a book, and there I go,
outgrowing the sweat and skin of me,
fidgeting to loosen each ribbon of nuance.
There was a time once when I would never
have said there was a time once.
See that nothing flowering
between each star? So what about it.
There’s me pondering the twenty-seven
corners of my apartment from the tub, twenty
minutes behind schedule, that person I could be
clipping and straightening a necktie,
a bagel in his mouth. I go after him
but the floor is wet. Perpetually wet.
The flakes of dead skin remain innumerable.
There’s this hat I flip cards in, black and oval,
lined with silk, inscribed with a name
in black magic marker. I try on the hat. I try
on the name and it fits.
I told my dad I stopped raising hell
and he called me a quitter
—cover of a book of matches
Johnny was determined to be the last man
to walk on the moon. He thought to wear
a big boot, read from a speech he devised
on the toilet. Johnny said once that lice
were reincarnated diamonds. He could dance
the Charleston but only before the Venetian
gesso mirror in his bedroom. Johnny played fairly,
voted out of sincere faith in decency and justice.
At twelve, he read to his invisible friend Justice
from the Song of Solomon and woke to rapid firings
under his bedsheets. He would ingest
four-leaf clovers for even better luck.
Johnny ate fried rice with pork rinds
and doused every dish with steak sauce.
If you knew Johnny you would
understand. One day he read his own
obituary and played scratched Twenties
records for two days before he called
the newspaper to report his survival.
They were not pleased. That night he curled up
by his bed, naked in his Special Forces
uniform. After rain he stamped the female moon
from puddles. Johnny felt the ghosts at his back.
Long sleek accusations rattled in his ear,
so he showered with the door open.
The ghosts were everywhere he looked:
the eye of a red dog, the curve of coffee
spoons, tips of waterproof matches.
Johnny felt uncomfortable around cathoderay
tubes and chrome. He once test-drove
a wooden lizard at a theme park. The words Free
Generation made him dizzy enough to hiccup bile,
he said. He recognized the smell of Bengal tigers.
Johnny knew how to snap the vertebrae
with a rope he used as a belt. Sometimes
he slept outdoors, in the mud, in the rain,
the air conditioner chopping wind like a helicopter.
He kept a condom under the receiver in his phone.
Johnny felt he sounded sexy on the phone,
a new tremor in his voice. Johnny drank gin
with plastic ice-cubes and memorized the license
plate of each car that passed his apartment
that first summer he returned. When the physician
uttered his condition he nodded and drove
home and looked it up in Webster’s College
and laughed. Origami butterflies died
strange deaths in his hands. He thought
if he were handsome, he could marshal
a parade as batons twirled asterisks
overhead, brighter than fragmentation
grenades. Johnny was in the market
for a good pair of scissors. He would
cut out the eyes from magazine models
and paste them on the bathroom door.
Johnny loved the sun more than anything,
though believing himself to be allergic to it.
Johnny admired how his muscles twitched
when he flexed his knuckles around a roll
of quarters. His body was an unwieldy tool.
He believed he had never set foot in a tattoo
parlor before, that the smeared green images
rose from a small, compact location
in his center: chakra and chi and navel.
Johnny had a running joke with himself:
he would be the first person to spaceship a monkey
into the sun. Whenever he thought about it
the tears just kept coming.
excerpt from
The Smithsonian Guide to North American Shapes, Rhombus, the
Notorious lush, half-brother to the diamond,
it leans to touch what upright forms will have it.
The engine/transmission mounting points of our fathers’
Oldsmobiles (1949-63) had trained this shape to sturdiness.
The perfect cube, tilted, displays in three dimensions
its one expression. On a six-sided prism it was, perhaps,
the window Newton watched Truth course color through.
Its sides imply risk with no eventual point of contact
save its beginnings. It continues beyond the perspective of pictures.
The parallels angle to fit a genus of conch shell,
and true to its worth, despite Goebbels terming all irregulars
Judeonegroid, as if it were a slander, the rhombus—
one crooner’s slang for “abstract ideal of Jazz”— avails
to some physicians as form of female genitalia during birth,
and thus, the shape of humans.
The linkages (bare-wired) gone watt & red hot,
sun-stamped earth, wait for me seamstress
of the double hemisphere, ruby-clawed hopeful bird.
Berry-ginner of the lower Guadalupe, when in flight
you danced my twin dreams of you: cross-current dandelion
freed of concentration / unbidden wind-driven dart.
Wick-feathered funky dropped-down smoothed-over
thing, light chasing from your movement, announcing
your arrival in broad colors. The stars reconciled & remitted:
there should have been no world not blue for you, warmed
about a dew-dipped belly, caramel & yellow dappled
Pekinese of the Pouty Lip, but beakwise—the whole
stage gone sour beneath: the proliferation of garbage piles,
the railway intercoastal and toxic sludge puddles. If I
found the right words (redressed?) I could keep you
safe in language, syllable bound & yes, language a trap
in itself, validation through intonation, not much braver
than silence, but hopeful. Man’s unmatched missions of mutability
unwound your wristwatch, warbler, leaving you fobbed
& forgotten. It’s hard to convince the living the value of
the near-dead not dying when death confirms their living;
no chain of being but a coat which fits us all just once.
