from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness
towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little
time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave-goods.
When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth
released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay.
I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from
what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour,
even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world.
8
The noises from the basement were not auspicious noises.
I wanted to live forever. I wanted to live forever and die
right then and there. I had heard the tight, distinctive shriek.
Here again and now. I no longer have legs. I am sleeping.
Long tendrils of tobacco smoke, composed of carbon dioxide,
water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen cyanide,
and 4,000 other chemical compounds, penetrate the room
through the gap beneath the door and through heating vents
with confidence. They are the spectral forms of anaconda.
The ruler of the underworld smokes cigars. A certain brand.
Hand-rolled. He smiles as if there is much to smile about.
And there is. He is hollow-eyed, toothless. His hat, infamous:
broad-brimmed, embellished with feathers, a live macaw.
His cape is depicted, often, as a length of fabric in distinctive
black and white chevrons. Otherwise, as here, the full pelt
of a jaguar. On a barge of plywood and empty milk cartons
he trudges through the froth. He is the lord of black sorcery
and lord of percussion. He is patron of commerce. He parts
the leaves of Mesoamerica, traveling with a retinue of drunken
ax wielders, collection agents. His scribe is a white rabbit.
Daughter of moon and of night. Elsewhere, you are having
your teeth taken out. There is no music left, but I still feel held
captive by the cinema, and in its custom, I believe myself
capable of protecting myself by hiding my face in my hands.
THE LAST VIBRATIONS
Meanwhile we wanted the sentence to continue
fading as we thought another would begin
only after the first had finished and the last
vibrations seemed not to extend from the sentence
anymore but the fact that we had heard it
fading there together. The air off the river
remembered our being someplace else, or a time
behind us waiting to return, and the chill
presented its case for returning, knowing
what happened next must somehow depend
on dismantling much of what happened before.
Therefore we tried to prolong the sentence
to give ourselves time to decide by repeating it.
Time to decide. We knew that we couldn’t
determine what happened down to the detail
but felt we might determine how the mind
should turn to meet it, the mind having often
believed itself to be struggling to continue
or thought itself that struggle to begin with.
In time to put that thinking aside, we thought
yellow leaves had torn through the blue
partitioned into day, but it was nowhere apparent
that they had. Down a channel of houses
framed in river air, we thought we could see
a portion of the water, but what we took for water
had foiled itself into a field of yellow light.
We knew that we might go on like that forever
without progression because the thought of
moving forward kept holding us back, the way
the thought of keeping still made us want to throw
ourselves like light on the river, unburdened
of that thinking we imagined might extend
endlessly thereafter, the way we thought we wanted it.
Light, river, air. Through the time we made
we felt what happened dismantle into yellow
leaves thought prolonged into trembling sentences.
Thought, leaves, houses; the last vibrations
faded to be remembered, in a place we would never
finish imagining: and it was then we began.
CHAPTER FOR REMOVING FOOLISH SPEECH FROM THE MOUTH
Tuning in again to the long elaborate
talk of the dead, ear held to a glass held
to what’s left of the world, I let them
lullaby me back to where it all got under-
papered walls my sphere, birdsong’s
infinite punctures in air like ticker tape
from the branches’ fine interweaving.
I don’t think to worry here whether half-
truths and music serve to reveal truth
or else only confuse it as stiff breezes
prove emphatic with their first purple
hyacinth and diesel. To what extent
stating a truth implies an endorsement
or when to embrace mere statement
means calling it true. I name the bees
sun’s diplomats to an embassy of flowers
whether neighbors want me to or not.
Latest clouds in apricot coach my lips
through wordless chants against a purr
fuming from the nearby textile factory.
I’m not moving a muscle. Any exercise
to the tune of work will have to wait
for habit’s stratocumulus to overcast this
puny light and need to stuff my mouth
with bargain cottons. When I’m done
I will be done, and the dead will come
riding their bone boomerang to return
me to that vertical life: tentative at first,
then all at once, as one might remove
red bandages at night, hands dutifully
maneuvering me forward as they take
me to task for having squandered so much
time on that sinkhole reverie I might
have invested in real estate or futures.
HIS THEOGONY
In the bathtub I envision
twin deities suppressing
the same eternal yawn.
