the gators prefer golf courses to marshes,
prefer Cheetos, Fritos, nachos, Ho Hos
to baby fish as bright as coins.
What doesn’t kill us makes us strong
(see the scar where propellers have cut through the hide),
but doesn’t that mean some of us will be killed
and not made strong? My sweet flabbies
swing their gum-rubber hips in freshwater
murmuring from the air-conditioning compressors
and waggle my little boat with their bristles —
what doesn’t capsize us
makes us give a whopper sigh.
Look up, and a geezer by his pool
feeds a great blue heron from his hand:
they are so alike they could be twins, him croaking
a tune the bird has come to know
and stalks at certain times of day.
Meanwhile two girls next door in bathing suits
who have turned on the hose in their backyard
hop now at the edge of their wooden bulkhead
singing Come to us humanities
and oh see how they do.
Transcendentalism
The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks
before coughing up the question
that had dogged him since he first read Emerson:
Why am I “I”? We hunkered like musk oxen
while his lecture drifted against us like snow.
If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind.
I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too,
a quiet little interlude from everyone outside
rooting up the corpse of literature
for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer
to my own question (how come no one loved me,
stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle):
I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet,
though I liked If the red slayer think he slays —
the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul.
Then he read a chapter from his own book:
naptime.
He didn’t care when our heads tipped forward on their stalks.
When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard
where dogwood bloomed despite a few last
dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal
being chased across the tundra by those wolves,
the postmodernists. At any moment
you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes.
And I am I who never understood his question,
though he let me climb to take a seat
aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade
of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it
from his yard, into my life — remains a mystery.
The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.
January/Macy’s/The Bra Event
Word of it comes whispered by a slippery thin section
of the paper, where the models pantomime unruffled tête-à-têtes
despite the absence of their blouses.
Each year when my familiar latches on them so intently
like a grand master plotting the white queen’s path,
like a baby trying to suckle a whole roast beef,
I ask: What, you salt block, are you dreaming
about being clubbed by thunderheads? — but he will not say.
Meanwhile Capricorn’s dark hours flabbed me,
uneasy about surrendering to the expert fitter
(even if the cupped hands were licensed and bonded) —
I had August in mind, seeing the pygmy goats at the county fair.
Now the sky is having its daily rain event
and the trees are having their hibernal bark event,
pretending they feel unruffled
despite the absence of their leaves. And we forget how they looked
all flouncy and green. Instead we regard
fearfully the sway of their old trunks.
The Van with the Plane
At first I didn’t get it: I thought it was just scrap metal roped on the roof
of this dented ancient Econoline van
with its parrot-yellow burden.
Bright mishmash so precarious
my heart twitched whenever I had to tail it down the road
until one day I woke to it: you blockhead, that’s a plane.
I don’t know how I missed it — of course it was a plane,
disassembled, with one yellow wing pointing sideways from the roof.
Fuselage dinged by rocks from the road
and two little wheels sticking up from the van —
now when I tally all the pieces, it seems pretty obvious.
And I wonder if toting it around would be a burden
or more some kind of anti-burden.
Because if you drove around with a plane
you might feel less fettered than the rest of us:
say your life hung around your neck like a concrete Elizabethan ruff
you could always ditch that junker van
and take off rattling down the runway of the road.
But my friends said they’d seen that clunker so long on the road
it was like a knock-knock joke heard twice too often.
You’ll be sorry they said when I went looking for the guy who drove the van,
whom I found in the library, beating the dead horse of his plane.
Once you got him started it was hard to shut him off:
how, if he had field to rise from, he’d fly to Sitka, or Corvallis—
but how does a guy living in a van get a field, you think the IRS
just goes around giving people fields for free? The road
of his thought was labyrinthine and sometimes ended in the rough
of Cambodia or Richard Nixon.
He said a plane in pieces still counts as a plane,
it was still a good plane, it was just a plane on a van.
And of course I liked him better as part and parcel of the van;
the actual guy could drive you nuts.