The linkages burn & burn—a white needle thinning
through thinning fabric like a javelin unraveling air.
The world’s great coat tightens like a lozenge in the throat.
These are the last days of the hog men.
Their balled fists strangle what is not there.
An apronned figure among the snow-bit woods
scratches an armpit of dried soap
and sings through the zero of her heart.
The woods are on fire behind her.
The woods are bleating.
The woods are clapping around her.
The hogs roll their eyes in the stockyard,
ramming their snouts between pen bars,
baring their tongues to the dirt.
There are fewer shotgun shells than hogs
and fewer hog men.
Some will never work this job again
knowing what they know now—this paradox of savior.
What was meant for the slaughter must have freedom.
The released bear their teeth to the new dusk
and race for the light.
What they are left with,
and what they will always be left with is this:
The bounty of ash, of cloven foot,
this sweet-smelling corona of hog eye.
The sound was abominable. It cleared the air
of rain and settled on a square patch of rosaries.
The eucalyptus could not stand the green gods
gave it; the sound was probably never heard.
It woke me with a shatter. From the dream I woke
with a spine of eucalyptus hickies stitched to my stomach
& coffee in the air, a woman missing, a steady silence broken
steadily by the kitchen faucet’s faux-menstruation.
The day at first proved normal. No impish puns, no miracles
that seemed inopportune or appropriately destined.
Churches open, meat market closed. Barbs of fascinated
children poked one by one from behind the church fence
as I passed, delighted by a patch of cloud-light
splayed across a brick wall. The crowds passed by
about their business, tattered business jackets, oiled eyes,
their ties somewhere between a spring and winter.
A silk beetle shivered in my breast pocket, which I
mistook for love, and tweezered it out with my fingers,
holding it aloft. It had no spoken name. Instead it hummed.
Love me, it hummed. Louder. I squashed it like a god.
Year of the Mutt, a river,
a tattered rope
of bristling leghumper darkening
the underbelly of neighborhood campers
rut-urgent
a puncture of lust in her whimper.
Sure, if I could be that
sure of what I wanted
skin undulating electric thought
virtual pulse
a current of catch and release
like fishing. Crisp Iowa morning
our green lures tintinnabulary on rock beds
as the rods bobbed wind swifting a tongue
through each orifice of clothing
as the slack line quickens at the first tug
the emotional moment dies an unself
flowers some light opens my genitals
sing when the rod bends my brain
goes numb
Or like fishing. Two half-aware figures
eyes knuckle-cold bundled in blue
and red flannel gaffing a pike through one
eye large and luminous leviathan
some child crouches in my bones
and prods the fishy squidish bits
burning new channels of rosewater with
a little finger-pressure.
“Fine” is too fat a word
for its blind, shimmering release.
Sometimes the mind wishes itself
a simple path into the woods unconcerned
recalcitrant
a game of catch me if you can if you wish
and sometimes insight our first communion
is what is to be found there
though now there is so much too much
that perhaps
insight has become a commodity.
The news is—and can I ever believe this?
—too widely distributed
is simply too free
something the eye no longer catches
lacking authenticity
as were those sandpiper tracks
fading on the Indialantic beach
sucking tidewater emptying themselves
of what was never there,
filling with what we had a horizonfull
already. The sea will not save us.
Sure we know that. What else you got?
My uncle passing my brother and I beers
and cigarettes and the secrets of women,
teaching us how to let
a lifetime pass
It didn’t take long to learn no
two things are the same or even one
thing once seen (the eye devoureth).
This is why witness changes
everything. The sky in the afternoon is
mullioned by wide arcs of geese today
in a frieze above the snow-covered
snow along my mind’s ridge because
I am now in my apartment imagining
those geese: hachured magnolias rating
their progress my cat chattering smelling
their fear as it burns
along the cornice of my skull.
Life consists of one germane coincidence
stooped in the secret of the next thought
like a pillbox
or a Matryoshka nesting doll
each moment a removing a dislocation
the dream of the pious to be
devoted to the idea that the Ideal will
find its home partly within, one foot here
one in the other world. Mystery is essential
to belief is essential to me sitting here
pirating the unnameable.
I do not know what I’m fishing for
in these rivers, green & not so,
but perhaps it’s something as ordinary
as God or the crease
separating the knowable and unknowable
where I sit (think fencepost
Midwest prairie [think “thought”])
watching whatever it is is-ing between
hitchingposts
and me realizing (for good?)
you can’t step anywhere
that isn’t a river.
Let’s play ball, says the stone. Let’s see what you’re made of.
