Far-Fetched
Page 2
of a pay phone
half buried in a hedge
of wild rose
and heard it ring
The clapper ball
trilled between
brass gongs
for two seconds
then wind
and then again
With head cocked
the bird took note
absorbed the ringing
deep in its throat
and frothed
an ebullient song
The leitmotif
of bright alarm
recurred in a run
from hawk
to meadowlark
from May to early June
The ringing spread
from syrinx to syrinx
from Kiowa
to Comanche to Clark
till someone
finally picked up
and heard a voice
on the other end
say Konza
or Consez or Kansa
which the French trappers
heard as Kaw
which is only the sound
of a word for wind
then only the sound of wind
TEMPERS
Hot days, violent storms,
high clouds, cold rain.
*
Sheets and curtains cast
a white-diamond gloom.
Are you asleep?
Wind heaves
against the glass
and slow breathing
fills the room.
*
Soft pillows, soft
blankets, soft sheets:
Her kiss? Sweet,
and hard enough
to crack your teeth.
*
Dark at noon
and darker still
beneath a tossing oak
where subaquatic
light renders
ironwork remote.
*
Clouds purl
in a conch whorl
around a center
yet to be declared.
CIRCLE LINE: LONDON
Curve of recurrence
Horns of dawn
Wheels touch down
on the smooth
ceremonial runway
a grand plaza
of stenciled arrows
to and from the sky
*
Soft clatter of plates
Clack of rain coming on
Her head sunk
in a leather menu
Her white fingers
turn a fork
and harrow the tablecloth
with tines
*
At the Electric Cinema
a hand waits its turn
outside a bag of popcorn
*
Browsing through a bookshop’s
narcotic dusk
she comes across
an aquatint
of brook trout
in the bargain cellar
submerged from street life
Day slips past
*
Stout and tobacco smoke
Tail end of a head cold
Bespattered pigeon cote
*
A bathtub
brindled with rust
glows in the dusk
Her white knee
sleek as a seal
breaks the surface
Estuaries
overflow
across the tile
TWO FROM CATULLUS
1
You ask how many kisses
would leave me satisfied?
As many as the grains of silt
that flow from Alton south
across the wide
Missouri’s mouth,
as many as the stars that shine
through quiet August nights
on tangled forms
of humankind,
so many kisses might
leave this craving satisfied—
more kisses than the curious
could tabulate
or bitter tongues malign.
2
Lizzie, you once said
I knew you as no other did
and that you’d rather lie in my arms
than in the light of Jesus.
I loved you then, not
as most men do their women,
but as a father loves his children.
These days I know you better,
and though I’m more
aroused by your touch,
you flaunt and flutter
through my thoughts
without much hold.
You wonder how this happened?
Such betrayal as yours excites
more desire and less affection.
BRIGHT THORN
Excrucior,
the crux of it:
torn between
two states of mind,
the axes of
a new life
and of the one
you left behind.
Time and time
again, you learn
nothing but pain
from pain.
Behind the school
each bright thorn
collects
a bead of rain.
GLOSS
Not long before your tongue
flutters inside my mouth,
nimble tip searching out
something to be said,
just as the deaf and blind
brush hands in tactile signs.
VISITING DAY
Do not share food or drinks.
No rubbing arms or touching faces.
Visitors and offenders may
hold hands across the table.
You will only be permitted
one greeting and departing kiss,
a closed-mouth kiss
of one to two seconds.
Do not leave children unattended.
FIXED INTERVAL
When he turns fifteen, you’ll be fifty-four.
When he turns thirty, you’ll be sixty-nine.
This plain arithmetic amazes more
than miracle, the constant difference more
than mere recursion of father in son.
If you reach eighty, he’ll be forty-one!
The same sun wheels around again, the dawn
drawn out and hammered thin as a copper sheet.
When he turns sixty, you’ll be gone.
Compacted mud, annealed by summer heat,
two ruts incise this ghost-forsaken plain
and keep their track width, never to part or meet.
