Selected Poems
Page 7
(2004)
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day.
BYRON
I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk!
THEODORE ROETHKE
Say You’re Breathing
just as you do every day, in and out, in and out, and in each
breath: one tick
of a shaving from a bat’s eyelash, an invisible sliver
or a body mite
who lived near Caligula’s shin, diamond dust (we each inhale a carat
in a lifetime), a speck of scurf
from the Third Dynasty (that of the abundant
imbeciles), one sulfurous grain
from the smoke of a mortar round, a mote of marrow
from a bone poking through a shallow grave,
a whiff from a mummy grinder
caught in a Sahara wind, most of the Sahara itself,
inhaled in Greenland, sweat dried to crystal on your father’s lip
and lifted to the sky
before you were born – all, all, a galaxy
of fragments floating
around you every day,
inhaled every day,
happy to rest in your lungs
until they are dust again
and again risen.
Dry Bite
When the krait strikes but does not loose
his venom: dry bite. What makes the snake choose
not to kill you? Not Please,
not I didn’t mean
to step on you. He may be fresh out: struck
recently something else. But: if he withholds
his poison,
when does he do so and why?
Can he tell you are harmless to him?
He can’t swallow you, so why kill you?
There’s no use asking the krait: he’s deaf.
In that chemical, that split-billionth
of a second, he decides
and the little valve
of his venom sac
stays shut or opens wide.
Dry, oh dry, dry bite – lucky the day
you began to wear
the krait’s snake-eyed mark
on your wrist
and you walked down the mountain
into the valley
of that which remains of your life.
Debate Regarding the Permissibility of
Eating Mermaids
Cold-water mermaids, and only on Fridays, said Pope Ignace VII.
Sumerian texts suggest consent if human parts
predecease fishy parts,
but cuneiform detailing this
was lost to tomb robbers.
The British Admiralty, sixteenth century, deemed it anthropophagy
and forbade it,
though castaways, after sixty days,
were exempted
upon the depletion of sea biscuits. Taboo! Taboo!, said the South Sea
Islanders, though a man could marry one
if his aquatic skills
impressed her enough. Conversely, a woman, no matter
how well she swam,
could not marry with a merman. Uruguayans, Iowans,
leave no records on the subject.
The Germans find it distasteful,
though recently declassified World War II archives
suggest certain U-boat captains…
No problem for the French: flambéed or beneath béarnaise.
The official Chinese position is they don’t have a position!
– But I grow weary of this dour study,
tired of the books
wherein this news is hidden, the creaking shelves
in museum basements, the crumbling pages
of the past and future, I’m tired
of this foggy research
to which I’ve devoted decades
trying to find the truth in these matters
and what matters in such truth.
Rather
Rather strapped face to face with a corpse, rather an asp
forced down my throat, rather a glass
tube inserted in my urethra
and then member smashed
with a hammer, rather wander the malls of America shopping
for shoes, rather
be lunch, from the ankles down,
for a fish, rather mistake rabbit drops
for capers, or pearls, rather my father’s bones crushed to dust
and blown – blinding me – in my eyes,
rather a flash flood of liquid mud,
boulders, branches, drowned dogs, tear through Boys Town
and grind up a thousand orphans, rather
finger puppets
with ice picks
probe me, rather numbness, rather Malaysian tongue worm, rather rue,
rather a starved rat
tied by his tail to my last tooth,
rather memory become mush,
rather no more books be written but on the sole subject of self, rather
a retinal tattoo, rather buckets of bad bacilli and nothing else
to drink, rather the blather
at an English Department meeting, rather
a mountain fall on my head than this,
what I put down here, rather
all of the above than this, this:________.
The American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association
Rat breeders gather
to primp and parade their best – the chinchilla rat,
silks, the Moluccan cream belly – at this dog show
for mice and rats where, if entered a cat,
there would be no crowning
this year of Rat of the Year, Mouse of the Decade.
The judge cradles a quaking contestant in her palm.
