Read Saving Daylight Page 7


  I’ve asked the French government,

  Richelieu in fact, for the use of a one-room

  cabin in the Dordogne where I can recreate

  the local origin of man in this birthplace

  of the Occident, riding the spear

  of the Occident into the future, the iron horse

  that makes us glue the life of mankind

  together with blood.

  In France I went to a place

  of grandeur though it was only

  a thicket as large as the average hotel room.

  I learned that we’ll float into eternity

  like the dehydrated maggots I saw

  in Mexico around the body of a desert tortoise

  missing an interior that had fled

  seven days before. How grand.

  For after death I’ve been given

  the false biblical promise of smoking privileges

  and the possession of hundreds of small

  photos of all the dogs and women I’ve known.

  The beasts (the plane and I) land on earth.

  Time for a hot dog and a small pizza.

  I glance at the mellifluous rubbing

  of a melancholy woman’s buttocks.

  I tell her to celebrate her tears.

  Effluvia

  Tonight the newish moon is orange

  from the smoke of a forest fire, a wedge of fresh orange.

  The mystery of ink pumped up from three

  thousand feet in northern Michigan from the bed

  of a Pleistocene sea. A meteor hit

  a massive group of giant squid, some say

  millions, from whose ink I write this poem.

  A bold girl I once knew made love

  on lysergic acid to a dolphin and a chimp,

  though not the same day. She said the chimp

  was too hairy, too fast, and improbably insensitive.

  An artist friend made me a cocktail shaker

  from a rubbery translucent material and in the pinkish

  form of a human stomach. Shake it and the vodka

  drops like rain into a sea of happiness.

  I am a relic in a reliquary.

  All of these damp skulls of ghosts,

  many of them feathered, telling

  me that the past isn’t very past.

  On an airliner going to both dream coasts

  I’m a Romantic Poet so alone and lonely.

  Lucky for me there are pilots up front.

  We must give our fantasy women homely names

  to keep our feet barely on the ground of this dismembered

  earth: Wilma, Edna, Ethel, Blanche, Frida.

  Otherwise we’ll fly away on the backs

  of their somnambulistic lust, fleas in their plumage.

  The birds above the river yesterday: Swainson’s

  hawk, prairie and peregrine falcons, bald and golden

  eagles, osprey, wild geese, fifty-two sandhill cranes.

  Their soaring bodies nearly lifting us from the river.

  Joseph’s Poem

  It’s the date that gets me

  down. It keeps changing.

  Others have noticed this.

  Not long ago up at Hard Luck Ranch,

  Diana, the cow dog, was young.

  Now her face looks like my own.

  Surprise, she doesn’t say, with each

  halting step, the world is going away.

  How could I have thought otherwise,

  these dogging steps pit-patting

  to and fro, though when the soul

  rises to the moment, moment by moment

  it is otherwise. Dog’s foot is holy

  and the geezer, childish again,

  is deep up a canyon with his dog

  close to the edge of the world,

  the heart beating a thousand times

  a minute, probably more,

  as if it were an interior propeller

  to whir us upward, but it’s not.

  Once I held the heart of a bear

  that was about my size. Stewed it back

  at the cabin and thought that the sky

  opened up and changed her colors,

  smelled the fumes of a falling contrail,

  sensed the world behind my back

  and beneath my feet, ravens above,

  each tree its individual odor,

  the night no longer night,

  the burst of water around my body,

  the world unfolding in glory with each step.

  Unbuilding

  It’s harder

  to dismantle your life

  than build it.

  One Sunday morning at Hard Luck Ranch

  the roadrunner flits around the backyard

  like an American poet,

  ignored by nine cow dogs lying in patches

  of sun, also by three ravens,

  and finally by seven Gambel’s quail

  who do not know that they’re delicious roasted

  when they come to the bowl of water.

  It is always possible to see the traceries of birds,

  but on the scrambled porn channel the woman’s

  mouth that prays is used otherwise and the ground

  delivers up insects I’ve never noticed before.

  I found myself in the slightest prayer

  for Diana who I fear will die like her

  namesake did far across the ocean blue.

  She’s fourteen with cancer of the mouth

  and throat though around Christmastime

  I found her making love with her son Ace.

  When they finished I gave her extra biscuits

  for being so human, for staying as young

  as her mind and body called out for her to be.

