AT THE EDGE OF WATER The tourniquet of the creek bed, twists. An embankment set, where, next to me: He who was Mr. Nobody, plodding. Each one I wrote down Until perfecting the purple he gave to one, spring day, I know it sounds precious. My name to cease, be rid. By then I had tied my shoelaces slammed the door, shut “Bitch” to the inside. Was it just me? Or, Mr. Nobody, Or a black bicycle flat like shale?
POSITIVE THINKING IS OVERRATED Down vs. Up all over again. I wind the time around my pen. The way you wind the kite string. Up to Henry. That’s where I look, with my hand like a visor scrying the heaven’s for my once true friend. Logic and poetry have never mixed. Semaphores mutate, are jinxed And slow as turtles. While we teach all, A simile is like something. A metaphor is. My love, a barnacle or pinwheel. My love, a kenning over yonder, or the form of a spindle.
HENRY MOON I would wake up in the middle of the night with the three-dimensional shadow of a little boy standing at the end of my bed, always silent as the movies. It scared me horribly, and when I told my Jesuit, skeptic father about it, he talked to me. I found the courage to speak to the ghost. The problem was, once I acknowledged his existence, the haunting really started. The spirit would kick out from between us When Henry and I sat at the bank, motionless. I could see a lightning bolt in Henry’s eye, A stray wisp inside the blue gleam in it. Contriving to fly ‘e was.
Voices, lights, shadows and objects moving were never uncommon there. I realized at the door that I had to make a decision. I could either accept my “gift” or hide it forever.
I started speaking with scientists, quantum physicists, psychics, anyone associated with paranormals. My goal was to record what I saw and heard, for those who couldn’t. I’m sure that part of that had to do with proving things to my father. When Homer went blind, his great hearing gave him solace.
PREEN IN THE ROOFTOP RAINS By the time he turned in her RX, she Was buried beneath Earth’s glass. Without PLOT, without riot. An antelope she became. If you live on Henry James’ Street, how’s A carrousel rescind? Directly to you, or me, a reign Luring us before? I could lay the lore softly on unsubstantial clay. The word, Henry, could make him go. And if you have to, let him go. If you have to see his angels’ stalemate rising. Henry’s half of the sky.
I poked my stick in, responding to orbs of a sister pool, Echoing southwards. Just to show me my reflection Going.
CAROUSSEL You were a star too, a bicycle burst out of a poster, let beams of rotating light fall curving to earth from a huge eye that only sees the puckered canvas. Muscular strength is slow and deliberate in the bluish light giving us certainty in specific examples: the precision of the antelopes, while the horses tarry, glee of all that jazz tight in uniforms that twist our body. We float foamlike over empire’s spectacle. If the ice breaks out in semaphores, we wait. Charming and elegant. Ropes crack as grace cracks Along to piano music cranking. Ringmaster operates a great machine. wants to show off his gears.
Semaphores can only be accessed using the following operations: Those marked atomic should not be interrupted. Notice that incrementing the variable s must not be interrupted, and the P operation must not be interrupted. The value of a semaphore is the number of units of the resource which are free. Differences between mutexes and semaphores are operating system dependent. Semaphores notify events. Mutexes are meant for mere exclusion only.
ENTRANCE OF RINGMASTER In newspapers we assumed too many mutexes from signs on doors nervous confident soldiers forming novel expressions, so many I had not thought such strong air felt so good for the night falling
QUICK MEDIUM HOUNDS BEHIND THE BICYCLE You could not chase or follow the sound without a compass. We called the dog off of Henry. A voice appeared. Look forward to space success. You meet the voice at pier’s end.
BROCHURE OF APPEARANCES I filtered water through potatoes in a wire net of relationships. We weren’t communists or comrades, Anymore. Pinker than dread. 2 bicycles on mounded hay. Dark satellites in the sky. Was this really all my doing?
EVENING PICNIC IN A VALLEY Water drains down the sink from a colander of potatoes. Morning as usual, offered a porous substitute. Only minutes before I nearly found you around a metaphysical corner. Only hours ago before daylight offered dialogue. This is the ending I must have chosen, my pelvis pressed at Formica’s edge. So now I am here without citylight. Birds and clouds sweep through leaves, offer patchy allusions of a blue sky and its yellow bending. All this, combines with darkness, does not insist on separation. Hot steam rises from the colander, and I slice questions with a sharp red knife: What if I were the forest and you were the light, and you were leaving your place, to find me in mine? What is black, then? What is blacker?
As if you really were the arbiter of Henry’s destiny I needed you to be. As if I could ever live without conditions.
Author had seen more than she wanted to see. She closed her book. Anybody could see that. She closed her book with force. She wanted people to see that. She found him by the creek, skipping rocks. When Author sang his name, he didn’t look up. She stripped down to her pink bikini and jumped in. “Author! What are you doing? You can’t swim in there!” “Why not?” She asked, sticking out from her waist up. “The water’s nice.” “Well, because a monster lives here.” Author’s thighs cut into the thick, brown muck. “What kind of monster?” “The kind you feed,” he said.
Muddy bicycle tracks on the walkway to the front door, evidence that He’s been here. How nonchalantly without even rustling the stray leaves on the concrete. His wanderings, always with the grace of an Apache, outside the General’s bedroom window, his knife shining in the moonlight. Though the sound of him sharpening it afterwards would have been audible to the General’s ears. Here he lies outside the General’s house in a pool of blood, his buckskin shot through with the General’s gun by the General’s wife. She stands there in the darkness of her legacy.
NO OUTLET In the light of time’s street sweeper, a row of ants dribbled along a curb, so tiny, I gave thanks for being human. The not-sound of squirming and the not-sound of ants dying under foot. Each one, lived to be seen, not heard.Up and down Terrace Road, bugs multiplied in miniature colonies. That ice cream cone turned over on the road many, many years Ago. That is the food of ants. ‘Oh keep the worm away” That’s my nostalgia. Or my dog who stays still when I call. I will burn the sugar off the ant, begin a fire wall. You are at the end of this path, my friend. Terrace Road lets out no one.
ARRIVES ON A SUNDAY IN TIME FOR THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER 40 miles -- from North Middleton Township to Mouth (confluence with Susquehanna River)
Spring: the plopping sound and chiming tune sinks into the heart and the heart rings. Athena, put down your sword. Someone rustles on the doorstep, some fire brigade or some man I’ve conjured to clear the air here, electricity stirs. I sing to skipping rocks, sing to the milk man. He leaves gallons of milk in plastic jugs on the front door steps. I leave him with the tiny dollops of skipping rocks I send to the Conodoguinet. Arrives on a Sunday, once a year, in time for winter: the chimney sweeper.
ACCOUSTIC COFFEEHOUSE POEM Subscriptions to the New Yorker. Being ruined by such and such. Even that. I can google. The library is closed by now, another good idea. But this gnawing and gnawing until all spirit turns into muscle. A boy’s bicycle, at the bank. Today’s heat outside. If I start to notice other characters, they come in. Once he disappeared. I could not-even with the crooning music of cafe ambiance, resurrect him.
DISABLED AMERICAN VETERANS CHAPTER NINE Old man, old man, out of my left eye seeing you seeing me I read your tshirt more than twice and heard your substantial cough that will disappear as nothing
HIATUS Who could say why Henry slept, lay supine and dormant ? When, even backing out mornings, and moving formward to the intersection where I turned right to go to school. I could see. Weaving in and out, a car door slamming, black cows on greenery, or the swatch of yellow lightning, staying with me, hello or amen, his voice tight around my eternal throat.
