magnet of a song is played poor and bare
as it is, then he begins to urge it out
from itself. First a shimmering gulp
from the tubular waters of the soprano sax,
in Bechet's mouth the most metallic
woodwind and the most fluid, and then
with that dank air and airborne tone
he punches three quarter-notes
that don't appear in the song but should.
From the last of them he seems to droop,
the way in World War II movies
planes leaving the decks of aircraft carriers
would dip off the lip, then catch the right
resistance from wet air and strain up,
except he's playing against the regular disasters
of the melody his love for flight and flight's
need for gravity. And then he's up, loop
and slur and spiral, and a long, drifting note
at the top, from which, like a child decided
to come home before he's called, he begins to drift
back down, insouciant and exact, and ambles
in the door of the joyous and tacky chorus
just on time for the band to leave together,
headed for the Tin Roof Blues.
Nabokov's Death
The solid shimmer of his prose
made English lucky that he wrote
plain English butterflies
and guns could read,
if they were fervent readers.
He loved desire. Ada could be
pronounced Ah, Da!—one
of those interlingual puns
he left, like goofy love notes,
throughout the startled house.
And yet we'll hold to our grief,
stern against grace, because we love
a broken heart, "the little madman
in his padded cell," as Nabokov
once described a fetus. For grief
is a species of prestige, if we mourn
the great, and a kind of power,
as if we had invented what we love
because it completes us. But
our love isn't acid: things deliquesce
on their own. How well he knew that,
who loved the art that reveals art
and all its shabby magic. The duelists
crumple their papier-mâché pistols.
The stage dead rise from the dead.
The world of loss is replete.
On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, NH
for Stanley Plumly
So here the great man stood,
fermenting malice and poems
we have to be nearly as fierce
against ourselves as he
not to misread by their disguises.
Blue in dawn haze, the tamarack
across the road is new since Frost
and thirty feet tall already.
No doubt he liked to scorch off
morning fog by simply staring through it
long enough so that what he saw
grew visible. "Watching the dragon
come out of the Notch," his children
used to call it. And no wonder
he chose a climate whose winter
and house whose isolation could be
stern enough to his wrath and pity
as to make them seem survival skills
he'd learned on the job, farming
fifty acres of pasture and woods.
For cash crops he had sweat and doubt
and moralizing rage, those staples
of the barter system. And these swift
and aching summers, like the blackberries
I've been poaching down the road
from the house where no one's home—
acid at first and each little globe
of the berry too taut and distinct
from the others, then they swell to hold
the riot of their juices and briefly
the fat berries are perfected to my taste,
and then they begin to leak and blob
and under their crescendo of sugar
I can taste how they make it through winter....
By the time I'm back from a last,
six-berry raid, it's almost dusk,
and more and more mosquitoes
will race around my ear their tiny engines,
the speedboats of the insect world.
I won't be longer on the porch
than it takes to look out once
and see what I've taught myself
in two months here to discern:
night restoring its opacities,
though for an instant as intense
and evanescent as waking from a dream
of eating blackberries and almost
being able to remember it, I think
I see the parts—haze, dusk, light
broken into grains, fatigue,
the mineral dark of the White Mountains,
the wavering shadows steadying themselves—
separate, then joined, then seamless:
the way, in fact, Frost's great poems,
like all great poems, conceal
what they merely know, to be
predicaments. However long
it took to watch what I thought
I saw, it was dark when I was done,
everywhere and on the porch,
and since nothing stopped
my sight, I let it go.
Uncollected Poems (1967–1981)
The Cloud
Here I am again,
fleet and green—
something that has left the shrubs
bleached, but in the old shapes,
some vegetable force
noticed only by its absence—
malingering through the house.
I rub my back on the ceiling
like smoke from the crushed cigarette
of a lover
escaped just in time:
the husband is coming
downstairs: a tennis ball,
a one-drop waterfall.
He has been wakened
from dreaming of love.
I hide in the shower.
This is fun! This is better
than rocking like a chair
someone has leapt up from,
rocking on my knees,
a nauseous monk,
the body shaken and sick
from dreaming of love,
my mind a thicket I peer from
watching my body vomit—
every nerve, every cilium
flapping free of its snapped tether.
I am a little fist
of shower mist,
a snarl in the dank air.
When it is safe I come out,
pale, bereft.
I want to tarnish the silverware,
to sleep in a drawer
forever, a tacky gift
dreaming of love.
I want to grow on the mirrors—
a mossy breath,
a life without a body
shaken and sick,
a life no larger than the smear
of structured slime, the microbe
that will kill me
dreaming of love.
I'm going to send you this poem
when I've finished it, it will
embarrass you
dreaming of love,
of the beach from which the cloud parade
is always starting
outward.
If the dream is inland,
the beach is a bed,
your body shaken and sick
of its dreaming of love,
the pale men stepping off the side
like suicidal pillows.
They have taken the wrong turn
for the Temple.
Perhaps you gave the directions,
dreaming of love,
your body shaken and sick
of its pale flags
nobody could see in a mist?
Where is the cloud flotilla?
It is carrying food to the fat ones.
Meanwhile in the kitchen
my tryst with the teakettle
had failed.
I'm oozing upstairs, I'm
like a beer growing a smaller head.
Here on this bed
I've dreamed of the love of one woman
at a time,
not caring who.
My body curled to sleep, a statue
of a snake.
There are no straight lines in nature.
If I writhed,
chances are
I was dreaming of love.
Then I would wake
to the trill in the forsythia,
the birds blunt in their needs.
Nothing in nature repeats.
So I rose—
a new noise
from a dropped tambourine.
