Selected Poems
Page 5
childhood of dull dinners – bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child’s?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.
Criss Cross Apple Sauce
(for Claudia)
Criss cross apple sauce
do me a favor and get lost
while you’re at it drop dead
then come hack without a head
my daughter sings for me
when I ask her what she learned in school today
as we drive from her mother’s house to mine.
She knows I like some things that rhyme.
She sings another she knows I like:
Trick or treat, trick or treat
give me something good to eat
if you don’t I don’t care
I’ll put apples in your underwear.…
Apples in your underwear – I like that more
than Lautréamont’s umbrella
on the operating table, I say to her
and ask her if she sees the parallel.
She says no but she prefers the apples too.
Sitting on a bench
nothing to do
along come some hoys – p.u., p.u., p.u.
my daughter sings,
my daughter with her buffalo-size heart,
my daughter brilliant and kind,
my daughter singing
as we drive from her mother’s house to mine.
The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently
is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It’s the writer’s words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her voice, but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice
saying, for example, the word barn
that the writer wrote
but the barn you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally – some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows.…
And barn is only a noun – no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.
This Space Available
You could put an X here.
You could draw a picture of a horse.
You could write a tract,
manifesto – but keep it short.
You could wail, whine,
rail or polysyllable celebrate.
You could fill this space
with one syllable: praise.
The only requirement,
the anti-poet said,
is to improve upon the blank page,
which, if you are not made blind
by ego, is a hard task.
You could write some numbers here.
You could write your name, and dates.
You could leave a thumbprint,
or paint your lips and kiss the page.
A hard task – the blank
so creamy, a cold
and perfect snowfield upon which
a human, it’s only human,
wants to leave
his inky black and awkward marks.
Commercial Leech Farming Today
(for Robert Sacherman)
Although it never rivaled wheat, soybean,
cattle and so on farming
there was a living
in leeches
and after a period of decline
there is again
a living to be made
from this endeavor: they’re used to reduce
the blood in tissues
after plastic surgery – eyelifts, tucks,
wrinkle erad, or in certain
microsurgeries – reattaching a finger, penis.
I love the capitalist
spirit. As in most businesses
the technology has improved: instead
of driving an elderly horse
into a leech pond, letting him die
by exsanguination,
and hauling him out
to pick the bloated blossoms
from his hide, it’s now done at Biopharm
(the showcase operation in Swansea,
Wales) – temp control, tanks, aerator
pumps, several species,
each for a specific job. Once, 19th century,
they were applied to the temple
as a treatment for mental
illness. Today we know
their exact chemistry: hirudin,
a blood thinner in their saliva,
also an anesthesia
and dilators for the wound area.
Don’t you love
the image: the Dr lays a leech along
the tiny stitches of an eyelift.
Where they go after their work is done
I don’t know
but I’ve heard no complaints
from Animal Rights
so perhaps they’re retired
to a lake or adopted
as pets, maybe the best looking
kept to breed. I don’t know. I like the story,
I like the going backwards
to ignorance
to come forward to vanity. I like
the small role they can play
in beauty
or the reattachment of a part,
I like the story because it’s true.
A Small Tin Parrot Pin
Next to the tiny bladeless windmill
of a salt shaker
on the black tablecloth
is my small tin parrot pin,
bought from a bin,
75 cents, cheap, not pure tin – an alloy,
some plastic toy tin?
The actual pin, the pin that pins the pin,
will fall off soon
and thus the parrot,
if I wear it, which I will,
on my lapel. I’ll look down
and it’ll be gone.
Let it be found by a child,
or someone sad, eyes
on the sidewalk, or what a prize
it would be for a pack rat’s nest.
My parrot’s paint
is vivid: his head’s red, bright yellow of breast
and belly, a strip of green,
then purple, a soft
creamy purple, then bright – you know
the color – parrot green
&nb
sp; wing feathers. Tomorrow I think
I’ll wear it on my blue coat.
Tonight, someone whom I love
sleeps in the next room,
the room next to the room with the black tablecloth,
the salt shaker, the parrot pin.
She was very sleepy
and less impressed than I
with my parrot
with whom, with which I
am very pleased.
FROM
The Street of Clocks
(2001)
The fact is the sweetest dream labour knows.
ROBERT FROST
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s
affections and the truth of the Imagination.
JOHN KEATS
Cucumber Fields Crossed by High-Tension Wires
The high-tension spires spike the sky
beneath which boys bend
to pick from prickly vines
the deep-sopped fruit, the rind’s green
a green sunk
in green. They part the plants’ leaves,
reach into the nest,
and pull out mother, father, fat Uncle Phil.
The smaller yellow-green children stay,
for now. The fruit goes
in baskets by the side of the row,
every thirty feet or so. By these bushels
the boys get paid, in cash,
at day’s end, this summer
of the last davs of the empire
that will become known as
the past, adoios, then,
the ragged-edged beautful blink.
The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball
each day mowed
and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter-acre,
the machine slicing a wisp
from each blade’s tip. Dust storms rose
around the roar, 6 P.M. every day,
spring, summer, fall. If he could mow
the snow he would.
On one side, his neighbours the cows
turned their backs to him
and did what they do to the grass.
Where he worked, I don’t know,
but it set his jaw to: tight.
His wife a cipher, shoebox tissue,
a shattered apron. As if
into her head he drove a wedge of shale.
Years later, his daughter goes to jail.
Mow, mow, mow his lawn
gently down a decade’s summers.
