just before hitting the ground,
say mint in a jar
purple picked daisies
that still close at night
still love the sun with their wilt.
Say there’s a man out the window or
a cat scratching the door
like a strange man
and no telephone,
no way to call out
or fish guts spilled straight
into the Aegean
farther up the beach
or that our skin can burn
can glare sunward so and scratch.
True, paper-eating bugs
have got in the paper paintings
mold in our pillows, rough sheeting
and that we’ve got to leave
on the ferry on Tuesday,
out with the tide,
but don’t say it say instead
love, I love you you sleepyhead get up
get up get up
the sun is.
TRANSCRIPT OF BIRDS, CONTINUED
[second bird:]---------
[to its mother]
[mother gives it some food]
---------
---------
[chews, no swallows, whole]
[1 and 2 sit] [patiently] [wait]
[mother hands it to the black bird
w/ the orange on its face]
[you’ve got to hand it to her]
THE DAY BEFORE THE DAY BEFORE WE HAVE TO LEAVE
From high above, I take three photographs of the same view of the terraces leading to Chrysopigi: whitewashed church on the peninsula-turned-island, its once-neck cracked by God away from the mainland to save monks under attack. Also it is beautiful, this our everyday view from breakfast, and also it is completely ordinary.
I want to commit it to memory. I want to commit it to memory. The photographs slip in place of memory, metaphors for the actual landscape. Transubstantiation. Out of my hands. I sit and watch.
Plain
I AM ON A PLANE
Have I been
on a plane
the greater part
of the day?
I believe I have.
I fall asleep.
I wake up still
on a plane.
I see the sun out
the window I shut
the window shade I go
to sleep. I wake up.
Still on a plane.
I see the moon halved
in the sky in the late
afternoon the same day.
I spend time off the plane
buying food and killing time
till the next plane leaves
and leave it must
and I on it still
I go to sleep.
*
I am asleep on the plane
next to the coffee machines
and I wake up smelling
burnt coffee on hot plates.
I am still on the plane.
The lady dispensing
the coffee is
halfway down the plane
and I am at the end.
Sometimes they start
at the end
but this is not
one of those times.
I go to sleep.
*
I wake up maybe
five minutes later
maybe an hour
maybe we are almost there and
the lady with the coffee
is two rows off,
has she passed me by
once already, asleep,
and come for a second round or
have I been sleeping
for just five minutes.
I don’t know.
I open the shade halfway.
Tops of clouds.
*
I wake up and my throat is parched
it feels as though the adjustable air hole
has been blowing directly on
my throat
the lady offers me
pretzels peanuts or cookies
I choose peanuts
she gives me two packages
12 g each, calories from fat 60
well and good
but I am so thirsty.
*
I’m on a plane and
the woman next to me
has a project.
She is tearing the pages
of a magazine
into smaller pieces,
maybe to mark pages
in a book, maybe
for some other reason
but I am trying to sleep
and I am trying to sleep.
The lady puts the torn paper
in her purse
for later use.
*
I try objectifying
the flight attendants.
This is not as fun
as one might think.
And a guy gets up into
the middle of the aisle
and begins his mild
calisthenics
bend, stretch, arms up,
bend, toe touch,
arms up,
rolls his head.
*
The overhead bins
of some sizes of planes
are too small for roller
carry-ons so nothing fits
and this is one of those
sizes of planes,
I am row 37
and my bag is row 28,
had to move all
the plastic-wrapped
blankets to fit it,
over there, I keep thinking,
remember to remember
you are missing parts.
*
Am I getting anywhere?
I must be
if slowly, if bit by bit,
an act of faith
hurtling through the sky
500 miles an hour or more
I put myself in someone else’s
hands, nod off, even,
and when I wake
the solid surface of clouds below
looks like a landing pad
in this light.
FARM PLOT
Even looking up, it is flat.
Sky stretched tight just
above the trees, great white lid
flat screen projected with
the movie of a sky (no plot)
great white parallel lines, sky, snowy ground,
a whole house gone blank as if caught between mirrors, smaller and smaller.
Sky pieced with light clouds brown white
washed blue new floodwater
and I can tell I am in Ohio just by the sky and
the parallel horizons line up thusly, mathematical:
huge cloud line, pieced top, like reflected farm plots then
thin line of bright horizon and
then the ground.
INTERVIEW
You love your west. Your home.
I do.
Your rocks. Your landscape.
My mountains. My mountains.
So why do you want to work in Ohio?
I have a job in Ohio.
That simple?
Oh I would not say simple. Rock
is simple. Sand in the desert is. My job
in Ohio is not.
And how is Ohio different?
Ohio is not different.
When you say different do you mean
from itself or from other landscapes?
You said different.
I said different?
Look at the transcript.
So I did.
What I mean is that Ohio is the same as itself.
That seems clear.
In Ohio, I cannot tell field from field. I drive
past a field and cannot find
a mark to differentiate it
from other fields. I have no mountains
to orient my map,
I have no map in my head to begin with, only stop
s
on the route, as with a subway line.
You have no cardinal directions?
No scope. No freeway ramp
high enough to see it from.
High enough for landscape, you mean?
Not nearly landscape.
Could a ladder help?
Perhaps a ladder. Perhaps
I could use a very tall ladder. To take it all in.
LAY OF THE LAND
Listen: train, train.
It goes low, high
the high part lasts longer
low
low, high.
Cool window air
feet height
when I am on my bed.
On my radio
a dead guy sings.
Let’s say it doesn’t bother me.
Let’s say there’s no breeze
and I open the window.
Let’s say no breeze I look out the window.
What does one do the land is flat.
No where for a breeze to start.
