after you snapped the picture
saliva thick in your mouth
•
Disfigured sequel:
confederations of the progeny
cottaged along these roads
front-center colonials
shrubbery lights in blue
and silver
crèche on the judge’s lawnO the dear baby
People cravingin their mouths
warm milk over soft white bread
2007
DOMAIN
i
A girl looks through a microscopeher father’s
showing her life
in a drop of water or
finger blood smeared onto a glass wafer
Later leaning head on hand
while the sound of scales being practiced
clambers bleakly, adamantly up the stairs
she reads her own handwriting
Neighbors don’t meet on the corner here
the child whose parents aren’t home is not offered a meal
the congressman’s wife who wears nothing but green
tramples through unraked oak leaves yelling
to her strayed dogs Hey Rex! Hey Roy!
Husband in Washington:1944
The girl finding her method:you want friends
you’re going to have to write
letters to strangers
ii
A coffee stain splashed on a desk:her accident her
mistake her true
country:wavy brown coastlineupland
silken reeds swayed by long lectures of the wind
From the shore small boats reach, depart, return
the never-leavers tie nets of dried seaweed weighted
with tumbled-down stones
instructing young fingers through difficult knots
guiding, scraping some young fingers
No sound carries far from here
Rebuked, utopian projection
she visits rarely trying to keep
interior root systems, milky
nipples of stars, airborne wings rushing over
refuge of missing parts
intact
2008
FRACTURE
When on that transatlantic call into the unseen
ear of a hack through whiskey film you blabbed
your misanthrope’s
misremembered remnant of a story
given years back in trust
a rearview mirror
cracked /
shock of an ice-cube biting liquid
Heard the sound / didn’t know yet
where it was coming from
That mirror / gave up our ghosts
This fine clear summer morning / a line from Chekhov:
it would be strange not to forgive
(I in body now alive)
All are human / give / forgive
drop the charges / let go / put away
Rage for the trusting
it would be strange not to say
Love? yes
in this lifted hand / behind
these eyes
upon you / now
2007
TURBULENCE
There’ll be turbulence.You’ll drop
your book to hold your
water bottle steady.Your
mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall
may who ne’er hung there let him
watch the movie.The plane’s
supposed to shudder, shoulder on
like this.It’s built to do that.You’re
designed to tremble too.Else break
Higher you climb, trouble in mind
lungs labor, heights hurl vistas
Oxygen hangs ready
overhead.In the event put on
the child’s mask first.Breathe normally
2007
TONIGHT NO POETRY WILL SERVE
Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon’s eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verbdisgracedgoes on doing
now diagram the sentence
2007
II
SCENES OF NEGOTIATION
Z:
I hated that job butYou’d have taken it too if you’d had a family
Y:
Pretty filthy and dangerous though wasn’t it?
Z:
Those years, one bad move, you were down on your knees begging for work
Zz:
If you’d had a family! Who’d you think we were, just people standing around?
Yy:
Filthy and dangerous like the streets I worked before you ever met me?
Zz:
Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?
•
Hired guards shove metal barriers through plate glass, then prod the first line of protestors in through the fanged opening. Video and cellphone cameras devouring it all. Sucked in and blurted worldwide: “Peace” Rally Turns Violent
Protestors, a mixed bunch, end up in different holding cells where they won’t see each other again
Being or doing: you’re taken in for either, or both. Who you were born as, what or who you chose or became. Facing moral disorder head-on, some for the first time, on behalf of others. Delusion of inalienable rights. Others who’ve known the score all along
Some bailed-out go back to the scene. Some go home to sleep. Others, it’s months in solitary mouthing dialogues with nobody. Imagining social presence. Fending off, getting ready for the social absence called death
•
This isn’t much more than a shed on two-by-fours over the water. Uncaulked. Someone’s romantic hideaway. We’ve been here awhile, like it well enough. The tide retches over rocks below. Wind coming up now. We liked it better when the others were still here. They went off in different directions. Patrol boats gathered some in, we saw the lights and heard the megaphones. Tomorrow I’ll take the raggedy path up to the road, walk into town, buy a stamp and mail this. Town is a mini-mart, church, oyster-bar-dance-hall, fishing access, roadside cabins. Weekenders, locals, we can blend in. They couldn’t so well. We were trying to stay with the one thing most people agree on. They said there was no such one thing without everything else, you couldn’t make it so simple
Have books, tapes here, and this typewriter voice telling you what I’m telling you in the language we used to share. Everyone still sends love
•
There are no illusions at this table, she said to me
Room up under the roof. Men and women, a resistance cell ? I thought. Reaching hungrily for trays of folded bread, rice with lentils, brown jugs of water and pale beer. Joking across the table along with alertness, a kind of close mutual attention. One or two picking on small stringed instruments taken down from a wall
I by many decades the oldest person there. However I was there
Meal finished, dishes rinsed under a tap, we climbed down a kind of stair-ladder to the floor below. There were camouflage-patterned outfits packed in cartons; each person shook out and put on a pair of pants and a shirt, still creased from the packing. They wore them like work clothes. Packed underneath were weapons
Thick silverblack hair, eyes seriously alive, hue from some ancient kiln. The rest of them are in profile; that face of hers I see full focus
One by one they went out through a dim doorway to meet whoever they’d been expecting. I write it down fro
m memory. Couldn’t find the house lateryet
—No illusions at this table.Spoken from her time back into mine.I’m the dreaming ghost, guest, waitress, watcher, wanting the words to be true.
