whose only point was reached recurrently,
at bright pink junctures flecked with pubic hair.
The actors’ voices smacked of youth, L.A.,
and nervousness subdued. The girls’ bare forms,
most pallid in their bulges, testified
to mornings sunning on the beach before
the dawn of these exploitive afternoons.
Tans are an enemy of sex; the boys
were brown and fair and could not get it up
beneath the camera’s cool lascivious eye,
though lapped and coaxed enough to rouse the dead.
The bits of film where actors, clothed, advanced
the feeble plot were touching—fumbled, mouthed
like Christmas pageants, Mary just a girl.
You knew you soon would see her stripped; in this
she was, this L.A. starlet, like a wife.
Your eyes grew accustomed; the flickering
picked out still shapes—men’s heads, some bowed, some raised
and awash in the carnal, jerky glow,
but all well-spaced, no two adjacent, dumb
ruminants grazing their turf in dreamland.
Young males, their cheeks exuberant with acne,
in Boston for a toot; old Chinamen;
commuters with an hour before the train
dragged them home to suburban spice in frocks;
and alcoholics angels copulating
could not distract from stupor and their thirst:
as in an ill-attended church, our heads
in scatteration showed a stubborn faith,
a sly propensity to praise. What a thing
a woman is! No end to her sufferance,
her spirit of coöperation, or
her elasticity and rosy grace!
The tints of every rose from black to white,
from purple proud in her cleft to surface cream,
became her beauty; mercy swallowed shame.
Succumb to the wrecker’s ball, closed Pussycat,
like a hooker jeering at her arrest.
There’s more indecency than meets the eye.
Bald light will break into you like a drug
that kills the good bacteria with the bad;
a thousand furtive lusts will throng the sun
and form a cloud as fertile as the id.
Enemies of a House
Dry rot intruding where the wood is wet;
hot sun that shrinks roof shingles so they leak
and bakes pane-putty into crumbs; the pet
retriever at the frail screen door; the meek
small mice who find their way between the walls
and gnaw improvements to their nests; mildew
in the cellar; at the attic window, squalls;
loosening mortar; desiccated glue;
ice backup over eaves; wood gutters full
of leaves each fall and catkins every spring;
salt air, whose soft persistent breath
turns iron red, brass brown, and copper dull;
voracious ivy; frost heaves; splintering;
carpenter ants; adultery; drink; death.
Orthodontia
You see them everywhere, the grinning martyrs,
mere children, most of them, though some
are full-grown women, with breasts in bras, their teeth
tight-bound in silver and pried by tinsel bands
whose tensile strength does something to the eyes—
adds a fanatic gleam. What will the ages
not of our faith make of this glad torture?
The Iroquois and Aztecs had their games
and obsidian knives, and the blue Tuareg
sport stony scarifications, but nothing
claims quite the scope of all these chastised mouths
shining on streets and in schoolyards like stars.
To what end? Lips whose curves can barely cling
to parallel perfections that look false.
Condo Moon
When plans were announced to tear down
the garages behind the main street and put up
twelve units of condos, there was a protest
the board of aldermen narrowly overrode.
Now, as I stroll from behind the “convenience store,”
the moon like a tasteful round billboard
of the condos’ massed neo-shingle-style bulk.
The moon makes no protest. It rolls what it sees
into the scene it illumines, and lends its old weight—
afloat and paper-thin and scarred with maria—
to what men have thrown up as once it beamed benign
on Crusader castles, fern swamps becoming coal,
and the black ocean when no microbe marred it.
Pillow
Plump mate to my head, you alone absorb,
through your cotton skin, the thoughts behind my bone
skin of skull. When I weep, you grow damp.
When I turn, you comply. In the dark,
you are my only friend, the only kiss
my cheek receives. You are my bowl of dreams.
Your underside is cool, like a second chance,
like a little leap into the air when I turn
you over. Though you would smother me,
properly applied, you are, like the world
with its rotating mass, all I have. You accept
the strange night with me, and are depressed
when the morning discloses your wrinkles.
