Volta of Venus
“Your love is like doggerel,” she told me.
“When I want my rhythm Sprung
and Manley meters hung on my enjambments,
you give me nothing but caesuras or
go slant when I seek heroic coupling
and crave the thunder of brute joy’s commandments.
“Your lines are always limping with elision.
Even after lessons on revision
your archaic diction and contractions
discharge their salty stresses in abstractions
while I am left adrift by such concision!
“See you missed my volta once again!
You always promise epic acumen,
But your stamina is limerick to the core.
Go Doolittle your Poesy Galore!”
"Sonnet" for Patriarchal Creation
What began, began with a bang
Or rather, bang! It began.
So say the cosmic biographers,
readers of the red shift, seeing
scions of some singularity twigging out.
Existence is an arboreal habit . . .
lives in the treeness of trees, deep in seeds
or in leaves or conifers’ cones
or like long-armed orangutans,
loping huge fruits, furry in the branches.
Squatters, yes. All simians are louts.
But creation always swang . . .
long before the mammals opened house,
even from the first emission.
Roots in the quantum soil
digging through darkmatter,
syncopation sprouts
keeping time for the comoving distance.
Somewhere between sun-suck and grope
stutters volition.
The shadow and the light, in roused attrition,
the ape, pulled erect by his own evolving hand,
sputters in the soil: the bastard man.
The Family Business
for CM
“A young man in the dark am I
But a wild old man in the light
That can make a cat laugh, or
Can touch by mother wit
Things hid in their marrow bones . . .”
W.B. Yeats, “The Wild Old Wicked Man”
We have an old man who lives upstairs.
It’s my fault, really, I said he could stay.
One day he arrived at our doorstep, it was the middle of February, and he was dressed as an inebriated Santa Claus.
He said he’d come looking for the perfect dusk-licked breasts
that could be rude to shadows like petulant Cassandras,
but suddenly burst into the flight of doves
startled out of a ruptured storm gutter,
that cooed cherubically when you cupped them in your hands,
for big beautiful nipples that stared into his eyes
like the brown cow irises of sunflowers, irresistibly textured,
as though the fingertips could impregnate with the slightest touch,
for the thick pubis like a moment of wooly black godthought
before the orbing out of heaven and earth,
and for thighs that were like miles and miles of a lost highway
stretching around to the dark side of the moon
where they waited to be ridden for the hushed secrets
of their long cloistered lushness.
He wanted a navel like an eggcup, lightly downed
and perched over a little slope of stomach, and hips,
vast hips like the bearing cliffs smoothed and shaped
by that fat-fingered breadmaker, the devastating sea,
hips that could hoist up the plateau of a wilderness
into a freshly risen Eden.
He said he had followed a star.
He pointed up and across the street to where a yellowed street light flickered.
I liked the way he ogled my wife, as though he could have done great harm if he weren’t so old, so destroyed.
His words were luxuriant oils, ointments of indulgence.
And we, whose habit it was to cherish, but never use, exquisite things,
must have longed to feel our decorous little humilities grow smarmy.
I invited him in for dinner, and he never left.
…
My wife was less enthusiastic, but I told her: I am a poet and must do such things.
Since, she has grown used to the old man, almost. When she goes into his room to remind him to take his medicines, and he pretends he’s dead, but that his bedcovers have fallen aside to expose his withered genitals, she is no longer shocked.
She enjoys reading his latest suicide note, and does so aloud at his bedside, shifting her weight from foot to foot as if standing near an ancient radio’s buzz as her favorite program comes on.
She tells me, “They are like two old prunes stuck together in their sugars and one horrible little strip of discarded bacon left in the pan, unworthy of breakfast.”
I worry that this may be my fate someday, as well, but I don’t tell her. I have not decided whether she looks upon the old man’s genitals with empowerment or disgust.
…
Our son, who is four, doesn’t understand—is the old man an uncle? A grandfather? Sometimes the old man makes him explode into giggles, other times, ball in terror. Our refrigerator is plastered with crayon simulacra depicting the old man’s daily exploits in utterly Homeric fashion.
The other day, I caught the old man dragging my boy up a hillside with a large hammer and a railroad spike.
“What is going on here?!” I panted as I caught up to them.
“We must nail his foot to the hillside. Come, grab his other arm.”
“You will do no such thing, old man!” I said.
“It is to honor our father, Lame Vulcan!” he replied, quite astonished at my objection.
“He who has been toiling so long,
sweat-stroked and sooted in the shithouse of heaven!
Forging and plotting, pounding in the heat, crafting
little tongue-petalled flowers out of colored tissue papers,
all the while feeling the mad weather in His shins!
