Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure
That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?
Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired
And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.
2.
He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie
For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play
Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours
Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,
Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.
But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.
Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.
3.
Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel
The way you’d think he feels.
Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.
I’ve lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I’ll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He’s got
The whole world under his foot,
And we are small alongside,
Though there are occasions
When a man his size can meet
Your eyes for just a blip of time
And send a thought like SHINE
SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE
Straight to your mind. Bowie,
I want to believe you. Want to feel
Your will like the wind before rain.
The kind everything simply obeys,
Swept up in that hypnotic dance
As if something with the power to do so
Had looked its way and said:
Go ahead.
SAVIOR MACHINE
I spent two years not looking
Into the mirror in his office.
Talking, instead, into my hands
Or a pillow in my lap. Glancing up
Occasionally to let out a laugh.
Gradually it felt like a date with a friend,
Which meant it was time to end.
Two years later, I saw him walking
Up Jay Street into the sun. No jacket,
His face a little chapped from wind.
He looked like an ordinary man carrying
Shirts home from the laundry, smiling
About something his daughter had said
Earlier that morning. Back before
You existed to me, you were a theory.
Now I know everything: the words you hate.
Where you itch at night. In our hallway,
There are five photos of your dead wife.
From time to time, I think of him watching me
From over the top of his glasses, or eating candy
From a jar. I remember thanking him each time
The session was done. But mostly what I see
Is a human hand reaching down to lift
A pebble from my tongue.
THE SOUL
The voice is clean. Has heft. Like stones
Dropped in still water, or tossed
One after the other at a low wall.
Chipping away at what pushes back.
Not always making a dent, but keeping at it.
And the silence around it is a door
Punched through with light. A garment
That attests to breasts, the privacy
Between thighs. The body is what we lean toward,
Tensing as it darts, dancing away.
But it’s the voice that enters us. Even
Saying nothing. Even saying nothing
Over and over absently to itself.
THE UNIVERSE: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK
The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even
A few bars of sax the stratosphere will singe-out soon enough.
Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane
Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise,
Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings
In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored
Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire
And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen:
The dark we’ve only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,
Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns.
Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears
Disappears as if returning somewhere.
TWO
THE SPEED OF BELIEF
In memoriam, Floyd William Smith 1935–2008
I didn’t want to wait on my knees
In a room made quiet by waiting.
A room where we’d listen for the rise
Of breath, the burble in his throat.
I didn’t want the orchids or the trays
Of food meant to fortify that silence,
Or to pray for him to stay or to go then
Finally toward that ecstatic light.
I didn’t want to believe
What we believe in those rooms:
That we are blessed, letting go,
Letting someone, anyone,
Drag open the drapes and heave us
Back into our blinding, bright lives.
When your own sweet father died
You woke before first light
And ate half a plate of eggs and grits,
And drank a glass of milk.
After you’d left, I sat in your place
And finished the toast bits with jam
And the cold eggs, the thick bacon
Flanged in fat, savoring the taste.
Then I slept, too young to know how narrow
And grave the road before you seemed—
All the houses zipped tight, the night’s
Few clouds muddy as cold coffee.
You stayed gone a week, and who were we
Without your clean profile nicking away
At anything that made us afraid?
One neighbor sent a cake. We ate
The baked chickens, the honeyed hams.
We bowed our heads and prayed
You’d come back safe,
Knowing you would.
What does the storm set free? Spirits stripped of flesh on their slow walk.
The poor in cities learn: when there is no place to lie down, walk.
At night, the streets are minefields. Only sirens drown out the cries.
If you’re being followed, hang on to yourself and run—no—walk.
I wandered through evenings of lit windows, laughter inside walls.
The sole steps amid streetlamps, errant stars. Nothing else below walked.
When we believed in the underworld, we buried fortunes for our dead.
Low country of dogs and servants, where ghosts in gold-stitched robes walk.
Old loves turn up in dreams, still livid at every slight. Show them out.
This bed is full. Our limbs tangle in sleep, but our shadows walk.
Perhaps one day it will be enough to live a few seasons and return to ash.
No children to carry our names. No grief. Life will be a brief, hollow walk.
My father won’t lie still, though his legs are buried in trousers and socks.
But where does all he knew—and all he must now know—walk?
Probably he spun out of himself
And landed squarely in that there, his new
Body capable, lean, vibrating at the speed
Of belief. She was probably waiting
In the light everyone describes,
Gesturing for him to come. Surely they
Spent the whole first day together, walking
Past the city and out into the orchards
Where perfect figs and plums ripen
Without fear. They told us not to go
Tipping tables looking for them. Not even
To visit their bodies in the ground. They are
Sometimes maybe what calls out
To people stuck in some impossible hell.
The ones who later recall, “I heard a voice
Saying Go and finally, as if by magic, I was able
Simply to go.”
What happens when the body goes slack?
When what anchors us just drifts off toward….
What that is ours will remain intact?
When I was young, my father was lord
Of a small kingdom: a wife, a garden,
Kids for whom his word was Word.
It took years for my view to harden,
To shrink him to human size
And realize the door leading out was open.
