They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.
Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.
I guess you could call it
a sort of sympathetic magic.
How else to explain
this obsessive reorganizing
of my home, my books, my papers,
my poems, this housekeeping
of my hard drive and floppies,
all the deleting and casting away
of redundancy and obsolescence,
dead files and moved-on addresses
and the scrubbing, the constant
scrubbing and dusting and the howl
of the protesting vacuum
that struggles to inhale
at least the 70% of house-dust
that is dead human skin
some of which might be hers.
Except when once we drew identical lots
nothing’ s ever come between us.
We keep our drifts of space
spare and daily shake our down.
You’ ve glanced beyond your dirty cuffs
and caught me hand-washing my clean shirts.
Stuck with sharp wind, both
bloods are rare and rarely do
we taste the walnut’ s knot of oil.
We wake between our fitted sheets
and shake our fists or pretend real fright
but not in this do we dare touch.
Three years, Huang Gongwang
worked on his famous handscroll,
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.
As he put successive applications of ink to paper
over the “one burst of creation,” his original design,
it is said he often sang like a tree frog
and danced on his old bare feet.
One day, he adds one hemp fiber stroke,
the next a moss dot.
What patience he had,
like a cat who comes back season after season to a mole’ s tunnel.
Spared by a car or airplane crash or
cured of malignancy, people look
around with new eyes at a newly
praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.
For I’ ve been brought back again from the
fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie
down for long naps. And I’ ve also been
pardoned miraculously for years
by the lava of chance which runs down
the world’ s gullies, silting us back.
Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet
happened away.
I. Of Choice
Despair is big with friends I love,
Hydrogen and burning jews.
I give them all the grief I have
But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose,
Don’ t make me say against my glands
Or how the world has treated me.
Though gay and modest give offense
And people grieve pretentiously,
More than I hoped to do, I do
And more than I deserve I get;
What little I attend, I know
And it argues order more than not.
I’ m having trouble looking animals in the eye.
Their empty suits in outer space!
Monkeys injected with a virus to show off
Our eminent domain, the nervous system.
Teacup pigs we breed and obsessive mice
Worrying themselves bald in a miniature opera.
For pleasures of the tongue we are
Winking cattle out of meadows
Slashing their throats and swiftly quartering them.
In riding habits with gold flame pins we ride horses
To hounds, chase a fennec fox until his red
Coat flares up against the extinction
“We do not dig graves or put caskets into graves any longer. The decision was made and funeral homes were notified that families and funeral homes would have to supply grave-digging personnel.”
— Ed Mazoue, New Orleans City Real Estate Administrator and Person in Charge of the City’ s Cemeteries
There’ s nothing but mud. The ground looks dry and firm,
but underneath is a stew of storm. Stout shovels, rusted,
grow gummed and heavy with what I heft and rearrange.
Progress is slow.
I was birthed restless and elsewhere
gut dragging and bulging with ball lightning, slush,
broke through with branches, steel
I was bitch-monikered, hipped, I hefted
a whip rain, a swirling sheet of grit.
Scraping toward the first of you, hungering for wood, walls,
unturned skin. With shifting and frantic mouth, I loudly loved
the slow bones
of elders, fools, and willows.
Aloft between heaven and them,
I babble the landscape — what staunch, vicious trees,
what cluttered roads, slow cars. This is my
country as it was gifted me — victimless, vast.
The soundtrack buzzing the air around my ears
continually loops ditties of eagles and oil.
I can’ t choose. Every moment I’ m awake,
aroused instrumentals channel theme songs,
speaking
what I cannot.
