You’ re gonna strike the match —
You’ re gonna strike it —
Flame the bank up into pods
of fire, be
a masterhand —
—
And someone said, Gasoline.
Someone said, We have to change the images
inside their heads, said
Gasoline?
And motor oil, he bought at a mini-mart.
—
You have installed a voice that can soothe you: agents
of the eaten flesh, every body
a cocoon of change —
Puparium. The garden
a birthing house, sarcophagidae —
And green was so dark in the night-garden, in the garden's
gourd of air —
green's epitome
of green's peace, the beautiful inhuman
leg-music, crickets'
thrum —
a pulse
A blast off the Atlantic
snaps a flag in the Firth
of Clyde, while thirty leagues
away, the same synoptic wind
surges across this hillside
honeycombed with mineshafts,
sounding the unstopped slots
of a "G" harmonica left
to dry on the kitchen sill.
Snow charges a sky
in which the sun swims
and glimmers like a groat,
a turbulent space where owls
On Christmas Day, Kathleen and I
propel a raft with plastic spoons
through the hissing fur of surf,
stirring as we go
an Alka-Seltzer sun.
We pass Bolinas-Stinson School,
the fire house, and Smiley's dive;
extinguished geodesic domes
along the mesa road
where Cream Saroyan lives.
Looking at Mapplethorpe’ s Polaroids, I learn that he
liked shoes and armpit crotch-shots of men and women,
both shaved and un’ — all giving a good whiff to the camera.
But best of all are his pictures of ordinary phones
which convey a palpable sense of expectancy as if
at any moment, one of the fabulous, laconic nude men
strewn about might call. One could pick up the receiver
and hear the garbled sound of ancient Greek and Roman
voices reveling in the background. But even when silent,
We gaze into your eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes.
We forget the display is blind.
Your fanned tail really a cupped palm,
gathering each hen’ s quiver to your ear,
your feathers the green-blue glamours of
reflective absence. No one
ever praises the ass of the peacock,
grin of quills that does the heavy lifting,
or how you eat anything from ants
to Styrofoam, from cheese to chicken.
Road roamer, flower devourer:
the one who’ ll pick a fight with a goat.
Geneticist as driver, down the gene
codes in, let's say, a topless coupe
and you keep expecting bends,
real tyre-testers on tight
mountain passes, but instead it's dead
straight, highway as runway,
helix unravelled as vista,
as vanishing point. Keep your foot
down. This is a finite desert.
You move too fast to read it,
the order of the rocks, the cacti,
roadside weeds, a blur to you.
Every hour or so, you pass a shack
which passes for a motel here:
tidy faded rooms with TVs on
Wake me in South Galway, or better yet
In Clare. You'll know the pub I have in mind.
Improvise a hearse — one of those decrepit
Postal vans would suit me down to the ground —
A rust-addled Renault, Kelly green with a splash
Of Oscar Wilde yellow stirred in to clash
With the dazzling perfect meadows and limestone
On the coast road from Kinvara down toward Ballyvaughan.
This is the life I wanted, and could never see.
For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough:
That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless,
And that remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come.
And I believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart
Beyond the depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace.
And so I never imagined that when peace would finally come
I
