Posts filed under 'Poetry'
In Slip, his first book about the rise and fall of the petite bourgeoisie,
the parents are disguised as one another– father as woman, but enraged,
mother as man but unpaid, a hostage to who she is and who she tries to be.
The son’s the little darling but lives in irony. Does he love the man
or the woman or the X? Life is beautiful, duplicitous, a sex detective mystery
like the ones mother read. Chandler and Cain. Father cuts the books up
with scissors, shreds them to protect his son from the fatale. Like the boy
in the book, he grew elliptical. Who’d want to look beneath the drag of skirts
to find that pleasure is a hair shirt? Born of the dream and disillusionment
of noir, the retailed wrecks and splendors of nowhere,
he lived ravished by color, like Dorothy in Oz. Color
like an imprinted name– Smith or Rodriguez– whispered in the dark
to him something vast and swarming and munificent, some clamoring
for red and gold and vermilion like a sunset, the suffering of nations stilled
for a minute. He tried, as in his next book, Snarl, to hide the body or evolve
from his nervous system (like a fish) a mind with God and Nature and Mankind
in it, when all there was was a shadow and a sax and the voice of a melancholiac
singing a love song freighted with shame. Like one of his heroes he is lame,
Northern, can’t dance. Sensitive. A Jew nearsighted and poor and passing.
He stews in Philadelphia, enters the University of the Dark, develops a dysphasia,
develops eyes like sea creatures in the Pacific trenches, survives a heart-attack,
a few, sleeps on benches, speaks in tongues or hums, writes his bildungsroman
(which goes up in flames when a match his father strikes ignites the manuscript).
But still he’s happy being in the dark with things slowed down or exploded, the tick
of the projector, the private dreams made public, faces the size of houses, the politics
of heartbreak, the astrology of money, guys and dolls, paleface and redskin, funny
stuff, weepers, horror porn, sleepers, all the rare huge mystery taboos,
all the ripped and rearranged blues become the book he is most remembered for:
Fugue, more music than story, more vamp and pan and zoom
than empire, history, and doom, in which a man in prison
sings to himself translations of the language of the news he receives
in the altered frequencies of memory: pink, then more pink, then the necessary
felony of self, then the minstelsry, and a feeling that he had been inside
of other people, like a virus or a song, and so survived.
February 11th, 2008
It is Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving
On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.
She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.
The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.
She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.
But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.
It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.
She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.
February 2nd, 2008
Elevators, like great oaks
rise into the evening, and when they descend
you hardly know yourself.
All night
the fair, shadowed cab light
shone on the trucker’s face. If only
he had learned to think like that!
Some extremes, but much benign lack of interest,
for which the heart gradually opens.
… patiently working, bringing cattle
from Denver, sorghum, oats,
butter, wheat and pigs from the Midwest,
steel bars, the body
with its different nightly smells …
He wanted to walk the length of Kansas.
The years had not even been difficult,
but like the stars
he watched from the speeding cab,
spaced unevenly …
so many particular events.
February 2nd, 2008
When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.
I suppose this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning
Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.
When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.
I suppose this error will go on & on.
Morning I kiss my wife’s cold lips,
Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.
I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.
I’d like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty
Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.
February 2nd, 2008
Homage to Robert Bresson
Spaces await their people.
An alabaster row of public urinals.
An empty theater. A table,
Chairs, an oak door, heavily grained,
Brass knob turning & who
Shall enter, already lost forever
In their lives? Now
Will a soul reveal its human face,
Secret luminous flesh,
& because the soul is speechless
There will be little talk,
Better revealed in this single plate
Set like a day-moon or
Lidless eye before its chair.
Who sits shall eat, because
It is important to stay alive, to
Bear the soul’s countenance
Down into the streets, their traffic,
Its endless movement. Here
A young priest, shaken, prays to give
False solace to the dying;
A girl, too young, casually prepares
To drown. Why are these
Forsaken, too long in anguish?
Why does the tree bear leaves,
The water bear downward into the earth?
This is the law, the rest
A commentary. She take off her clothes,
Folding them. He enters
A room. Though nothing can be done,
They are not resigned.
February 2nd, 2008
Let me not to the marriage of true swine
Admit impediments. With his big car
He’s won your heart, and you have punctured mine.
I have no spare; henceforth I’ll bear the scar.
Since women are not worth the booze you buy them
I dedicate myself to Higher Things.
If men deride and sneer, I shall defy them
And soar above Tulse Hill on poet’s wings –
A brother to the thrush in Brockwell Park,
Whose song, though sometimes drowned by rock guitars,
Outlives their din. One day I’ll make my mark,
Although I’m not from Ulster or from Mars,
And when I’m published in some classy mag
You’ll rue the day you scarpered in his Jag.