The child falls as it strikes him, this memory of his dead father
who is still alive but dying.
It’s easy to forget you have to do something wrong to be forgiven.
The darkest hour is the reason we have hours in the first place.
This isn’t invoking, it’s evocation. Your words, says the stone,
will not always be enough. As if living were a game you played
with a stone. With a heart made of words.
In the new world, everything is ice
and factories. Clutter is a rule rather
than a way of life. Some miss the smell
of juniper crushed in the palm. Wires
congress overhead and what isn’t loss?
In the small world things condensed
re-friction, fabricate the possible.
There are no senses but a sensitivity to
other small things. They make the new world.
They rub against each other in sex and prayer.
Tiny blubbery blue-eyed pink fledgling
bird in my palm ebbing breaths, chirpless
strategy for life, frenzied with ants
like a transient disease, you are between
two worlds and complicate these matters.
I might leave you to frizzle (fragile
neck of melted rubberbands,
möbius intestinal track translucent
in the spring sun under dogwood),
I might frock you in my pocket.
But the small world things are myopic
and fashionably resistant to the problem of death.
All they know is congregation and
displacement. Let us be like them.
In Cocoa Village there’s a small, clean
bookstore near the mint-green ocean
known for undertow. It has good coffee.
All clouds are the new
retro.
Each mystifies
the next, an apparition
of apparatus.
Here comes the next big
thing—a camel squeezed through
a needle squeezed through the engines
of a private jet.
Reality is just Time slipping
on a skin. War is a lonely
hot date with itself.
Sit back. Here’s the part
we imagine ourselves.
O Cinctured Somebody, my mirror-light-cusped somnambulist, all
I ever wanted was to clasp your palatable data to my hard drive—why
bow to shower water before the Patron Saint of the Profane, old knock-knee-hearted me? Well, my pithy lapse in tithing the People their bottomless
cups of Want unburdened my billfold. O brothers! My former partner’s
gone AWOL in Iowa, but not my Left Hand Man, my lovely
pewter-colored computer (screen-saved by decollated digitronic
lapdog), handsomely ornate, a virtual biography of beck and call,
fly-eyed, with one roosted in a private chatroom linked via cable
via camera to your shower stall, O showering next-door Somebody.
My pixilated pixie, your split-ends splayed by a roof-cistern’s draining
runoff of ruddy rainwater in one of the faux-French deals I had installed
before my labor worker layoffs. Water is not a passing through but a coming
into thing, awash in light & spectral like you, minor matinee idol,
reduxable instant celebrity for the livid cybermoonlighters grown dim
with LIVE! downloadable id. The unexamined life is not worth living
or leaving unexamined.
The Second Fall (a character study)
Funes the Memorious categorized the leaves
Of a sapling, branded each with a new name, those
Set with the quicklime of time, ever industrious
& hungry for moment, for minutiae. For what?
A horror. The mind cannot let go. Come noon
In Babylon I walked the frail flames with Shadrach,
Meshach & Abed-nego under the golden
Idol of Nebuchadnezzar, breaching the subjects
Of stifling economies, mule specimens &
The momentary weakness of significance
Before all is made trivial by some momentary insight.
Each were assured in our assurances: we’d be saved.
It was good to chat beyond celestial obligation.
Sub-Conscious, hid in instant, I suddenly sensed God could not
See or hear me (Aye, Caliban upon Setebos—‘Will sprawl,
Not that the heat of day is best, / Flat on his belly
In the pit’s much mire) & so I bestowed upon the boys
A vision I would pass to others: Lizard—belly-slumped
on a sanguine beach—miraculously transformed into a man
In an iridescent flash of evolution.
I shrug at their big questions. It is not for anyone
To know. All is package & record. History
Is a salted slug, the shriveling of conclusions,
Guesstimations, protocol.
***
He hands me a trumpet as I mount Pestilence.
There are too many eyes upon me now to turn and flee.
& what if He should hear me, sneak up on me
& steal the plumèd spine that straightens me, kneeling, along this cross
of judicial servitude?
Perhaps these thoughts are best left drowned in quietude.
***
Post-SecondComing, post-HowGreatThouArt, wrestling
On the white granite peak of Mt. Harney, South Dakota
With Honest Jon of the Lakota & a biker named Larry Unsung
Motored in for the Sturgis Rally. We breath hard & deep like old Victrolas
Into the deepening valleys; wondering now if I did right in sparing, now sparring,
Able men under this illegitimate sun—I smash their groins like gourds amid
the cottonwood & ponderosa.
***
Mountains crumbled to crumbcake & I chose not to fight the fallen in Christ
& sudden clang & whoosh of Me, felled by my brothers’ blood butter-brown swords
& left behind. We fought as if no love had passed between us,
O cloudless centuries
Moment of self-awareness as felled guardian, Gideon, eon-fluxed
Man who wouldn’t bow to Baal & then angelic henchman & again my human
Form fits me like Pascal’s coat, hemmed with the possible apology.
