have been choked,
attaches itself to the structure
of the old class like a destructive gangrene . . .
it takes on morbid forms of mysticism,
sensualism, moral indifference,
physical and psychic pathological depravations . . .
The old structure does not contain and is unable
to satisfy the new needs . . .”
• • •
—Trying to hold an inner focus while hoarse laughter
ricochets from the guardroom—
• • •
—liquefaction is a word I might use for how I would take you—
• • •
—the daunted river finally
undammed?—
[prevent this mind]
2005
The University Reopens as the Floods Recede
Should blue air in its purity let you disdain
the stink of artificial pine
the gaunt architecture
of cheap political solutions
if there are philosophies to argue
the moment when you would
or wouldn’t spring to shield
a friend’s body or jump
into scummed waters after
a stranger caught submerging
or walk off to your parked
car your sandwich your possible orange
if theories rage or dance
about this if in the event any
can be sure who did
or did not act on principle or impulse
and what’s most virtuous
can we not be nodding smiling
taking down notes like this
and of all places
in a place like this
I’ll work with you on this bad matter I can
but won’t give you the time of day
if you think it’s hypothetical
2006
Draft #2006
i
Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions.
(What were you there for? Why did you walk out? What
would have made you stay? Why wouldn’t you listen?)
—Couldn’t you show us what you meant, can’t we get it right
this time? Can’t you put it another way?—
(You were looking for openings where they’d been walled up—)
—But you were supposed to be our teacher—
(One-armed, I was trying to get you, one by one, out of that
cellar. It wasn’t enough)
ii
Dreamfaces blurring horrorlands: border of poetry.
Ebb tide sucks out clinging rockpool creatures, no swimming
back into sleep.
Clockface says too early, body prideful and humble shambles
into another day, reclaiming itself piecemeal in private ritual
acts.
Reassembling the anagram scattered nightly, rebuilding daily
the sand city.
iii
What’s concrete for me: from there I cast out further.
But need to be there. On the stone causeway. Baffled and
obstinate.
Eyes probing the dusk. Foot-slippage possible.
iv
Sleeping that time at the philosopher’s house. Not lovers,
friends from the past.
Music the vertex of our triangle. Bach our hypotenuse
strung between philosophy and poetry.
Sun loosening fog on the hillside, cantata spun on the
turntable: Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.
Feeling again, in our mid-forties, the old contrapuntal ten-
sion between our natures. The future as if still open, like
when we were classmates.
He’d met Heidegger in the Black Forest, corresponded
with Foucault. We talked about Wittgenstein.
I was on my way to meet the one who said Philosophers have
interpreted the world: the point is to change it.
v
On a street known for beautiful shops she buys a piece of
antique Japanese silk, a white porcelain egg.
Had abandoned her child, later went after him, found the
child had run away.
Hurt and angry, joined a group to chant through the pain.
They said, you must love yourself, give yourself gifts.
Whatever eases you someone says, lets you forgive yourself,
let go.
America, someone says.
Orphaning, orphaned here, don’t even know it.
vi
Silent limousines meet jets descending over the Rockies.
Steam rooms, pure thick towels, vases of tuberose and jas-
mine, old vintages await the après-skiers.
Rooms of mahogany and leather, conversations open in
international code. Thighs and buttocks to open later by
arrangement.
Out of sight, out of mind, she solitary wrestles a huge
duvet, resheathes heavy tasselled bolsters. Bed after bed.
Nights, in her room, ices strained arms. Rests her legs.
Elsewhere, in Andhra Pradesh, another farmer swallows
pesticide.
vii
Condemned, a clinic coughs up its detritus.
Emergency exit, gurneys lined double, mercy draining
down exhausted tubes.
Drills and cranes clearing way for the new premises.
As if I already stood at their unglazed windows, eyeing the
distressed site through skeletal angles.
Tenant already of the disensoulment projects.
Had thought I deserved nothing better than these stark
towers named for conglomerates?—a line of credit, a give-
away?
viii
They asked me, is this time worse than another.
I said, for whom?
Wanted to show them something. While I wrote on the
chalkboard they drifted out. I turned back to an empty room.
Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough. Maybe it was too soon.
ix
The sheer mass of the thing, its thereness, stuns thought.
Since it exists, it must have existed. Will exist. It says so
here.
Excruciating contempt for love. For the strained fibre of
common affections, mutual assistance
sifted up from landfill, closed tunnels, drought-sheared
riverbeds, street beds named in old census books, choked
under the expressway.