WHERE HIS BIKE LAY FLAT What color was the boy's jacket in that city where you first saw snow where the flag turned into itself by the force of wind. Students say it howled and the jacket was downy red. What color was that little girl's jacket in that country where you first saw bees and honeycombs, read poetry about flees bothering corpses--home-grown and down with the frogs jumping at the bog. That's where the summer started. Down by the cray fish crawling onto a dam. That's where the summer began, when I turned into a man, a bicycle rider into blue sky. Egrets fly long arcs into the sun-lit blue, icicles dangle from that other house all the way yonder across the sea, a sea I don't ever wander into, fret yet, fingers spring in to dip the water. Not a minute, not a year, not a morning glory's worth of life, not the blink of time that was paradise. I pined at the edge of flat ice cricks, Henry wander(ing) (wandered) over where his bike lay flat, another barnacle. The ice, compact, I sipped the runneth over the rim. I see him. Icy him. Over and under and tumbling, lottery balls in the sifter. Stiff corpse frozen, just under the surface. The hodge-podge wreck of a man carted off to the looney bin, my Henry, divorced from the probability of all things falling. All falling things, echo visions flying as designed into night sky gathering starry eyelets that rouge pink, bionically. Laser into the chambers of the bicycle's titanium, Sixo's work, stars and more stars, there being no fear of gravity here, jostling in the sifter, volts rush and reach outwards, a thousand hands and at their tips 10 thousand fingers. Hallucinate the color I wore two thousand eons long ago under neon billboard signs blown glass orange, glowing roundly and out all along the lawn of asphalt, call
Uncle, calling Uncle, Uncle until another boy became the angel I made of snow.
COLLAPSED MATH It was time to take over; the food was in the gulch. Little primroses and the cantilevered clouds perplexed no one anymore. The antelopes had disappeared into the tall yellow-green stalks of beech-grass. My head lost in prairies somewhere in crisis. God knows it was always supposed to have been this way. It was time to grapple with the algorithm. Restore the climate to what it had been before the hurricane. Before the drought. Before the torrents swept shallow river beds. Before I had gone back into the formation of the v, the disappearing of the form until formlessness reigned, wobbling outwards, slowly diaphanous, then completely gone. Out here the stardust tends to scream into the remotest puddle of an asphalt alleyway. Out here in the third eye after a game of chess. I shake the archer’s hand. He draws a bicycle in the sand.
WHAT SIXO TOLD ARJUNA dedicated to Michael S. Harper I took God down all walls. I put God up. I took God down all walls. I put God up. I took God down all walls. I put God up.
The long road drawn long like an arrow. What once were chancellors of space are now like grommets, firecrackers of brightness, faithless geometries, fueled by the opposite of love.
THE OTHERS In every room a ceiling fan, the spooks come to offer metaphors for every poetry. In every bed I have gone to rest terror in the shadow of the blade that spins suspended from a wall a guardian from rain and other outside elements Let the sky come in cloud my sleep let the clouds winnow, tear, whirl or glide along moonlight their outlines claiming a distance I fuck to measure, get there where your trail heads back behind the nursery track into my mansion on a hill or at the lighthouse gabled, even a pale blue promise, let it be, glow yellow, blinds open on bed sheets, a Decatur neighborhood, circa 2001, my smile from side to side flies so fast I might catch you still. Shrilly buckle under the grasping and breathe once, collapse. The fan again. That dasein scene from Memento, I remember, without tattoos
because I go nowhere there’s not a fan spinning. Smile so wide, the horses tried to run me down. Mistaken for their kind, wilder, pre historic. Merely grew sick as sickness can make me, who was born innocent.
As a hunter I do believe I’ve become clever with these tools. Hold a fork. Spoon feed clues, until your heart is covered, and then glazed over by ice. Fish, eye, coaster.
Questions as indifferent as these answers I do not ask the hypocrite. I stare up at you, Henry. As if concentration, that mesmerizing dot in the process of becoming, would reduce or surrender. A flagship voice says don’t stop me you’ve been bothering me my whole life.
And these were “The Others” The ghosts that figured in a fabric in through a hole, a certain light his mother wore. His mother wrought by its other side. She wrote. She might flip a coin, try death or into her son’s consciousness, extend and live again. Shhh lulls him, pulling his real mask. Glimpse in droplets a sheet of death. The other side
out there,
of consciousness—where science lives. The Other side. Where your brother rides in circles reaching an arm, an extended finger poking a black hole, around which a gold ring spins so continuously it seems not to spin. A hero entertains me but I never listen. Hear me hissing Henry, motionless, Miss
ing.
you. And these were “The Others”:
Sirens, singing women Henry entertained. In his ghost parlor, I sat as if drugged— a red liquid splashed against a divan or bed. In the future, I am listening to that purring. I take on the pallor of harlots, rendering your death! Unto you, now once you found me better. Antler horns like spread legs. Against me they moved their skins, like pelts they felt, primitive or furied, by being of the room they were the room
sibilant bitches by being in my heart they became my heart became animal and became my arms as their arms
my hair as their’s and as with their lips I began to respond Shhh your mother said, bending low to pet me The blood appeared as if I had from her breast been fed the same as you. Shhh, she said, I feel you listening. As if inside a chrysalis . . . She seemed to wear a yellow dress. The yellow fabric changed to green. I saw her glowing bluer Then redder she became. A pool appeared in which my shame did ride upon the backs of antelopes, another carrousel reconceived in hell. Yellow bell. And the animals sped so wildly across the void, they burned, and broke, and burned. And all that she became, she became.
And all that she had been, became rehearsed, the frozen plain of ice above,
melting, swallowing every space around my skin, until I was held there in the womb flipping a coin
“I CAN’T ESCAPE UNHAPPINESS,” SAID AUTHOR “IN MARRYING YOU I WOULD TRY.” I. The word “process” from the spine of a book obtrudes. I leave that space, move to my bed, reap into parts, the head of the story, the limbs. In dormant space, where light piano keys call my ears away, closer to the other door where rain, earlier, patters still. Like violins, in and out, I remember creek beds, one spring. I remember Henry. II. If I overtake time by treading back into time, a ruminant cloved-animal appears. Ruminant: a word, Meaning to chew cud, to turn Over in the mind. III. How stomach and mind be linked. Methinks upon this happenstance. If ever love cleaved the gut and mind and led to violence in that union, if ever the lover did reject the contents of her lunch into civilized porcelain, while thinking of betrayal, visions of his leave-taking, the departure of spirit, even before his body departed. Gallows draw
boundaries for his steel trajectory to unknown space. IV. Who are the enemies of process? I ask, laying down my pink Huffy, walk to the shallow bed where a crawfish lay. V. Claw. Unbroken then broken. Claw. Unbroken then broken. VI. In Tennessee I saw a jar. The jar was my heart. I was still as any still thing, as still as a painting. Of a painting, we do not ask it to speak. Of my longing for Henry. Ellipses.
PROCESS And that is where the vatic went. I called to the crab. To the lonely turtle. I wanted oneness with seahorse. Surcease. Wanted to cantilever upwards on that carrousel horse. Of its enigma, I ride regret having to dissect, tear into pieces the crawfish head. arms lay in bits where Henry may-as-well lay dead.
I want to tell you about the look I get sometimes wandering past a shelf of books, how a single word decodes the illusory of my moods, how a single nightmare can emit a thousand lyrics of repair, and skip along the water’s surface as the pools clear out again.
