Vinegar

a moment's panic, then the zen sets in
and everything is stations and rock gardens
and streams long covered in concrete
but still streaming unseen where roots reach for

The two:
a man on vacation and
the wasted slosh of overnight wine bottoming the bottle
a silver border leaflet advertising
the way that the sun reflects on the road
those cracks of tar that show where the earth rejected

too many years of silence to speak up now
too much advertising to be owner-operated
and too few watt-hours left to play the songs again
so goodnight and goodnight and goodnight

and instead of two, an elevated train of
golden shapes marks off the distance
like an old roman road, like a old brown book
like a treadless-bald tire, like the ruined wine's cork.

here:
a warm night air, rushing into the compartment
there:
friends shaking hands, touching arms, nodding
then moving on

A Sonnet for EMPs and other Nuclear Detonations

Henri shot up the stairs two at a time,
the sparks of his ascent licking his toes,
bare heels on steel, snapping nails as he goes,
step-skip-step-skip: then repeating the same,
until the radioflash singed her shoes,
a rumbling groundshock shook loose her coiled frame,
and rising blastwinds of indigo flame
from other suns of incandescent truths
trumpeted a dawn in the West. A name-
-less azure terror flared out his nostrils,
at her fall, he sputtered three syllables,
No God No, then fled out into the ashen gray rain
and looking back, for years, wide-eyed and pained
was glad that he had lived. Was glad; ashamed.

how quickly the night got dark

Uncurling up from my post,

as a quarter-time sloshing spring uncoiling,

to patrol and scope out,

like a half-sleeping spy out on the land,

out the glass, the dark beyond, and this empty house

that resonates on the rattle,

on the crunch, on the squeal, on the tickling cough

on the rattle-echo of this night,

up through the attics and the rafters and the roof,

down through the floor and foundation and deep, deep

into the dirt pulsing heart throbbing in time,

in resonant time, with this heart and the rattle,

with the radio static and the electric squeal

of crossing waves in the air, out there in the sky

like bright burning birds colliding and shattering

in concentric spheres of spark-feathers that crunch as they fall

in spirals, twistering down and teasing

at the throats of the dog, the cats, and me.

Nipples

Late mid-December, sleepless, out a-prowl, scotching a 12 year Glenmorangie, reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, trying to ignore the unholy bat-wing flap, that buzzing terror that is floating above The Season (a fucked term for the interim between two gluttonous erstwhile-holy days), above my head and the lampshade, up in the midnight clouds over a Christmas-smashed Dallas that is drunk on presents and playing with its twin nipples of Northpark and the Galleria.

But after all, it's only midnight.

Poeming My Students

Sometimes I give out a poem without speaking

Just to let you sit there and read it without speaking.

Let you taste the words, taste the air.

Let you sit there and breathe there

and read there in awkward silence.

Sitting and reading in the strange presence

Of neither great art nor great nonsense

But just of breathing, breathing, breathing.

Mnemosyne And Ezra

I.

this dredging up

debarking first

and after, the

deforesting

or uncorking

the slush bottle,

sweet but rancid

hand and mouthful,

stings with bleach water

stings with nettles

unwinds the wraps

carefully bound

See this here, here

under the rule

of year and hour

and each in full,

another page turned -

There! a streaked sheen

smudge, a cold splash

of quicker sin -

and turned back to

the front cover

the bricks laid out

each in anger

then stacked again

motarless wall

toppled sideways

rebuilt anew

II.

Jeruselem's

own shackled-eyed

prophet-mason

knees in rain-muck,

the register

in his right palm

a count of those

left, the remnant,

his shredded robe

muddy under

his prostrating,

weeps and weeps now.

Bitter and Salt.

Charlie Crippen

Underneath it all, Charlie Crippen supposed there was something to be said for fratricide; that is, the act of killing one's own brother. It seemed much neater, much tidier than - and neatness and tidiness were two of the most important elements of Charlie's world, so much so that the cake falling on the floor evoked a dreadfully shrieking end to his eighth birthday party - than actually attending his brother's wedding on this blustery, cloud-covered November afternoon. The front of the church was a well-scrubbed white; the stain-glass adequately reflected the single-tone sky. Stark, titian leaves fell madly all along the church's front drive and circle, pitching an urge in Charlie's soul to return home for his rake, or a broom, or a mop; or something to clean up with. Where most others would see a picturesque day for a Fall wedding, he only saw the leaf-edges shatter on impact, each particle multiplying out into an ever-increasingly dirty, dirty world.

Outside the church, as Charlie drove around towards the back to park, the bridal party made its way from another white-washed building to the chapel, which must have offered a too meager preparation suite for the girls and forced them to ready in the former. The bride's dress was crushed whiter-than-egg-but-not-quite-snow-white (how many wedding dresses are really white-white nowadays, Charlie thought, there's always some modifiers. How messy!) and complemented nicely her glowing face and obviously pregnant figure. The other women helped hold her dress and sidle heavily down some stairs as they entered the back of the chapel without seeing him, just as he put his car in park. A bit of aerial flotsam blew past.

