anti-gravity

levitating through backyards in the suburbs i was taken aback by all the lights and fences, so returned to the house where you rent me a second floor room.  i kept banging into the wall.  as i attempted to hover over the roof i saw you in your nightgown illuminated by the tv's dull light. you were looking out the picture window.  i hoped you wouldn't, but you saw me and said, i didn't know you had powers too. looking into your eyes i remembered your son was a suicide. in the bright morning yellow we stood in the nave of a church without pews and turned up our palms.  a few old men encircled us.  the power made me tingle but we couldn't make them float. they were just too heavy.  one of them shouted phonies and swatted the air at goddammed mumbo-jumbo. we went into a backroom beneath the bell tower and sat at a barrel where the pastor had set out a plate of doritos.  a trail of orange crumbs ran across the floor and up the wall into a dusty trapdoor on the ceiling where a hole had been chewed.

LXXV*

Is it always 1 am?

Have your clocks stopped
trusting you?

What good is all this reading
after your glasses have gone to sleep?

Did you forget
to bring out the best wine last?

Isn’t even darkness light?


* after Paulo Neruda's The Book of Questions

vaulting

in half-light of moon through honey locusts
white petals given to summer gusts

they say ride rider ride, claim this promise of freedom
others exhort the darkness is an oblivion

this universe is vast and infinitesimal
your gallop born by cold wet stones

the moon lies down and hoof-beats sleep
you barter hope for a single blown petal

lineage

and what will the outcome of all this be?
days rising and falling
one after the other

your father's ancestors
sent out with spears to hurl
into the black unknown

how many came back?
shall you not also go?

it had to be a cephalopod

O for octopus
for my octogenarian mother
the octagonal lies I tell myself
about how the sky is really the sky
and not just a mass of diminishing air

Mathematics

attempted proof—
if this then that
it leads to a card
an image of a brown rabbit
a white card with a pastel blue border
passed down from a generation that still writes

this doesn’t fit into the constructed equation

some people require mechanical valves
an old man in a nursing home
where I played as a boy
his leg gone above the knee
a pencil stub

I’d wheel grandmother into a sunny room
she’d tell mother
how the ceiling writhed with rats

which variables do I assign?

red digits of an alarm clock
night full of numbers for inputs
sine wave at the bottom of a curtain—
a vine of gold thread repeats in a pattern
bifurcates three times
ends in three leaves

each spring mother went to the woods
picked a lady slipper
set it on a table in a glass vase that never broke
she’d done this since childhood
before wild orchids were endangered—
a place she only speaks of now

we hunted for salamanders under logs
if lady slippers are x and salamanders y
if you plotted them against t
they’d approach the same value

sometimes M seems to be zero

she sent a card—
gold foil Sun with round cheeks
crescent moon surrounded by stars
never stop believing
the trick to drawing salamanders is to alternate legs
give the tail a slight sinusoidal curve

