Death

A hole torn in the fabric of the world,
the web, the whole infernal weave
through which live-giving rain is falling
but mixing with the tears and with the blood.
Dead body-snatchers enter, the mega-corpses,
much in the news these days, enter and grind
bones, flesh and sinews down to dry tree bark,
mixing with tree bark, crawling with the demonic
beetles. They’ ll tell it later: “No one expected this”:
not one — patient, doctors, practitioners
of every stripe, no one except the one whose daily

The grave has more power than the eyes of the beloved.
An open grave with all its magnets.
This weight on the wings. The sky is waiting for an airship.

I have the feeling that I haven’ t got much life left.
Three hours after the celestial attack.

Why don’ t I respond when I’ m being offended?
Because my religion doesn’ t allow me to.
Exterior maps: geography. Interior maps: psychography.
And in your hard cathedral I kneel.
Mountains pass camels pass
like the history of wars in antiquity.

Doors open and shut.
We’ ve come to the place where nothing shines.
I hear eternity
Is self-forgetting. Interiors warm with the nightmare of guests and poetry
And you. Everything darkly
Reverent years of reading about death eluded.
Bled
Back from the ear sidestepping your bullets bloom in on ye lay
Rock. Rud. Spread
So swiftly tastes like mud. Dredged mud off
The corpse sled hushed down woodsmoke.
Said the stars thrum on Marie
Marie. Hold on tight.
In the depths of outer space
Is man.

The mower flipped it belly up,
a baby garter less than a foot long,
dull green with a single sharp

stripe of pale manila down its back,
same color as the underside
which was cut in two places,

a loop of intestine poking out.

It wouldn't live,
so I ran the blades over it again,

and cut it again but didn’ t kill it,

and again and then again,
a cloud of two-cycle fuel smoke
on me like a swarm of bees.

It took so long
my mind had time to spiral
back to the graveyard

We wonder at our shifting capacities, keep
adding and striking skills
from the bottoms of our résumés
under constant revision
like the inscriptions on tombs
shared for generations
unnervingly up
to date

Made nervous by our shift in capabilities, we write:

Soldiers never do die well;
Crosses mark the places —
Wooden crosses where they fell,
Stuck above their faces.
Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch —
All the world roars red and black;
Soldiers smother in a ditch,
Choking through the whole attack.

Again with spring
she wore light colours
and with gentle steps
again with spring
again in summer
she was smiling.

Among fresh blossoms
breast naked to the veins
beyond the dry night
beyond the white old men
debating quietly
whether it would be better
to give up the keys
or to pull the rope
and hang from the noose
to leave empty bodies
there where souls couldn’ t endure
there where the mind couldn’ t catch up
and knees buckled.

for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959,
recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959

When they come
filling the yard with their overheard,

broke-glass catastrophes of voice,
overcrowded party line,

he lets the screen door clap
to see them plume

the settle back to the fence,
aftershocks of crowd and wail.

When they come
he says again he was home at breakfast

radio preacher doing love thy neighbor
and then the bomb,

just ask the wife.
The silence

in the TV's cathode glow
slowly fills with questions

as starlings shutter light
then weigh the lines, voices

Krakatau split with a blinding noise
and raised from gutted, steaming rock
a pulverized black sky, over water walls
that swiftly fell on Java and Sumatra.
Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam,
the last known member of Equus quagga,
the southernmost subspecies of zebra, died.
Most of the wild ones, not wild enough,
grazing near the Cape of Good Hope,
had been shot and skinned and roasted by white hunters.