Seattle Uplift
Rain, now as all night, is tapping
in the alleyway that serves this hotel.
In my view, the skyscraper—the tallest west,
they boasted, of the Mississippi—where
last night I dined with the local rich,
dizzy (I) at the thinness of the glass
that held us back from flying out and falling,
half hides in the clouds, its steel head in a sulk.
More churlishly still, some unknown sport
has left a litter of dirty magazines
on a wet tar roof two stories below.
In the post-dawn gloom, I can make out skin,
its pinkness, and a dark patch or two,
but nothing distinct enough; I am still up too high.
The Beautiful Bowel Movement
Though most of them aren’t much to write about—
mere squibs and nubs, like half-smoked pale cigars,
the tint and stink recalling Tuesday’s meal,
the texture loose and soon dissolved—this one,
struck off in solitude one afternoon
(that prairie stretch before the late light fails)
with no distinct sensation, sweet or pained,
of special inspiration or release,
was yet a masterpiece: a flawless coil,
unbroken, in the bowl, as if a potter
who worked in this most frail, least grateful clay
had set himself to shape a topaz vase.
O spiral perfection, not seashell nor
stardust, how can I keep you? With this poem.
Charleston
A kind of wooden Boston, crowding toward
the ship-laden Atlantic down peninsular streets.
A square flat common shows, in January,
green blades of spring; a steeple-topping pillar
holds glowering Calhoun while Copa Lounge
(COPA DOLL REVUE FEATURING NICOLE)
and Tavern on the Green between them squeeze
a doorway-wide, one-windowed clapboard shack.
More seaward, like a prow awash with trees,
a fragrant park holds pyramided balls,
some stubby cannons
, big blue paving stones
worn smooth by slaves’ bare feet, and a prospect of
that horizontal smudge, Fort Sumter, where
six hundred thousand men began to die.
Frost
That snowless, warmthless January sucked
our lawn to the color of nothing, dead turf so hard
just seeing it made tears, sandpapering sight.
But, slowly, rimy patches caught my eye—
small doormats, as it were, of fibrous white,
like summer cobwebs bleached by dew the sky
has breathed upon them from above. But whence
did this small frost descend; or did it rise?
It was the breath, it was the very breath,
I in a revelation realized,
of creatures sleeping in the earth. Their holes,
now that I looked, were what the whiteness rimmed,
an inch or two all round: warm humid breath
from deep within the burrow’s dark betrayed
the presence of some life besides my own,
bent down with murderous thought and tracker’s glee,
my own breath a continuous white flag
declaring not truce but vital rivalry.
These sleeping were the gardener’s enemy,
consumers of summer’s stems and meaty roots;
a poison bomb would work within their dreams.
I counted four such furtive homes, each tingeing
with helpless vapor this abandoned lawn,
and let them be. Warm blood calls out to blood;
together we contest the deadly cold,
and if our heat of being hoists a flag,
our mazy respiration tells a tale,
salute it, listen to it, and forgive
intrusive life as we forgive our own.
To a Box Turtle
Size of a small skull, and like a skull segmented,
of pentagons healed and varnished to form a dome,
you almost went unnoticed in the meadow,
among its tall grasses and serrated strawberry leaves
your mottle of amber and umber effective camouflage.
You were making your way through grave distances,
your forefeet just barely extended and as dainty as dried
coelacanth fins, as miniature sea-fans, your black nails
decadent like a Chinese empress’s, and your head
a triangular snake-head, eyes ringed with dull gold.
I pick you up. Your imperious head withdraws.
Your bottom plate, hinged once, presents a No
with its courteous waxed surface, a marquetry
of inlaid squares, fine-grained and tinted
tobacco-brown and the yellow of a pipe smoker’s teeth.
What are you thinking, thus sealed inside yourself?
My hand must have a smell, a killer’s warmth.
It holds you upside down, aloft, undignified,
your leathery person amazed in the floating dark.
