Boys, two-hundred-proof I read somewhere, and his throat went
whoosh and he died too. Who was the final McCoy
or Hatfield? He says point a gun at me, then maybe
I’ll know where I am. What else, I will learn
what year it was, and lift my head from reading
a full year later, finished with Hatfields and McCoys,
my sight on fire will have gutted their houses, the line
of old whiskey will have ended here now.
The Arch
Of all living monuments has the fewest
facts attached to it, they slide right off
its surface, no Lincoln lap for them to sit
on and no horse to be astride. Here is what
I know for sure:
Was a gift from one city to another. A city
cannot travel to another city, a city cannot visit
any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives
away a great door in the air. Well
a city cannot except for Paris, who puts
on a hat styled with pigeon wings and walks
through the streets of another city and will not
even see the sights, too full she is of the sights
already. And within her walk her women,
and the women of Paris looking like
they just walked through an Arch . . .
Or am I mixing it up I think I am
with another famous female statue? Born
in its shadow and shook-foil hot the facts
slid off me also. I and the Arch we burned
to the touch. “Don’t touch that Arch a boy
we know got third-degree burns from touch-
ing that Arch,” says my mother sitting
for her statue. She is metal on a hilltop and
so sad she’s not a Cross. She was long ago
given to us by Ireland. What an underhand
gift for an elsewhere to give, a door
that reminds you you can leave it. She raises
her arm to brush my hair. Oh no female
armpit lovelier than the armpit of the Arch.
When the World Was Ten Years Old He Fell Deep in Love with Egypt
Just as he fell in love with the dinosaurs,
just as he would fall in love with the moon—
no women in the world yet, he was only ten
years old. A ten-year-old is made of time,
the world had forever to learn about Egypt.
He entered encyclopedias and looted every
fact of them and when he had finished looting
there he broke into the Bible. He snuck
into his mother’s room and drew thick lines
around his eyes and those were the borders
of Egypt. He carefully wrote in stiff small
birds, he carefully wrote in coiled snakes,
he carefully wrote in flatfooted humans.
The ten-year-old world needed so much
privacy, he learned to draw the door-bolt
glyph and learned to make the sound
it made. I am an old white British man,
decided the ten-year-old world, I wear a round
lens on my right eye, the Day, and see only a blur
with my left eye, the Night. When the sun shone
on him it shone on Egypt, all the dark for a while
was the dark in the Pyramids, the left lung
of his body was the shape of Africa
and one single square breath in it Egypt.
They never found all the tombs, he knew. Anyone
might be buried in Egypt, thought the ten-year-old
world in love with it, I will send my wind down
into my valley, and my wind will uncover the doors
to the tombs, and I will go down myself inside them,
and shine light on all the faces, and light on the rooms
full of gold, and light on even the littlest pets, on the mice
and the beetles of the ten-year-old kings, and shine light
on even their littlest names.
List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers
First there was Helen of Sparta, who did it only
with oil, no one knows how; then there was
Maggie of England, who even on the battlefield
put men back together; and then there was Rose
of the deepest South, who stood up in her father’s
clothes and walked out of the house and herself.
Disguised women were always among them.
They badly wanted to wear blue, they badly
wanted to wear red, they wanted to blend
with the woods or ground. Together
with men they were blown from their pronouns.
Their faces too were shot off which were then
free of their bodies. “I never had any dolls I only
had soldiers. I played soldier from the minute
I was born. Dropped my voice down almost
into the earth, wore bandages where I didn’t
need them, was finally discovered by the doctor,
was finally discovered at the end.”
Someone thought long and hard how to best
make my brother blend into the sand. He came
back and he was heaped up himself like a dune,
he was twice the size of me, his sight glittered
deeper in the family head, he hid among himself,
and slid, and stormed, and looked the same
as the next one, and was hot and gold and some-
where else.
My brother reached out his hand to me and said,
“They should not be over there. Women should not
be over there.” He said, “I watched people burn
to death. They burned to death in front of me.”
A week later his red-haired friend killed himself.
And even his name was a boy’s name: Andrew.
