my footsteps following you up stair-
wells of scarred oak and shredded newsprint
these windowpanes smeared with stifled breaths
corridors of tile and jaundiced plaster
if this is where I must look for you
then this is where I’ll find you
From a streetlamp’s wet lozenge bent
on a curb plastered with newsprint
the headlines aiming straight at your eyes
to a room’s dark breath-smeared light
these footsteps I’m following you with
down tiles of a red corridor
if this is a way to find you
of course this is how I’ll find you
Your negatives pegged to dry in a darkroom
rigged up over a bathtub’s lozenge
your footprints of light on sensitive paper
stacked curling under blackened panes
the always upstairs of your hideout
the stern exposure of your brows
—these footsteps I’m following you with
aren’t to arrest you
The bristling hairs of your eyeflash
that typewriter you made famous
your enormous will to arrest and frame
what was, what is, still liquid, flowing
your exposure of manifestos, your
lightbulb in a scarred ceiling
well if this is how I find you
Modotti so I find you
In the red wash of your darkroom
from your neighborhood of volcanoes
to the geranium nailed in a can
on the wall of your upstairs hideout
in the rush of breath a window
of revolution allowed you
on this jaundiced stair in this huge lashed eye
these
footsteps I’m following you with
1996
SHATTERED HEAD
A life hauls itself uphill
through hoar-mist steaming
the sun’s tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
When?When? cry the soothseekers
but time is a bloodshot eye
seeing its last of beauty its own
foreclosure
a bloodshot mind
finding itself unspeakable
What is the last thought?
Now I will let you know?
or, Now I know?
(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue
mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)
Shattered head on the breast
of a wooded hill
laid down there endlessly so
tendrils soaked into matted compost
become a root
torqued over the faint springhead
groin whence illegible
matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt
volumes of sporic changes
hair long blown into far follicles
blasted into a chosen place
Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)
revenge on the mouth
packed with its inarticulate confessions
revenge on the eyes
green-gray and restless
revenge on the big and searching lips
the tender tongue
revenge on the sensual, on the nose the
carrier of history
revenge on the life devoured
in another incineration
You can walk by such a place, the earth is made of them
where the stretched tissue of a field or woods is humid
with belovéd matter
the soothseekers have withdrawn
you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus
when that place utters its worn sigh
let us have peace
And the shattered head answers back
I believed I was loved, I believed I loved,
who did this to us?
1996–97
1941
In the heart of pain where mind is broken
and consumed by body, I sit like you
on the rocky shore(like you, not with you)
A windmill shudders, great blades cleave the air and corn is ground
for a peasant century’s bread and fear of hunger
(like that, but not like that)
Pewter sails drive down green water
barges shoulder fallowing fields
(Like then, not then)
If upstairs in the mill sunrise fell low and thin
on the pierced sleep of children hidden in straw
where the mauled hen had thrashed itself away
if some were dragged
if some lived and grew old remembering
how the place by itself was not evil
had water, spiders, a cat
if anyone asked me—
How did you get here anyway?
Are you the amateur of drought? the collector
of rains? are you poetry’s inadmissible
untimely messenger?
By what right?
In whose name?
Do you
1997
LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET
1
Your photograph won’t do you justice
those wetted anthill mounds won’t let you focus
that lens on the wetlands
five swans chanting overhead
distract your thirst for closure
and quick escape
2
Let me turn you around in your frozen nightgown and say
one word to you: Ineluctable
—meaning, you won’t get quit
of this: the worst of the new news
history running back and forth
panic in the labyrinth
—I will not touch you further:
your choice to freeze or not
to say, you and I are caught in
a laboratory without a science
3
Would it gladden you to think
poetry could purely
take its place beneath lightning sheets
or fogdriplive its own life
screamed at, howled down
by a torn bowel of dripping names
—composers visit Terezin, film-makers Sarajevo
Cabrini-Green or Edenwald Houses
ineluctable
if a woman as vivid as any artist
can fling any day herself from the 14th floor
would it relieve you to decidePoetry
doesn’t make this happen?
4
From the edges of your own distraction turn
the cloth-weave up, its undersea-fold venous
with sorrow’s wash and suck, pull and release,
annihilating rush
to and fro, fabric of caves, the onset of your fear
kicking away their lush and slippery flora nurseried
in liquid glass
trying to stand fast in rootsuck, in distraction,
trying to wade this
undertow of utter repetition
Look: with all my fear I’m here with you, trying what it
means, to stand fast; what it means to move
5
Beneaped. Rowboat, pirogue, caught between the lowest
and highest tides of spring. Beneaped. Befallen,
becalmed, benighted, yes, begotten.
—Be—infernal prefix of the actionless.
—Be—as in Sit, Stand, Lie, Obey.
The dog’s awful desire that takes his brain
and lays it at the boot-heel.
You can be like this forever—Be
as without movement.
6
But this is how
I come, anyway, pushing up from below
my head wrapped in a chequered scarf a lanterned helmet on this
head
pushing up out of the ore
this sheeted face this lanterned head facing the seep of death
my lips having swum through silt
clearly pronouncing
Hello and farewell
Who, anyway, wants to know
this pale mouth, this stick
of crimson lipsalve Who my
dragqueen’s vocal chords my bitter beat
my overshoulder backglance flung
at the great strophes and antistrophes
my chant my ululation my sacred parings
nails, hair my dysentery my hilarious throat
my penal colony’s birdstarved ledge my face downtown
in films by Sappho and Artaud?