Tiny handprints prance
across their tightened lids.
Trembling beneath this
revelation, dozens more
wait to hatch, but I lack
the wherewithal to make them.
As I sink back thinking
they can all just imagine
themselves themselves
tonight, the twins’ eyes pop
open like the massive
tambourines of the future!
In this life I’ll almost certainly
not be acquainted with
much luxury, so if it ever
shakes in front of me again,
I’ll take it in my hands
posthaste: to play with, then destroy.
TIBERIUS AT THE VILLA JOVIS
Disturbances that ask to be likened to the weather
choose a storm that is wheeling nearer to oneself,
eye tightening through days across the tossed water
then upon one with its tentacles finagling the last
ramparts cracked open in a haze from cleft slumber.
Suppose a chance fear proved demon with devices
conducting one through mazes in unbroken sleep:
what happens one knows, but only with a knowing
mistakable for dream, or for a portraiture of weather
pushpinned to the wall above a bed’s tangled deep.
Rescue from that k
not must appear at first certain
danger leapt through a howl in full guise of storm,
then chipped at the ears by its own demonstration
as bedside necks with comfort’s faces stuck on them
suffer love more acutely than if kept behind glass.
In that case to awaken would mean to tumble into
the storm you had run from: no stairway, no porthole
other than that which you find to climb out through
would mean to return to a need to be done, a mind
confined to its blizzard of quandary in time numbing
down, but not quite entirely—don’t give up on me,
I can fight this, I am Tiberius, a sudden wooden boat
my boat floating sofa spoken from the mouth of a grotto
bright with water, the blue a blue noon sky, my voice
your voice is around us lacing with light’s clear voices.
ADVICE TO BABOONS OF THE NEW KINGDOM
When they approach you with plates of soft fruit
and erotic objects, they have already singled you out
for worship. The agreeable arrangement of your face
and your humanlike behavioral traits have served
to identify you as a vessel for the habitation of gods.
Resist the impulse to play along, but if you can’t,
and few can, enjoy the barge music as you drift up
the Nile from the Land of Punt—the many-stringed harps,
the delicate wooden flutes blown directly through
reinforced mouthpieces—all the while keeping close
watch on your ten attendants, who are glistening with
unguents made of rendered goat fat and spikenard.
As the barge nears the river’s banks, leap from deck
into dense papyrus stalks that have attained a height
of no less than seven feet, certain that no crocodiles,
hippopotami, or comparable riparian predators lurk
half-submerged in shadows. If chance to abandon ship
fails to present itself, they will carry you into the city,
feed you pastilles of licorice and poppy, slowly bathe
and adorn you, anoint your thick, coarse, ash brown coat.
Afterwards, as the grogginess runs out, you return
to your senses in a dim-lit temple, your dietary needs
guessed at but missed, your body’s dependence on
sunlight and freedom of movement unintuited as yet.
You grow despondent; your coat grows thin. You show
no evidence of divinity—does it need to be proven?
As you rest between ceremonies, watch the outlines
of your votaries interrupt the faint light at the mouth
of the corridor that leads from the temple’s entrance down
to your holy chamber. In this manner, you will pass
months, whole seasons, possibly years, until you are
possessed of a god at last, and this one means business.
DREAM OF THE OVERLOOK
Already the present starts plotting its recurrence
somewhere in the future, weaving what happens
in among our fabrics, launching its aroma, its music
imbuing itself into floorboards, plaster, nothing can
stop it, it can’t stop itself. You will never have access
to its entirety, and you have asked how to calculate
what resists calculation, how to control what refuses
to cooperate, but know full well a propensity to resist
and to refuse is the source of its power. The winters
can be fantastically cruel, as if the weather can see
what happened here before and flares itself up as a way
to remember, or else it intuits what evil is about
to happen and does what it can to divert it, stands on
haunches to frighten it off. On the other hand maybe
what happens and the weather are working together,
and one does what it can to push the other one up
over mountains, across a carpet. All this calculating
exactness of modern life, one result of our monetary
economy, shares an ideal with the natural sciences—
namely, to transform the world into a math problem.