Every one of you a One, a sudden stranger wrought with history
None heard the first crack in the firmament (nor the last)
Being too attuned to one time, one place—and so blind to the Great War
Understand that I endure you: compost heaps & banner ads & motor vehicle trends
It bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (as seen from the side)
Should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front)
Panoramopticondemic. Awash in scene, witnessed by the Viewer omnipresent,
Alienated from the affection of that voice which shards like lightning.
Two Mormon boys buy me soup & I listen & worsen & wissen
Q: If the beast is trained to kill, where goes that blood-memory
once beast is conditioned to live anticlimactically among the domestics?
A: It prowls the archetypes. It broods over its own milky bones. It lies in wait
Gott weiss ich will Not of the philosophers
Kein Not of the intellectuals
Engel sein Not of not of
I, out of the order of angels, can hear you. What strikes you
as beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror
***
Lines Taken From Gideon Ilkarmen’s Second Collection of Short Stories, Division Songs
Death arrives in two ways: a) Quickly b) Not so quickly. The bull, blood soaking its spindly hide, knelt before the stands. There is no better life than mine, no longer among the monasteries. It is a true world that turns its back on its people. He still enjoyed playing tetherball with a Coke can tied with fishing line to a birch. A flashlight ambering a solid fifth of Kentucky straight bourbon. Withering harpsichord, you amplify my freshest feelings of regret. The beach crystallized by night’s spangled armada. The glib orchestral ring suddenly adopts a stance of unforgiving lightning. Living is often confused with survival. The young girl read aloud from her book: the opalescent eel churns its electric body music beneath a thick, wet skin. A horribly pragmatic take on abortion: take it out, put it on a table—does it live? And talk of loadstone and sea granite. One man’s moral aperitif is another man’s hard edge of reason. A talent may often rely on the negation of itself; keep in mind the calculated withdraws of the pugilist. The beauty of the labia unfolding is briefly platonic. It is the pain of categorization to label fingers digits. I take notes so that I can forget more often; thought is simply an emptying of the crowded mind to make room for more emptiness; I write to forget. I felt less when I knew more. Compassion happens when someone is tired of someone else not having anywhere to hide. The true gift given to humanity by the cosmos is the ability to ignore; this is why man has power over the gods, yet no true power over his own heart, which cannot be ignored. The gift given to humanity by the heart is its ability to replace the cosmos with other people. This is how we all became beautiful gods unto ourselves. Watch us fall & fall & fall.
Ghost of Gaudí Caught in a Tower of the Sagrada Família
Standard-issued trumpet & cement chaingang of precious fruit
Heaven & Earth, rivalry unto contempt
there is nothing in this next world that I could not have had in that
triangle, grape, palm tree
Hosanna if I could dream it would not be dreams of corn
sacrificed motifs
symbols on the faces of flipped coins
Let my fear be based in fantasy
A visitor says
Herod stands over the geese & murdered babies
Let the tortoise bear my weight
watch again as the tram
passes through me
not metro blocks away
Here there are tabletops with wings
mopeds in the summer
wind-chill factors
Barcelona. I have no meaning for now
Once in a land and there you have it
As a child in Reus, I kept pace on a donkey
because of the rheumatism
I’ve seen the best of both worlds turn
their backs
Old man drafting a tower where he would wind up as the tower’s dream
Motley ornamental privately-funded spectacle of God
Gent de camp, gent de lamp, temper like a red bird slingshot from a hat
Flickering anatomy of a hollow reptile the shimmer of what is missing
The visitors teach me. Mediterranean Gothicatholic
Calvary at noon & magnanimous Passion
Otherworld? I am the unnatural litmus
I stay because there is nowhere else to go
Raku brimming with blast furnace colors
Green cypress with pigeons piercing its lip
My brother would break the shoes in for me
blue and gold of desire, my land of honey
the four-barred shield and St. George in the square
The driver thought my body was a vagabond’s
pomegranate head with its uncoiled rope of fire
I cannot die, Barcelona. It is not finished
Rose window with triumphal brow
peering into the ribcage of a stillborn
Micro-Pointillist, Devolved
What was I eating the first time I heard color and fire
were not tangibles but events?
what was I wearing?
hopefully something blistering and vivid
so that I dotted these events about my canvas tight as riches
and thrust my fine hands through eternal.
A detonation of denotation. The final CLAP! Hush now icicle. Hush now empty frame.
There in the stone garden the last stone passenger pigeon
a form crazed in two from weather pressure
wet from the first spring rain, the memory of its first body (the stoney hilltop)
extinguished among household plants.
My kinsman—all small things grown large return to their reduced forms.