Everyone.For a moment.
7
It’s not the déjà vu that kills
it’s the foreseeing
the head that speaks from the crater
I wanted to go somewhere
the brain had not yet gone
I wanted not to be
there so alone.
1997
CAMINO REAL
Hot stink of skunk
crushed at the vineyards’ edge
hawk-skied, carrion-clean
clouds ranging themselves
over enormous autumn
that scribbleedged and skunky
as the great road winds on
toward my son’s house seven hours south
Walls of the underpass
smudged and blistered eyes gazing from armpits
THE WANTER WANTEDARMED IN LOVE AND
DANGEROUS
WANTED FOR WANTING
To become the scholar of : :
: : to list compare contrast events to footnote lesser evils
calmly to note “bedsprings”
describe how they were wired
to which parts of the body
to make clear-eyed assessments of the burnt-out eye: : investigate
the mouth-bit and the mouth
the half-swole slippery flesh the enforced throat
the whip they played you with the backroad games the beatings by
the river
O to list collate commensurate to quantify:
I was the one, I suffered, I was there
never
to trust to memory only
to go backnotebook in hand
dressed as no one there was dressed
over and over to quantify
on a gridded notebook page
The difficulty of proving
such things were done for no reason
that every night
“in those years”
people invented reasons for torture
Asleep now,head in hands
hands over earsO you
Who do this work
every one of you
every night
Driving south:santabarbara’s barbarous
landscaped mind:lest it be forgotten
in the long sweep downcoast
let it not be exonerated
but O the light
on the raw Pacific silks
Charles Olson:“Can you afford not to make
the magical study
which happiness is?”
I take him to mean
that happiness is in itself a magical study
a glimpse of the unhandicapped life
as it might be for anyone, somewhere
a kind of alchemy, a study of transformation
else it withers, wilts
—that happiness is not to be
mistrusted or wasted
though it ferment in grief
George Oppen to June Degnan:“I don’t know how
to measure happiness”
—Why measure? in itself it’s the measure—
at the end of a day
of great happiness if there be such a day
drawn by love’s unprovable pull
I write this, sign it
Adrienne
1997
PLAZA STREET AND FLATBUSH
1
On a notepad on a table
tagged for the Goodwill
the wordBrooklyn
on the frayed luggage label
the matchbox cover
the nameBrooklyn
in steel-cut script on a watermarked form
on a postcard postmarked 1961
the wordBrooklyn
on the medal for elocution
on the ashtray with the bridge
the inscriptionBrooklyn
in the beige notebook
of the dead student’s pride
in her new language
on the union cardthe love letter
the mortgaged insurance policy
somewhere it would say,Brooklyn
on the shear of the gull
on the ramp that sweeps
to the great cable-work
on the map of the five boroughs
the death certificate
the last phone bill
in the painter’s sighting
of light unseen
till now, in Brooklyn
2
If you had been required
to make inventory
of everything in the apartment
if you had had to list
the acquisitions of a modest life
punctuated with fevers of shopping
—a kind of excitement for her
but also a bandage
over bewilderment
and for him, the provider
the bandage of providing
for everyone
if you had had to cram the bags
with unworn clothing unused linens
bought by a woman
who but just remembered
being handed through the window
of a train in Russia
if you had had to haul
the bags to the freight elevator
if you had been forced to sign
a declaration of all
possessions kept or given away
in all the old apartments
in one building say
at Plaza and Flatbush
or on Eastern Parkway?
Art doesn’t keep accounts
though artists
do as they must
to stay alive
and tend their work
art is a register of light
3
The painter taking her moment
—a rift in the clouds—
and pulling it out
—mucous strand, hairy rootlet
sticky clew to the labyrinth
pulling and pulling
forever or as long
as this grain of this universe
will be tested
the painter seizing the light
of creation
giving it back to its creatures
headed under the earth
1997
SEVEN SKINS
1
Walk along back of the library
in 1952
someone’s there to catch your eye
Vic Greenberg in his wheelchair
paraplegic GI—
Bill of Rights Jew
graduate student going in
by the only elevator route
up into the great stacks where
all knowledge should and is
and shall be stored like sacred grain
while the loneliest of lonely
American decades goes aground
on the postwar rock
and some unlikely
shipmates found ourselves
stuck amid so many smiles
Dating Vic Greenberg you date
crutches and a chair
a cool wit an outrageous form:
“—just back from a paraplegics’ conference,
guess what the biggest meeting was about—
Sex with a Paraplegic
!—for the wives—”
In and out of cabs his chair
opening and closing round his
electrical monologue the air
furiously calm around him
as he transfers to the crutches
But first you go for cocktails
in his room at Harvard
he mixes the usual martinis, plays Billie Holiday
talks about Melville’s vision of evil
and the question of the postwar moment:
Is there an American civilization?
In the bathroom huge
grips and suction-cupped
rubber mats long-handled sponges
the reaching tools a veteran’s benefits
in plainest sight
And this is only memory, no more
so this is how you remember
Vic Greenberg takes you to the best restaurant
which happens to have no stairs
for talk about movies, professors, food
Vic orders wine and tastes it
you have lobster, he Beef Wellington
the famous dessert is baked Alaska
ice cream singed in a flowerpot
from the oven, a live tulip inserted there
Chair to crutches, crutches to cab
chair in the cab and back to Cambridge
memory shooting its handheld frames
Shall I drop you, he says, or shall
we go back to the room for a drink?
It’s the usual question