All his grace depended on his sitting underneath that plane
as it rattles up and down the road
like a train with a missile, a warhead of heavy hydrogen.
Because the van reverts to rubble once the plane takes off.
And if my own life is a plane, it’s like the Spirit of St. Louis —
no windshield, just the vantage of a periscope.
Forward, onward, never look down — at the burden of these roofs and roads.
Snowstorm with Inmates and Dogs
The prison kennel’s tin roof howls
while the dogs romp outside through the flakes.
The inmates trained a dog to lift my legs —
for months they rolled the concrete floor
in wheelchairs, simulating.
Through a window I watch them cartwheel now,
gray sweatpants rising against the whitened hill
traversed by wire asterisks and coils.
At first I feared they pitied me,
the way I flinched at the building’s smell.
Now the tin roof howls, the lights go off
to the sound of locking doors. Go on, breathe —
no way the machinery of my lungs
is going to plow the county road.
Didn’t I try to run over a guy,
spurned love being the kindling stick that rubbed
against his IOUs? Easy to land here,
anyone could — though I think laughter
would elude me, no matter what the weather.
Compared to calculating how far to the road.
Signs there say: CORRECTIONS CENTER DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.
My instructions were: Accept no notes or photographs,
> and restrict the conversation to such topics as
how to teach the dog to nudge
the light switch with his nose.
Now the women let their snowballs fly — as if
the past were a simple matter that could splat and melt.
Only my red dog turns his head
toward the pines beyond the final fence
before the generator chugs to life.
Early Cascade
I couldn’t have waited. By the time you return
it would have rotted on the vine.
So I cut the first tomato into eighths,
salted the pieces in the dusk,
and found the flesh not mealy (like last year)
or bitter,
even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem
that made my throat feel dusty and warm.
Pah. I could have gagged on the sweetness.
The miser accused by her red sums.
Better had I eaten the dirt itself
on this the first night in my life
when I have not been too busy for my loneliness —
at last, it comes.
Twenty-Five Thousand Volts per Inch
The weird summer of lightning (to be honest) was not a summer, but a week
when we sat every night in a far corner of the yard
to watch the silver twitch over our drinks.
It may help to know the sky hardly ever spasms here,
which is why we savored the postscript smell of nickel,
ions crisping in the deep fry.
The bolts made everything erogenous, the poppies and the pumpkin vine —
we could hardly bear to leave our watch post
but had tickets for the concert at the pier.
And we could not bear to miss the jam band from our youth,
which we feared discovering lacked talent and looked foolish
in their caveman belt buckles and leather hats.
Whew. That we found in them a soulfulness, an architecture
of tempo changes and chord progressions
left us relieved. Childishly
we hummed along as the sun got gulped down like a vitamin
and boats of cheapskates gathered on the bay.
When the lightning started, it was fearsome and silent
as usual. We were older, we knew this,
but the past proved not to be all suicide and motorcycle accidents.
Here was proof the music had shown some finesse —
even if it pillaged the discographies of black men from the Delta
it did so honorably, erotically, meaning
“that which gathers.” So we held hands and drew near.
And the flashes lit us, when they lit us, in platinum flames:
then we saw, behold, below the bleachers,
a man whose rubber sneaker toe-tips
punctured the darkness as he spun.
He lurched and spun and lurched and fell,
a messenger from the ancient cults
until his stomach’s contents were strobed ruthlessly
once they splattered on the tarmac. Sky says: Rise,
feet say: Heavy. Body would say: Torn in two
if it weren’t already passed out
with all the good Samaritans busy remembering
the words to the tune about the rambling man. Oh
Bacchus, Dionysus, ye Southern rock stars
of antiquity: Thank you for shutting the black door
behind which he vanished, so we could resume
holding each other, like two swigs of mouthwash.
Then the brother who was not dead
played another of our childhood songs.