But it wasn't the church's driveway or parking lot that made Charlie think of familiar murder. It was the messiness inside the church. He couldn't stand messiness of any sort: blubbering, gushing tears and flushed red cheeks, running snot being sucked up the nose with a snort and sniffle, the yelps and whelps and boo-hoo-hoos; and underneath it all, the hearts crying out "No more! I can take no more..." while secretly thirsting, bleeding for more and more and more. People love punishment, Charlie knew, and people - for all the protests and wailing - created lives that exactly fit what they wanted: a fat woman who whines to be thin chooses her fatness because she'd rather remain as she was than give up food or laziness or the money it would take for surgery. Or a man who complains about his job but chooses to stay there rather than living with a lower income. All of life is choices, Charlie said to himself as he withdrew the key from the ignition, and we choose to work because we don't want to choose to not eat; we choose our relationships, no matter how fucked they are, because we refuse to choose loneliness; and me, who chooses to come to this messy, dirty wedding where I'm not really welcome because I can't bring myself to choose the consequences of not coming.

As Charlie Crippen reached to open the rear door of the chapel, he heard the last notes of his sister's fine alto as she sang some Italian aria he had never heard. Charlie didn't know much about music since his piano lessons had ceased around age eleven for hygiene reasons. He felt at the right door handle's cold faux brass, then released it and sniffed his fingers before wiping them on his pant leg. Realizing that he didn't have a handkerchief or napkin to open the door, he grimaced, reached for both handles of the double doored entrance and made his choice.

From the inside the chapel, heads whipped around at the screeching of the main doors and a loud voice crying out "Stop! The child is mine!"

Susan Anthony

Susan Anthony, named after the old suffrage movement leader, boarded a plane for Singapore, not intending to come back. Through the gate, down the walk, and into her seat, she sighed contently that America and the past would be quickly 20,000 feet below and then an inseparable gulf behind her.

As soon as the plane was airborne, she ordered a glass of wine, then asked instead for a coke, then changed her mind and ordered a diet coke, then thought again and asked for a water. "Today is a day for changes," she smiled to herself, "and why not? Whatever this new life holds for me, I'll face it undrugged." She resolved herself to vegetarianism and water for the duration of the flight. "And my life. The rest of my life."

She sat windowside and by some act of the love of the God, she thought, she had a free seat next to her. The only empty seat on the plane and it was her buffer zone from the rest of the passengers. Her carry-on only contained a cell-phone and a copy of Les Fleurs du mal in the French, which she could barely read. She flipped open to the near the middle of the book, to the middle of a poem and read this:

La gerbe épanouie
En mille fleurs,
Où Phoebé réjouie
Met ses couleurs,
Tombe comme une pluie
De larges pleurs.

"It sounds wonderful. I wish I had spent more time...no, energy, or attention, or something, to French." She had a rough idea of the meaning, and could pronounce each word with a rough accent, though any Parisian would know that her tongue had not learned those sounds until adulthood. "Why didn't I spend more time on it? What was I doing for all those years?" Her questions, spoken aloud though softly, went unanswered. The people around her were now sleeping or plugged into the movie. "This is how it always was. Me alone, but I never had time for myself. How does that happen to a person?" She read the poem's lines again and sighed.

It didn't matter, of course, since America and her past had dropped into the depths below her, and as she looked out the window still saying those words, the ocean came up and the land fell away. "Ahh, now I'm truly gone."

She opened her cell phone and pressed the power button, began to wait for it to load. Within seconds, the stewardess was hovering over her, admonishing her that she couldn't use it while in flight. Susan apologized and made it put it away - the stewardess began to move up the aisle - then reopened it dialed a number that she had memorized. "Today is a day for changes," she whispered, and also "How does that, or this, happen to a person?" She pressed Send.

The sheaf unfolds into
Countless flowers
In which joyful Phoebe
Puts her colors:
It drops like a shower
Of heavy tears.

-Charles Baudelaire

Two Haikus

Cats scratch at the door
keep us from sleeping all night
I retaliate.

This gray wet morning
I find the dog ate their food
I apologize.

Either A Lie Then Or A Lie Now

In these later days too, full
of the easy battle,
pipes and languages
and whisky, we carried on until the next day

Myself, flicking round the edge-circle, a drop of solder
waiting on the next licking snap to turn me silver
Christ also bored; patience for the unknowable hour;
brow lifted heaven-ward, waiting on the Father.

And then we found out
what we had forgot about:
the heavy gut-drop of loss
and abiding ourselves forgotten

A first attempt at translating my own work.

As an exercise for myself in French, I attempted a straight translation of my last posted poem, And sometime drink whiskey with me. I made no attempt to carry over anything but the most basic of senses - the words themselves and the meanings of the clauses. It helped that it was a fairly simply poem to begin with. Here is the French version:


Et un jour bois whisky avec moi
pour que je vais te dire de
ma cache de mots ramassé
secrètement soigneusement
plumé
d'un bouche-piège de grand-père de quelqu'un. Ce Vieux Babillard Mâchoire-Fente-là.

