Selected Poems
Page 3
soupy womb-warmth, do some rolls and saults
(it’ll be too crowded soon), delight in your early
dreams – which no one will attempt to analyse.
For now: may your toes blossom, your fingers
lengthen, your sexual organs grow (too soon
to tell which yet) sensitive, your teeth
form their buds in their forming jawbone, your already
booming heart expand (literally
now, metaphorically later); O your spine,
eyebrows, nape, knees, fibulae,
lungs, lips… But your soul,
dear child: I don’t see it here, when
does that come in, whence? Perhaps God,
and your mother, and even I – we’ll all contribute
and you’ll learn yourself to coax it
from wherever: your soul, which holds your bones
together and lets you live
on earth. – Fingerling, sidecar, nubbin,
I’m waiting, it’s me, Dad,
I’m out here. You already know
where Mom is. I’ll see you more direcdy
upon arrival. You’ll recognise
me – I’ll be the tall-seeming, delighted
blond guy, and I’ll have
your nose.
A Little Tooth
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all
over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.
Great Advances in Vanity
Major progress is: in the act of embracing ourselves
we do not do so because of cold, fear,
but out of absolute – which is healthy,
the magazines say – self-love, which is healthy,
a positive self-image is healthy,
all the experts say,
and less effort
than loving an other. I am I, therefore
I am good: love thyself
selflessly, that’s OK. And if
you want me, or want me
to want you, or want to
sell me something, then tell me
I’m beautiful. If there is a blank anywhere
in your life, an abyss tucked high up behind your breast bone,
or a black molecule of doubt
in your soul, well then,
fill in that blank,
palimpsest that abyss, that doubt with optimism: you can!
In the mirror in the morning say
this: I like myself. This
is your iambic dimeter mantra, say it,
and all the rest that diminishes you
will disappear down the bones of your face,
will die all night outside your door,
will file away like a line of ants.
Say it, say it: I’m beautiful,
I’m loved – and then wager it all,
all of the ice, all of it,
on the ice to win.
FROM
Split Horizon
(1994)
The People of the Other Village
hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We de-vein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.
An Horatian Notion
The thing gets made, gets built, and you’re the slave
who rolls the log beneath the block, then another,
then pushes the block, then pulls a log
from the rear back to the front
again and then again it goes beneath the block,
and so on. It’s how a thing gets made – not
because you’re sensitive, or you get genetic-lucky,
or God says: Here’s a nice family,
seven children, let’s see: this one in charge
of the village dunghill, these two die of buboes, this one
Kierkegaard, this one a drooling
nincompoop, this one clerk, this one cooper.
You need to love the thing you do – birdhouse building,
painting tulips exclusively, whatever – and then
you do it
so consciously driven
by your unconscious
that the thing becomes a wedge
that splits a stone and between the halves
the wedge then grows, i.e., the thing
is solid but with a soul,
a life of its own. Inspiration, the donnée,
the gift, the bolt of fire
down the arm that makes the art?
Grow up! Give me, please, a break!
You make the thing because you love the thing
and you love the thing because someone else loved it
enough to make you love it.
And with that your heart like a tent peg pounded
toward the earth’s core.
And with that your heart on a beam burns
through the ionosphere.
And with that you go to work.
The Neighborhood of Make-Believe
To go there: do not fall asleep, your forehead
on the footstool; do not have
your lunchpail dreams
or dreams so peaceful you hear leaves thud
into the fine silt at a river’s edge;
do not hope you’ll find it on this updraft
or that downdraft
in the airy airlessness.
It is elsewhere, elsewhere, the neighborhood you seek.
The neighborhood you long for,
where the gentle trolley – ding, ding – passes
through, where the adults are kind
and, better, sane,
that neighborhood is gone, no, never
existed, though it should have
and had a chance once
in the hearts of women, men (farmers dreamed
this place, and teachers, book writers, oh thousands
of workers, mothers prayed for it, hunchbacks,
nurses, blind men, maybe most of all soldiers,
even a few generals, millions
through the millennia…), some of whom,
despite anvils on their chests,
despite taking blow after blow across shoulders and necks,
despite derision and scorn,
some of whom still, still
stand up every day against ditches swollen with blood,
against ignorance, still dreaming,
full-fledged adults, still fighting,
trying to build a door to that place,
trying to pry open the ugly,
bullet-pocked, and swollen gate
<
br /> to the other side,
the neighborhood of make-believe.
Amiel’s Leg
We were in a room that was once an attic,
tops of trees filled the windows, a breeze
crossed the table where we sat
and Amiel, about age four, came to visit
with her father, my friend,
and it was spring I think, and I remember
being happy – her mother was there too,
and my wife, and a few other friends.
It was spring, late spring, because the trees
were full but still that slightly lighter
green; the windows were open,
some of them, and I’ll say it
out loud: I was happy, sober, at the time childless
myself, and it was one
of those moments: just like that, Amiel
climbed on my lap and put her head back against my chest.
I put one hand on her knees
and my other hand on top of that hand.
That was all, that was it.
Amiel’s leg was cool, faintly rubbery.
We were there – I wish I knew the exact
date, time – and that
was all, that was it.
Frankly, I Don’t Care
This miserable scene demands a groan.
JOHN GAY
Frankly, I don’t care if the billionaire is getting divorced
and thus boosting the career
of his girlfriend, a ‘model/spokesperson’ with no job
and nothing to promote; nor does my concern
over celebrity X undergoing surgical procedures,
leaked as ‘primarily cosmetic’ if it can be measured
quantitatively, reach the size of the space
inside a hollow needle. Regardless,
prayer vigils are being held
around the clock in the hospital lobby.
