WHEN WE FLEW AS CHILDREN

 

 

We were the last ones off.

It was winter: your red wool coat,

your knit gloves and bonnet.

Coming out in Boston at the top of the stairs,

the wind picked you up--for a long moment

you were suspended.

Our escort, a steward, reached out

into the force of lift and vacuum,

pulling you back--one hand clutching your sleeve,

 

the other arm around your waist, gingerly

setting you down,

as if he were helping you--a full woman

in heels and nylons,

off an unsteady boat and onto the dock.

We held hands and left the wind in the night.

We walked down to the ground, the comfort of

the terminal, the peal of voices,

the building's heat and light.

 

___________________________________________

 

 

 

 

THE LAKE

 

 

In dusk its surface scales from a breeze, and the stone

ribs of an anticline bow-out like gills.

You call this lake Big Fish

for the cove that flares, speckled with lake grass,

and the tapered kiss, the mossy rock

peaking through the surface like a dark eye.

 

We're in a pattern of lakes you say,

as if the talons of a hawk had scored these woods.

Flies touch the water; their rings catch the pink of the clouds.

You turn quiet: the lake turns glass, the colors darken and go.

The night sounds behind us

in the moonless woods, the cries of loons.

 

___________________________________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SONG AT HAMILTON BAY

 

 

What I remember of the time

we sat on the bench by the old foundry,

the morning after she cried all night,

are the trails of slag, the leached chemicals

and rust--a wake of gray and brown

moving away from us. They made us talk

about time: how long did it take to lay them

in their bed of concrete, and how long will they last,

the remains of the steel plant

that issued them, ruining this bay.

Then the cries coming again

with the buzzing of an insistent, hungry bee,

the hum of distant traffic--

building to her murderous song, the word

of a world growing

hard teeth in her tender mouth,

and the gulls diving, crying their descent.

 

_________________________________________

 

 

 

 

THE GEOGRAPHY LESSON          

 

 

She is holding the clouds as she turns her back

to face the river. The river is a brown ribbon

lying on the plain of the valley. She explains

the principle of the meandering river,

how the name derives from the river Meander

of Asia Minor, how it is constantly recreating

its course through the dynamics of erosion and transport,

and how it will eventually create new forms

like the ox-bow lake. She is stretching out

her arms, pointing to the landscape of rich soils and groves

of pine. Clouds rest in the palms of her hands

and sunlight falls at her feet.

In her blue and orange sari she is taller than the mountains.

All is reposed. Her children are in love with her anklet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GATHERER

 

 

There is a woman we call the walking bush

because she carries straw she has cleared from the trails

that lead to where the coastal cypress stand

like raised fists between our town and the oceans.

There is so much straw upon her head

from the bundle riding over her shoulder, it seems

she has become a moving field that carries itself

and us as bundled stalks, our seeds gathered

to be sown, slipping through her fingers like a rosary.

 

___________________________________________

 

 

 

 

THE ROSES

 

 

We have taken down the pictures in the room of our dead

and saved them in boxes, sealed from their years

in smoke and sunlight. The walls stand like an old skin,

grayed and peeling; the white they once were

exposed by dimensions of calendars and portraits,

eclipsed by the window's shadow rising from the afternoon sun.

 

Outside the grass cuttings dry out, arranged in dunes

from the last days' wind. Beyond this,

the roses--once lovely--stand ragged,

their petals charred by the series of frosts

and scorching days, their beauty gone

dormant, withdrawn to a purgatory of stalks and thorns.

 

 

___________________________________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE CEMETERY AT LOUISEVILLE

 

 

Beyond the series

of spouses and infant death,

names show the effort

to make one more living:

they remain among the bodies

of bees and ants, on the green

summer of the church yard;

they marry the same, are followed

by children of the same--

their dates move forward,

compressed into today.

As I wander the rows

a wind plays my ear

like a conch shell,

bringing me the ocean,

and when not--when it stills

and the sun feels warmer,

I think that your name could whisper

itself across the stones.

__________________________________

 

 

 

THE EGYPTIAN SERVANT

 

 

They have told me that my lord is gone,

that I will go to him,

to love him as I do now.

 

They are putting his body into the urns

and I will go as I am. 

 

It is true he is born

with the ka of Thoth,

but I do not want this.

 

I have heard the story of the traders

from the west and the south,

and how they saw that the lives are false.

 

I do not fear this.

I love my lord as I love my brother,

my brother whom I love by the waters;

the rafts drift

as we stand in the reeds.

