thanks to our
Schaefer customers
for their loyalty
and support.
It is brewed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
It knows its place.
It wears its heart on its sleeve
like a poem,
laid out like a poem
with weak line endings and questionable
closure. Its idiom
would not be unfamiliar
to a Soviet film director,
its emblem a stylized stalk
of bronzed wheat,
circlets of flowering hops
as sketched by a WPA draftsman
for a post office mural in 1934.
It conjures a forgotten social contract
between consumers and producers,
a world of feudal fealty—
the corporation
is your friend, your loyalty
shall be rewarded—a vision
of benign paternalism
last seen in Father Knows Best
and agitprop depictions of Mao
sharing party wisdom with eager villagers,
bestowing avuncular unction.
It was, once, the one
beer to have
when you’re having more than one,
slogan and message
outdated as giant ground sloths roaming
the forests of Nebraska,
irrecoverable
as the ex-cheerleader
watching her toddler eat handfuls of sand
at the playground
considers that lost world of pompoms
and rah-rah-let’s-go-team
to be.
It has earned no lasting portion of glory.
It has eaten crow
and humble pie. Long before it was faded
by the sun it appeared
faded by the sun, gathering dust
in the corner
of the bodega or the county store,
cylindrical, handy, holsterable,
its modesty honestly
come by, possessing the courage
of its simple convictions
like the unsuspected gunfighter
emerging from shadow
to defend the weak from tyranny.
And if we have moved forward,
unmasking the designs of the regime
upon our fertile valley,
learning to litigate against the evil sheriff,
such knowledge has left a bitter taste
in our mouths,
and if this can of beer
deserves our attention
it is as a reminder of what it meant
to speak without hypocrisy,
to live unironically,
to be sincere.
Thin, rice-sweet, tasting of metal
and crisp water,
it is no worse than many,
and if it is not an elixir it might serve
as an occasional draft
of refreshment and self-knowledge.
It was established in the United States in 1842.
It contains 12 fl. oz.
Store in a cool place
and drink responsibly.
Poetry and the World
In the world of some poets
there are no Cheerios or Pop-Tarts, no hot dogs
tumbling purgatorially on greasy rollers,
only chestnuts and pomegranates,
the smell of freshly baked bread,
summer vegetables in red wine, simmering.
In the world of some poets
lucid stars illumine lovers
waltzing with long-necked swans in fields
flush with wildflowers and waving grasses,
there are no windowless classrooms,
no bare, dangling bulbs,
no anxious corridors of fluorescent tubes.
In the world of some poets
there is no money and no need
no green cards, no unceremonious toil.
And how can we believe in that world
when the man who must clean up after the reading
waits impatiently outside the door
in his putty-colored service uniform,
and the cubes of cheese at the reception
taste like ashes licked from a bicycle chain,
when the desktops and mostly empty seats
have been inscribed with gutter syllabics
by ballpoint pens gripped tight as chisels,
and the few remaining students are green
as convalescents narcotized by apathy?
But—that’s alright. Poetry
can handle it.
Poetry is a capacious vessel, with no limits
to its plasticity, no end to the thoughts and feelings
it can accommodate,
no restrictions upon the imaginings
it can bend through language into being.
Poetry is not the world.
We cannot breathe its atmosphere,
we cannot live there, but we can visit,
like sponge divers in bulbous copper helmets
come to claim some small portion
of the miraculous.
And when we leave we must remember
not to surface too rapidly,
to turn off the lights in the auditorium
and lock the office door—there have been thefts
at the university in recent weeks.
We must remember not to take the bridge
still under construction, always under construction,
to stop on the causeway for gas
and pick up a pack of gum at the register,
and a bottle of water,
and a little sack of plantain chips,
their salt a kind of poem, driving home.
Girl with Blue Plastic Radio
The first song I ever heard was “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”
There was a girl at the playground with a portable radio,
lying in the grass near the swing set, beyond the sun-lustred aluminum slide,
kicking her bare feet in the air, her painted toenails—toes
the color of blueberries, rug burns, yellow pencils, Grecian urns.
