For a long time you lay tipped on your side like a bicycle
but now your pedaling has stopped. Already
the mosquitoes have chugged their blisterful of blood
and flown on. Time moves forward,
no cause to weep, I keep reminding myself of this:
the body will accrue its symptoms. And the handbooks,
which warn us not to use the absolutes, are wrong:
the body will always accrue its symptoms.
But shouldn’t there also be some hatchlings within view:
sufficient birth to countervail the death?
At least a zero on the bottom line:
I’m not asking for black integers,
just for nature not to drive our balance into the dirt.
What should we utter over the broken glass that marks your grave?
The bird books give us mating calls but not too many death songs.
And whereas the Jews have their Kaddish and the Tibetans
have their strident prayers, all I’m impelled to do is sweet-talk
the barricades of heaven. Where you my vector
soar already, a sore thumb among the clouds.
Still I can see in the denuded maple one of last year’s nests
waiting to be filled again, a ragged mass of sticks.
Soon the splintered shells will fill it
as your new geeks claim the sky — any burgling
of bloodstreams starts when something yolky breaks.
And I write this as if language could give restitution for the breakage
or make you lift your head from its quilt of wayside trash.
Or retract the mosquito’s proboscis, but that’s language again,
whose five-dollar words not even can unmake you.
Altered Beast
You were a man and I used to be a woman
before we first put our quarters in
the game at the gas station, whose snack-chip display
wore a film of oil and soot
beside which you turned into a green gargoyle and then
a flying purple lynx —
whereas I could not get the hang of the joystick
and remained as I began
while you kicked my jaw and chopped my spine,
a beating I loved because it meant you were rising
fast through the levels — and the weak glom on
via defeat, which is better than nothing —
insert sound effects here: blip blat ching ching,
and when they stopped, your claws gripped the naked
-looking pink lizard that I was,
blood-striped and ragged, as if being a trophy
were the one reward the vanquished get —
which is why, walking home through the curbside sludge,
when you held my hand with your arm outstretched
as if you were holding a dripping scalp or head,
I hummed with joy to be your spoils.
On the Chehalis River
All day long the sun is busy, going up and going down,
and the moon is busy, swinging the lasso of its gravity.
And the clouds are busy, metamorphing as they skid —
the vultures are busy, circling in their kettle.
And the river is busy filling up my britches
as I sit meditating in the shallows until my legs go numb.
Upstream I saw salmon arching half into the air:
glossy slabs of muscle I first thought were seals.
They roiled in a deeper pocket of the river,
snagged in a drift net on Indian land.
Trying to leap free before relenting to the net
with a whack of final protest from the battered tail.
They’ll be clubbed, I know, when the net’s hauled up
but if there were no net they’d die anyway when they breed.
You wonder how it feels to them: their ardent drive upstream.
What message is delivered when the eggs release.
A heron sums a theory with one crude croak; the swallows
write page after page of cursive in the air. My own offering
is woozy because when their bodies breached the surface
the sun lit them with a flash that left me blind.
Inseminating the Elephant
The zoologists who came from Germany
wore bicycle helmets and protective rubber suits.
So as not to be soiled by substances
that alchemize to produce laughter in the human species,
how does that work biochemically is a question
whose language requires difficult conjugations under any circumstance:
first, there’s the matter of the enema, which ought to come
as no surprise. Because what the news brings us
is often wheelbarrows of dung — suffering,
with photographs. And so long as there is suffering,
there should be also baby elephants — especially this messy,
headlamp-lit calling-forth. The problem lies
in deciding which side to side with: it is natural
to choose the giant rectal thermometer
over the twisted human form,
but is there something cowardly in that comic swerve?
Hurry an elephant
to carry the bundle of my pains,
another with shiny clamps and calipers
and the anodyne of laughter. So there, now I’ve alluded
to my body that grows ever more inert — better not overdo
lest you get scared, the sorrowing world
is way too big. How the zoologists start
is by facing the mirror of her flanks,
that foreboding luscious place where the gray hide
gives way to a zeroing-in of skin as vulnerable as an orchid.
Which is the place to enter, provided you are brave,
brave enough to insert your laser-guided camera
to avoid the two false openings of her “vestibule,”
much like the way of entering death, of giving birth to death,
calling it forth as described in the Tibetan Book.
And are you brave enough to side with laughter
if I face my purplish, raw reflection
and attempt the difficult entry of that chamber where
the seed-pearl of my farce and equally opalescent sorrow
lie waiting?
For the Mad Cow in Tenino
I don’t know where you rank in my list of killers:
my viral load, my sociopaths, my inattention
on the interstate, where I crane my head after the hawk
and the windshield splatters
into diamonds. Not just thinking about the hawk,
or even merely watching it, I always have to be it for a minute,
just as my mind enters the murderers
for one long flash before it stumbles out.
From your postmortem, you held us fast
while a man said It’s enough as his lungs filled
after being stabbed here near the playground,
before they milled his limbs with power tools
and scattered him beyond retrieval. Too late
to recall your brain, and the fatty white part of your spine,
already delivered to the rendering plant
and melted down into the slurry.