Ou je vais te dire autres baliverne, mensonges, comme la soir fuit de façon précipitée.



I found to my surprise that the rhythm I uncovered with the English version, though modified, still seems to work. The syllables in lines four and five match perfectly. The hardest part was figuring out how to say "That Old Jawing Slit". I settled on, with help from two dictionaries, something that translates more literally as "That Old Talkative Jaw-Slit." I wish I knew French well enough to invent words - I just don't have a good enough grasp of the morphological nuances to do so.

The impossible part was what to do with line seven in the original poem, the line with the three words drawn out of the cache. I considered finding straight translations, but the actual meaning of those three words is secondary to their impact (though they were chosen for specific reasons) as dusty old relics. And I definitely do not know enough French to tackle those sort of nuanced pragmatics.

In retrospect, I would have tackled a different poem for my first go - one that didn't rely so much on lexical precision. My next goal, besides my own work, is to try a translation of e.e. cummings i will wade out, which I have also written about here.

And sometime drink whiskey with me

And sometime drink whiskey with me
so that I'll tell you of
my cache of collected words
secretly carefully
plucked
from someone's grandfather's mouthtrap. That Old Jawing Slit.
absquatulate, bafflegab, zograscope.

Or I'll tell you other nonsense, lies, as the night flees headlong on.

Old Photos That Stop A Soul

She gave
a quick glance over some old photo
clicked by, recalling that trenchant laugh
tinkling away at what hour it had and is now become;
or those innocent hands, folded, set
like starched stone grave markers at sunset;
a flash in the heart at the glimpse of calf;
later dancing, later kisses that tasted of rum,
but now, snipped out of time and so,
and so and so.

Song for Drunkards

We go out, we stumble about
Drink up the wine, make fools of ourselves

We go out, grumble on about
the distance involved from then to ourselves

We go out, rumble and shout
try to believe that the regrets will all pass

And we go out, should have gone back in
drunk up the wine, made fools of ourselves

Christmas Night, Tyler Street

The street went gray outside while we cooked
and then blue and black and purple and dark,
but around the edges, the ambiance cracked,
unfairly lit by Christmas trees
keeping vigil behind curtained windows
and each marking tense and pretending families,
so that the street lights looked sick
with forgotten love and near-dying faith.

And now the immobile urgency of a cat
sleeping in my lap - trapping me to my seat
with the tree and the tv glowing but silent,
with this pen and this crossword,
and the little white space aside
that for these marks must have been custom made -
unwinds the boredom and begins to lift
the gray fogs of an endless month.

Questions We Answered Next Week

1. A slow break-down,
hydro-fracturing deep
below us now.

2. A drumbeat goes
like thumbprints left on glass
white from soap-film.

These two odd ends
now shoe-boxed together
makes you wonder

about process and iteration,
doing the same things the same ways
as we've always done them
just like our mothers said to.

Only myself

From darkness, at the edge of hearing:

What might be voices
but is just leaky windows,
rubbing door jambs, a dog's sleeping belly-murmurs.

But I reach for the pistol under the pillow
or knife or bat.

Grip the handle
fingering, palming, tightening, tensing
white-knuckling, straining to listen, to hear
what isn't there.

I could get up and check the house.
Jiggle knobs and pad softly.
Peer around corners and squint at shadows.
Climb back into bed, assured.

But I lie still.
Now I am caught between
the terror of being murdered in my sleep and
the terror of looking foolish, if only to myself.

Dimming

in the dimming twilight of her twenties,
She turned from the outside in,
and gave nothing, and took nothing

her life had been a tragic series
the father left and somewhere died
her mother drunk or high, until a kind aunt
whisked the child up and fled

cancer killed the aunt, a car the other aunt
a foster family for a year, bounced twice,
distant cousins through junior high
her senior year on her own

so in the sadness of her teens,
She turned from the outside in,
and gave nothing, and took nothing

believing the up-from-down stories
of the successful she worked her way
through college, struggled, spent
her nights clearing tables of chinese food

a fight on some early playground
had left her nose an ugly bump, a broken flap
and she dated boys who didn't mind
a few months of being seen with her

in the lonely space between school and life
She fell without sound and did not rise again
but passionless and bored, she worked and nothing else,
She dimmed and turned from the outside in,
and gave nothing, and took nothing

-Friday, October Nineteenth 2007

Leaving New Mexico at Midnight

I saw

A snake sluicing
Wrapping up a dark hill
Under a moon piercing back down through
On to land shining in width
And fog like cats, so Carlos says,
Yawning up the blurry road

and I remembered
coming home this way before

Leaving Home

Blessings for the long road,
Blessings for the skies,
Blessings for the straight winds, for well-aimed thoughts,
Blessings for the dreams we will have in beds that are not our own.
Blessings for the going.
Yes, for the going.