some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living….
(for John Engman, 1949–1996)
WHO THE MEEK ARE NOT
Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent
under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep
in the rice paddy muck,
nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles
make the wheat fall in waves
they don’t get to eat. My friend the Franciscan
nun says we misread
that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them.
To understand the meek
(she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop
in a meadow, who—
at his master’s voice—seizes up to a stunned
but instant halt.
So with the strain of holding that great power
in check, the muscles
along the arched neck keep eddying,
and only the velvet ears
prick forward, awaiting the next order.
HYPERTROPHIED FOOTBALL STAR AS SERIAL KILLER
1. Double Sessions
Sometimes the coach whapped his earhole;
or many linemen bulldozed his form
like a training sled, face mask turning up sod
for yards. When his brain bounced hard enough
the lights snapped out, and he was sidelined.
Still, if the whistle reached his sleeping ears, he’d bolt
from stretcher to green field helmetless.
Put me in, he’d say. That’s heart,
said the coach, for whom a hit meant love.
2. Romancing the Skull
In bed, our football star spoke wordless rain
till a cool moon burned in a lady’s pelvic lake.
Then he was ape again, the bringer
of bruises with an icepick stare.
He loved his women drugged enough
to pin like bugs, and found one starved:
picture a death’s head in a velvet cape,
the only one he didn’t kill, since she came
dead already. His face would bear the scars
her talons clawed the night he threw her out,
and she cut her wrist with an oiled and scented blade,
so the slit might exude rose attar
and not the stink of graves.
3. Keening, Nascent Time
For weeks, he’d boil the skull, row it
to his private island, swing it from a tree limb
with other skulls above his hammock.
When he ran wind sprints in surf,
to feint and dodge his ghost opponents,
he felt the black eyeholes watching.
His own hair began to shed like leaves,
and his chest was snow, and winter
ran his face, and though he scrubbed himself
with mint, he could not clean the death off.
One night he knelt between
the legs of one he’d unrolled
kept him out. He did her quick and left her head
attached, then rowed home bald and small.
4. Pathos Unbound
After the dropped oars came the island hours
when the mother tempest spun inside his head,
and he strapped on pads to charge at phantoms
bursting into spray, and bashed his face mask
till the mouth guard bent, but could not kill
the girl in him. He ended limping into slosh,
which ruffled his crotch in its yellowed cup.
The first wave to slap his chest made him
a babe again in water wings, paddling toward
the dwindling V of his father’s arms.
Through darkening jade, he fell
weightless, as if bounding from the end zone
to catch a ball. It’s said
when the mystery finally speaks,
you hear the void you’ve spoken
every longing into, silence articulate.
From his helmet’s dead earphone
the words: Just go out long, I’ll find you.
ORDERS FROM THE INVISIBLE
Insert coin. Mind the gap. Do not disturb
hung from the doorknob of a hotel room,
where a man begged to die entwined in my arms.
He once wrote
he’d take the third rail in his teeth, which is how
loving him turned out.
The airport’s glass world
glided me gone from him, and the sky I flew into
grew a pearly cataract through which God
lost sight of us. The moving walk
is nearing its end.
The diner jukebox says, Choose
again, and the waitress hollers over,
“All them soul songs got broke.”
She speaks from the cook’s window, steam
smearing her face of all feature.
The tongue is a form of fire, the Bible says,
and in the computer’s unstarred blue
the man’s brutal missives drag me along by my throat.
Press yes to erase.
REQUIEM: PROFESSOR WALT MINK (1927–1996)
My friend’s eyelids were closed
with these thumbs, which left
faint whirlpools of skin oil.
It’s okay. He’d stopped
seeing: The lifelong film unreeling behind his gaze
had stopped (sprocket jam, gear freeze, dim
to black). So the last frame burned out
(as I picture it) white on the brain’s bulb.
No one could fix it, though this friend was a scientist,
and I’d watched his hands repair
the skull circuits of mice small as my thumb.
That was in my youth and in his tutelage.
And everyone he touched
seemed changed by it—brighter, faster, more
capable of love. Thinking of him
I long for hands imbued
with grace to shape me.
