The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

  Having become the person I most feared in Childhood –

  A DRUNKARD. They were pointed out to us

  in our small town: oil workers, some poor farmers

  (on Saturday marketing), a mechanic, a fired teacher.

  They’d stumble when walking, sometimes yell

  on the street at noon, wreck their old cars;

  their wives would request special prayers in church,

  and the children often came to school in winter

  with no socks. We took up a collection to buy

  the dump-picker’s daughter shoes. Also my uncles

  are prone to booze, also my father though it was well-

  controlled, and now my fifteen-year war with the bottle

  with whiskey removing me from the present

  in a sweet, laughing haze, removing anger, anxiety,

  instilling soft grandness, decorating ugliness

  and reaffirming my questionable worth. SEE: Olson’s

  fingers touch his thumb, encircling the bottle – he

  gulps deeply, talking through one night into the next

  afternoon, talking, basking in Gorton’s fishy odor.

  So many of my brethren seem to die of busted guts.

  Now there is a measured truce with maps and lines

  drawn elegantly against the binge, concessions,

  measurings, hesitant steps. My favorite two bars

  are just north and barely south of the 45th parallel.

  I no longer believe in the idea of magic,

  christs, the self, metal buddhas, bibles.

  A horse is only the space his horseness requires.

  If I pissed in the woods would a tree see my ear

  fall off and would the ear return to the body

  on the morning of the third day? Do bo trees

  ever remember the buddhas who’ve slept beneath them?

  I admit that yesterday I built an exploratory altar.

  Who can squash his delight in incomprehension?

  So on a piece of old newspaper I put an earthworm

  on a maple leaf, the remains of a bluebird after

  the cat was finished – head and feet, some dog hair,

  shavings from when we trimmed the horses’ hooves,

  a snakeskin, a stalk of ragweed, a gourd,

  a lemon, a cedar splinter, a nonsymbolic doorknob,

  a bumblebee with his juice sucked out by a wasp.

  Before this altar I invented a doggerel mantra

  it is this it is this it is this

  It is very hard to give birds advice.

  They are already members of eternity.

  In their genes they have both compass

  and calendar. Their wing bones are hollow.

  We are surprised by how light a dead bird is.

  But what am I penetrating?

  Only that it seems nothing convinces

  itself or anyone else reliably

  of its presence. It is in the distance.

  No Persephone in my life,

  Ariadne, Helen, Pocahontas,

  Evangeline of the Book House

  but others not less extraordinary who step

  lightly into the dream life, refusing to leave:

  girl in a green dress,

  woman lolling in foot-deep Caribbean,

  woman on balcony near Vatican,

  girl floating across Copley Square in 1958,

  mythologized woman in hut in 1951,

  girl weeping in lilacs,

  woman slapping my face,

  girl smoking joint in bathtub looking at big toe,

  slender woman eating three lobsters,

  woman who blew out her heart with cocaine,

  girl livid and deformed in dreams,

  girl breaking the window in rage,

  woman sick in hotel room,

  heartless woman in photo –

  not heartless but a photo.

  My left eye is nearly blind.

  No words have ever been read with it.

  Not that the eye is virgin – thirty years ago

  it was punctured by glass. In everything

  it sees a pastel mist. The poster of Chief Joseph

  could be King Kong, Hong Kong, a naked lady riding

  a donkey into Salinas, Kansas. A war atrocity.

  This eye is the perfect art critic. This eye

  is a perfect lover saying bodies don’t matter,

  it is the voice. This eye can make a lightbulb

  into the moon when it chooses. Once a year I open

  it to the full moon out in the pasture and yell,

  white light white light.

  A half-dozen times a day

  I climb through the electric fence

  on my way and back to my study

  in the barnyard. I have to be cautious.

  I have learned my true dimensions,

  how far my body sticks out from my brain.

  We are each

  the only world

  we are going to get.

  I don’t want to die. It would certainly

  inconvenience my wife and daughters.

  I am sufficiently young that it would help

  my publisher unpack his warehouse of books.

  It would help me stop drinking and lose weight.

  I could talk to Boris Pasternak.

  He never saw the film.

  Wanting to pull the particular nail

  that will collapse the entire house

  so that there is nothing there,

  not even a foundation: a rubble heap,

  no sign at all, just grass, weeds and trees

  among which you cannot find a shard of masonry,

  which like an arrowhead might suggest

  an entire civilization.

  She was lying back in the rowboat.

  It was hot.

  She tickled me with her toes.

  She picked lily pads.