Whatever the weapons may come to mean
2009
III
FROM SICKBED SHORES
From shores of sickness:skin of the globe stretches and snakes
out and inroom sound of the universe bearing
undulant wavelengths to an exhausted ear
(sick body in a sick country:can it get well?
what is it anyway to exist as
matterto
matter?)
All, all is remote from here:yachts carelessly veering
tanker’s beak plunging into the strut of the bridge
slicked encircling waters
wired wristsjerked-back heads
gagged mouthsflooded lungs
All, all remote and near
Wavelengths—
whose?mine, theirs, ourseven
yours who haven’t yet put in a word?
•
So remoteness glazes sickened skinaffliction of distanceso
strangely, easily, clinging like webs spread overnight
by creatures vanished
before we caught them at work
So: to bear this state, this caul which could be hell’s
airborne anaesthetic, exemption from feelingor
hell’s pure and required definition:
—surrender
to un-belonging, being-for-itself-alone, runged
behind white curtains in an emergency cubicle, taking care of its own
condition
•
All is matter, of course, matter-of-courseYou could have taken
courses in matter all along attending instead of cutting the class
You knew the telephone had wires, you could see them overhead
where sparrows sat and chattered together
you alongside a window somewhere phone in hand
listening to tears thickening a throat in a city somewhere else
you muttering back your faulty formulae
ear tuned to mute vibrations from an occupied zone:
an old, enraged silence still listening for your voice
Did you then holding
the phone tongue your own lips finger your naked shoulder as
if you could liquefy touch into sound through wiresto lips or
shoulderslick
down an entire body in familiar mysteryirregardless laws of
matter?
Hopeless imagination of signals not to be
received
•
From the shores of sickness you lie out on listless
waters with no boundariesfloodplain without horizon
dun skies mirroring its opaque face and nothing not
a water moccasin or floating shoe or tree root to stir interest
Somewhere else being the name of whatever once said your name
and you answerednow the only where is herethis dull
floodplain
this body sheathed in indifferencesweat no longer letting the
fever out
but coating it in oilYou could offer any soul-tricking oarsman
whatever coin you’re still palming but there’s a divide
between the shores of sickness and the legendary, purifying
river of deathYou will have this tale to tell, you will have to live
to tell
this tale
2008
IV
Axel Avákar
[Axel Avákar: fictive poet, counter-muse, brother]
AXEL AVÁKAR
The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liar
My roots are not my chains
And I to you:Whose hands have grown
through mine?Owl-voiced I cried then:Who?
But yours was the one, the only eye assumed
Did we turn each other into liars?
holding hands with each others’ chains?
At last we unhook, dissolve, secrete into islands
—neither a tender place—
yours surf-wrung, kelp-strung
mine locked in black ice on a mute lake
I dug my firepit, built a windbreak,
spread a sheepskin, zoned my telescope lens
to the far ledge of the Milky Way
lay down to sleep out the cold
Daybreak’s liquid dreambook:
lines of a long poem pouring down a page
Had I come so far, did I fend so well
only to read your name there, Axel Avákar?
AXEL: BACKSTORY
Steam from a melting glacier
your profile hovering
thereAxel as if we’d lain prone at fifteen
on my attic bedroom floorelbow to elbow reading
in Baltimorean August-
blotted air
Axel I’m back to you
brother of strewn booksof late
hours drinking poetry scooped in both hands
Dreamt you into existence, did I, boy-
comrade who would love
everything I loved
Without my eyelash glittering piercing
sidewise in your eye
where would you have begun, Axelhow
would the wheel-spoke have whirled
your mind?What word
stirred in your mouth without my
nipples’ fierce erection?our
twixt-and-between
Between usyet
my part belonged to me
and when we parted
I left no part behindI knew
how to make poetry happen
Back to you Axel through the crackling heavy
salvaged telephone
AXEL, IN THUNDER
Axel, the air’s beaten
like a drumhead here where it seldom thunders
dolphin
lightning
leaps
over the baysurfers flee
crouching to trucks
climbers hanging
from pitons in their night hammocks
off the granite face
wait out an unforetold storm
while somewhere in all weathers you’re
crawling exposednot by choiceextremist
hell-bent searching your soul
—O my terrifiedmy obdurate
my wandererkeep the trail
I WAS THERE, AXEL
Pain made her conservative.
Where the matches touched her flesh, she wears a scar.
—“The Blue Ghazals”
Pain taught her the language
root of radical
she walked on knives to gain a voice
fished the lake of lost
messages gulping up
from far below and long ago
needed both arms to haul them in
one arm was tied behind her
the other worked to get it free
it hurt itself because
work hurtsI was there Axel
with her in that boat
working alongside
and my decision was
to be in no other way
a woman
AXEL, DARKLY SEEN, IN A GLASS HOUSE
1
And could it be I saw you
under a roof of glass
in trance
could it bewas passing
by and would translate
too late the strained flicker
of your pupilsyour
inert gaitthe dark
garb of your reflection
in that translucent place
could be I might have
saved youstill
couldor would?
2
Laid my ear to your letter trying to hear
Tongue on your words to taste you there
Couldn’tread what y
ou
had never written there
Played your message over
feeling bad
Played your message over it was all I had
To tell me what and wherefore
this is what it said:
I’m tired of you asking me why
I’m tired of words like the chatter of birds
Give me a pass, let me just get by
3
Back to back our shadows
stalk each other Axel but
not only yours and mineThickly lies
the impasto
scrape down far enough you get
the early brushworkemblems
intimate detail
and scratched lines underneath
—a pictograph
one figure leaning forward
to speak or listen
Collected Poems Page 67