the senseless odor of death now
hushed and violent upon this city’s
summer air to every overgrown child
migrated here from provincial town
in doomed hope that memory’s
quick shame and long haunt will dim
these thousand lights still shining
on that jasmine branch I break again
and thrust into your drowning hand
Tangerine peels
two women and a man
sit in winter light
eating chocolate and tangerines
from a crystal bowl
mint tea steams the turquoise pot
a green canary sings Mozart
among dying hibiscus
the man hears familiar talk
of transsexual politics
does gender hold the heart
at bay in heterosexual love
when bodies are the same
which can dominate the other
is coupling war or just a game
and if a game whose metaphors
furnish the players’ rules
how do they know to play
a game whose rules get written
even during the act of play
not sure what to say
or which to love
the man stands up
to clear the plates away
the woman in white
has eaten all her peels
only the chocolate’s
silver wrappings remain
on a single green leaf
the woman in black
has torn her peels
into tiny bits and stacked
them in three heaps
upon three green leaves
the man stacks three plates
in the turquoise sink
he wonders how
each woman’s hunger
can include a man
he chews a shred of bitter
peel to find the answer
pappa pappa pappageni
the canary’s song is clear
above the women’s laughter
tart tangerine in a wounded ear
R. G. Evans
Dungeoness
The worst part about being the guy in the cartoon
hanging shackled to a dungeon wall is the mirror.
It wasn’t always here, like back when I was young
and sure of rescue, hurling curses at my jailers
wherever, whoever they were. I was vain enough then
I’d probably stare for hours, mugging at my reflection,
sucking in my gut. But no. They slipped it in
one night last year as I hung sleeping. When I awoke,
both I and the haggard old man across from me
screamed ourselves hoarse. Or is it as I hanged sleeping?
If I could shrug, he’d shrug too. Xylophone-ribbed.
Hair and beard an inseparable, lice-ridden thicket.
I know it’s just a mirror, but I also know he watches me
as I sleep, or pretend to sleep, dreaming that instead
of being stretched by time here in this god-lost dungeon,
I’m somewhere in the Caribbean or South Pacific maybe,
just me and a lone palm tree, no one who looks like me.
No one at all. One day if I’m lucky a bottle washes up,
a little rolled note inside that says only, “Look.”
And when I do, he’s there in the glass surface of the bottle,
hollow-eyed and screaming at me loud enough to wake me
but not to rouse my jailers. They wouldn’t come
if he screamed all night, the way he’s planning to.
Something about a Suicide
Something about a suicide makes us
tread more lightly as if the ground
once trod by the voluntary dead
grew spongy and unwell, as if to move
might send distress signals like a fly
in a web to whatever hungry mouth
might be waiting to eat us.
We make a thousand secret shrines
we think no one can see, but pass another faithful
on the street and you know. The bowed head.
Eyes looking straight at someone no longer here.
Every one a reliquary, bearing pieces
of the one true do-it-yourself cross,
ready to nurse doubt into belief and beyond.
The Edge
Go to the edge. We have always gone to the edge,
to the place where the land becomes the sea,
where with one more step we become something less
solid, less substantial as well. This is why we can’t stay,
why the edge compels us to take a bit of it away.
A handful of scallop shells. A bit of sea glass
bluer than our memory of the sea itself. Perhaps
one larger shell, one with an obstruction
that looks like a concrete seal, no way to hold it
to the ear and have the imagined sea remind us
of the edge. Take it away. Take it into your home.
Forget it for a day or two. You will find it or
it will find you, the way the wrong breeze
from the salt marsh finds you: by the nose.
You will find that the obstruction was a living foot
that dragged its spined and sacred safety
out of the closet and onto the bathroom floor
to its final rest on the rough, sea-less tile.
The edge never comes to us, and this is why.
We know no better than to think we have control,
that the edge will bow to us. Go to the edge
with your shell-shaped ear. A sound like the sea
will be waiting.
The Magi
The alpaca seemed resigned to the vultures
that ringed it where it lay in the mud.
The black-headed birds stood sentinel,
not moving a feather, just watching
as the alpaca’s chest rose and fell
and rose and fell again, rapid, shallow breaths.
The vultures waited. A soaking rain
had fallen for hours, only stopping
when the birds arrived. The alpaca lay
sunken so far in the black and deepening slop,
the stillborn cria beneath her breast
all but concealed, only a pair of legs
motionless in the mud. The mother panted
and tried to lick her child’s wool clean.
