and what these moments are
when all that was impending
begins, when the whole
downtown, arrested like a lung
between intake and expulsion, erupts
into genuineness—as if many
bells have been struck and what
the world is, is that I can touch
their ringing. It is unbreakable.
It is the examiner before whom the emptiness
inside me perjures itself.
It is the examiner who is a fist.
For Jane
At left, with a net, in a light
like whiskey, you skim flotsam
from the water.
I can’t tell you how vivid
this undertaking is—
you are as unsettling
and as naked as that yellow
flower admiring you as it rests
along the surface of the pool.
I am just going to listen
to the sound of liquid,
the sound of oleanders.
If ever
I was about to speak I
forget. I can see
that the single flower goes
aloft on the water of
the pool because it is something
that everything has addressed
to my darling, while I stand
here like some ashes
that used to be a clown,
looking out quietly
from my face to watch the failure
of these words to be those things.
Sway
Since I find you will no longer love,
from bar to bar in terror I shall move
past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth
and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,
their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,
suffer the light from the wrestling arena
to fall all over them. And what they say
blends in the tarantellasmic sway
of all of us between the two of these:
harmony and divergence,
their sad story of harmony and divergence,
the story that begins
I did not know who she was
and ends I did not know who she was.
The Circle
for Jane, after a dream
I passed a helicopter
crashed in the street today,
where stunned and suddenly grief-torn
passers-by tried to explain
over and over, a hundred ways, what
had happened. Some cried over the pilot,
others stole money from his wallet—
I heard the one responsible for his death
claiming the pilot didn’t need it any more,
and whether he spoke of the pilot’s
money or his life wasn’t clear.
The scene had a subaqueous timbre
that I recognize now as a light
that shines in the dreams I have when I sleep
on my back and wake up half-drowned.
However I tried to circumnavigate
this circus of fire and mourning—
the machine burst ajar like a bug,
the corpse a lunch pail
left open and silly music coming out—
I couldn’t seem to find a way
that didn’t lead straight to the heart of the trouble
and involve me forever in their grief.
The Woman in the Moon
for Glenna K, 1922–1979
Who wouldn’t have been afraid
of your face?—watching me
from another world through your cheap
frame on the dresser, while your daughter
wept and I made hysterical
love to her, trying
to banish your ghost that wandered
with its smashed head through this life
I never invited you to.
Who wouldn’t have wanted to drive you out of her,
seeing how your memory, grown
sharp as flint in grief, carved
her face a little more every
day into yours?
I thought you were watching me out of her eyes,
I thought every night I heard the telephone
clatter to the floor again,
and your daughter
scream so she couldn’t stop.
And for months afterward
you came to me like
nobody—secondhand,
through a daughter’s hindsight,
her unblinking, horrified love,
as night
after night the room filled
with the dark and the air
burned with your murdered presence,
until I couldn’t possibly make love to the dark gold
woman, vessel of your self, the torn
strings of your motherhood dripping
from her like an ocean
where she drowned but couldn’t die.
Who would drag us before some tribe of elders
to be scorned,
or have anything but pity
on us, that we turned to other lovers
and lost each other?
Glenna,
forgive me: tonight, in a moment
of learning that is as clear
and absolute as ice, and hurts
as much to be inside of,
I see how much like him
I’ve become, the man
who beat you until you died with something
they never found—
walking in an anger of love
and hatred through these streets
just as the geraniums
of light around the baseball
diamonds are coming on—
oh, God, inside me I carry a black
night you climb through like
the moon in which the Asians
see a woman:
higher
and smaller, Glenna, farther
and farther away,
and nothing
will ever bring you back.
And nothing will ever get rid of you.
The Flames
In 1972 I crossed Kansas on a bus
with a dog apparently pursued to skinniness
painted on its side, an emblem
not entirely inappropriate, considering
those of us availing ourselves
of its services—tossed
like rattles in a baby’s hand,
sleeping the sleep of the ashamed
and the niggardly, crying out
or keeping our counsel as we raced over the land,
flailing at dreams
or lying still. And I awoke to see
the prairie, seized by the cold and the early hour,
continually falling away beside us, and a fire
burning furiously in the dark: a house
posted about by tiny figures—
firemen; and a family
who might have been calling out to God
just then for a witness.
But more than witness, I remember now
something I could only have imagined
that night: the sound of the reins breaking
the bones in the farmer’s hands
as the horses reared and flew back into the flames
he wanted to take them away from.
My thoughts are like that,
turning and going back where nothing wants them,
where the door opens and a road
of light falls through it
from behind you and pain
starts to whisper with your voice;
where you stand inside your own absence,
your eyes still smoky from dreaming,
the ruthless iron press
of love and failure making
a speechless church out of your dark
and invisible face.
FOUR
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Minutes
You and I—we agitate
to say things, to dress every gash
with a street address or a relative.
We are found in the places of transport at an hour
when only the criminals are expected to depart.
We are blind and we don’t know that our mouths
are moving as we place a hand to stay
the janitor’s mop—I’ll tell you the story
of my life, you’ll make a million—
blind and we don’t know that our parents are dead
as we enter the photo-booths.