Reputations made or broken, breeding secrets, build
a better cancer rat and your pride can turn to cash, pack
another gram of fat
on the thighs of a mouse
and this news shivers up and down the row
of herpetologists here for the show.
Then, in another, a back row,
sit those whose interests lie in mouse and rat aesthetics
rather than in their behavior
or market potential – Oh the beautiful,
beautiful rats, they sigh, oh the beautiful rats.
To Help the Monkey Cross the River,
which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
to help him
I sit with my rifle on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first upriver: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from downriver burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey,
croc- and snake-speed, and if, if
it looks as though the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river’s far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.
Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They’re just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands like a child’s,
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.
The Devil’s Beef Tub
There are mysteries – why a duck’s quack
doesn’t echo anywhere
and: Does God exist? – which
will remain always as mysteries. So
the same with certain abstracts
aligned with sensory life: the tactile,
for example, of an iron bar
/>
to the forehead. Murder
is abstract, an iron bar to the skull
is not. Oh lost
and from the wind not a single peep of grief!
One day you’re walking down the street
and a man with a machete-shaped shard
of glass (its hilt
wrapped in a bloody towel) walks toward you,
purposefully, on a mission.
Do you stop to discuss hermeneutics with him?
Do you engage him in a discussion about Derrida?
Do you worry that Derrida might be the cause of his rage?
Every day is like this,
is a metaphor or a simile: like opening a can
of alphabet soup
and seeing nothing but X’s, no, look
closer: little noodle
swastikas.
Boatloads of Mummies
embarked from Egypt to New Jersey in 1848.
Boatloads of mummies by sail
sold to a pulp mill
to make into paper.
Which venture (one tries to think
what the investors thought) didn’t
work out: the stationery resulting
was gray
and gritty
and held not the black depths of ink.
One wonders where the remaining mummies went.
A few were ground to powder
and put in jars, and then on shelves of remedies,
but all the rest, three or four holdfuls,
where did they go
when the vision of capital failed
(as visions do, more often
than they don’t), where did
the remaining mummified go?
The Magma Chamber
Here it boils and begins to build, deep in the core,
what will be lava, molten
rock, in great domed cathedrals of rage underground
eventually expelled – to air,
and land. Sometimes
the magma – feeding up into the spreading rift
to fill the cracks
between the separating plates–heals. Sometimes
it needs a way out
and finds it – bang! – and slow, remorseless rivers
of liquid rock, red rivers
of rock, find their way
to the sea – through houses and horses,
over beet fields and putting greens, over hospitals, eating
through, with fire,
anything that wants to stay in its place
and just go on being. The orb
is hot inside, hurt,
which is bad for those who gauge
and receive its rage.
Nothing can stop it
but the sea
which boils where it enters, nothing
but the sea is vast and deep
and cold enough
to take all this poured fury, nothing
but the sea (if it so pleases)
can make a new island, new mountains,
a new republic of hope.
Guide for the Perpetually Perplexed
Don’t hurt your brain on this: if the arrow points left,
it’s left you should go. Then
take your first right,
then the next right,
again the next right, then another
right. If you head-on a cement truck,
it is as it should be. Too much
perplexity and soon everyone’s head
is a revolving hologram of a question mark!
Instead: if the sign says USE YOUR WORDS,
then use your words,
in this order: subject, verb, object.
Instead: if the sign says SHUT THE FUCK UP,
then you should shut the fuck up.
If it comes over the intercom to get in line,
for gosh sakes, then get in line, your wingbones
to the wall and eyes forward.
Do nothing to further perplex the other perplexed.
We’ll let you know when it’s single file for lunch,
where it’s first your placemats of puzzles
and impossible dots to disconnect
followed by your beans, and your brown meat, gray,
over which you’ll pray, oh yes, you’ll pray,
if you don’t want us to break your neck.
