climb onto my back and cry wreck it wreck it
like a frog in the grip of ecstatic amplexus
— before the UVB exceeds the threshold
or the chytrid fungus destroys our skin
or trematodes further encyst in our limb buds
or the meteor hits and Earth is once
more wrapped in a cloak of dust.
2.
Please accept my regret
for the frogs that I’ve eaten
but grant me the gig
with which I impaled them
and the words gig and impale
and especially the splashing through
the lake edge at night
searching for eyes!
There was too much to love about their deaths,
using the gig like a picador
stabbing the hump on the neck of the bull
so the darkness roars and throws down its roses!
At least, I felt its velvet petals on my cheeks.
3.
This year’s Christmas trees are tainted
with Pacific chorus frogs
that we’re not supposed to let hop
out the door. But there’s an easy solution:
all you need is a jar.
And the will
to stick the jar in the freezer
overnight
then flush.
It’s simple, it’s clean.
No one’s talking about a whale here
dead in the dooryard.
Or an aurochs or a quagga.
4.
Too late for the golden toads, who vanished
as soon as the scientists arrived to map out
their plots. Until it dawned
on the scientists: they
were the vector. As in:
Look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall filter and fiber your blood.
But in the village you can still buy
figurines, for luck — golden toads
on cell phones and toads on mopeds and toads
who will serenade you with their mandolins.
5.
I don’t have the ending: ask the Vegas Valley leopard frog.
The dwarf hippopotamus or the giant swan.
Stag-moose, shrub-ox, passenger pigeon.
The golden coquí or the short-faced bear.
When we are gone, may some survivor
like Mr. Industrious Roach
evolve enough to hawk our likenesses
for didn’t we cherish commerce and
view fortune as a wheel.
Water Theory
Now I live where I see water — you pay more
to see water. Perhaps the eye prefers the subtlety
of liquid to the commotion of the leaves,
which right now are yellow and spotted,
about to spring into the air. Whereas the water
features nothing falling nothing dying,
its surface made dark or light by clouds
as they sweep past — though they too
decompose when raked by wind, or when the sun
rides in like a warlord in his jeep.
Or could be that we prefer the water
for its resemblance to money, a thin array of coins.
The gray is common; it’s the glimmer that’s rare,
as the red semicircle on the blackbird’s wing
was once prized by native people of the West
in the absence of the cardinal.
Two theories. Now I am out of theories.
Save for one claiming the flat expanse
is also a stage where the self steps out.
And we think the feeling of the body
as hollow as a nutshell or a husk
is the product of threatening it with many
cubic yards of sky, not that it’s finally secured somewhere
to rehearse its final bow.
Elegy for Idle Curiosity
I used to ask aloud such things as: why is the moon round,
buffed only by the chamois cloth of space?
But now I hold my tongue, or else people start to tap
apparatuses they’ve strapped to their hips
as if they were knights. They are knights,
assailed by the uncertain. When it stands to reason
that we must be somewhere on the map: the self
tends to be the only one not knowing where it is.
No more paddling the murk of pointless speculation,
wondering whether the force that stirs the whirlpool
also winds the spider’s web. A person can’t just wobble around
with her mouth open — it arouses
the surveillance. Instead we’re supposed to be
like traffic lights, vigilant in every season.
No more standing like a chanterelle, spewing out ten thousand spores,
penetrating the substrate, laying a fiber everywhere.
Belated Poem in the Voice of the Pond
Time to snuff the candles of the lily pads.
The newts that all summer long
plied thick water with their toe-tips splayed
have dug their own graves
in the dust-brown bottom.
Painted turtles hold their positions
on a log: they are moon rocks
detained by the sun.