December 15th, 2007
Dante wrote his wife, Gemma, about his garden
which grew double-breasted roses & plum trees,
but this was in Ravenna, where he lived in exile
for twenty years. It’s enough to say he knew something
about Hell, but exile is a strange business & memory
is a kind of Hell & longing, too. Which reminds me
of my uncle Jake who worked in a movie house watching
the same films like one of Dante’s sinners replaying
the same crime. Each night he listened to his police radio
in his room off our kitchen & wrote letters to editors
about busted traffic lights & birds starving to death.
When he died I found fifteen shopping bags full of girlie books
& badly rhymed poems about loneliness & unregenerate love.
Dante came out of his room once in a while. He understood
passion & divine punishment & knew there was more to passion
than everlasting fire. Where in his kingdom of the damned
would Jake fit? Jake, who crouched behind his bureau,
rubbing at himself like the sinners Dante placed in a pit,
each damned to gnaw the other’s head for eternity. But
their punishment amplified their lives. There’s transcendence
in such agony. But there was nothing metaphysical about Jake,
who sat hunched on his perch beside the screen, imprisoned
in his blasphemous fantasy & rage. Ah, Jake, a man who cannot love
is forever exiled from himself. His life is his punishment.
Think of Dante alone in his garden where the starry skies
lit up in realms of fire, music & light. Think of him scribbling
his remorseful visions all night, longing for Florence, for Gemma.
In his every word there is the pain of celebration. Yes, beauty lost
is still splendid in its reinvention. But what about Jake,
whose shoes didn’t fit & who cut himself shaving every morning–
Jake, for whom there is no music of the spheres or the forgiveness
of light & who will never again behold the cold passion of the stars.
December 11th, 2007
Like their cocks and haunches are heavy with it.
Arrogant past Starbucks and baggage claim, past
flinching monitors and the C gates, pilots stride
navy and crease, chiseled heads swiveling in bare
tolerance of we, the ground-bound. Their faces are
chapped by a higher sun, their pompadours glossy
and blade cut. They live a huger life awfully close
to heaven, where blessings begin. How smug are
those little hats, dripping with mysterious medals,
shaped like a salute to the men who wear them?
We bear bowed, pissed witness to their dismissive
sniffs, the oh-so-holier-than-thou in their hips.
There’s no bound script for that sexy moment when
the wide sky inhales their laughable machines and
folds their hurtling heartbeats into the blue. Go on,
join the club. Envy their asses. And pray towards
them. Every flyboy is your fate wearing a crisp little
uniform. A quirk of pulse, a sleepless night, a flick
of his wrist could kill you, a hundred other yous.
And maddening as it may be, there’s just no answer
to that strut. It says, Fuck you. I’ve got the air.
December 2nd, 2007
Deep into spring, winter is hanging on. Bitter and skillful in his hopelessness, he stays alive in every shady place, starving along the Mediterranean: angry to see the glittering sea-pale boulder alive with lizards green as Judas leaves. Winter is hanging on. He still believes. He tries to catch a lizard by the shoulder. One olive tree below Grottaglie welcomes the winter into noontime shade, and talks as softly as Pythagoras. Be still, be patient, I can hear him say, cradling in his arms the wounded head, letting the sunlight touch the savage face.
October 24th, 2007
THERE’S nothing grieves me, but that Age should haste,
That in my days I may not see thee old,
That where those two clear sparkling eyes are placed
Only two loop-holes then I might behold ;
That lovely, arched, ivory, polished brow
Defaced with wrinkles that I might but see ;
Thy dainty hair, so curl’d and crisped now,
Like grizzled moss upon some aged tree ;
Thy cheek, now flush with roses, sunk and lean ;
Thy lips with age as any wafer thin ;
Thy pearly teeth out of thy head so clean,
That, when thou feed’st, thy nose shall touch thy chin.
These lines that now thou scorn’st, which should delight thee,
Then would I make thee read but to despite thee.
(a bit modernized)
September 23rd, 2007
You might say the same of poetry:
you’ve sunk too much in it
to quit now, driving
good hours after bad
too much of you wound
round the wires and the hoses.
You might stop addressing
this absence beside you,
cursing through the intricate
cities, singing in high passes,
tooling down freeways,
minding the numbers,
ears pricked for oracular
tappings, limping past fields
of sullen junkers, eyeholes crawling
with nettle and goldenrod.
If you let go now, the bearings
will scream from their orbits,
the rocker arms clang in their cylinders
and the needles return to their various zeroes,
as if your hands had never clenched
this sweaty wheel.
July 7th, 2007
(after George Meredith)
Here’s my bright idea for life on earth:
better management. The CEO
has lost touch with the details. I’m worth
as much, but I care; I come down here, I show
my face, I’m a real regular. A toast:
To our boys and girls in the war, grinding
through sand, to everybody here, our host
who’s mostly mist, like methane rising
from retreating ice shelves. Put me in command.