Most pleasure piers looked distinctive however. They pointed determined fingers into the sea. They were designed by engineers not architects.
TAROT PACK Success prevented by Delay with a green strawlike 7 coming out from in between the word: De 7 lay. Guided by the moon. Wolves in the foreground. Earns Rest. The one With Skill. The man inside the infinite Wheel will turn and turn. Until the checkered beehive background Opens to a desert scene. A wagon wheel. Or, something my type. In the background I see the city. Part of the reason Henry Stared. Into the spinning fan of desolation. Part of the reason the moon glows Over pillowy poppy clouds. A lotus forward floating. A red sheet coats the background of Loss. A sword points True north. While other swords move southward.
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple, Pray for me and for all writers, living and dead: Because there are many whose works Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end to the vanity of our calling, make intercession For the treason of all clerks. W.H. Auden, “At the Grave of Henry James”
THE GENERAL OF THE CEILING FAN FACTORY I kept returning to the kitchen’s paradox. There was no report of disease. There was no General to deliver any one of many hierarchies. But I was sure there would be. I dreamed of his white mustache. His old word ways. I wanted to take the box cutter to the police, insist I never crimed. Insist on other forms of carnage. What do minds entertain and never do? And all these miles walked for nothing. No threshold. No Henry. The trance just comes and goes. Comes and goes like a ticking bomb. Tick tock. For that surprise element, my antelopes long for their carthorses, enjoy freakish friendships, codependence. No need I was told: Grommets process at level six.
SNOW ITSELF ARTILLERY To intrigue your ear, I would throw my words around those antelopes, reign in their horns, who in our private lore always thwart your carrousel, but end the mention, well before the bicycle crash, which closed that chapter of space success. You were so distant, still out there. I tried to detour this anecdote to our most outside layers, least monster layers, to my umbilical, blue shivers run down, my birth rite emerging, a memory of what I also heard.
MY ELITIST EXILE Am I on repeat? I keep four fingers down and touch my thumb. In the future will I keep my fingers down? Opened already, turning around at a checkout counter, another detour. No big nuisance— Anapestic salutes: bring me bananas, or, milk, closer to chance occurrences. I had employment, then quit, editorial delays connecting days with money-outcomes. Whereas the stars were already invented for my newborn eyes to see. * Elitist exile, under nether ice, where Henry locks me up. Sad black eyes of prehistoric faces blink and blink. I’ll go home, again. I will repeat. What if existence really does repeat? Peering through glass, I see the changes sweep softly above, over cloudy complaints, hear the laughter, already opening, a world’s rippled shadows bob in widening trees and caress their dappled fingers on the paved roads we sometimes drive, as we make our way homewards. For now, I prefer my thumbs opposable.
PRACTICE OF THE ART CONDITIONS METAPHOR As empire hustles, the romancer evokes the crisis. Still I believe in nothing answering back, in your harlot's uses, any traces, believe in whatever pries open the face into its vestige of smile. Or do I? Assume Sex as product's end, via process. Its aims repudiate, they are never worth the gossip. Obvious, the rhythm of the oarlocks.
ANGLE OF THE CURVE It’s the stagnant, longest spell of silence on my sender/receiver device. Ruminations of little flowers germinate in the greenhouse of Henry’s science school. All of a sudden it’s May. Everyone’s posing. My winter euphony rose sweetly. The streets and skyline, empire’s signature, moved into the natural world, and the lips of its limbs became art deco curves. As I angle another form of fauna, as I hoist, add weight and counterpoint. A shelf of afterlives already contrives to improve the air.
LOOK FORWARD TO SPACE SUCCESS The ceiling fan’s all that’s left of Henry James’s bicycle. Every night I walk upstairs and close the bedroom door, to read for an hour. The fan’s revolutions: incessant, unscrewed, a metronomic rattle similar in syncopation but not in tone, to Henry’s bicycle wheels, as the wind fled through the spokes, which it often did. This time, Henry’s rehearsed; he is a dead man. Or I mean, this time, he’s not. (Another alarm clock wakes me my antelope ring tone, another morning— ceiling fan machinery wobbles.) Mystery had been—where— you were going—now, it’s— when have you gone. I count Chinese Sparrows—or— into the fan blades.
rustle rise above myself
The way I lost my manhood was more like wrong sperm right place, so I put a little more fear in the cheer. Decap— itation more lively, someday, with the loosening of grommets. Antelopes for breakfast, and all morning the grommets, whirrs again machinery with threat of its own annihilation, General Mercury’s horse whinnying, hoof-tracks made from coffee grains, over the surfaces of my living space. My living space, qua assassination. Or, another way I lost my manhood: unloading
the groceries, suds up my skirt. What I don’t get back mowing the lawn. Not this coldest me—though I once resisted all the fish in China. I am no communist, until I’ve had a good shave. May it be here, as well as anywhere, this hunt for the golden ring. On a carrousel, my female thighs (newborn legs)slapping against the horse I ride all the way to where? To what tune? YOU KNOW when the hand cranks and the tiny pastel (China) ponies, ribbons and ceramic bones, start to turn. What music did the maker place in the gearworks of the carrousel? What music did the maker place inside its microchip? (Za za za?) If Henry were here he’d answer me, or be able to tell you Something apocalyptic happened, in space time (remember). He had managed (to chase or follow the sound) by pedaling his bicycle around (the speed of light) so practical. O, no way, beyond no other way of reaching that voice taunting from across the pier.
singing to him
Look forward to space success, I remember him saying.
BOMBING CHINESE SATELLITES: ANOTHER AMERICAN PAST TIME, SOMETIMES EVEN CANADA INTERVENES. EVENTUALLY SOME BODY HAS TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE ATMOSPHERIC SPACE DEBRIS LEADING TO WHAT UNKNOWNS? There was no there, there. But there was a pier. The pier would cast the echo so well for whomever, the voice was speaking, saying there, there, you are going to die, there, there. Henry heard the voice; I was busy on my equipage. What did the music make, inside the microchip, in the gearworks of the carrousel? What a nightmarish (cartoon) horse ride Rachmaninoff would be! and Bach? Ornate enough, but too lofty. These horses were becoming seahorses. Or I walk off this machine. Confront my fear, to descend below the nadir ice. Where I don’t want to be. With those antelopes again. I was chilled. The General lives with me now. We could make beautiful music. Every day, he’s suggesting Motown, Ziggy Stardust. Stuck here, and reformed like Travis Bickle. What he did to those families in France. His murder of innocents during the war.
THERE It wasn’t waxwings he was planning to fly with. That’s the difference. Maybe he made it into space. Maybe he’s there now. In the first story we are told of the treachery of his ambition, to fly, to become something beyond beast or man. We are told this treachery ends in madness. But it’s in madness it begins. He is gone. He is gone. He is never coming back.
RECEPTION Time was. We ferried back and forth. Cell phone signal faded whenever someone was about to say I love you. But Henry didn’t know anything about time, so preoccupied with ascent. I thought he might have been jealous, once, but how do halfformed thoughts surrender win? I had no one. Henry was chasing that sound. Love was on the ground, and I kept on walking towards a better signal, listening for your voice, shutting the others off.
