limb to limb dreaming underneath
conspiring by definition
Bridgestrajectories arched
in shelterrendezvous
two banks to every rivertwo directions
to every bridge
twenty-eight chances
every built thing has its unmeant purpose
v
Every built thing with its unmeant
meaningunmet purpose
every unbuilt thing
child squattingcivil
engineerdevising
by kerosene flarein mud
possible tunnels
carves in cornmeal mushirrigation
canals by index finger
all new learning looks at first
like chaos
the tiny magnet throbs
in citizen’s pocket
vi
Bends under the arc walks bent listening for chords and codes
bat-radar-pitched or twanging
off rubber bands and wires tin-can telephony
to scribble testimony by fingernail and echo
her documentary alphabet still evolving
Walks up on the bridgewindwhippedroof and trajectory
shuddering under her catpaw tread
one of seven
built things holds her suspended
between desolation
and the massive figure on unrest’s verge
pondering the unbuilt city
cheek on hand and glowing eyes and
skirted knees apart
2007
LATER POEMS
(2010–2012)
ITINERARY
i.
Burnt by lightningnevertheless
she’ll walk this terra infinita
lashes singed on her third eye
searching definite shadowsfor an indefinite future
Old shed-boards beaten silvery hang
askew as sheltering
some delicate indefensible existence
Long grasses shiver in a vanished doorway’s draft
a place of originsas yet unclosured and unclaimed
Writing cursive instructions on abounding air
If you arrive with ripe pears, bring a sharpened knife
Bring cyanide with the honeycomb
call before you come
ii.
Let the face of the bay be violetblack the tumbled torn
kelp necklaces strewn alongshore
Stealthily over time arrives the chokehold
stifling ocean’s guttural chorales
a tangle
of tattered plastic rags
iii.
In a physical world the great poverty would be
to live insensateshuttered against the fresh
slash of urine on a wall
low-tidal rumor of a river’s yellowed mouth
a tumor-ridden face asleep on a subway train
What would it mean to not possess
a permeable skin
explicit veil to wander in
iv.
A cracked shell crumbles.
Sun moon and salt dissect the faint
last grains
An electrical impulse zings
outricochets
in meta-galactic orbits
a streak of nervous energy rejoins the crucible
where origins and endings meld
There was this honey-laden question mark
this thread extracted from the open
throat of existence—Lick it clean!
—let it evaporate—
2011
FOR THE YOUNG ANARCHISTS
Whatever we hunger for
we’re not seagulls, to drop things
smash on the rockshurtling beak-down
Think instead the oysterman’s
gauging eyes, torqued wrist
hand sliding the knife into
and away from the valve hinge—
astuteness honed through
generations to extract
the meatCut out it can slip
through your fingersKicked in the sand
forget itOnly every so often will
diver rise up from stalking grounds
lifting this creature into daylight and
everyone standing around
shrinksor think they want someWe’ve
fumbled at this beforetrammeled
in fury, in hungerBegin there, yes
—only fury knowing its ground
has staying power—
Then go dead calm remembering
what this operation calls for—
eye, hand, mindDon’t
listen to chatter, ignore all yells
of haphazard instructionAnd
when you taste it don’t
get too elatedThere’ll be grit
to swallowOr spit to the side
2010
FRAGMENTS OF AN OPERA
Scene One: Ales, Sardinia, 19——
Child’s voice (Antonio):
from this beam
the doctors think
I can hang straight
in this har
ness dang
ling
dai
ly
grow how
I
should be
Explicator’s voice:
Village doctor on a southern island
Treating one of seven
Children of a
Father in prison
For smalltime
Pecuniary
Crimes, maybe
Framed
Mother’s
Heroic measures:
Knee presses, releases
Presses again the lever
Of a machine
Fingers push
Cloth
Under the needle
A woman stitches
Years months weeks days pass
In this way
Six children
Run and scream
Antonio must hang
From a beam
Recitativo: Neurosurgeon’s voice:
It would have been a kind of traction.Who knows how
it might have been done differently, elsewhere, in another
era of medical intervention?Another country?Other
family?It was a kind of childhood.Perhaps rickets?spina
bifida? scoliosis?
Explicator’s voice:
A kind of mind
That would address
Duress
Outward in larger terms
A mind inhaling exigency
From first breath
Knows poverty
Of mind
As death
Whose body must
Find its own mind
Recitativo: Prosecutor’s voice: from the future:
We must prevent this mind from functioning for twenty years.
Scene Two:Turin, Northern Italy
Industrialist’s voice:
Turin, Turin makes tractors for FIAT
Makes armored cars and planes
We’re making, we’re taking,
We’re raising our goals
We can use immigrants
We can use women
Illiterate peasants from the South
There’s a war out there
A World War and it’s buying
Who’s crying?
