Luck Is Luck
(2005)
The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its
life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined
views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to
the chicken.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
To My Big Nose
Hard to believe there were actual years
when I planned to have you cut from my face —
hard to imagine what the world would have looked like
if not seen through your pink shadow.
You who are built from random parts
like a mythical creature — a gryphon or sphinx —
with the cartilage ball attached to your tip
and the plaque where the bone flares at the bridge
like a snake who has swallowed a small coin.
Seabird beak or tanker prow
with Modigliani nostrils, like those strolled out
from the dank studio and its close air,
with a swish swish whisper from the nude’s silk robe
as it parts and then falls shut again.
Then you’re out on the sidewalk of Montparnasse
with its fumes of tulips and clotted cream
and clotted lungs and cigars and sewers —
even fumes from the lobster who walks on a leash.
And did his owner march slowly
or drag his swimmerets briskly along
through the one man’s Parisian dogturd that is
the other man’s cutting-edge conceptual art?
So long twentieth century, my Pygmalion.
So long rhinoplasty and the tummy tuck.
Let the vowels squeak through my sinus-vault,
like wet sheets hauled on a laundry line’s rusty wheels.
Oh I am not so dumb as people have made me out,
what with your detours when I speak,
and you are not so cruel, though you frightened men off,
all those years when I thought I was running the show,
pale ghost who has led me like a knife
continually slicing the future stepped into,
oh rudder/wing flap/daggerboard, my whole life
turning me this way and that.
Languedoc
Southern France, the troubadour age:
all these men running around in frilly sleeves.
Each is looking for a woman he could write a song about —
or the moonlight a woman, the red wine a woman,
there is even a woman called the Albigensian Crusade.
It’s the tail end of the Dark Age
but if we wait a little longer it’ll be the Renaissance
and the forms of the songs will be named and writ down;
wait: here comes the villanelle, whistling along the pike,
repeating the same words over and over
until I’m afraid my patience with your serenade
runs out: time’s up. Long ago
I might have been attracted by your tights and pantaloons,
but now they just look silly, ditto for your instrument
that looks like a gourd with strings attached
(the problem is always the strings attached).
Langue d’oc, meaning the language of yes, as in
“Do you love me?” Oc. “Even when compared
to her who sports the nipple ring?” Oc oc.
“Will we age gracefully and die appealing deaths?”
Oc oc oc oc.
So much affirmation ends up sounding like
a murder of crows passing overhead
and it is easy to be afraid of murder-by-crow —
though sometimes you have to start flapping your arms
and follow them. And fly to somewhere the signs say:
Yes Trespassing, Yes Smoking,
Yes Alcohol Allowed on Premises, Yes Shirt Yes Shoes
Yes Service Yes. Yes Loitering
here by this rocky coast whose waves are small
and will not break your neck; this ain’t no ocean, baby,
this is just the sea. Yes Swimming
Yes Bicycles Yes to Nude Sunbathing All Around,
Yes to Herniated Bathing-Cappèd Veterans of World War One
and Yes to Leathery Old Lady Joggers.
Yes to their sun visors and varicose veins in back of their knees,
I guess James Joyce did get here first —
sometimes the Europeans seem much more advanced.
But you can’t go through life regretting what you are,
yes, I’m talking to you in the baseball cap,
I’m singing this country-western song that goes: Yeah!
Oc! Yes! Oui! We! — will dive — right — in.
The Crows Start Demanding Royalties
Of all the birds, they are the ones
who mind their being armless most:
witness how, when they walk, their heads jerk
back and forth like rifle bolts.
How they heave their shoulders into each stride
as if they hope that by some chance
new bones there would come popping out
with a boxing glove on the end of each.
Little Elvises, the hairdo slicked
with too much grease, they convene on my lawn
to strategize for their class-action suit.
Flight they would trade in a New York minute
for a black muscle-car and a fist on the shift
at any stale green light. But here in my yard
by the Jack in the Box dumpster
they can only fossick in the grass for remnants
of the world’s stale buns. And this
despite all the crow poems that have been written
because men like to see themselves as crows
(the head-jerk performed in the rearview mirror,
the dark brow commanding the rainy weather).
