I want to drown with you in red wine like a pear,
Then sleep in a macédoine of wild berries with cream.
At the Cookout
The wives of my friends
Have the air
Of having shared a secret.
Their eyes are lowered
But when we ask them
What for
They only glance at each other
And smile,
Which only increases our desire
To know . . .
Something they did
Long ago,
Heedless of the consequences,
That left
Such a lingering sweetness?
Is that the explanation
For the way
They rest their chins
In the palms of their hands,
Their eyes closed
In the summer heat?
Come tell us,
Or give us a hint.
Trace a word or just a single letter
In the wine
Spilled on the table.
No reply. Both of them
Lovey-dovey
With the waning sunlight
And the evening breeze
On their faces.
The husbands drinking
And saying nothing,
Dazed and mystified as they are
By their wives’ power
To give
And take away happiness,
As if their heads
Were crawling with snakes.
Pastoral Harpsichord
A house with a screened-in porch
On the road to nowhere.
The missus topless because of the heat,
A bag of Frito Banditos in her lap.
President Bush on TV
Watching her every bite.
Poor reception, that’s the one
Advantage we have here,
I said to the mutt lying at my feet
And sighing in sympathy.
On another channel the preacher
Came chaperoned by his ghost
When he shut his eyes full of tears
To pray for dollars.
“Bring me another beer,” I said to her ladyship,
And when she wouldn’t oblige,
I went out to make chamber music
Against the sunflowers in the yard.
Entertaining the Canary
Yellow feathers,
Is it true
You chirp to the cop
On the beat?
Desist. Turn your
Nervous gaze
At the open bathroom door
Where I’m soaping
My love’s back
And putting my chin on her shoulder
So I can do the same for her
Breasts and crotch.
Sing. Flutter your wings
As if you were applauding,
Or I’ll drape her black slip
Over your gilded cage.
Slaughterhouse Flies
Evenings, they ran their bloody feet
Over the pages of my schoolbooks.
With eyes closed, I can still hear
The trees on our street
Saying a moody farewell to summer,
And someone, under our window, recalling
The silly old cows hesitating,
Growing suddenly suspicious
Just as the blade drops down on them.
Blood Orange
It looks so dark the end of the world may be near.
I believe it’s going to rain.
The birds in the park are silent.
Nothing is what it seems to be,
Nor are we.
We can all hide in its leaves.
We won’t need any clothes either.
I feel as old as a cockroach, you said.
In my head, I’m a passenger on a ghost ship.
Not even a sigh outdoors now.
If a child was left on our doorstep,
It must be asleep.
Everything is teetering on the edge of everything
With a polite smile.
It’s because there are things in this world
That just can’t be helped, you said.
Right then, I heard the blood orange
Roll off the table and with a thud
Lie cracked open on the floor.
October Light
That same light by which I saw her last
Made me close my eyes now in revery,
Remembering how she sat in the garden
With a red shawl over her shoulders
And a small book in her lap,
Once in a long while looking up
With the day’s brightness on her face,
As if to appraise something of utmost seriousness
She has just read at least twice,
With the sky clear and open to view,
Because the leaves had already fallen
And lay still around her two feet.
Late Train
A few couples walk off into the dark.
In the spot where they vanished,
The trees are swaying as if in a storm
Without making the slightest sound.
The train, too, sits still in the station.
I remember a friend telling me once
How he woke up in a long train
Put out of service in a railroad yard.
In the dining car the tables were all set
With wine glasses and fresh flowers,
And the moon’s white glove on one of them.
Here, there’s nothing but night and darkness.
In the empty coach, far in the back,
I think I can see one shadowy passenger
Raising his pale hand to wave to me,
Or to peer at the watch on his wrist
I suspect has stopped running years ago.
Sunset’s Coloring Book
The blue trees are arguing with the red wind.
The white mare has a peacock for a servant.
The hawk brings the night in its claws.
The golden mountain doesn’t exist.
The golden mountain touches the black sky.
Club Midnight
Are you the sole owner of a seedy nightclub?
Are you its sole customer, sole bartender,
Sole waiter prowling around the empty tables?
Do you put on wee-hour girlie shows
With dead stars of black-and-white films?
Is your office upstairs over the neon lights,
Or down deep in the dank rat cellar?
Are bearded Russian thinkers your silent partners?
Do you have a doorman by the name of Dostoyevsky?
Is Fu Manchu coming tonight?
Is Miss Emily Dickinson?
Do you happen to have an immortal soul?
Do you have a sneaky suspicion that you have none?
Is that why you throw a white pair of dice,
In the dark, long after the joint closes?
Late Call
A message for you,
Piece of shit:
You double-crossed us.
You were supposed to
Get yourself crucified
For the sake of the Truth . . .
Who? Me?
The smallest bread crumb
Thankfully overlooked on the dinner table.
A born coward.
A perfect nobody.
And now this!
In the windowpane,
My mouth gutted open.
Aghast.
My judges all wearing black hoods.
It must be a joke.
A big misunderstanding, fellows.
A wrong number, surely?
Someone else’s dark night of the soul.
Against Winter
The truth is dark under your eyelids.
What are you go
ing to do about it?
The birds are silent; there’s no one to ask.
All day long you’ll squint at the gray sky.
When the wind blows you’ll shiver like straw.
A meek little lamb, you grew your wool
Till they came after you with huge shears.
Flies hovered over your open mouth,
Then they, too, flew off like the leaves,
The bare branches reached after them in vain.