“He has been cuckolded again, and His anger breaks
the wings of moths over an anvil!”
“No it doesn’t,” I said curtly, grabbing my boy.
“But his limp, his limp!” whined the old man.
After ten minutes of arguing, we finally compromised. We all affected a ceremonial limp on our way back to the house.
My wife looked up from her gardening at three ages of limping men heaving their disagreeable legs along like sledgehammers through the bleached solemnity of the street,
each with his own special countenance of miseries,
feeling his heart banging
like a toy cannon firing diamonds
at a charging brigade of uniformed chimpanzees
pedaling artificial currencies . . .
feeling: newly born.
…
During the holidays, the old man talks only of the devil like he was a fallen comrade, evokes his name at the beginning of meals in a lewd forgery of grace, digressing and digressing as the mashed potatoes turn into snowballs.
“. . . and the time that you explained to Eve that the penis
was like a kind of fruit
from which you must suck the seeds
to fully enjoy its sweetness,
and she was willing,
for she so liked the sweetnesses of fruits . . .”
Then he’d grind a lump of coal in a parmesan cheese grater and sprinkle it over his cold food, and then he’d begin to chew, painfully, like a sagged Holstein.
My wife’s parents dislike the old man. They say nothing, but I can tell they think he’s a kind of infidel. This alone is probably a good reason to keep him.
…
The old man will sit in his room into the wee hours, just him and the dog, to whom he tells mournful stories of lost love, and they lean into each other weeping copiously and howling like wolves over their pageant of salt.
The dog licks the old man’s tears from his cheeks and nose, each lick like lighting a candle for the dead, and the old man laces his fingers into the dog’s fur and kneads her loose gray skin. I walk by the open doorway with a midnight bourbon, and I too want to be among the weeping and furry, but I don’t go in.
…
Last month, there was an evening he didn’t come down for dinner, and as we ate by ourselves, he leapt from his bedroom window and fell to the ground like a pocked chunk of moon right outside our dining room. We looked at each other in silence for a second, then the old man gathered himself up into a moose of contusions and oozed in through the front door.
He was wearing a now crushed and disheveled pair of wings fashioned out of coat hangers and bed sheets.
“No thank you, I’m not hungry,” he mumbled leprously as he limped past us and back up the stairs, although we had not asked.
After dinner, I went up to his room with a plate of food, and he told me he was busy circumnavigating his bed, and that he planned to write a novel about it. He has put on a fake Russian accent.
“I vill be za first person vith a fake Russian accent to circumnavigate his bed and write a novel about it,” he explains with a kind of stoic, cold war heroism.
…
The old man has a nasty habit of calling on us. He takes his wind-up alarm clock and throws it, concussing and clattering, down the stairs where it finally comes to a rest, buzzing obnoxiously.
I bring the clock, silenced, back to his room, stomping up the stairs, and peer into his eyes like a saber-toothed tiger ready to take dictation. He is working on his will again.
“I am leaving you the Family Business,” he says.
We’ve heard this before and doubt very much that there is such a thing. We’ve become accustomed to nodding along with his proposal with suspicious affection. I nod once again.
“Yes,” I say, “the Family Business.”
“It is important to me,” he goes on, “that you do the honorable thing, run the business well and pass it on to your own children when you have grown too old, and they have grown old enough.”
We have, politely, asked the old man what sort of business the Family Business is, but he has been reluctant to tell us out of the fear that we will try to persuade him to alter his will.
But, this time, he is ready to tell me. He has even put on Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony as mood music and erected some makeshift spotlighting out of table lamps and scarves.
“It is the Business of Making,” he dramatizes.
“Ah,” I say, “so . . . now I can become the Count of Monte Cristo.”
“You are always thinking of revenge,” says the old man with an expression half smile, half frown that negates itself, “but that will pass.”
I leave the old man to his Dvorak and go back downstairs to tell my wife. “But you already make things that come to nothing,” she tells me.
“Well, I’m afraid we won’t be able to sell the Family Business and retire early to Florida, as we’d planned,” I say and then realize I am still carrying the old man’s clock in my hand like a loser at the game of Hot Potato.
…
Last night, my wife rolled over in bed with the moonlight sitting on the floor behind her, impassively. “I think we should get divorced,” she said.
I was frozen. I tucked the blankets around my shoulders like a poultice.
