In the road, a dog. Days dead,
that dog. Liliana was walking beside me awhile
(I am sure) and I was almost not crying but then found
what I was looking for.
She heaved it for me — all of it, the stench, the weight —
in her thin arms until it was too much.
Tired, she dragged the thing by its wasted paws
all the way home. Her dress was stained. This is how
I learned about love. She did not mind at all
the silent, steady distance I placed between us.
The sill plays a cruel joke — thrones me. Frames me
lording over lawn mower stripes — myself
in a shallow trench. In grass blades. Myself
persisting, despite a dickhead sun — me
in chlorophyll. Early, I find myself
swaying — me! in the black chokeberry, me!
in the rabbit’ s throat. Me, the rabbit. Me
dancing out pellets. Out-dancing myself —
my father’ s pellet gun, the hawk. The joke
is a bright belly full of dark hopping
along my father’ s garden & the joke
small, between wrapped talons, is the hawking
Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips
on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another
pocket of the room where six kids rocking holey
T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls
in words I cannot comprehend. All of this
happening in a time no older than your last
heartbeat. I’ ve been told the internet is
an unholy place — an endless intangible
stumbling ground of false deities
dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit
in a world without flies. My loneliness exists
in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched
I was thinking: God has abandoned me,
So, what of it — he is a priceless ray of light,
Or a thin needle in the haystack of man. And cruel.
I have turned away from him — torment me no more.
But which of us is more cruel? More to be feared?
The one who has no body, of course.
He has made us endless, vast —
So that our grief will know no bounds.
Providence, 2001
What a thing it would be, if we all could fly.
But to rise on air does not make you a bird.
I’ m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles.
It’ s spring, and everyone’ s got something to puke.
The things we puke: flights of stairs,
a skyscraper soaring from the gut,
the bills blow by on the April breeze
followed by flurries of razor blades in May.
It’ s true, a free life is made of words.
You can crumple it, toss it in the trash,
or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining
a permanent address in the sky.
This early the garden’ s bare
but people pay to walk it,
at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,
and stoop to mouth the names —
araucaria
araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something
Japanese — each particular
ridiculous to be.
As with this Jet Ski family
braiding the lake
with bigger and bigger shocks
until the one
car-sized one
cuts his engine
and, following him, for an instant
they all coast
through silences
of self-made
rain —
how much is required now
to carve,
out of the general
livable quiet,
independence?
Off rows of windshields
in the Amtrak lot
rain in sudden
clumps like jacks. Parked cars
with people in them
awaiting people they imagine
hurtling through suburbs
of silver woods
awaiting them. True
love needs interference,
a certain blizzard distance,
for the words to worm through.
Remember Iowa?
August storms that would self-spark
as if our fights could trip
the finest wire beneath the sidewalk.
And the sunlight, harder after.
By new names
and then no names
at all, their laws
will reach your land,
Lorine, to feed
on your much loved
marshy spaces
whose occasional faces
discern a stranger
from far off
but like to take
a break from well
or welding just
to talk. We can-
not extricate
a place from those
it’ s made of, the sounds
it makes. But now
from Blackhawk
Island to Madison
to Washington,
geologies
thin; more things
sound or work
As anyone
is apt to, you began as someone
else’ s symptom. As in
other beginnings: drawn lots, blood,
some dancing on the heads of pins
and inside needles’ eyes,
cellular revelry,
hopping
of microscopic
turnstiles. Lucky guest,
grist, leapt
long odds to spark
the tinder in the dark.
Then, the subcommittees met:
made merry in duplicate, triplicate
and so on, much of themselves, divided
and divined and concurred.
All sides insides, pre-ambulatory
perambulation meant: sure
