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For Immediate Release guest-edited by Ira Cohen |
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Volume
II, Number 9 |
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The search for human remains CELESTIAL GRAFFITICollected by Ira Cohen
For Randy Roark’s
For Immediate Release with special thanks to The Pink Pony
NOTE: This is a text-only version
of an anthology collected and edited by Ira Cohen,
which includes an additional forty pages
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Contents: Marty Matz: Two Poems Ira Cohen: Three Poems Angus Maclise: from “The Subliminal Report” Petra Vogt: Hello, Nothing Ronnie Burk: Six Poems Aidan Andrew Dun: Canto IV from “Universal” Louise Landes-Levi: Six Poems Paul Grillo: Eleven Poems John Brandi: Nine Poems from “Distance” Daniel Moore: Two Poems Renee Gregorio: Ten Poems Janine Pommy Vega: Seven Poems Jack Hirschman: The Apocryphon Arcane David Rattray/Ira Cohen: Sweetmeat / White Ashes Agneta Falk: Four Poems Allan Graubard: Seven Poems Judith Malina: Five Poems Peter Lamborn Wilson: The Cohen Gene Ira Cohen: Ten Poems
Penny Arcade:
I Love New York |
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HATS OFF!
Charles Henri Ford Died at 93, on September 27th, 2002, in New York City Peacefully
In Celebration of his Transcendence |
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two poems |
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I Know Where Rainbows Go To Die A poem for Bob Kaufman I
know where rainbows go to die Together we
walked through a fabled city On January 12th
I
remember from “Ode
for Bob Yarra” Let us soar
then |
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three poems |
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Summer
Solstice Today is the first day of summer Song of the
Hennaed Ringseller O my brothers, the rich & the
poor |
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from "The Subliminal Report" |
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In the dressing room of the deathless children staring long Avenues clear glistening stars whirling the hallowed seed-image down Its breathing distances impel astonished moment the mingled strains darkened through the Greater Siren’s whisperings remembering aloft the glazed-with-soma eyes of ringing citadels Everything will be and everything is seen with other eyes With rivers There & silver the gliding barque you’re on Nameless airs of its passing From aloft a Starsystem causing the drawn-out delight & Dawning dream of Earth The massive Primal weather endlong Facing it is a night unknown Giving it hushed glee Of radio announcers in the Void The Grail
The fifth sequence of
“Or Else”
The matter isn’t it Case in point Object under Scrutiny To be Glistening throughout some kind Of: have it broken down by:
========
I will call back the Huns -& the light will rage into my eyes.
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-(mysteries over Then and there as I passed on the way it came to me how all of our kind, questing, need no other sorely at all moments to joy in in the clear) uncertainty, loving it with a will, willing it to be Being none too as it is, will thus Be it known To all the House:
You’ll never know what hit you- stunned under peculiar devastating jolts, under light’s roaring panic seizures, throes Aghast ...and when you make your way to where your place was, be not Alarmed over the unclean & tricky- little pranks of the ENTITY —DOWN WITH THE ENTITY— -He’s copped all the bliss-music .You were glowing on the Tree till the last Gaspbelonging Thing of mine It’s no archaic System, almost Stone Age (Slngspaca: yes till I know where to set this One part Down) so as I won’t need no constant Meetings to the Magic wood I want to set this One apart Track Down so all of its emotional litters gasp belonging to me Silken Its Deep moan I’ll be with you It’s no archaic System: I want to Believe My urging pastures reviving delicate thresholds Revving Up And away OVERSPACE OF The bliss-attics giving us no room next here w/o a hard time Along my sun-tracks of casual- Thrived till the last
Shudders Huge with its Glistening Where is it Heart huge with Afterlight shudders Huge with its
Glistening Tremors of minstrelsy
The freaky pulse of non-entity its grief in our amazed palm shrinking too rapidly — locking arms with our embodied dismay — bristling & drooling with your powers buzzing in myriad clouds & beams emanating from the seething electric cruelty of your brain — Your brain that is like a mirror held with unfeeling hands impatient with the eternally unsatisfied lusts of vast deity without end
-Announcements of the rewards awaiting metaphysical courage under the face of the Eternal—
— And now heads for the Vacant Seat and the offices of the Executor From Beyond where the Great Light prepares its subtle pervasive radiance- inbetween the great bursts of sinister Blackout are its brief glowing rays
-shrieks of lesser angels calling thru every intervening barrier put up and maintained by the astonished center of our inner mart— —jangle of their need, creaking buzz-tone, to turn off onto forested path leading Elsewhere—
-Surfacing with all arterial code Intact -Gave out broadcast of the Human Hour
I couldn’t reach the fleeing demonic figure, bright spired darkness crashing w/in the circles out from the sharp currents & mounds all of their karma in swirling clouds large with self and night- massive wings flutter, pause, & then flutter on— surprising shocks of being there
—I woke and walked in a straight tangent to the pets of the Executor— all the crushing emblems of the Almighty arrayed before the Reviewing Board— He was lying on black lawns strewn dimly with the orchids sustained by my insane mind— Oh it crows mysteriously with a total crowing, towards the unlimited
ceilings of THERE, WE ARE THERE |
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Hello, Nothing |
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I am standing next to Nothing Hello, Nothing, I love you, I am as strange and pale as you I love without clinging the absence of your being. It is Nothing which I adore, Embrace me, Nothing, so I can feel more the darkness into which I’m born. Nothing, only Nothing can take away the pain of my useless love for Nothing, which I have searched in vain. Only Nothing hears my cry, and Nothing will be dancing when I die. Sing, sweet Nothing, sing for me the lullabye of someone who loved Nothing more than going by Hello Nothing, I love you, Nothing, You and I dressed in the colours of the sky. |
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six poems |
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High Frequency
Geryon’s the first monster to leave the room The planets move on high wires The clock of the world is held together with masking tape Bug spray, hair spray, deodorants, flurocarbons roach pills, neurotoxic shampoos & rug cleaner were only a few of the items I saw in her medicine chest Heart of the spider weaving this spell A tiny incision in the fur coat of Grandmother Spider knitting the constellations Having given back the lingerie of the Holy Virgin Polluted air forced me to grow gills.