FELT FREE BEING THE BEAR Music guides my attention, denatured, on the drive to the mountains. nightmares of bears plaguing my brother last night. A trailer of horses being pulled in the periphery of my right eye. he tells of ferocious bears hanging out in the moonlight. You can’t play dead when your dreaming. I say, so we’re driving to the mountains, towards that, listening to rock and roll on the radio. He had agreed with me straight off, which he never does, then asked me To repeat myself. You can’t play dead. But his lips suggest a tragedy no heart can make clear. Does he think of his red flesh, falling in chunks? We were drawing near a marina where pine trees and chalets seemed indifferent, transparent and so the trip took us beyond hope and despair, past community gates that rose up, when we told them the code. and the chill, the hurt? It’s where we are now, up in the mountains, theatrical, surveying nature. “Awash in a bath of moonlight.” Try looking the other way.
SUMMERTIME & THE LIVING AIN’T EASY I covet in the form of desire (watermelon gin cooling on nightstand) despair my entry in cotillion. If only the wait broke down wherever the wall’s at (the gin diminishes as it refreshes) and would deadly remain cool in conscience lament fascists and over this. Quarantine will take my place. Meet me at the carrousel, za za, I’m always headed there.
HENRY PARKS A BICYCLE IN THE SPACE GARAGE I. The clouds begin where I keep perfumed, under the carrousel’s ceiling. Imagine an archer’s arrow connecting with Henry’s bicycle, as Henry pedals through woods and into stars, the pacifist descends to combat. The plot begins where I was ending up in Henry’s story, or any other I might write. For now, there was this nonchalant ceiling fan, which I saw chopping my head off from boredom. I was ready to cut and run, right off the page, into another kind of paradox, more surreal, like concealment, or space. Only, this was where Henry was riding his bicycle.
II. He had a blue screen. I had an implicit feeder in my inner ear. And historical relevance on my ceiling. Do his prompts, his projections, ever go on the fritz? Does he have nightmares like this? Even the antelopes react to God’s caprice. Where antelopes roam, they pranced, frenzied under nadir ice, below my feet compact from centuries of vice —all for one cause— the golden ring’s effusive call, its spectacle of horses.
III. Henry asked, as I debased him. Divorce Henry was the saddest see you later alligator appearing on his screen. She had 1, 2. She had 1, 2. These saddest words appearing on his escape, debased him. As if such remorse could spark a sudden interest in space apparel. Whether made of mylar or plastic vellum, elastic or neoprene. The tear in the fabric scratches like my hiss, ages from now. He was deer-parked in his elegance, He was a rapier, I was unmade, managing the saddest face. An alligator, replacable. A poor transmitter, lullaby, an orbital constant, retracing my steps back to the basement where I once saw a bat fright out from a holler.
IV. My metronomic hastier resistor embedded in hysteria sounds like routine equivalents carried forth. Below nadir ice (where the antelopes roam) into outer space, Sir Walter Raleigh or my papiol, even they, direct their SENTENCES, at the pier’s end, towards the carrousel, even to such suburban prisons where I dwell. I keep it all in the family, per se, since the General killed them today, it’s hard to surfeit the names for whom my secrets are purchased, for whose sake I carve hieroglyphs of markings on antelopes with my ice skates, round and round, until I fall.
V. There is one clear voice that easily registers every other silence, every other, as long as you’ve been called. This voice promises a pair of ears for hands. I can hardly stand to hear. Or consider her voice from any other. I leave it to Henry, and howsoever he hears it, no matter how I try to refoot, back again towards icy breakers, when on a neon night, breaths suspended, and longing faltered from the moon to land on rain swept pier, plunge into the ocean, dive closer to the antelopes, when I first heard the sound, first saw the blood appear.
VI. Henry and I, together then, rode round and round on our bicycles, grounded by a nether voice, which we met there, when we got there. Look forward to space success the voice said, jangling in our ears, dogtag clatter’s crystal. Let go of Indian summers and balloon strings, hula hoops and pinstripes, jars of lemonade, serenades of june bugs, piñatas strung over car lots, cherry bombs; burnt ends of candlewicks. Let go of midnight swims wings worn in the school play, hold the lettuce, a pink bicycle, a red mitten unraveling. Let go of the breath you held for the dead canary, Pluck a yellow feather, Press it in a book.
VII. Henry represented the worry of walls. Interupption: italics Where is Henry, where is he,
to get explained my whereabouts? Exactly who heard that voice pitched exactly at the curve of the pier’s end. Who exactly? Where is Henry, where is he, to get explained my whereabouts? The voice also frightened me there and there. Doubly at the end of the pier. Where is Henry, where is he, to get explained my whereabouts?
VIII. What he heard, I myself had heard pitched exactly as others also did, that voice at the end of the pier. But nothing frightened me more than the ominous light beneath the door.
IX. The verdict: The ceiling fan became a spokes and tire. Tick tock, its spinning thrusts a jangling clop, just like an analogue clock. Time for the archer, some kind of joke, to say, you will fight, to release wisdom, earn peace. Another de/lay, Coming closer and then closer, then the 1 is called, another remains. The old story of number 2s connecting night and day. Seahorses don’t appear from thin air or magic. Antelopes and horses, figments of imagination. Where do they come from? China, I guess, as the owl of Minerva flies out of the great wall. How does a 3 or 4 become smaller? Send the Papiol off to war and he’ll grow stronger.
X. Does he have nightmares like this? Embedded in the earth’s glassy body, antelope glaciers, celestial and primitive. Prehistoric class: ruminant. Plunked like glass into the chiasmus of the creek ceiling. Crescendoes: pressing one’s back, one’s shoulders against the saturation of stars, the hush and splendor of silent space. But the horses, barely breathe anymore. The whinnies of the carrousel die down, whatever music the maker made to carry out the crusade, Well, what do I know? Haha bangbang only dreaming of travelling to the Great Wall, only dreaming of other lives.
XI. I don’t like having this boulder put to me. I don’t like the ambiance of this jazz, music. Click. The flutes jettison. A rumble as the brigade turns on my remotest anxiety, the v of birds enter the cleft. Wingspan dithering in a pentameter of a Sunday morning, listening to David Bowie in Milledgeville, GA, CD Wright, my red gloves. I throw down this poem about the turbines. How did Henry James stop the insubstantial stuttering of our sex and learn to pass through AWE into AWE? Alter these corpuscles. Mix in the platelets. And every now and then pops up a dirigible, slicing its hawsers one by one. I can hear the artillery clicking. Radio-static blurs the receiver I need to speak these public lines.
XII. My ear chip on the fritz, hot and sweaty behind the podium, I, the medium, hiding behind her seasoned artifice, rose to tell you this. (I hog the phone repeating every story twice) But in that moment felt the wobble, lost use of the equipment, begged god, the machine to work again, channel sentences I understand.
XIII. The owl of Minerva flies out of the great wall into garages of the universe. Cars parked in them. People in the cars. Machines in the people. The chip inside the machine works in the holler to recover the body. (This pen sounds fricative against this paper, in my ear’s thrum many futures hence.) I rehearse my part. In my ear’s thrum ages from now, I remember I heard what Henry heard. When I rehearse my part, I remember I heard what Henry heard. Eons from now, vibrations against my Mylar suit, a substitute for bicycles. From the hand of the dice thrower, I am launched. I am following him. Hearing the voice taunt now when before it was like a siren’s song.
XIV. Ha. I caught you again. Death sentence plunged in the nadir ice. Ha. Ha. I was sent on by telegraph. Antelopes again. Ha. Ha. I caught you riding on the carrousel. Oh was it a hoax? Or was it a hoax? I caught you again on the carrousel daydreaming about horses and galloping ha ha I caught you
XV. In hearing’s portal, the car is indexed, inside the garage. The car pulls out. Backing out into the street, at any speed, is now an option. God-granted. Backing out at any speed is now an option. 1.2.3 I clear my voice. I look through the death mask I wear. Tap at the microphone pedal. Hear the bad signal scratch back pad through static into a cleaner air. Every now and then, I get worried about the chip in my ear. Dirigibles. Sounds enter me like strings in rosary beads. They come back as English, American. I dilate, my corpuscles steady, descend, work again in congress with platelets and natural chemicals. Joy’s avalanche falls on me with AWE.