This would be when—1966? No, later, ’67 or ’68. And no,
it was not the very first song I ever heard,
but the first that invaded my consciousness in that elastically joyous
way music does, the first whose lyrics I tried to learn,
my first communication from the gigawatt voice
of the culture—popular culture, mass culture, our culture—kaboom!—
raw voltage embraced for the sheer thrill of getting juiced.
Who wrote that song? When was it recorded, and by whom?
Melody lost in the database of the decades
but still playing somewhere in the mainframe cerebellums
of its dandelion-chained, banana-bike-riding, Kool-Aid-
addled listeners, still echoing within the flesh and blood mausoleums
of us, me, we, them, the selfsame blades
of wind-sown crabgrass spoken of and to by Whitman,
and who could believe it would still matter
decades or centuries later, in a new millennium,
matter what we listened to, what we ate and watched, matter
that it was “rock ’n’ roll,” for so we knew to call it,
matter that there were hit songs, girls, TVs, fallout shelters.
Who was she, her with the embroidered blue jeans and bare feet,
toenails gilded with cryptic bursts of color?
She is archetypal, pure form, but no less believable for that.
Her chords still resonate, her artifacts have endured
so little changed as to need no archeological translation.
She was older than me, worldly and self-assured.
She was, al
ready, a figure of erotic fascination.
She knew the words and sang the choruses
and I ran over from the sandbox to listen
to a world she cradled in one hand, transistorized oracle,
blue plastic embodiment of our neo–Space Age ethos.
The hulls of our Apollonian rocket ships were as yet unbarnacled
and we still found box turtles in the tall weeds and mossy grass
by the little creek not yet become what it was all becoming
in the wake of the yellow earthmovers, that is:
suburbia. Alive, vibrant, unself-consciously evolving,
something new beneath the nuclear sun, something new in the acorn-scented dark.
Lived there until I was seven in a cinder-block garden
apartment. My prefab haven, my little duplex ark.
And the name of our subdivision was
Americana Park.
Wheel of Fire, the Mojave
What is this white intensity
swallowing me as the night swallows and now disgorges
only Jonah was rocked and the night
is sorrowful music
but this is something else? What is this absence,
immersion as faith is a kind of immersion,
a thirst for light in the true air?
Look at the sun’s jailbreak over the violent
walls. I’ve driven all night
to find myself here. Look at the gypsum desert,
elements scattered like 7-Elevens all the way to Death Valley,
the way L.A. reaches into it, one hundred miles or more.
I’m talking about America, the thing itself,
white line unreeling, pure distance, pure speed.
I’ve driven all night
from fear of the darkness that would seize me if I stopped,
even coffee at a truck stop, even water. Look
at the wraiths of stars,
Buick Electras rusting in the freight meadow.
It is the ghost of the light that moves me.
I’m talking about the half-seen,
dawn and evening, desert orchids,
coyotes coming down to the river to drink.
I’m talking about the thing itself,
what rises in the night like anger or grief,
language-less, blistering and overbrimming
as a river coming down from the mountains
to die in the sinks of rushes and alkali,
the absolute purity of light or intention,
memory of grace, seagulls canting windward
above the Great Salt Lake—
the sun, the desert,
the weight of the light is staggering—
until even the flesh of our days falls away,
ash from a cone, fruit from a stone. Even now
when the whirling miraculous
wheel in the sky has risen and vanished at first light,
gears of a huge engine, starlings
drunk on oxygen—
when the wheel
is gone and I am alone with the willows
at the edge of the utterly desolate
Mojave River.
I’ve driven all night toward the basin
of angels. I’ve driven all night without understanding
anything, need or desire, this desert, neon
signs remorseless as beacons.
I’m talking about America.
I’m talking about loneliness, the thing itself.
I’ve driven all night to find myself
here. Look around you,
even now look around you.
Dawn breaking open the days like jeweled eggs,
Joshua trees crippled by this freakish rain of light.
Consciousness
An obsessive compulsion, a ring of keys,
a sequence of numerals to roll the tumblers
and open the golden vault, a web, a blizzard,
a stochastic equation to generate song.
It goes on. There is no satiety mechanism
in the market system, in the agora of thought.
We cannot bloom, cannot flower,
cannot crystallize into coal or diamond
or disassemble ourselves into pure melody.