“We should get divorced, and then, then I will marry the old man, and then you can live in the upstairs bedroom growing mad and hairy. While the old man sleeps in this bed, I will creep upstairs to find you playing dead, your cock lolling out from beneath your covers. There will be a suicide note on the nightstand, and I will pick it up and read it out loud like a grammar school teacher in horn-rimmed glasses with three buttons worth of cleavage:
Oh, let it be known that I died, a weary old man
in need of just one outrageous night of fucking,
just one moist night of love inside the fist-tight cunt
of a younger woman, so that I could keep drawing breath.
And so, like Shelly’s Ozymandias, I say—
Look on my works, Ye Mighty, and despair.”
I blinked, and the heat started to come back. That night, my wife and I were happy we’d met the old man who came looking for the perfect dusk-licked breasts.
My fingers played upon her body like the fingers of a man who can play Chopsticks on a piano, or maybe the melody half of In the Mood, but nothing else . . . doesn’t read music. But it is a good song, and I play it with enthusiasm, and she was willing, so I played on and on, verse after verse.
We were both as ravenous as Grail Knights at a feast, just come back empty-handed again, famished, dirty, and raw, brandishing new wounds like scanty, slutted fox pelts.
We heard the dog howling her rendition of Old Man River into the numb plasters of the house, and the house reeled and creaked its heft about, dancing like a sequoia in the earth’s lap to appease the obstreperous wind.
Our son slept in his tiny bed, gigantic, like a dragon sleeping on the strange gold of its dreams, and the old man sank into his freshly-circumnavigated bed like a baby sinking deeply into a plushly-furred Russian hat, picked up a pen to launch the fast ships of his novel into its rosy-fingered dawn, and wrote:
In za beginning . . .
What Has Happened In Heaven?
(Another American Messiah Tells His Tale)
The purpose of wandering upon deserted towns
is to run into deserted people, not,
as it is commonly believed,
to allow one’s own desertedness to diffuse
through alleyways littered with anonymous metals
into the loose swing of barroom doors
down the frayed ropes of dead wells
that have absorbed the western dust as men
have absorbed the amber of the sun.
But we love to slough, to get rid of our burdensome selves
and there are some places wild enough or barren enough,
uncouth and aboriginal, places that just love dying,
that hunger for death to no certain sating,
places that can be fed and fed on the stuff.
There are people like that, too, black
and bottomless of appetite
who make great spittoons for our forgetting.
These folks, I’m told, live westwardly, or thereabouts
and will do right by your chosen currency,
be it blemished or bent or wooden or worthless.
As we Americans have discovered (and proudly),
going westward long enough is a way
of leaving death sowed in a plant row of waste behind us.
Seedless fruit for our tendered hungers.
Movement is the essential thing, consumption, trade.
Our travelogue is a manifesto of purchase.
Our dear dead ones blow off in our backfires . . .
crumb-emptied potato chip bags littered at the static roadside,
lousy with their labels’ polymorphous flavors,
residues left for dirt’s indigent tongue to lick out
(hailing back its slavered Godbless) . . .
the unwaddable inside-out silver of little souls
lost to the prairies . . . where highways form
like premature wrinkles in the forced smile
of the face of the earth.
Despite this, we have never been able to resolve oceans.
It takes an ignorant man, a man who runs
westward with his back into the sunset,
obsessing over the clumps of dead things
he scatters, the light looming off of the debris,
or how the wake persistently
chases the boat, a truly ignorant man,
to continue west into the ocean
and beyond, a man who is unaffected,
for whatever reason or disease,
by the weight of water
and can defy gravity with the acme of his stupidity
(for just a moment)
like Wile E. Coyote.
When the newspaper began advertising a position for such a man
I immediately made my application.
Of course, I began to suspect something was amiss,
snuffed the stink of contraband desperation
(which smells like the sulfur of falling
and lugs you into its gravity)
when my potential employer was not ready to meet in person
and left little notes in coffee cans or
sewn into the underbelly of my mattress
providing maps and directions and the words:
bring a pad of paper and a pen and quit your day job.
Still, a man must follow where his talent leads him,
and undoubtedly, I was trapped in the pendulous swing of this mystery
as a philosopher might be trapped
in the finite language of his philosophy.
When the call came I rushed out arse-forward,
packing beads and primed for providence,
trailing a garbage of guilts and silvered glass,
stopping only to buy dream catchers and Mexican blankets
on my 21st century style odyssey across America—
following the WalMart trail
where the limped footprints of Coyote retreated, scavenging away.
I kept accelerating as if to keep from falling over backwards
until finally I smacked into a wiry old man
and sent us both sprawling.
The Pacific chortled with shag like a damp buffalo pelt below me.
