through a filterpaper sieve:
there is a draft created by its exodus
that you might think that if you rode
you too could slip away quite easily.
Is this why they call to mind the thought of death?
Squeak squeak, their song: I want to go
but I am stuck here, it is a mistake
being incarnate; I should be made
of the same substance as the dark.
If they must stay, like us they will be governed
by their hungers, pursuit
without rest. What you see in their whirling
is not purity of spirit. Only appetite,
infernal appetite — driving them, too, on.
This Red T-Shirt
was a gift from Angus, came with his new Harley
which no ladies deigned to perch their buttocks on
and was therefore sold minus the shirt—
net cost: three thousand dollars, I wear the money
in my sleep. The black braid flowing from the man
herding dice at the Squaxins’ Little Creek Casino
cost me two hundred thirty-five, well worth it
for the word croupier. Work seven months on a poem,
then you tear it up, this does not pencil out
especially for my mother who ate potatoes
every day from 1935 to ’41. Who went to the famous
Jackson Pollock show after the war — sure, she was a rube
from across the Harlem River, snickering
at the swindle of those dribbles until death squelched the supply
and drove the prices up. I’ve known men
who gave up houses worth half a million just to see
the back of someone whom they once bought diamonds.
And I’ve known women to swallow diamonds
just to amplify the spectacle of their being flushed.
The Gutenberg Bible — okay, I get that:
five-point-four million dollars for a book of poems
written by God on the skin of a calf. A hundred years ago
the Squaxins could tell you easily
who the rich man was. He’d be dressed in a red robe
made of epaulets from redwing blackbird wings.
The Wolves of Illinois
When I stopped along the road and climbed the platform that the wildlife people
built, I saw the dead grass moving. A darker gold that broke free from the pale
gold of the field.
“Wolves,” said the man who stood beside me on the platform. On his other side
stood his wife and children, I assumed, dressed as if they’d come from church,
a boy and girl, her scalp crosshatched with partings from her braids. Note that this
is my way of announcing they were black
or African American, I am shy not only of the terminology but of the subject
altogether
compounded by the matter of words, black being strong
if not so precise a descriptor —
and my being torn about the language makes me nervous from the start. “Look at
the wolves,” he told his children
before dropping a quarter in the scope, which I didn’t need because I had my own
binoculars
and know the names and field marks of the birds
(like the white rump of the marsh hawk),
so I include “the white rump of the marsh hawk” as it flies over the field.
“Those are coyotes,” I said
with pity for the man’s foolishness? Is there a correlation between my
knowledge and my pity
(an inside joke: the marsh hawk’s having been renamed the northern
harrier,
though marsh hawk is stronger)?
Plus what about the man’s pity for the white girl with coyote in her mouth
— coyote in two syllables, the rancher’s pronunciation,
when wolf is stronger. I wondered whether he was saving face before his
family when he said, “No, those are wolves,”
or did he only want his kids to feel the dangerous elation of the word?
I could not tell because they did not look at me, they who had come from
praying to a God in whom I don’t believe, though I am less smug about
that not-belief
(could be wrong, I oftentimes suspect)
than I am about the wolves. Because I know the wolves were coyotes;
the wolves were coyotes
and so I said, “There are no wolves in Illinois.”
“No, those are wolves,” the man said, turning toward his wife who offered
me her twisted smile, freighted with pity or not I couldn’t tell, the pity
directed toward me another thing I couldn’t tell, or toward her husband
the believer in wolves
(at least he was sticking by them, having staked his claim).
In the autumn withering, the eyes of the children were noticeably shining,
but I saw only the sidelong long-lashed white part of their eyes as
they stepped up to the scope.
“Check out the wolves,” he said (the minutes ticking)
(the minutes nuzzling one another’s flanks)
(the minutes shining in the farthest portion of the field
as whatever emerged from the tall grass entered it again).
Pharaoh
In the saltwater aquarium at the pain clinic
lives a yellow tang
who chews the minutes in its cheeks
while we await our unguents and analgesics.
The big gods offer us this little god
before the turning of the locks
in their Formica cabinets
in the rooms of our interrogation.
We have otherwise been offered magazines
with movie stars whose shininess
diminishes as the pages lose
their crispness as they turn.
But the fish is undiminishing, its face
like the death mask of a pharaoh,
which remains while the mortal face
gets disassembled by the microbes of the tomb.
And because our pain is ancient,
we too will formalize our rituals with blood
leaking out around the needle
when the big gods try but fail
to find the bandit vein. It shrivels when pricked,
and they’ll say I’ve lost it
and prick and prick until the trouble’s brought
to the pale side of the other elbow
from which I turn my head away —
but Pharaoh you do not turn away.
You watch us hump past with our walkers
with the tennis balls on their hind legs,
your sideways black eye on our going
down the corridor to be caressed
by the hand with the knife and the hand with the balm
when we are called out by our names.
Samara
1.
At first they’re yellow butterflies
whirling outside the window —
but no: they’re flying seeds.
An offering from the maple tree,
hard to believe the earth-engine capable of such invention,
that the process of mutation and dispersal
will not only formulate the right equations
but that when they finally arrive they’ll be so
…giddy?
2.
Somewhere Darwin speculates that happiness
should be the outcome of his theory —
those who take pleasure
will produce offspring who’ll take pleasure,
though he concedes the advantage of the animal who keeps death in mind
and so is vigilant.
And doesn’t vigilance call for
at least a
n ounce of expectation,
imagining the lion’s tooth inside your neck already,
for you to have your best chance of outrunning the lion
on the arrival of the lion.
3.
When it comes time to “dedicate the merit”
the Buddhists chant from the ocean of samsara
may I free all beings —
at first I misremembered, and thought
the word for the seed the same.