XVI. By the skin of our bear teeth, we emigrate. Shelf life barely receding, barely distilled. The calico schoolhouse in the distance where there once was a prairie. I, Davy Crockett. turned the television on at home in America. I, Dostoevsky, was three years old. I, Kumari, kept balance, after Dee Vorce, by watching the families on the television screen. The TV said. DIVORCE. It was a good rehearsal. Mere message. Pantomiming the real, until the real is pantomimed. Garages of the universe. Cars parked in the garages. People in the cars. Inside the people images of these garages of the universe. Laundry machines, TV sets, paint cans and tin foil heaps, spark-plug kits, chipped ceramic pots, houseplants. A pair of creek sneakers and a bicycle. The door slams the TV shut.
XVII. Open the book to open the voice. She comes from across the pier. Look forward to space success, the voice tells the bicycle. The bicycle meets the voice at the end of the universe. A bicycle appears from nowhere. With barely a peep, Sixo rode it into Henry’s chamber, Where the bats lived. That door also slams the book shut.
XVIII. For practice I took the bicycle, for awhile I practiced nature. Rode the bicycle to the creek, no Nantucket, but a spindly creek in central Pennsylvania, crochet blanket thrown aside from my place on the basement couch. Legs still hot from too much of that comfort. Flicked off the power buttons on everything electric. Stopped. Took the bicycle for space practice over the rocky driveway. Moving forward, the rickety sound of air through spokes, engendering the historic sweep.
XIX. Space practice over to the creek. And I stared: The dam and fishermen and egrets. An old house on the other alter set up high with windows to look at, not through. A heap of mowed grass. Egrets again. Crawfish and worms. Flat rocks like platelets. Cantilevered upward, as my hand felt its way through the proper arc and method of throw— rings winnowing out of each one, 2, 3. Dip and glug, infinite recurrence of the same. The heart will work for me, too, said Henry James, How like an island the bicycle becomes.
ADDRESS TO THE PINION What about being a revolver instead of being what’s revolved around? This time the gearworks break. Easier this way, to scapegoat, coax an endgame, in a whinnying I hear slaughter continue. shutter/click What would it be like to become prehensile? Long before the machinery of horse-gears and baroque animals offered their backs. I might not have learned how to ride this carrousel. Think back, I might have never learned to bend my fingers, pry open the shaft, lift a pen. What jeopardy might have become me then? What would it be like, just an atom, no word for heaven. World pinioned for revolt, crystallizing into computer?
ANOTHER BARRACUDA For the coldest days I keep the British Museum in my pocket, an antidote, a little wormwood. Standing in the aisles, no foghorn, but a sense of having lost my purse or keys, drew a chalk-line around my daydream. I retraced my steps: arrived very early to campus, that day, a full fours hours, but by the third hour in the library aisles and the doubling of Henry’s sorrows, I forgot to be where I should be. So I walked out into albedo’s atomic cloud. Some later morning a plane landed. In whatever home God says nothing when I shout. I got tired and made some coffee. The udders of my bathrobe dragging on linoleum. Yiddish. Rubbish. I spent one year with the school psychiatrist. Another barracuda.
HUNTER When I look into that book and next find it just the right size, fits well today inside my paradox. Remotest nub of chance, haunting my every days. Keep it far hence, whatever it was, I know the name but keep my lips pursed. Don’t want to break the spell. When I lift this page up to my beak as you knew I would with my chirping all of yesterday how it was never, ever going to happen again. All of my egrets all white, flying northward, not even frightened, but alas not to return, now, forever out of sight. So nimbly I stay tuned to my next remotest paradox, hurtle upright under duress of stardust. I turn to you, blooming all gloomily purple out there.
ENTITLEMENT While my eyes graze over, pluck forward the lintels there, blue in the caned twilight, like a burial ground, if seen as the sweet end, night-musk fills my beak threatening this glide, toward the terrible focus. Edges of these surfaces forming nests for landing into. Gay paroles in the air, gables full of hawthorn blooms, magnolias under southern shade, a cedar growing upward, as I cut wingspan, slit air’s skin, over green landscapes on which the flight depends. For what am I if not in opposition to what I see? The paradox of the bicycle, like and unlike what I was born as, to be this winged thing, unflappable.
PIECE OF SUGAR The impatient waiter simply waits. She is the one who has time without wanting it. I must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts, to drink my cup of sweetened water. Aperitif— surmount this obstacle with maddening patience. I wait, scant attention paid to the turmoil of my walking days
when I watched the seagulls graze over my head. A time, when I did not endure and spite time but enjoyed the duration of that quivering shadow undulating like the sea waves under the late summer sunlight. I willy-nilly now remember a viscous substance dangling from my eyes that they called tears.
LETTER TO BLANK Your repose, like the languid way in which I eschew the compromise of ____ , is familiar in quality, but related to an utterly different circumstance. As origins of all things prevail only when the intended-historian writes the script, I may circle Yes or No. To what avail? You know you’re AWEsomeness better, and have the tenacity vs. composure to trill its every warbling vertigo. As origins of all things prevail by the rhythm of historical syntax. Just at it should . . . I ran a circle around ______ or ______. Either/Or? Let it not be by chance, I throw I Ching to find the answer.
ELLIPSES (see other version from Another Manuscript) Keep the dilation steady, elastic as the syringe held up Celebrate before the cantilevered clouds, curvature the nanosecond this sound inserts insouciance, Inveterate sound, I slice my hand into it. Let me illustrate. A pair of dice, thrown way back . . . Insertion of an elision, in certain languages strikes me dumbfound. These occasional crises (theatrical searching for pronouns) awakens in me, derisions awakens my impulse for creativity, or spirituality, whichever one prevails. (whichever one listens). Keep the dilation steady, as this is the starting point, right before the nanosecond of the dumb show. What did the IChing say? I asked during transference.
(see other version from Another Manuscript) Through turnstiles. Through occasional crises in certain cities; the feet that are supposed to stay grounded, upright, above the nadir-ice, through which I peer (redundant) at the antelopes. They loosen their roots. Have you ever seen a downed tree? What am I doing here on a frozen crick, another country, without my iceskates, nowhere to be, not yet, wanting only to carve and slices circles in the ice, around the antlers and eyes, lying in the cold-dark Dead for how many centuries? I’m dim-witted, votive, against all troubles, alibis of coherent syntax. I-Ching: stumble up the road, back down again through the windy stairway the underneath
of all high-ball
glasses:
ARCHIPELAGOS As I win my waxwing childhood ride eternal on plastic pomp and circumstance. A nightmare of horses coined, in expert gallop, to and from the sea emerge as antelopes, below the ice, that nadir end of surfaces. I love my pony and her inanimation, juice at her confused whinnying, ridden wild across the waves, break and burn against them and then lose my faculty to adjust the fabulosity from the panic that it should have been.