On the patio I sit and drink piña coladas and shots of liquid cocaine with a bowl
of raspberries, slightly chilled. The cataclysm of the known world erupting
over itself reversed, re-engineered laying tracks for new hegemony— this can happen anywhere, in a backyard such as this, looking out at children on swings, chained to some euphoric energy.
Hush now.
The mind crazed with event. The self as color and fire.
The detonation brought on by the new dismantling the new dismantling.
New thought new world. We all work like this.
Changing your mind means adjustment in consciousness.
That’s why I used to love tending garden. Each new color was a tune-up.
But learning requires an undoing of something else. ‘Yes, and now I know better.’
If one believes in betterment. And is not the end of something
the beginning of something else’s end and their collision in time the event of being?
and that moment simply
a replacement part from the world’s endless storage facility?
Larger than the ash&rubbished
(and newly refurbished)
Library of Alexandria. (& newly ashed).
How each moment I
detonate suicidally
with recreation—
-after Humphries and Fitzgerald after Horace
You’ve claimed more little deaths than the Titanic.
Half the boys in town notched up your headboard &
Took your feather pillows in their mouths (a lover’s panic)
For what you’ve smirked & called Communion of the Damned.
But the young men come less often, don’t they, Seth.
Midnight raps that once led you downstairs to your proscenium
(In silk kimono, a Bordeaux import on your breath)
Haunt you now on alcoholic nights as woodpeckers
Turn your front porch into beachside condominiums.
If your buckled door had been less easy at the hinges
These nights might not have grown such tongueless hours;
I’ve comforted your X-lovers, held their hands as dawn mirages
Reddened their eyes, kept them up with chess & Sweet & Sours,
Spoke as gently as a mother, though years their minor; their hopes
Like inchworms in the creases of my palm. I refused whatever cash.
Half those simpletons were all pumped-up on dope
But still it mattered. Watching them sleep, humanity was somehow thicker.
Sometimes they’d cry your name and bring me to a blush.
From your alley apartment, the myrtle melting to a dark mustard,
You watch me pass with my new lovers on our way for beers.
In your old age that leather belt has lost its luster—
Still, you’d stick it in a knothole to relive the glory years.
excerpt from
The Smithsonian Guide to North American Shapes, New Hotel Developed During Recession
Architectural nib—wound lofty, uppity even,
constructed effervescently, saintly skyward blueward against
a bright backdrop—HOTEL—pasted there. A sheen like magic,
like the magical enterprise of music, lit up, steelshine
windows and glossy-corporate a color now, a compilation
of lost colors, weightless in the beachsalt air, aloft,
a compendium of antiearth, aboveitall, americhrist.
Maybe I’m just reaching. But there, arisen where dunes
reigned and seaoats perked their views, a tower,
a new thing blinding the sunset, with summer pools a mile’s
fraction from the surf, haloed by seagulls, a breach in terrain,
archiving tyrannically whatever rebuffs it: baker’s shop
and sandwich tent, pavilion, boardwalk, what ebbs and ebbs
against its borders. My eyeshift pastes it there. Hotel lit
on the cloud mountains, over the sandhills, where surfers keep
their watching, their voices bleared by treble/and bassthumps cars procure/
where hoisted to the heavens/it stunts us at the shore.
Refrain. It’s hard to. I grew up sculpting castles near these dunes.
But now, what could obscure that...weightless...watermirage? And
why not wash my hands of it? Because it lacks essence.
It demonstrates without allowances. A building is no ocean.
Peninsular carcinoma, unleash your querulous nest of jetlagged snowbirds.
Bathe the town in burnt red and watery knots of bubbleflesh. Why
not. This isn’t paradise. It’s funny. How I act surprised, as if you
weren’t expected. Truth is, the lawyers saw you coming.
This transient land’s watched apostles topple the apostates, subjugate
the everglades, evergreens, canes, groves, cattail river gates in search
of goldpower. Grabit&growl. Get your tickets for the Fountain-of-Youth.
What’s changed? The industry of Florida is disparity and space.
Even the wild pigs are not our own.
My words seem lousy failures, but this is what I’ve got instead of money.
I’d pay a hurricane but you’re proofed for it. You’ll be empty in a decade,
though you’ll already have succeeded in bringing down your winters.
The Child, as I Knew Her
Within these confines: two leafless cogs ground out
the dulled red berryseed of a sapling: twenty finger
lanterns: plump eggplant hunched in its black universe.
A throb of hysteria resounds: whale calls transmitted
through Campbell’s soup cans soul-strung by feeding wire,
or was it only the vacuum cleaner sputtering
through its necessary ritual beneath the dust cloth?
And if I say
this child is imagined, that the midnight phonecall
from the X-lover never arrived, would you be surprised
to learn that I have loved that child? that I ran cool oil
over its hips: scoured the odors from its crevices
and read the folds of her eyelids like unearthed scrolls:
the halophyte of the fist: and to break from its unbridled
clench would snap off my good wing?