And then I went to bed some more
and here I am
floating above my body,
a threatening rain
dreaming of love.
Who wants to hover long?
Those pale plants are my fault.
The ground is to fall down on
dreaming of love,
the body shaken and sick.
Wherever you are
dreaming of love,
good night.
The ferns of blood and light
knit shut my eyes,
coals in a later life.
Ashes to ashes, breath to breath.
Then I will go
down for breakfast
in a substantial dew.
Shredded wheat!
This must be how the medium feels
when his astral body comes
home after the séance—
foolish, whole.
Perhaps I am a fraud
dreaming of love,
my body shaken and sick.
The cold milk beads its glass.
The shrubs gleam green.
Dust in the lit air swirls.
I broke from my bed
like a pheasant.
I'm leaving myself off the hook
all day, you'll have to come over.
This is like the light before a tornado,
and it is only a new morning—
the raveled wheat reknit in its bowl,
the milk staring
from its faceted glass like a white bee,
the smooth udder of the sun
hung over my head
and yours, wherever you are.
I feel like a new tree,
a cloud with a stem
sunk in the earth of the body's
dream about the body
shaken and sick
dreaming of love.
Eternally Undismayed Are the Poolshooters
for Robert Peterson
A slow circular flail of fan
not moving the still air.
Shee-it. Slap of pool balls. Hot.
Arms sag from sweat-stained sockets,
drenched tendrils.
"It's so hot at my place
you can hear the paint crack."
Everything's slick with a soft sweaty grit.
In the parking lot
a sponge-tongued beagle
spurns a dirty puddle
shaped like a woman's foot,
crumples into the shade
beneath a Buick, sleeps.
She loved heat.
On the beach for hours
like a snake, then daintily
to the water, foamtoes,
one deep breast-heaving breath
and in.
"104 out there. Too hot to fuck.
I once loved a woman left me
on a day like this."
We woke marbled with sweat.
"Those days I was working straight commission,
I could sell a truss to a trout.
I said, my love
let's buy an air conditioner.
She put my shirt on, then her slacks."
Like a bride aiming her bouquet
at a tubby friend, she tossed me
her underpants and left.
Each ball slides for no reason
where it wants,
glasses of beer warm up to room
temperature (about 78°)
at the same pace
the balls click quietly
like tumblers in a lock.
Freddie brings the paper in,
hangs around, goes back out.
Nothing from the poolshooters,
faces of camels
working their gums
among the smoke rings.
The Drunken Baker
Those pale fish, his hands—
he never thinks of them: what good
are married daughters?
Three days he's been like this.
They shape his every
loaf of breath.
Leaving the Cleveland Airport
for Robert & Tomas
In another language strange things happen. A razor can be a rocket. The stewardesses murmur up and down the aisle like a translator caught between languages, silences leaking from his hands as he hurries. Or it could be something that those of us who travel too much are trying to bring home: a swamp-bubble, a vowel from the shadow language that is in the names of our wives and children, something rising under the earth's skin like a sun of dirt and stone and artifacts buried with the dead, and cave-water over which the shadows of bats—who cannot see them—have written for centuries their pure language without readers.
Dancing to Reggae Music
The night, with its close breath
of sawdust and overproof rum,
its clatter of waxy leaves above
this scuff of earth we print
and erase—the night pours
over us its star-spotted syrup
of wakefulness. I love the halt
and stutter both, and the lyrics
with their exultant certainties
about politics and religion:
I want to disturb my neighbor
'cause I'm feeling so right.
Somebody's lit a spliff, I can tell
by the dense caramel of ganja smoke.
There are trances of paying
attention, and trances of giving
it up, which is where the blue-
grey ganja smoke will go, slowly,
it's so thick and layered,
and where the scent of dancing
will go, a little acrid the way
an armpit is after orgasm,
as if acrid meant truculent
to come back to our common life
after the trances of the self
we use each other for.
How easy it is to dance about
the self, and easy to confuse
it with the constellate body.
If they were the same, we couldn't
move, much less dance the night
away that's leaving us anyhow.
It too will go up, pushed back
by the salt light of dawn coming
from the ocean. And up is where
we go from here, after a detour
through dust. So long, politics
and religion. Hello, stars.
Gossip
That year they said I was miserable, and it became an epithet, a destiny, an excuse.
They thought me miserable because they couldn't imagine themselves behaving so badly out of weakness or choice, but only if they were overcome by a superior force, like gravity or misery. They were wrong. I behaved badly on my own, and they can do it, too.
It was a sort of kindness, their myth of my misery: presently I'd be the real and better me. And it was a sort of
malice: The Big Cheese is all parings.
But I was not miserable. The more the theory grew among them the more I grew secret—almost without effort, for they had given me an identity through which I couldn't be seen. And I grew happy.
And so it came to seem to me that they must be, because of their common error, miserable. Though I don't suppose they know it, and I won't say a word about it. I hate gossip.
Iowa City to Boulder
I take most of the drive by night.
It's cool and in the dark my lapsed
inspection can't be seen.
I sing and make myself promises.
By dawn on the high plains
I'm driving tired and cagey.
Red-winged blackbirds
on the mileposts, like candle flames,
flare their wings for balance
in the blasts of truck wakes.
The dust of not sleeping
drifts in my mouth, and five or six
miles slur by uncounted.
I say I hate long-distance
drives but I love them.
The flat light stains the foothills
pale and I speed up the canyon
to sleep until the little lull
the insects take at dusk before
they say their names all night in the loud field.
Lions in the Cincinnati Zoo
Compared to their bodies,
peeling in swatches
like old wallpaper, their pug
faces are too big and bland,