And I worry the form I’ll finally take (death
lesson) and whether I can be made to leave
on anyone some mark worth bearing.
PLUCK
That spring snow fell late and long to clog
every road away from the house my marriage
had withered in
and whose mortgage
I could scarce afford. Because my son
was young and my academic check
went poof each month
about day ten,
I developed pluck—
a trait much praised in Puritan texts,
which favor the spiritual clarity
suffering brings.
Pluck also keeps the low-cost, high-producing poor
digging post holes or loading deep-fat fryers
or holding tag sales where their poor
peers come to haggle over silver pie-slicers
once boxed special for a bride. This
wasn’t real
poverty in America, but it soured my shrunk soul
to its nub. Nights, I lay on my mattress
on the floor, studying the clock face
with its flipping digits. One day I woke to sun
Then grass pushed up,
and my son trapped dozens of crickets
in a pickle jar’s sharp, upended air.
In an old aquarium, he laid a shaggy carpet
of clover, apple hunks, and a mustard lid filled
with water—
covered with a screen, weighed
with the dictionary so the cats couldn’t get in.
On Mothering Sunday, when one is obliged
to revere whatever bitch brought one
to this hard world,
my son led me down to a room
where crickets sang as if I were the sun.
Which I was, I guess, to him,
and him to me. After that, when a creditor rang
to bark his threats,
I set the phone down on the counter
so he could hear the crude creatures plucked
from the weeds by the boy, and what they sang.
DESCENDING THEOLOGY: CHRIST HUMAN
Such a short voyage for a god,
and you arrived in animal form so as not
to scorch us with your glory.
Your mask was an infant’s head on a limp stalk,
sticky eyes smeared blind,
limbs rendered useless in swaddle.
You came among beasts
as one, came into our care or its lack, came crying
as we all do, because the human frame
is a crucifix, each skeletos borne a lifetime.
Any wanting soul lain
prostrate on a floor to receive a pouring of sunlight
might—if still enough,
feel your cross buried in the flesh.
One has only to surrender,
you preached, open both arms to the inner,
the ever-present hold,
out-reaching every want. It’s in the form
embedded, love adamant as bone.
In a breath, we can bloom and almost be you
(for Paul Goggi)
MISS FLAME, APARTMENT BOUND, AS UNDISCOVERED PORN STAR
Here in my lonely bed one day, I sprawled in silks.
There was a fire escape but no flame. Outside,
a world of brick. Through the sweatshop window
across the way, a man’s face popped up, as if to study
my stalled lust. His stay was brief. Another face.
The men were taking turns—did they vie and jostle
for the briefest sight of me? Should I take myself in hand
and writhe? (On the net, I’d seen for sale The Little Minx
Stripper Pole. For a hundred bucks, I could buy a stake
for my gyrations, and show these strangers how an American slut
unwinds.) But it was day. The whole sun fell between us, filled
the alley: My windows were a total blank,
which was what my last lover saw—a brick himself.
Like him, the men were blind to me, taking turns at the pissoir.
REFERENCE FOR EX-MAN’S NEXT
after Catullus
When you climb the next lady’s steps
with your frat boy bounce, fist
gripped around some peonies, fresh steaming dough
baked on your homely stone for her
alone, she should know that vows you spout
would fill a stadium empty
as your chest; that the good emails you sent
to grease her up (“’twas but a dream
of thee” and that ripe crap) were writ by Donne
and meant no more than worms
you’d feed a stupid fish; that the hot girl slang
you’ll naked whisper came
from Bambi (sexysluts.com) and has been pitched
as underhand and low to schoolgirls
you did con to bed—and yes, to me: dumb cunt.
WINTER TERM’S END
The student pokes her head into my cubicle.
She’s climbed the screw-thread stairs that spiral up
to the crow’s nest where I work to say goodbye.
She hands back books I lent.
I wave her to move papers from the spot
she always took, worrying a sentence or a line;
or come with protruded tongue to show
a silver stud;
or bamboozled by some guy who can’t appreciate
the dragon tattooed on her breast, the filigree
around her thigh. This term she’s done with school.
Four years she’s siphoned every phrase,
or anecdote, or quote that’s mine to dole.