Who will fault me
for not accepting
the responsibility
of making meaning
from whatever it is
you have somewhat
mysteriously laid
before me when
the reason I picked it
up for to begin with
was a hope of taking
pleasure in the same.
EXPLANATION OF AN ORIOLE
Miraculous to find time to do nothing other than gather
dust like the mismatched furniture in whose slow company
my gratitude increases the longer I don’t think about me:
no cringe at what I’ve done, no wince at what’s to do.
Windowed oak grow bare in the time it takes to remember
the word for the small, sensitive branches that reach out
tirelessly from a nerve cell to receive adjacent nerve cells’
tidings of electricity and with dispatch pulse them back.
Another hour on standstill and I’ll almost be able to feel
entangled in exchange with much more than necessary.
To notice wind incite the branches to interact in a manner
mistakable for happiness when happiness has stopped
seeming so implausible. Just to see the gold bolt through air
is explanation enough, a knowledge that opens itself up
without ending, an end in itself without having to conclude.
Just to breathe on purpose is an act of faith in this world.
BULLETIN FROM UNDER THE BED
Then it all starts seeming like a terrible mistake
but to turn back now would only serve to make
matters even worse, bringing as it would the very
seeming of the first condition into finitude, hastily
plastering it in history, and thereby giving shape
where shapelessness has so long worked to our advantage.
It falls upon us then to build up our resistance to
the lure of such reversal, letting what has seemed
plow ahead with its seeming without interruption,
lest we find ourselves sent on the infinitely more
lamentable mission of having to confront what what
began in mere seeming has managed to become, or—
while I hunt for the term for the left hand reaching out
to prevent any further involvement of the curtain
ceremoniously you shield a last candle with your right
against the wind released through the turning of pages.
DREAM OF A POETRY OF DEFENSE
As pendulum. As wind. As an ever-changing mutual voice.
As consciousness, sympathies, chords of speculation.
As to prolong speculation plastic and within. As copious
as infancy. As infrastructure to the most invisible
indestructible flower. And infinite. As infinite as pleasure
apprehended through excess. As cross-fertilization
of intelligence and cloud. And as light, and as energy.
As all related instruments indispensable to choruses.
As being differently indispensable. As being harmonious.
Whatever echo, cadence, or strain from the catalogue
of meaningful music, deep in the midst of its composition:
a proposal for living, an epitome, a permanent spark
through American darkness, barbarous as nightingale
awakened in a laboratory, hidden from the world
in its thousand details. As ancient armor around the body
deformed by protection. As pains against fragments
in an epoch of drama. As danger period, a distorted history.
As dance without music, as passion without capacity.
As exactness equal to any example. As under this thin
guise of circumstance. As if internal Minneapolis.
As enlarged by sorrow, terror, where so ever I decline.
As against decay of liberties, as against misapplication,
monster propagating and the extinction of softness.
As overzealous as a number. As when the degradation
distributes itself as workforce venom, paralyzing
citizens in vivid architecture. As from the great faculty
an effluence is set forth. As episodes, as footsteps.
Bewildered anomalies. Extraordinary drawbacks.
As convulsions nourishing their course with strength,
and expeditiously. As national vapors. As theater wrecks.
As at successive intervals the exhausted population
penetrated caverns. At drowse. At impossible to feel.
The full extent of sympathy considered a mistake.
As the dregs in the sensible. As in paradise stamped
in sleepless surveillance and proceedings of state.
But at inmost, a starry flock. At connection, an attaché.
And the still overflowing inextinguishable source.
As first written waters, as burning information.
We can advance the fountain. We can define foundation.
As awakened a shadow, as a vessel of assurance.
Let portions of our being. Let chapter the invention.
We want more brightness than money can imagine.
We want what arises from the passages between
mind management and the exasperation of anatomy.
Yoke evanescent wonder. Reanimate the blunted.
The mind that directs the hand is not vanishing.
Let laundering. Let mechanism turn to potable song
and highest human flight. As illustrious as trumpets
awakening washed garments. As manifestations
of the long electric work. Let gathering a nation.
Let the end of the battle be astonished birth of person.
4
THROUGH THE WILDERNESS OF HIS FOREHEAD
You wager too much, small self, on the way you feel. Nothing
you have thought should last forever can’t be lost.
Even the yellow wind that begins at once to strip the last of the
heart-shaped foliage from the tree across the way
knows that feeling is a spell from which the mind can
rouse itself awake if it would only let itself be taken
leaf by leaf apart. And you have felt this fear before, clung
as to a vapor misremembering what had stood to
live through memory alone. Or was it afterwards among
fog folded into blankets of some self-erasing sleep.
Or when, conversely, focused on the constancy of any given
thing without dispersing, undissolved—an icecap-
white moon or clock-face on a tower—the mind intent on far
too fine a point to take in any more. You will outlive
yourself again, and what you feel now, this adamantine
sorrow, will scatter its dicethrow behind you into swans.
GLOBUS HYSTERICUS
1
A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from
factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag
me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect
massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants
havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed-
fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell
and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger
as they inch up stems. Through the bulkhead door
I can hear their spirals plunk into the sluggish south-
bound current and dissolve therein with such brutal
regularity their dying has given rise to the custom
of measuring time here in a unit known as the snailsdeath.