The cria disappeared into the muck
under its mother’s weight. The vultures
stood in a ring, watching, waiting.
The low skies promised rain.
The Maximist
When he thought he loved the human race
he wrote novels, brick-sized monuments to lives
in chaos, filling the holes in those lives
with every word he could. Then he fell in love
with days that certain people lived
and wrote short stories, road maps to guide them
through the intricacies of 24 hours in a life that
as a whole he could never love. Then he became a lover
of organs: heart, brain, liver, the generous lock and key
of penis and vagina. At last he was a poet,
scribbling 15 minute odes to love and loss,
drunks and other philosophers, and he would
stand up at a microphone and read them,
like a man fellating himself in public.
But now he is a hermit, more wisdom than love in his life.
He writes maxims in the sand, and when the tide comes in,
in the water. The wise man knows,
but tries to love nonetheless. A single fist
contains more truth than all the libraries in the land.
This is the s
and. That is the sea.
Try to tell the difference to a word.
David Kann
Dead Reckoning
For Beth Buxton
Well, you died by inches
fighting the filthy crab,
surgeons carving important pieces
from you,
always one step behind.
Tell me:
when you lay
together with your lover,
though your desire had become
no more than an echo,
and when you let him
uncover you
and reveal the gnarled landscape
your body had become,
did you turn your head away
in the slant lamp-shadows,
like a child believing
not to see him meant
you were free
of his gaze
while he read
the chart of scars,
some red and purple and new,
some tallow-yellow and settled-in—
that odyssey of agony—
could he squint through the map
and regain the territory,
and navigating by dead reckoning,
did he lay his cheek by your tender navel
and breathe you in,
honey-sweet as an infant?
Bolus of Flame in the Sistine Chapel
The moment after Michelangelo
finished
the Sistine ceiling,
he cleaned his brushes,
snuffed
his lanterns, turned and walked away
for wine and a lover, needful,
stunned
by completion’s void,
leaving the room, leaving God
swaddled
in a cloak red as sunrise,
by pink, cloud-rounded cherubim
lifted,
with his finger almost touching Adam’s.
In the reeking dark,
filled
with snuffed candle-smoke and drying plaster’s smell,
life’s bright unruly spark
leaped
from God’s finger to Adam’s,
and like sunstruck oil
flowed
and filled his palm, while God
rose into the night and
faded
indifferent, leaving
His orphan reclining on bare rock. Adam
raised
his burning hand to his mouth,
swallowed the bolus of flame, then
stood,
staggering under the weight of conscious flesh,
found his fiery tongue and
spoke
himself and all his get into time.
Report from Planet Senex
Whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.
—Lorca
Oh, but this is a hard land
to love.
Grey hills slump
and thick rivers
sprawl in deltas
splayed like dead hands.
Tan sand’s strewn
with flakes of flint and chert.
No steel to strike.
No kindling.
Nothing to slice
but brown lichen,
rags of dead flesh
on empty skulls.
The shambling wind skins
dust from the ground.
Sunrise is a gray smear,
and sunset stains
the sky with spilled ink.
All night
in the dark
sick fish wail
from a stagnant lake,
tearing the clouds.
In the black gashes
a few stars dim,
their voices growing red,
like opals sinking
in thick oil.
Pieta in Red
I found a liquidambar tree,
blazestruck with autumn and sunset.
Among its five-point leaves,
a red-tail hawk
pinned a sprawled dove
to a branch.
She dipped her sickle beak
to shredded pink meat.
The naked dove didn’t move,
complicit in the slow
tearing toward its heart.
In the windless evening
the red light died
in night’s slow slide
up the flaming tree.
When the Red-Tail gutted me
with her eye.
I filled
with the icy consent
of lichen, mushroom and frost.
Then she closed
her switchblade talons
and rose above
the leaves
with the lolling dove.
Ricky Ray
Death, a Wife, and a Life of Broken Rules
I
Is it because
I’m tired tonight
that I don’t want
to think of death,
my lifelong confidante,
the ear in me
that has no flesh,
that never had a drop of blood
to spill
between some crack in the desert—
the ear that,
as far as the eye can tell,
is not here
but is nonetheless wholly listening?
II
Whatever the reason,
No, my friend, I do not want
a glass of wine with you,
a tray of cheeses
and fine cuts of meat;
I do not want to shove you in my mouth
and savor your descent into my bowels.
III
I want the simplicity of water
tinged with the minerals
of my hometown,
the familiar blend of sulfur,
iron and arsenic that makes
hotel water taste wrong.