Teachers bricolating scattered schools of trust. Rootlets
watered by fugitives.
Contraband packets, hummed messages. Dreams of the
descendants, surfacing.
Hand reaching for its like exposes a scarred wrist.
Numerals. A bracelet of rust.
In a desert observatory, under plaster dust, smashed lenses
left by the bombardments,
star maps crackle, unscrolling.
2006
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth
i
You who can be silent in twelve languages
trying to crease again in paling light
the map you unfurled that morning if
you in your rearview mirror sighted me
rinsing a green glass bowl
by midsummer nightsun in, say, Reykjavík
if at that moment my hand slipped
and that bowl cracked to pieces
and one piece stared at me like a gibbous moon
if its convex reflection caught you walking
the slurried highway shoulder after the car broke down
if such refractions matter
ii
Well, I’ve held on peninsula
to continent, climber
to rockface
Sensual peninsula att
ached so stroked
by the tides’ pensive and moody hands
Scaler into thin air
seen from below as weed or lichen
improvidently fastened
a mat of hair webbed in a bush
A bush ignited then
consumed
Violent lithography
smolder’s legacy on a boulder traced
iii
Image erupts from image
atlas from vagrancy
articulation from mammal howl
strangeness from repetition
even this default location
surveyed again one more poem
one more Troy or Tyre or burning tire
seared eyeball genitals
charred cradle
but a different turn working
this passage of the labyrinth
as laboratory
I’d have entered, searched before
but that ball of thread that clew
offering an exit choice was no gift at all
iv
I found you by design or
was it your design
or: we were drawn, we drew
Midway in this delicate
negotiation telephone rings
(Don’t stop! . . . they’ll call again . . .)
Offstage the fabulous creature scrapes and shuffles
we breathe its heavy dander
I don’t care how, if it dies this is not the myth
No ex/interior: compressed
between my throat
and yours, hilarious oxygen
And, for the record, each did sign
our true names on the register
at the mouth of this hotel
v
I would have wanted to say it
without falling back
on words Desired not
you so much as your life,
your prevailing Not for me
but for furtherance how
you would move
on the horizon You, the person, you
the particle fierce and furthering
2006
Tonight No Poetry
Will Serve
* * *
Waiting for Rain, for Music
Burn me some music Send my roots rain I’m swept
dry from inside Hard winds rack my core
A struggle at the roots of the mind Whoever said
it would go on and on like this
Straphanger swaying inside a runaway car
palming a notebook scribbled in
contraband calligraphy against the war
poetry wages against itself
• • •
Once under a shed’s eaves
thunder drumming membrane of afternoon
electric scissors slitting the air
thick drops spattering few and far
we could smell it then a long way off
But where’s the rain coming to soak this soil
• • •
Burn me some music There’s a tune
“Neglect of Sorrow”
I’ve heard it hummed or strummed
my whole life long
in many a corridor
waiting for tomorrow
long after tomorrow
should’ve come
on many an ear it should have fallen
but the bands were playing so loud
2007
Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time
Lurid, garish, gash
rended creature struggles to rise, to
run with dripping belly
Blood making everything more real
pounds in the spearthruster’s arm as in
the gunman’s neck the offhand
moment—Now!—before he
takes the bastards out
• • •
Splendor in black and ochre on a grecian urn
Beauty as truth
The sea as background
stricken with black long-oared ships
on shore chariots shields greaved muscled legs
horses rearing Beauty! flesh before gangrene
• • •
Mind-shifting gods rush back and forth Delusion
a daughter seized by the hair swung out to bewilder men
Everything here is conflictual and is called man’s fate
• • •
feed enormous flies
Hoofs slicken on bloodglaze
Horses turn away their heads
weeping equine tears
Beauty?
a wall with names of the fallen
from both sides passionate objectivity
2009
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
verb disgraced goes on doing
now diagram the sentence
2007
Scenes of Negotiation
Z: I hated that job but You’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 liqht 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 wate
r 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 from memory. Couldn’t find the house later yet
—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
From Sickbed Shores
From shores of sickness: skin of the globe stretches and snakes
out and in room 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
matter to
matter?)
All, all is remote from here: yachts carelessly veering
tanker’s beak plunging into the strut of the bridge
slicked encircling waters
wired wrists jerked-back heads
gagged mouths flooded lungs
All, all remote and near
Wavelengths—
whose? mine, theirs, ours even
yours who haven’t yet put in a word?
• • •
So remoteness glazes sickened skin affliction of distance so
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 feeling or
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-course You could have taken
courses in matter all along attending instead of cutting the class