Alone in the ruined observatory we stand
surrounded by astral bodies, glittering
milk-folds of star creation we stutter to name
but still we cannot burn our fingerprints
into the void. Into. The. Saints of it, myths of it,
cloister, waterwheel, winged lion, myrrh.
Knots of olive wood in a beached rowboat
over which to roast the tiny silver fish
delicious with salt and lemon. Marooned, then,
but well fed on the substance of this world.
And still forsaken. And still hungry.
Smokestacks, Chicago
To burn, to smolder with the jeweled incendiary coal
of wanting, to move and never
stop, to seize, to use,
to shape, grasp, glut, these united
states of transition, that’s
it, that is it,
our greatness, right
there. Dig down the ranges, carve out
rivers and handguns and dumps, trash it,
raze it, torch
the whole stuck-pig of it. Why
the fuck not? Immediately I am flying
past some probably
pickup truck with undeniable motor
boat in tow, a caravan
of fishermen no less, bass and bronze eucalyptus scars,
red teeth of erosion click-clacking
their bitterness. And
the sports fans
coming home through a rain
of tattered pompoms. And the restless
guns of suburban hunters shooting
skeet along the lake. Desire is
the name of every vessel out there, but
I think the wind that drives them
is darker. I think I see
the tiny sails are full of hate
and I am
strangely glad. Don’t stop,
hate and learn to love your hatred,
learn to kill and love the killing of what you hate,
keep moving,
rage, burn, immolate. Let the one
great hunger flower
among the honeysuckle skulls
and spent shells
of the city. Let longing
fuel the avenues of bowling alleys and flamingo
tattoos. Let sorrow glean the shards
of the soul’s bright jars
and abandoned
congregations. Harvest moon
above the petrified
forest of smokestacks.
The Burning Ship
No room for regret or self-doubt in art,
doubt but not self-doubt. The ship hauls anchor,
the kerosene lantern flickers and goes out,
voices in the pitch black swell with anger
as shipmates mistake each other for enemies.
The lantern spills, the pilot drops a lit cigar.
Tragedy ensues and engenders more tragedy.
If only the moon could see, if only the stars
had been granted the power of speech.
But the blind remain blind, the voiceless mute.
The burning ship threads its way between reefs
in the darkness. Doubt, but not self-doubt.
The Future
I would speak to it as to a stream in the forest
where infant ferns grow shapely as serpents or violins.
I would surrender to it if I could drift among the stars
as among a cloud of milkweed spores, or jellyfish.
Years turn, like autumn leaves; they pass,
and we number them, like galaxies or symphonies,
when we should honor them with names,
&nbs
p; like hurricanes, or the craters of the moon.
What will Arcturus ever mean to me
compared to these years—1962, 1986, 2005?
They march beside me like siblings,
they are more intimate than lovers,
they do not turn back when I fall behind.
The future watches us and marvels
at our inability to comprehend it.
Even Einstein only glimpsed its shores,
like Magellan, planting small vineyards
at the edge of the ice, like Erik the Red.
To view it plainly we would need to evict
the self from its rough settlement,
to strip the bark from our limbs and branches,
to reside in a place where atoms and stars
resemble shy animals learning to eat from our hand.
Only then would the future, like a lonely hermit,
find its way to that clearing by the stream in the forest,
and sit beside us on a mossy stone, and listen.
The Zebra Longwing
Forty years I’ve waited,
uncomprehending,
for these winter nights
when the butterflies
fold themselves like paper cranes
to sleep in the dangling
roots of the orchids
boxed and hung
from the live oak tree.
How many there are.
Six. Eight. Eleven.
When I mist the spikes
and blossoms by moonlight
they stir but do not wake,
antennaed and dreaming
of passionflower
nectar. Never before
have they gifted us
in like manner, never before
have they stilled their flight
in our garden. Wings
have borne them away
from the silk
of the past as surely
as some merciful wind
has delivered us
to an anchorage of such
abundant grace,
Elizabeth. All my life
I have searched, without knowing it,
for this moment.
Nights on Planet Earth
Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally “night,” like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian Fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian “Field of Rushes,” the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/Diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).