The naked trees look muscular
and when bent by the wind
they push back
though their limbs drop off
little by lot. And this time of year
inside each branch you can see
the red fuse, smoldering.
for Hayden Carruth, in memoriam
Early December, Two Weeks Shy
There’s a rectangle of oily substrate where the garden grew,
a greasy vine impounded by each tomato cage
someone meant to store in the shed but somehow the months
just slipped…
no point to hauling them in now
since the days will soon be lengthening again, oh slide me in
to this dark trench on the backward side of autumn
and then just let me sleep…
Only the brussels sprouts are lit on their bright leathery tree
unravaged by the slugs,
unmildewed by the rain.
Siphoning the sheen
off the day’s gray skin,
not suffering from the season
though they dwell among the spores.
Go on, ask how this is possible, however childish it may be
to address the little green bulbs
of their undistinguished brains.
The days will only dim before they brighten;
other friends have taken to their beds.
*Speckled and Silver
I have read a lot of books and most of them I have forgotten,
in particular one about a man who grew up on a farm
or was it ranch in Reno or maybe it was Oregon —
one thing that’s clear is that I read it
lying on the sofa in the Quince Street house
while a particular light* washed over me
that made me realize snow had begun to fall.
Sometime around December ’97,
though in the book it was I think spring in ’53:
as I turned pages I heard the rusty gears
inside the world also struggling to turn.
Time folded then like a musty old quilt
someone had laid me to bed underneath:
I was reading, or was I dreaming I was reading,
other duties suspended, badges removed,
hat on a hook, resignation turned in. All I had to do
was turn on a light when the blue air thickened.
That was it: to turn on a light. Either turn
on the light or just lie there in the dark.<
br />
My Only Objection
I hope the weather is good this day
we celebrate the marriage of Tom and John
now that it’s legal in this state, though I worry
I’m pledging to a sorority whose mission
is making crowns from shiny things
found on the beach or bought on eBay
so all the people who are coupled
can be crowned, but that’s it. Union is king
and union is queen. And one might feel
the urge to combat this insistence
by becoming a drifter. Or by joining everything
to neutralize the hierarchies
between the clouds and the jet stream,
the worm and the dirt,
one shiny fly and the other
shiny, shiny fly! Let the green blades
become one with their holes in the ground, the rootlets
their nutrients, the ant its labor,
the fir needle it carries, the ant the path
it trudges along. Couple the chlorophyll
and the leaf to the light, the skull
to the sky, the frog to the lily,
lily to pond, fly to the frog, yes and even
the frog to the snake. Let us wed
our intestines to cake, the dog
to the bone, spider to web,
man to man and human to human and
creature to creature, and creature
to dust, and all the particles
to all of the waves and quark to quark
and vibrating string to vibrating string
to vibrating string till everything
hums with being crowned.
FREE
Found this old photo album by the road
in a box that also contained an eggbeater
and a pair of skates. Its white vinyl cover
stamped in gold OUR WEDDING —
first page heavy parchment, rain-rumpled
but stiff, with spaces for names,
dates, all the facts
you would not want to forget—all these
left blank. But before we rush
to unhappy conclusions, let me say
it is not such an uncommon thing
to not do, filling in blanks
required in so many ominous settings
that to require it of love
may not seem the work of happy gods.
Who is to say the final vinyl sleeves
foretell any type of troubled uncoupling
just because they are empty?
The inevitable dispersals —
the wayfarer also ends up by the road —
and look: he’s whistling. It is natural
that black turns brown and white goes yellow
as the atmosphere spins
against the gold letters. Every object selected
and carried away as the hawkweed
turns into a ball of achenes
at the base of the Stop sign, where the box
is dissolved by the next season.
Eschatological
When the old man said the woodpecker was gone for good,
I told him no, the experts found one
down in the bayou, where had he been?
So big that when men saw it overhead
they were said to call out for the Lord.
We must not think the worst of the world, I said
because the old man could be a grumbler, one of those
who say that mankind feeds on what is beautiful
and excretes shopping malls
(well he has never had to buy a curler).
But now the experts have retracted their discovery
and it’s the old man who’s gone for good
and the one thing that endures it seems:
those sixty-something ivory-billed woodpeckers
dead in shallow drawers at Harvard
in the Museum of Natural History. Study specimens
for which you do not need a natural pose, it’s more
this thing is dead, let’s not pretend we didn’t kill it.
