The moon, pushing us into the earth
like a baby’s thumb
pushing a strawberry into the mud.
Wounded in the Black Forest
Over there, by the X, is the place I was hit.
I was cut down in the dusk by an absence of face
in the midst of this forest of Hansel and Hitler,
this forest of make and believe.
I think you’ve guessed by now
that my human strategy was saddened by truth,
my forehead used as a plow.
My company found me minutes later, clothes
emptied, entered by rain.
They found me and took me straight to a grotto,
where landed snow made it seem like the end of the century.
There they left me to turn into a priest.
And that’s how I ended up here at this midnight
surgery being stepped on by swans.
Returning Home on Sick Leave
I, who emigrate, walk
in on the rampage of the library.
The windows have been emptied.
In any one corner there’s very little room.
Books torment.
Above desire, a globe burns with rhyme.
Is anybody home, there on the stairs
where the dogs . . . ?
The estate is missing, taken
on the road where it bleeds.
Home, where spouses, abundant, surge,
and where kiss gathers in its sheets and tatters.
Home, where the breast and its shepherd,
a hand, fly like rice before the coming bride.
Is anybody home?
I doubt it, with a whip in the thorax,
while the bones breathe.
“Hello?” hangs there in birds.
Eventually, I look into
my own face again, and touch
on the fat of “place.”
The Meaning of War
I was at a party when someone asked “What is the meaning of war?” I was about to answer when someone else said “Hey, what the hell do you know about war? Were you ever a soldier?”
Well, let me say this: I’ve traveled with a skull and I’ve drunk its water. After a long and brutal firefight I’ve stumbled out of my barracks, well a-fter dark, and dropped to the ground, sick from the earth’s rotation, and there held onto the grass as if holding someone’s hair. And let me ask you this: Isn’t one a soldier who has slept with soldiers and woken up like that, eyes raw with smoke, but not the smoke from wood or leaves?
I’ve participated in the wars of the church and in the militarisms of fame and shallow hope. Just by taking a look at my fist you’d know that I know how a soldier feels after fighting with luxury.
(If you had the time I could explain what it feels like to go to war pregnant and then come back a spirit. The only thing rendering you visible? Survivor’s guilt smeared on the lips.)
My information would indicate to you what if feels like to darken after years and how to stumble beneath a pile of graves under water.
I can’t tell you the meaning of war because it’s an impression left on our flesh like fire impressed on a guitar in the form of dried wax. The meaning of war can’t be said but can be eaten like dust from the basement of a church; and it can’t be told but only heard, like past-sounds traveling through us at the speed of regret; and it can’t be confessed but must be held, like a tattoo of a heart blazoned onto a heart; and it smells like that most violent of all human emotions—fresh air.
But of course that doesn’t explain the meaning of war, which is why, after the party, I go home, then into my son’s room and take him, crying, out of his crib, and put his bare flesh against mine because he’s strong and we’re both upset. Then I sing, not a song, because my singing is awful, but a death chant; I do this because although it’s morning it’s only 3:00 in the morning and he’s hungry and would like nothing better than to sleep, and my death chant can help him enter the land of visions it will be hard to remember upon waking, and that, more than anything, is the meaning of war.