  No rain now for one hundred twenty-three days

  so I read Su Tung-p’o where it’s always raining,

  Rain drenches down as from a tilted basin,

  and recall I owe forty thousand on my credit cards.

  Carried along by red wine and birds, dogs,

  the roadrunner’s charm, I take apart my life

  stone by mortared stone while I’m still strong

  enough to do so, or think that I am,

  wishing that I could smile like a lazy

  dog curled in the dust on Sunday morning,

  far from the shroud I sewed for my life.

  Suzanne Wilson

  Is it better to rake all the leaves

  in one’s life into a pile

  or leave them scattered? That’s a good question

  as questions go, but then they’re easier to burn

  in one place. The years take their toll,

  our lives, to be exact. We burn without fire

  and without effort so slowly the wick of this lamp

  seems endless. And then the fire is out,

  a hallowed time. And those who took the light

  with them pull us slowly toward their breasts.

  Current Events

  I’m a brownish American who wonders

  if civilization can be glued together with blood.

  The written word is no longer understood.

  We’ve had dogs longer than governments.

  Millions of us must travel to Washington

  and not talk but bark like dogs.

  We must practice our barking and in unison

  raise a mighty bark. The sun turns amber

  and they’re opening the well-oiled gates of hell.

  Poem of War (I)

  The old rancher of seventy-nine years

  said while branding and nutting young bulls

  with the rank odor of burned hairs and flesh

  in the air, the oil-slippery red nuts

  plopping into a galvanized bucket,

  “This smells just like Guadalcanal.”

  Poem of War (II)

  The theocratic cowboy forgetting Vietnam rides

  into town on a red horse. He’
s praying to himself

  not God. War prayers. The red horse

  he rides is the horse of blasphemy. Jesus

  leads a flower-laden donkey across the Red Sea

  in the other direction, his nose full of the stink

  of corpses. Buddha and Muhammad offer

  cool water from a palm’s shade while young

  men die in the rockets’ red glare.

  And in the old men’s dreams

  René Char asked, “Who stands on the gangplank

  directing operations, the captain or the rats?”

  Whitman said, “So many young throats

  choked on their own blood.” God says nothing.

  Rachel’s Bulldozer

  The man sitting on the cold stone hearth

  of the fireplace

  considers tomorrow, the virulent

  skirmishes with reality

  he takes part in, always surprised,

  in order to earn a living.

  On most days it’s this villain

  reality making the heart ache,

  creeping under the long shirtsleeves

  to suffocate the armpits,

  each day’s terror pouring vinegar

  into the heart valve.

  Today it’s Rachel Corrie making me

  ashamed to be human,

  beating her girlish fists against

  the oncoming bulldozer blade.

  Strangled mute before the television screen

  we do not deserve to witness this courage.

  After the War

  God wears orange and black

  on Halloween. The bumblebee hummingbird

  in Cuba weighs less than a penny.

  I was joined by the head to this world.

  No surgery was possible.

  We keep doing things together.

  There’s almost never a stoplight

  where rivers cross each other.

  Congress is as fake as television sex.

  The parts are off a few inches and don’t actually

  meet. It’s in bad taste to send the heads

  of children to Washington.

  Just today I noticed that all truly valuable

  knowledge is lost between generations. Of course

  life is upsetting. What else could be upsetting?

  From not very far in space I see the tiny pink

  splotches of literature here and there upon

  the earth about the size of dog pounds.

  Reporters mostly reported themselves.

  This was a new touch. They received

  producer credits and director’s perks.

  Tonight I smell a different kind

  of darkness. The burning celluloid of news.

  The Virgin strolls through Washington, D.C.,

  with an ice pick shoved in her ear.

  Who is taking this time machine

  from the present into the present?

  One of the oldest stories: dead dicks playing

  with death toys. Plato said war is always greed.

  Red blood turns brown in the heat. It’s only

  the liquid shit of slaves.

  Un mundo raro. The angel is decidedly female.

  She weighs her weight in flowers.

  She has no talent for our discourse,

  which she said was a septic tank burble.

  Of the 90 billion galaxies a few are bad

  apples, especially a fusion of male stars

  not unlike galactic gay sex. Washington

  is concerned, and the pope is stressed.

  All over America people appear to be drinking

  small bottles of water. Fill them with French

  red wine and shoot out the streetlights.

