“I need to write
good fast music.
All my good music
is slow.”
How should a person be?
“I am happy
to be contemporary.”
“I am glad I will die
before all this prevails.”
In child pose
you breathe through the back.
Then there’s the rest,
all those positions
you flow or stumble through
until that rock. That specific rock.
ROAD / HERE NOW
I think of you here
because I thought of you here
before. Otherwise
I never think of you
except on a summer drive
that echoes the drive
I took the day after
I heard you died
except when I see
the red skirt
I wore that day
the day you finally
kissed me
a red skirt
I now see
only in pictures
from a long-ago trip
to the Pyrenees
the skirt I wore
to your party
In the middle of the party
here’s death
is what I thought
when we saw our friend
lying on the bare road
by her smashed bike
She’s alive
in the Berkshires.
So many are alive!
More are dead.
Strange thing
to survive to discover
you will live
till one day it’s over
no more to discover
no more rounding back
to this ongoing living
avoiding till you don’t
that specific rock
III
TODAY’S COMEDY
Why Dante in summer?
Why not? The doctrine
of purgatory’s no more strange
than nanotubes or Tang.
I used to know
its ins and outs.
What we’ve abandoned grows
higher than trashheaps
in Naples. My love
canal’s clean and my heart
in my breast
is right dressed.
No guide led me here
but Virgil and everyone
I ever met, in woods
books dreams in suburbs
the city the farm.
Marcus Aurelius
took a page
from the town mouse
and his country cousin.
The lesson of fables
is mutable, their structure
not. Something
must change. A hero
must range in a land
he also unwittingly
charts. If many die
not everyone can.
Odysseus must reach
if not Ithaca
a farther shore
and the little zygotic blip
you once were
must enter the world
& its pure gore.
MEZZO
To choose
not to translate
heaven
paradiso
not so heavy
so let it be
& let there be
a Golfo Paradiso
sailed slowly through
the day you arrived
at the place the names
made their way to your ears
* * *
did all this fall
into the lap of the world
protozoa pulsing
upward from the slime
complicating themselves
into a sentience
you’d recognize
* * *
the quilted greens
an eye ascends
the terraced steep
attests the hands
and feet of men
who raised the sail
& crushed the grape
* * *
Apennines scraped
but for a few pines—
man or sheep or time
the denuder,
stripper of scrub,
flayer of rock—
* * *
that stone over there
whitestreaked outcrop clawed
by perpetual waves
it too thinks
a stone’s stoniness
* * *
here it is ever
mild and the faces
show it gently
lined different
from the way
a less temperate clime
will incise you
* * *
below my neck
a faint network
the mirror reveals
in the morning
* * *
nel mezzo del cammin
I was caught
in a glass net
what did the glass weave
GENOA
The merchant republics are done
as is the nun
who forbade us aged five to say
we were done.
The oven door opened
in her mime
the door to the oven
where we were thoroughly roasted
and done.
If you are done
that means I can stick
a fork in you. You
she corrected
are finished.
Finished
with all that some days
it seems a dream
the long boredom
in the schoolroom
workbook assignments
rushed through straining
toward what weird
consummation?
Sister Lucretia—
she was another one
terrifying the children who braved
the zenana of nuns
pledged to Christ and torture
of the wayward souls who ventured
into the sanctum sanctorum
the private apartment of six nuns
for a weekly piano lesson.
Bach had twenty children
she declared. Her heart was given
to a Texan—Van Cliburn.
A wimpled nun
one of the last
thus to dress among the remaining Franciscan
sisters. Excess
daughters in immigrant families
ready to give some
aid and comfort to the Lord
or the local monsignor—
a special vocation—
were they rotting away
in their habits, were they
the transfigured ones?
I wanted once
to become one.
Those days are done
and I am almost done
almost historical as a usuried ship
heading west and more west
to find treasures
for kings. Look in thy heart
it is a treasury
it was said
Mary said.
She was another one.
Even now at the Brignole station
we see flocks of nuns
rope-belted, a crucifix flying in wind.
A veiled woman
might become another woman
under a different sun.
Even here the sisters
have become Indian, Ethiopian,
no extra Italian
daughters to pay the godly sum
of glorious renunciation.
The Turks are threatening Christendom
in old chronicles
and today’s European bulletin.
Beware of falling under the thumb
of Islam.
It will never be finished
said the Caliph
> to the Sultan.
It is almost done
this meal where I stick
a fork in tomatoed squid stew
called burrida its Arabic origins
brining my tongue.
I stick a fork in an animal
fork in a soul
and I eat and I eat
until kingdom come.
SAN FRUTTUOSO GLOBAL
The merchant republics are done.
The Cristo degli Abissi beseeches the sea
from seventeen meters below.
He will never again see the sun.
They sank him in 1954.
The Strada Nuova was old.
Genoa devoured the world, Braudel said.
Columbus killed Taínos for gold.
It’s good not to be dead
—a thing one wouldn’t have said
those days the islanders fled
to the hills escaping Spaniards
their helmeted heads
and fists clasped round handles
of pikes and swords for striking
off every savage hand
empty of glinting metal—
they knew they knew
where gold could be found
and they knew their lord
a forgiving lord
who watched indifferent
as they ran them to ground
DRINK WITH MOUNTAIN, REMEMBERED, ANDALUCÍAN
The rosé from Spain
followed us west
as if hot on the scent
of tomato—
O brave New World
your fruits have gone incognito!
A rosé’s a rosé’s a rosé
with love apples.
You are moving west
beyond the Chinese coast
to the interior
of Inner Mongolia. A threatened
horse rides again
the steppes unburdening
themselves below revived hooves.
The time of the emperor
is nigh. No inquisition
will be able to check
the future. Your local
grapes are delicious
picked off the vine
or bottled, thus.