The Garbo Cloth
Her daughter wrote back to say my friend had died
(my friend to whom I wrote a letter maybe twice a year).
From time to time I’d pictured her amid strange foliage
(and in a Mongol yurt, for she was fond of travel).
Why not a flock of something darkening the sky, so we would know
(ah, so-and-so is gone!)?
For a woman from the city, this might perhaps be pigeons
(blacking out the sun).
Or else a human messenger, as once when she was fabric-shopping
(bolt of green silk furled across her body)
Garbo passed, and nodded. At Macy’s years ago
(when I was not a creature in her world).
Of course she bought the cloth, but never sewed the dress
(“a massive stroke, and I take comfort in the fact she felt no pain”).
Logic says we should make omens of our Garbos and our birds
(but which one bears the message? which one just the mess?).
From the kayak, I’ve seen pigeons nesting underneath the pier
(a dim ammoniated stink)
where one flew into my face. I read this as a sign
(that rancid smash of feathers)
but couldn’t fathom what it meant, the bird trapped in the lag time
(of an oracle’s translation).
Foolish mind, wanting to obliterate the lag and why —
(let memory wait to catch up to its sorrow).
A Pedantry
Many of the great men — Buddha, Saint Augustine,
Jefferson, Einstein — had a woman and child
they needed to ditch. A little prologue
before the great accomplishments could happen.
From nothing came this bloody turnip
umbilicaled to the once-beloved,
only now she’s transformed like a Hindu god
with an animal snout and too many limbs.
You’d rather board a steamer with chalk dust on your pants
or sit under a bo tree and be pelted by flaming rocks,
renounce the flesh
or ride off on a stallion —
there is no papoose designed for such purposes,
plus the baby would have to be sedated.
Sorry.
We don’t want the future to fall into the hands of the wrong -ists!
That’s how civilization came into being
for us who remained in the doorways of here,
our companions those kids who became chimney sweeps, car thieves,
and makers of lace.
By day we live in the shadows of theories; by night
the moon holds us in its regard
when it doesn’t have more important business
on the back side of the clouds.
Martha
Nearly all the remaining quarter million passenger pigeons were
killed in one day in 1896.
They named the last one Martha,
and she died September 1st, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo,
she who was once one of so many billions
the sky went dark for days
when they flew past.
Makes me wonder what else could go,
some multitudinous widget like clouds or leaves
or the jellyfish ghosting the water in autumn
or the shore-shards of crushed clams?
Goodbye kisses:
once I had so many of you but now I note
your numbers growing slim —
yesterday a man stood me up in the sea
behind the big rock where the sand dollars live.
And when I said Now we should kiss
it seemed we’d grown too peculiar
and I thought: Oh-ho kisses, are you leaving too
like the man’s hair? Or like
the taut bellies we once had
or the menstrual period that was mine alone —
time flew its coop
our days did skid
and now see my commas going too —
art mimicking life’s mortal nature?
So I did no hem-haw with the man
I told him to grab hold of my ears
since daylight bur
ned
the tide had begun to apply its suction then
the shotguns of our lips turned toward
what was perhaps the last of our wild flock.
Breaking News
They found the missing bride and she is living.
They found the boys floating on the ocean in their little yellow raft.
The ornithologists found the extinct woodpecker
when it flew over their canoe.
Not everyone is convinced, though.
One recording of its distinctive knock turned out to be a gunshot.
A century of Ozark fishermen
said they saw the bird when they were stranded
on their hummocks in the swamp.
Nobody believed them but the catfish in their pails.
Those boys thought their muscles strong enough to paddle against the squall.
And the bride only wanted a bus trip west
before the rest of her life downed her like an olive.
Sometimes survival strikes us dumb
with the improbable story of resurrection;
we see the blossoms smutted on the ground
turning back into a flowering tree. Next year
there’ll be new nettle stalks
to sting your fingers, which you’ll drag
through the serrated leaves to prove
the world has not lost the consolation of its old pain.
For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive in Our State
Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones Page 11