Rande Mack
rat
in the old days when the music mattered more
than the mold on his cheese or the vintage of his
swill this man danced circles around his appetite
he was conceived on a oak pew in a choir loft
he was abandoned the day the plague arrived
his mother’s reasons were too raw to consider
he swept her final kiss under a rug in his heart
his dreams turned into tunnels silent and twisted
he circled the moon stamped on a miner’s map
he staked his claim on flood ravaged hearts
he glued mirrors to the toes of his boots and
waded through laundromats looking for love
the people he calls friends are like old shirts
stolen from lines in backyards without fences
he finds the more they fade the better they fit
he enjoys irrigating his neighbors’ contempt
he leaves tracks across pieces of their minds
this man’s shadow might pick his own pocket
rabbit
this man wishes the music wasn’t so jagged
in his dreams the music is always dripping
drops of acoustic candy that nourish his delight
he dips his thumb in the wine and twirls his ‘stash
he pulls on his big ear as he surveys the salad bar
he fingers the sudden hole in his empty pocket
his impeccable shadow ambushes his swagger
he samples a crouton before turning away
over his shoulder the silence grows louder
all the wrong strangers inspect his surprise
he feels like god might be squeezing his aorta
he feels like rubbing noses with the waitress
he is a son of a tenth generation heartbreaker
he has an alphabet’s worth of brothers and sisters
his mother’s carrot cake still makes men tremble
this man slips out the door into the arms of a new moon
he wakes up in a bed of roses but ends up yet again
in a mirror tending the scratches carved by thorns
wolverine
this man is a master at making time
every sundown he matches wits with regret
too long in one place plays hell with his shadow
his foot prints are craters filling with snow
his heart is a canyon with caves on the walls
sooner or later he’ll climb through them all
this man likes his elbow room frigid and vast
he likes his music empty of all but the beat
he unbuckles his belt when he sits down to eat
curiosity is an avalanche that overwhelms him
he gargles gin and broken glass to sharpen his smile
his big jaws chew on the words before he speaks
before he woos a woman with bones in her belly
and silence in her eyes and white painted teeth
another jazz angel on another moonlit street
in his dreams his lovers become mirrors where
he finds his children with names he can’t remember
a turbulent murmur shudders his sleep
snake
this man’s heart is smaller than a chokecherry
mercy never rattles the locks on his thoughts
he grins as he dreams another man’s dreams
he goes days without eating teasing desire
imagining the flavors of his favorite soufflé
he is a connoisseur with dirt under his nails
this man peddles fruit from the family tree
his mother sits nearby in rusty moonlight mirror in
hand plucking silver hairs sticking out her tongue
this man’s past is wrapped around a rhythm
he loves to bob his head and shake his tail
and bend every ear up and down church street
he whispers as he stretches the truth
listen closely to the parable of his want
hear the silence he carves when he moves
this man heats his shanty with shadows
he beats his rugs and sheds his skin before
the dew on his lawn turns to blood and freezes
J. K. Kitchen
Anger Kills Himself
I wanted to nap one afternoon.
Another row next door, I thought,
though the sound was so regular
when you woke me to listen.
We heard one long scream
followed by one long pause,
then another scream, same pitch,
and another pause, same length.
By the time I got up,
you had already crossed the alley
to find the cry and your neighbor,
cord circling his neck,
hanging on a branch of Dutch Elm,
the most beautiful tree for blocks.
His wife was still keeping the time
of stare, scream and head in hands
when the ambulance came.
That was ages ago.
But last night I heard them again,
only he was the one screaming,
and it was constant until all air left him.
Out of the sudden quiet her whisper told me
she should have combed her hair;
then he wouldn’t have gotten so mad.
Late in the morning
the lady from the dry-cleaners returned my call,
said my shirt’s pattern of crimson flowers
was already faded when I dropped it off.
I hung up and walked the seven blocks
to call her a liar. Enveloped in my yelling,
her thin cheeks had the clear sheen
of a crimped garment bag
when she lost her breath.
Then I myself could hardly breathe.
Our end will come in a picture-perfect, strutting blast of rage.
A postcard you sent from France years ago
still hangs on the fridge.
Most days I hardly notice it:
a burly man carved on a capital
in the choir of Notre-Dame-du-Port.
Crouching demons drape his shoulders,
their scaly arms choke his swelling biceps.
His whole body is smooth.
With thick long legs and a wide muscular torso,
only his soul would be light enough
to hurl into hell. His deep mouth gulps air.
His eyes are stretched. Above them,
two full waves of hair move in a stone flow
past his blown cheeks. His long sword,
its hilt gripped with both hands,
rises straight from the waist,
edges between hard breasts,
then points to his throat—
all power about to be spent.
To me he looks about as Romanesque
as a dimpled lifeguard:
athletic, handsome, mythical;
a kind of Saint George who could
slay Satan’s minions, or die trying.
Such chiseled vice might pass for virtue.
Perhaps the medieval sculptor gave
this Anger too flattering a personification.
I imagine someone must have noticed
the Sin’s lovely allure in proud relief—
a cleric once robbed of church plate
or a respected widow raped in youth;
someone who had suffered a knight’s rage
or a husband’s fist, who would have known
that such crafted beauty, so hard to resist,
demanded a deadly caption to warn us of stabbing fury,
how ruin follows the one unleashing it.