How much pure fear can your wrinkled brain contain?
I put you down. Your tentative, stalk-bending walk
resumes. The manifold jewel of you melts into grass.
Power mowers have been cruel to your race, and creatures
less ornate and unlikely have long gone extinct;
but nature’s tumults pool to form a giant peace.
Each Summer’s Swallows
How do they know
the swallows each May
how to find in a continent of rooftops
our garage
with no door to shut
them in or shut them out
and exposed rough rafters
and above-lintel cubbyholes
where a dozen earlier nests
shaped of mud and straw
memorialize earlier summers
How do they know
how to assemble
the segments of mud
to make them shape up and cling
to a rough rafter
swooping all day in and out
to shape a cup to hold
the enigmatic eggs
the baby birds that peep
blue and brown above the edge
and to push
the tidy white packets of guano
over the edge
How do we know these
are last summer’s swallows
and not their offspring
whose first careening flights
in air’s bug-filled 3-D
astounded last July
for even the flight of birds
must be learned
or at least perfected
How do we know
one immortal diving dipping pair
does not always return
to our open garage
and then in August
before morning lifts the dew
again is not there
Fargo
“The fertillest soil this side of the Tigris
and Euphrates”—so the schoolchildren
of the countryside are taught, of their land
flat as a checkerboard to the hem of the sky.
The giant sky, pale green at dusk, stays black
long after morning cow-milking time.
Wind is incessant in winter, so
that snow falls sideways, like arctic sunshine.
· · ·
This land of Lutherans and sugar beets
thickens its marvellous thinness here at the edge
of a Red River whose windings alone
betray the rectilinear. Downtown,
parking space is no problem, and grain-fed health
rewards those God’s grandeur does not drive mad.
Fall
October 1989
The undertaker, who was with the local minister
and the neighboring farmer when they broke in,
made a wry face and hinted at damage
too dreadful to be viewed—“a cut in the eye,
a lot of blood.” I took his kindly offer not
to view the corpse but looked, back in the house,
in the kitchen corner where she fell, head crushing
the paper bag she used for trash. She was eighty-five.
Her heart had floated to a stop and she dropped
without lifting a hand or averting her face.
What corner or edge might have given the gash?
I saw none, then saw her glasses, a circle and half
of plastic frames, the one lens popped
and skipped a foot away amid the dust.
I picked it all up
, and the little wool hat
(it was getting to be fall) she wore for warmth,
with a spot of dried blood on the blue threads.
She seemed so very small in these her remnants.
“Oh, Mama,” I said aloud, though I never called
her “Mama,” “I didn’t take very good care of you.”
The Millipede
Oi! oi! noli me tangere, no argument:
this hideous thing in the kitchen sink.
Moving across the countertop with that slinky
motion having a hundred legs imparts,
it hesitated by the breadboard, sensing
my spiritual presence, and I knocked it in,
with the roll of paper towels, thinking,
What do I do with the damned thing next?
Turning on the faucet was obvious,
but drowning is not a death I’d wish
for myself, wriggling against the splash
down a slimy vortex black with sludge.
Nature knows best, I thought, and abandoned
the problem to read the newspaper.
While I pursued the latest Boston rape
from page one to Section B, page eleven,
my wife, dear woman, entered the kitchen
and went to the sink. Ooh, she pronounced,
not loudly, and I heard a small skirmish whence
the sound of the trashmasher opening
proceeded, accepting a Scott towel used
to wipe away some stray organic matter.
Poor millipede—he must have been a he—
to catch the eye of the real housekeeper.
Generic College
The statue of the founder wears a green
cape of verdigris upon his epaulettes.
White pillars everywhere, and bricks, and streaks
of dawn seen through the hard-to-sleep-in campus
guest house’s narrow-mullioned fenestration.
A professor toddles on the walk below,
emitting smoke puffs like a choo-choo train.
The lamps installed to discourage rape go out.
Within this guest house, the founder’s portrait