Selected Poems
Page 8
Goofer-Dust
(dirt stolen from an infant’s grave around midnight)
Do not try to take it from my child’s grave, nor
from the grave
of my childhood,
nor from any infant’s grave I guard – voodoo, juju, boo-hoo rites
calling for it or not! This dust, this dirt, will not
be taken at dawn or noon
or at the dusky time,
and if you approach
this sacred place near midnight,
then I will chop,
one by one, your fingers off
with which you do your harm. Goofer-dust: if you want it,
if you need it, then
erect downwind from a baby’s grave
a fine-meshed net
and gather it
one-half grain, a flaky mote, an infinitesimally small fleck
of a flake at a time
and in such a way
it is given to you
by the day, the wind, the world,
it is given to you, thereby
diminishing the need to steal
this dirt displaced by a child
in a child’s grave.
The Ice Worm’s Life
is sun-avoiding, and by burred flanks
they wriggle through the glacier
which they’ll never leave
nor ever meet ice worms of a neighboring glacier.
To them is the unexamined life
worth living? By day
a few yards in/under ice
and then wild nights, wild nights
on the glacier’s surface
where to them the wind brings pollen, fern spores,
and the algae
that tint the blue frozen water red. The ice worms gorge,
they gorge, thousands of them,
in the dark, in the cold, aspiring to grow
from one-tenth of an inch
to four-tenths of an inch.
All night, the glacier a lawn
of them bent by the wind, and by dawn
they’ve gone down into the ice to sleep,
to mate, until it is time
to ascend again: our refrigerative
fellow creatures, our neighbors
on the glacier beside ours
who, if we could invite them into our living rooms,
would decompose
in fifteen minutes (that soon!)
and go wherever their theology tells them they must go.
Hospitality and Revenge
You invite your neighbor over
for a beer and a piece of pie.
He says words inappropriate
about your Xmas bric-à-brac.
You shoot him, three times, in the face.
While you complain to his first son
re high off-white-couch cleaning costs,
he shoots you in the face five times.
At your wake, your first son pumps eight
slugs behind his first son’s left ear.
Your wife invites your neighbor’s widow for tea.
Breakbone Fever
On the femur a brick drops hard, from the top rib
to bottom a steel
bar slams, on neck bones and skull, on clavicle, the fever
drops its stones, on the knuckles,
the wrist bone; the carpals, both regular and meta-, they get
cellar doors slammed on them. Oh the capitate, hamate,
lunate, and pisiform bones take a bad
beating: ball-peens bang
and jackhammers
jack against each one. Even some joints – interphalangeal
agony! – ligaments, get this fever, go down
with it; even fingernails, nerveless themselves, battered by it,
and hair, hair enters the skull like a hot needle. Watch
out, ossicular chain – hammer, anvil,
stirrup, bones smaller than grains of rice
in the ear’s pea-sized cave,
full grown since birth, first to turn
to ash, watch out – the pain there
will tell you who owns the heat,
who aligns the tenses – past, present, future, and none,
will show you who owns the fishhook frictive verbs,
who assigns the persons, places, and things,
who islands the ocean, who affords the tree its rings,
who owns, in fact, your blistering bones.
Monkey Butter
Monkey butter’s tasty, tasty,
you put it in cookies and pie,
you mix it in cake, I can’t tell you a lie:
don’t be light with it, nor hasty
to push it aside. It’s not too sweet,
with a light banana-y hue,
the monkeys all love it,
and so will the one you call you,
the you who’s another you want to love you.
Put it in his pudding, in her pastry puff,
then sweep the table of all that other stuff.
Later, leave a little in his left, her right, shoe.
Can’t Sleep the Clowns Will Eat Me
(for Claudia)
it says on the dead
author’s (‘the author is dead’) daughter’s
T-shirt. He sympathises with this line
and his daughter who wears it,
and recognises that its author (who also
must be dead) wrote the line to describe
and mock dread, insomnia, fear.
The author, her father (continuing to be dead), buys
the shirt for his above-mentioned child
because she likes the line.
The author (dead as a brick) is glad
his daughter enjoys and understands
the line, that it’s funny, parodic, odd.
