Marcel Duchamp,
where is a cause I can believe in?
Do away with art, with it all—
Marcel, give me something I can piss on.
Heather Katzoff
Start
Lining up near a throng
of other little girls
striped knee socks rising
from velcro sneakers of pink
and purple clashing with camp
shirts orange and white
we waited on dead grass
no longer green until
a whistle broke through
the air, startling our crowd
into motion, and in the middle
of the pack, with whipping
ponytails blinding sight
with elbows and knees
building barriers
locking us like puzzle pieces
keeping the herd together
I found my way out
and flew toward a splintered
makeshift totem pole finish
line upon discovering
that I could run.
Into the West
highway transformations
criss-cross the country
turnpike entrances
dot the states
places recounted
by parkway exits
co-gen plants
give way
to corn fields
to the continental
divide
there exists a point
after industry
before complacency
where scenic overlooks
become contemplations
of prairie grasses
the journey
begins at a toll booth
entrance ramps
gas stations
rest stops
mile markers
of the passage of time
interstitial spaces
with roadside sculpture
and memorial crosses
replace mini-malls
and truck depots
where antelope
really do play
against barbed wire backdrops
and the unnatural
beauty
of a smog-inspired
neon pink sun
melting
into the horizon
but before I-80
dead ends
into the ocean
before you reach the salt flats
that were once
vast seas
before tumbleweed
adheres to the front
bumper
we
have already passed
into the west
Desire
I want your lips,
lips that are mine
neither by birth
nor commitment,
with no proper names
in the annals of anatomy.
We will name them
together.
We will baptize those places
with our breath
the order of consonants and vowels
secret
and idiosyncratic
and shared
in silence.
I want your eyes.
I want to claim them
in a way that I cannot.
I want them on me
following me
feeling their gaze move and rest
in time with my hips
and I want to see what I look like
inside them.
The Naming of Things
We dance around the vocabulary
but there isn’t a word
to suit
and all the ones tested
sit ill on tongue
and teeth
neither of us certain
that a words exists
to define our relationship
one to the other
neither of us certain
we need definition
Adam went about the garden
telling every bird and beast
what it ought to be called
ignoring the fact
that they were what they were
whether He liked it
or not
ignoring the fact
that the snake
would charm
and then bite
no matter what name
He gave him
Eastbound
The wind chill
made the air
feel 14 degrees
below
when I left this morning
before the sun
showed its face
to a sky of perfect
sapphire
blue
and the sky is punctuated with stars
too bright and too many to name
and I want you
to tell me which ones they are
but I leave while you still sleep
gently kissing your forehead goodbye
and though you stir
your snoring continues
I drive east
and watch the sun
work its magic
on the Pennsylvania landscape
the colors of it breaking
my heart
over and over
I see the spectrum
everywhere
in fields of snow
on the rock walls
lining the highway
in the memory of your hair
as it catches the moonlight
before you wake
Tom Yori
Cana
When they tipped the jars
ly those old amphorae
that cradled wines from Rome to Tarsus,
Hellespont to Heliopolis
—it wasn’t water any more.
It ran red as blood
and He fell silent
hearing the echo
of a word yet unspoken.
But the steward, an obsequious Greek
(graduate, All-But-Dissertation
—Pythagorean U., Corinth Campus)
won by his master casting lots
simpered at the rube.
Though, he said, it was quite a fine merlot,
the main course was fish.
Could you do something in a white?
And the guests, hearing a magician was
miraclizing out back,
almost stampeded to make requests:
They were a Zealot crowd.
So Mary, seeing Him clutch His stomach,
which threatened imminently that notorious, eruptive dyspepsia,
asked if He’d like to leave now.
For the strangest moment He cast on her His eyes so limpid
the world looked right through them
and He seemed to take measure again of the measuring human heart
its human limits, its bonds, its obligations,
its specificity, its universality
then as strangely as when He obeyed her to begin
He followed her direction again and parted.
However, the mysterious Q saw all.
He recounted it, raconteur he was,
to a scribbler, circa 60, in Thessaly,
who, à la Woodward / Bernstein, plied
Q—with wine, not coffee—
slurring his notes when Q left to refill.
