downward through the air through what we have come to call
swimming. Though the rule states clearly that every guest
must be greeted with courtesy, with heads bowed in utmost
humility and care, the arrival of a ship by way of air proves
no less incompatible with convention than a sense of urgency
proves palpable even from my parapet. But it’s impossible
to tell if, when the monks grab our hero, they do so in rowdy
welcome, or to pry him away from the too-prized anchor, or away
from the miracle they’ve mistaken for the devil’s snare. Stop,
he says as they drag him to the earth, you are drowning me.
Again, amid struggle: You are drowning me. Then kill the lights.
Centuries afterwards, visiting the site where these events
came to pass, walking the grounds, I think what I remember
most is a feeling of being apart from them, the great loneliness
which seems to be one’s lesson. In the herb garden, I look up
and realize the window I sat at wasn’t far away at all. I think
they were all just ignoring me, or angry at me for making them
self-conscious about what they were trying to sleep through.
As I leave the theater, its unlit halls wind in no direction I can see.
Then I see there are no halls, it’s all just one big empty space.
Then, in the darkness, the voice again. And it says I control this.
MONTEZUMA TO HIS MAGICIANS
If they are gods, if they have
divinity in them, then why
when we lay at their feet
garlands of quetzal feathers
and gold coins do they leap
upon the gold as dazzled
monkeys might and tread
on sacred plumage like dust?
DREAM OF ARABIAN HILLBILLIES
Salutations from the all-encompassing
arms of a hammered millionaire!
I send a blessing of watches over your body
and a messenger to your folks
sanctifying them in a long crude eruption.
May you journey in the security
of a huge American truck. May your enemies come
to wither in front of this truck
allowing you and your kinfolk to occupy
the avenue of personal interests
privately and in full style for 60,000 years.
Talk about divine measures!
All enemy forces threatening your basic
philosophy of life demand a helpin’
of grievous medicine: it is no longer possible
to press letters of forgiveness
loaded with soft words and in diplomatic
style into their hands when clearly
in their hearts they would strip you of such
incredible resources: money out
back in important places, a wicked grip
on the situation, pools of lost time
and no little grace . . . but who can push the enemy
underground with hospitality?
No one. Gain control of circumstances by
taking some. Repel with mischief
raised to the utmost power, one forbidden
behavior after another, from pure
dissociation from the feelings and prides
of your forefathers to aggression
against the infrastructures of the sea and sky.
Spell serious danger to their being,
y’all—only half your hoard is remaining.
I address you now with a big torch
of guidance handed over to me by the stars
above Texas. It is unacceptable
to assist the enemy in your dispossession.
Be not bitten by the same snake
twice. The first explosion inspired
the devil, and the second a gathering
of military leaders who talk to you through such
fast-moving light, one day today
is tomorrow’s fear commercial, thank you
very much. The money you pay
out for loving this world will all come back
for the money you have left, saying
“To express hate and anger is a moral gesture
to the future.” I did not just say that.
Time to be enshrined in the sanctities
of the bubblin’ in your head that is
the persistence of news agencies.
Time to liberate that head from the whole
world’s behind and listen for a pen
to spell the words of your foes’ humiliation.
Why not paradise before as well as
after death, kept at a beautiful 72 degrees
and with nothing between you
and all the privileges heapin’ so high
a neck is pinched just signing up for them?
Terrorizing the snake for twisting filthy
text to your house is a human duty.
Let your good black shoes witness you push
hard into the red dust of the battle
burning your intestines like a pagan tea.
Cleanse the road to your destiny
of all idolaters and claim what they be droppin’
for your booty. Take no captives—
or maybe one or two, should they surrender
wealth, drink, hearts and selves
to your supremacy without hesitation.
Paradise’s nearness isn’t getting any
better. May you not cave in and weep deep. May wolves
not eat your wings. May your life
not be a lifelong movie of your life
but a steadfast becoming other than that
which you are: a slave to the power
fiddling among hills of fed clouds and shaken
into wonderment like a shot horse barely
gathering will to lay down with it, y’hear?
CHAPTER FOR BEING TRANSFORMED INTO A LOTUS
The comparison only went so far: the suffering
from which we had come to expect so much
remained mere suffering; the swamp due south
to which we had thought to compare it in our youth
stayed water choked in excess life, its voices
thoughtlessly forcing the same plump syllables
across the distance into windows furred with night.
