Paper stays with us, black and smoky like the sky above the roofs but behind the trees and there, automatic, it wasn’t, that thing that made me turn the lights on, car alarms buzzing and shouting, a noisy night of mammalian thunder and siren’s arms spilling out of cars. When the bomb hits, it’s only one, and wow, what a brightness and forth of July to a dead revolution, but bombs still burst. Here’s me in my quiet bed imagining blood. If only those soft curls fell on wounds, if only the snow, but why even talk of snow in a San Jose drought? This will be forgotten; an impact arises and grows from ambition, is that right? I doubt it. There’s door-kings of glass to grab, but leave the door closed. All the belts behind the door hide their history and the sky is cracking. Where are the soft hamburgers of pointed pain, a mess, but popcorn helps. It has no edges, only a plaintive mew. The bombs scratch the sky. Did we really do it all on purpose? We bought it, the breaking of many branches.
Lookout Mountain
Stuffed with the tongues
of hummingbirds
the snapdragons
stoically choked
through August into
fall.
Mother heard
the thunder
days before
the storm.
Of course, her nerves
were a spine
of army ants
on fire.
A Tiny Crown
O Bug bug bug bug bug…
—John Hollander
Little musical hairdressers, His
favorites sing with nail and comb,
natter rhythmic clicksongs in His ear,
so many variations after the first
essay: pool skimmers to slide over
shady waters, little kitchen demigods
ruining the flour, nano-lumberjacks,
and you, assiduous worker, proud
to roll your ball of dung in the broad
field of His approving gaze: a God
so plainly fond of you if otherwise
unknowable, capricious, obscure.
Court-Bouillon
is what French militants dubbed
the fish head mélange, but we say
Coubion, because the fewer syllables
the less bourgeois. This is no tartare.
This is the muculent skull of an arrow,
stirred into a stock with the butts
of scallions & celery, jealousy & snot.
Like Goliath’s lot, this too is prepared
for the sovereign, along with its guts
dangling from where the severance
took place. If a scalp is clutched
by its locks there is a face, if clasped
by its beard, a squid. Crustacean
shells & grey shallots may be heaved
in to give the stew more of a zing.
To ready the king’s palette, intestines
snipped from beneath the pectoral fin
are waved before his anointed brow,
in a hypnotic baiting, blood clotted
grapes. Here, he must bite down
& strain every drop before hawking
the putrid skins across the raw slate.
Appalachia
A woodchuck munches
on a bruised crabapple
beyond the clothesline
where we play badminton.
It wobbles off, past mulch
and duff, snout dabbling in
rough muckage. Dandelions
lush the lawn with blowsy
ghosts. A truck guzzles up
a fog of yellow dust. Mizzle
stuns our horse-pond. Knuckle
deep, seep jellies over periwinkles,
whole brindled bundles of them.
A backlit buckle of felled trees
now doubles in it. Autumn,
and my life is almost over.
No, it only feels that way. Really,
the overcast erupts in slender
tinsel. Fat glops of frog spawn
slurry. The faint light suffers.
The Breakneck Boys
prettily-lit
& laced with that wealthy haze
insinuating older gentlemen
(aged less by trial than by trouser-ironing better halves)
practiced in rain-based exchanges of words
an hour here or there
in rooms kept safe
barred from the breakneck boys
by the legitimate sons
however dumb
(however deaf)
in letter jackets
linens & ties crafted for the occasion
crowded ’round
listening carefully for oceans
in shells
hallowed out
for the purpose of being easily swayed
The Hurried Valley
Nearly died of too much weekend. Even if you have only one symptom, you’ve probably got the whole disease. Like a bloodhound who’s lost the scent, you have to learn to adjust your goals. I thought I saw a face in the trees, but it was just my pareidolia acting up. Bruegel or Bosch? It’s bad, but it won’t kill you. My half-sister arrived with a basket of rented food. Usually it doesn’t agree with me, but here in Purgatory Park, I feel like a total bro, for sure. That’s why I tell people, Appreciate each hand clapping in the applause. You never know when it’s going to be too late to benefit from exercise. But it’s a balancing act. Your heart beats all the time. Six of one, a half-dozen of the other. Pretty soon you’ve grown eyes in the back of your head and the mountains crawl toward you, like a hunter on his knees, the dark of the approaching valleys, black and smooth as a panther’s flank. You’d like to think they only toy with you, but you’ve never run as fast as you’re running now, panicked prey fleeing the valley of the shadow of death. By the way, aren’t those fantastic snakes? But don’t take my word for it. Decide for yourself. No rush.
In the Dawn
for John Berryman
Nobody in the dawn. It hasn’t yet assembled
the people in its psalm.
If a voice has no body, does it need an ear?
Does the blood carry
its own crosses as it flickers in the flesh
in search of nothing,
the woman it is, a walking yard of graves?
She is not for loving,
as if love were the sharp tip of purpose
piercing, cutting away
the civilizations bacteria build on bone.
But loving does fit in,
if fitting means being strung along an act
of service: the guitar
talks back to the fingers, the world whispers
to the living: touch
until the noise and feel coalesce, reveal
the music made when
strings and fingers lock as lovers
knocking the headboard
against the wall, a thousand times
its rhythmic pulse
that gives the hour what it wanted when
it made the bodies
and made them ache and put them together
for love or what
might ever come of living in the dawn.
Potiphar’s Wife Talks About that Time
In the end Joseph did all right for himself.
Because he was in the dungeons,
he called the dreams, and from there
he worked it like he worked it in
my husband’s home, putting together
puzzles of rain, watching hands,
oh he watched, roll pastry dough
on marble table tops. I saw the oasis
shimmer at the edge of the horizon
like I had been walking toward it
my entire life, like I had been crawling
on my hands and knees.
