The way a tired Chippewa woman
Who’ s lost a child gathers up black feathers,
Black quills & leaves
That she wraps & swaddles in a little bale, a shag
Cocoon she carries with her & speaks to always
As if it were the child,
Until she knows the soul has grown fat & clever,
That the child can find its own way at last;
Well, I go everywhere
So the tide forgets, as morning
Grows too far delivered, as the bowls
Of rock and wood run dry.
What is left seems pearled and lit,
As those cases
Of the museum stood lit
With milk jade, rows of opaque vases
Streaked with orange and yellow smoke.
You found a lavender boat, a single
Figure poling upstream, baskets
Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples?
Why do you dim yourself with folded silks?
Do you not see that I can buy brocades in any draper’ s shop,
And that I am choked in the twilight of all these colors.
How pale you would be, and startling —
How quiet;
But your curves would spring upward
Like a clear jet of flung water,
You would quiver like a shot-up spray of water,
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
Victor gets a real sense of power
from making his own raisins. He buys
pounds and pounds of grapes
and leaves them to dry
on the kitchen table.
Theresa doesn’ t want to hear about
her ex-husband’ s cancer. Not on Father’ s Day.
She takes a train all night
to have breakfast with her cousin.
All Sunday she rides the train back.
Once Martin’ s wife had left,
he decided to take advantage of her space.
He built a sauna where her closet was,
and now sits there every morning
to read the paper and Buddha.
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.
When I watched the Barbaric Writers defecate on my
manuscript, I felt a great sense of relief, a great sense of
fraternity with these men who loved literature enough to
destroy it, and I recalled a poem I had once written, but
never had the confidence to publish, about a so-called
poet who shat himself into a toilet, only to float on his
back as torrential downpours of power filled the bowl and drowned
him. I have always know that constipation is essential to
poetry, though what I did not realize, until recently,
They dropped the charges of homicide, filed new charges of
terrorism, dropped the charges of terrorism, filed
new charges of public nudity, dropped the charges of
public nudity, filed new charges of lewd and
lascivious behavior. A spokesman for the FBI
said they found him on the hood of an SUV in a part
of town known as the “Fruit Loop”. His penis was in another
man’ s mouth and in the front seat were vials containing a rare
strand of bacteria known to cause blindness in rats. They
dropped the charges of public nudity and filed new
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.
Somebody who would never refuse money told me this —
about the syncretic effect when each person plugs
their attention into a field to read ad copy, let’ s just say
they become opened up and other beings can see into
their minds. This was considered a science fiction idea
to many people, but not to me.
In my negative space construction is always occurring.