The old guy picked himself up and dusted the salt
water off his trousers and introduced
himself as Emmit and asked did I
remember the pen and paper, and
yes I did. “Good,” he said,
“now write this down,” he said
and proceeded to tell me the story of
what had happened in heaven.
***
“There was once a great partnership,” said Emmit, and paused,
“What I’m going to do is tell you my story. But don’t worry, it’s short.
“Once, a long time ago, there were two Gods in heaven, two Gods just starting out in the Big Business, two who had together thought up a way of marketing mankind to the world, and to get to the point, I was the other God, no lower on the totem pole, I’ll have you know.
“The way things worked . . . He did the designing, the abstract, and me, I was the God with the effable name. I did the legwork. If a universal principle needed to be written He would say, You know, we need a universal principle for . . . for entropy, let’s say, and my job would be to write the formula, hire the crews, and conduct all the construction. He would say, You know it’s gloomy over there, and I would pound out a solar system, and so forth.
“If He wanted His Presence felt below, I would ghost write a bible, trying my best to capture the essence of his ineffable egotism without blackening his raison d’etre.
“Well, who knows why such things happen, what straw finally breaks the camel’s back and squeezes it through the needle’s eye, what conceit’s fat will float up to the surface when the broth has bubbled long enough, but all of a sudden, He gets this idea that the true axis, the kernel, the metaphysical omphalos of our corporation is monotheism. It started as one of those notorious what-ifs veiled in innocent pondering, that white raiment of ideological advancement, but it blew up like a nuclear bomb into a mania, an obsession—all for the idea! The idea of monotheism!
“He felt there was a kind of purity to it, an unassailable, inarguable logic of ‘simpleness’, and what else could come of this except The Great Downsizing? And after ages and ages of wondrous destruction and restoration, I was out on the street. It was for the good of the company, He said. My talents were wasted on busy work, He said. I ought to go and start my own business, He said. He was really doing me a favor, He said, and the corporation was bigger than either of us, and must live on, as it always had, for the sake of form, for godheadliness, for the sake of sake itself.
“With me went the bulk of the angels, all laid off (or cast out as we later called it) so suddenly, so terribly that at first it all seemed a grand deific slapstick. And then it was He who said, History is written by the winners, and called that the Logos.
“And then heaven, which was once something like we’ve been pretending it is, fell into decay: the crime rates went up, gimmicks for transcendence and salvation flocked in like fat filthy pigeons, the pain of the lost began hovering like a damaged storm, atmosphere thick as soup skin, and really, the living were being stewed in their own juices, trying to live off of their own loosening flesh.
“We give the damned such a glossing over, always making up reasons for them getting what they deserved, losers and sinners all, we like to say, but damnation is waking to the truth that we are tightrope walking on the grace of a God who is sawing away with his bowie knife at the nether end. When you fall . . . well, there’s a mind out there that thought up gravity out of its love of the sight of falling things.
“What will He do? What can He possibly do without us? we said, thinking that some comeuppance was in order. But as it turned out, spirituality (for those whose hungers couldn’t be assuaged with surrogate commodities) could be manufactured cheaper overseas by Buddhists . . . who are used to nothing. He was happy to import any of this he could get his hands on, it didn’t matter that Buddhists didn’t even believe in the soul and sought freedom from samsara and the 10,000 things. “Things fall apart,” said Siddhartha, whereas our ethic had always been the passion of the spirit trapped in the crumbling, corporeal world . . . beauty transcendent only in the finite, entropy as the ultimate catalyst for the theater of selfhood . . .”
***
Then Emmit the Effable checked himself
and looked sternly into my eyes.
“I want you to take this all back with you and show it to the world. Make sure everyone knows the truth, because people should know why it’s all gone to hell on a hog cart.”
And with that he vanished into thin air
and I was whisked instantly into one
of the sea’s realities, one of Emmit’s
formulations of descent.
I fell like a flying fish
falling back down after a near perpetual
flight into the salty laments of the seawater
and sank heavily down to the scullery of the ocean floor . . .
it seemed miles down until my feet found some
floor to walk on, and walk I did,
crabbing all the way back along the bottom
to the beaches of the west coast,
and it was like walking in suburbia at three AM
when even the lampposts have fallen asleep
like bilge-bellied security guards paid
to keep track of a warehouse
without any wares.
It was like walking back from the Rush
after the gold was gone,
leaving nothing but a name on a claim,
some emptiness . . .
a few dented shovels and broken screens
bleeding out their ghosts, those poor ores
and lumbers amputated from the earth
by human hands to serve human hands . . .
for the sake of form, I suppose.