A friend writes to him, “My dress blues are being
altered for a bloodstripe.” That’s a beautiful line,
I can’t help hearing. “Kisses,” he writes to a friend.
His friend he writes back, “Cuddles.” Bunch of girls,
bunch of girls. They write each other, “Miss you,
brother.” Bunch of girls, bunch of girls. They passed
the hours with ticklefights. They grew their mustaches
together. They lost their hearts to local dogs,
what a bunch of girls.
I sent my brother nothing in the desert because
I was busy writing poems. Deciding one by one
where the breath commas went, or else it would
not stand and walk. This was going to be a poem
about release from the body. This was going
to be a poem about someone else, maybe even me.
My brother is alive because of a family capacity
for little hairs rising on the back of the neck.
The night the roadside bomb blew up, all three
sisters dreamed of him. There, I just felt it,
the family capacity. My brother is alive because
the family head sometimes hears a little voice.
I had been writing the poem before the boy died.
It then did not seem right to mention that burn means
different things in different bodies. I was going
to end the poem with a line about the grass. But
they were in the desert, and I was in the desert when
I thought about them, and no new ending appeared
to me. I was going to write, “The hill that
they died on
was often a woman, wearing the greatest uniform of war,
which is grass.” I know my little brother’s head. The scalp
is almost green, where the hair is shortest. I know
my little brother’s head, and that is where the ending
lives, the one that sends the poem home, and makes grass
stand up on the back of the neck, and fits so beautiful
no one can breathe—the last words live
in the family head, and let them live in there a while.
The Hunt for a Newborn Gary
Once babies were born as Garys
and no one doubted what they were, and they were
true men, these babies,
with dangle, and the very name
Gary it had the sound of exposing itself to you. Each
Gary made a fine crowd noise, each Gary was a Crowd
to cheer his death-defying loop-de-loops, and each Gary
went wild when he did not die, one Gary after another
in a loud unbroken line. But was somewhere born a baby
named Gary, sometime in the last fifteen years? Not one,
says the Living Record. Not at two o’clock in the morning,
now the way ORVILLE must have sounded in 1950: a man
in the brand-new days of the car saying Haw and Gee
to his Ford, he can’t help it, so recent did the horseflank
twitch beneath the fly. What Garys are still alive are gray,
they ask to hold our newborns and the rest of the family
looks on afraid. If the infants are dropped and broken
they will make a sick overripe sound: Gary. Now just
one minute I interrupt, my father had that name,
I don’t believe a word of this, except for the honest
word Gary. When he had it the name was in fullest flower
and perfectly a name of the now, and he shot wiggling
seconds into my mom and one of them plumped and grew
bigheaded, and he named me he couldn’t help it Orange,
and my life was a film as long as my life of my name growing
mold in real time. I was part of a picnic basket, and packed
for a family trip, for a family trip to where, the past, and Gary
was a canyon there, and the babies of the past tumbled into him
happily, and the sunset into him was famous, and up and down
his sides grew the freshest wildest four o’clocks.
The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple
How many sets of her parents are dead. How
many times over is she an orphan. A plane,
a crosswalk, a Boer war. A childbirth, of course,
her childbirth. When she, Shirley Temple, came
out of her mother, plump even at her corners
like a bag of goldfish, and one pinhole just one
pinhole necessary. Shirley Temple, cry for us,
and Shirley Temple cried. The first word of no
baby is “Hello,” how strange. The baby believes,
“I was here before you, learning to wave just
like the Atlantic.” Alone in the world
just like the Atlantic, and left on a doorstep
just like the Atlantic, wrapped in the grayest,
roughest blanket. Shirley Temple gurgled
and her first words were, “Your father is lost
at sea.” “Your mother was thrown by a foam-
colored horse.” “Your father’s round face is
a round set of ripples.” “Every gull has a chunk
of your mom in its beak.”
Shirley Temple what makes you cry. What do
you think of to make you cry. Mommies stand
in a circle and whisper to her. “Shirley Temple
there will be war. Shirley Temple you’ll get no
lunch.” Dry, and dry, and a perfect desert. Then:
“Shirley Temple your goldfish are dead,
they are swimming toward the ocean even now,”
and her tears they fall in black
and white, and her tears they star in the movie.