But here in the room where we sit thinking that
if suffering had to enter our house, it should have
been the kind that sang, or else the kind from which
small shapes would zoom and circle the light
hanging in the middle of the room like a thought
whose fifteen petals open and whose opening we become
custodian to, here in the lotus of half-sleep, I am
beginning to forget where a comparison falls short.
ANTEPENULTIMATE CONFLICT WITH SELF
1
The times the thought of being pulled apart from
you comes as a relief have come now to outnumber
those it startles me like light from a hurricane
lamp left burning unattended dangerously near
the curtains of the theater we both attend and are.
The fire of it spasms up the tall glass chimney
like little air pockets we’ve watched trudge down
loops in hospital tubing—disarmed, but quietly.
When I have made in our manhood some large noise
to spook off harm, harm has only found us faster.
Saying one should distract it as the other escapes
to an agreed-on spot where we can reconnoiter
after, like under the alder where the jackdaw builds
its nest of surplus playbills. They shred them up
like that
as a matter of procedure. They intend no
particular disrespect to you or your production.
None taken. Glad to hear it. Because I thought I saw
a darkness drift across your face that I associate
with umbrage. Not even close. If I were you I wouldn’t
flatter myself. And yet, turning things around, this
darkness you speak of, it must have drifted across
your own face at least as much as mine. Admittedly, yes.
So why not leave me out of it? I’ve been trying to do
just that. Looks to me like you haven’t been going
about it right. That makes two of us, then. Not quite.
Leaving the burning theater behind one begins to
ease into a new perspective. The stairway leads to
a doorway, the doorway to an alleyway, the alleyway
to another door, more stairs, another amber room
where one can forget again, its window overlooking
a car lot emptied of its cars. The stark lines recall
what was and will be there, but isn’t now or anymore.
The scent of juniper or cat piss. A knock at the door.
A look around the room before opening to confirm this
isn’t the one we’ve been, only half in fear, dreaming.
2
After calculation, I’ve let you in. Seated at the table
in cold beneath the window, we try to remember each
example of the condition we’re after, namely that of
a multitude at work in unison. You say alder branches
blown in the wind. I say the warp and weft of waves
on an open bay. You say activity near beehives. I say
heavy snowfall. You say a flock of birds tilting mid-flight
and I say some performances we turn to long enough
to forget what we can never have, not without shedding
either or both of us. As if one had to clear out room
for a discovery that doesn’t come so much as splinter
into the shag. We are down on our hands and knees
trawling gold acrylic pile. We are old here already.
To have rehearsed this almost infinitely hasn’t helped
move things along. On the contrary. The whole idea
of perfection, evidently our aim, seems to have done
less to guide us away from missteps than to make them
even sharper, more palpable, and in several respects
downright impossible to avoid. (All the pressing in of
what we’ll never have reminds us of how thoroughly
bereft we are, even of a hope of one day not wanting.)
You ought to put an end to this. (What pierces my hand
pierces yours, stops us into focus strong enough only
to drive off gauzy voices urging more harm for the quiet
that comes after.) You ought to have put an end to it
first. Shown a little courtesy. (Light dim as light can be
and still be thought light flosses the cleft between poorly
drawn curtains.) You shouldn’t have followed me here.
You made it impossible not to. Took you long enough
to say it though. Some things go without. Without? Without
saying altogether. They sit unsaid in a lost auditorium,
muttering into night. I think they should be heard. I think
I can hear them now. As from behind a wall, or within it.
We have that gift. Yes, and each other. Also sticktoitiveness.
But it’s gifts like these that always get one into trouble.
HIS APOLOGIA
As I press my ear against
earth or any surface
come to think of it I hear
the glissando of falling in
forgottenness then
worse—as, for example,
somewhere in Nebraska,
lodged in the throat
of an abandoned mineshaft
shut with a concrete
slab in the fall, warmed
by the gradual advance
of sun, a colony of dormant
bats awakens one
quiver at a time, steadily
congesting the air with
vibration, opening
the thin leather fold of the
wings Linnaeus knew bore
much less resemblance to
a bird’s than to the quick
human hands held over a mouth
red with attempt
to cry out in danger or
those that have penned us
in the din into which
we at once unhinge—and from
which I can never tear
myself away without
what I agree to call irritability.