It was like walking back from the Land of California
to the Delta after making forty dollars
for a race record and shedding a shackle
of heaviness, a shirt collar thick with salt
only to come back
to the steadiness of sharecropping,
the plow, the stink of the old beast of the field,
the old beast of self,
back to the east, back eastward
back into the ignorant gaze of the sun
and the amber waves of grain
over which it fails
to mean anything.
My mouth began to open, spilling out words.
It was a slave ship jettisoning half its starved
and sickened cargo in mid-passage.
And America’s eyes fell on me
as the eyes of plantationers might fall on a union man
speaking at the laborers of the field.
The country raised up its great tattered flag
like a distracted glance at its wrist watch
and drifted away whistling to itself.
I wanted to carve my initials on its lynching tree
inside a little heart to show how defiant my love could be,
how when I laid down the Word, the language would cede
its thirty pieces of silver at your feet . . .
but the only word that comes to mind is
“Croatoan”
Croatoan—you know
where you can find me.
Anima
When I am dancing in the meadow
with my sword,
swinging it gaily
and humming sweet verses,
stealing the sight of monsters—
then you are a child
climbing trees in bare feet,
noticing new graces in my form.
When I am wretched with lust
and dirty as a dead magpie,
rattling about with hookers,
impervious to your drug—
then you
with long finger nails
and black dizzying hair
will explain to me
precisely how to fuck you.
When I am growing tired with myself
and my illusions
of knighthood and Christhood
and holy cocksmanship—
then you are as mighty as Athena
dressed up in the warshirt of your father,
stoking my heart with battle cries
and prophecies,
guiding me back from death
to Ithaca
where you lay me
on the shore
asleep.
When I am old as an oak
and wander inland
where strangers mistake my oar
for a winnowing fan—
then only dust rises
when I fall into my bed,
but the wind taps a sea-beat
over the sill,
and I have left the little door ajar
where your gray eyed poem
once sat like a quieted bird
veiled for evening.
Problems With Romance
I
You have heard, I’m sure, that it is the blue flame
that is hottest. This is the purest of heats.
When Jesus roasted a lamb for his supper
the spit would stick it under the nose of a blue flame,
the flame, like a royal food tester, would lick it
all over, smack its pale blue angel lips and say,
“No, no poison in this one, no reason to ship off
into the unleavened bread just to keep on living for another day.”
When Judas came in the night as one whose roses
had not arrived in time for Valentine’s day, came
with night in his beard to kiss his lover open-eyed,
the staled cordial of his heart nudging at the back of his throat,
when this greatest moment in the history of romantic love
became engorged on the page of the old love book,
the blue flame leapt out of Christ’s tonsils
and tasted those hairy lips before flesh
tasted flesh, dipped ethereally into a faint gesture
of blue, said, “And all along
I thought you were just paranoid . . .”
II
My recent interest in the sciences has got me all worked up about flame.
The red flame, the old familiar, that is the flame said to be
least hot. Red would merely melt, whereas blue,
like the girth of the sky suddenly uncorseted,
would engulf. Blue flame
is Zeus’s electric ejaculation
disestablishing the curiosity of maidens like a perfect philosophy
might quell the desire for sex.
But if I am to make any contribution to the field, let it be
the acknowledgement of a variety of darker flames.
A descent of flame, a degeneration
from the pure and holy
to the immeasurably tainted and feckless.
There are mean purple flames like those pretty skies
they say come from pollution, purpling from self-extinguishment
like Christ’s kingly birthday suit torn over the casting of lots
and carried away into the dismantled pettiness of dark.
There are deep green flames like sick plants,
heavy gray flames that make a knocking sound
like two stones knocking unable to make a spark, awful
tan flames that swallow heat and forget it
into the desert in the nighttime.
There are personalized flames like birthstones
signifying our medleys of temperament, flames
that existed long before humanity, ancient flickering
minerals sitting deep in the earth in their yogic trances,
pushing our souls this way and that
with a slow telekinetic heat.
My own flame is a marshy brown, nearly black in a certain light,
that shivers like an accidental hail of brimstone
snuffed out in mid-flight, quenched into a type of muddy slop,
as if God said “whoops”
and checked his rashness, albeit awkwardly.
Such a flame is not even hot to the touch and
feels like cool peat that is on your skin and then suddenly not
as it laps at you, in the way a snake doesn’t leave
behind it a large wet worm trail although it
seems it could have.
III
When I was rattling through my closet the other day
for a pair of boots I could have sworn I still had
I discovered the flame fiddling around with a patch of mildew.
It almost burned my hand like a genie freed from a bottle,
ready to grant reckless wishes, but it just couldn’t.