This is the interval
between eras of fathers,
dictators fallen, the marble
fists crushed and not crushing.
But the future, its empress,
who can say what beast
she’ll ride to meet us?
Raise a glass, comrades—
all you who refuse
to forget the civil war.
INSCRIPTION
Not far
from the Chandrabar
and the Nervi Belvedere
I drink this beer
under an awning
on the Passeggiata
Anita Garibaldi
a kayak flotilla
choreographed quintet
heading east and easter
the French Alps outlined
in a faint blue to our west
My t-shirt’s plain
white & cheap
an affront to the strollers
jewelried & jacketed
though here and there
a louche jogger
lowers the tone
almost to my level
& a young mother
& a posse of teens
newly gelato’d pass by
Serena Hearts Lucas
names on stone
TO ONE IN PARMA
The privilege
of even being
provincial,
to know the small
humiliating city,
the ever unfinished
cathedral,
that over there
is the real where:
we had none of it.
No one heard
of anything.
The glit and shine
and scut of it shimmered
on TV the satin crotch
of the metropolis
a 13" square
of already thinned
fantasy.
No wonder
the saints
were martyring themselves
repeatedly, furiously
in imagination.
This was something
to die for
a life outlined
in acid-bit etchings
obsolete as the names
of trees we were never given
to know in the neighborhood.
LEVANTO
salt lips & a buoyed band
binds the sea in loose chains
to swim in. the beach’s
thinned out, the clouds puffing
in, the last ferry’s
debarked a last load.
starting out now
seems impossible
but. the rock walls
break the breakers
in. nothing
cannot be disciplined
or freed. scant pines
stagger the apennines
semaphoring
what. quartz-
striped granite
tells a time
that outlives us.
I am older
than the sea
in me.
IV
TERRAN LIFE
—an excursion beginning with a line of William Wordsworth
When we had given our bodies to the wind
we found bones in the earth and not in the sky.
We found arrowheads in the earth and not in the sky though they’d flown through the air before grounding.
The era of common sense is over
& finished too the flourishing of horoscopes.
Hey traveler what chart to sign your way? what iPhone app?
All the birthdays have immolated themselves in a far pyre
and no one knows where
they were born.
Earth gods always come after sky gods.
If you could choose
a secret power would it be flight?—
a wish more often expressed
than the desire for invisibility.
“A mythology reflects its region”
and a poet sang the sea the lemon trees and pines
the Ligurian breeze salting his lines
and a lightly placed step on a Greek mountain is the goat song of tragedy.
Jehovah rarely shows his face for we would die of it
die as surely as those who looked to the sky in the bombing raid
the underground tunnels a sudden refuge
Out of ash I come Out of the earth
Back to ash I go He fashioned them
male and female I tell you
they wore the most beautiful evanescent clothes
in paradise so much subtler than the trawling nakedness of heaving giants
hurling other giants to heaven & some to hell
on the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Thus far clones are of earth, alone.
When you say earth you mean land but more than land You mean the oceans covering “the earth” as if earth were the substrate of everything and not also the crust.
I found the ground sound, unfaulted, uncracked, even where the continents have split and will again split the archaic seamstress unable to suture the plates of the earth forever.
“Terran life”: what the biologists typically study but “weird life” is also a zone of research. “It is easy to conceive of chemical reactions that might support life involving noncarbon compounds”—
viz. The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, p. 6.
Earth now supports life but could not now initiate it.
Crawl, sway, sashay: you’re still doing it on an earth
you take for granted instead of going crazy
yr head blown off by an apple no I meant an IED no
I meant an apple.
N
ewtonian physics’ defunct but that doesn’t mean an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree composed of atoms whose dark matter you don’t know how to measure, supermodel. Me neither.
Gravity thy name is woman
always secretly pulling me toward you
as if I had no resistance
as if the clothes I wore were merely draped
on a mannequin as if I were merely an earthbound species with new skin
that fur an old animal’s fur
reclaimed by another.
Did you see the subtle shift from umber to somber to ochre on the walls of Les Caves de Lascaux?
What ibex steps as beautifully as you
what ancient bison shakes the steppes
what gazelle’s ankles are so perfectly turned as yours?
There are no crackheads in prehistory but surely
they were addicted to something those hominids
strutting their way out of the savannah—
I demand the sun
shine on me
I demand the moon bare its face in the night
and lo! damn! see how these heavenly bodies do what they do
like clockwork before clocks
like skin before clothes
like the earth before the parting of the waters revealed
the earth was the earth is the earth …
And if she only likes vegetable things
that grow toward the light
and if she will not eat your roots and tubers
how then choose
between a rooting boar and an urban forager—
There is beauty in indistinct areas the microtonal
hover where the ear buzzes so—
There is a gasp a sharp breath in a sharp wind reminding
you the wind was someone’s breath chilled.
Clouds are now fashionable as they were in John Constable’s day Luke Howard having taxonomized the little buggers in 1803: cumulus, cirrus, etc.
So let’s go skying with Constable let’s scan
the horizon as if we were sailors
able to read the sky Let’s blast off
and outsoar the noctilucent clouds
I espy with my little stratospheric eye.
Do you think I’m afraid of crashing to earth?
Love we’ve been falling ever since falling made way for a leap.
EMBROIDERED EARTH
embroidered earth
refusing an undesigned mind
uphold me now
it’s hard to walk
secure on your pillowed ground
mossed ferned & grassed
this tapestried field
may it yield to an unsteady step
& take only the softest impress
the enfolded brain pressing
against a carapace
millennia ago unfolded
a species and its walk—
a steady upright walk
ICE PEOPLE, SUN PEOPLE
This Blue : Poems (9781466875074) Page 2