trying to coax them to apply their shock-paddles to my heart,
it wasn’t working. Until one morning when
I found them black and staggering in their pails,
charred marionettes, twist-tied to their stakes, I apologize
for being less turned-on by the thing than by its going.
Not the sunset
but afterward when we stand dusted with the sunset’s silt,
and not the surgical theater, even with its handsome anesthesiologist
in blue dustcap and booties — no,
his after’s what I’m buzzed by, the black slide into nothing
(well, someone ought to speak for it).
Or it can come in white — not so much the swirling snow
as the fallen stuff that makes the mind continuous
with the meadow that it sees.
Auntie Roach
Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others.
PHILIP LARKIN
One day George Washington rides around Mount Vernon
for five hours on his horse, the next
he’s making his auspicious exodus
on the spectrum of possible deaths.
Rasputin was fed cyanide in little cakes
but did not slough his living husk,
and so Prince Felix sang to him, then mesmerized him
with a gaudy cross. And though he dropped when he was shot
he popped back up and ran outside: it was
Purishkevich who fired three times in the courtyard —
but even with his body bound
in the frozen Neva, one arm worked
its way free. Now, he must have howled
while his giblets leaked, though the cold
is reputed to be kind. Sliding his end
toward a numeral less horrible; it falls
say as a three on a scale of zero to ten?
Shakespeare went out drinking, caught a fever,
ding! Odds are we’ll be addled —
what kind of number can be put on that?
One with endless decimals,
unless you luck into some kind woman,
maker of the minimum wage, black or brown and brave enough
to face your final wreck? My friends hoard pills
for their bad news, but I wonder if it’s cowardly
to be unequal to the future. Someone should write a book
for nursery school, with crucial facts like: how,
as the sun drops, shadows lengthen, including a sharp
or blurry one that is your own. And you scuttle from it
like a cockroach fleeing light — an anti-roach,
running from the dark. See my feelers, long and feathery:
I am more than well prepared.
Ulysses Grant lay in misery for half a year
after eating a peach that pained his tongue.
Versus Ivan the Terrible, last heard singing in the bath,
who fainted dead while setting up the chessboard.
Wheel
I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake —
after crawling through the rotting milfoil on the shore.
At first
the materials offered me were not much —
just some cattails where a hidden bullfrog croaked
and a buckhouse made from corrugated tin —
at first I thought I’d have to write the poem of its vapors.
But wait
long enough and the world caves in,
sends you something like these damselflies
prickling your chest. And the great ventriloquist
insists
you better study them or else:
how the liquidmetal blue gleams like a motorcycle helmet,
how the markings on the thorax wend like a maze,
their abdomens ringed like polecat tails,
the tip of his latched
to the back of her neck
while his scrawny forelegs wipe his mandible
that drops and shuts like a berth on a train.
But when I tallied his legs, he already had six —
those wiper-legs belonged to a gnat
he was cramming in his mouth. Which took a long time
because the gnat struggled, and I tried to imagine
a gnat-size idea of the darkness
once the mandible closed.
Call me bad gnat: see how every other thing strives —
more life!
Even with just two neurons firing the urge.
Then the she-fly’s abdomen swung forward
to take the sperm packet from his thorax,
and he finished chewing
in this position that the field guide calls The Wheel.
Call me the empress of the unused bones,
my thighs fumigated by the rank detritus of the shore
while the meal
and The Wheel
interlocked in a chain
in the blue mouth of the sky
in the blacker mouth beyond
while I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake
where sixty thousand damselflies
were being made a half inch from my heart.
Pioneer
Let’s not forget the Naked Woman is still out there, etched
into her aluminum plaque
affixed to her rocket
slicing through the silk of space.
In black and white, in Time, we blast her
off to planets made of gases and canals,
not daring to include, where her legs fork,
the little line to indicate she is an open vessel.
Which might lead to myths about her
being lined with teeth,
knives, snakes, bees — an armament
flying through the firmament. Beside the man
who stands correctly nonerect, his palm
upraised to show he comes in peace,
though you globulous yet advanced beings
have surely taken a gander of our sizzling planet
and can see us even through our garments.
So you know about the little line —
how a soft animal cleaves from her
and how we swaddle it in fluff,
yet within twenty years we send it forth
with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launcher:
you have probably worked out a theory
to explain the transformation. And you
have noticed how she looks a bit uncertain
as she stands on her right leg, her left thrust out
as if she’s put her foot on top of something
to keep it hidden. Could be an equation
on a Post-it, or could be a booby trap—
now comes time to admit we do not know her very well, she
who has slipped the noose of our command. Be careful
when you meet her, riding on her shaft of solar wind:
you will have to break her like a wishbone
to get her open, she whom we filled with teeth
and knives and snakes and bees.
300D
When he was flush, we ate dinner
at Tung Sing on Central Avenue
where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic
bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet-
and-sour pork — what else
was there to care about, except his sleep
under the pup tent of the news? And the car,
which was a Cadillac until he saw how they
had become the fortresses of pimps —
our hair may look stylish now,
but in the photograph it always turns against us:
give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976
he went to see the enemy, the man
(with sideburns) who sold German cars
and said: take it easy, step at a time,
see how the diesel engi
ne sounds
completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink
around the block in the old neighborhood
where he imagined people (mostly black: by now
his mouth had mastered the word’s exhale,
then cut) lifting their heads to look (-kuh).
And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung
back into the lot to make the deal, although
to mitigate the shift in his allegiances
(or was this forgiveness? — for the Germans
had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)
he kept the color constant. Champagne,
the color of a metal in a dream, no metal
you could name, although they tried
with a rich man’s drink. He could afford it now
though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump
of meat around the glass’s narrow, girlish stem.