Bird after bird — and your heart ambushed
by their conformity when one by one
those drawers come rolling out.
Suddenly they’re smaller than they were.
And how do you explain the parallax?
No, you cannot, so roll the drawer back in.
A Little Death, Suitable for Framing
T (the Nobel laureate)
warns us to be on the lookout
for a tailor,
not the Reaper.
We will know him by his well-made
but shabby suit.
And the sharp implement he carries
turns out to be a needle.
In the gloaming we might see its tip,
a speck of light
created by the moon.
Its long thread, of course,
will not be visible.
Until he gets up close.
Etiology of my illness (I ran the nature center near the city, so
the cause could be the boy or the river or the snakes —
all of them left a musky grease on my skin.
The garter snakes’ teeth left tiny red pinpricks;
I liked to show off my not-flinching when they bit me on the arm.
All of them left a greasy musk on my skin,
starting with the boys, with their pleas and their diseases.
I liked to show off my not-flinching when they bit me on the arm
in those days when we thought penicillin or abortion could fix all scenarios
starting with the boys, with their pleas and their diseases.
No one worried much about the porous membranes
in those days when we thought penicillin or abortion could fix all scenarios —
fat chance. I tried to prove myself by swimming far into the river.
No one worried much about the porous membranes
even as the body-boat let down its gangplank for the germs.
Fat chance I proved myself by swimming far into the river
whose water’s clean now, though its bed was found to be a little toxic still.
Even as the body-boat let down its gangplank for the germs
the garter snakes’ teeth left tiny red pinpricks.
Now my bed is clean, but the snakes were found to be a little toxic. Still:
the cause could be the river or the boy who dropped me on my head.)
Rotator Cuff Vortex
for Tim Kelly
When the TV played above the bar, I faked my interest in the game —
it was the bodies that I wanted to tell the stories. Like the story
Tim told of Darryl Stingley: there was a photo of him playing
in his obituary, leaping for the football
in a perfect arabesque (this before the hit that cut
his spinal cord). On Friday nights, Tim and his friends throw
the Vortex ball in the bookstore parking lot, although Tim threw
his shoulder out, and now the game
is on hold until the surgeon finds the time to cut
Tim’s rotator cuff and reattach the fittings. The body tells a story
mostly about loss (all, in Stingley’s case). And still the ball
exerts a pull: the men strain toward it when the TV’S playing,
transfixing the dog as well, who goes crazy playing
fetch, and will retrieve as long as anyone can be coerced to throw,
a drive inbred and neural, although the ball
is, in the dog’s case, a stand-in for some specimen of game —
by what gene does the compulsion travel? In the epic story
of the Maya, the heroes get their necks cut
by the wings of bats down in the underworld, so that their cut
heads can bounce off the hips of the death-lords playing
what is simply ca
lled “the ball game” — naturally, the story
ends with the heroes resurrected, then thrown
into the sky to become the moon and sun. Scholars call the game
a way of ritualizing war, blood not entirely averted by the ball
since the losers were beheaded, skulls racked like bowling balls
in the upperworld arena. I have seen depictions of this cut
into the stones of Chichén Itzá, where you can hear the game
still roaring from the dusty court, although the playing
died five hundred years ago. Also carved there is the throne,
or chacmool, and the king lounging on it, though this story
is debated: could be any doofus spectating. And what’s the story
behind his enthrallment with the ball —
do all round things have gravity, no matter if they’re thrown
by men or spin of their own accord in space, orbs cut
from bigger orbs in a motion picture that’s been playing
ever since The Bang? And we take our minuscule positions in the game.
Forever after, Stingley sat in the throne of his chair, uncomplaining,
probably dumbstruck: your old life cuts out and a story takes over
that’s all a game played by the ball on your neck.
Message Unscripted
Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones Page 15