to witness, to taste . . . . From the uranium cradle to hear
hosannas ascend from the ashes of rung bells . . . .
Adam and Eve: 1969
“(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” is everywhere that year,
humming from the radio of the old blue Chevy
at the brand-new drive-thru bank off Metzerott Road where
you’d get a purple lollipop from the lady if you were lucky.
And then Otis Redding died in the plane wreck,
or he already had, and that knowledge is bared to a child’s scrutiny,
and the keen of it enhances the soundtrack,
grief and joy, each a movement, each a groove, each
a tone to be borne and abided, rueful and honey-struck
as the untroubled melancholy of his voice.
And then the assassination of Martin Luther King,
first glimmer of the ways in which
the melody’s ampersand ensnares us, first inkling
of the intertwined harmony of self and society,
call and response, part and counterpart sung
in the choral grandiloquence of the common polity
while the grave-robbers torching oblivion
comment more eloquently than any thin-tied anchor on TV,
my father’s commute to the city dogged by the contagion
of Georgia Avenue storefronts looted to cinders.
And then my best friend’s father sent off to Vietnam—
we were still, marginally, military; Sunday dinner
at the Officers’ Club—and the inverse celebration
when my uncle Billy pulled a lucky draft number.
He was my favorite babysitter, ballplayer, the one
who took me to the drive-in to see
the double feature that poured a mythological foundation
for my adolescence—The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
followed by One Million Years B.C.
Clint Eastwood and Raquel Welch as Adam and Eve,
ideal gender models, everything we desired and desired to be.
How could I have known the years it takes to unlearn
certain lessons, singing “Sugar, Sugar” with the Archies
in the backseat while the honeycomb of our innocence burned
in the streets, everything we would inherit
cast and scorified in the crucible of those years?
How could I tell what was real from what was not?
When Raquel pawed her caveman I smiled,
when Clint said draw I shot.
Iowa: 1983
First trip alone across the country: a dream of driving
through driving rain in Iowa, sodden Iowa,
miles of drenched earth passed through in the gloaming,
roads of pickup trucks, hogpens, corn bins, silos,
a grocery where I stop for apples and white bread,
streetlights reflected on asphalt and dented iron,
on a bright orange Subaru I acknowledge with a nod
as I acknowledge myself, behind the wheel,
Woody Guthrie and the Ramones, the open road,
all that, the scope of the world, its gravity and zeal
beyond rain-wet windows, its diverse
and circumstantial passage, even the familiar become unreal
in light of that unscrolling: taste of liverwurst
and sweet-pickle sandwiches; tears of a woman
on a pay phone beside a piebald horse
in some city flashing past, gone,
perhaps Cedar Rapids; atavistic vision of deepest greenness,
the summoning sheen and wavelength of the corn,
as if the kernels radiated an oceanic luminescence
the husks worked to cocoon and sequester
back into the dark. Of course it was
all much stranger than that, richer and sadder
in its unique and particular word-defying actuality
than my familiar penciled grid of sequential semesters.
Different how, in what way? I can’t say.
I mean that it is unsayable, a string of precious shells
or trading beads—cow, brook, hay—
not the coinage of names but the things themselves,
their totality, their scale and dimension,
the knowledge that there are spheres and levels
one has never conceived: so this is what the rain
feels like in Iowa, in California; this is another way,
another state, another life, another vision.
And then what? What to equal that revelatory awe?
Elizabeth’s beauty like an exhibition
of blown-glass roses, her heart’s raw glory,
the birth of our children,
that great awakening, leaving the hospital
our first morning together like a vestal procession
passing from the lobby into the lightfall
of a pure blue Chicago spring
as if crossing some threshold of universal
import, powered by mysterious agency, a door opening
silently as the future opens its automatic portal
before us, second by second, invisible and astonishing.
My son is born and I am no longer immortal.
The ring shall be closed, the cycle fulfilled.
I am bound over, as in a fairy tale,
to the will of time, pledged to this world
by an oath of fearful enchantment.
Pledged. Promised. Bound over. Beguiled.
Everybody Knows John Lennon Is Dead: 2004
Seated on the avenue eating almond ice cream beneath the orange trees
the Andalusian heat seems at last to have lessened, or
at least there is a breeze to squall the dusty citrus leaves
along the cobbled alleyways as a mélange of ambient music emerges
from the barrio—Eurodisco, Hendrix and the Beatles,
flamenco guitar. A kid on a Vespa hops the curb to deliver
a serrano ham to the bar across the street,
joint of a pig wrapped in muslin carried crosstown
on his shoulder. Nice to know they still resist our microbial foibles,
our fetish with sterility, though there are clearly some
exotic new strains of growth in Sevilla’s petri dish.