*
You cannot kill amaku’a without incurring a karma impossible to rectify Now’ that all the porpoises have committed suicide nostalgic for life before the white man arrived I had a bowl of poi sat down on tin can beach & ate a banana fragrant banana flower dripping with flower sperm you cannot kill amaku’a without bombing your children’s children to genetic malevolence So much for your fetal obsession meeting its wax double! Take a vacation to neon cities return to TV eat plastic food & vomit your bile soaked brain with assorted chemotherapeutic poisons Bury lead tooth marks of uranium bullets in all the breasts of Diana Whatever you do just remember you cannot kill amalcu’a without putting a scowl on the face of Nuestra Senora de los Remedios
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Wolf boy sharpens his claws pressing wormwood through a meat grinder Giant spider in a maze working the lattice of the radium screw
Thunder is loose in Hercules mineral bath Dipped in starlight the planets whirl on out to metamorphose new halos of the human larvae
Chrysalis in a purple ray
Banded with the seven colors black flowers droop in a dissolving shower of methadone
Stalagmite the crystal magnet of the ghost horse nostril
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Carte Blanche
THE HAIR OF A FAULTLESS WOMAN SHUCKING THE CORNHUSKS OF CATHEDRAL WINDOWS A FALCON HIDES BETWEEN THE PAGES HAVING BENT THE ACROBAT BACK INTO A BOX INSIDE A PHONE BOOTH AUNT MATILDA INSTRUCTS LITTLE AMY ON THE SKILLS OF RUBY CUTING SNAKING HIS WAY TO LEFT FIELD A WEREWOLF PICKS HIS TEETH
LOOSING A PYTHON ON A STEAMSHIP TO
HUMAN MEAT CAN BE QUITE APPETIZING
Hotel Ziggurat
He is buried around here somewhere in these caves of gold-on-black-ore gladiators go to battle within an immense emerald spinning metal threads over the head of a Roman Emperor
Saturn rims down each descending ladder rung, level, scale to Hell Globes of liquid gold in a centrifuge might be worlds in a crystal cabinet William Blake in there spinning a nourishing, life sustaining terrestrial web
There is no elevator escalator we take the stairwell ladder scaffold to the next rung
The world is a high-rise hotel ziggurat skyscraper
Hinged at the edge of a ripppling ocean cosmos universe
forever under construction the roof is on fire
Veined Flower
The disaster that greets us between The sky & the sea Is a face in flames Wanting out of the world’s torpor Boarding a flight machine We take off like gods Able & fucking With new flesh Fairies rot inside a soggy patch of bog Bulbous & awkward My hands reach down toward Infernal regions Here at the bathroom sink washing your sperm From my hair I am not born yet Hold me
Red Lion
forcing open the mouths of certain flowers tiny dragons of torn light pierce amber crystals melting to glowing filaments gold nuggets studded with ice green jewels swim in the murky pond shimmering depths of the curative waters splintering seed in an iron box your cup of snakes eats your raven night & day swallowed whole even if you placed every King on the Tree the illuminated child would still preside over a thicket of heart-shaped rosebuds blooming in a bowl of air flagellating lovers
restore you to the solarized power of a red
lion
All Saints Tavern
Scylla and her monster ride the zodiac The Devil stands hunchback to her gremlin in the bracken Rotting witches stuck in the chimney gift wrap the buildings House hunting a clock full of angel hair congregations of duck-billed people torment the dirty bride Pouring kerosene on a dead branch Wild Man Valentine burns his shoes Hot key in a boiling cauldron
ice diamond
caroling Crown Manor You enter through the red chalk doorway the hotel like living inside a cameo Homed denizens of the pit sound the alarm as a band of scaly women topple Our Lord Jesus from his wooden cart
Hidden among checkerboard boxes a giants face floats down Ragpicker’s Alley Entrails of fishtails, mouths frill of ash, nailing their coffins shut human crayfish go to their hole |
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Canto IV from "Universal" |
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Over the blue rolling outline of
from Hydon’s Ball, fairy-hill of magnetic Godalming,
the old roads go down to the
seaport town of
on Southampton Water where the generations were severed as that white freight-steamer and banana-boat raised anchor,
marking on the winter
the lines of that parting long ago, a moving apart, when we, little family of exodus and outward-crossing, waved down to you on the fog-bound waterside, Grandfather. And under the baritone funnel throwing coal-smoke heavenward
it rained enough to float the
unloaded into the south-western ocean on my tears, tears I cried in a delta-like way down my face like the deviant lines from the wave of the vessel as she ran, in scattering directions, never again to be one.
Outward-bound! Sailing to the
Fierce skies of the hurricanes! Gaudy sunsets! Dark skins!
With both eyes closed I
hallucinated
while you rode an iron train back
to the fogs of
(Dispensing gloom like a national inebriant, Aidan, now unlock another condition of your utterance! In the nautical mood of this song-cycle you will colour a resolutely forward-looking atmosphere of departure.
In great doubtful fogs of transition we cast off, unclear as to where we go, unsure of the sea, godlike schizophrenic ocean with her mood-swings. Uncertain we take leave of spent days, we driven ships, forgetting how the perfect full-circle of the future turns round through the whole returning circumference of time. Now say no more of the apparent separation but look forward from the single point of the bow to the promising horizon.)
Out of the
for the old chain of spice-islands
under
hi seven days’ sailing the impossible ocean changed colour from grey-green turbulent mountains of brine ever-tossing
to blue in the off-shore zones of
the midway
a long swell of blue valleys, great white-spuming summits, somehow transforming to mirrors of turquoise rolling,
the little
not like some poor kite that tumbles on airwaves of the weather when a little boy flies his wind-craft in contrary skies. Have you heard of the blue-white supernova, city-dwellers, generation blinded by the paltry twinkling of street-lights, slaves under sentence of monotony in concrete?
I was a city-child born on a
bombsite in
horror-struck among the white expressionless faces, learning to walk with dead men under their sun, ominous body of materialistic light. And only when I saw that blue-gold guiding-star from the deck of a tarantula-infested banana-freighter, ocean spangled with the terrible perfection of her spaces, dazzling expanse of freshening breezes, mobile wilderness of fishes, endless playground of seabirds, mystery of mariners, aqueous symbol of the cosmos, then and only then was I born into existence like a man.
And my father’s spirits lifted like the bow of the ship, he, exotic creature, victim of winterland climates,
child of tropic
And we stood dancing., father and son, on the deck-planks. And he pointed out, skimming low over blue distances, flocks of those strange half-bird half-fish-like creatures flashing in dense formations at an angle to the ship, plunging back into the diamond face of the waters, sometimes flying unobstructed straight through a wave to emerge again with broad silver parachutes working, versatile gliders between two worlds, transcending dimensions, determinants, frontiers of wonderful existence.
But shadow where no cloud intervened suddenly collapsed the tropical sunlight across your face. Your eyes went out! And silhouetted by vastness in the blue and gold oceanic theatre of emptiness I stood looking for the image that crossed your eyes, eclipsing the sunlight on the foredeck of the flying ship. And I saw her briefly, for a moment, blazing, Baal-child burnt up by rays of the green lantern-flies, star-spangled false-idol, adolescent Lilith, radioactive sacrifice, virgin of seventeen years.
And in her ashes collapsed the
plantocracy of
lusting for her incandescent green-flashing body of cold light, madonna of the green candles, sinister consort, doomsday bride, Hispanic Cassandra forecasting
atom-wars in the
early-warning systems in
all precious diodes and seismographs broken and smashed, science lying in a debris of abortions, empire
breeding demons in the red
back-streets of
She was the only daughter of an island-lord. Her father’s kingdom was outside of Sancti Spiritus. Her country saw the generation of spectacular bodies,
black-skinned commodities of
young men and women of western Afrik whip-driven without wedding-songs of the Bozo and Tamaschek, on mandatory grounds of eugenic common-sense, to acts of love ungoverned by any tenderness to fill the bellies of slaves with children for the driver, terrible red circumcisions of tragedy showing, the cat-of-nine-tails descending on tile canefield, red lines starting out of black shoulders on the burning estate-ground, fields of King Sugar clouded in dense whirling smoke.
The time is turn-of-the-century
republican
How much has changed in the days that are imminent? (O island-chain of slave-states liberated superficially!) Look! The great tandem-mill still clanks beside the river belching brown sugar and rum into the brothels of Sancti. The rains have stopped. That is all. Fete-season in Sancti rises again from the perspiring island, a rainbow. It is the mating-season of the lords and masters! Young girls get overexcited. Dark secrets flower. Spicy taffeta and muslin rustle out of teak cupboards. Older girls talk of undergarments in quiet corners down the veranda. The big poui blossoms blush.
But voltages build in jealous atmospheres. Whispers of static arc in conversation fiercely. A mauve sky discharges a yellow-green thunderbolt! Black Cinderella, African princess in bondage, barefoot beauty in rags with her chastened shoulders walks like a swaying sidewinder or diamondback up from the house-kitchen climbing a flight of white stairs. Ah! When she walks to the river at the hot end of day to bathe her slim nakedness in cool liquid upstream,
brown voodoo
sons of the great house in bamboo smoke shag and watch,
whisper in hot
hypnotic Ashtoreth, statuesque ravishing woman, slender black African virgin of seventeen years.
she too needs strong magic. And her thoughts become splendiferous dreams of hot-season night-dresses with little green suns flashing, strategic green stars winking over bare flesh, a strange invented petticoat enclosing green fire and nakedness, a see-through Venusian cloud of tantalizing. Diosa!
