to memorize certain poems.
My generation too craves posterity.
Accept this dish of well aged meat.
In the warrens of our rotting cities
where those small eggs
round as earth wait,
spread the Word.
Visiting a dead man on a summer day
In flat America, in Chicago,
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side.
Forty feet of Corinthian candle
celebrate Pullman embedded
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete.
The Potter Palmers float
in an island parthenon.
Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat
are postmarked with angels and lambs.
But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned
in a triangle of trees swims dappled with leaf shadow,
sketched light arch within arch
delicate as fingernail moons.
The green doors should not be locked.
Doors of fern and flower should not be shut.
Louis Sullivan, I sit on your grave.
It is not now good weather for prophets.
Sun eddies on the steelsmoke air like sinking honey.
On the inner green door of the Getty tomb
(a thighbone’s throw from your stone)
a marvel of growing, blooming, thrusting into seed:
how all living wreathe and insinuate
in the circlet of repetition that never repeats:
ever new birth never rebirth.
Each tide pool microcosm spiraling from your hand.
Sullivan, you had another five years
when your society would give you work.
Thirty years with want crackling in your hands.
Thirty after years with cities
flowering and turning grey in your beard.
All poets are unemployed nowadays.
My country marches in its sleep.
The past structures a heavy mausoleum
hiding its iron frame in masonry.
Men burn like grass
while armies grow.
Thirty years in the vast rumbling gut
of this society you stormed
to be used, screamed
no louder than any other breaking voice.
The waste of a good man
bleeds the future that’s come
in Chicago, in flat America,
where the poor still bleed from the teeth,
housed in sewers and filing cabinets,
where prophets may spit into the wind
till anger sleets their eyes shut,
where this house that dances the seasons
and the braid of all living
and the joy of a man making his new good thing
is strange, irrelevant as a meteor,
in Chicago, in flat America
in this year of our burning.
Girl in white
Don’t think
because her petal thighs
leap and her slight
breasts flatten
against your chest
that you warm her
alligator mind.
In August
her hand of snow
rests on your back.
Follow her through the mirror.
My wan sister.
Love is a trap
that would tear her
like a rabbit.
Noon of the sunbather
The sun struts over the asphalt world
arching his gaudy plumes till the streets smoke
and the city sweats oil under his metal feet.
A woman nude on a rooftop lifts her arms:
“Men have swarmed like ants over my thighs,
held their Sunday picnics of gripe and crumb,
the twitch and nip of all their gristle traffic.
When will my brain pitch like a burning tower?
Lion, come down! explode the city of my bones.”
The god stands on the steel blue arch and listens.
Then he strides the hills of igniting air,
straight to the roof he hastens, wings outspread.
In his first breath she blackens and curls like paper.
The limp winds of noon disperse her ashes.
But the ashes dance. Each ashfleck leaps at the sun.
A valley where I don’t belong
The first cocks begin clearing the throat of morning—
Who’s that walking up on Pettijean mountain?—
rasping their brass cries from outflung necks
as they dig their spurs in the clammy cellar air.
Windows upon the mountain trap the first light.
Their bronze and copper plumage is emerging
from the pool of dusk. Lustily they drill the ear
with a falsetto clangor strident as mustard
raising alarm I I I live I live!
I stand with a damp wind licking my face
outside this shabby motel where a man snores
who is tiring of me so fast my throat parches
and I twist the hem of my coat thinking of it.
“The rooster, or cock, is a symbol of male sexuality,”
the instructor said, elucidating Herrick.
You stuck me with spiky elbow and matchspurt glance.
We were eighteen: we both were dancers in the woods,
you a white doe leaping with your Brooklyn satyr.
Bones and sap, I rode in the mothering earth
tasting the tough grass and my dear’s salty mouth,
open and swept, in a gale of dark feathers.
We owned the poems they taught us, Leda and Europa.
We struck the earth with our heels and it pivoted,
sacred wood of blossoming crab and hanging snake,
wet smoke close to the grass and a rearing sun.
That fruit has fallen. You were burned like a Greek
just before the last solstice, but without games.
I was not there. For a long while I hadn’t been.
Now you are my literary ghost.