I am tired.
It takes more here to walk a dog.
*
A grocery store.
A gas station.
And Upground Reservoir,
built on the old quarry
where they removed the rock,
and Riverbend Park,
the prettiest spot in town but so flat
I can’t tell which direction
the water is going.
Cooper Tires.
A cemetery, then the city edge,
line of trees
field field silo with an eagle
painted on its side
then a plain old silo then 12 more
exactly like it
another cemetery.
National Lime and Stone you can’t see
from the freeway
Benton Ridge Sewage Lagoon
you also can’t see
and the hole they dug
to build the overpass is
now filled with water, a campsite
right by the onramp
surrounded by trailers, and in the overpass pond
roiling screaming kids with inner tubes
then field field field quiet
line of trees
then a cemetery then
field field field field field.
*
And in the winter
the snow flattens things further
a two-dimensional version
of landscape, a map of itself,
flattens everything around it
flattens even the sky.
POEM FOR THE PUTTING IN OF THE NEW CARPET
Findlay, Ohio
This day’s a green one, breezed, wet with air.
I sit by the window, wonder
if I will become kind again
once the carpet is in.
I am far from home.
I am in a house I have bought I have
come far.
*
We put up a painting we have bought,
a painting with pieces of figures taken from Courbet
and spliced to other figures
one’s part of a head that turns into
part of a hand that turns into—who knows?
*
I have painted the two desks green
the kitchen table wine rack
side tables a chair all green
the chairs around the table brown.
This is the stuff of our old families.
We have taken the stuff of our old families
and put a layer of green on.
*
How to hold
to have my house contain.
It keeps out the humidity keeps in the cool
and we will pay for it later for
all of it and our
secret togetherness, now housed,
is put down in a book
and calculated and summed
and the average part is
I have become cold.
Meantime the sky
is heavy without girth
like the wet air.
The sky is a blue roof and not.
*
When the sky is daytime blue
it is a curtain
drawn up over the stars.
At night, the curtain opens
to a flat map of the universe,
the near and far side by side,
one single surface.
*
They are putting the carpet in
right now as we speak
and up will go the green desks
and up papers and books
I will become kind or
I was never not kind
or I am what I always was.
*
Can I have your hand?
Can you put your hand on the top
of my head like a cover
and can you turn it on my hair?
*
Rooms become smaller
with new trim paint and nothing but scrapwood flooring.
It’s an optical illusion—I was never blue.
Can’t count on a house
and the calculations are already such that
I am green. Let’s start again. Again.
Put it in, the carpet,
I need a bottom so as to catch me.
OHIO
This day has a quietness
that sticks. The writing
makes a noise like sheets,
then a quietness.
Yesterday, a sky I could
live with. Day before, wind.
I pushed the side of my car
up against the great nothingness
of air, and it pushed back.
Yesterday the sky had height,
the clouds were measurable
and various. Dark and light.
The blue between the clouds was blue.
SHOWER WATER
stood in the shower today
let water drip off my lids
it wasn’t crying
it was shower water
the top of my eyelids
if I moved back more water
if I moved forward less
Port
BOAT TOUR
You will see to your left the new port
you will see to your right the old,
l’obelisque, to the left the clocktower,
only remaining piece of—
bombed by the Germans when they left,
now a great distribution center for fruit
all the way from Africa,
and the gulls on the roof scare
all at once, middle of the night,
all up in the air and yelling
their human yells, the fruit,
the stars, the war memorials in
three different languages,
bombed par Allemandes in 1944,
the waves are slight, very slight,
the water molecules, I am told,
stay in the same vertical trajectory
though they appear almost to be moving forward.
FIELDGUIDE
is it a red one it is
desert paintbrush it is skyrocket
is it a pink a purple
shooting star is it a wild rose
primrose a morning glory
is it growing on top of a cactus
so prickly pear is it cold
out still glacier lily
can you blow the petals poppy, orange
desert dandelion blown white
it is a weed nonnative pull it
it is this or it is that one
I saw a purple bell upside down
the width of two fingers
I’ve never seen anything
like that way out here
FIELDGUIDE MARGINALIA
Flax
is not yellow as I thought
but purple blue, thin skinned
as poppies—Sue<
br />
has got a thick patch
posing for photographs
with whole mountains
Dandelions, late-stage
here there are bones—
Addie has a bone she found
growing as if from the ground—
and greens and honeybees and
the dandelions have overblown
but there’s always another thing to be,
the puff of white seed only an early
stage of yellow
Valley lily
sweet bells, dress frilled
faced groundward like a little girl,
a picture book: a fairy in each
the bell is her dress part
wait till night only
the sweet
smell will
put you to sleep
take it for a nightcap, even
Radiotower violet
electric blue, blue electric purple
stacked as with signal
the whole meadow covered
all parts connected
Glacier lily
thin, but built for ice
meadow yellow
thin, thin stalked, then the field
turned to shooting stars,
not red like Sue said
but purple-pink, clumped
head first for the ground
petals back, a diver underwater
head first, a whole meadow wide
and the wind blows intermittent
grasses into brushed sea
this rapids, this blown grass
THREE POEMS CALLED “THE BASIL”
The basil
The basil wilted
clear to the side of the pot
and I gave it some water
and it’s back now
I’ve quit my Ohio job I’m
better than ever
The basil
It is amazing the basil
how the water was sucked dry
its wilt and fall
how it took to the new water
and how back to normal
The basil
The basil is big
I trimmed it back to make it bigger
each break a double growth
each stalk tipping with
its own weight
I cannot write about my dead dog
he is dead
the basil I can write is big and alive
KEEPING TRACK
Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World Page 2