Lubricating the Void
Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper: I can barely pronounce your name
but have been thinking of you ever since your grease gun
erupted into space. Causing your tool bag to slip
beyond the reach of your white glove, when you were attempting
to repair the space station’s solar wing. Thanks
for that clump of language — solar wing! One of the clumps
of magic shat out by our errors. And thanks
to your helmet camera’s not getting smeared,
in the inch between your glove and bag — irrevocable inch —
we see the blue Earth, glowing so lit-up’dly despite the crap
that we’ve dumped in its oceans, a billion tons of plastic beads,
precursors to the action figures that come with our Happy Meals.
Precursors to the modern Christmas tree and handle of the modern ax.
Precursors to the belts and jackets of the vegans.
The cleanup crews call them mermaid’s tears, as if a woman
living in the water would need to weep in polymer
so that her effort would not be lost/so that there would be proof
of her lament, say for the great Trash Vortex
swirling in the current, for the bellies of the albatrosses
filling up with tears that can’t be broken down.
For the smell of mildew in the creases of ruptured beach balls,
for seabirds strangled by what makes the six-pack possible,
for flip-flops that wash up so consistently alone
they cause disturbing dreams about one-legged tribes
(described by Pliny before he sailed across the Bay of Naples,
into Mount Vesuvius’s toxic spume).
Dreams logical, Heidemarie, given the fearful data.
Dreams had by us who live 220 miles below.
Queasy from our spinning but still holding on,
with no idea we are so brightly shining.
Freak-Out
Mine have occurred in empty houses
down whose dark paneling I dragged my fingernails —
though big-box stores have also played their parts,
as well as entrances to indistinct commercial buildings,
cubes of space between glass yellowing like onionskin,
making my freak-out obscure.
Suddenly the head is being held between the hands
arranged in one of the conventional configurations:
hands on ears or hands on eyes
or both stacked on the forehead
as if to squeeze the wailing out,
as if the head were being juiced.
The freak-out wants wide open space,
though the rules call for containment —
there are the genuine police to be considered,
which is why I recommend the empty vestibule
though there is something to be said for freaking-out
if the meadow is willing to have you
facedown in it,
mouth open to the dry summer dirt.
When my friend was freaking-out inside my car, I said
she was sitting in the freak-out’s throne,
which is love’s throne, too, so many fluids
from within the body on display
outside the body until the chin gleams
like the extended shy head of a snail! Even
without streetlamps, even in the purplish
penumbra of the candelabra of the firs.
My friend was freaking-out about her freak-outs,
which happened in the produce aisle;
I said: oh yeah at night, it’s very
freak-inducing when the fluorescent lights
arrest you to make their interrogation! Asking
why you can’t be more like the cabbages,
stacked precariously
yet so cool and self-contained,
or like the peppers who go through life
untroubled by their freaky whorls.
What passes through the distillery of anguish
is the tear without the sting of salt — dripping
to fill the test tube of the body
not with monster potion but the H Two… oh, forget it…
that comes when the self is spent.
How many battles would remain
in the fetal pose if the men who rule would rip
their wool suits from their chests like girls
in olden Greece? If the bomberesses
stopped to lay their brows down on a melon.
If the torturer would only
beat the dashboard with his fists.
Maypole
Now the tanagers have returned to my dead plum tree —
they sip the pond through narrow beaks.
Orange and yellow, this recurrence
that comes with each year’s baby leaves.
And if the tree is a church and spring is Sunday,
then the birds are fancy hats of women breaking into song.
Or say the tree is an old car whose tank is full,
then the birds are the girls on a joyride
crammed in its seats. Or if the tree is the carnival
lighting the tarmac of the abandoned mall by the freeway,
then the birds are the men with pocketknives
who erect its Ferris wheel.
Or say the tree is the ship that chugs into port
to fill its deck with Doug fir logs,
then the birds are the Russian sailors who
rise in the morning in the streets where they’ve slept,
rubbing their heads and muttering
these words that no one understands.
Les Dauphins
The dogs of the childless are barely dogs.
From tufted pillows, they rule the kingdom.
They’d stand for their portraits
in velvet suits, if they had suits —
holding hats with giant feathers.
And ousting the question: who loves the dog more?
the question becomes: whom does the dog love?
The woman says: you are the one who plays him
a drum, you tap the anthem on his head.
No, the man says, you debone him the hen,
you tie the bow of his cravat.
The dogs of the childless sleep crosswise in bed,
from human hip to human hip — a canine wire
completes the circuit. The man says: I wonder
what runs through his head
when he squeaks and snorls all through his dream?
And the woman says: out
of the dream, I’m in his dream,
riding the hunt in my lovely saddle.
When the masters are gone, the dogs of the childless
stand in the mirror with swords on their hips.
They’d stand for their portraits with dogs of their own
if we were kings, if they weren’t dogs.
The Unturning
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for Ben S., 1936–2010
My friend said: write about the dog in The Odyssey —
four hundred pages in. I found him lying on a dungheap
where ticks sipped his blood, though in his youth
he’d taken down wild animals, eager to kill
for a man the gods favored! Who comes back
in disguise; you expect the dog to give him away
with a lick or a yip, but this is not what happens.
Instead we’re told that “death closed down his eyes”
the instant he saw his master after twenty years away.
And I wondered if my friend had played a trick —
setting me up with this dog who does not do much
but die. When the gods turn away, what can we do
but await their unturning? That means: don’t think
that after so many years of having such a hard pillow,
the dog wasn’t grateful. But I wonder
if, for the sake of the shape of the plot,
the author ought to have let him remain
for another line or two, if only to thump again his tail.
Bats
Light leaves the air like silty water
Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones Page 13