This pleases the author (a rotting corpse)
and – forever, down the boulevard of elms and ash,
forever beside the indeterminate river into the long night,
forever with his child and their blood-on-blood – he will,
he will be happy
learning to live with being dead.
Render, Render
Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle,
bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil
it down, skim, and boil
again, dreams, history, add them and boil
again, boil and skim
in closed cauldrons, boil your horse, his hooves,
the runned-over dog you loved, the girl
by the pencil sharpener
who looked at you, looked away,
boil that for hours, render it
down, take more from the top as more settles to the bottom,
the heavier, the denser, throw in ache
and sperm, and a bead
of sweat that slid from your armpit to your waist
as you sat stiff-backed before a test, turn up
the fire, boil and skim, boil
some more, add a fever
and the virus that blinded an eye, now’s the time
to add guilt and fear, throw
logs on the fire, coal, gasoline, throw
two goldfish in the pot (their swim bladders
used for ‘clearing’), boil and boil, render
it down and distill,
concentrate
that for which there is no
other use at all, boil it down, down,
then stir it with rosewater, that
which is now one dense, fatty, scented red essence
which you smear on your lips
and go forth
to plant as many kisses upon the world
as the world can bear!
FROM
God Particles
(2008)
Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one.
JOHN DONNE
I do not remember our friend’s name, but he was a good man.
RALPH WALDO EME
RSON,
on leaving Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s funeral
Behind the Horseman Sits Black Care,
and behind Black Care sits Slit Throat with a whip,
and on Slit Throat’s shoulders, heels in his ribs,
there, there rides Nipple Cancer, and on her back
rides Thumbscrew. No one rides Thumbscrew’s shoulders.
Certain suicide, everyone knows not to try that,
everyone, that is, who wants to get older.
Even Pee Stain, the kid whose lunch money,
instead of being stolen,
he’s forced to swallow,
even Pee Stain
knows not to ride Thumbscrew’s shoulders.
The Horseman (and, presumably,
his horse) prefers none
of this – Black Care with his arms
around his waist as if he’s his girlfriend
and those others stacked atop him
like a troupe of acrobats, unbalanced.
The Horseman desires a doorway,
a cave’s mouth, a clothesline – or best: a low, hard,
garrotey branch.
The Hungry Gap-Time,
late August, before the harvest, every one of us worn down
by the plow, the hoe, rake,
and worry over rain.
Chicken coop confiscated
by the rats and the raptors
with nary a mouse to hunt. The corn’s too green and hard,
and the larder’s down
to dried apples
and double-corned cod. We lie on our backs
and stare at the blue;
our work is done, our bellies flat.
The mold on the wheat killed hardly a sheaf.
The lambs fatten on the grass, our pigs we set
to forage on their own – they’ll be back
when they whiff the first shucked ears
of corn. Albert’s counting
bushels in his head
to see if there’s enough to ask Harriet’s father
for her hand. Harriet’s father
is thinking about Harriet’s mother’s bread
pudding. The boys and girls
splash in the creek,
which is low but cold. Soon, soon
there will be food
again, and from what our hands have done
we shall live another year here
by the river
in the valley
above the fault line
beneath the mountain.
Hitler’s Slippers
were hand embroidered, first with a round, red
rising sun, upon which, centered,
was sewn the symbol – who would bow
for long to such a crippled
wheel? – by which his reign is known.
Hitler’s slippers were a gift
(someone else opened the package for him) from a mother,
grandmother, who bent over them for months.
She knew no other way to serve him, therefore, stitch
by stitch she adorned his slippers,
two-thirds of the Axis
represented (ciao Italy already)
to please the leader’s eyes when he slung
his legs out of bed in the bunker
to begin another day with dry toast,
milk, and one egg, poached.
Sleep’s Ambulance
takes me to a quiet room down the long hallway, into the golden elevator,
which whooshes me beneath – the wheat fields are stripped
but the hay fields green – down to the many streams, estuaries
like the veins on the back of a hand, flowing to the fingers’ tips
and draining into the air beyond.
Did someone turn a soothing siren on?
I think I hear a siren. The factory whistle – Father’s home
for supper before the evening shift? It’s something of a squeaky song.