“Flame,” I said, looking at it sincerely and lovingly,
“I would like it if you moved out of this old closet
and moved in under my bed.”
“Hmm,” said the flame,
“since you have given me two weeks notice,
I find your proposition suitable.”
We were happy for some time with this arrangement,
whenever women visited us I assured them
my flame was harmless
and couldn’t burn up anything.
“Go ahead, put your hand in it,” I would nudge.
This always astonished them and they cringed.
But when all good things are in their proper positions
the dimensions of the rooms begin to get antsy
and the house starts to look like it was redecorated
by M.C. Escher
on a picture straightening binge,
so when I said, “Flame, would you like to come live on my desk
and write poetry for me?” it sighed and told me that
I don’t understand it, I never really understood.
In a display of grand melodrama,
quivering with determined muddiness,
it explained to me that, alas, it was a destructive force,
and that it had been gradually consuming everything it touched
burning it into ashes.
The analogy it used was that of an enormous python,
a python the size of a ring around Saturn that had
swallowed and was digesting the bulk of Saturn itself at
the immeasurably slow rate at which space digests light—that,
it said, was how it was digesting the house, and that was how
it would digest my poetry.
“But until then . . .” I pleaded.
“See,” it said, “I told you, you don’t understand.”
“Make me understand,” I said.
“I can’t,” it said. “I think I better move back to the closet.”
And then it left me, and I felt like I had nothing
but an after image of murky kisses burned onto my lips
to lick at in the night, to trust only hesitantly.
IV
Now the flame, my flame, although it resides quietly in the closet
possibly consuming boots and old towels
could eventually devour the entire world, and intends to
and that, I think, is the secret;
it’s racing with the lifespan of the sun.
I’d like to think it would say,
“Now you are beginning to understand”
as I suggest that it is an ancient opened thing,
opened and emptied
by the force of a personal architecture, an urn,
a thing that loves the feathery touch of ashes,
the fallen sight of ashes falling into the density of darkness,
that loves the love of black imp-angels,
and loves the hunger that is never satisfied,
the way time, in our illusion of it, is never satisfied with itself
and must go on.
Or it’s an ancient will, like an idea of the divine
before there was a divine,
that means to love everything gradually in its own way
and proves, tragically, but not really “tragically,”
that nothing can ever love it back.
I’d like to think it says, resignedly, “I will love you anyways.”
And there’s the sorrowful love of the universe
unrequited if only because too subtle,
the sad love, the Blues like the quiet blue spill
of milk that floats our now cowless galaxy,
vestige of udder sustaining life with a slow nutrient of poison,
Mother Milk Cow Blues
dimly burning in the cellular bones of everything.
I want it to say, “Now you are beginning to understand,”
and maybe redeem me into its reality
so I could sanctify its loneliness, be an easy rider
unraveling my wardrobe of need
as it rambles absurdly, nearly stilled,
on its journey through the highway’s appetites.
But it doesn’t say that, it doesn’t say anything,
and I’m starting to feel the cosmos wend into a saddle
of increasing space turning inside out,
the Great Gulp of a throat to counteract the Big Bang . . . .
And burning, everything burning, nearly hot enough and hungry
for the Age of Coming Home to be born.
The flame says nothing,
it doesn’t even return my boots
which it has worn out in the feast of walking.
The Literary Life
I am a poet
because I write about the sun.
I say things are golden
that aren’t really.
And not surprisingly,
the sky started looking down on me
like a dog looks down
on its food dish
just before it’s filled.
I now have a new pair of creek boots
and everywhere I go
I snicker
and leave flittering salmon
in people’s socks.
I’m a regular Santa Claus
when it comes to that.
I’d rather be an inventor, though
and maybe create things,
things that fly
using nothing but junk-mail—
junk-mail is someone’s poetry too . . .
but he’s not a poet I like at all.
I can’t like anyone who keeps offering me money.
Maybe I’ll just be a poet.
Nobody offers me money for poems,
and so there’s nothing that
is never delivered.
Maybe I’ll be a mailman.
Well, that’s all I have to say.
Except this:
Doom, doom, doom!
This is what I’ve learned
From sipping from a pockmark
On the moon:
A good poet repeats his words
Three times,
A good parrot
Only two.
Maybe I’ll be a poet.
I like to say pithy things,
and the only time I care at all for crackers
is all mushed up
in my soup.
Maybe I’ll be a chef.
I like to eat,
and I could create dishes
out of old poems
soaked in a meat broth.
They would be like those items on the menu
that sound quite bizarre,
but if you ever get brave enough to order them,
you find they are uniquely delicious.