The story, like the scribbler’s head, and vision,
came out blurry.
But he workshopped it at Ephesus
where the first item to go was that charged-glance thing
What is that anyway?
You can give an Evil Eye or a Look of Love
either of which, to your mother, is creepy.
Next they realized the steward’s expertise
in Sophocles and Aeschylus
detracted from focus on the wine,
which must have been—must have been
—The Best.
They eliminated also that distracting byplay about the color.
And if anyone noticed they didn’t care
that that steward, who’s supposed to run the master’s house
talked to his boss like someone
hired for the day
from Feasts R Us.
So anyway the point emerged:
Not what happened, but the Deeper Truth
the unschooled hungry heart always knew
but never knew it knew,
As fruit yearns to ripen.
Blood Drive
They keep calling you “hero” as though you were a kid
having to be verbally nudged off the high dive
or even the low dive.
The literature does that I mean:
The people with the stealthoscopes are too busy asking you
Have you ever had sex even once since 1977 with another man?
Have you ever paid to have sex either with money or drugs?
Has anyone ever paid you for . . . since 1977 . . . even once
. . . shared a needle to inject drugs?
. . . spent six months or more total in the UK?
(so what, you wonder, do they do in the UK when they need it?)
. . . looked for an undue amount of time at a map of Africa?
Before you finally start
you’ve recited your Social Security number
five times.
But they know you now in this church hall,
people without pressure cuffs or red crossed coats or question or claim:
the cute white-haired Louise for instance who works the
reception table under the basketball net
(she reminds you of a first girl friend),
the bespectacled bustler at the recovery table
set up by the stage preempted with afterthoughts and unfinished by-play,
busted boxes herniating Christmas garlands in August heat.
They never seem to sport their own donation bandages.
Louise, looked at twice, may still not weigh the minimum 110 pounds.
And once upon a glance her eyes dodged to your shirt’s I Gave! stick-on
wanting to be wanted so.
Because there’s nothing like it,
what you’ve got aplenty.
It’s all-state biracial multinational
and every kind of natural.
You may feel that you are plodding on the treadmills of obscurity
especially Monday mornings
but you’re not the LED-up machine over there in the corner
glaring neon colors
coughing up product
at the in-chink of coin.
You are instead the real Real Thing,
a coursing vehicle of sin and crimson essence
beating the byways the arteries
putting your damaged heart into it
take and give
give and give and take
just as yours
drew in their hour from these tangled roots this turf of streams.
This is what your preemie daughter needed,
your mother, that time she had cancer,
your brother when he wrecked that bike,
your buddy when he took that bullet,
all from alien folk
who owed you
zip.
Stranger yourself, you don’t need what’s called closure,
the story that a story must complete
because they don’t just go on
the way they really do.
It doesn’t matter, what happens to toda
y’s pint
what happened to the last one.
And it’s amazingly easy:
you just like back and let it flow
seems the least you could do:
Run in this easy-flowing roadwork,
this highway
this interstate system
this over-arching network of veins
a-pulse
a-pulse
a-pulse.
Since 1500
It’s hard to see the difference
in 25 mere generations,
though your wife’s brother Carl,
mouth full of turkey,
claims infallibility.
He loves to poke you in the ribs
or gouge your eye
with his faith moving mountains
of jobs to the world’s truly
exploitable.
After each election he’ll crow at you
How’s that hope thing working for you
that faith thing.
You want to retort
but really he’s a brother too throws back his head
laughs from his belly
sends huge packages at Christmas.
When he dies,
you will miss him,
and how he loved to tow your kids
behind his fun, godawful
powerboat.
But those blunt dull tools of God’s wrath in 1500
came rude and wet to life
like you;
and so did those victim misbelievers disemboweled:
Martyr and holy murderer
all lanced toward something
dimly seen
on a father’s spit, a mother’s blood.
Here’s the real confession:
I’m not so far beyond the burning rage,
the lune-y howls.
The suspicions Carl had for instance
that someone over there had a bigger,
better boat just handed to him
—the welfare—for nothing—