That night is gone and cannot be reassembled
despite my re-imagining the car
with a man dying in its trunk, a car otherwise like any other,
as we could not verify your affliction
for days after you fell. Which left the land in chaos
except for Scatter Creek’s flowing past,
wending without hurry through the coastal range
before it empties rain and blood into Willapa Bay.
from
On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
(2012)
No death for you. You are involved.
WELDON KEES
The Second Slaughter
Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
behind his chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom. Then he lays out
a banquet for his men, oxen and goats
and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat
until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.
The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief —
in the morning more animals must be killed
for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds
no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;
not even heaving four stallions on the pyre
can lift the ballast of his sorrow.
And here I turn my back on the epic hero — the one who slits
the throats of his friend’s dogs,
killing what the loved one loved
to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent
by vanishing from my concern
after he throws the dogs onto the fire.
The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.
When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once
I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement
though it is not.
Again, the Body
I have become what I have always been and it has taken a lifetime, all of my own
life, to reach this point where it is as if I know finally that I am alive and that I
am here, right now.
TOBIAS SCHNEEBAUM, KEEP THE RIVER ON YOUR RIGHT
When you spend many hours alone in a room
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself —
this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal
but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us
do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,
from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit
a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,
who walked four days into the jungle
and stayed for the kindness of the tribe —
who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?
This could be any life: the vegetation is thick
and when there is an opening, you follow
down its tunnel until one night you find yourself
walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved
friends are using their stone blades
to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,
though the chunk I ate was bland;
it was only when I chewed too far and bled
that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.
How difficult to be in a body,
how easy to be repelled by it,
eating one-sixth of the human heart.
Afterward, the hunters rested
their heads on one another’s thighs
while the moon shone on the river
for the time it took to cross the narrow sky
making its gash through the trees…
To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall
Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood
swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance
while a helicopter chewed the linings
of the clouds above the clear-cuts.
And I forgave the pollen count
while cabbage moths teased up my hair
before your flowers fell apart when they
turned into seeds. How resigned you were
to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli
as they swept past. And soon those gusts
will mill you, when the backhoe comes
to dredge your roots, but that is not
what most impends, as the chopper descends
to the hospital roof so that somebody’s heart
can be massaged back into its old habits.
Mine went a little haywire
at the crest of the road, on whose other side
you lay in blossom.
As if your purpose were to defibrillate me
with a thousand electrodes,
one volt each.
Domestic
Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,
feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store
where they sell food that comes in cans
yesterday expired. Picture it
perching on the dumpster, a corrugated
sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch
accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,
skittering on the cans. It has tried
to gnaw them open and broken all its teeth.
Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels
of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon-
chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells
from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,
with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light — ”
we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.
Because we occupy the wrong animal — don’t you too feel it?
Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?
Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting
your robe into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped
fighting the urge to howl, and howled —
and did it bring relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?
I Could Name Some Names
of those who have drifted through thus far of their allotted
fifty or seventy or ninety years on Earth
with no disasters happening,
whatever had to be given up was given up —
the food at the rehab facility was better than you would expect
and the children turned out more or less okay;
sure there were some shaky years
but no one’s living in the basement anymore
with a divot in his head, that’s where the shrapnel landed/or
don’t look at her stump. It is easy
to feel possessed of a soul that’s better schooled
than the fluffy cloud inside people who have never known suchlike
events by which our darlings
are unfavorably remade. And the self
is the darling’s darling
(I = darling2). Every day
I meditate against my envy
aimed at those who drift inside the bubble of no-trouble,
— what is the percentage? 20% of us? 8%? zero?
Maybe the ex-president with his nubile daughters,
vigorous old parents, and clean colonoscopy. Grrrr.
Remember to breathe. Breathe in suffering,
breathe out blessings say the ancient dharma texts.
Still I beg to file this one complaint
that some are mountain-biking through the scrublands
while she is here at Ralph’s Thriftway,
running her thumb over a peach’s bruise,
her leg a steel rod
in a miniskirt, to make sure I see.
Cold S
nap, November
That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less
alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the
course of a single life would lead us to believe.
JOHN BERGER, THE SENSE OF SIGHT
In 2006, in Ohio, Joseph Clark raised his head in the middle of his
execution to say, “It’s not working.”
The salmon corpses clog the creek without sufficient room to spin:
see, even the fish want to kill themselves this time of year
the therapist jokes. Her remedy
is to record three gratitudes a day —
so let the fish count for one, make two the glaucous gulls
who pluck the eyes before they fill
with the cloudy juice of vanishing.
But don’t these monuments to there-ness
feel a little ostentatious? Not just the gratitudes,
but also what they used to call a hardware store
where you hike for hours underneath the ether
between the ceiling and the dropped-down lighting tubes,
muttering I need a lock-washer for my lawnmower shroud —
huh? You know
you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating
everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II
commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.
When even one giant marble Moses feels like a bit too much.
This year made it almost to December without a frost to deflate the dahlias
and though I stared for hours at the psychedelia of their petals,