On his other side lived mine and me,
across a narrow pasture, often fallow –
a field of fly balls, the best part of childhood
and baseball. But if a ball crossed his line,
as one did in 1956
and another in 1958,
it came back coleslaw – his lawnmower
ate it up, happy
to cut something, no matter
what the manual said
about foreign objects, stones, or sticks.
Plague Victims Catapulted over
Walls into Besieged City
Early germ
warfare. The dead
hurled this way turn like wheels
in the sky. Look: there goes
Larry the Shoemaker, barefoot, over the wall,
and Mary Sausage Stuffer, see how she flies,
and the Hatter twins, both at once, soar
over the parapet, little Tommy’s elbow bent
as if in a salute,
and his sister, Mathilde, she follows him,
arms outstretched, through the air,
just as she did on earth.
Bonehead
Bonehead time, bonehead town. Bonehead teachers.
Bonehead mom, bonehead dad, bonehead aunts
and uncles and cousins too.
Bonehead me, bonehead you.
Bonehead books, playground, box lunch, fast food,
tract homes, Sunday school.
Bonehead Truman, McCarthy, Eisenhower too.
Bonehead me, bonehead you.
Bonehead music, TV, H-bomb, movies,
butch cut, tail fins, baby boom.
Bonehead Russia, America, England too.
Bonehead me, bonehead you.
In the Bedroom Above the Embalming Room
a man sits on the bed’s edge in a white T-shirt,
white socks. He is my neighbour,
the local undertaker.
His wife lies behind him, reading a book,
the sheet drawn up above her breasts.
Otherwise, it would be impolite to look.
Or to look I’d wait until they dressed.
From my window they make a kind of X.
I’ve seen her feed the birds,
but not so much they stay
too long and leave their lime
to stain her deck and waste her time
in washing it away.
Thomas the Broken-Mouthed
A sack on his back, his burlap shirt flapping in a devil’s wind,
Thomas the Broken-Mouthed
walks up and down
the bad land, and amidst the bad believers,
he was born in, and among.
He walks up and down, his big wooden stick striking
the road just ahead of the two still
unsettled puffs of dust
his bare feet raise. Thomas the Broken-Mouthed – called thus
for his lies, say some,
called thus for other reasons, some others say.
In each village two or three fall behind him – disaffected vendors
of drowsy syrups, stiff-fingered cutpurses, sour
camel drivers, well poisoners, and children (milky-skinned,
pockmarked), children of the rich,
of prelates, pushing before them
wooden-wheeled barrows of grain
to bake into bread
to eat on the march. Thomas the Broken-Mouthed has a mission,
within which is a vision,
within which
is a tiny black fire. Who will pile the drought-dried straw on this fire,
who will be the naphtha resin,
who will follow the fire,
who will be the sparks with fiery wings for me? asks
Thomas the Broken-Mouthed,
standing on a tree stump that reveals
one hundred rings, one hundred years
that the books now call The Last One Hundred Years.
The Handsome Swamp
knows it’s a handsome swamp: the alligators
tell it so, as do the water lilies (always
sycophantic) and their pads. The bug life
stands on its hind legs
and cheers. Let’s live in the handsome swamp!
The feeders on fish
and the fish food, the oxygen-spewing algae,
the vines, the cypress
and its knees – all are glad.
And the handsome swamp
keeps its handsome up: combing its reeds,
silk-sieving its silt.
The thick black snakes love the handsome swamp.
They speak this to it
as they cruise in grids
on its surface. But now
the green tree frogs,
those of the bright spots on their backs,
sing no, no, no, contrarily, all night, no, no, no.
This stirs the macaws to clatter; a hornbill
picks a parasite
from beneath his wing
and cracks it with his beak, which sound catches
a big beetle’s antennae, and then the monkeys
take up with it (it’s always
the me, me, me monkeys, greedy
for personification), and finally the rats
come out, noses first,
and gather in pods,
sniffing the air.
Grain Burning Far Away
The wheat fields blaze, wide
waving plains
of them, on fire again, the black burn-line lapping
the gold grain: nature’s delete button eating
each letter of each stalk. Over that short mountain
to the north, barley fields ignite,
and to the south, across the salt marshes, acres
and acres of oats
crackle and smoke,
and, it is reported from the east, the long green stands of corn
sawed off at the ankles
by heat. All the flora’s, in fact, on fire: onion fields fried
underground, not one turnip unscorched, every root,
bulb, and peanut on the planet boiled
in the soil. Trees burn
like matches, but faster, orchids die
when the fire’s still a mile away. Seaweed, too,
and the kelp beds
from the top down blacken like candle wicks; spinach, in cans,
when opened, is ash. Moss melts,
hedgerows explode, every
green thing on earth
on fire and still all smoke jumpers snug,
asleep, undisturbed, the fire station’s pole cold,
palmless, the fire extinguisher fat
with foam. Hear it snap,
the red angry fire,
hear it take the air and turn it into pain,
see the flame’s blue, bruised heart
never waver, waver, never waver.
The Doldrum Fracture Zone
The place where sailors – though now open
to all professions – went to consider the mirage
of their own despair. Once, only sailors could
go there: the breezeless place,
the weed-choked and stinking sea plain
where they stalled for weeks, months. Today,
the Zone comes to us,
its great grey inertness dragged
like opaque knife wounds over each
who stands on a shore and calls it in,
dragged over him or her who believes his or her despair is
a mirage and not
a mirror.… That man
who still holds the handle of the mailbox open, its huge black mouth
having just swallowed