MEANS OF ESCAPE
The courtroom, clad in wood veneer,
could be a lesser pharaoh’s tomb
equipped for immortality.
A civil servant drags her broom
around the bench and gallery
as jurors darken a questionnaire.
One coughs against the courtroom chill.
One drums her fingers atop the bar.
One finds escape through Stephen King,
as through a window left ajar.
One talks and talks, a reckoning
of who got sober, who took ill.
The talker seeks me out at lunch,
a bond of passing circumstance.
He slides the food around his tray
disdainfully and looks askance
at those nearby, as if to say,
In here, you can’t expect too much.
Across the hall, five years ago,
the talker fought for custody
and lost, his daylight blotted out.
He’d spent the decade carelessly
and sucked a mortgage up his snout.
He never sees his daughter now.
They meet online for Realms of Ra
as siblings, catlike humanoids,
survivors from the Hybrid Age;
or Foxen riding flightless b
irds
across the plain, a scrolling page
above which two moons light their way.
They gather gold coins as they roam,
and relics, sometimes holy ones.
They seldom map attentively,
but swing their swords and have some fun.
They chat—backchannel strategy,
but not of school, her friends, or home.
Last night, they entered a castle keep
infested with the living dead,
whose breath abruptly turned the air
to crackled glass. A pop-up read,
Initializing Griffin’s Lair:
please wait, and soon he fell asleep.
Of course, he can reboot the game
tonight, with nothing lost or missed.
Meanwhile, a case of larceny
awaits, from which we’ll be dismissed
(we both have too much history).
I wish him well in his campaign.
STRANGERS
On an overbooked flight from Houston,
I find my seat beside a woman
in black shades, with the hard-bitten look
that sometimes follows addiction,
nails chewed down to the quick,
talking too loudly into her phone:
Yeah, I got my dad a new amp.
Rocking must run in the family!
As we level off in the tenuous dusk,
she orders a Red Bull and Skyy,
scarfing down her portion of pretzels,
shifting abruptly from side to side
to cross and recross her legs,
swiping through files on her phone.
Meanwhile, I skim an Audubon guide
and pause at the boat-tailed grackle
with its iridescence, yellow eye,
and long, harsh trilling song.
You like that book? she interrupts.
I got some crazy shit to show you.
Here, a silky fantail
from the State Fair of Texas.
Have you ever seen a mule pull?
This team’s dragging five tons.
Oh, that’s me, getting an award.
I’m a doctor, you believe that shit?
In the snapshot, she wears a white lab coat
with a ribbon pinned to her lapel,
her arm around a soldier’s waist
in what looks to be a shopping mall.
I love birds! So check it out:
I raised fuckin’ racing pigeons
with my dad, a top geneticist
at Baylor—total brainiac.
We banded squabs, flew them in batches,
drove them out for training tosses.
This one, with a Belgian pedigree,
came first in the Texas Showdown.
Fuckin’ A, I loved those birds.
On and on, an improbable mix
of tough talk and expertise
that finds no resolution.
But then, consider my own account,
withheld: an invitation
to read my poetry aloud,
tequila and a fine lechón,
a morning free to watch a pair
of caracaras take apart
the carcass of a wild hog
along the Chocolate Bayou.
What would such scraps mean to her?
Even in our final descent
she pushes past my doubt
and reticence, to say,
I started as a dancer,
and now I’m a goddamn doc.
Looking back, it all makes sense!
—the incidents of a life
fanning out in a strange display.
NIGHT AND DAY
Newly a father, half asleep
between the dark and dawn,
I lean against the kitchen sink
and struggle to recall
a riddle of the sphinx,
the western sky a color
that the Greeks refused to name
because it extinguishes all others,
their sea of green or wine,
their sky of hammered bronze.
What starts as a faint
migration of light
extends itself alone and widely
across the kitchen tile,
pewter on a soap bubble,
bombycinous, endored,
adding word to word until
everything gets remembered.
There are two sisters: one
gives birth to the other
and then is born from her.