So I think I know how they must feel:
ripped off, shook-down, taken to the cleaners.
What they’d like to do now is smash a phone against a wall.
But they can’t, so each one flies to a bare branch and screams.
On the Destruction of the Mir
Every night space junk falls from the sky —
usually a titanium fuel tank. Usually falling
into the ocean, or into nowhere in particular
because ours is a planet of great vacancies,
no matter how much fog would be required
in downtown Tokyo. In the Skylab days
you’d see people on the streets wearing iron
helmets, like centurions. But nowadays
we go bareheaded, as if to say to the heavens:
Wake me when I am someone else.
Like the man whose car made fast acquaintance
with what Yeats would have called the bole of a tree.
And who now believes he has written
many of the latest hits, which he will sing
for you while he splits a cord of wood:
like a virgin — whap! — like a virgin — whap! —
until he’s got enough fuel for the winter
and a million dollars stashed in an offshore bank.
You may think it’s tragic, like my Buddhist friend
who claims that any existence means suffering,
though my gay friend says, Phooey, what about
Oscar night, what about making popcorn
and wrapping up with your sweetie
in that afghan your great-aunt made so long ago?
You don’t have to dwell on the fact that she’s dead
or bring up her last unkempt year in the home,
when she’d ask anyone who walked in the door
to give her a good clunk on the head. Instead,
what about her crocheting these squares
in preposterous colors, orange and green,
though why must their
clashing be brought to the fore
if the yarn was enough to keep her happy?
In fact, don’t the clashes light the sparks
in this otherwise corny thing? Which is safer
to make than a hole in the skull to let out
the off-gassing of one’s bad spirits.
As in trepanation performed by the Incas,
who traded their melancholy for a helmet
made from a turtle shell. You never know
when your brain will require such armor —
could happen sometime when you least expect.
Could even happen when you are parked
behind your desk, where a very loud thump
makes you look up to discover a robin
diving into the window again and again.
It is spring, after all, and in its reflection
the bird may have found the perfect mate:
thus doth desire propel us headlong
toward the smash. Don’t even try
translating glass into bird-speak; it only knows
Same one who beaned it, same one who’s perched,
glaring back from a bough of the Japanese maple
with its breast fit to burst. And behind the lace
of new leaves, there’s a wallpaper of clouds —
weighing hundreds of tons
but which float nonetheless —
in the blue sky that seemed to fit so well
when we first strapped it on our heads.
Le deuxième sexe
The famous Polish poet calls Simone de Beauvoir a Nazi hag
but to me she will always be her famous book,
the one with the Matisse paper cut on the cover,
a sad blue nude I took into the woods.
Where we college girls went to coax the big picture
from her, as if she could tell us how to use
all the strange blades on our Swiss Army knives —
the firewood we arranged in either log cabin or tepee,
a little house built to be burned down.
Which could be a metaphor:
Simone as the wind puffing the damp flames,
a cloud with a mouth that became obsolete
once we started using gasoline. Still,
she gave me one lesson that sticks, which is:
do not take a paperback camping in the rain
or it may swell to many times its original size,
and if you start with a big book you’ll end up
with a cinderblock. In that vein I pictured Simone as huge
until (much later) I read that her size was near-midget —
imagine, if we took Gertrude Stein, we’d be there still,
trying to build some kind of travois to drag her body out.
The other thing I remember, a word, immanence —
meaning, you get stuck with the cooking and laundry
while the man gets to hit on all your friends in Paris.
Sure you can put the wet book in the oven
and try baking it like a cake. But the seam will stay soggy
even when the pages rise, ruffled like French pastry.
As far as laundry goes, it’s best I steer clear,
what with my tendency to forget the tissues
wadded in my sleeves. What happens is
I think I’m being so careful, and everything
still comes out like the clearing where we woke.
Covered in flakes that were then the real thing:
snow. Which sounds more la-di-da in French.
But then the sun came up and all la neige vanished
like those chapters we grew bored with and had skipped.
The Floating Rib
Because a woman had eaten something
when a man told her not to. Because the man
who told her not to had made her
from another man’s bone. That’s why
men badgered the heart side of her chest,
knowing she could not give the bone back, knowing
she would always owe them that one bone.