So at the top there is this: Ira se occidit.
Daydreams of California and a Phone Call
1
When February’s snow thickens and clumps,
the Berkeley Marina
is where tugging nostalgia
takes me to see kites,
some the size of giant centipedes,
others the shape of pre-historic birds;
their faces are totems and their flyers
take the name, sometimes even appearance,
of each floating animal, “the flag of a clan.”
In fact
the little round clouds here
remind me of Durkheim’s baldness,
the way it balloons over the blue border
on the cover of Elementary Forms.
I imagine him, with his glasses
pointed gently downward,
as a French rabbi
on an armchair that hangs in the sky.
A cloud among clouds
he observes and at last shares in
the rest of a nebulous Sabbath.
To the lighthearted sociologist
kites might resemble
impaired churingas
in slow and fluttered motion.
And in those parts of the air
where faces of reptiles
hover neck and neck
the wind makes quiet sounds
of slurred and whistled breaths.
The kited Marina,
imagined from the distance of a far-away winter,
is the measure of my dreams.
2
And my brother is always there
at the hollowed-out bottom
of a hill, his deck shoes
planted before the tide’s sandy arc.
His line stretches the highest.
It is attached to the sun.
The light he tethers
gives each saurian form
its airy iridescence.
Strands of his thick fire-and-ash hair
rise and fall with the gusts.
He needs me to take hold of the orange reel,
to free his fingers from the strain of the twine.
And I want to. And I do.
He feels for changes
in the breeze
as he walks and smokes.
I tug at the gentle glare.
Glancing back I see
his body blending into the bay,
his shirt filling with a squall,
his steps going
closer to the docks,
away from the knoll.
Gaunt and miniature
in the distance he waves to me.
His cupped and damaged hand,
afloat in the cigarette’s fog,
points to a striped spinnaker
about to fly off the bow of a puffed yawl.
When we get home
we’ll ask Mom
for cookies and cognac.
3
Beneath the kitchen lamp, eyes closed again,
I see that beautiful black roundness of a seal’s head.
It glistens and bobs, as the weaving streams
of the kites’ blissful tails twist beside the water.
My eyes open. Back in white Edmonton
I am still handling garlic, mayonnaise and oil
mixed in a mustard jar, with the lie of a shaky simile
riveting me to the wintery place I’m desperate to leave:
no matter what, scattered walnuts won’t ever
settle on top of lettuce like boats anchored in seaweed.
Conflated memories make better dreams.
My garlic, the milky package reads, comes from Gilroy,
that spot I visited once as a boy craving to smell what was raw.
Again to the shore of home I drift. The webbed feet
of a white albatross grip the top of a bulb-shaped buoy.
My eyes stay shut until the buzz of a phone.
4
M
other is calling to say I have jury duty
in Martinez: yet another oil town,
wet and windy and oceanless.
On the edge of a strait that looks
as hard as a shellacked box,
this county seat of Contra Costa
toils under the hot glint of refinery tanks.
The moiling waterway of Martinez
is as much a coffin to me
as the grim river that halves the city of Edmonton,
where the air dries out once the flow freezes.
5
The Californian official who sent home the letter
of my summons refuses to accept
her argument that my living in Canada
exempts me from judging those of my native land.
I tried to explain to the man . . . .
This praying mother’s protests rarely matter
by the time the special intentions of her lost ones
have inched their way along her rosary’s shivering beads.
Sorrowful mysteries, they can no longer plead for themselves.
Sleepless unto death, they are sentenced to the hard time
of eyes and testimony they can hardly close.
6
Changing the subject, she asked me
if I remembered (hell-bent-on-discipline)
Sister Monserat, my fifth-grade teacher.
She left her order years ago, distraught,
I was told, and then moved to a neighborhood
where hanging flowerpots line the streets,
somewhere—Mom forgot exactly—on the Marin side of the bridge.
Apparently, she had a pretty place.
From her view she could see sailboats
in their berths and windsurfers near the cove
where Donny, my brother, went to sleep
on water. Like a kite let go of,
he floated away on the same fogless morning
her usual fast-paced walk across the Gate
was cut short.
For all we know the former nun
closed her eyes before the parting splash,
rose numb to the surface of a green swell,
blew out from her belly his pieces of swallowed ash
then rolled her wailing body back into the sea.