OWL-EYED
A golden hand
imprints the dawn
figurative
intent forgot
A black jug
with beak and brow
returns the owl
face to Pallas
Countless broken
pots unearth
evidence
of deep thirst
an afterlife
in earthenware
three thousand years
of twilight
THE SUDDEN WALK
after Franz Kafka
When evening comes to find you still
at home and settling down to stay,
when the last rays have lit a cloud
of fingerprints on the storm door
and television’s lambent flame
plays across veneer and glass,
when you have dealt a hand or two,
the dinner dishes cleared away,
and shrugging on the familiar robe,
you open an atlas of the world
to archipelagoes engraved
with light of other longitudes,
when a cold fog descends and drives
every creature down its hole,
when you have sat so quietly
that your least movement brings surprise
to everyone, and when, besides,
the stairs are dark, the deadbolt locked,
and in spite of all, you start up
in a sudden fit of restlessness,
shed your robe, snap a coat,
and bang the door shut more or less
emphatically, according to
the pique you fancy having stirred,
and when you find yourself once more
at unexpected liberty,
absorbed in rhythms of breath and limb,
attention racing on ahead
and then returning like a dog
through hawthorn blooming in the dark,
that rich potentiality,
when Mars and Jupiter ascend
above the cloudbank, bright and crisp,
then you become a clean stroke
of ink-and-brush calligraphy,
a lone figure strolling west
on Shenandoah Avenue.
Returning home, still full of such
euphoria, you stop to watch
flitting across your window shade
at this late hour, the silhouettes
of children loosed from all constraints.
TURNED LOOSE
On Friday afternoon, turned loose
like cattle dogs across a slope,
kids fling themselves out of doors
with a thin shout as though through bronze,
descend on idling cars en masse,
and then disperse on separate paths
as we distinguish one of ours.
On Saturday, stunned by the week
of school and work, we rise late
and linger at the table
above the morning’s residue
of orange peels and magazines.
Light and unobtrusive,
a pencil rustles paper
to sketch a horse with arched neck
and whipping lines for legs.
Does anybody have the red?
On Sunday, after small delays—
the ritual of a coat refused
or shoe misplaced—we find ourselves
our clothes still radiating cold.
We scrutinize an arc of tusk
and chronicle of bone.
Among so many strangers,
the children cling to me like burrs
and I disregard the impulse
to be free of them.
Monday in my office,
a day that will not bring them near,
I want nothing but their presence,
my ears attuned to outdoors
and the timbre of their voices,
the damp friction of their shrieks
so primitive and freshly peeled.
WANT
Let the child cry awhile
with a rasp that strains his throat.
Let him learn what can’t be satisfied
and break him like a colt.
Beneath a blanket, let him find
some solace in himself.
*
I need mine cuddy!
—the family word
for a blanket frayed
to a snarl of yarn,
a mushy cud
that smells of spit.
As the soporific
takes effect,
eyes roll inward
and night unravels
the wale
that day has knit.
*
Tilt this lacquered disk
against the sun
tap tap
its pendulum
pulls each head in turn
to pivot in a slot
and peck at painted
flecks of scratch
the hollow tap
of appetite
SCHOOL DAYS
Passing our porch, a girl of ten
holds a drum against her stomach
as you might a covered dish.
China trembles with a truck’s idle
or the white hum of compressors,
the morning air muted
as though near the ocean,
lightly ruffled by subaquatic
scales on a clarinet
and the tuning of strings.
When she passes again, near dusk,
the insect chorus subsides
to a pinprick of cricket song.
Narrow pens of fenced yards,
as yet unraked, lie thick
with indotherms and agitrons.
Something keeps brushing against me!
Around a plot of ragged mint,
the lemon zest of walnut leaves
illuminates the lawn,
brickwork slowly revealed.
LATE OCTOBER
Kids crowd the stoop
backs to a darkened house
so close to nothing
yet incurious
*
Across the brick façade
a kestrel
races to meet
its shadow
*