 

It is he I want to bury and return with,

as we had returned before--

it is his body

I do not want to leave,

his kisses and his songs.

________________________________

WHERE BAD WATER COMES FROM

 

 

As a young girl, Mary dreamt herself a rabbit

running in the desert, leaping over brush,

past scorpions and jackals. A shadow passes

from behind; she feels talons clutch her waist, lifting her

into the slate of sky. She falls toward the sun,

shedding bloody fur like the birth sack of a calf,

then awakes helpless but for the ability to blink--

her eyes like black seeds, the eyes of a dove.

 

She tells the dream to the visitors, strangers mostly.

Joseph stands up, irritated--he's sick of the chit-chat,

the dream stories. Don't wait up, I'm checking the flock,

he rolls his eyes going out.

As he enters the desert, he thinks about

his errant son, the squandered business,

his wife's obsession with her dreams.

 

Alone on the plain at night,

Joseph's seed became hateful

and fell on the sands, giving birth to the black springs

that trace the ancient grazing trails of the eastern Sinai.

Cattle that drink from these springs become mad:

refusing to eat all else but scrub cactus, and fleeing

from the sight of other cattle.

 

________________________________

 

 

JOE AND HIS CHILDREN

 

 

All around me children flock

like wild insect chicks,

while their mothers watch and dote

with kindness, tolerance;

 

I watch praise raise from their grimed eyes

a smile and a glow,

and this discounts my judgment

till their love is all I know.

 

Remember, Joe, when we were boys

and lived together in her house:

you wrote your stories in the hills,

your ideas on love and trust.

 

But now I visit in your home

of Cadillac and pool--

suburban life of job success,

twin boys and a girl--

 

and you break my heart--who loved so strong--

to be so intimate:

to show me how within your home

you trash your innocents.

 

What is reserved for when guest leave

you've laid out for me plain:

the self you've lost, the lives you gained

you equalize with pain.

 

____________________________________

 

 

 

 

THE POET'S WIFE

 

 

The poet's wife sits in a tree house

stuck after he pulled down the ladder

and ran off with the garbage man,

grinning like opossums and drooling honey

down the driveway of their home.

 

I should have married a fireman, she tells herself

as she looks at the clouds and azure,

missing the dog and the dog-collar keg of brandy

and thinking of snow and meowing.

 

"Yelp yelp!" she whispers, 

embarrassed that no one hears her,

and knows it will take weeks

for the young man to come and mow the lawn

 

and even then it is questionable

if he will ever take off his earphones

or look up from the cloud of dust and exhaust,

and who will feed the dog, she thinks

as the elephant becomes a dragon,

becomes a camel, becomes a ceiling of cotton balls.

 

_________________________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MY SISTER WITH THE VISION OF AN ATTRACTIVE MATRON

 

 

 

When I was a young girl with mirrors of mascara

                  and the cones of Carmine,

my sister had the dog-legged luck, skippy with travel, naked         

 

                  except desert boots as shriveled mouths received God's flesh.

When I was myself a young girl of pupils contracting,

                  evidence of sabotage occurs outside Zagreb:

 

my sister had the dog-legged escape,

                  outside Zagreb, within the covert of nuns;

shriveled mouths fleshed the cones of Carmine.

 

                  My mother was there, before her long probing face,

gravely composed without moving her lips; with a sack of cinder

                  blocks and plans for a repeating gun; wearing only shorts and large grenades

 

we sit knee to knee, reading the same book.

                  When I myself was as much stranger as daughter, with butterfly

lips blurry with thoughts-- horses hips with muscles of taut

 

                  and legs running in slow burn, my sister had the vision                                      

of an attractive matron, a slow burn in the pit of her chrysanthemums;

                  and she with my mother--both doing the commitment and patience

                 

while I do the hula-hula in mason jar's sweet sweet of ginger breads and jellies.

                  When I was myself as a young girl as before the time of beer

and bran muffins, as when "Oh hell," he said, "I just like to name things.

 

                  I like to name horses. I like to name songs."

When I was a young girl with the eyes full of gulls,

                  of old buttons and tall tables.

 

___________________________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

COW ORATORY

 

 

It's been a terrible year for crows and cattle like us.

Our dead have been worn out,

turned into handbags and cheap jewelry.

I know that there are some who will moo nay

at what these things say about our place

in this world; I reject the old banner,

make peace with your cud, yet gesture

to laying down in the beds of sprung poppies

while the earth still gives milk to their stalks.

In the distance, the dust of a truck rises

like a snake getting fat from swallowing a hare;

soon they will take the beauty of the tarpaulin

from the loading ramps--the way it makes

the dew shine, holding it up to the low sun.