I’ve watched
the votive candles burn through vats of rubber
as my daughter whispered stars. I’ve glided through a wandering
drunk and mouthed her precious curls as she slept,
one arm behind her head like a suicide, and have charged
a god with her current keep at an open casket wake.
Don’t you ever
tell me I haven’t got what it takes to love, because
I’m in the mind of nails and warring factions
and the other end of this line is dead.
Mrs. Edwards concurs. There must be life
On other planets. She loves Hawaii. The big
One. There are soaps to be made, bicycles
& sunglasses, statues, lamps & bougainvillea.
She feels someone must hold us all responsible.
Mrs. Edwards knows that when the Dow
Drops, gas & new technology is strictly off limits.
So are new handbags. Conservation goes into effect.
A sensible person simply does not gallivant
Around, flashing $ in “the poor’s ravenous eyes.”
Mrs. Edwards believes in life after death,
The constant invisible, the white light & tunnel.
She went under the knife, tuck, tuck, snip
& woke with a new face to meet the faces
Of the dead, fogging up her mind like a cataract.
Mrs. Edwards has her many vials: blue, velvet,
Cream. Her ups & downs. Her little helpers.
The sunlight is too credible, too steely. It waits
In rearview mirrors, windshields. Rain’s ruined
Her knees. Her son sends rare bark from Brazil.
Mrs. Edwards loves her sugar. People deserve
Better, she says. She recycles & reprimands
Columnists in The Times for misrepresenting
The aging Boomers. We support the charities!
We banished fur! We saved the whales & Serbs!
Or was it Croats? Mrs. Edwards cannot believe her eyes.
The old neighborhoods have gone to hell with rival gangs
& towers gone. Reminisces on the old Broadway.
Her second husband left, she says, for lack of oral sex.
They kept it open. She missed her men & lunches.
She wants the concierge of loneliness to retire.
To give up & go. Her exotic finches lay their heads
On cold mirrors in the cages, gray breath like liquid
Fire fogging their apparitions. They are unwilling
To chirp the worksong of those born in captivity.
Mrs. Edwards says she has this urge. I will set
Them free tomorrow, she says. Tomorrow I’ll
Transit tunnels, the express, the turnpike, to Father’s
Dock in Browns Mills overlooking the cranberry
Bogs, and let them go. Or drown them. Or us all.
Mrs. Edwards feels she is out of options.
We sit on the patio, snacking on plantains.
The only pure thing in life, she says, is detestation;
Everything else must be answered for. I light her
Cigarette & smile. The price of sex is conversation.
Tobacco that lewd effervescence of death
a streamlined hysterical blue wing of smoke
ground cough of the body utopian pleasure
I’ll smoke till molasses catch flies in my chimney
plutonium please just hand me a Camel
I’m not even kidding I’ll smoke till I croak
these motherless nipples moved Freud to consider
neurotic reactions to internal pressures
so I’m nursing for life
green elephant ears frayed by dusk’s choreography
on foothills of North Carolina’s topography
permissive as druggists instructing the redwood
on living too well marauder of capital mass importation of wealth
from the Chinese who smoke thirty million fresh packs in an hour
clear cellophane wrapper pure crinkle of promise cocooned like
the Imogen Cunningham photo invisible
women asleep in white blouses
the odor of winter parched woodburning stove
a general’s slogan tattooed on its waistline
dried brain of cicada
unequivocally cinema
Failed staff inflates to devil’s walking stick.
Fall in Spring, & you walk the talk.
The walking stick & a bit of whiskey
in the gut. Say things like
The sky tonight is rich in ethereal industry.
The creambelt of nimbus, jetstream turfwars.
Gone now the bobbing crab apple
that daily ripens & plummets like a stock.
Forget the diagnosis of osteoporosis
Falstaff—just don’t forget your cane.
Sell the percocet and crystal meth to neighbor’s kids
& move on down the boardwalk.
A caravan of mermaids pass,
blues & seagreens & naked breasts & old
men gumming coneydogs.
You’ve changed your life
& now you change your life
again. & now? You’ve got
a battery of selves, a fuselage
of conquering constructs.
Change again. Do it again.
You must lose your lives
to live one.
Wild finch, free-thing, you are too quick for this poem!
But bull, broadbacked, tempered brass bull you
are not. Horns hooked like the brass moon, stretched
by the meaty palm of Perillus, the voice you low
is your creator’s. You were a king’s final word.
But Perillus did not catch the irony
of his name in time. Here he thought his life’s
great gift—you bull—was to make a fire chamber
for the kingdom’s crooks. Your hatchback beat the Beetle’s.
Your belly a place, once heated, broiled the hearts
of humans condemned for being born Medieval poor.
Poor bull, their screams are your true voice,
a slave voice, bellowing from a ballpeanbattered
pit. Poor Perillus, the artist’s curse,
to be trapped and cooked in your creation.
But Perillus! The lowly bull lowing is how we know you meant it:
device of slow torture, imaginative industry of death.