You can tell how much has changed by the Germans begowned
in halter tops and spandex shorts milling in fiendish
prolixity around a cathedral that resembles a reticulated spider
escaped from some dank cage of the Iberian Dark Age. As if
every least rain droplet of the future were not equally and altogether
new, alike as minted coins or the waters of the fountain before La Giralda
toward which even now the carriage horses stare in mute desire.
Strange the way one’s life comes to seem a historical diorama,
looking back as from rocky peaks across golden valleys
where regiments of moonlit sunflowers lay siege to the Alhambra.
Sometimes, in the childhood of a now past century,
my family would forgo dinner to banquet on banana splits
at the old Gifford’s ice cream parlor out the parkway,
with the ornate water fountain and marble tabletops,
cloth napkins and fluted silver spoons and formal glassware,
as here, though this, however reminiscent, is not
American ice cream. You can tell by the intensity of flavor,
the almondness of the almond, as you can tell from the woven rubber
chairs that this is not my long-gone suburbia, or any American anywhere,
though it could perhaps be Rome, thirty years ago, when the street vendors
hawked necklaces of hammered iron nails wired to leather thongs
and those clickety-clackety plastic bolas in the floodlights along the Tiber,
a city of bridges and diesel fumes and casual decay, like this one,
though you can tell it isn’t Rome by the scent of rotten citrus in the air,
and the muzzled shadows of Moorish arches, and the wine is wrong,
and though it is always childhood for somebody, somewhere,
it certainly isn’t mine—you can tell because the boys
are drawing aliens on the place mats with sugar-crystal hair,
still moving forward, not yet dreaming in reverse,
trafficking in a brotherhood that promises never to end,
and when “Strawberry Fields” fades down to street noise,
Jackson asks, Which Beatle sings that one, Dad?
And Sam says, John Lennon.
And Jackson says, Idiot—everybody knows John Lennon is dead.
Capitalist Poem #57
Like a sailor practicing knots in the darkness,
like a warrior sharpening his blade in the lull of battle,
like a blind man searching out the figure of a sleeping lover
the mind surges and eddies
through the concourses of the terminal
with its way stations and concessions
of bottled water sandwiches,
dot.com billboards trumpeting instant riches,
another gourmet coffee at the cappuccino bar,
grande decaf half-skim latte,
seeking to delimit its appetites and hungers,
as even Money magazine wonders
how much is enough?
Like one returned home after years of hard travel
I call out in greeting to my familiars—
Avarice, trusted and faithful retainer,
Extravagance, mi compañero,
Greed, my old friend, my bodyguard, my brother.
The Manatee
Deep sunk in the dreamtime of his terminal coma,
the manatee persists like a vegetative outpatient,
victim of the whirling propellers of impatience
and a buoyantly bovine quiescence gone nova.
Dream deep, brother. Dream long and deep, sister sea cow.
May millennia of soft tides and sea grass sustain thy sleep
across the dark ages of extinction. May your memory keep
heavy the hearts and hulls of your inheritors. Us, for now.
Storm Valediction
That sound is the thrashing of paper lanterns against the eaves.
Vessels frail as bodies lit with incandescent blood,
what else but that to survive the storm? What else could there be
to hold back the darkening rain of the city, empathy
like an opal, sorrow like a shriveled raisin
in the dust beneath the stove
but still a raisin. Pockets of odd coins, lint
to speak for transience and the rusted metal of fallen leaves,
paper cups with pastel scrimshaw elephants or diamonds, whatever
yolk the dawn subscribes for our delectation,
whatever throne the night sees fit to claim from the angels.
Difficult, difficult. All of it, any of it—
schoolgirls, vendors of sunglasses, businessmen
trembling their woes toward destiny and sleep—to feel it
or perish in the wicks of unlit candles,
to begin again within the inked shells of Easter eggs.
Steam is rising from grates, a child
pedals a bicycle through the alleyway of ghosts unafraid.
Purity, the maw of it, blackbirds and kestrels
against a sky the color of antique mahjong tiles, color of aspirin
dissolving in seawater as the sun bursts its amnion
of tattered clouds like the raw carcass of the heart revealed.
That sound is the ticking of paper lanterns in the storm.
Just that. It is hard
in the radiance of this world to live
but we live.
Rock Falls, Illinois
Now the clouds are pleasure craft and tugboats towing strings of empties across the mighty Mississippi.
Now we’re singing “Ring of Fire” as we slough past scrap-wood shacks strung high along the levee,
regiments of willow shoots, phalanxes of cottonwood among the islets and sandy channels,
backwater mudflats papered in drowned Nilotic reeds with seedpods rattling in empty sockets
like Babylonian baby toys, like the stork and ibis amulets of ancient Sumerian funerary wands.
Now the palisades are waving kindled branches in warning. Now the local flocks: crow, duck, grackle.
Now the night has shed its skin and taken root, alluvial soil two hundred feet deep, black earth overturned
as the ungainly reapers ratcheting dry stalks to husk-mulch and grain clip through the dusty acres of sheaves.