She alone will dominate the
candlelit ballrooms of
creole goddess of the Sancti Spiritus ancient country-night. Quickly! Quick! A thousand green fires of allurement lead her small brothers trawling in darkness with hand-nets, with little glass prisons to trap the green phosphor bugs, a galaxy of fireflies to clothe a divinity with light.
And so! Come the dry-season grand-fête in Sancti, full-moon and mountain-people coming down to town, dawn made her entrance in the middle of the night, the sun-covered Queen of Heaven in translucent white, the Milky Way for her train through an open-mouthed evening, a vision of splendour, nakedness clothed with emeralds, candlelight from all the golden wax-candles eclipsed, glory moving in a transparent air-green fire-skirt, lace cage flashing with tiny luminescent prisoners. Arid every man’s heart in the great place going crazy! And every girl’s dreams of the night in the cruel dust. Arid glory moved over the dance-floor clouded in stars, barefoot incandescent white goddess of the island.
Queues formed for dances. Rum-soaked offers of marriage tumbled from the lips of slave-owners’ eligible sons. Older men, suffocating lust with expensive cigar-smoke, disappeared into lascivious shrubbery with groans. The hot Cuban night sighed deeply for what it had seen. But O! Dark radiance came up with sunrise, sickness, twisted prostrations and poisoned agonies following, rays of the green winged-insects, the pretty lantern-flies, smouldering deep in her bones, a killing necrosis, life-overshadowing twentieth-century flames. Slowly the proud girl destroyed lay dying. She passed! And from that indolent countryside dark cries of pathos sounded, torn from shuttered mansions of sugar-estates. And from that genteel republic of plenty came curses screaming from the red lip of dawn with malediction against the great god of insane vengeance manslaughtering
virgin girl-children of the good
white lineage of
a sky-queen taken to the terrible heaven of the planters.
Only for a moment your face clouded over. Perhaps you were thinking of that Cuban nemesis, the long road you marched out to Aldermaston, father, you and the other twelve thousand prophets of wormwood. Or perhaps as we moved down through more torrid latitudes it was only a memory of vanished seasons of manhood,
long-married sweethearts of
But father, the sorrows of the generated flesh came to bear
as we, in the sunship of the
towards the hotter suns of the new world in the south-west. With superheated blood circulating in heavier bodies, sure indications of mortality in the grandsons of Atum we stood there admiring the weightless flying-fishes,
planing the
airborne ones of the double-life we also know. |
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six poems |
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Girl Friends
“All my girlfriends are getting laid & getting famous & I’m not getting enlightened & I’m definitely not getting enlightened… There would be signs, Smoke Signals So to speak.” LLL (from a letter)
Dream
State
I DREAM I EXIST/ I dream I do the Practice of the Yoga of Sound/ I dream I hear bells, walking down the
Rozengracht in
wait until I arrive at the Cafe
this down, I dream I am writing/ I dream Tommy is here/ a light in the shadow.
I dream the Jewish Museum can be seen ‘thru’ the window/ I dream I hear the voices/ crying in a dream, I dream I see the candle flickering/ lighting up the table, my hand, my bracelets
from
I dream I go to Lucia’s/ I dream I see the death plague of tile poet Vondel. I dream I see my reflection in a dimly reflecting/ mirror/I dream I am walking down
isolated streets/ in my dream, this
is
I dream I see the sign
for the first time, although I have passed this corner many times, in the past WHICH I HAVE DREAMED.
I dreamed I see Anje/ in my dreamstate I am glad I have not expressed negativity to her/ although I felt it in my dream/ She looks lovely in her grey jacket in the grey night! which I am dreaming, I dream I have to restrain myself from saying to her
Hello I am dreaming you
I dream the canals of
thawing/ there are large ice-chunks in the still water which I dream,
I dream I see Leo, I dream I am no longer afraid of my reflection, I dream the thought waves of despair & elation, I dream the confusion of this human birth.
I dream the blocks to creative discipline have passed, I have only dreamed them, they have never existed.
I dream I am no longer afraid. I dream I have Been afraid. I dream you are very near, I dream this unbearable tension, I dream the inevitable space between Spring & summer. I dream I hear
voices of friends in
wake up from my dreaming state, I dream this body, this mind I dream.
I dream we have met! I dream we have sung hymns to Siva, I dream these flutes are like enchanted birds, I dream I should not wait for the Tram no.14 I dream I shld. take tram no. 13/ I dream I get off at the Marnix Straat, I dream I am soon to leave/
By dreaming all thoughts are dispersed, there is no more negative content in the mind because
all is a dream.
Rainmaker for Ira
As though the Rainmakers gathered in your speech, as though the seeds unfolded in your breath.
Or was it all Reflection & there we lost the meaning & the content at the Symbolic Mirror, in your plentitude, appeared my empty State, in your Pleasure, I played again my harp of passion & rejoiced.
At dawn the tailor’s threads translucent, at dusk his cloak was sewn, for when we speak of Allegory we do not mean the Absence of the Stranger
The substance was imminent & Immanence fled appearance to inundate your form, & When they murdered him He disappeared entirely, that Lover
of the Master of
I.
says that I
met a shadow reader in
Gregory / 1992
20 yrs.ago / No (magic Bompo number), 13 yrs. ago / You took me in yr. arms / “delicata” / you said /
at other limes / you spat at me / “jewess” you said, now I’m “beautiful” a- gain, “on the rebound”,
A natural “druk-pa” they said about you
I gave you a dollar when I was 18, Today you return the offering, Beloved / cave man, Beyond / cave man, VISION You stole the golden mala, & wore it on your tongue.
Druk pa: In Tib. druk=dragon, pa=person; it is also the name of the most essential school of the Kagyudpa. A Tibetan saying is “Half of the Kagyus are Drukpas. half of the drukpas arc madmen & half of the madmen are the
greatest poets and painters in
Cloud Photography
I
discover
“Cloud Photography”
but
forget to open
the
lens
of
the
camera
I
have, moreover,
borrowed.
Timeless
after losing my computer: I went downtown To Chambers & Broadway Many many
computers lost, also husbands, wives & eyeglasses policemen were also unaccounted for.
*
From whose particular diatribe?
Airplanes & money oil, /
Beneath the Sea.
I want you I want IT.
I need itNow & if you don’t give it to me I’ll tear yr. fucking balls off & totally mess w. yr. mind.
I’ll destroy it, if I can.
Flags flattend
above So.
& the Bowery.
222
Tibetan flags & when the AIR was poisoned, the letters
“Baby you changed my life. I’m trying to show you”
purified the mind & the body.
“NYC” cld. Not be put in a knapsack & carried w. one
The detchen Linpa said that. I wonder what he meant. That my travels were over or that the Earthquake which was ‘officially’ reported
at
was actually a
bomb
beneath the island
“the bombs
wld eventually
sink
‘Too many gay people’ & I wish you’d fuck me in the ass at
after meeting S & W then please liquify my cunt & make me come & tell me in that soft voice “I don’t like you”& mean please fuck me so I don’t have to think abt. my mother.
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The Loss of The Beloved is the True Subject of Poetry
9.11
If I was not in NYC where was (I)?
ALL those…/ human voice. We thought we knew “la differenza” fra SAMSARA & NIRVANA, or
that non che. I heard it, clearly, in the forest.
Maria Grazia you gave yr. left ear-lobe everyone spoke of yr GENEROSITA 1st. Bhumi,
‘satisfy their wishes’.
The deep emotion of looking into the sky & seeing Nothing.