IV
I want a joke
and the knowing laughter
that swells in wit
born of sorrow,
sorrow that bites
and leaves a mark
that mars
every flawless mirror.
V
I want a broken back that has just experienced
an uncommon day of relief,
a spine stretching toward the heavens
that doesn’t recoil in pain.
VI
I want to know why the pigment in that painting
made me feel the way I do. I want to live
another night in the company of my wife’s skin.
I want the moment when her shades of cream
conspired to teach me what I could never
have taught myself about the complexities of snow.
VII
I close my eyes
and I am there;
she is next to me
and we are happy;
the future
is a condition
apart from
our time together.
VIII
They tell me I am foolish to dwell,
that there is no life in death
and no bringing back what’s gone.
But I tell you
they don’t know everything
and life is a breaker of rules.
IX
And what my heart does with me
when I turn myself over to its aims
makes me a firm believer
that love can do anything it wants.
X
When I want to be with her,
all I have to do
is sit like this
and close my eyes.
Then it’s easy,
it’s like
I’ve awoken in the night
and all I have to do is
peel back the covers
and feel my way
to her
through the dark.
The Music of As Is
Dearheart: forgive the extreme tardiness of my reply—
I meant to reply much sooner, but, alas, intentions
are weaklings who hardly ever muscle their being
into keeping its appointments. Interesting, the notion
that we’re nearly always late to or altogether missing
the meetings set up for us by our desires,
and thereby run around on the stringy detritus
of our potential. Why stringy? I don’t know,
but when I think out the field and walk through its grass,
I envision the shed potential not as flakes of skin
drifting down, but as strung out guts falling in ropes,
though without the gore or macabre mess—no,
these are the guts of something finer within us,
some heavenly-feathered cross-fiber, some
suddening strings of energy that break into music.
When I lie down in that field and feel the wind
make followers of my hairs, I envision us running
over these barely perceptible snakings of failure—visible,
like much of beauty, only if we actively look for them—
and think yes, there’s music in the air, so much music
that the strings beneath us and the strings of us
combine and conduct for the ear that cocks
with ache to hear it, and that’s the music I want:
the music of the way things go, not the way things
could go, if. Oh, I meant to write you a letter dearheart,
but I guess this is as it should be—I was never much
of a correspondent. Still, imagine the possibilities
of all that music, waiting like starlight to be
plucked, threaded through the ears and taken down.
The Blooming Noses
Flowers, these people are flowers who can brace the wind of a winter’s day, but not the wind of a bullet. Most aim is bad despite the years of training and most rubber bullets will miss, but the few that don’t will scatter the majority into hiding, the rebels into hills, while dissidents shiver in abandoned buildings, heating beans over small blue flames. Some of the shooters will want to change sides, but will be bound to ignore their consciences and abide by the pullers of strings. Strings of the purse, not strings of the heart. Strings that say plant the drugs in the pocket and watch the felony grow. Mace the face and watch the dissent shrivel into tears. Rough up for good measure, but not in front of the camera, and not the pretty female face or the old face or the rest of the faces where it’s blatantly visible. A kidney shot for the mouthy ones and a stomach jab to widen the eyes of the poorly dressed and highly educated. Raid the encampment in the middle of the night and make a racket that would make your scalp seeking ancestors proud. Burn the library and break the cookware. Accost the medics, dump their stores into the sewers. Herd them all like sleepy cattle. Hint at slaughter. Make them feel that their life is in danger and tell them that you’re doing it for their own good. Their hygiene has been declared a public hazard and their health is in jeopardy in more ways than one. This is the land of baby powder, not the land of shit and mud. This is the land of tightly controlled chemical stimulation and the doctors are standing by to diagnose your condition. The pharmacists are standing by to fill your orders. It’s time to put away the signs and pick up your belongings and head up the mountain of debt. It’s time to think of your children in the present and forget about a nebulous future. It’s time to face the facts of your position and make your journey along the predefined routes. And if you insist on questioning rules, if you insist on picking at scabs, then it will be time to call in the hounds, and there is nowhere left on earth that escapes our gaze for long. If we have to hunt you down, we will, and then it will be time to teach you a lesson. Then it will be time to taste the blood of a traitor. Then it will be time for locked doors, brutal beatings, and the torturous hands of power. Then it will be time to wake up day after day and smell the bloody, blooming noses. And then, then it will be time to listen to the blood in our bodies, the blood down our faces, the blood on our hands, and feel our hearts pump with the truth of what the blood tells us to do.