You got what you deserved, buddy, sliding out its brass asshole.
The Sportsfisherman Responds to the Fish King with No Wishes
Dream-eyed, antediluvian fish, I canonize you
in the name of the leadweight pellet, hairy
ferret-tufted lure we call the rooster tail,
scaleglint ripplets near the Coralville Dam
in latest September. Flat-headed panfish
of the Near-inedible Bonies, I give you gravity,
which is the tug of death,
raised now in a light your subaqueous truths
ignored. A wisp of chimney smoke lights on the lip
of dusk while I imagine you imagine home a final time.
In the rocky gorges you flashed and scuttled, the hollowed trunk
harbor where your cities sprawl. The cache of your mind a flutter
of dashes. Dangling at this angle, you shiver bitterly like guilt.
It is probably not enough to tell you some evenings I walk
the brickyards lonely along the river home
and watch rings widen on the water
in wavering ellipses until they grow beyond
reconcilement. Lately, the earth giving underfoot
feels sturdier in my catch’s absence,
nor is the unburdening of my gear
among the rotting apples not a relief. If anything
I’d wish to be oblivious as God to the tribulations
culled by near-death fishy wishes. The conflict lies
in moralizing pain in plainest pleasures, which
if anything is what the sporting’s all about. I must put
you back, though I would guess, with the roles reversed,
you’d serve me up to turkey buzzards. As if the moon
were the flashing bottom of a pail in darkness
and I were the one bottom-slinking sunk and breathless drowsing.
What can I say? Empathy may not be something to be found
at either end of a monofilament line, or along
the redbrick paths of a honest hunger. You eat fish
yourself, no? and wish for more. But this is my choice,
beyond the wishing, and I wish for fish no more.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal
physical fear so long sustained by now that
we can even bear it. There are no longer
problems of the spirit. There is only one
question: When will I be blown up?
W. F., Nobel Speech
.
The salt-struck air off the strand decompresses over
the green dragon at the confluence of two rivers—
concrete scales green as shelf-life, fledgling dragons
at the coquina base. Anchored to a river island mythic
in the village sense, where sailboats lick its harbor
free of antecedents—waiting for ever. The story goes
an angel, masculine & primitive, subcontracted,
bade the dreaming sculptor design a dragon to meet
the Eau Gallie Causeway traffic with charmed
indifference, lest the island sink, which it did,
two inches a day, which is the rate I grew
from Jan 1st-Feb 1st, 1986, measured against
a doorframe, which is where I’d say the contest
between me & the finite world began.
..
Legend also had it that once wombed inside the dragon’s belly:
a warhead, pornographic, timed for temperature
to bump from Cold to Hot & so the loss
of Georgia & inevitable retaliation. The apotheosis of dogs & cats,
all lit up and thrust skyward in tableau
among the wafts of boiled swamp cabbage,
snook, blue crab, lightbulbs, love, above the coast
that slipped a disc, spread supine its vertebrae of hotels
& discount malls. Nostalgic weapon? Lest we forgive our debtors.
This is how rain feels on its one-way mission
to puddledom. I imagine my brother Jason, a roofer,
lays down his hammer, looks slantwise & upward,
pines flowering with the lit filigrees of disaster, O Tannenbaum
gone Disneytechnic: virtual—virtueless—vanquishing.
…
The waves like billfolds opening, fluttering, folding.
The layers of phosphorous the moon silk-screened on the shells
of sebaceous loggerhead turtles shimmer like an afterbirth.
We go to the beach to get drunk & whisper in the conch’s ear
the sour language of forgiveness, a humble tutelage,
amassing & destroying all the wealth
of a childhood severe in its orchestration,
a violent
pithy
nature.
If you look at a star too long it disappears, so we spent
the night undoing, until the sky went barren with our interest
& the moon logged-off in the southwest
corner between Key West and Tampa Bay.
….
The smell of an orange blossom gives voice to the blossom.
A yellow sort of speech raised to drop its dropsy baritone.
Without loss there is no recovery, no record, no chord plunked.
What is most frightening in life is a possible loss of that recovery.
The ocean building to aria, Sturm & Dranging over the impassible dunes.
The ocean filled our empty ears with chatter, which we refilled
with talk of mole crabs, elliptical remarks, whistles, beach glass &
wandered up the coast like twin weathervanes
drawn to separate distances on the same axis, two wind-worn painted dragons
cut from a tin coffeepot inscribed with: And the Poor Will Always Be ---- Us.
We have agreed that I should die before him.
We have agreed that neither of us should ever die.
And suddenly the sky flares up. A thin hot wire illuminating the darkness
over Cape Canaveral.
Satellite on a rocket, launched, now a rogue missile gone astray & detonated &
descent scent
descent.
The sea is half of it, the Other
is the other half.
This after the driftwood bearing our initials drifts past sight.