Winter coming. Like the last heroic soldier
Of a defeated army, you’ll stay at your post,
Head bared to the first snowflake.
Till a neighbor comes to yell at you,
You’re crazier than the weather, Charlie.
The Emperor
Wears a smirk on his face.
Sits in a wheelchair.
A black cigarillo in one hand,
A live fly in the other.
Hey, sweet mama, he shouts.
I’m wearing my paper crown today
And my wraparound shades
Just for you!
The Garden of Eden parking lot
Needs weeding,
And the candy store
Is now padlocked.
On the street of Elvis look-alikes,
I saw the Klan Wizard in his robes.
I saw the panhandling Jesus
And heard the wind-chime in his head.
•
It’s live horror-movie time,
Says the Emperor,
A can of bug spray in his hand.
He lets my frail mother
Help him cross the street.
She’s charmed by his manner and exclaims:
“Such a nice boy!”
Even with his empty eye sockets
And his amputated legs.
•
When midnight comes—
Commands the Emperor—
Put a mike up to the first roach
Crawling up the kitchen wall.
Let’s hear about their exotic dancers,
Their tuxedos-for-rent places,
And see if their witch trials
Are just like the ones we have.
The priest with a flycatcher
On the altar of a church.
The child left as a baby in a shoebox
Now having a haircut in a barbershop.
The Emperor and his three-legged dog
Peeking in through the open door.
•
Make us see what you see in your head,
Emperor.
I see toy soldiers under everyone’s feet.
I see a house of cards about to fall.
I see a parrot in a cage admiring himself in a mirror.
I see a tall ladder meant to reach the moon
teeming with demons and men.
VIII
from JACKSTRAWS
The Voice at 3 A.M.
Who put canned laughter
Into my crucifixion scene?
The Soul Has Many Brides
In India I was greatly taken up
With a fly in a temple
Which gave me the distinct feeling,
It was possible, just possible,
That we had met before.
Was it in Mexico City?
Climbing the blood-spotted, yellow legs
Of the crucified Christ
While his eyes grew larger and larger.
“May God seat you on the highest throne
Of his invisible Kingdom,”
A blind beggar said to me in English.
He knew what I saw.
At the saloon where Pancho Villa
Fired his revolvers at the ceiling,
On the bare ass of a naked nymph
Stepping out of a lake in a painting,
And now shamelessly crawling up
One of Buddha’s nostrils,
Whose smile got even more secretive,
Even more squint-eyed.
The Common Insects of North America
Bumble Bee, Soldier Bug, Mormon Cricket,
They are all there somewhere
Behind Joe’s Garage, in the tall weeds
By the snake handler’s church,
On the fringe of a beaver pond.
Painted Beauty is barefoot and wears shades.
Clouded Wood Nymph has been sightseeing
And has caught a shiver. Book louse
Is reading a book about the battle of Gettysburg.
Chinese Mantid has climbed a leaf to pray.
Hermit Beetle and Rat Flea are feeling amorous
And are going to the drive-in movie.
Widow Dragonfly doing splits in the yard
Could use some serious talking to by her children
Before she comes to a tragic end.
De Occulta Philosophia
Evening sunlight,
Your humble servant
Seeks initiation
Into your occult ways.
Out of the late-summer sky,
Its deepening quiet,
You brought me a summons,
A small share in some large
And obscure knowledge.
Tell me something of your study
Of lengthening shadows,
The blazing windowpanes
Where the soul is turned into light—
Or don’t just now.
You have the air of someone
Who prefers to dwell in solitude,
The one who enters, with gravity
Of mien and imposing severity,
A room suddenly rich in enigmas.
O supreme unknowable,
The seemingly inviolable reserve
Of your stratagems
Makes me quake at the thought
Of you finding me thus
Seated in a shadowy back room
At the edge of a village
Bloodied by the setting sun,
To tell me so much,
To tell me absolutely nothing.
Mother Tongue
That’s the one the butcher
Wraps in a newspaper
And throws on the rusty scale
Before you take it home
Where a black cat will leap
Off the cold stove
Licking its whiskers
At the sound of her name.
El libro de la sexualidad
The pages of all the books are blank.
The late-night readers at the town library
Make no complaints about that.
They lift their heads solely
To consult the sign commanding silence,
Before they lick their finger,
Look sly, appear to be dozing off,
As they pinch the corner of the paper
Ever so carefully,
While turning the heavy page.
In the yellow puddle of light,
Under the lamp with green shade,
The star charts are all white
In the big astronomy atlas
Lying open between my bare arms.
At the checkout desk, the young Betelgeuse
Is painting her lips red
Using my sweating forehead as a mirror.
Her roving tongue
Is a long-tailed comet in the night sky.
Mummy’s Curse
Befriending an eccentric young woman
The sole resident of a secluded Victorian mansion.
She takes long walks in the evening rain,
And so do I, with my hair full of dead leaves.
In her former life, she was an opera singer.
She remembers the rich Neapolitan pastries,
Points to a bit of fresh whipped cream
Still left in the corner of her lower lip,
Tells me she dragged a wooden cross once
Through a leper town somewhere in India.
I was born in Copenhagen, I confide in turn.
My father was a successfu
l mortician.
My mother never lifted her nose out of a book.
Arthur Schopenhauer ruined our happy home.
Since then, a day doesn’t go by without me
Sticking a loaded revolver inside my mouth.
She had walked ahead of me and had turned
Like a lion tamer, towering with a whip in hand.
Luckily, in that moment, the mummy sped by
On a bicycle carrying someone’s pizza order