THE WOOD VENEER(see other version from Another Manuscript) Reflected trough the whiskey glass: Routine equivalents. Bar-hopping in the mix. Barn-swallows. Minx. I am not root-salvaging. Not compromising here. Wish he had been someone else. Correspond with a letter. I went someplace else. He(a)rd the antelopes. Pulled them with a sleigh. Or let the sleigh be pulled by them. Sled down the icy slope, swallowing molasses. As all-white canvas slit diagonally with a box-cutter. Remember who they were when all literate? Could I learn to smell again. Re-remember what once made me (happier than this). Rowing and rowing. Large gray elephant. Frozen over, the antelopes drowned in the lake. Gone extinct by winter, good night, we wish ourselves past loves pantomime. Cardboard love paintings, ominous characters under the lake glass. Peer through to the animals under your feet, find Cardboard love pantomiming on the telephone line: O cord, cord, did you need a soul for that? In the eighties I was free. My chakras like a Rubik’s Cube, and his rung by hula hoops. Did mine
not find a counterpart? I don’t know pellets of snow, Can see past the road’s fast jetties, Someone dies. Each eye puts on a new shoe. Open. Split. Theatrical. A combination we can’t see anymore, we wax on, corpuscles coursing roads as they arch and deepen in their retreat, fast jetties of winsome. Ah bicycle. did you need a soul for that? I keep, elementally, by my side, a telescope. This may hurt you some. These forecasts of certain maelstroms, more amenable than others. Nine inches of snow already
THIS CARROUSEL Let me imagine the darkest parts of our bodies. The words come out like moon-doves: Honey. Honeybees, work rings around the constellations, move in revolutions like this carrousel. Coordinates break my heart. Everything they weren’t. Telling you the longitude and latitude. They weren’t everything, once.
PAPER BOAT There was a pink orchid in it. Made with India Ink. I’d have known what boat to make if . . . he stole the paper by being paper with his toes wading knowing the boat with his toes, wading on the sand on the beach, wading into the water when young. Silver rocks, silver rocks were thrown on silver seas. Those were the best words; those were the source words. I had a boat that without . . . what without an ocean for it. There was a fog I’d wrote about somewhere on the water. The way he walked on the sand. No matter how much he loved the ocean.
HUNTED A rifle aimed at chance, hunches lead the scent. Another book discarded, skipped rock on the bottom of a creek bed. I look into the next book. Once, I kept it, flint of shale, far hence, tensing through crosshairs, that it must be bad. Twice, it’s nibbling at the feathers. I already let fall. Where? Wherever it was, I knew the name, I’ve changed my language. Hush, as a welt of mystery appears inside my wing. I’m folding into birdsleep, to follow libraries of downed-trees, to ruffle old feathers, shed new ones, soar angled, into stanzas, obedient, axioms, caught under moonlight, rendered where they bramble, sepia of lavender, gloomier than a wolf. When I lift this book up, elegies of the moors, to my beak as you knew, the view, I chose to, even as your dog ears rise, then flap down, generous not to shut closed, with my shrieking all of yesterday how it was ever, never, I am again with song, going to happen. With all of my egrets, all of them modern, flying northward, not returning, not now, part of the hunt.
HEXAGRAM JINX Try drawing that heart pinker than dread and once drawn away it becomes time to puff out another me, another horse, never stabilized, annoyance with carrousels, the wet blinds, the weepers, the bed being turned-down for another not final rest. I wake mornings 6AM to Antelope alarm bells oozing out of my blackberry pearl, hit snooze being both afraid of my crisis and unmoved.
A RED HARBOR AND THE FLAMES FORM SHADOWS AROUND THEIR FACES, AND SHADOWED AROUND THEIR FORMS, I VEER INTO THE SHADOW, A RED HARBOR, A CROOK OF AN ARM, HE PUT THE OTHER ON THE HIPBONE KEEPING ME SECURE FROM IT. Books I read to go outside and unfrighten, then sleep. Those days as night were not leaving me I breathed without choosing. Bent closer inside the harbor, a kind of lean-to. If tin disguised glass. If the wilted petal fallen from a glass column. If going back, if there was an able to by time travel. If tin disguised glass. But I cut open sky and found something else to glance through. You (hypocrite) will love your easy, effortless look. Even the gods told you not to. Even when papa hushed me to hear the nightingale and the rainwater, mama’s golden bangles clanked on her cocktail glass. The encoded milky whirls through which I stare, crystal vase seafoam green backlit where he was and I was Sending a look to relatives leaving on a city bus, going on pilgrimage (again) a tulip of dust out of the tailpipe. These days you hear a feather landing. I didn’t want to hear it; didn’t try Then got to thinking about something else. Shrugging when asked a question. The lovely arc roses create between eye and vase, when they come fresh-picked, and the dew drops on a granite top cut glass-tenors of peach glow, green flecks, and that winter rouge . . . of certain faces. That time of year . . . He was washing a dinner pot under very hot water, looking at it. Demure. The spout as metallic and vain as pure water. I was looking at him. When the snow was melting, his hand found my button and undid it, looking like a sparrow caught in a barb. Ruing when face and unface mattered, I covet the mask-embers crackling out of the firepit. Flake and detritus outlast farewells, final vestige in the crackling around my red harbor; they say these tulip-puffs die too, cough out embers of leave-taking all animate/inanimate Books I read to go outside and unfrighten, sleep. Those days as night were not leaving me I breathed without choosing. Bent closer inside the harbor, a kind of lean-to.
EVEN THE OCEAN REMEMBERS HIM "I want to sleep the sleep of that child who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea." lorca Then I could forget what the sandpiper said. I sipped the misshapen horn, leveed and bled, by midday, he was dead. I want to slap awake the engine thrumming hidden almost at heaven and now this: deserted beaches, a caw, gentle but maddening. Breaking and breaking. How does my hand cupped, lift just that tiny portion to my lips? With him, I could have had all the more, lyre, rag, mist. Hissing in my ears, sense of distance. Then nothingness.
TO DIVIDE OR NOT What about the irrevocable the doorway that split the self apart standing uncertain of the way in or the way out until I was turning a doorknob back in my memory, about to walk inside the basement, decisions being made then, cauterize what can’t be unmade—there being no way out—just my hand on the door knob— choosing to turn. The nucleus reenacts this—to divide or not. There was a creek bed and inside the waters—the ugly crawfish crawling in loose silt. Men fished on the dam, and I loosened my power—drained by the energy the doors needed to stay locked. There is no argument now having chosen—only AWE.
A VOICE LOOKING AFTER YOU You could chase or follow the sound. Never without a compass. Quick medium hounds behind the bicycle. We called the dog off Sixo. A voice to look after you, the voice said, “For space success.” Jutting slowly like whale fins from an ocean-pier. You could never chase or follow the sound. without a compass. Quick medium hounds tore off behind the bicycle. Sixo said freeze. Sixo said Simon says. Red light. Green light. Even statue. We tried. We tried to call the dog off the bicycle. It was a voice looking after you, “For space success,” the voice said slowly jutting out of the ocean looking like a whale fin from the pier.
PREOCCUPATION WITH ASCENT It could’ve been Sixo because he heard the voice too, who leapt on some other mode of transport, say, a crow. A barn swallow. Anything with wings could’ve picked him up lead him to wherever yonder the voice was urging. He heard it too. The rise and fall of its feminine come-hither calling. Almost angel-like, almost safe. Especially on a warm summer night when Sixo would lay down on the pier to rest. Graced with the feeling he could make plans. Henry paid Sixo to fix that bicycle up right. Sixo knew the price but he had to find a way to live in this world. What Sixo could do with a bicycle any winged thing, would have done for him. And me? What about me. I knew Sixo, say, out the corner of my eye. I could spot him, in his elegance, shining the chrome caps of the tires, even felt, by instinct, what his gifts could do. But he didn’t learn how to tell a story until long after Henry had gone. Off with my heart. I was skipping rocks along the bank
with no one but Henry for company for so long that I missed the longing grown inside him. I kept up the pace, for how long, riding our bicycles away from whatever thing we needed to run. But I was always going back home to my mother, turning right, laying my bike flat on the driveway. So long, I’d say to Henry, learning to deliver himself to that voice on the chariot Sixo was mastering for him, until there was no one left to hear me say, See you later Alligator. And me? What about me. Did I hear that voice during those long afternoons of catching crawfish, skittering along the silt? I held something ugly in my hands one moment, let it go.