Meaning “the wheel of birth and misery and death,”
nothing in between the birth and death but misery,
surely an overzealous bit of whittlework
on the part of Webster’s Third New International Unabridged
(though if you eliminate dogs and pie and swimming
feels about right to me —
oh shut up, Lucia. The rule is: you can’t nullify the world
in the middle of your singing).
4.
In the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory
RoboSeed is flying.
It is not a sorrow though its motor makes an annoying sound.
The doctoral students have calculated
the correct thrust-to-weight ratio and heave dynamics.
On YouTube you can watch it flying in the moonlight
outside the engineering building with the fake Ionic columns.
I said “sorrow” for the fear that in the future all the beauties
will be replaced by replicas that have more glare and blare and bling.
RoboSeed, RoboRose, RoboHeart, RoboSoul —
this way there’ll be no blight
on any of the cherished encapsulations
when the blight was what we loved.
5.
They grow in chains from the bigleaf maple, chains
that lengthen until they break.
In June,
when the days are long and the sky is full
and the swept pile thickens
with the ones grown brown and brittle —
oh see how I’ve underestimated the persistence
of the lace in their one wing.
6.
Is there no slim chance I will feel it
when some molecule of me
(annealed by fire, like coal or glass)
is drawn up in the phloem of a maple
(please scatter my ashes under a maple)
so my speck can blip out
on a stem sprouting out of the fork of a branch,
the afterthought of a flower
that was the afterthought of a bud,
transformed now into a seed with a wing,
like the one I wore on the tip of my nose
back when I was green.
New Poems
But inside me something hopeful and insatiable —
A girl, a grown-up, giggling, gray-haired girl —
Gasps: “More, more!”
RANDALL JARRELL
Daisies vs. Bees
Who could not love the Shasta daisies, lining the walk,
the difficult daisies,
the first difficulty being that they smell like rotting meat?
Okay, you can say the smell teaches us that there is more to summer
than girls in yellow bathing suits and new-mown grass —
if you want the beauty you have to take a whiff of death.
Okay, I know, I am not a baby:
dear Mother Nature,
deliver me the contract and I will sign.
The second difficulty being that they attract the bees
to which a person can be fatally allergic, though
okay, it titillates, checking the mailbox in August,
a game of agility and speed,
the goal being to outwit the feral mind.
Okay, I admit I’ve thought of dousing myself with perfume
to tilt the game in their direction.
I call this “going to the bees” —
didn’t Robert Lowell say, if people were equipped with switches,
who wouldn’t be tempted, at some point,
to flick themselves off?
I admit I have romantic ideas about lying down in blossoms, though
okay, at the first tingle of my windpipe’s swelling shut, I think
I’d grab the EpiPen and jab the needle in my thigh.
I call this “going to the flowers” —
and in my conjuration of the jab,
I am as impassive as a samurai, outside among the daisies,
because you have to show the bees you have no fear.
As the daisies smear everything with their odor,
how do we decide who wins, given that the bees offer us
just their speeding particles
versus the steadfast flowers?
okay, okay, we know the nose will never?
Bruce
Now the world is thinner and wider: each day brings information,
such as the name of the famous mechanical shark.
Did you know sharks have two pseudopenises?
The facts come on a cable, they come from a cloud,
they come from Edith Hamilton. The biggest penis
belongs to a barnacle, at 40× its body size; it also
changes sex, à la Tiresias, when he saw two snakes
coupling and struck them with his staff.
Once I followed a small bird into the woods,
took notes on it for hours. Or I stood on a glacier,
staring into a blue crack whose dark was a long way down.
My thoughts were narrow: how not to fall in,
one inch left, one inch right, the big nada
or not. But now
I move by sideways slip,
the way Tiresias skids from a prick to a slit…
then back, when he sees those snakes again —
such horny snakes! Slip far enough,
you’ll go all the way around and arrive
back where you started, with two penises
also possessed by snakes, the second one
to fire off a plug so nothing else gets in!
In a similar vein, said William James:
Wisdom is learning what to overlook, but who
has the discipline to zone the hemipenes
outside her cranium? There’s a lot of data
to be gathered until the power grid
goes down. Or the Lord comes with his airship.
Sometimes I dream I’m climbing the glacier
until I remember I can’t, and turn into a worm
in a goose-down suit. Edith Hamilton
you can google. There’s even reception
on top of the glacier, on top of the world —
a man can phone his mother while he freezes.
But how does a worm dial, even in a dream?
Blacktail
Like webworms, we cover the landscape with mesh
because of the deer, the ravenous deer.
They enter the yard with the footwork
of cartoon thieves — the stags wearing preposterous
inverse chandeliers, the does bearing fetuses
visibly kicking inside their cage. And who
can not-think of that crazy what-if: what if
a hoof tears through? Would you call
the dogcatcher or an ambulance?
The problem’s their scale — you might as well park
a Cadillac in the house. Or go be a hunter
inside a big plastic goose, a fiberglass burger
on top of a hamburger stand. The way they tiptoe
past the bird feeder, rattling the seed
the squirrels have spilled. Then they eat
something outrageous, like the pansy
all the way up on the stoop. Before they leap
into the ravine with a noise like cymbals!
But isn’t that how things end, with a
cymbal crash? Leaving
you at the window with not even your rage.
Because you cannot rage at such delicate skeletons —
that is a social misdemeanor — though they have stepped
toward us the way the founding fathers
must have once approached the natives, with their arms
extended, though they bore disease.
The Great Wave
Life on this earth has often been disturbed by dreadful events
GEORGES CUVIER, 1825
1.
Now that we’ve entered the wave of extinction
let’s sing while we still can,
before we all go where the dinosaurs went,
dropping our bones down into the shale —
and the floor of the sea becomes the top
of the mountain, the top
of the mountain the trough of the ditch.
Quick