The air feels so different, one can smell the privilege
emanating from a battery of pine—one must build
a fortress of it, all the best people, one gold afternoon
unraveling through sleep into another: some visitors
complain of nausea, vertigo, chills, feelings of dread,
confusion, but it’s so beautiful here . . . hard to believe
a snowstorm could be that close. I want to go outside,
stretch out in the sun. Yet to our north, to our west,
it’s snowing and cold, and it’s moving as if conveyed
down corridors into rooms whose many tribal motifs
have amplified over decades into labyrinths invisible
to the naked eye but solid nonetheless, so that to walk
through a door means to face a number of possibilities
greatly circumscribed by history: left, right, left, right
to the immaculate bathroom from which much steam
shall gallop; right, right, left, left to the improbably
large bed where one lies sleeping; right, left, left, right
to a window overlooking the hedge maze into which
somewhere in the future, quieter and away from what
habits have kept us from feeling what static has kept us
going, unknowingly, we venture. Each of us a creature
whose existence depends upon difference, our minds
discovering themselves in the differences between
present impressions and those that have preceded.
I think it might be a good idea if you leave the radio
on all the time now. The torrents keep building up
against a barrier far too fatigued to withstand much
more. As if at any minute. As if even the snow, falling,
possessed a little consciousness, near-infinite voices
boisterous with parenting advice, spiritual guidance,
stock tips, ribaldry, and grievances from the long lost.
No less as ghosts we consume ourselves in press.
Let me explain something to you. Many years from now,
on the verge of sleep, someone will be lying down
where I am lying now, and he or she will suffer, suddenly,
what I am suffering now, and where I come from,
we call that success. One must first become open, flung
wide or pried apart, to an order of feeling foreign
to most, a form of surrender to thought and occurrence
through apparatus not your own, hours of rendezvous
with the absent, the air, the demonic. Obviously some
people can be put off by the idea of staying alone
in a place where something like that actually happened
once, much less one where it happens all the time,
but when we reckon ourselves haunted, it is beyond
mere house. Now hold your eyes still so that I can see.
Midnight: the construction draws attention to its secret
passages; in intimate office, a wisdom is revealed
in the periphrasis a finance counselor laps from a lap.
The stars: and quiet, through evening’s hush, a stranger
murmuring tranquillity to those closed in the narrow
cell arousing beyond or before more bourbon takes.
And you: that voice from afar, a flow of warm waves
I drift off remembering, that radiance through clouds
archaically measured in foot-candles: I think you hurt
my head real bad. Admittedly you’re under binding
contract to do so. On the flipside much of the damage
has animated production of the interior as I know it,
made me more myself making brute with me, kindling
them old predatory embers never quite satisfactorily
displaced into numbers, as off in the distance, almost
picturesquely, the blizzard obliterates the humming
topography of Colorado, the hard writing of the place:
one sentence reconfigured page after page, no progress
but insistence, an entity meant in the plural, not single
wolves but a pack: in believing oneself to be just one
one made the first mistake. I think the next is to think
of the ax in our hands, blood everywhere, rather than
just pick it up, get on with it. One’s economic interests
don’t tell me to smother the beast in me, they tell us
to put it to work. I and the others have come to believe
somewhere in the future it will be just like nothing
ever happened, or like the sound of the horn at the heart
of nowhere. Notice the group photo in which I stand
apart from but attached to. I feel I should die if I let myself
be drawn into the center no less than if I just let go.
TEAM OF FAKE DEITIES ARRANGED ON AN ORANGE PLATE
Maybe indolence is a form of conflict between oneself
and everything else in the room, and turning
inward and away is a step toward peace, or into it.
Or maybe peace would be more like turning
toward with hands outstretched, an open look
through measured breathing. Either way, I like it.
I know I do. I like the way it sounds when I sing.
I like to see amber light from the pages
of the book I’m not reading. I like the clock’s unstoppable
escapement and the cornstalks wrung with blue
convolvulus, a treacherous vine whose flowers
look like drunken trumpets. Look at that look on the face
of the hardworking workman home again from work.
He’s earned it. Look at that Indian elephant
decimating peppermints. I like it. I like what I see
and I am not indolent. I like a nonexistent Deity
and a team of fake deities arranged on an orange plate.
I like what I’ve done though I know it won’t last.
And even if there is a Deity, I still like the idea
of a team of little fakes, and if we turn their invention
into a contest, you can bet your ass I’m winning.