Now Patty Loveless is on the radio. Now the annual interstate game with the ritual rival across the river.
Now squadrons of geese settle to the stubble field, bushels of apples and butternut squash,
hay bales, clover honey, scarecrows bearing pumpkins and cider to scavenge the empty miles of silos.
Now the country music station from De Kalb or Clinton begins to falter as we come to the first sure sign of the city,
road deconstruction, cigarettes and lotto tickets, two-lanes of jackhammered arterial funnel
to choke the reek of mini-marts and muffler shops back to the long-corrupted aorta.
Now the mills like skeletons of prehistoric whales in the distance.
Now the familiar planetary gloom of a pancake house orbiting against ectopic eclipse,
waiters trundling gurneys of blueberry syrup like doctors delivering a miracle serum
to the lone patient left alive inside the Belgian waffle ward. Now the old neighborhoods of the millworkers,
blue-domed churches and backyard shrines, shuttered taverns and Union Halls,
blocks of wooden bungalows with old-world flags and used car dealers flying patriotic bunting.
Now the upturned cobbles are cast against the ice machine behind the liquor store.
Now the country music is lost altogether. Now we too are lost among the mills and foundries collapsing in decay,
brickyards and crucibles, husks the size of aircraft hangars full of desolate machinery
like the ruins of ancient siege engines or prized displays at a trade show or ghostly exhibition,
the Great Hall of Abandoned Dreams. Now the road expires in barbed wire and tangled thickets,
the bridge a ruin of joists and wishbones in the weeds and broken cinder blocks below,
the Rock River rife with trash and spoil like an animal slit open by hunters to spill the foam and spoor of its entrails.
Now the forsaken freight tracks lead nowhere. Now grocery carts are wheeled across the empty lots
by the hands of invisible shoppers gloved in fallen leaves. Now the clouds are barges full of salt.
The Fly
As for the fly I chased around the bathroom with a towel that night, swatting, slapping, thrashing, pounding,
kicking with one foot the toothbrush cup onto its side, dislodging the tea curtain with a misplaced elbow,
unable for all my efforts to terminate his gallant loops and arabesques, his beeline dives and fighter-pilot vectorings,
his stalls and silences, his crafty retreats, his increasingly erratic bursts toward any open corner or avenue of escape,
behind the toilet, above the shower rod, inside the light wells, disappearing like a magician only to reappear again and again—
as for the fly, our struggle went on a long time. Too long. It was already after midnight when it began, the house calm,
everything dark beyond our gladiatorial arena, crazy to bother, ridiculous to carry on, but I was determined to finish it.
And when he stopped at last, gone for good, the body unseen but certainly dead, pulverized at a blow, squashed and unrecoverable
,
when that silence was assured I felt certain of a conquest too small to call a triumph but a victory nonetheless.
And when, the next day, lifting a fresh towel from the bar, he fell to the floor, not dead but irreparably damaged,
lurching, toppling, lopsided, wing-still, no longer jittering with defiance, no longer challenging fate with desperate brio,
when I discovered him then everything had changed, and we were no longer fated to deadly opposition,
no longer entranced by the simplicity of our struggle, and I no longer understood the antagonism of the night before,
felt entirely alien from it, felt now that it was a perturbing frenzy, a kind of madness that had possessed me.
Which did not mean that he did not have to die, only that it was not, or not anymore, an act of murder but a cost of war,
or so I told myself, adorned in the common skin of my kind, naked before the mirror in the exalted light of morning.
Zeugma
Zeugma. From the Greek, zeugnynai, to join together; from
a pair of animals linked at labor;
yoked oxen. The Greeks, of course, for whom beginnings signified
better than endings, alpha & omega, for whom
x was just another letter: xiphoid, xerophagy, xenophobia, xoanon.
Civilization, perforce, is abecedarian.
When Xenophon’s hoplites charged the Persians at Cunaxa he
denied the agency of local gods, mistaking
vox populi for vox angelica, voice of a suffering populace
entirely freed of fleshly yoke,
uplifted in exquisite agony. Such are the costs of transmigration.
Fish demand ladders, wooden horses
transhumance, referring to reindeer but apropos in Ilium,
green-fingered Lydia or Mesopotamia,
stage for the tidal clash of cultures & languages, ebbs & floods
hardly unique to Persians & Greeks.
Recall the illiterate Pizarro against the hummingbird-feathered
Inca Atahualpa, sun-god & moon-
queen trampled into Andean dust by a few dozen Spaniards
jointly with their horses, gunpowder, &
priestly blessing to sanctify such slaughter in the name of the king of
kings. Back to Xenophon & the Ten Thousand:
on the retreat now, following the Tigris, they come to a ruined city,
Larissa, inhabited by Medes, thought to be
none other than Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, hippogriffs become
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