ALL WAR IS TERRORISM
K. has been trying to introduce ANARCHY for years
w. only RELATIVE (or even no) success he says.
yet he suggests I write my conspiracy theories (as poems) poem never meant to influence, but to uplift
We’ve all been told in the KALI YUGA
respect for (human) life will be
minimalized
still
it comes as
a
‘surprise’
‘by surprise’
shld. I quote the Master?
“When I look down I see
Nothing”
The great sexual Rebellion/ as insidious Fires burn
“Samsara is always confusing, announced that OLD FRIEND
of mine,
Does it matter if it’s more or less confusing?
Louise is crazy
She even lost her ms. ‘CRAZY LOOUISE:
The title of her next book is: Louise survives insurmountable obstacles & writes ONE GREAT POEM.
NYC NOV. 2001
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eleven poems |
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To Look and Linger
We move like moths Attracted by the scarlet flame Like runaways sunken by lies And smarting with scars from long-held wishes
One more time The wavering moon lifts the lids of the city Like a personal escort Seeking luckless lips in their frothy nests Pulsing with a rusty grace
Tonight we wake in a rage From our long white sleep Tomorrow we take the copper mountains And crooked rivers Not yet withered by the first hint of Winter
Today we can only look and see Promised relics pop in the sky Like pink florets of thunder and lightning Like myriad flecks of scalding rhinestone Like gravity-resistant forks of fire
We can’t hear a word of love or sweetness Or find any sign of diamond hours Any seasons of light preserved in amber No parasols shading bewitching faces No underground stems keeping watch until Spring No Tuscan leaves that fall uncontested
At this late hour At this moment in time All we can find alive in the darkness Are thrillseeking sons and meanstreet daughters Scarred victims and unwilling hosts Breezing by in the space of an eyeblink
While the starlight snows down
From Wall Street to
Like the glistening sands of Al Jazeera TV
The Unaccounted
Squads of mournful angels appear in our midst Wearing crowns of thorns and designer shoes The right column takes to the low-lying marshes While the left hunts madly in the luminous muck
Even if they can do nothing That does not accord with the Divine They can only descend to stir the waters To lay bare the calligraphy of ancient rivers To strip the earth of rattling ghosts and profaned legends
Like selfless, unredeemed sleuths They do not just sing their dirges and lullabyes But write wistfully on mirrors And lenses And frozen streams Determined to prove themselves More graceful and lovely Than a blackbird shadow on a shimmering puddle
What we believe to be their ritual passing Is only a red rose falling With all the fixed beliefs of artists of old When we think we hear our slain sons Purring like seraphic toddlers In the bloodied fields It is only a scud of thirsty angels Feigning surrender Starting over Sliding skyward Expecting to fly
They gather blossoms under cover of night Take brides, ride trains And pound the windows of Heaven With their velveteen claws
They are the eyes that hide themselves In the waning seconds of dusk and dawn The fevered whispers on the dancefloor That lead out of town and into the wild The love letter from the girl next door Whose worn sleeve wears her swallowed heart
They are never aimless or obsolete Even now they approach the tainted shallows of our dreams To sweep them clean of traitors, moles and vengeful tourists Like pale and reachless guardian owls They watch over our sleep Inspire us Serve our interests Lend us their blessing And sometimes tease us into almost believing That something or someone Keeps our dead from reporting After missing their doom
One Truth in a Hundred
Life in the city Has reached its flashpoint Driving winds Race down the high horizon In cadences and aromas That are prepared to bare The full fruit of History’s trembling Hand
We no longer believe in heated confrontations Or shades of willful innocence That strike beyond the predictable Pale
We study fallen suns Dark waters and prophetic nights Like sacred books Musing not if, but when The terror will strike
We may be attacked As we lay sleeping Solitary and secret as birds Or geese Unready to defend ourselves Spumed by honor Embittered by cureless epidemics We fall to pieces And shrink in our rooms
A new day dawns on the lucky town In the parks With their pit bulls and fighting cocks In the dream’s fourth dimension In the hard cover of an antique minor
Where Orpheus the poet And urban guerilla Rises like a heroic angel To sell his mansion and regrown hair To serve the poor And earn the homage of a sage Or a saint Shattered by too much reminiscence
Our eyes might yet get the best Of the dark gods within And our tactics survive The fiercer climes of the all-spiteful
Night
Prophets and Losses
There is no need to fear The corroborative evidence of the wind Even as we have hushed firsthand experience That ravenous phantoms are back on earth
Strange agents of insidious visions Are huddled in rooms without light and air Trying to keep us from finding Our own way home
Courage unfolds in ever more psychotropic circles The gambler’s fingers are slowly called to life By the hallucinogenic mushroom cloud The leaves from which the drug of fellowship is derived Cower and fade in the eyes of a bride Who clutches a memory like an illegal sacrament In a locket around the fiery nape of her neck
A schoolboy hero and a traveling hipster Hear the waves write their sinister goodbyes And pull black market samples from the fading tide While out of sight, below the earth A hair-raising face attempts to climb to the surface Tossing with dreams of how he fell in love blindly
The wreckage is heavy with the aroma of toad sweat From kingdoms more lost than DC or Atlantis The Black Avatar, the Old Man of the Mountain Sleeps alone on jagged brambles on dangerous peaks
While far above the splintered city Among bridges and towers not of this world
Gavin Arthur is weeping on a nearby
star.
Amber Skies Blend to Twilight Blue
We are mesmerized by the guarded welcome Of the fleeing moon Which goes disguised as a long-haired vampire
A perfect son has made a deal for eternity With the quarrelsome and icy sky A perfect daughter hears her cries stray on the air Like steamy showers of spoiled pleasures Like slick talk hushed and bloodied Into a magnetic slumber of revenge and murder
It is unsafe to venture any further Even as the lure of TV pours down from heaven And radios sing on dimly lit corners We are caught in the treacherous grip Of the iron fist of September Tucking our feathers under our hearts Like stricken angels with broken wings
A new sleep is dropping from the skies And we are under the spell of shivering eyelids And dangerous spirals let loose in the dusk We search among the recoiling shadows Branded as seers with sights struck blind Straining for buried family treasures Drifting on imagined hands, imagined feet For a door, a voice A death made holy An intimate friendship somewhere in the future
The story grows quiet Passions ring clear Stars dim above the wreckage Like the near-innocent forgeries of a marvelous imposter Like the menstrual scraps of a bloated romance Angelic smiles, glittering waste
Dragged down a path of no return
Desperate Treasures
Conspirators drink absinthe in the dark Like mythical figures Wearing their disdain and wonder On their brooding faces Tracing tantric secrets Among the seaside debris
The full murmur of their wasted pains Has its own guarded charm Its wing and a prayer When blood won’t listen Its tenor warning Intelligence failures and self-contained fires That hold back the dawn
The moist kelp of the long-outlawed stars Has turned a deaf ear To their workaday names Their white-on-white lies And tactless glances
Like randy dolphins Steelworkers who have made their mark By playing hard and living large Have left their sweat Just around the corner At the feet of the polestar And struggling bluejays Conjured out of thin air Still in denial Go back to their roots
Back downtown Through the failsafe streets With their vengeful outcasts And fireworks Dealing the cruelest remarks
War looms like a perfect gift Among the ecstatic sign language Dropped hints and self-inflicted wounds Burning like kisses In the blazing blue
Appealing as ghosts in lawless protest Bloodless and empty
As the glory of Love
Standard Miracles
The signs of evening creak And gnaw Against the soft labyrinths Of the city dusk Masking yet revealing The dilemmas etched in the narrow Ridges of lavender eyes
A plaster cast of a classical bust Sits atop a wall Questionable and rousing As the face of a notorious strongman And pairs of unpaired shoes Steam among the cinders Of an honest street
Illusion In all its seductive disguises Furrows the brow of a lonely man Picking his way Through a field at sunset While his widows and heirs Sit enticingly Before an always-false mirror Whose boatman hands reach Across the centuries To the barren floors of the family House
And just beyond the tower rooms And dreary mews of the neighborhood A mermaid sheds her surly smile Like fresh-strewn flowers And anglers push a fragile craft Toward the sea
A siren song Pierces the two-faced mirror Like a fugitive cup Of new-minted Winters Offered to the possessed and the heartsick As evidence of eternal love
A salvage party huddles Below the cliffs Where women scrape seed From their mourning Sashes
Black flags Black ice The black blood of martyrs Writhes over the earth Back and forth Fair and foul Before and after
A solitary walker finds a halo Blesses himself Against the flood of collective black magic And recognizes the key To his lost domain
A quiet house From which he will never allow
The flesh to keep him
From Silence to Silence
Inside each tree is the lamp of the seeker the shadowmarks of an ottoman moon the tongue-tied arithmetic of your eyes that casts words like breadcrumbs into the mists
A fleeting man falls from the beckoning sky where unseen faces lurk and conspire like the foolscap roses that clog the chimneys and drains tonite
Stories climb in the wind and gather to me now like the unuttered singing inside the pockets of strangers burning for you
I want to taste the longing unleashed from the furrows of their childlike eyes and the blush of regret from smalltown sills when they signal to you at safest distance from the blue turn of an amnesiac Street
Where the owls gossip & loaf in the cowering snows waiting to taste and lick clean the leaf
of
your smile
Voyager Caged, Voyager Transported
The harbor lights spread their anxious accents
deep sea blues weeping willow blues blues without a change of heart
In
The Father of Chaos unravels a mammoth ball of twine and uses the string to plot direct lines from every corner of his lonely room to the untapped surface behind the stars ...