  She watched mating dragonflies.

  “How many fish below us?”

  “O a hundred or so.”

  “It would be fun to fall in love with someone.”

  The rower continued his rowing.

  Why be afraid of a process you’re

  already able to describe with precision?

  To say you don’t believe in it

  is to say that you’re not.

  It doesn’t care so why should you?

  You’ve been given your body back

  without a quarrel. See this vision

  of your imagined body float toward you:

  it disappears into you without a trace.

  You feel full with a fullness again.

  Your dimensions aren’t scattered in dreams.

  This fat pet bird I’ve kept so many years,

  a crow with a malformed wing

  tucked against its side, no doubt a vestigial fin:

  I taught him early to drink from my whiskey

  or wineglass in the shed but he prefers wine.

  He flies only in circles of course

  but when he drinks he flies in great

  circles miles wide, preferring bad days

  with low cold clouds looking like leper brains.

  I barely hear his whimps & howls: O jesus

  the pain O shit it hurts O god let it end.

  He drags himself through air mostly landing

  near a screen door slamming, a baby’s cry,

  a dog’s bark, a forest fire, a sleeping coyote.

  These fabulous memories of earth!

  Not to live in fancy

  these short hours: let shadows

  fall from walls as shadows, nothing else.

  New York is exactly

  dead center

  in New York.

  Not to indulge this heartsickness as failure.

  Did I write three songs or seven

  or half-a-one, one line, phrases?

  A single word

  that might hang in the sti
ll, black air

  for more than a few moments?

  Then the laughter comes again.

  We sing it away.

  What short wicks

  we fuel with our blood.

  Disease!

  My prostate beating & pulsing

  down there like a frightened turkey’s heart.

  A cold day,

  low ceiling.

  A cloud the size

  of a Greyhound bus

  just hit the house.

  Offenses this summer against Nature:

  poured iced tea on a garter snake’s head

  as he or she dozed on the elm stump,

  pissed on a bumblebee (inattentive),

  kicked a thousand wasps to death in my slippers.

  Favors done this summer for Nature:

  let the mice keep their nest in the green station wagon,

  let Rachel the mare breathe her hot damp horse breath

  against my bare knee when she wanted to,

  tried without success to get the song sparrow out

  of the shed where she had trapped herself fluttering

  along the cranny under the assumption that the way out

  is always the way up, and her wings lie to her

  with each separate beat against the ceiling saying

  there is no way down and out,

  there is no way down and out,

  the open door back into the world.

  Coleridge’s pet spider

  he says is very intellectual,

  spins webs of deceit

  straight out of his big

  hanging ass.

  Mandrill, Mandrillus sphinx,

  crest, mane, beard, yellow, purple, green,

  a large fierce, gregarious baboon –

  has small wit but ties himself to a typewriter

  with wolfish and bloody appetite.

  He is just one, thousands will follow,

  something true to be found among the countless

  millions of typed pages. There’s a picture

  of him in Tibet though no mandrills have been known

  to live there. He wants to be with his picture

  though there’s no way to get there. So he types.

  So he dreams lupanar lupanar lupanar

  brothels with steam and white dust, music

  that describes undiscovered constellations

  so precisely the astronomers of the next century

  will know where to look. Peaches dripping light.

  Lupanar. The female arriving in dreams is unique,

  not another like her on earth; she’s created for a moment.

  It only happens one time. One time O one time.

  He types. She’s his only real food.

  O lupanar of dreams.

  Head bobbing right and left,

  with no effort

  and for the first time

  I see all sides of the pillar at once,

  the earth, her body.

  I can’t jump

  high anymore.

  He tightens

  pumps in blue cold air

  gasoline

  the electricity from summer storms

  the seven-by-seven-foot

  blue face of lightning

  that shot down the gravel road

  like a ghost rocket.

  Saw the lord of crows

  late at night in my living room;

  don’t know what true color of man –

  black-white-red-yellow –

  as he was hooded with the mask of a crow;

  arms, legs, with primary feathers sewn to leather

  downy black breast

  silver bells at wrist

  long feathered tail

  dancing for a moment or two then disappearing.

  Only in the morning did it occur to me

  that it was a woman.

  What sways us is not each other

  but our dumb insistent pulse beating

  I was I am I will I was

  sometimes operatic, then in church

  or barroom tenor, drunkenly, in prayer,

  slowly in the confusion of dreams

  but the same tripartite, the three

  of being here trailing off into itself,

  no finale any more than a beginning

  until all of us lie buried

  in the stupefying ache of caskets.