And you could see how older girls who knew
their catechism armed themselves against it:
with the pike end of teasing combs
scabbarded in pocketbooks that clashed
against the regulation jumper’s night-watch plaid.
In the girls’ bathroom mirror, you watched them
hazard the spike at the edge of their eyes,
shepherding bangs through which they peered
like cheetahs in an upside-downward–growing grass.
Then they’d mouth the words to “Runaway”
and run white lipstick around their lips —
white to announce they had no blood
so any wound would leave no trace, as Eve’s
having nothing more to lose must have made her
fearless. What was weird was how soon
the ordinary days started running past them
like a river, and how willingly they entered it
and how they rose up on the other side. Tamed,
or — God, no — your mother: ready to settle
with whoever found the bone under her blouse
and give it over, and make a life out of getting it back.
Original Sin
When first they told me the serpent beguiled her
I pictured her eyes knocked loose and rattling round
like the gizmo you’d take with you into the closet
and pump with your thumb to make red and blue sparks.
You needed the darkness. You needed the quiet.
Most, you needed the shelf where your father’s brown hats
squatted like toads, forget about sparks —
the mouth, not the eye, is the holy portal.
Hats with cool satin bellies and stained satin bands
that I put to my tongue when alone in their dark,
compelled by the mystery of his old sweat.
And this much I knew: such an outlaw rite
would command adult fury in the open. You could not
speak of sucking the hats’ bowls to your face,
or of licking the grosgrain of their sweat-darkened ribbons:
there was no way to explain why you even wanted this.
Let them think I was in there fooling with my Black Cat sparker
and not tasting the wax that came out of his ears,
not hungry for everything about him that was forbidden.
God cursed the snake — Thou shalt eat nothing but dust —
but wasn’t Snake a scapegoat for the wrong
that God Himself had done? To name
out of all paradise the one thing denied her,
so Eve would spend those first days walking round
with apple apple filling hours in her head?
Sour, sweet — how it tasted went unsaid. Either way,
I doubt the fruit lived up to what she would expect.
The Cardinal’s Nephews
They started out like the rest of us, huns
of the vacant fields behind the houses,
where our arrows punctured ancient mattresses
that wobbled drunkenly amid the asters.
It wounded me to think about the cardinal’s brother
fornicating even once for each of all his sons,
but when they tied me in the staghorns
and ran their Matchbox cars over my feet, suddenly
it was me too swooning with that fervor to breed an empire.
Then their hair grew out like jigsaw pieces as the decade
kinked and snaked… until it was Saturday night
in small-town downtown, all of them piled
like marsupials in the backseat’s pouch. Their car
would be hawing at the curbside while the eldest
bopped into the liquor store for some Wild Irish Rose,
his strides filigreed with a little hiccup
every time he shucked the ballast of his Dingo boot.
Later, when they passed out where the rumpus rooms
gave way between the speakers, or when their car
barreled into the lone tree that stood its ground,
I saw how power suffered its ignominies
without blustering or braking — think of Cesare Borgia
leading the cathedral’s Christ Have Mercies
in a tin mask after syphilis wrecked his face.
These were the ghosts of men who stood at the altar
wearing spurs and daggers underneath their pleats,
Romans come back now all leather fringe and eyelids
drooping in a rogue half-sleep. The miracle
was how by Sunday Mass their mother always
righted them again. And bullied their hair
into nests like squirrels made, and strapped their neckties
tight to hold up their heads. Then came the rumbling
that was their singing, before the uncle’s name
drew through us like a knife, the uncle whose red cap
meant willingness to shed blood for the faith,
though at the time all I knew was its astonishing color.
White Bird/Black Drop
1.
The snowy egret’s not extinct
no matter how archaic it may seem:
its crest a rack of spiky feathers
that would ornament a woman’s hat
in another era. A less functional era.
Where the hat would go with a backless gown
showing off the woman’s spine,
her legs hidden under fabric folds
made sumptuous by light.
We imagine her legs have grace
when in fact they could be sticks,
like the stick legs of the snowy egret,
which are covered in black chitin
that erupts into bright-yellow feet.
Lavishness where it makes no sense,
buried in the mud. So Audubon
painted the bird on shore, giving