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
Amazing to believe that nothingness
Surrounds us with delight and lets us be,
And that the meekness of nonentity,
Despite the friction of the world of sense,
Despite the leveling of violence,
Is all that matters. All the energy
We force into the matchhead and the city
Explodes inside a loving emptiness.
Some people might describe this room as spare:
a bedside table and an ashtray and an antique
chair; a mattress and a coffee mug;
an unwashed cotton blanket and a rug
my mother used to own. I used to have
a phone. I used to have another
room, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge.
I used to water my bouquet
of paper clips and empty pens, of things
I thought I’ d want to say if given chance;
but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch
a particle of thought dote on the dust
Bashō, with your grass pillow, what underground sounds come into your dreams?
Do blue-horned beetles scratch against the starless night sky that lines your head
with the starless night skies of their own domed backs? Do centipedes trickle through?
Do worms burrow with their snouts, with their bodies that are entirely snouts?
Snoozer, I can only ask you this because now you are dead asleep:
Do I ever appear as a nightcrawler whispering in your ear?
Are the words, “I love you,” as soft as the cough of a good luck cricket?
The Poet:
Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine —
where’ s the pink crimp in my side
where they took you out?
The Octopus:
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
A yarn ball and a hill
maintain an equipoise until
their neatness starts to bore the gods
of potential and energy
who hedge bets, reckoning the odds
of when the rest will be
If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells,
saltwater-stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins.
Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us,
influenced by the sphere of angels.
Here, then — thumbnail sketches
for zoning changes along the riparian bank
of the species boundary, for a chimera.
Like fiber optics, human nerves
lay along glassy bone & spinal veins of a fetal mouse
that will be drowned before ever waking.
I
“You must speak not only of great devastation
but of women kissing in the yellow grass!”
I heard this not from a great philosopher
but from my brother Tony
who could do four haircuts in thirteen minutes,
his eyes closed, reciting our National Anthem to the mirror.
“You must drink cucumber vodka and naked sing all night
Unite women and boys of the Earth!”
He played the accordion out of tune in a country
where the only musical instrument is the door.