  As a long-lived interior astronaut

  it was mostly just space. The void

  was my home in which I invented

  the undescribed earth.

  This is Rome. There are no Christians

  so we throw Muslims to the lions of war.

  We have the world in the dentist’s chair.

  I pray daily for seven mortally ill women,

  not to say that life is a mortal illness.

  It’s always been a matter of timing.

  Lives are as hard to track as flying birds.

  To understand the news is to drag a dead dog

  behind you with a paper leash.

  Once you loved the dog.

  Try to remember all of the birds

  you’ve heard but didn’t see.

  This is called grace.

  I was living far too high in my mind

  and started fishing like the autistic child

  they found the next morning still fishing.

  The war became X-rated. No American bodies.

  During these times many of us

  would have been far happier as fish, making

  occasional little jumps up above the water’s

  surface for a view of the new century.

  It seems that everything is a matter

  of time, from cooking to dropping dead.

  Just moments earlier the dead soldier

  drank warm orange juice, scratched his ass

  and thought about the Chicago Cubs.

  Mrs. America is smothering the world

  in her new pair of enormous fake tits.

  She’s the purgatorial mother

  who can’t stop eating children.

  Rose was struck twice by a rattler

  in the yard, a fang broken off in her eyeball.

  Now old dog and old master each

  have an eye full of bloody milk.

  The end of the war was announced

  by the Leader in a uniform from the deck

  of an aircraft carrier, one of those deluxe

  cruise ships that never actually touches

  the lands they visit.

  A girl of a different color kissed me once.

  I think it was in Brazil. Celestial buttocks.

  Honeysuckle dawn. Imanja rose from the sea,

  her head buried in a red sun.

  Hot August night, a forty-day heat wave.

  Thousands of the tiniest bugs possible

  are dying in this old ranch house. Like humans

  they are easily attracted to the wrong light.

  Tonight the moon is an orange ceiling globe

  from a forest fire across the river. In the dark

  animals run, stumble, run, stumble.

  I stopped three feet from the top

  of Everest. Fuck it, I’m not going

  a single inch farther.

  We need a poetry of fishscales, coxcombs,

  soot, dried moss, the heated aortas of whales,

  to respond to the vulpine sniggers of the gods.

  Throughout history soldiers want to go to war

  and when they get there straightaway wish

  to go home.

  Change the lens on this vast picture show.

  See the mosquito’s slender beak penetrate

  the baby’s ass. A touch of evil.

  I read the unshakable dreams of the hundred-

  year-old lesbian, life shorn of the perfection

  of the pork chop. Everyone lacks inevitability.

  Michael and Joseph never truly returned

  home because they weren’t the same people

  they were when they left home.

  My dog Rose can’t stop chasing curlews

  who lead her a mile this way and that.

  I have to catch her before she dies of exhaustion.

  This is a metaphor of nothing but itself.

  The motives were somewhat imaginary but people

  died in earnest. Some were

  shoveled up like flattened roadkill.

  During World War II my brother John

  and I would holler “bombs over Tokyo”

  when we pooped. A different kind of war.

  She kicked her red sandal at the sun
<
br />   but it landed in a parking-lot mud puddle.

  “We’re de-haired chimps,” she said

  finishing her pistachio ice-cream cone.

  Osama won really big I heard on a game

  show. We changed our institutions,

  the surge toward a fascist Disneyland.

  I wish I had danced more, said the old man

  drawing nearer his death bedstead in a foot

  of grass in the back forty. Where’s my teddy bear?

  Of late, on television we are threatened

  by crocodiles, snakes and bears

  in full frontal nudity. Politicians are clothed.

  My childhood Jesus has become an oil guy

  but then he’s from the area. Seek and ye shall

  find an oil well. The daughter of murder is murder.

  Nothing can be understood clearly. A second into

  death we’ll ask, “What’s happening?” Viola said

  that there’s an invisible world out there and we’re

  living within it. Rose dreams of ghost snakes.

  Of late, politicians remind me of teen prostitutes

  the way they sell their asses cheap, the swagger

  and confusion, the girlish resolutions. They can’t go

  home because everyone there is embarrassed.

  I nearly collapsed yesterday but couldn’t find

  an appropriate place. Our pieces are anchored

  a thousand miles deep in molten rock. A spider-

  web draws us an equal distance toward the heavens.