a runway beckoning ancient skyships
Mendicant ospreys scout over the sea as much to uncover as to conceal its glories
other lips other arms other drugs other weapons
On a houseboat in
the woman who talked back to the earth deciphers the handwriting on the wall and finds the purple smudge on one of her windows to be a roadmap to another dimension
Where a winded diver squats like a frog among the tangled nets of spheres seeking to free himself from a promising future
While high in the Catalan mountains
of
the keeper of the Scarlet Book conjures the descent of an angel into the desert of this world’s moment both to reveal and cover its most luminous clues
other cargoes
other gods
In the Saddest of Avenues
We watched where the wind darkened And saw the evildoers dashed In their radiant celestial unions And their leader wild and silent As an ill-used weapon Or a sadistic dancing master Trying to fly the country on rainbow-tinted wings Amid haunting cries and rains of ecstasy Like Judas treading on an upside-down flag
Even still our minds dwell on demons And our lonely hearts enter the same sordid world As the spirits and bodies of the Just Where we have nine brief encounters On the very same night With the trapped, the wounded And the living dead
Now the grey crests of frustrated countinghouses Come apart in the twinkling of an eye And daybreak shudders on the balconies Like an alluring transvestite At last trump the blur of the leaves slows down A photograph laughs with all the venom of immortality A burning mist with no time for love A swirl of coins that sing like tears Where captive visitors once threaded through the streets Like suspects pursued By their own chanted prayers
We will no longer sleep among empty storms We will all be changed or die
In the striving
A Life of Silence, a Life Divided
1. Burning pictures might heal themselves At the ends of the oceans Alive with the most exotic colors And captive sleepwalkers might run free To love, honor and cherish the music Of their priceless and irresistible yearnings.
But we have decided to watch for intruders To circle the painted walls of the city Like prowling dogs who await their mates Led away by vandals in seraphic robes
We follow through the doors of the storm To find the landscapes in quiet prayer Keeping dreams alive as if to prevent Misleading mariners from other dimensions Beseeching with our heads in our hands Sporting gods and persistent starlets Thoughts wizzing off in the Milky Way
The sweeping curves of the clouded shoreline Elegiac, neurotic and sinister Cling closer together Like the pink and black beaches Of some distant world
A breathless figure who has climbed hundreds of steps In the spectral staircase of a giant glass tower Seems to find haven in the near horizon Mourning, nevertheless, in empty gestures Echoing in the purple skies Thrashing among the silent pines and defeated hamlets Like rootless shrieks In the enveloping net of a jealous wife’s hair
II. We gaze into the widening distance And see the shimmer of threatening storms Along the withered edges of history And the flotsam of eternity shows its encoded script Flaming red inside the sky’s open cloak
There is a caution in the streets That presses down on our schemes and chartings Like the desperate need of a lighthouse keeper
The fresh-minted moon burns low Like a candle almost going out
Arms withdraw through a bottomless
And fingers reach out to seize the attention Of numbstruck men and griefless widows
Lordly feathers and floating lamps Rise and drop in their agonies Locusts weep at waters’ edge Where just a moment’s wasted waiting Means there will be no rescue From these spectral days Scrawled in blood on a mysterious book Inscribed with pentacles, stars and crescents
Magic numbers and tricks lay spent and grounded In the parting glances of hours past Soaring dreams at their crossroads Speak an orphan tongue And desire is understood to be madness
Phosphorescent sparks in the night Dividing old and young In a flood of dead leaves |
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nine poems from "Distance" |
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Letter from
Friends, let us wake with disbelief, bare our souls, tell our stories, lose our eyes, become vagrants of the Sea.
Let us seek the heat of the kernel that feeds in the dark and step aside of men whose twisted lips pretend to lead, but are not real in their pursuit of war.
I’ve already seen years of massacre, hydrogen light the night, children with mined eyes, tortured by what no one should ever see.
Let us leave our security, open our memory, bring flowers from the storm, write letters that become sanctuaries, so that we ourselves may become sanctuaries.
Friends, a dream runs up to me smiling. I call on you to see in the dark, to finish
the song inside you.
No Superlatives Please
There’s really not much to it. If you’re a poet, sire delight through what you write. If a vagabond, fry the fish with its eye pointed up. And if in Chang Mai, drink heavily of unidentified tea.
I’ve placed a white hibiscus in your hair over breakfast and helped tie a filigree amulet around the smooth blue throat under your face. Today I won’t go for my mail. No news from the outside, please. You’ve got my shoes, I’ve got your socks, and together we’re barefoot in Li Po’s moonflower shop, these names and incidents all true.
“And I am glad for everything beyond the normal and how we choose it” you write, as I feel the back of your leg swollen with a tropical bite. Call it chance, coincidence, synchronicity. Or what was it
you said about the note Coltrane
hit,
Today I’ll caress endlessly every square centimeter of light rippling through the air, and not call it something, or look for it over there, or eat from it in my lap, but forsake the superlative, be faithful to the shared fidelity of mistaken identities within the engaged obsession of the moment.
Coomaraswamy called it perpetual uncalculated life in the present, and Alan Watts, he wanted to know, does the light in the refrigerator really go off when you shut the door?
Let’s walk to the Alligator Cafe, catch up on the world’s latest evil doings, order wine, raise our good cholesterol level, sit back and unpsychoanalyze those rare blossoms stuck to our heels.
After all, every straight line can be bent into a circle, a bridge, a rainbow. There is light inside the pockets, the window of darkness holds a balcony of flowers. These words let us see out and in. These stories put us together again.
Pun Lumbung, Bali
What Dagger, What Thirst?
“What is meant by happiness? To
live every
unhappiness. What is meant by light? To gaze
with
undimmed eyes on all darknesses.”
—Nikos Kazantzakis
What histories lie hidden
in these veins and wings, these
roamers
walking, peddling and circumcising
their young?
What sunrise
through the stink of charm, what
beaker of foam, whose flag, what
bloodhounds
at the foot of the rainbow?
Where’s this kid
who comes up to me in a Jakarta
alley
with a fetus floating in bottle for
sale from,
what’s his life?
What that guy with no arms tying
ribbons
around the sky, singing a song of
secret beauty
in the middle of day all about?