I with broken suitcase and plump hips, about
to be expelled from this man to whom I’m bound
by the moist cord of want and the skeins of habit,
a hitchhiker in the hinterland of Ozarks.
You hardened to an edge that slashed yourself
while I have eased into flesh and accommodation.
The cry of the mouse shrill and covetous in my fingers,
I cannot keep my hands from anything.
My curiosity has been a long disaster.
I fear myself as once I feared my mother.
Still I know no more inexorable fact
than that thin red leap of bone: I live, I live.
I and my worn symbols see up the sun.
S. dead
You were unreasonably kind
three different years
and unasked defended me
in public squabble.
I praised a poem.
Gently drunk, you
gave me it.
I never saw you
again. Three
tooth yellow pages.
The fossil fern tracery
of kindness unearned
as death.
Day like a grey sponge
the car spun out in mud.
My head broke the windshield:
long streamered impact star.
When Robert pulled me out
waking I asked
who he was. Later
I pissed blood and screamed,
I rehearsed your act.
Your face is gone, and now
what will they
do with your poems?
Both poems and cars:
artifacts that move.
Loss of control smashes.
Skill looks organic.
But poems do not
(outs
ide of Gaelic)
kill: or save.
There’s nothing
of you here,
only words moving
from anger at waste
from an itch
sorry, self seeking
from bowels and breath
entering a longer arc
than the car that killed you
toward oblivion.
Hallow Eve with spaces for ghosts
The joy of wax teeth,
to run masked through crackling bat black streets
a bag on the arm heavy with penny bars,
licorice, popcorn balls, suckers.
I knew that when I was grown out of me into glory,
doors would open every night to a reign of sugar,
into my cupped hands patter of kisses and coins.
When the last porch lights doused at the end of streets
I drifted home with stray glutted skeletons
to count over all I’d begged and for once got.
The pumpkins and pasteboard bones bore me.
I brush past tinseled children. The night
is low and noisy with a reddish neon glare
yet still a holy night ancient and silly.
My hands itch.
I light a candle and yawn, kicking the table,
but though I wait with meal and honey
no ghosts rise.
Lovers manage without ritual or the worn bits
mumbled over their hairiness damage nothing.
Birth is fat and has rooms.
But the dead sink like water into the ground.
While we are brushing our teeth a friend dies.
A month later someone tells us in a bar.
By the time we believe, everybody is embarrassed.
Then, then, we have to start wearing him out
month after month wearing down
till there’s a hole where he used to be in the mind.
My nothings, grey lambs I count on my back,
shriveled sea deep babies, why can’t
one night be allowed for adding postscripts,
urgent burrowing footnotes to frozen business?
Help the Poor! Utterly robbed, how could people
pray to their dead? You whom we slip over
our minds occasionally like costumes.
Don’t chip off my mural. Please prune my roses.
Now it is late and cold. The wind
twiddles leaves into rattling gutter dervishes.
The last lost witch has gone home
complaining of too much popcorn, not enough love.
Put the dolls of the dead back in their box:
they do not know
you have been talking to their faces.
Landed fish
Danny dead of heart attack,
mid-forties, pretzel thin
just out of the pen for passing bad checks.
He made it as he could
and the world narrowed on him,
aluminum funnel of hot California sky.
In family my mother tells a story.
My uncle is sitting on the front steps,
it is late in the Depression,
my brother has dropped out of school.
Somehow today they got staked and the horses ran.
My uncle sits on the rickety front steps
under wisteria pale mauve and littering scent.
I climb in his lap: I say
This is my Uncle Danny, I call him Donald for short,
oh how beautiful he is,
he has green eyes like my pussycat.
A Good Humor man comes jingling and Danny carries me
to buy a green ice on a stick,
first ice burning to sweet water on the tongue
in the long Depression
with cornmeal and potatoes and beans in the house to eat.
This story is told by my mother
to show how even at four I was cunning.
Danny’s eyes were milky blue-green,
sea colors I had never known.
The eyes of my cat were yellow. I was lying
but not for gain, mama. I squirm on his lap,
I am tangling my hands in his fiberglass hair.
The hook is that it pleases him
and that he is beautiful on the steps laughing
with money in the pockets of his desperate George Raft pants.