TO HIS DETRIMENT
Your wisdom is in never wearing me down entirely.
The way you leave me just enough to build upon, no more:
a pair of human hands to reach and push away with;
tightened chestfuls of remembrance; an alarum in my ear
which means I am awake now, means I am alive:
again despite appearances, again as though the day
had some contraption up its sleeve, another devilish design
time unfastens by degrees, almost teasingly in fact,
so that somewhere over lunch, as the whole becomes
discernible through the parts I’m given access to, I end up
wishing it upon myself: I wish it right up to the neck
but never any higher. Leave me will enough and strength,
I will never wish it higher! Frazzled aureate, the early
morning splits open like upholstery, a John-of-Patmos chintz.
I commend it all for happening, no matter what it is:
mint condition of a fountain, mindless under thunderclaps
and all these empty days, days crashing into phrases,
dawn conniption in the trees. The mere fact the fabric
of the air undoes itself intoxicates, that weariness before
having borne any burden, you leave me little choice:
I have to admire it; I drop my magazine. But as fertility
in domestic animals and plants was once held to decrease
in inverse ratio to food supply, I worry that my own
productivity might suffer in accordance with my appetite
for atmospheric disturbance, and I turn from the window
hungry for accomplishment, recalling the industry
exhibited once by a bone-pale spider, how it mended its web
in the rococo of an antique lectern, utterly immune
to the fluttering above it—a perfect miniature of tidiness!
Regarding miniatures, I notice several near at hand:
three of which I cherish, another which I recognize but lack
significant attachment to, a fifth which I renounce,
a sixth which you have placed here simply to disarm me,
and a seventh which belongs not to the category
of the miniature per se, but rather to that of the play of light on water.
My impulse to destroy all seven of the miniatures,
including those I cherish, including light on water,
I now understand as a passion for remembering
how delicate they are, and it need not find expression.
As I have come to understand it, tidiness is a form
of knowledge concerning the fine placement of things,
reminiscent of mosaics, or of the slow holy work
of rearranging a living space to find out what it means.
Hope is both product of and fuel for these machines,
and while you leave me little, you grant me near enough
to travel abroad in search of much more, a cache
perhaps mismanaged by those whose whole approach
undermines mine, and if
I am not now that force
which only yesterday moved heavy furniture, my purpose
still precedes me: to journey forth by day, absorbing
hope from all passersby; to know the world’s big backslap
unhampered by the steam of this or any downpour.
Farewell mirror where I tremble, farewell funny door
I bolt behind me—these are the unstoppable footsteps
whose return will herald such renaissance, I see no reason
to forestall it: a pivot, and I’m home again at last!
Dear detriment, see me through this victory. It is almost too rich.
There will be drink in this ceremony. We will prove such music.
What transport, markets, and livestock we have missed
we will enumerate, and somewhere in the adding, experience.
Time and again I have been this person we are gathered
here to celebrate, you’d think I would get used to it.
This pair of human hands to reach and push away with,
small wonder they are mine: I know just what to do with them.
Certain whitespace surrounds our sentences at first,
but with the whiskey things take off. In my dizziness to see
your wisdom clearly it grounds me. We need each other.
Without me you would cease to be yourself. Without you
I would be unthinkable. You ask me to comment on my triumph,
on rivers meandering across continents, on the imponderable
seas which receive these waters without remuneration,
but you make it sound so tedious! In the ultimate eloquent
gesture I reach out for small comforts, everyday items:
an unread book, urban water, any refreshment, but my touch
dissolves them. No other way to put it. I reach for them
and then they just aren’t there. I try not to make too much of it.
Always it ends like this, in diminuendo, a heaving down.
I’d never do anything to hurt the miniatures, you know that.
I sense a change about to last, a shadow inching inward
toward the center of the pool, but then that old alarum
in my ear starts in again, a stillness fills the room. Evidently
my purpose is to maintain it. Now and then I shift somewhat
back and forth to throw the too-perfect stillness into relief.
But this is more than just maintenance. This is enhancement.
CHAPTER FOR KINDLING A TORCH