She cries so wet her hair uncurls, and then the rag
is in the ringlet and the curl is in the wave, she thinks
of dimples tearing out of her cheeks and just running,
out of cheeks knees and elbows and running hard
back to the little creamy waves where they belong,
and the ocean. Her first
glimpse of the ocean was a fake tear for dad.
A completely filled eye for her unseen dead father,
who when he isn’t dead he is gone across the water.
A Recent Transformation Tries to Climb the Stairs
One segment of a worm ago I was a swan,
I stank of the surface of lake just the surface
and I was a sight on the water. Why is it always
the swans, why is it never the stilts who turn
human, the stilts who would know how to walk
at least? I lift my webfoot for once and for all
and I try to climb one step, but a blubbery force-
field surrounds me now and I learn why human
women bounce: they’re deeply encased in pink
rubber, so sad. The smell
of it, erasing! Erasing a picture
of what? Pink Pearl is written everywhere!
A bite mark on one end, a mouth of incisors
and molars and canines—out of nowhere I know
the proper terms, I suddenly want to know every-
thing else, and whenever I felt that way on the lake
I simply ate a fish-head, but fish-heads won’t fill
me now. Your attention is a fish-head,
into the body climbing the stairs. For ten years
writers loved phantom hands and wrote with
and about them nonstop, this particular writer
wrote, I quote,
“She lifted her phantom hand and she threw it
to the swans,” but where are all the writers who
had extra hands sewed on? Which hand should
get the pen? The one that never wrote a word
or the one that knows what to do? Is there one
that knows what to do, is this it? A grown girl
swan is called a what, the tips of my fingers
can almost touch it! You’ll look it up when you
get home—a recent transformation has no way
of knowing which wordplays are mostly
exhausted. My hair blows out behind me, where
my hair is attached to my head
I can feel a rushing
hot pivot, like where the wind changes direction.
I think that’s where I begin to be dead, the best
part of this new body—better to be in one cell
of a swan! When I finally feel where these new
legs end,
I’ll take two at a time to the top
of the stairs and two at a time back down,
and I’ll walk to the lake and climb in a swanboat
and ride as a gizzard inside it.
The Feeling of Needing a Pen
Really, like a urine but even more gold,
I thought of that line and I felt it, even
between two legs I felt it, the legs I wrote
just now, a panic, a run-walk to the private
room with a picture of a woman
&n
bsp; on the door, or else the line was long, too long,
I barged into the men’s, and felt stares burning
hard like reading or noon, felt them looking
me up and over, felt them looking me over
and down, and all the while just holding their
pens,
they do it different oh no they don’t,
they do it standing up, they do it at the window,
they do it so secret in a three-hour bath, they do it
aloud to someone else, their wife is catching
every word and every word is gold. What you eat
is in it, blackberries for breakfast are in it,
fat atoms of Shakespeare and Hitler are in it.
The sound of water makes me need to: Atlantic,
Pacific, Caspian, Black. I feel it so much because
I am pregnant, I am pregnant with a little self,
all of its self
is that spot on a dog that causes its leg to kick.
It kicked and I felt and I wrote that last line. Even
now it’s happening. I eat only asparagus like arrows,
I am famous for my aim. I get almost none on my hands,
almost. Under my feet the streets, under the streets
the pipes. Inside the pipes a babble sound.
Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It
Doing what, I don’t know, being alive. The green
of her is a scum on the surface, she would like
to look at herself. Should I have a memory?
she wonders. Of mother washing my frogskin
in muddy water? I do not have that memory.
My near-transparent frogskin? Mother washing
it with mud to keep it visible? I do not have that
memory, almost, almost. Warmblooded though
she knows for a fact, and spontaneously generated
from the sun on stone, and one hundred vertebrae in every
wave of the lake, as one hundred vertebrae in every wave
of her. All of her meat blue rare blue rare, a spot
on her neck that would drive her wild if anyone ever
touched it, and the tip of her tail ends with -ness and
-less. So far all she knows of the alphabet is signs
that say NO SWIMMING.
So far all she knows is her whereabouts.
Has great HATRED for the parochial, does the liver