I think I could pull it off.
Maybe I could just be a diner,
but a diner that gets paid:
a restaurant critic.
And I could just sit at tables and eat and drink.
I like to sit at tables, it reminds me of signing books,
and eating and drinking remind me of little people
coming up to ask me what I meant
when I said such and such.
I write my best poems usually
on those little drink napkins . . .
but then I always lose what I say
inside wet circles
every time I put my drink down.
Maybe I’ll just drink at home.
I’ll use a coaster,
nobody ever writes on a coaster,
you’re pretty safe if you drink at home.
Someday I’ll get banned from the bookstores.
After all, I only ever write about the sun,
and I’ll get banned . . .
because I’ll always be writing in other people’s books—
a tiny nuisance of sunlight dawning over their words.
You can publish anything that way,
and anybody will read it.
It will seem more personal.
Someday they’ll lift the ban,
and I’ll be famous for writing in other people’s books,
and everyone, even the authors, will love me.
I’ll get an honorary degree.
Everyone will laugh
and I’ll laugh and twinkle my little solar quill
a la Groucho Marx,
and they’ll all say,
“Tell me your life story”
and I’ll laugh again.
Everybody will be at ease.
And then, maybe,
I’ll tell it.
I’ll throw one dirty creek boot up on the table
sending rattles through my beer.
I’ll smile like a Cheshire rainbow,
tap my finger twice against my nose.
I’ll tell everyone how it is.
Fantasia on a Train Station
for T.S. Eliot
We are boarding the train and steam is leaking out of its platform. It’s like a huge snake speaking in the cold that forgot to bring his body along. The voice of steam is curling up around us as we coil in a queue toward the train, our feet shuffling in a slow fall of scuffed dominos . . . ribs of belly muscle expanding and contracting.
Or else . . . are we the body?
(We are thinking this is some reptilian testament to time in its extinguishment of measurability.)
We notice, above the trees, beyond the train, old men in black shroud coats are floating. (It is thought to be a sign of autumn.) Some of us gesture and say, “It must finally be autumn.”
The old men are speechless, their eyes unfocused and downcast. If their feet were moving . . . they would be shambling to a silent dirge (but instead it is much worse).
This floating slowly, steplessly, in a westward arc, following the moon and stars, bleeding into blur (like an opened aperture into silver) . . . this floating is evidently the sign of something much worse.
There are janitors, unceremoniously uniformed, on the platform, standing around (old buckets and mops) as if something will soon be dirtied. But now, they are still as lampposts waiting as the lamplighter and the dark both stroll to work (to sell a medicine and a medicine for that medicine). The janitors’ faces are carved with the expressionlessness of waiting.
We are boarding now, each luggaged with a bell jar the size of a large head, but oblonged. We are filing in, gripping our respective jars with both hands. Inside each jar a kind of frayed green light is twitching. We sit down in the train as it winds itself up like a giant steel spring, contorting into its impossible yogic coil.
Through the windows we see old women pacing on the platform, old widows hunched (humpbacked?) and wearing black lace veils.
As the train aches to its heavy wheels to move, we notice the janitors moving toward the old women as if to . . . we do not know. (As if to what?) The janitors have dropped their mops, which seem like wooden puppets, de-animated, whose lives drool out in little gray puddles from their yarnthick hair.
(We wonder, is it like the diffusion of memory after death?)
The janitors appear to be approaching the old women in order to lift their veils. Any minute the old women’s veils will be lifted . . . but now the train is slowly entering the tunnel.
We notice how the train enters the tunnel, how it pushes its wide metal body into the tunnel’s dark gap, how the sound of its churning is squeezed in at us.
On board the train everyone’s bell jar is rattling quietly, and we are reminded of a breeze blowing a porch full of wind chimes. We are all thinking of porches as the outside light diminishes.
(The tunnel has no appetite for light, it seems.)
The trees below the procession of old men in black shroud coats start to drop their leaves (. . . this is definitely reminding us of autumn). But the leaves seem like so many tears cried by the old men, fluttering down like the curved lips of spoons falling through a yellow oil.
Despite this, our attention is turned toward the tunnel with its refusal to munch on the outside light (not even a nibble out of courtesy for the passengers who are guests here).
How the train is entering the tunnel seems especially important to us.
Inside the tunnel there is no light, but the green glow from our jars seems to spill on everything so as to make the train car a tube of eerie green, a green that seems like green strobes in the distance.
(Yet there is no distance.)
Meanwhile, outside, beyond the platform, the old men are opening their shroud coats slowly like a succession of Red Seas parting. The old men are parting the leaves of their coats and displaying their withered genitals.