LIVING BOOK I had been trying to write it down, but couldn’t stop reading. Galleys once housed prisoners and other beasts. When the river opened, their limbs and guts fell out of heaven and into hell. I had to stop to write it down. Except for the smell up here, there’s not much different on the rooftop, where the pharaoh’s daughter takes a lavender bath. The last page (I couldn’t wait) says she’ll wait against time and myth. She is patient and knows that a ship is drifting upon the river Styx. I pause in the book to read the sentence twice, once inside the illusion: The ship is drifting on the river Styx. and then outside: He is strapped to a cross on a wooden ship, sailing away from the pharaoh’s land. When I wrote these things, they happened, vowels and consonants came out of the mouth, too unripe to echo yet when I wrote them, the ship that was carrying the lovers the one fueled by the oars and oarlocks of slaves began to drift to the horizon becoming an inkblot and then invisible. The copper sky brushed its hair along the sea, and the luck grew into something amorous, when I was reading I wrote this as it happened. There was a long spell of silence finished off by poison.
SANDOVER If I want to travel to Turtle Ocean that’s alright . . . I’ll have to find a way to manage it. And, for God’s sake, No Poaching! Henry James Back again to the cold breakers. Never the sand in toes again. Feels like snow’s coming. Gone already? Let me turn the newspaper page, and see for myself. And yesterday was Turtles. Today it is glass in my soup. Catch, catch, the bauble falling. Begin to stir the soup. Back then there was an old sage. We called him by his name: Sand-over
Sand-over
Back into deeper ocean, the linear crest churned into her remotest self where horizon seemed to greet the plane he stood on. Yesterday was Turtles and tomorrow is a Seahorse and even my own name has gone back home to fetch a mask. Back then there was an old sage. We called him by his name: Sand-over
Sand-over
ANTELOPE CARROUSEL The carrousel is underneath the glass of every high ball you ever drank. Every class encounter made the glass colder. I can see up through this final frontier, now my head’s below the ice. I like to grip the antlers as I ride fast these revolutions. The nadir’s above. How did I grow so bold, so cold in my cheer— being here. God made me come all the way down, from my highest hopes into my remotest despair, to board a rotating spectacle of ancient antelopes, never native to the west. As I turn and turn I sometimes peer further below, but it’s not clear if there’s another holler to fall deeper into. Uncertainty was a theme holding me captive above. That golden ring, to think of all the rising up to grasp what was always, in its design, untouchable. Milledgeville is frozen in time. Milkweed. Memorial Day. Significances. Making coffee for mothers, for General’s wives. I am never going to regret this journeying.
We have been frozen stasis beneath the hallowed human stepping, quaint cotillions above this nadir ice. We can see you sometimes squinting down, through the glass you place on the wood veneer, and the glass is empty now with only your sneer filling it. Every form on earth being filled by it. Even our antithetical merry-go-round on the underside of your condition: prehistoric, we are like the ghosts beholden to your remaining, for memory keeps us locked here, because of memory we still exist, living on the rim of what you sometimes suspect, an eternal drifting out of the soul into a remoter paradox that cleaves to the music your steps create above our locking horns and native instincts, By your steps we’re kept in tune to our own purposes of keeping the General’s ghost eternal, and the ghost of his beloved wife. She rides here beside me, tells me stories about the horses that caused her husband’s madness, either on this side of the surface or the next.
I AM NOT SKY, NOT TREE I am not sky, not tree. I watch my other self step backwards and don’t follow her recession into blue canopy. Now I am on my parent’s bed. The faucet drips to my left and the grandfather clock sings eleven o’clock. I am rushing past her, a husk left on the staircase. There is no witness but this message I record. I kill her but she’s already gone. Make me a cradle to place her in. Make me a song, barn swallow or mockingbirds’, to help me erase the memory. I am not sky, not tree.
THE VOICE FROM THE PIER SPEAKS In the neighborhood you can hear the whistling of the carrousel. She can hear you listening. Shhh. Lie back. She well tell you everything. My jewels grow like islands. Like islands, they drift along the ocean, floating through space-time until the Earth becomes a series of tiny canals and wooden bridges, a world of archipelegos.
HENRY PRACTICES SPACE SUCCESS I remember the wind breaking it, wingspread dither, then thwack of jawbone and cheek against macadam. Grated streaks of red and flesh where his face came to rest sideways and flat. After the shock of him falling, I hallucinate the bird I think I am. This dumb distance between him and the lawn, impossible to navigate. So his arms falter as they sway and fall. A severe thwack of jawbone and cheek, Surrenders to hard stone grated streaks of red and flesh. A picture of white gulls flying the white cliffs of Dover and the expanse of blue sky enlarges, throbs wide, magnifying one glimpse of a god-vein, the rest of god beyond the eye’s kiss. Bones and flesh rubbed into asphalt Where his face rests sideway and flat. I am grief-eclipsed, a descending bird’s body. Only the descending body, stabbing a wing, to break the down-drop, into vein-skin. blue skies blood rains flow.
THE INGRESS OF BLOOD LIKE THE LATE SUMMER LEAVES. A settling quiet in the nighttime brisk now a hushed cool, moist heat swelled out from the playground lot. A child’s squealing on a swingset, parents crushing bags in trunks, a dog’s bark bursts, twenty, thirty feet away—then the sound of tags’ rattle and the dog feeling more distant, car door’s shutting, swings steady with the rusty creaking of a metronome.
FOOD MONEY FOR BIRDS For three days he spent the food money on birds of every kind. The terrace was now alive with birds.--Anais Nin There was the spotlight and the summit. I would wait there for the plump birds, purple in their paint color. Piebald sky, where the dark emptied and where light came through, everywhere else a scatter of birds. Just to remind me what I’d forgotten (where had I put the money?) Inside each new form a bird (another alibi), White birds, black birds, each a little v-line constrained by sky, each bleeting distinct. And by these songs I kept entertained. That the money didn’t make me. I was born of something else. And then made soft by
Even in outer space, in a time capsule, words to move us with\ move with us, become the math we understand. It was\ approximately, a way to let you know where I’d be riding the horse: around the carrousel, here and then there, centered on its pinions.
TO THE KILLER You wandered here after the first night of not knowing why. After the seventh time, you paused at daybreak to think under the sun, of the solitary walk, the tearing away from the hinge. (home) A deluded surge entered with distraction a thrush, or a heavy-lidded man leaning against this damn. This creek, no Nantucket, Hattaras— nor a barge for sea scallops or shrimp. This ship, boat-palm cupping into mucky water where crawfish were, caught and let go, ugliness captured as long as you could bear screeches of innocent witnesses—for whom this was NO new event.
THE GENERAL’S WIFE Beginning here, we must nurse her, turning around backwards, barracudas, nightmares chasing us down airport runways. Out of a glass eye, seeing all this, our future as milky as our ancestors, as caked with mud, as composed. Grave sighs digging into the work, our nurse gives us the only perception of spirit we’ve known. So we glorify her.