Happy little mice, I think, eating through a sack of bones.
Lump of Sugar on an Anthill
The dumb ants hack and gnaw it off grain by grain
and haul it down to the chamber
where they keep such things
to feed their queen and young. The smart ants
dig another entrance, wait for rain.
Which melts the sugar,
and through viaducts they direct it
to their nurseries, the old ants’ home, the unantennaed ward,
and so on – the good little engineering ants!
The dumb ants have to eat their sugar dry.
Put your ear to a dumb ant’s anthill’s hole–mandibles on
sandpaper is what you’ll hear.
The dumb ants pray it doesn’t rain before
they’ve done their task,
or else they will drown – in sweetness,
but drown, nonetheless.
Stink Eye:
what the mongoose gives the cobra. The eye
that says: be confident
with your poison while
I kill you with my teeth – nonvenomous,
nor as sharp. Stink
Eye: the slit-eyes of a boy
on the trolley from Tijuana
to San Diego, late, telling me: where you get off,
I get off and rob you. Stink Eye: mine,
saying to him, Good luck, fututor matris,
which means motherfucker
in Latin. My whole life I’ve been an educator;
the children come to me
to learn their ABCs.
Stink Eye: the broken, bitter eye
of spite – keep that eye from me, and
furthermore, Lordy, Lordy,
keep me from wearing that eye,
which looks outward and leaks inward,
eating first the brain
on its way to eating the heart.
Only these things: blindfolds, clouds
of cataracts, sharp sticks,
eyewash of acid, lids sewn
shut, lids sewn open
facing nuclear blast, every boy armed
with a BB gun–only these,
and one more hope as recourse
against Stink Eye: hold
the gray backside of a mirror
to your face and return it
to its sender.
The Lead Hour
A block of black salt sits
on his chest and on that
a block, a city block, of ice.
Swallowed: one ton (metric) of metal shavings.
In his pockets: every cannonball on earth
except the ones glued in pyramids
near cannons on town hall lawns.
His wallet’s solid steel, size of a toaster!
Like the men pulling the guy wires
on the Hindenburg just before the spark
was set: that same strength
hauling his eyelids down.
Two hours before dawn: the lead hour.
Late afternoon, winter: the lead hour.
He’s got his stone visor on, stone shoes,
and granite cravat, a bag on his back
full of hammers’ heads: ball-peen, claw, and sledge.
Each finger held down by staples
big as goalposts! Notwithstanding,
after all, in any event – under it,
under the lead hour,
he works.
The First Song
was sung after the first stone was thrown at a beast,
after a spear in a man’s hand
brought down a pile of meat.
Of course we sang of that!
We hardly had a language and we sang.
We sang the stories, which turned into better stories,
which is why stories are told
and told again. Then, when we had more time
and bellies full enough with food,
we sang of love. But it began
with stones and sharpened sticks,
then sharpened sticks hardened
in fire.
The General Law of Oblivion,
Mr Proust called it: the beloved gone so long
you forget what he/she looks like,
no matter portraits, photos, or memory,
which is the best tool for forgetting.
Though one cannot deny
its genius, Mr Proust’s prose
kills me, it loops
me over and out. Is it just French novelists
who don’t know how to end
a sentence and so love the semicolon (‘the period
that leaks’) they can’t write two lines
without one? And I am so godamned tired
of hearing about that cookie!
As if he were the first (first fish were!) to notice
the powers of the olfactory! But
about the General Law of Oblivion
he had it zeroed: ‘It breaks my heart
that I am going to forget you,’ he said
in a last letter to a friend.
The length and music of that sentence
is perfect, in English or in French.
Midmorning,
accompanied by bees
banging the screen,
blind to it between them
and the blooms
on the sill, I turn pages,
just as desperate as they
to get where I am going.
Earlier, I tried to summon
my nervous friend,
a hummingbird, with sugar
water. The ants got there first.
Now, one shrill bird
makes its noise too often,
too close: ch-pecha, ch-pecha-pecha.
If he’d eat the caterpillars
(in sizes S to XXL!) eating my tomatoes,
we could live as neighbors, but
why can’t he keep quiet
like the spiders and snakes?
I spoke to an exterminator