Where’s this woman in lowcut red on
the bus
whose thigh wets mine in equatorial
heat going?
What bruised arms and walnut skin
darkened
with rain eats gravel for a living
in the
while milk leaks from her left
breast?
Who? This Laxmi, this Magdalene,
this child
in the back room sewing costumes
for the living?
What secret grip undid the knot?
what loosened atrium brought from
egg and seed
these coughing sisters of unwed
mothers?
Rain fills the vacuum of nirvana
I am going to the same place as you on your anonymous bicycle, as you in your trick of mystery
The earth is peopled with us The dogpack derelict in high towers of glass
I think a thought in a mirror of canceled evidence, let you suck out my eyes so I can feel my way through oblivion
Whose leg under mine understands the world is a cataract over a perfect eye? We are clownfish in a reef while shepherds of crime go about their trade
This skin inside yours, this sultan’s pavilion, these sweepers of dark streets... I hear them as we scream, hear the fingers at the window and my voice like sand
What is it we call it when we finally remember? What steeple, what canyon, what lifetime, whose cry broke the waist of the hourglass?
Jalan Jaksa,
Perhaps
Perhaps it’s the bomb craters filled with stars after the rain, the raw fix in the nostrils of tilled fields and wet thatch.
Perhaps it’s the bed of the rusted war truck where the farmer begins his rice seedlings.
Or the television back home showing war like a movie, but never the widow’s broken teapot painted with falling blossoms.
Perhaps it’s the eggplants in the wicker basket holding dawn through the heat of day,
The carpenter napping under Buddha. a street vendor offering a persimmon in the mist, or the baker’s lamp flickering before dawn.
Perhaps the mountain path never led to the bombed temple or the burned clinic, but to hills of moonlit bamboo where the poet sat.
Perhaps the typhoon washed old battlefields to sea, and the ancestors’ graves bloomed sky blue with morning glories.
Perhaps it’s your eyes, the short dusk, fine rain turning sidewalk carnations silver, or your hand in mine
on the
Perhaps it was you I was trying to find, talking to the cyclo driver in the wrong tones.
Perhaps it was the thunderhead over the ancient script on the red gate that said “Long Life” —or the wisteria scent
Under the window of the inn where you shut your eyes, and wanted to sleep after you told me your name.
I Saw the World Floating By
Lovers moaned while the movie rolled. Silence bled from a knocked-out loser in the ring. A cat in heat jumped the steps of an old church in sleep.
The human crossed looked sad inside its splintered glass. Under a passing comet a beggar’s violin opened its wings.
Morning brought flowers from the sun while people stood in line for gas, butter and psychotherapy. Newspapers declared the price of meat had risen, but the price of skin remained the same.
Torture went by the same old name, dressed to kill in suit and tie.
In a park, between waving trees not one sneeze undid the tai-chi masters from their calculated frieze.
A gorgeous lady flashed her thighs speaking aerobic rhythm from 22 showroom tvs while speed bumps shook assorted rumps and chess players timed clockwise moves.
Around a corner, came a guy like me talking to himself under a perfect sky as Dow Jones took a dive.
For a fact the world was fiction— Some thought black holes had another side. Others bragged of their computer’s memory never considering how many songs Lightning Hopkins stored beneath his tongue.
Everywhere, successful people applauded careers. Personalities born from relentless clones peddled themselves while the rings of Saturn groaned.
Clearly I was alive in a time when nothing came to an end. Under the bright, round moon I wiped my eyes.
All of this came to me in the streets, looking for a friend while the earth propped its feet on the table and the lining of my shoes wore thin.
125th & Broadway, NYC / 1997
Late Afternoon
Over a Bottle of Sake
Blue clouds float backwards in autumn sky. Cottonwoods twirl in leaf song.
You open a bottle of the finest sake. We scan the trees. “Year after year, the same leaves
Over and over again.” Your hair is white, life is full. Bodhidharma, Buddy Holly
now silent in the meditation hall. Sun stands on its legs,
The broken hoe has become a morning glory. You, a funny old guy with lots to say.
Buddha was born from Mara’s side. Christ from a virgin. Lao Tzu, barefoot, in a falling star.
What do you mean by miracle I ask. You tell me your roshi told you “Stand, now sit
You have just seen a miracle.”
No Ship Will Ever Take You Away from Yourself —Cavafy
Abyss washed clean by fathoms of mist.
Hallway around the world I wake under a cover too thin, finish a poem, fill the pen.
Teapot nods its lid. High crags shine in warm breeze.
Who is this man working through words to find stance in the journey? A foot taps up and down under the table. A sudden gust turns the page.
Empty, it holds spring sunlight. I Am Not I but Everyone
Madness overpowers the world. Reins slip from the horse and drag across the field. Laundry flaps under the stars like dangling handcuffs.
I hear the bucket crack with ice, see lights of distant towns on cloud bottoms; follow dark shadows in a dry river course.
Too soon, what is seen becomes memory.
Our insistence on violence overpowers the soft-beating vows of nuptial circles. What hope without an anguished sideglance into today?
What music without silence, what sleeper rising from the grave without questions, revolt, solidarity, exchange— A heart beats in the baboon A heart beats in the eucalyptus A heart beats underground in a cocoon,
on the 70th floor in
Someone sleeps in stone, someone lights a grenade in the mouth of a prisoner. Someone jumps from a flaming tower.
We own nothing. We are but a spark, the possibility of rivers shaking hands. We are animals almost extinct at the water hole.
We can raise the cup, pass the key, unlock the door. We can yield to one another, untie the knot that tightens our countries, our bodies, our limitless possibility. |
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two poems |
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The
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ten poems |
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Photograph
this time of day light wanes through west window echoing image of him in Canyon de Chelly arms raised to hat’s brim in April wind the way the light’s reflected I can’t see much of him instead see all that’s behind my desk— old iron bed
from
muted flowers of comforter woven in antique green the old bed frame superimposed on the body of his photograph
mostly letting go.
The Child
Pashupatinath—the Bagmati River moves slowly beside the stone pyres and wall. I lean over the stone, see two men place a tiny, white cloth bundle atop stacked wood. One man, bent over the unlit wood, sobs. His child’s body.
A sadhu climbs a tree. In his hands, a bucket containing something unknown, his dark face outlined in chalk. He clutches his pail, crosses his legs like branches, stares at the wrapped, dead child, begins to pray.
The men cover the body with unbundled straw. It’s wet but they try to set the pyre to flame. It won’t let go into fire, smolders, fills the already thick air with smoke. There’s no room to breathe. Nothing to do but turn away.
A man washes his feet in the filthy water. Another man, fully clothed, crawls by in the shallow river. On its far bank, a man pisses against stone. There is no breath to find.
I hear the child’s body catch. In that final release, body to flame, I am released into a sorrow that envelopes like the wail of a monk’s long horn.
If I could I would ask how the life that’s had not time to take shape goes on, if anything at all goes on, on this earth now made less human.
Sated, I walk away from the sacred, muddy river. Is it simply belief that turns filth into blessing?
Three children play and laugh under
the twisted, root-filled banyan.
In the City of Light
with you, I give my body back to all the elements the rain that scares me is your spring days you are my very own city of light nights we recall what it is to bum for another clothes strewn on floor as we reach around corners to the rivers within we visit places of worship where water drips endlessly devotees shower lingam with hibiscus wanting fingers touch the lip of the yoni then their own faces to transfer that boundless force within we know the stark city where there’s no layer of comfort to make us at ease grittiness and desire, beggars and fire withered bodies diving into the Ganges I hold your body tight against my own on as many sleeping surfaces as possible I take you into me as the Hindu scriptures echo:
no river like craving
Stolen
At the edge of the abyss, your hands smooth as grapes... I suffered like a child would suffer, crawling across a floor to reach out to a parent’s face deep in its bourbon, sloshed in a glass... “Angel,” I wanted to say, “Death comes easily to those who court it,” Then, “There is never any death.” Hey, sun! Tell us innumerable truths about light, about burning so hard there’s always the possibility of burning yourself out. I could not bear living like this, everything was spinning rapidly, the grey sky held close... Everyone was asleep on the earth! “Angel,” I wanted to say, “let’s gather blue clay from the creek, make every instant lovely as crayons... At the edge of the abyss,
your hands were still smooth as
grapes.