  This earth of intentions.

  Moonfucked, you can’t eat or drink

  or sleep at ten feet. Kneeling, love

  is at nose tip. Or wound about

  each other our eyes forget that they are eyes

  and begin to see. You remember individual

  fence posts, fish, trees, ankles,

  from your tenth year.

  Those savages lacking other immediate alternatives

  screwed the ground to exhaustion.

  Bad art: walking away untouched, unmoving,

  barely tickled, amused, diverted killing time,

  throwing salt on the grass. The grace of Yukio Mishima’s

  suicide intervening in the false harmony,

  Kawabata decides to live longer, also a harmony.

  In bad music, the cheapest and easiest way to get

  out of it infers Clapton. Eros girdled in metal

  and ozone. A man in a vacuum of images, stirring

  his skull with his dick, sparing himself his future,

  fancy bound, unparticular, unpeculiar, following

  the strings of his dreaming to more dreaming

  in a sump narcosis, never having given himself

  over to his life, never owning an instant.

  Week’s eating log:

  whitefish poached with lemon, onion, wine, garlic;

  Chulapa – pork roasted twelve hours with pinto beans,

  red peppers, chili powder; grilled twenty-two pounds

  of beef ribs for friends; a lamb leg pasted with Dijon

  mustard, soy, garlic; Chinese pork ribs; menudo

  just for Benny & me as no one else would eat it –

  had to cook tripe five hours then mix with hominy

  and peppers with chorizo tacos on the side;

  copious fresh vegetables, Burgundy, Columbard, booze

  with all of the above; at night fevered dreams

  of her sumptuous butt, a Mercator projection,

  the map of an enormous meal in my brain.

  Still trying to lose weight.

  How strange to see a horse

  stare

  straight up.

  Everything is a good idea at the time.

  Staring with stupid longing at a picture, dumbstruck

  as they used to call it, an instant’s whimsy;

  a body needlessly unlike any other’s,

  deserved by someone so monstrous

  as Lucrezia Borgia: how do you come to terms

  with it? thinks the American. You don’t, terms

  being a financial word not applicable

  to bodies. Wisdom shies away, the packhorse

  startled at the diamondback beneath the mesquite,

  the beauty of threat. Now look at her as surely

  as that other beast, the dead crow beneath the apple

  tree so beautiful in its black glossiness

  but without eyes, feet stiff and cool as the air.

  I watched it for a year and owned its bleached

  shinbone but gave it to someone who needed

  the shinbone of a crow.

  She says it’s too hot,

  the night’s too short,

  that I’m too drunk,

  but it’s not too anything, ever.

  Living all my life with a totally normal-sized dick

  (cf. the authorities: Van de Velde, Masters & Johnson)

  neither hedgehog or horse, neither emu or elephant

  (saw one in Kenya, the girls said O my goodness)

  neither wharf rat, arrogant buck dinosaur,

  prepoten
t swan, ground squirrel, Lauxmont Admiral

  famous Holstein bull who sired 200,000 artificially.

  I am saved from trying to punish anyone,

  from confusing it with a gun, harpoon, cannon, sword,

  cudgel, Louisville Slugger. It just sits there

  in the dark, shy and friendly

  like the new kid at school.

  In our poetry we want to rub our nose hard

  into whatever is before it; to purge

  these dreams of pictures, photos, phantom people.

  She offers a flex of butt, belly button, breasts,

  slight puff of veneris, gap in teeth often capped,

  grace of knees, high cheekbones and neck,

  all the thickness of paper. The grandest illusion

  as in ten thousand movies in all those hours

  of dark, the only true sound the exploding

  popcorn and the dairy fetor of butter. After the movie

  a stack of magazines at the drugstore

  to filter through, to be filtered through.

  A choral piece for a dead dog:

  how real the orchestra and hundred

  voices on my lawn; pagan with the dog

  on a high cedar platform to give the fire

  its full marriage of air; the chorus

  sings DOG a thousand times, dancing

  in a circle. That would be a proper

  dog funeral. By god. No dreams here

  but a mighty shouting of dog.

  Sunday night,

  I’m lucky to have all of this vodka,

  a gift of Stolichnaya.

  And books. And a radio

  playing WSM all the way from Nashville.

  Four new pups in the bedroom.

  The house snores. My tooth aches.

  It is time to fry an egg.

  Heard the foghorn out at sea,

  saw horses’ backs shiny with rain,

  felt my belly jiggle as I walked

  through the barnyard in a light rain

  with my daughter’s small red umbrella