The snailsdeath refers to the average length of time,
about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first
snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly
equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human
throat, while the adverb here refers to my person
and all its outskirts, beginning on the so-called cellular
level extending more or less undaunted all the way down
to the vale at the foot of the bed. I often fear I’ll wake
to find you waiting there and won’t know how to speak
on the subject of my production, or rather my woeful
lack thereof, but in your absence, once again, I will begin
drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves.
2
Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched,
trudges through the froth. I take its photograph
from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch
day’s delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of
the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts
on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche
has proven spirited enough to produce such a range
of material effects upon what we’ll call the closed
system of its custodial body, indeed if it’s expected to,
and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute
the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation
willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand-
new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera,
and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out
for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale,
then might it not also prove possible for the psyche
by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress
its thumbprint on some other system, a production
in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you
inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway,
dragging your long chains behind you most morosely
if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it
imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move
wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak.
3
After the memory of the trucks withdrawing heavy
with their cargo fans out and fades into late-morning
hunger, I relocate in time to the lit bank of vending
machines still humming in the staff-room corner for a light
meal of cheese curls, orange soda, and what history
will come to mourn as the last two cream-filled cakes.
Eating in silence, a breeze in the half-light, absently
thinking of trying not to think, I imagine the Bethlehem
steel smokestacks above me piping nonstop, the sky
wide open without any question, steam and dioxides
of carbon and sulfur, hands pressed to the wall as I walk
down the corridor to stop myself from falling awake
again on the floor in embarrassment. If there’s any use
of imagination more productive or time less painful
it hasn’t tried hard enough to push through to find me
wandering the wings of a ghost-run factory as Earth
approaches the dark vale cut in the heart of the galaxy.
Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction
visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture
what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand
in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes
rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples,
or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that
surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it.
4
(Plunk) Up from the floor with the sun to the sound of
dawn’s first sacrifice to the residues of commerce.
On autofog, on disbelief: rejuvenation in a boxer brief
crashed three miles wide in the waves off Madagascar,
cause of great flooding in the Bible and in Gilgamesh.
Massive sphere of rock and ice, of all events in history
(Plunk) thought to be the lethalmost. A snailsdeath
semiquavers from pang to ghost where the habit of ghosts
of inhabiting timepieces, of conniving their phantom
tendrils through parlor air and into the escapements
of some inoperative heirloom clock on a mantel shows
not the dead’s ongoing interest in their old adversary
(Plunk) time so much as an urge to return to the hard
mechanical kind of being. An erotic longing to reanimate
the long-inert pendulum. As I have felt you banging
nights in my machine, jostling the salt from a pretzel.
This passion for the material realm after death however
refuses to be reconciled with a willingness to destroy
(Plunk) it while alive. When the last of the human voices
told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping
list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats.
That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy
albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern,
yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless.
5
Graffiti on the stonework around the service entrance
makes the doorway at night look like the mystagogic
mouth of a big beast, amphibious, outfitted with fangs,
snout, the suggestion of a tongue, throat, and alimentary
canal leading to a complex of caves, tunnels, temples . . .
There are rooms I won’t enter, at whose threshold I say
this is as far as I go, no farther, almost as if I can sense
there’s something in there I don’t want to see, or for which
to see means having wanted already to forget, unless
stepping into the mouth at last, pressed into its damp,
the advantage of not knowing is swapped out for the loss
of apartness from what you’d held unknown, meaning
you don’t come to know it so much as become it, wholly
warping into its absorbent fold. I can’t let that happen
if it hasn’t already. What draws me on might be thought
canine, keen-sighted, but it’s still incapable of divining why
the constant hum around or inside me has to choose
among being a nocturne of toxic manufacture, the call
of what remains of the jungle, or else just another prank
on my gullible anatomy. Am I not now beset in the utmost
basement of industry? Is that basement itself not beset
by the broad, black-green, waxy leaves of Mesoamerica?
And haven’t I parted those selfsame leaves, discovering me
asleep on my own weapon, threat to no one but myself ?
6
Asked again what I miss the most about my former life,
I remember to pause this time, look left, a little off-camera
an entire snailsdeath, an air of sifting the possibilities,
I eliminate certain objects and events from the running
right off the bat, such as when their great displeasure
brought the gods to turn to darkness all that had been
light, submerging mountaintops in stormwater, the gods
shocked by their own power, and heartsick to watch
their once dear people stippling the surf like little fishes.
Or when the flaming peccary of a comet struck the earth
with much the same effect, waves as high as ziggurats
crashing mathematically against our coastlines, scalding
plumes of vapor and aerosols tossed into the at
mosphere
spawning storms to pummel the far side of the earth,
approximately 80 percent of all life vanished in a week.
Or when we squandered that very earth and shat on it
with much the same effect, and more or less on purpose,
emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production,
shoveling it in as ancient icecaps melted, what difference
could another make now. And so I clear my throat, look
directly into the camera, and even though it will make me
come off bovine in their eyes, I say that what I miss the most
has to be those cream-filled cakes I used to like, but then
they prod me with their volts and lead me back to the barn.
7
After the panic grew more or less customary, the pity
dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility
from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense
that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually
moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing
visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it
or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much
managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography
will come to show: field after field of untouched white.
After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare,
too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge
that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale
turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle
tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only
imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens
and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather
over time might deaden one all over again, unless being
changed with death means not only changing past change
but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards
that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change.
That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from
change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it.
In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once
given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph.
The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back