The Year the Locust Hath Eaten
They chewed my lawn down to sand
and then polished
each facet of each sand grain
with their relentless wings and then
were up and off again, a huge ball,
a tornado, a rack-clacking
wind of them.
They ate the sheep of all but their wool.
They ate the trees’ leaves, then the twigs, then the branches,
then the trunks,
then sent out sappers
for the roots. They gnawed fence posts
leaving parallel rows
of barbed wire
across bald fields.
They took down the haystacks
and found no needles.
They left the bookmobile
tireless and with but one book uneaten: (insert odious book
of your choice).
They consumed the letters in the attic,
all the letters from sea to land
and land to sea,
all the letters of funeral and woo.
Grandma’s wedding dress – leaving a wreck
of pearl buttons – they devoured.
They buzz-cut the attic
and its sawdust sifted down
to the second floor–which was when I fled
and left behind the bitten land and the year
the locust hath eaten.
Burned Forests and Horses’ Bones
are all we see when we cross the river
to this land. Two or three days, we guess, since the fire
reached this shore
and went to sleep.
This is where it stopped,
not where it started.
Why didn’t it leap this narrow river?
We see but wisps, locally, of smoke.
We can’t go back the way we came.
Before we crossed
to this scorched shore, we knew: we can’t
go back whence we came.
The trail is charred with drifts of ash,
but passable. We are nine men, three women, seven children,
three mules – two pulling carts; the third, a pack
on its back – one dog, one duck.
We see nothing
but the burned bones
of horses, not for miles, nothing not gray or black.
Because his whiteness (though going
a grimy gray) offends us, we’ll eat the duck.
Three more days we travel amid smoldering stumps,
crossing sooty streams, no sounds but the screech
our feet make on the black
and squeaky ground.
At night there is no wood with which to build a cooking fire.
Tomorrow we’ll hack up an armoire
and kill and roast the dog.
Not one of the children will cry.
We have three mules yet, two carts.
We have one mission: to arrive
where the fire started
and pass over it to the place before the fire began.
Myope
The boy can’t see but what’s right in front of him.
Ask him about that clock
across the room, he can’t see it, or he don’t
care. He makes a picture of a mountain–he’s looking
at the mountain! – and it comes out fuzzy
and he puts in cliffs and fizzers
that ain’t there. Sit an apple down
on the table and he can draw it in pencil, in color, once so right
I almost took a bite.
&nbs
p; And he’s got a nose on him like a hound.
His daddy says he can sniff a rat in a freezer.
A set of ears, too: he says he hears
his baby brother crying
and I can get to him
just as he opens his mouth to wail
and in my arms it’s right to sleep again.
That comes in handy, sometimes. Sometimes
a baby’s got to cry.
The boy’s a bit odd.
He likes books a lot.
On a hot summer evening,
I swear, he’s reading on the porch
and the turning pages make a breeze.
To Plow and Plant the Seashore
His tractor rattles down the dunes: low tide, it’s time to plow
the seashore and then follow
with the finer harrow
blades to comb
this rich earth smoother. The bits of shell and weed
will contribute to the harvest.
He’s not been farming long – see: he has all his fingers
to their tips. No, he’s not been farming
long. Now his field is ready
and it’s time to plant his seeds
in earth through which he pulled his farmer’s tools.
This year, it’s corn: he loves the little yellow crowns.
Yes, this year it’s corn, the farmer thinks,
last year the soybeans didn’t take
and the yield was: minus-beans, i.e., the seed beans, too, were gone.
Corn will love this rich and muddy ground
and grow in rows over his long but thin two acres.
That’s what they gave the farmer: two acres, a tractor
with its partners,
and that little house
in the blue-green sea grass
above his field. Also four chickens.
They gave him four chickens
and a hammer, and a pitchfork.
This is what they gave him
and he was glad for it, and for his title: farmer.
His fields are tilled.
Someday he’ll have a daughter and a son.
By morning, the farmer thinks, the shoots
will be up an inch or two.
The wronged one is always the wrong one.