I walked through, and my eyes
Swallowed everything, no matter
How it cut. To bleed was my prize:
I was free, nobody’s daughter,
Perfecting an easy weightless laughter.
Of all the original tribes, the Javan has walked into the dappled green light.
Also the Bali, flicking his tail as the last clouds in the world dissolved at his back.
And the Caspian, with his famous winter mane, has lain down finally for good.
Or so we believe. And so I imagine you must be even more alone now,
The only heat of your kind for miles. A solitary country. At dawn, you listen
Past the birds rutting the trees, past even the fish at their mischief. You listen
The way a woman listens to the apparatus of her body. And it reaches you,
My own wish, like a scent, a rag on the wind. It’ll do no good to coax you back
From that heaven of leaves, of cool earth and nothing to fear. How far.
How lush your bed. How heavy your prey. Day arrives. You gorge, sleep,
Wade the stream. Night kneels at your feet like a gypsy glistening with jewels.
You raise your head and the great mouth yawns. You swallow the light.
You stepped out of the body.
Unzipped it like a coat.
And will it drag you back
As flesh, voice, scent?
What heat burns without touch,
And what does it become?
What are they that move
Through these rooms without even
The encumbrance of shadows?
If you are one of them, I praise
The god of all gods, who is
Nothing and nowhere, a law,
Immutable proof. And if you are bound
By habit or will to be one of us
Again, I pray you are what waits
To break back into the world
Through me.
IT’S NOT
for Jean
That death was thinking of you or me
Or our family, or the woman
Our father would abandon when he died.
Death was thinking what it owed him:
His ride beyond the body, its garments,
Beyond the taxes that swarm each year,
The car and its fuel injection, the fruit trees
Heavy in his garden. Death led him past
The aisles of tools, the freezer lined with meat,
The television saying over and over Seek
And ye shall find. So why do we insist
He has vanished, that death ran off with our
Everything worth having? Why not that he was
Swimming only through this life—his slow,
Graceful crawl, shoulders rippling,
Legs slicing away at the waves, gliding
Further into what life itself denies?
He is only gone so far as we can tell. Though
When I try, I see the white cloud of his hair
In the distance like an eternity.
THREE
LIFE ON MARS
1.
Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people
When what holds them together isn’t exactly love, and I think
That sounds right—how strong the pull can be, as if something
That knows better won’t let you drift apart so easily, and how
Small and heavy you feel, stuck there spinning in place.
Anita feels it now as a tug toward the phone, though she knows
The ear at the other end isn’t there anymore. She’ll beat her head
Against the rungs of her room till it splits, and the static that seeps out
Will lull her to sleep, where she’ll dream of him walking just ahead
Beside a woman whose mouth spills O after O of operatic laughter.
But Tina isn’t talking about men and women, what starts in our bodies
And then pushes out toward anywhere once the joy of it disappears.
She means families. How two sisters, say, can stop knowing one another,
Stop hearing the same language, scalding themselves on something
Every time they try to touch. What lives beside us passing for air?
2.
Last year, there was a father in the news who kept his daughter
Locked in a cell for decades. She lived right under his feet,
Cooking food, watching TV. The same pipes threading through his life
Led in and out of hers. Every year the footsteps downstairs multiplied.
Babies wailing through the night. Kids screaming to be let outside.
Every day, the man crept down into that room, bringing food,
Lying down with the daughter, who had no choice. Like a god
Moving through a world where every face looked furtively into his,
Then turned away. They cursed him to his back. He didn’t hear.
They begged him for air, and all he saw were bodies on their knees.
How close that room. What heat. And his wife upstairs, hearing
Their clamor underfoot, thinking the house must just be
Settling into itself with age.
3.
Tina says dark matter is just a theory. Something
We know is there, but can’t com
pletely prove.
We move through it, bound, sensing it snatch up
What we mean to say and turn it over in its hands
Like glass sifted from the sea. It walks the shore,
Watching that refracted light dance back and forth
Before tossing whatever it was back to the surf.
4.
How else could we get things so wrong,
Like a story hacked to bits and told in reverse?—
5.
He grabbed my blouse at the neck.
All I thought was This is my very best
And he will ruin it. Wind, dirt, his hands
Hard on me. I heard the others
Jostling to watch as they waited
For their turns.
They were not glad to do it,
But they were eager.
They all wanted to, and fought
About who would go first.
We went to the cart
Where others sat waiting.
They laughed and it sounded
Like the black clouds that explode
Over the desert at night.
I knew which direction to go
From the stench of what still burned.
It was funny to see my house
Like that—as if the roof
Had been lifted up and carried off
By someone playing at dolls.
6.
Who understands the world, and when
Will he make it make sense? Or she?
Maybe there is a pair of them, and they sit
Watching the cream disperse into their coffee
Like the A-bomb. This equals that, one says,
Arranging a swarm of coordinates
On a giant grid. They exchange smiles.
It’s so simple, they’ll be done by lunchtime,
Will have the whole afternoon to spend naming
The spaces between spaces, which their eyes
Have been trained to distinguish. Nothing
Eludes them. And when the nothing that is
Something creeps toward them, wanting
To be felt, they feel it. Then they jot down
Equation after equation, smiling to one another,
Lips sealed tight.