It is always the same:
she is standing over me
in the forest clearing,
a dab of blood on her cheek
from a rabbit or a deer.
I am aware of nothing
but my mutinous flesh,
and the traps of desire
sent to test it —
her bare arms, bare
shoulders, her loosened hair,
the hard, high breasts,
and under a belt
of knives and fish-lures,
her undressed wound.
Every night the same:
the slashed fetlock,
the buckling under;
I wake in her body
broken, like a gun.
They took my body to the forest
They asked me to climb a ladder
I did not want to climb a ladder
But they forced me to climb the ladder
If you don’ t climb the ladder
we will bury you in the foamy mud
I had to decide: should I die
by hanging or by burial
I climbed the ladder and they wrapped
a belt around the thick limb of a tree
And then when I could no longer breathe
they tossed me into a stream
And I floated to the edge of the village
where someone prayed for my soul
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’ s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’ s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? — I explain that, Mr Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
— If life is a handkerchief sandwich,
in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
— You is from hunger, Mr Bones,
— ALL HUGE LIKE GIANT FLIGHTLESS KIWIS TWICE THE
SIZE OF OSTRICHES,
they turned and walked away from us
and you were there Jane and you were twenty-two
but this was the nineteen-forties,
in Wichita, near the edge of town, in a field
surrounded by a copse of cottonwoods. It was
I am a dreamer
I dream of peace
I dream of reason
A dream of greed
I dream of wishes
I dream of hope
I dream of angels
A dream to gloat
I once dreamt of optimism
I once dreamt of truth
Heaven knows why Hell is coming
I once dreamt of new news
I once dreamt of new beginnings
I once dreamt of change
Yet if I dream another dream
They all shall fade away
I once dreamt a thousand thoughts
I once dreamt of glee
That time now feels so far away when
I once dreamt of dreams.
1.
Last night I dreamt I was Pancho Villa —
ragged, bandoliered, reckless.
I dreamt my poetry at the end of a pistol,
felt it kick nearly out of my hand.
But this morning I awoke again
white and assimilated into these cobwebs
of my half-self. When did I forget
my mother? Sometimes Spanish
syllables creak like wobbly shopping cart
wheels, I have to lean against accent,
fill myself with verbs: necesitar, hablar, poder.
Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps —
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.
And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies —
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.
Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen —
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.
Savage Beauty
Like hell they'll fall for each other.
“Shalom,” called the pink-shirted man in the Oceanic
Terminal of Heathrow, and I snapped,
“I do not want to talk to you.” Manic
with fear, I extended one pointy-tipped shoe, tapped
the message home. My cases bulged with the wrong
clothes, every outfit trimmed with clipped