LIBERTÉ
Ankles shackled
metalled and islanded
holding aloft a mirror, feral
lipstick, eye-liner
She’s
a celebritya star attraction
A glare effacing
the French Revolution’s
risen juicesvintage taste
the Paris Commune’s
fierce inscriptions
lost in translation
2011
TEETHSUCKING BIRD
Doves bleat, crows repeat
ancient scandals
some otherwhere
Listen, that teethsucking bird’s
back up on the telephone wire
talking times and customs
naming the dead to the half-alive
hardship to lyric and back again
to the open road of the toll-taker’s
booth at the last exit
to skateboarding boys of body bags
to the breaker of hearts of the old-age motel
to the would-be weird of the scalded woman’s
escarpment of a face
And this is the now the then the gone
the means and ends the far and near
the news we hear
from the teethsucking bird
2010
UNDESIGNED
i.
It wasn’t as if our lives depended on it—
a torrential cloudburst scattering
mirrors of light : : sunset’s prismatics
in a Tucson parking lot
then the desert’s mute inscrutable
way of going on
but it was like that between us : : those
moments of confrontation caught in dread
of time’s long requirements
•
What’s more dreadful than safety
you’re told your life depends on
a helmet through whose eyeholes
your gun is seeing
only what guns can see
—a mask that wove itself without your
having designed it
ii.
On video : : a man exploding
about being sick for no reason
though he knows he knows the reason
: : a video that will travel
around the world
while the man sickens and sickens
•
You say we live in freedom
Have you watched the ceiling overhead
descending like Poe’s pendulum
moving down slow and soundless
lower and closer for longer
than we’d thought
The last word in freedom
The first word
2011
SUSPENDED LINES
Scrape a toxic field with a broken hoe
Found legacies turn up in splintersblood-codes, secret sharings
Cracks of light in a sky intent on rain
Reading our words from a time
when to write a line was to know it true
Today your voice : : you can make from this
One-string / blue / speaking / guitar
suspended here
2011
TRACINGS
This chair delivered yesterday
built for a large heavy man
left me from his estate
lies sidewise legs upturned
He would sit in the chair spooked by his own thoughts
He would say to himself As the fabric shrinks
the pattern changes
and forget to write it
He would want to say The drug that ekes out
life disenlivens life
I would see words float in the mirror
behind his heaped desk
as thought were smoke
•
The friends I can trust are those who will let me have my death
—traced on a rafter salvaged
from a house marked for demolition
Sky’s a mottled marble slab
webs drift off a railing
There were voices here
once, a defiance that still doesn’t falter
Imagine a mind overhearing language
split open, uncodified as
yet or never
Imagine a mind sprung open to music
—not the pitiless worm of a tune that won’t let you forget it
but a scoreless haunting
2011
FROM STRATA
1
Under this blue
immune unfissured autumn
urbs et orbispivot and axisthrashing
upthrust from strata
deep under : silences
pressed each against
another : sharpened flints
pulverized coralstoneware crumblings
rusted musket muzzles
chips of China-trade
porcelainshackled bone
no death unchained
Here at eye-level the new
news new season new
moment’s momentary flare :
floodlit abstractions
root-rivenscrambling
for adulation
Yes, we lived here long and hard
on surfaces stunned by the wrecking ball
where time’s thought’s creature only
and when all’s falleneven
our remnant renegade selves
—let this too sleep in strata :
the nerve-ends of my footsole
still crave your touch as when
my earlobes glowed between
your quiet teeth
2
Say a pen must write undergroundunderwaterso be it
The students gather at the site :
Come over here and look at this
Looks like writingyesthat’s how they did itthought it
into marks they thought
would outlast them
it would take patience to do thatAnyone
recognize the script?
Could it be music?a manifesto?
3
Rescuers back offhands lifted open as in guilt
for the ancestors no one is rescued from :
curated galleried faces staring
offfrom behind long-stiffened bandages
but who would meet those lookaway eyes
maybe they’re metalblind reflectors
maybe only who choose to look can see :
thought finding itself in act
violet olive brush strokes speaking of flesh
leaps diagonals pauses : a long conversation
with others living and dead
palpable and strange
4
Viscous stealth, brutal calm : subterfugal, churning
encrypted in tarsending expendable
bodies to underworlds unseenuntil
catastrophe blows apart
the premisesa spectacle hits
the TV channelsthen in a blink
a dense cloth wipes history clean :
but never in beds never to warm again
with the pulsing of arrivalshudder of wordless welcome
the body heat of breadwinners and lovers
5
My hands under your buttocksyour fingers numbering my ribs
how a bow scrapes, a string holds the after-pluck
astonishing variationshours, bodies without boundaries
Back into that erotic autumn I search my way defiant
through passages of long neglect
6
Throw the handwritten scraps of paper
into the toilet bowl
to work their way spiraling down
the open gullet of advanced barbarism
So : if you thought no good came from any of this
not the resistance nor its penalties
not our younger moments nor the continuing on
then, I say, trash the evidence
So : a scrap of papera loved bitter scrawl
swirls under into the confluence
of bodily waste and wasted bodies :
—a shredabsorbed, belonging
7
Weathers drag down and claw up the will :
yellowdust windasphalt foga green slash
of aurora borealisor :
a surveillance helicopter’s high-intensity beam
impaling solitudesransacking solidarities
In the end no pleas no bargains :
it’s your own
humanity you’ll have to drag
over and over, piece by piece
page after page
out of the dark
2010–2011
ENDPAPERS
i.
If the road’s a frayed ribbon strung through dunes
continually drifting over
Collected Poems Page 69