Washing Kai in the sauna,
The kerosene lantern set on a box
outside the ground-level window,
Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the
washtub down on the slab
Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops
brushed by on the pile of rocks on top
He stands in warm water
Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach
“Gary don’ t soap my hair!”
From raindrenched Homeland into a well: the upturned animal
was mine by law and outside the tunnel, him again!
Everywhere I turned the children ran between. “Loose dogs!”
he roared. I remember one sequence: a gulf in his thinking
meant swim as fast as you can. But it was winter and the water
was closed. The mouths of the children were sealed with ice.
There is no Rescue Mission where it isn’ t freezing
from the need that created it. The lost children
distill to pure chemical. Where Good is called No-Tone
it’ s the one who cries out who doesn’ t get a coat.
The children fuse colors because they don’ t want to
separate. Daughters shot off of hydrants who cut
each other in the neck and gut, don’ t care
which one of them will end up later in surgery.
The fork lived with the knife
and found it hard — for years
took nicks and scratches,
not to mention cuts.
She who took tedium by the ears:
nonforthcoming pickles,
defiant stretched-out lettuce,
sauce-gooed particles.
He who came down whack.
His conversation, even, edged.
It is an afternoon toward the end of August:
Autumnal weather, cool following on,
And riding in, after the heat of summer,
Into the empty afternoon shade and light,
The shade full of light without any thickness at all;
You can see right through and right down into the depth
Of the light and shade of the afternoon; there isn’ t
Any weight of the summer pressing down.
Into my backyard’ s six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline,
Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens.
From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block,
neighbor women watched ours boil tub water; the barechested men,
laying out knives and cleavers, fumbled the animals into daylight,
Use me
Abuse me
Turn wheels of fire
on manhole hotheads
Sing me
Sour me
Secrete dark matter’ s sheen
on our smarting skin
Rise and shine
In puddle shallows
under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd
somnambulists and sleepyheads
“While we’ re alive,” we kept
repeating. Tongues, throats,
roofs of our mouths bone dry,
skeletons we’ d someday
be...
Panicky masks we wore for
effect more than effect,
more real than we’ d admit...
It is terrible to be trapped at def con
with not even Ray Kurzweil’ s
daughter to gaze upon
I know some of you wish
I would go wherever
my people go, the factory,
physical therapy, a telethon
No! says my mentor
Not this. This is too angry
This is too much about
Not that. Not that
I like to hack, sometimes,
the Hebrew Bible
I don’ t think my mentor hacks
the Bible b/c it has too much
lame deaf blind circumcised in it
I was sitting in Old Town Square
with tourists and birds and I was reading
Foucault, how “he who is subjected
to a field of visibility... becomes
the principle of his own subjection”
and all around me the beautiful
Czechoslovakian boys moved through the first
day of spring like perennially
visible inmates in the opening credits
of a prison porno. The sun reflected off
the glass and my table was an inscrutable
tower of light from which I peered, invisibly,
at the swan-graceful boys who seemed to skirr