In there is the quiet like the kernel of a word:
in there everything we were going to say
is taken from us and we are given
four images of ourselves. What are we going
to do with these pictures? They hold
no fascination for the abandoned,
but only for us, who have
relinquished them to the undertow
that held us, too, but let us go,
so that the hospitals opened like great vaults
for us and we stepped from bed to bed
on the faces of the diseased, the beloved,
moving like light over a necklace
of excruciations—I’ll tell you
the story of my life,
you’ll make a million…
this is what it means to be human,
to witness the heart of a moment like a photograph,
the present standing up through itself relentlessly like a fountain,
the clock showering the intersection with minutes
even as it gathers them to its face
in the so often alluded
to Kingdom of Heaven—
to watch one of those minutes open
like a locket and brandish a picture
of everyone we ever loved who drowned,
while the unendurable generosity of everything
sells everything out. Would you like
to dance? Then here, dance with the terror
that now is forever,
my feet are stumps. The band is just
outbreaking now with one that goes
all the evidence / the naughty evidence / persuades
the lovers endearing by the ponds /
the truants growing older in the sleazy arcades /
there’s no banishing / of anything /
only con- / quering within /
make it enough / make it enough / or eat
suffering without end
The Coming of Age
Outside the spring
afternoon
is occurring, my love,
just as our voices
are going home from us
to the plains, and the shapes
of ourselves, as we impose
them on this one, prepare
to blend with other
afternoons, possibly in
this very room
as tiny dusts uplifted
in the bands of sunlight,
or in other still chambers.
I don’t want you to be afraid
as we stand here losing
our lives, unable to speak,
soon to enter the dream
of once having touched
this portion, that smoothness
of flesh now buried dead
and having heard the lovely
tones ascending on a voice
merely speaking; there is
the chance there will be
the singing of the voiceless,
unraveling into the unenclosed
emptiness a silence
drawn taut so
slowly its
high music encounters
us before
it begins, and we are dancing.
You
You were as blind to me
as your footprints last Friday,
but I saw you dancing
with that girl who wasn’t me—
because I don’t dance
and laugh in that terrible
style with every stranger.
But you are no stranger.
But you were strange when you were dancing,
and the room turned all yellow
and the glass I was holding
spilled burgundy wine.
I got out by the side door
and I leaned on a box,
and I saw you at the end
of every street,
and in the Flame Inn
I watched the men shooting
eight-ball and mule-kicking
the jukebox till it worked.
On the wall they had many,
many wooden plaques
bearing humorous sayings
that I will never say
to you even if you begged me,
not even if you came out
of a prison, and begged me.
Poem
There was something I can’t bring myself
to mention in the way the light
seemed trapped by the clouds,
the way the road dropped
from pavement to dirt and the land from pine
to scrub—
the red-headed vultures on dead animals,
the hatred of the waitress breaking
a cup and kicking the shards across the café
that looked out on the mountain and on the white smear
of the copper mine that sustained these people.
I claim there was something you wouldn’t
have wanted to speak of either,
a sense of some violent treasure
like uranium waiting to be romanced
out of the land…
They sat under white umbrellas,
two or three together, elbows on card tables
at the dirt roads leading to the mines,
rising each at his turn to walk
around a while with a sign
announcing they were on strike,
their crystalline and indelible
faces in the hundred-degree
heat like the faces of slaughtered hogs,
and God forgive me,
I pulled to the side of the road and wrote this poem.
Radio
He bears a rakish feather
through the streets in a hat
on his head and has had
several drinks, and is crying.
He totters at the change
of traffic lights.
I do not know if he has just
been orphaned, or what.
From a room above the stores
the insistent test-tone
of the Emergency Broadcasting
System stares at him, and he
cannot stop hearing it.
The perfectly desolate afternoon’s
single utterance is this sound
like an ambulance across
the mild lake whose driver
swims while the siren cries.
It is putting the man
in the feathered hat at
the intersection under arrest.
I do not know if he has just
been informed, or what.
I know it is my radio, but
I am only beginning to understand
whose orphanhood, whose tears.
Tomorrow
I take
you by your arm of stained glass
while the moon turns warm and wet
as the kitchen window of a distant
restaurant in the beautiful
moments after closing,
and we walk up and down—
oh! don’t we promenade?
Every radio in the town
plays the same station through doorways
thrown wide to the elements and we are
buoyed and relayed how tenderly along
this underground railroad of tuneful oldies.
&nbs
p; It is a nighttime filled
with animals, bubbles, tiny lights.
Now we do not fear treachery,
now we are not asking ourselves how
will we know if the insect lies,
how will we know if the fire lies.
The ache of our loving just
throttles us speechless inside the midnight,
though the radios are all crying out
that the weather tomorrow in
the mountains will be unprecedented.
The Confession of
St. Jim-Ralph
OUR PATRON OF FALLING SHORT,
WHO BECAME A PRAYER
I used to sneak into the movies without paying.
I watched the stories but I failed to see the dark.
I went to college and drank everything they gave me,
and I never paid for any of that water
on which I drifted as if by grace until
after the drownings, when in the diamond light
of seven-something A.M., as the spring was tearing
me up in Cartajena, only praying
on my knees before the magnifying ark
of the Seventh St. Hotel could possibly save me,
until falling on my face before the daughter
of money while the world poured from the till
brought the moment’s length against the moment’s height,
and paying was what I was earning and eating and wearing.
This to the best of my recollection
my uncle said in 1956,
moving against my father like a bear
on fire as the evening of his visit
killed the rum. He’d come from Alaska
or some place like that, the Antarctic, maybe,
and he left in a hot rage, screaming by the door
that nothing would save me from my awful father,
just as he, my uncle, had been saved
by nothing. Thirteen weeks from then, he died.
“This family’s full of the dead,” my father told me.
I was eight. I used to make excuses
to join him in the washroom as he bathed
in the mornings, soaping himself carefully
so as not to splash the automatic pistol