unsolvable symbols
unrelenting theory of chaos
if only the answer was one

come to the cinnabar caves

come by starlight
by whispered word
don’t believe the lies

darkness of night
has long been thought a paradox

travel south
to the side of a mountain
where morning sun enters

follow windblown seeds
let the wicked be a ransom

ask the scarlet peacock
that struts there every evening

its tales are endless
whole kingdoms

you’ll find no doors
at the cinnabar caves

even tyrants rest
only their deeds to wake them

an abandoned city

dark of night
disembarking from a train

the only taxi
a Fiat from 1968
rattles down a cratered road

the hotel--
grand dream
of a butchered architect

a lone diner
eats the last plate of liver and chips
by kerosene lantern

a silver knife echoes
upon a porcelain plate

great wooden beams
reveal themselves in sputters of light
they lift the ceiling into shadow

~~~

in the quiet of a room
the clanking of the worn-out train returns

upon a stiff linen pillow
lies the jostling of travel

before sleep
while still digesting liver
a bright evening sun appears
half-remembered

small fish caught up in a net
hung upon a wall

a small round table

flakes of mahi-mahi in garlic butter
color of honey running down a fork

flavor of a long ago kiss-- the first
washed down with beer

a prayer

a prayer still clings
upon a strip of linen

tattered by winds that assail
the pure white mountain
where a tree once grew
in cool abandoned air
 
branches remain
without leaves
each copper twig
shaped by lingering sun

oh, those un-crossable years
veiled in endless strands of her hair

no other way

you've buried your meager coin

sand slips through your fingers

a sun without warmth casts its dull light
a cadence of waves beats the shore

this is a black and white photo

of someone else's summer vacation

you've poured out your measuring cup of envy

sold your teeth

one by one

strung on cheap necklaces of self-pity

and now—

will you also discard the bones your mother brought forth?
your ribs because they are a cage?
your skull just a hollow bowl?

who would choose this?

so many mountains of skulls yet to cross
countries of skulls
whole continents of skulls

rising out of cruel unasking seas

all we’re afforded

entrance beneath trees
sun verging on surrender

only the present
where the forest grows

it tolerates
no remembered thing

moss and lichen without roots
the beech have grown for years

likewise our ways
worm trails under bark

come
empty your bowl

bone and branch
whitened by years

which in their sure way
sanctify us too

an otherwise ordinary day

so this skinny chair rubbed up against a fat telephone pole, or was it the other way around? the telephone pole rubbing against the chair entirely the wrong way which in this case was the right way and all those people who still had land-lines overheard everything-- the cardinal sin was public knowledge and we all went to bed with visions of soft fat chairs and hard skinny poles chaffing against an otherwise ordinary day.

glass

the one gift he was given
he didn’t know how to accept —
such a fragile thing
intricate glass-work
silver inlay
the craftsman skilled

but each time he held it
he’d break it
he didn’t mean to
just couldn’t be careful
couldn’t put it down

so he kept himself from it
couldn’t bear surrendering
its rare wonder
for his pleasure

but it was made to be broken
and its breath set free

thirst

this river within the silken dark
is not dark

it waters my silent mouth
flows across the table
and i drink it up

but it is wide and deep

an unrelenting current washing over me
it erodes all hope of deliverance

i cannot fight it

in it there is no fear
only the unfamiliar awe
of being consumed

until all that i am is taken in
and these endless panting waters

full

Tuba

I woke at 2 AM and poured my heart out, and everything else came with it, even the tears I cried in 4th grade when I'd butchered the tuba and discovered it was, like me, a mass of hollow tubes. Pooling in the bottom of some of them I found foul fluids I presumed to be stagnant spit though some was blood and semen and synovial fluid which I've forgotten the purpose of.  Sometimes in the early morning I am all ears, or rather just one, a fleshy kind of sousaphone that God likes to play when He is drunk which he must be after He thinks of places like North Korea or Rwanda in 94. Sometimes I think He only knows how to play sad songs, or maybe enjoys playing melodies that even He doesn't try to understand. Back in high school a classmate and I locked one of the juniors in a tuba case because after a couple of years we'd had it with the obnoxious motherfucker. That's what God has to do with me too when, for instance, I tell people I want to piss on the late April snow. This morning Jim Harrison had to come along and undo all the latches.

what remains of an inappropriate nursery rhyme

...when the days and nights
all grew dreadfully clear

we knew the war
would continue that year

still the snow it fell
on one and all

on the dead and the dying
and the living and the lost

and there by the hand
of a cold frozen child

just inches away--
a sleeve

of a red and black sweater
on top of the snow

The morning star twinkled
anew in the sky

then silence was broken
with the coming of dawn

a lone robin twittered
one promising note

but then came the thunder of shells
falling all the day long...

Funny Thing

The funny thing is after you’d been gone for all those years you showed up yesterday. We got a hotel room that turned out to be an engine of a huge steam train. All its handles and levers confounded me until I realized we were in my best friend's hotel room and you had come with a homely girl and we were all together. When his wife appeared at the door, you huddled behind me peeking over my shoulder. I stood there like nothing had happened, but I think we were naked. All evening we'd been unable to keep our hands off of each other. Your shirt was unbuttoned and I had my arm between your breasts, against the warmth of your skin. Then I put my armpit between your buttocks, and the inside of my arm against your belly. You ran your hands all over me as I balanced laterally on one arm performing some gymnastic act I am incapable of. In the morning my friend drove up on an antique tractor he’d borrowed to carry your luggage. I felt a little out-done. As we escorted you and your friend to a distant parking lot, a group of tourists stopped and asked me for directions. The place they wanted to visit had too many turns. You were slipping away; I had to run to catch up. When we said goodbye your face eclipsed the whole gray city. Odd I thought— your green eyes, curly bobbed hair, and how I called you Jane who's a brunette. This evening when you showed up so unexpectedly telling me you'd read everything I'd sent you, all I could think was you were taller than I remembered; when we hugged so closely I couldn't help feeling embarrassed for all the places my arms had been. I wondered how I would ever explain this to my wife.

Note to self

Be thankful for the irreversibility of the universe. It shows us which things are precious, and which are not. Without it, what would urge us forward? It teaches us to be careful but not too careful; to enjoy what we have when we have it, and after it is gone to let it go. It scolds us not to abandon the things that are repairable, and to discard those that are not. There is no arguing with it, it can't be convinced. It wants no nick-knacks on its shelves.

promise

this light
fading from the sky

this day
this moment already gone--

let go
you cannot keep it

more will come
the world is merciful that way

blue dye no. 2

last sunday's easter egg
leaking sky on a cheap white napkin
not much, just enough to follow

i'm lost
can you find me
floating in the stain?

that’s me hovering
over the shattered sky
which i have broken

the half-eaten sun—
un-resurrected
not warm enough to feel