It’s not that I wish
for a slip of the surgeon’s wrist
but I just flat-simple don’t care
although I understand and try
to empathise: as beauty diminishes
so does the bankroll. I am also indifferent
to – to the point of yawns large enough
to swallow the world – a senator’s or, say, singer’s
girlfriend’s or boyfriend’s disclosures
re the singer’s or senator’s sexual behavior – well, unless
the disclosure is explicitly detailed
and for christsake interesting!
– But does this protest too much?
We the people, day-laboring citizens, need to love
those of you larger than us, those whose teeth
are like floodlights against loneliness,
whose great gifts of song, or for joke telling,
or thespianly sublime transformations
take us, for whole moments at a time, away
from ourselves. We need
you and from this point on we promise
to respect your privacy,
diminish our demands on you,
never to take pleasure
in your troubles or pain.
And on those cruel days when death has its way
and takes two or even three of you
at once, three of more or less equal fame, we will,
in the obituaries, the newscasts, the front pages,
we will list your departures alphabetically;
your popularity will not, on this day, be tallied
or polled. Because in death, although still not anonymous,
you will be like us: small,
equal, voiceless, and gone.
Endive
If I mix a vegetable and moral metaphor
then this pale,
arrogant little leaf– its juices spare,
its taste pinched
and numbing – is equivalent
to a rich child pulling legs
off a bug, to a swaggering walk through a TB ward
by a pulmonary giant. Not to mention
a pathetic excuse for salad: four, five spiked shards
arranged like spokes
around its hub: a radish delicately carved.
The white plate upon which it sits so bare it blinds me.
Who, forced to wear white butler’s gloves,
bends over a row all day
to pick this for a lousy wage
and can’t afford or, I’d prefer, refuses
to eat it? It’s so pallid
turning to yellow, I feel stabbing it
with my fork
would hurt it
or at least be impolite
so I slide the shiny tines beneath a piece
and lift it to my lips
and it’s as if I’m eating air
but with a slight afterburn: dust and bone,
privilege and toe dancing.
So delicate, curling in on itself
in an ultimate self-embrace: fussy, bitter, chaste, clerical
little leaf.
The Driver Ant
Every member of the army is completely blind.
JOHN COMPTON, on the driver ant
Eats meat exclusively. Can’t bear
direct sunlight, marches at night,
in tall grass, or in covered causeways
it builds, by day. Relentless,
nervous, short, conservative,
twenty million or more,
like a thick black living rope
they exit, often, the colony
to eat: lizards, guanas, monkeys,
rats, mice, the tasty
largest python, Python natelensis,
who just devoured a small antelope
and can’t move: double dinner,
in a few hours a pile of bones
inside a pile of bones.
This army’s slow
(one meter per three min.) so
they can’t catch you
unless you’re lame,
or dumb, or staked
to the ground – a hard way to die,
eating first your eyes,
and then too many mandibles
clean you to your spine.
The Driver Ant, penniless,
goes out to eat
in hordes, in rivers, in armies of need,
good citizens
serving a famished state.
Kalashnikov
(an AK-47 assault rifle, probably the most
numerous small-arms weapon in history)
Designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov who, if alive
today, is seventy-three years old,
but is he
as well known in his native Russia
as Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Akhmatova,
or Osip Mandelstam? Russians love
their poets. I don’t know
how they feel about Kalashnikov
but he is or was wealthier
than the poets above ever were
and has out there several million
of his namesakes: read a book
in which people shoot people – revolutionaries,
whether earnest, sincere,
or just thugs: Kalashnikovs, everybody’s got one.
There’s a guerrilla
somewhere: a Kalashnikov. Assassins,
warlords’ soldiers, smugglers, pirates,
poachers: Kalashnikovs, caliber
7.62 x 39, 600 rounds
per minute, a potential 10 corpses
per second.
Kalashnikov – it’s not a dance,
nor a troupe of funny jugglers,
nor is it a vodka,
and if you said a small city (pop. 49,000)
in the southern Crimea,
you’d be stone-dead wrong.
Money
A paper product. We say it’s green
but it’s not, it’s slate green, drained green.
New, it
smells bad
but we like to sniff it
and when we have a relative pile
we not only want to inhale it but also look at it,
hear it buzz
as we work with our thumbs
its corners like a deck of cards.
A wall of it would be nice, in bricks
like you see in the movies
when vaults get robbed.
And those beautiful – so tiny – red, blue threads,
capillaries, cilia, embedded
in the texture of the paper (that secret
which most thwarts the phony money men),
those threads
like river valleys on a distant planet,
rivers with no end, no source,
like steep ravines in an otherwise flat pan
of a landscape. Look long
and deep enough
at a piece of paper money
and you will see the heaven you were promised,
there, which we look so hard into,
to the very bottom, depths of which
we are called
by the riverbed, the ravine’s bleached stones
calling us down: money, money,
paper money.
The Big Picture
gets made up of 5.3 billion little pictures (sacks, thousands,
of rice rotting, rat-gnawed, in warehouses, jail cell
graffiti, a tiny crimson powder-burned disc
on a man’s forehead, a torturer’s migraine, immense
abstract delusions – no problem here – a filthy
fingernail sunk in a chunk of gray bread…), eleven pictures
of medium size (the Marxist discussion group
breaks down into smaller groups
to study punctuational/syntactical nuances, why nobody
minds lies if they are colossal enough, etc.), a few blank
frames (example: Jesus walking on water and rising
from the dead?, the Mormon guy, Joe Smith – sounds like
an alias – digging up some gold plates
in his backyard?: this enumeration, this list