I dreamt of some poetry serial killer who leaves notes in a red wax marker. The notes just say “Poetry and basketball don’t mix” I have two poem ideas, and a 3rd idea where the hare and tortoise end up in the same place but on two different chronological scales; the hare races towards death; the tortoise is on a slow crawl to the end of time: It’s a poem, about the differences between the end of one lifetime, versus the end of all time. 1st idea: General Mercury’s Revision idea: attempt trifold structure thing like amon liner—each column takes place in the same chronological moment. In one column is the first poem. Then a revelry about red wood ands sequoias. The third column will show the General in his hermitage. His exile. In the fourth column, everything that’s happening outside of my office window. 2nd idea The second poems asks the question: what is innocent love? And further explores being alienated from it/having to block it out of one’s memory in order to go on with life. Then examines the “awful daring of a moment’s surrender” and that is what that surrendering to love is in its pure form, and with the clarity of hindsight leads into . . . facing the bull; it is a sublime moment; it is pure horror but the apprehension of what is happening (the MIND FUSING WITH a higher truth) overrides any sensory experience of fear or panic. It is ultimately a nightmare, ultimately a story about human power, it is also, ultimately, the story of the limits of man’s quest for nirvana. It is this sublimity that is the real culmination of the quest and it’s endpoint. leads into . . . because what happens after that never compares leads into . . . the ghost walk (the companion to gait of grace. the poet never reaches the dying friend. because the poet walks in circles) the narrator who is, paradoxically, writing the poem, is the dying friend, who is waiting to be rescued by the poet leads into . . . the poet who never comes leads into . . . resolutions of surrendering again—but this time to experience leads into . . . SAFEGUARDING, a whole litany about safeguarding. the fortress built, throwing the memory of innocent love into the ocean with an anchor, building walls, everything, the passage of times, eons, epochs, the art turned into artifact turned into dust and not even a rumor anymore leads into . . . the burning and the desecrations leads into . . . a REVERSAL where love starts ugly and ends pure. So that the referent is always the WISDOM of the leads into . . . THE MEMORY NEVERTHELESS OF THAT MOMENT OF SURRENDER that awful love
INVOCATION They lie who say separation does not strike, the fear, for they have not felt the lie, I wait in the reverse, for the muse knowing my name to tell me my idiom.
POP Points of Parity POD Points of Differentiation 1000 songs in your pocket ^ ^ this is the this is the part that part the puts the customer customer in AWE understands
DECLARING THE ENTERNAL YES On the other side of the everlasting why There is a yes and a yes and a yes. Lucy sees a murder In the Italian square. Would you be so kind, George To fetch my photographs. In the aftermath Of one loss of innocence, her form Returned austerely, Because he seemed not To Die. His anonymous Spirit remained . after all the suspense, and the real killer escorted off the piazza. While black-masked harbingers of death carry the dead away. Lucy remained Ever so worried about the gossip. As George filled the Arno With her postcards, What would become of the tremendous moment When covered in blood, the picture remained in the memory unendingly, an excessive despair of experience never fading.
CReMatIOn oF a LetTEr The big and small lettering on the envelope read like shrubs and redwoods in the landscape of the General’s unconscious mind. The degree of his madness already apparent even before the letter was unsealed. So without even a mention of it, his heartache broke out all over the sun-drenched page (in my hand) the way the silk bouquet of bright flowers bursts from the magician’s tuxedo cuff, the way ants pour down in multitudes the flute of a sand hill, in the early morning hours, dew still wet on grass blades. General’s childish trust in the grace of God, in mercy, articulated with “the jagged end of my knife blade skewering the ventricles of the animal’s heart, bloody from the assault, noisome, its cries.” My fingernail flicks off dead skin dried on the margin. He continues, “unreasonable mortifications pursue the power mongers of good. The hurt pride mortifies. And the pagan power mongers of evil slip by. The just slip by! (exclamation in red ink) “to give the semblance of Blood,” he writes in the margin, below the dead skin flake, which he writes, “is INTENDED to give the semblance of Bread.” The General plans in his utter confusion to erase his words by this method: First. Trap the isolated thought
on the page By an implement Not theoretical, but material. Dirt, for instance. Paint, for instance. Second. Deliver the letter to the Services of Government. The Office of Message Handlers. Third—Wait. The will despairs, is stifled, finally defers to the Fourth step when the vessel is returned to the dirt.
In his lassitude, Henry tumbles into a clearing full of weeds and muck, and even this time, he feels undelivered and betrayed, since his hopes up there, climaxed into a golden sheen, he presumed was space success. A fiery-headed figure emerged, singing a message of mirages in the desert, and the end of time. His disappointed hands gripped the rough twigs of the dry-land fauna, his thirst overpowering reason. The last time: a difficult return to the sky; He was made weary of belief, its humdrum evolution.
WHERE ARE THE DEAD? They tell me not to ask questions. Then a cloud bursts and my head gets stuck watching the sky rust. Since the age of three I stare through the window screen, visions of square after square leap in three dimensions. Oh where is he?
THE UNCANNY OF STRETCH We were persuaded of a ghost station grounded in the body. Come-ons scratching at the wheel, fricative, spinning against this mylar suit. Thought I twere a man. Many futures hence, in a galaxy far far away . . . Don’t let the thicket stop you, Henry. . . . after face-planting on the bedrock of myth . . . Thwack. Wing-spread dither. Bones against macadam. Bedrock this, the voice resounds at the other end of surfaces. Let the horses break your heart, Henry, being so practical, you put your heart right into the spokes instead. Headed off to the dam for skipping rocks. (shimmying over surfaces) Take the picture, there. Centuries hence, they’ll see this bicycle pumping blue like a harp. Go into the thickets, Henry’s voice across the pier repeats. Pumping down, he pumped down harder, pumping uphill towards his ambition. Everything clear until the evening light along the pier, receded, clambering through the wall btw flesh and sky, stars flickering into the pool of what became; the ingress of blood like the late summer leaves, falling as if Henry, too, would join the carrousel, to ride on horses that aren’t real.
BPM 37093: DIAMOND PALACE The outside rind’s a smokescreen. But it sends pulses to the scientists to let them know what’s going on inside. Winking to the billionaires who couldn’t afford its price. Couldn’t begin. 7 billion light years away where its quieter still, extinguished, and near the southern cross, but it commands a diamond core, a metaphor older than Pluto can ever hope to be. Now its fricative against my neoprene suit, it hisses like a wind tunnel. The intense pressures at the heart of such dead stars compress the carbon into diamond. Fricative against my neoprene suit, howls of the wind’s hiss in a tunnel. Father time came out of the Bermuda triangle to mock us. Farther out than Pluto. What once existed, may never exist again. I take in the soft strokes of this felt pen, it sounds like cotton scratching a rock. Quiet enough to propel me out there where its quieter still. I can hear the dull rumble of outer space, punctured in measures by the pounding of the highest piano key. Even the richest man on earth couldn’t begin to afford the core of this white dwarf, it’s outside a smokescreen This white dwarf’s outside like a smokescreen, pull open the gaseous envelope and see the compressed carbon heart. Seven light years away and near the southern cross, a metaphor farther out than Pluto. This dull fricative against my neoprene suit. The cosmos allows/ing but a dull hum and this diamond. Something our sun will become, priceless, by then our pens will cease to function as anything, stops against our hearts. They way I remember it.