Out of a high meadow where flowers
bloom above cloud, come down;
pursue me with reasons for smiling without malice.
Bring mimic pride like that of the seedling fir,
surprise in the perfect leg-stems
and queries unstirred by recognition or fear
pooled in the deep eyes.
Wheel of sorrow, centerless.
Voices, sad without cause,
slope upward, expiring on grave summits.
Mournfulness of muddy playgrounds,
raw smell of rubbers and wrapped lunches
when little girls stand in a circle singing
of windows and of lovers.
First the bad boots
give up their strength, then the toes lift
their anchors. The ankle
bones are broken,
and so on, until the bladder lets go, without
shame, and the genital
organ washes away, the ovum
and her fertile signals. A proxy pain
stands in for the larger
intangible.
Last night
tossed in
my bed
the sound of the rain turned me
around,
a leaf
in a dried gully
from side to
side,
the sound of the rain took me
apart, opened to what is it?
breath caught in memory of
a deep sweetness
This season for us, the Jews —
a season of candles,
one more
on the seven-branched candlestick for
the seven days of the week,
but let it be seven
in the sense of luck in dice,
seven of the stars in
the constellations:
Orion, Aldebaran in the sky
II. iv
I am writing this poem
about the 1965 massacre
of Indonesians by Indonesians
which in an article ten years later
I could not publish
except in Nottingham England with
a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since
himself been murdered
no one will say by whom but I will guess
Past the fountain out of repair
And the boarded diner
A small studio
You’ d never told anyone about
Where old clothes have remained
Right where you’ ve dumped them
Side by side
With random notes and sketches
When someone close to you
Has a different idea of what you represent
He insisted
You’ ll write a check for the loan
There were other misjudgments
As well. Exits were being blocked
Down every hall I walked
Until a sort of muscle memory —
Well, I knew it all along, of course,
we all got tickets to The Truth
finally we thought finally
when the curtain fell away
our indrawn breaths could be heard
even in the next theater
even the gasp of the mime
who had slipped in among us
a loud whushing like reams of litter
whirling upward in a gale
hands shot to mouths and mouths
fell open I couldn’ t say within
how many seconds
all our minds shut some
slamming others just a click
like 300 parallel
rows of tipped dominoes
a racket of almost unison
A momentary rupture to the vision:
the wavering limbs of a birch fashion
the fluttering hem of the deity’ s garment,
the cooling cup of coffee the ocean the deity
waltzes across. This is enough — but sometimes
the deity’ s heady ta-da coaxes the cherries
in our mental slot machine to line up, and
our brains summon flickering silver like
salmon spawning a river; the jury decides
in our favor, and we’ re free to see, for now.
I was arrested because of that internal memo,
and ended up in a cell, then I was told to sit
with the police and the local bigwigs.
In the hushed and fast darkening room they said
someone — someone — had reduced the safety margin
on the airport risk factor, and I got the blame.
The sky that day was a pale, clear blue, but
that was happening outside, and far away.