For every town, we’ll have a marching band.
For each thoroughbred, a comfortable stable;
for each worker, a place beneath the table.
A shadow over every starlit thing.
July 6th, 2007
Every so often he jumps, just to make it clear that he is essentially immobile. The jump is in some way like a heartbeat; careful observation makes it plain that the whole of the toad is a heart.
Clamped in a hunk of cold mud, the toad sinks into the winter like a mournful chrysalis. He wakes in the spring knowing that he has not changed into anything else. Dried to his depths, he is more a toad than ever. He waits in silence for the first rains.
And one fine day he heaves himself out of the pliant earth, heavy with moisture, swollen with spiteful sap, like a heart tossed onto the ground. In his sphinxlike posture there is a secret proposition of exchange, and the toad’s ugliness appalls us like a mirror.
July 4th, 2007
Over the balcony eave, seaside,
One after another, the rockets arc
Barely into view, each sudden thud
Rollmg from behind the brickface.
We used to say the rockets “burst,â€
As though speaking of someone’s heart—
Star-beam, dream-light, bright spokes
Wheeling, falling in a sort of glory.
One summer, in an orchard in Manteca,
The scent of peaches was like fog,
The dust rose and settled like fog,
And both of us went waving sparklers.
You ran on, out farther, tracing
Spirals high in the air. They stayed
Long after the light went, after you
And the heavy, sweet trees were one.
Now I close my eyes and find only
Traces of those wiry figures burned
Into the night. They are fading as
They must, and as they always do.
Whatever shines, however briefly,
We tend toward and love perhaps,
Grounded as we are in the literal—
The powder, the ashes the earth.
July 4th, 2007
Like a candle through a keyhole
shoved, burning towards knownwheres–
Always the days unstay me.
I need to have admired more those symmetries which preach
each seed is buried beneath a flower,
each weed above a wound.
June 26th, 2007
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking its bath.
The exam is History of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away –
but when it’s clear I don’t know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.
June 6th, 2007
It begins in the crux of beam and insulation,
Behind the sepia portraits of ancestors
On the bedroom wall. A wire burns through
Its cloth sleeve, overwhelmed
By demands of modern current.
It splits into two antennae,
Two probes in close space.
A spark shoots and sows in a post,
Then it starts to race –
Hungry, reckless,
Through the dry skeleton of the house.
Go to the wall. Can you see it?
Every episode is different.
Will it burn a seam or hole
To reach the open air?
You have to evacuate the family, but no one
Wants to go. And when they are dead,
And you are contemplating
The sticks, the wheezing ashes,
The iron pots melted to pools on the lawn,
The authorities will say it was structural.
Now that you think of it,
There were warning signs, gestures:
A flaming toaster,
A persistent aggressiveness.
On the littered ground in hindsight
You devise solutions.
What if you’d paid it more attention,
Sworn off sleep, made tea –
Could you have quelled it?
What if you’d stood nightly by the wall,
Felt around for the heat,
Drawn a cold, wet cloth across the surface,
And, speaking soft words,
Held it?
June 4th, 2007
Attentive as one is to a whisper, the children wade through standing water, uncertain of its depth or source. They find and salvage a sogged train schedule. For their short lives the depot has been boarded shut. One has a flair for death and can fashion a noose from corn silk. One keeps an archive of diaries. One is the movie extra a camera seeks out, lingers on. One reads the subtitles aloud before the characters speak. One imagines sleep to be a furnished room. One imagines rain on the rolled hay, the must of empty stables, the tin-edge of blood on the tongue. By schema and classifications, they are a sister and a brother. Waylaid between this puddle and the next, one creates a theory of the spectral. One fingers through a cache of candies. One is plump and ready for the oven. One could not even flavor a stock pot. One is the overlooked subject. One is a language of mishearings. They cling to the hitherto unknown. When they dissect the bird they find nothing of the song.
June 4th, 2007
… a possible music
lifts through the panic of dismay -
it’s the blue of all the flowers of your body,
the brain stem, the clitoris, the tongue,
the wrist vein, the channels of the heart, the dying lips,
reaching to their likeness in the sky, in the sky’s waters -
you can’t lift it out of your flesh
because it won’t exist, but it flowers past you.
It opens the places you’ve always been,
house, fire, glass, bed, water,
tree, night,
the child’s glance which strews your transparencies
across a field of colours you have no name for,
the profane ash of touch
darkening your tongue, the dream of imperishable silver
which wakes to another dream, a boat departing
from an unmapped shore, and your crumbling words, unable
to hold even one drop of light.
June 4th, 2007
The world tells me I am its creature
I am raked by eyes brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head
in the space between her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have done or hiding
from power in her love like a man
I refuse these givens the splitting
between love and action I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly and not to use her
I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence
May 9th, 2007
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