Into my backyard’ s six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline,
Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens.
From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block,
neighbor women watched ours boil tub water; the barechested men,
laying out knives and cleavers, fumbled the animals into daylight,
To make, you first have
to create materials. Re: man, we know
the rib removed. But, before — ?
Forget ash to ash, dust
& c.
Stick a floating rib (i. e. thoracic
11 – 12, y’ know — “Edenic”) in a glass
of water with the promise
it’ ll grow
roots like leek or fur
Every tripod-
toting birder
knows it never
nests on urban
girders. Even
fences set its
scalded-crimson
head askew, its
waddle swinging,
wings akimbo.
Few have got it
on their lists and
fewer still have
caught it singing,
this endangered
North American
candor, cousin
of the done-in
dodo, big-eyed
Big Sur tremor-
tenor — only
ten or twenty
hang glide over
Modoc County,
There is an alley
where you can go,
where you can kiss
someone’ s mouth
until you climb
inside them, force
your way in, push
your cells into their cells
and become one
creature — angelic.
It isn’ t the way
you’ d dream it.
There is piss,
dew-damp moss crawling
across the brick.
Some nights it is so dark
you must enter only
by touch.
Walk by in the light
and it will seem
like nothing.
The scripture
is written by wenches:
4eva, L+ J, I. T. A. L. Y.
Having returned at last and being carefully seated
On the floor — somebody else's floor, as usual —
Far away across that ocean which looked
Through Newport windows years ago — somebody else's livingroom —
Another messed-up weedy garden
Tall floppy improbably red flowers
All the leaves turned over in the rain
Ridged furry scrotum veins
All winter we sat blind, I next to the girl
who loved her scabs, the blood shields
her head gave up, her face a sun of blank
amazement. She drew. This means love:
a circle with a line through it. More work:
a cross. More crosses. Ice sloughed
through fields. Ice river, the pages
All day they stream past, petitioners
for understanding, accolade, critique.
I read them all, a vast anthology
of jumbled genres on a common theme:
affliction. So I parse, interpret, scan.
I graph dysrhythmias, dysmetrias;
I eavesdrop on caesuras for unsaid
murmurs, gallops, rubs, snaps, flutters, clicks.
The perils of misreading harrow me —
beware the treacheries of metaphor! —
the elephant that squats upon a chest
is not a burning heart or waterbrash.
Then it was the future, though what’s arrived
isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and
cybernetics, when we set up exhibits
in the cafeteria for the judges
to review what we’d made of our hypotheses.
The class skeptic (he later refused to sign
anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental
degradation of language) chloroformed mice,
weighing the bodies before and after
to catch the weight of the soul,
Jerboa on a triple: I was in for it,
my zither on a double looking feeble
as a "promising" first book. Oedipal & reckless,
my scheme would fail: keep him a couple drinks
ahead, & perhaps the muse would smile
upon me with some ses or some blanks.
I have seen the arrested
shrub inform the crag with grief.
Lichens crust the rocks with red.
Thorns punctuate the leaf.
Sorrow is not a desert
where one endures the other —
but footing lost and halting
step. And then another.