_______________________________________

 

 

IT'S NOT HER AT ALL

 

 

God knows

it isn't easy

her screaming

for life that ain't

what it is

and me red and black

and seizing up

and shutting down

and doing

my best to think

with a mind

that's quit

and what is she

now clay

now doing

now giving

to my red and black

getting away and out

and me letting her pass--

can't she do

can't I be

I'm not as I am

looking in glass

and see red and black eyes

and looking

at what was

and what is

and sick tomorrow

trying to explain

why it's not

her at all.

____________________

IN THE BEGINNING

 

In the beginning

when ugh meant I love you,

darling, could you have told me?

It's so difficult for some people

to say what's so simple.

Ugh, it means I love you,

it's at the root of your vocabulary,

sweets, say it.

 

________________________________

 

 

PEACOCK

 

Wrap me in peacock

and walk me as your heart's plume

away from the tigers

and vultures of this zoo.

 

I've noticed a tendency for flies

in these rooms, and crumbs

last for ever, adding up to the evening meal.

 

I get hungry when the phone rings.

It gets lonely when the crickets call.

 

Come, I'll cut the lemons,

you chop the parsnips, and we'll throw them

together into the hot wok.

_________________________________

 

 

THE WALLS

 

This writer's room

where the walls

rested her eyes,

 

this quiet room's

waiting--its white walls

cleaned of dust.

 

Look out the window;

this was her view!

the trees

 

against the grey,

green and yellow waving

in the breeze,

the quiet of

the glass.

 

 

____________________________

 

 

CELLS AND TRANSMISSIONS

 

 

He understood engines,    

but transmissions

                                        (the meshing and unmeshing of gears, ratios of cogs

                             spinning in orbit of each other, planetary gears

                             engaging and releasing, joined to wrench the torque

                                              of 100 horse power)

and the matter of wet clutches--

he did not understand these things.

How to lie each night

with the same body

pressed against the back,

the same arm over the side,

the same fingers grazing the stomach,

stirring regular

routines, desires;

how to go each day

separate and rising

to press together.

 

 

The poet with his sugar skull of honeyed wisdom,

hands wringing

dripping sticky, writes:           "the gods do not love

                                                as immortals, indeed they love

                                                as bitter old men

                                                who in shadows and hate

                                                drink bitter whiskeys 

                                                in enclosed

                                                windowless barrooms."

 

why speak of gods--

their oracles does not serve us

here,

sitting on top

of engines and moving

beneath wires and over cables

with silent mantras of 1's and 0's

they do not speak

to the fact of cells

and membrane--in skin       

in clothes          

in cars

separate and touching

touching only in pressing.

 

_________________________

 

MICHAEL

 

Light clinging

and disappearing

with last dust

 

rusted Chevys

shipyard smokestacks, 

ascetics

isolated and pure--

 

banished like the most beautiful

angel drifting

through the streets

of a city

 

shrouded in fog,

trumpet,       

cab,     

 

every street lamp has a halo.

 

With eyelids

        half-mast,

        sails filled

     

                    soft wind

                    behind his eyes.

_____________________________________

 

 

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

 

In the skies above Australia vapors of termites accumulate

as threatening atmosphere, gnawing the ozone.

In Greece, humanity is buried beneath the dung of the mighty goat.

In Miami, beetles grow huge beside the sea.

The cartographer in Lisbon sees a serpent rise beside a castle.

 

The rats in Brooklyn are fearless. In fetid darkness alligators bloom

beneath the structures of skyscrapers and factories; their fish bellies basking

on back-water soils and kiddy beaches, as natural as drift wood,

as armored as rhinoceroses, as panting as lap dogs.

 

My mother tells me of herself  as a young bride,

fresh out of Providence, gone to Key West;

The roaches are giant.

They crawl out of drains and toilet bowls.

A woman sees a roach perched on the rim of her baby's cradle

and knows it's the devil himself as the chiseled insect eyes her child,

its head cocked, antennae gently spun, drinking the smell.

 

The community of insects, the bovine masses--here stinks our doom.

Spin on like angry molecules, let fall the muck of atomic heat--

bombs and missiles are no match for the ubiquity of mounds and hives.