Marginal Way —for Jan
The path, now paved, winds around the sea’s edge, serpentine and gritty, walked on to excess, place of beauty, terminus hungered after, like all prodigious meeting places— desert to sky, river to ocean, skin to skin, speech to air.
It is here that we come, over and over, in comfortable shoes to walk the length of the Marginal Way, weather notwithstanding, to take each curve with our soles touching lightly, to talk in that unfettered way, two women facing out toward a sometimes-raging sea, facing in toward the heart’s raging.
But we have been to the edge of the world before, yes?
Remember the early Picasso, his mother and child paintings, how undefined the child’s face? Maybe all our beginnings are amorphous, quick and of the soft, moist earth. By witnessing a birth, I know now more about the pain of opening, how much blood one body loses to gain another, what animals we are from the start, crying toward the light that might feed us.
We might speak of this, walking the Marginal Way, or recall the streets of San Francisco, no more seats on the cable car, so you were forced to ride the steep hills standing, hanging on with one arm to the bars, or watching the older Chinese residents doing T’ai Chi at dawn in Washington Park, me noting how old the couples were who moved there, you never thinking yourself young enough
Or remembering the street woman rising from blanketed doorway in North Beach, adjusting her dress, her hair, lifting a foot to place in her off-white pumps, just like you and me, I thought, preparing for our own beckoning days... The only thing missing for her—a roof under which to make herself beautiful.
And is this the fate of mother and daughter, separated but not separate?
What’s good about the Marginal Way is it’s home to neither of us, But we are at home in its circuitousness—in it you tell me who you’ve loved and why or what you can’t possibly recall of them, say why you left my father, turn to me full-faced asking what I know of death, if I’ve ever been pregnant.
We stop sometimes to gaze out at the perfect sea, its occasional sailboat manned by someone else, its ceaseless churning, the peace that long, empty view of horizon gives us, knowing suddenly what we arise from is as much this air
as each other, salty and elemental
as this water.
Eating an Artichoke
It oozes water; in its presence I am drenched. Its juice runs down my chin. I don’t want to dab it away with the edge of cloth napkin I hold tentatively in my hand.
It’s spring, for the sake of the goddesses, why doesn’t the river run? Is this what desert life is, undergrowth more visible for lack of water?
I used to love my solitude, truly I did. Tonight I take each leaf to my lips, let my front teeth scrape the softened underside into my waiting mouth. This, and this alone, satiates.
Today the clouded sky, filled with the cutting Xs of jets. I kept looking up to see the jets themselves, but only saw a sky rich with residue, streaming over all our heads. It made me want to go far away, be someone else.
I finally get to the heart of it, after all those watered leaves. Not much of the feathery cap to clear away. I cut it into three pieces of equal heft, dip each one into the waiting mayonnaise, bite clear through each piece of heart to the deep taste within.
Tonight the sky turns so quickly from light to dark, the clouds from pink to gray. It’s night before I know it, and the music’s been like this: Buddy Guy, Chet Baker, Bob Dylan, Ferron.
Naming a new shape to the blues in
this darkening air.
Arc of the Moment
A fine, green mesh of fishnet on sand, hibiscus flowers in red and pink bloom, smiles full as ripe papaya on all the chocolate bodies of children.
In Puerto Angel, there are houses without doors or windows— straw-roofed, tree-limbed, dirt-floored— nothing to stop the wind and water from entering.
At the temple in Mas, families held their hands out for water’s blessing, water shaken into their hands to drink, onto their heads to push back over their dark hair. They received water with open hands as if feeling for rain.
Of the erotic drawings in the wooden-leafed book in Pashupatinath, the seller said:
If you do all these positions,
you’ll go to heaven.
The memory of their faces form stars in my head, as if swallowed by the night sky.
In my dream I told everyone I loved them, and it was true, but they were all skeptical. In my dream, monogamy went running into the hills.
When fabric’s sewn together with our own hands, flaws become testaments to what’s human. Our vision must shift to accommodate color suddenly thrown together.
I talk to the spaces in a photograph, to its time and place. On the tombstone:
Here lies Lester Moore, 7 slugs
from a 44, no les, no more. Part of his arm leaning on the stone. I talk to the photograph as if it makes him suddenly real.
A trapeze artist reaches out for connection, momentum, prepares to let go. All of this, essential for the arc of the moment to work.
The air is sweet with our various breaths, as I sit here flirting with the night.
All I wanted was to walk down the stretch of railroad tracks, to see the abandoned station house,
to wait for a train that long ago
stopped coming.
Weather
The disorienting haze of rain.
Rain as a veil.
The river moving beyond the trees.
The refuge of cloud.
On the far riverbank,
carved faces in rock.
When I slept by the wild river,
I felt protected.
It makes me want to protect back.
I saw the gold of early morning light
stretched across a strip of frost
on the boards of a footbridge—
half the bridge clear, half frost-laden,
a perfect line dividing the two possibilities—
and Icried.
The day of the burial,
So much rain—rain and the hole
Dug in the wrong place.
Certain clouds are only water.
Others, forgiveness.
Entering El Rito
because the moon is full because its fullness is rising because I mistook its light for gold
because around the first curve it was hidden because around the second the clouds parted because its light was kind
because when the clouds dispersed I saw its shape because its hugeness made me gasp because it dared to shine so fully in my face
because it could light the roadway by itself because I could watch it for hours because I could never get my arms around it
because it draws the blood from me because its diurnal temperature ranges vastly because the composition of its atmosphere is tenuous
because it directs the pulse of the fides because its dark side is lit half the fime because it has no words for me
because of these things
I could drive all the way home.
Fissure
O’Keefe’s cross fills the canvas, makes thin the pink horizon. Because it’s well-built and knows its own structure, it bursts with moonlight.
my body has its own joy— dark, rolling hills meeting night sky.
March winds have lasted through June— they’ve shred prayer flags, dried wood, scattered seed where it was not planted, replaced adhesion with fissure.
the world spins on within and without you and me when we leave each other’s body.
I liked watching the double rainbow form above the neighbor’s perfect house, felt the pressure of the sky’s wanting to empty itself, the earth’s thirst.
I will never know the psychology of cows or a way to summon the dead.
But I will practice knowing my body on this earth. I will let the rain, when it comes, shape me fiercely. |
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seven poems |
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Off-hand, from a Word
Wide open, sag mother, refulgent among churches, is it a sin to sweep Apollo under the rug? A sin to carry a temple in your pocket?
There’s a certain kind of lie where we don’t exactly say, Who wants this war? but bury it in letters, like a gangster dumps cement overshoes in a lake
The answer lies in stars lurking out at the edge juggling love with loss black hole with radiant cradle
Hansel and Gretel, the skeletal duo knock on a door, their garish grins offset by Easter bonnets Come in, come in
the train is on fire, we fired at everything and hit nothing desire unappeased raised tiny flags
and they bound us hand and foot to the literal lateral
ladder on the roof.
From a Weekend of Kindness
She stops on a dime a plate of pigeon eggs arrests her flight she is bound for the drawing room the cozy fire and cockscomb of continuous wing
antlers grow from the naked brain the hat on fire, the song of victory in an empty mirror, I saw a man
portray a chicken once funniest thing I’d ever seen his neck jerked forward, pecking the air
it works as a mnemonic device, a triangle of moving hands you hawk off-stage into the wind and a hen steps up for her morning meal
it is you the chicken the sun coming up on Tibetan Plateau the iron dagger, a blue green
flash on the winter snow.