(Their left eyes are bulging with a sinister glee.)
The janitors have reached the old women. The janitors have lifted their veils. And now the old women are kissing the janitors (who are appalled) with shriveled lips, covering them with ancient wet shriveled old woman kisses.
The janitors look much younger now that their fingers grow dainty, clipped around the veils’ lace, their lined faces filling up with the wet of kisses like dried creekbeds when the beaver dams are blown.
Inside the train, where it is a distant glowing green, it is becoming quite clear that this tunnel does not have another exit, and the train slowly dies to a halt.
The train is sitting in confusion wanting to obey an order from the engineer who is sitting in confusion.
We all look at one another and say nothing. The train begins to move sluggishly into reverse. The train is moving out of the tunnel backwards. (We are noticing the train’s special backwards movement out of the tunnel.)
The train tiredly retreats into the station where the old women in veils are pacing and the janitors are darkened lamp posts.
In the night sky the procession of old men has set behind the trees. We stand up one by one and let our bell jars fall. They all fall to the floor and shatter with the sound of very thin glass. (They shatter in the aisle like dropped Christmas ornaments.)
We are now moving our bodies off the train.
We are exiting the train pulling our tickets from our coats’ breast pockets. We are not satisfied with the train ride, and we wish to tell this to someone who was not on the train but could assume responsibility.
We walk past the old women pacing but don’t look toward their faces. (We are looking for someone else, someone responsible.)
Meanwhile, the janitors have boarded the train with their buckets and mops. The janitors are mopping up the mess of green light in the aisle. Their mops are soaked with green, and they smear the green glow all over the floor of the train.
The green doesn’t seem to be coming up, but the janitors are sloshing it around with their giant paint brushes.
The janitors are humming in unison.
(The green seems to be increasing.)
We have found a man in an elevator that had gotten loose. The big box scraped and squeaked toward us. The man in the elevator is wearing a black top hat.
He goes everywhere in that elevator, always holding down the open door button so he can talk to people outside who do not need to use the elevator. Although, all he ever does is listen.
We tell him the train is a dead end. We say there is no opening on the other side of the tunnel and probably no tracks leading out either.
He listens to us.
We suggest this train be retired and hauled over into the corner of the station. We suggest this could be seen as a testament to history that doesn’t require us to ride through history on it but only to seize on to it lightly with the cobwebs of nostalgia . . . and then be released lightly.
We glance at the train to indicate which one we mean, and it is bleeding green glowing water from its doors and windows. The train appears to be humming . . . and hunkered, and it hisses restlessly in its clambering steams. Imprisoned, but molting.
(All of this suddenly reminds us of autumn, and we stammer.)
The old hunched women with the black veils slide past us into the elevator. Their hips brush our hips (and they feel . . . of dry polyesters and bones and little latched diaries).
The man in the top hat bows, almost imperceptibly, and removes his finger from the open door button. The elevator doors close (like a mouth, after a yawn, closing on nothing), and the elevator drifts heavenward, a huge black cube of helium.
Soon it vanishes into the night.
We look at each other.
We will try the train again, but we are not entirely hopeful.
The Progeny Of Behaviorists
When I was a bad child I would be taken out back to the gazebo for a spanking . . . but once I got there, my parents only talked about the idea of taking me out back to the gazebo for a spanking.
As I became more responsible, my punishments changed.
I was told to take myself out back to the gazebo for a spanking, as it was known that when I got there I would most certainly think to myself about being taken out back to the gazebo for a spanking, which turned out actually to be a talk about going out back to the gazebo for a spanking.
When I was grown and married, living in my own house, I remarked to the wife that we would need to build a gazebo in the backyard.
“Why?” she asked.
“So that when we have children who are bad we can take them out back to the gazebo for a spanking, but then only talk about going out back to the gazebo for a spanking after we get there.”
She thought this extremely clever and then suggested that we go upstairs to the bedroom to make love.
Once we got there, though, she only talked about the idea of making love.
From then on, when one of us suggested we go upstairs to the bedroom to make love, it was understood that once we got there, we would only discuss the idea of making love.
“Let’s go upstairs to the bedroom to make love,” we would often say when we felt the urge to reestablish our priorities.
This practice eliminated the need for having to punish bad children by building a gazebo in the backyard where talk of spankings would occur.
After all, in the bedroom we talked about how making love would inevitably lead to having bad children whom we would have to punish by taking them out back to the gazebo for a spanking, but, once there, would only talk to them about the idea of going out back to the gazebo for a spanking.
In this way, we had improved upon my parents’ technique of child rearing.