Embedded in bedrock, imprinted in the rungs of chromosomes,

like the rhythmic shadows of passing clouds, the batting of lids,

interruptions of connections,

a failed ear piece, a surging pacemaker; the machine

stalled, slipping in sand with disks crashed, losing

our ones and zeros like marbles

rolling through cracks grown deeper

and the rising of sleeping spores, like the bear, the wolverine lumbering

from hibernation, hungry; its yellow eyes

crusty with the urge of generations, slagging down from the forests

toward the lights that glimmer like a steelhead's scales

struggling against the currents of waters that cut the earth

like worms burrowing beneath a giant redwood, felling

and leaving it etched with a circuitry of ancient runes.

 

___________________________________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE POPE AT GIANTS STADIUM

 

 

The curious and devout have come to Giants Stadium. It's raining and the Pope is here--the crowds are thick around the souvenir vendors; t-shirts, videos of a Holy Mass,

commemorative rosaries, and a field of pinwheels spinning--moved by the wind blowing south from the stage.

 

Who had thought of rain--we want sunbeams through clouds as the Holy Father raises his arms. O Pope, clear the gray, make a path through the strife of the twenty-first century that waits like a black thunderhead, full of soggy licentiousness and bolts of arrogance.

 

He comes out under a canopy, like the Rolling Stones fainting from electrocution. The masses are here as die-hard fans; they are drenched by the rain, and their devotion is a vanity to engine their faith. Little children are in Polish folk costumes for him, and he loves us as our fathers have forgotten to, as we have forgotten to, as Springsteen and the Stones have forgotten to: he does not pass out from the flu or the road--he is the Pope at Giants Stadium.

 

_________________________________

 

 

PIANOFORTE

 

 

Across the hall, the girl from China

plays Stephen Foster on her pianoforte.

I use the old name for the instrument,

for in her songs she is soft and strong,

walking the naked music around for her neighbors.

I think she knows Haydn, she tosses baroque trills

like gamy meat at the ends of Foster's starved-dog phrases,

but who would have expected Foster

from a transfer student from Beijing,

fooling with the nuclear--the fixes for cancers and viruses.

My world shatters every day. Save us, Stephen Foster,

as you have been saved, your hard times.

 

___________________________________________

 

 

 

 

 

ROCKBOUND PASS

 

 

Snapping like a sail, a tempest of poncho and pack,

the wind on Rockbound Pass tossed rain into my face

dripping sweetly into my mouth after the climb.

 

Dropping down the crag, out of the squall of hail and rocks,

the sound of bells rose on warm currents from the grass below.

 

I thought of prayer wheels and Galen Roland's photograph

of the rainbow ending at the Tibetan monastery,

and I felt that I was someplace other than California.

 

The rain was blessed when I saw the cows watching with watery eyes,

frightened to see me bipedal and hunchbacked with materials.

 

As they fled I heard the sound of their bells, and the moment

was raised to the mists from which I'd descended

as I followed the trail, wrecked in the wake of nervous cattle.

 

________________________________________

 

 

THE PICNIC

 

 

Look at that boat that's in the water,

Look at those chicken bones in your lap,

Look at those shoulders that are burning,

Pour some more wine into my glass.

 

Look at my hat, do you like its pitch,

And the prop that I've brought for my fishing pole,

Wrap the bones up in the sports section,

Pass me my sweater, I'm getting cold.

 

Look at the water, it looks like oil,

The sunset has turned it black,

The sky's filling with wispy trails,

Ants are crawling on your back.

 

See our children, they run like shore birds,

They wear kelp ribbons like velvet gowns,

They dig with sticks into damp sand,

Commanding waves to come and begone.

 

_____________________________________

 

THE SWAMPS ARE DRY

 

There is no duck in orange sauce or Beef Wellington,

it's a tuna fish sandwich well enough. This is America; you must be ingenious.

No silver platters, just paper plates and ketchup.

No silk slippers, just Florsheim wing tips and cups of coffee.

No Ivy Leagues in California; Tim Leary left Harvard for San Francisco

forty years ago. That's what museums are for.

This is the emerald world, a semiprecious place. Kansas is gone.

There is no Indian corn from bloody Indian soil.

There are no Indians. There is no Indiana.

There are no blues; the swamps are dry, the west is behind us.

 

__________________________________________

 

 

SUMMERS IN MONTANA

 

And there was Helen who was a mess--

tranced-out woman who never left the cabin;

and her husband, Henry, a real Norman Rockwell piece--

retired railroad worker in overalls.

We convinced him to go skinny-dipping

with all us hippie-kids.

Covering himself--his hand and absurd fig leaf--

must have brought back memories:

naked boys slipping

into cool Montana river water

warmed in the shallows

then filling deep pools

where we swam beside big trout.

No one mentioned fishing,

not even Henry.

______________________________