The Tray
In the photo someone comes through a doorway it might be my mother, maybe me or someone I’ve never seen locked away behind walls behind walls behind walls watching the snow
the person carries a tray of objects, the photo is just a negative indistinct, but they look like handsized ewers What is she doing? Is the act of bringing a celebration, a signal to the world that the pitchers are filled?
What they hold doesn’t matter as much as going through the door that time to this, the sundagger in the palm of your hand, an unknown road Will the pavement cave in? Is there quicksand? Has a bridge collapsed? I have something here to share with you
it has brought me to your door.
Please Look Both Ways before Crossing
The Desert Storm we raised in Iraq was a terrorist act. We called it retaliation. The killing of tens of thousands of teenagers dressed as soldiers was, we said, a casualty of war.
We tried out the marvelous flares and bombs and watched the pyrotechnics safely six thousand miles from the action in privileged seats. Six days of televised spectaculars. We made bull’s eyes with Saddam Hussein at the center. He’s a bully, we said. He has to come down.
The invasion of Grenada was a terrorist act. We did not like the island president speaking so loudly about his brand of socialism so close to our door.
To threaten invasion of Colombia, Peril, Bolivia because they insist on tending the coca Yaguar Huaca gave them to withstand tiredness, hunger, thirst, and cold, and that we insist on buying and selling is a terrorist act no less than Sendero Luminoso’s gouging the eyes out of CIA agents, and leaving the bodies in fires on a hill.
Acts of terrorism hurt people. Blow up bridges, skyscrapers, hospitals, villages, naval fleets, schools, places of worship, and you will hurt people.
Please look both ways before crossing. We export principally garbage and weapons of war, we stay well fleshed on the work of others. Flexing the military capitalist muscle, the ‘My God is bigger than your God’ muscle, will not bring us home.
Women know it. We dress the dead. We sweep up the mess, we make our way back to the fields and re-plant. We put food on the table, we survive. Modesty is not such a bad hat. It’s certainly lighter
than armor, and cheaper to care for.
Madre de Tavolieri (for Devorah Major & Sinan Gudzevic)
I
You are drawing your breath in waiting for the sighs of the wind to aid in childbirth you are looking years ahead to children who will lie down in chaos without you
You have tilted your head back under the sky, your eyes closed zigzags under your breasts your hand pulling up grain your hand pouring out oil
Tiptoeing up the stairs behind museum guard so no one will follow, we climb back through time up the stories of Napoli’s Archaeological Museum looking for traces
you are written in the pots, the skein of water, the zigzag of mountains the wavy scrawl celebrating plenty on the top floor a photo of your
mesolithic urn, Madre de Tavolieri.
In an urn on the side of the hill among the things of the dead they found you your mouth a round O you could almost be sleeping
dreaming in the somnolence of another time, of intuition clouded when we would turn from You, Pothnia Theiron Lady of Animals, and lie scattered like dormant seeds on an iron plain
II
So this is your mouth of Vesuvio open to the gulp of air the sea egrets and babble of gulls so this is your cauldron
a vacant space in the lava pellets the rosy rock of your mouth speaks volumes like the indrawn breath of the dead
Holes in the stones your empty eyes closed eyelids a skin between us outside and your interior dream
gray wisps of smoke from the side of your mouth passing in and out of consciousness as through a veil what do you see
in the babble of multitudes children scrambling on your back serious climbers with picks and rope ladders thousands millions billions of us Mater Matuta, turn us back to your hands
Napoli, Italy, April 28, 2001
The Great Vessel I—IV (from the drawings of Sherry R. Selavy)
A woman is riveted to the mirror. The no-nonsense set of her mouth and jaw, and the focused clinical regard in the eves behind her glasses suggest a surgical doctor. She steadies a knife against her chest. She has hung a transfusion syringe, already prepared and connected, over her shoulder. Her left hand empties the syringe, her right hand tilts the knife. The book on the dresser is open to a page of illustrations: the heart from every angle. A china nymph, the base of an ornate candelabra. is holding a stop watch in her hand. Forceps and scissors stand in a jar of disinfectant. A large female doll, naked except for a pierced heart at her genitals, is covered with numbers and measured into segments like a map. A letter tells us it is Valentine’s Day. The light is steady. It is time to cut in.
Her face wears the bewilderment and shock of vivisection. A book on the management of pain lies on the dresser. In the mirror she has cut open her chest and is measuring the incision with a ruler. The incision is square, she is pointing with her left hand to the heart, her heart. The tilt of her head beneath her lace shawl, affixed with a crown of roses, suggests the agonized regard of a witness or a mother over her wound. Or the indrawn sorrow of an anchorite, separated from what she seeks. Has she made the opening big enough? Antiseptic lineaments and salves stand alongside pain pills and little candy hearts in a dish. Sweet Heart. Lover. Valentine. The china nymph holds an hourglass and has turned toward the doctor. The room is warm. The air is still.
The lace head-covering is around her shoulders. The dresser is a jumble of measuring instruments, elaborate scales. electrocardiac machine, thermometer, hourglass, magnifying lenses. microscope, meat grinder, and surgical fork. The china nymph holds a caliper. The doctor’s muscular hands hold onto her own heart, now outside her chest. Her thumbs dig into the middle as into a grapefruit, to split it open. Six candles waver in the currents of air. The woman bends over the task with care and determination. Outside herself the heart is a puzzle. The pain one expects to find registered in her face is subsumed in her inquiry. She must follow it through.
Her lace shawl, slightly opened.
reveals her clavicles and breastbone, where the spread
fingers of her right hand hold it in place. Her head
is thrown back, her neck swan-like, her eves are
closed. Her crown of flowers is lit up like an
aureole, the expression on her face indrawn, ecstatic.
The china nymph turns toward us, holding a rose. The
queen of hearts is melting in a magnifying glass. A
heart-shaped candy box in a bowl is decorated with a
white flower. Six flames are blown sideways in the
wind, loose petals fly from the rose. The heart held
out in the doctor’s hand has become a wing, a cradle
of light. a bubble traveling through space. It is
midnight by the ancient clock. The vessel packed with
muscle cells is empty enough now, filled with light,
to move across the face of the sea and dissolve in
love.
Willow, NY, March 18,
2002
Temple of Vesta
Not troubled not trampled down. O Vesta in the shade of a colonnade providing respite from relentless sun I sit outside the fenced in earth with a bird in the tree listening
Vesta Vesta without a face the tree your sentinel and servant in a cur of ghastly monuments you preside unmoved invisible one like water, without you
no life O sacred flame no jar and no contents indwelling power, song of the rose I am back at your lintel three thousand years have passed your round house quietude of late afternoon
should I pick up a stone? should I leave one? will you not know I have passed here me your daughter? gulls crisscross your piazza ages of man roll out come back like waves of the sea
you sit inside the stone well cupped hand ripples widening mild protectress, mother of the hearth, my midnight altar an empty basket to catch your shining grace.
Roman Forum, Italy, July 26, 2000. |
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The Apocryphon Arcane |
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1.
So Gestell after all does root down through the Greek to the Hebrew/Aramaic verb Shin-Yod-Tav----to place, set, put, the root Shin-Tav-Lamed meaning: to transplant.
From which the Nasoreans (still in the lowlands of southern Iran) derive the name Sitil (Seth), the transplanted soul, who was the 3rd son of Adam and the genus of the human soul, archetype of a spiritually perfect human personality, sometimes seen as religion itself greeting souls on route to baptism in the Jordan.
That hole of hopelessness before which the lips tremble and memory masadas
“rather than surrender”.
Now, once more suicide flowers blossom in religion’s pure shit, |