His eyes flicker like leaves,
his laugh breaks in his throat to pieces of sun.
Three years and he will be drafted and refuse to fight.
He will rot in stockade. He will swing an ax on his foot:
the total dropout who believed in his own luck.
I am still climbing into men’s laps
and telling them how beautiful they are.
Green ices are still brief and wet and sweet.
Laughing, Danny leaves on the trolley with my brother.
He is feeling lucky, their luck is running
—like smelt, Danny—and is hustled clean
and comes home and will not eat boiled mush.
Late, late the wall by my bed shakes with yelling.
Fish, proud nosed conman, sea eyed tomcat:
you are salted away in the dry expensive California dirt
under a big neon sign shaped like a boomerang
that coaxes Last Chance Stop Here Last Chance.
A few ashes for Sunday morning
Uproot that burning tree of lightning struck veins.
Spine, wither like a paper match.
I’m telling you, this body could bake bread,
heat a house, cure rheumatic pains,
warm at least a bed.
Green wood won’t catch
but I held against my belly a green stone
frog colored with remorse and oozing words
pressed to me till the night was fagged and wan.
Reek of charred hair clotting in my lungs.
My teeth are cinders,
cured my lecherous tongue.
Only me burnt, and warmed:
no one.
Concerning the mathematician
In the livingroom you are someplace else like a cat.
You go fathoms down into abstraction
where the pressure and the cold would squeeze the juice from my tissues.
The diving bell of your head descends.
You cut the murk and peer at luminous razorthin creatures who peer back,
creatures with eyes and ears sticking out of their backsides
lit up like skyscrapers or planes taking off.
You are at home, you nod, you take notes and pictures.
You surface with a matter-of-fact pout,
obscene and full of questions and shouting for supper.
You talk to me and I get the bends.
Your eyes are bright and curious as robins
and your hands and your chest where I lay my head are warm.
Postcard from the garden
I live in an orchard. Confetti of bruised petals.
Scents cascade over the gold furred bees,
over hummingbirds whose throats break light,
whose silver matings glint among the twigs.
Sun drips through those nets to puddle the grass.
If I eat from the wrong tree (whose sign I cannot
guess from bark cuneiform) my plumpness will wither,
the orchard crab and rot, the leaves blow
like cicada wings on dry winds, and dunes bury
the grey upclawing talons of choked trees.
My father was a harrier. My mother a thornbush.
My first seven years I crawled on the underside
of leaves offering at the world with soft tentative horns.
Then with lithe dun body and quick-sorting nose
I crept through a forest of snakegrass, nibbling seeds.
Before the razor shadow streaked for my hole.
With starved shanks
and pumping ribs of matchstick
I squeaked my fears and scrabbling, burrowed my hopes.
Seven years a fox, meat on the wind
setting the hot nerve jangling in my throat.
Silence like dew clung to my thick brush.
The splintering lunge. Scorch of blood on my teeth.
Then a pond. Brown and brackish, alkali rimmed.
In drought a cracked net of fly-tunneled sores.
After rain, brimming and polluted by wading cattle,
sudden swarming claws and bearded larvae.
Now I live in an orchard. My breasts
are vulnerable as ripe apricots and fragrant.
To and fro my bare feet graze on the lawn,
deer sleek with plenty. My hair is loose.
These trees only intrude upon the desert.
There, in crannies and wind scraped crevices,
digging in chaparral, among rock and spine
live all the others I love except my love.
I sit on a rock on the border and call and call
in voice of cricket and coyote, of fox and mouse,
in my voice that the rocks smash back on me.
The wings of the hawk beat overhead as he hovers,
baffled but waiting, on the warm reek of my flesh.
The cats of Greece
The cats of Greece have
eyes grey as plague.
Their voices are limpid,
all hunger.
As they dodge in the gutters
their bones clack.
Dogs run from them.
In tavernas they sit
at tableside and
watch you eat.
Their moonpale cries
hurl themselves
against your full spoon.
If you touch one gently
it goes crazy.
Its eyes turn up.
It wraps itself
around your ankle
and purrs a rusty millennium,
you liar,
you tourist.
Sign
The first white hair coils in my hand,
more wire than down.