Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four,
the soldierly grey boulevards slippery
with tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding,
the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knew
whose face was wheel-broken in a crash,
and remade so well it was hard to say how
she looked wrong. I’ d brought two questions here —
holding them as if they might slip: who were
my mother’ s people? Where did they die?
In an attic-archive — deep card indexes, ink turned lilac
inside the car
françois and i
could see the light
coming from the
cigarette michele
duvalier was smoking
her husband
declared president
for life looked like
a fat chauffeur
sitting beind the
wheel
françois
and i smiled
the small
procession of cars
slipping past us
in the dark
1.
Betrayed by his five mechanic agents, falling
Captive to consciousness, he summons light
To all its duties, and assumes the world
Like a common penance. Rust on the green tongue burns
Like history’ s corrosive on his living tree.
But all the monsters of his sleep’ s dark sea
Are tame familiars in the morning sun.
2.
I went out walking
in the old neighborhood
Look! more trees on the block
forget-me-nots all around them
ivylantana shining
and geraniums in the window
Twenty years ago
it was believed that the roots of trees
would insert themselves into gas lines
then fallpoisonedon houses and children
Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene
some far suburb’ s mall lot
Summer’ s theme: this year’ s humid
— to sweat is to know —
pen squeezed too tight yields
ink as blood or pus
so the phrase scraped, removed
offending thine eye: “Outsource Bush”
Against which, insource what? Who
will do it? Most terrible
predicate — high above mountains snow-capped
even in August in-flight motion
picture Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind infuriates many No
action, no funny, plot too
Nonentity’ s birthplace: a front yard sweeps
its dirt clean. Devil hopped up the oak tree,
devil-take-the-profit seized
a jay in the twigs by the feet, wings buffeting
this child’ s cheeks to rhyme. Leaf of gift
box tissue folded over her pocket comb. Hind
pocket kazoo. Won’ t somebody please start
something other & oddball soon,
narrow her down out of folly
& trivia to destiny? But Whynot the tortie cat
flopped an irregular sunny patch,
wriggles & rolls & revives the blissy fits of ignorance.
Would you believe it, I got lost again
And all roads led to Rakestreet. Which was which,
The short road or the long? A girl of ten
Behind her counter, drew me a thumbnail sketch
I don’ t say things I don’ t want to say
or chew the fat with fat cats just because.
With favor-givers who want favors back,
I tend to pass on going for the ask.
I send, instead, a series of regrets,
slip the winding snares that people lay.
The unruffledness I feel as a result,
the lank repose, the psychic field of rye
swayed in wavy air, is my respite
among the shivaree of clanging egos
on the packed commuter train again tonight.
Sapping and demeaning — it takes a lot
1
Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop
a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping
love’ s abstract particulars,
while football plays on the big screen;
I listen like a thief in case the women know the score.
But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child.
there is a dark mass following me. these legs are clumsy. they flap quickly.
I want to slow them down. but my nerves. Lord, these pensive endings.
the sun slumps against the merging fall on red leaves.
and where the natives are unenlightened, the mass comes closer.
only white people swim in lakes nowadays
you know... Crystal Lake?