Before your plane dips a wing
into the overripe sun.
You only knew the half of it.
I’m on the beach with mirrors
signaling you home,
aware that even if you noticed the sporadic flashes
you would not turn back.
An incredulous sandpiper
the size of a fallen halfmoon
gets one good look at itself before
the brass wave overturns its body.
I wish your plane would turn to stone.
It begins by blowing sandpipers sideways, manacling coco-de-mer palms with metal chains from garbage cans used to keep the raccoons out. It’s the first of the last days, rain plowing roads with the opposite of nihilism: the everything, the too much, the irretrievable. The eye has moved beyond us, biblical, causing battery-powered radios to bark on, startling crickets from the sink drain. All eye and no heart and yet charged with an imagination; sucking up small toads from the St Johns River, kiting their aerated husks over the Melbourne Causeway. We watch from inside a café where two yellow strips of masking tape bisect windows at the diagonals. We play chess and feed crumbs to a Husky whose owner confides in us that in a former life he was King Solomon, and had it been his decision to make again, he would have sliced the child in two, ‘Since everyone’s so skilled at lying.’ We venture outdoors. Car alarms protest the hail now golfball size which ping and pank their starred signatures in white. Gales tunnel the avenues, sending up newspaper leafs like planes taking off from a destroyer. The horrifying beds the beautiful. The sublime drenches our pants and presses our spines to the brick wall. The heavens are falling, we think—simultaneously thinking, I imagine, because we share the same body under an umbrella blown outward and I would rather not be two minds in a hurricane than one.
The Indulger of Larger Anatomies of Self
It is possible we have grown emotional
opposable thumbs
(I can almost sense the weight of this new hammer)
which lack any viable means of expression.
It is possible that we can finally feel each other.
I find myself sometimes believing there are fringes (ok parenthesis)(ok auras)
outlining the body which when punctured by acceptance of us
as everything else, leak our very natural selves
into the external very natural Self so that we can no longer identify ourselves
from et cetera, bungalows, catamarans, shuttlecocks, kumquats, garrets,
Appalachia, marsupials, gingivitis, eyestalks, kakapos, jerky
{your world here}
which when punctured
hitch our blazing basics to the jetstream
one grand unifying
vanishing act.
The problem is there are neuro-firings that misread the shadows at the hinge,
miscommunicate the fresh blossom scent rising in an empty room,
so that our sense of a shared Internal which may or may not be false
is at least mistrusted. Can we trust our own responses enough
to believe they can be globalized, when everyday we discount
the simple false epiphanies from the day before?
Perhaps eventually all feelings will be entirely recorded as nonexclusive
from the events in which they take part, rather than sensations
one struggles to define internally and then attempt to share.
“My lover left me. This produces feelings I know you know,
because you are me and I am also the lover that left us.”
Which is painfully sad, if you ask me.
Perhaps we will go the other way, attempting to maximize
expression by crowding the feeling with language
until it bursts from the flesh like a splinter:
“At 4:15 and 21 seconds on Friday etc in the auburn dusklight
radiating behind the etc my lover left me
and there is this thing in me that struggles to stay afloat and a place
that feels like bees.”
Our sympathy doesn’t require the whole of the story—
though sometimes it is difficult as in religion
and perhaps as dangerous
to take that leap
that ‘philosophical suicide’ as Camus put it into belief
into trusting that someone understands you.
Until that time when all is known in shared significance
we manage.
At least there is no stopping the self from desiring to trust itself.
Bodies tend to trust their own histories.
Even pain tells us who we are.
You Know How it Feels to Inherit Tragedy
—For D.L.
Twin gargoyles resting, legs crossed, wings cushioning their slumps,
beaks like a pair of a pair of pliers.
Before we apply the necessary clamps, try not to think electricity.
Try to remember your birth and that first rubbery knot of light.
The farmer moved about his crops, testing the wind with dirt,
knowing one of his sons must die and one must bear the mark.
When the boy who’d run away woke, the eighteen-wheeler
was gone, his bags were gone, he looked down by his sides
along the road’s shoulder. He still had no arms. A fog muzzled
the streetlamp down the road. The healer kept his fifty dollars.
The skiff coasts gently into the cavities of night.
Stars loiter like pennies in a well
where hands are pulled from hands, or wash
the grime from knuckles before suppertime.
There came a time her hands forgot their stations
at the side, at the wrists,
above the cobbled street in a vacant room
where dresser drawers left open
offered nothing and the stairs creaked in expectation of my weight
as if all she remembered in the salt air was this.
She’d lost the cradle that grips a child’s crayon loose in tight fingers.
She let our child slip into the ocean.
The Coast Guard would not find her
before she drifted into the Gulf of Mexico.
A shadow caws for its black coat then turns and nods.
It spreads its two wings, Music and Urgency.
It pours the bugle noise from its blank heart.
It rains its bellied hatred through the glass parade of buildings,
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