It was Sunday, before dinner.
My uncles were listening to the opera.
O. Z. and I carried my brother in
And laid him on the table.
The women started screaming.
My brother raised up on his side
With dried blood on his hands,
We killed those goddamn Canale brothers
And nobody is ever going to touch us!
The men shut their eyes and danced.
We drank until morning
When everything was quiet.
They wiped their eyes, kissed us goodbye and left.
The yolk went down my leg
Like a beautiful snail without a shell,
Went down the hill
To the skillet of water, to the nymphflies,
Into the lips of pond minnows,
Down the long belly of the gar – the hellbenders
Having dived and lost, then into
The paw of the lame panther
Who loped back to her lair with it.
As for the white, it stayed with me,
Mark of the beast, birth, and trade.
There was always a lizard
Or a frog around the pump,
Waiting for a little extra water
Or a butterfly to light.
Jimmy said the pump gave him the worms.
I got the worms under the slick boards.
The pump would bite you in the winter.
It got hold of Jimmy and wouldn’ t let go.
The blades of Johnson grass were tall
And sharp around the pump stand.
I had to hoe them all the time
Nobody filled the prime jar, though.
"They won't attack us here in the Indian graveyard."
I love that moment. And I love the moment
when I climb into your warm you-smelling
bed-dent after you've risen. And sunflowers,
once a whole field and I almost crashed,
the next year all pumpkins! Crop rotation,
I love you. Dividing words between syl-
lables! Dachshunds! What am I but the inter-
section of these loves? I spend 35 dollars on a CD
of some guy with 15 different guitars in his shack
with lots of tape delays and loops, a good buy!
The sprig of unknown bloom you sent last fall
spent the long winter drying on my wall,
mounted on black. But it had turned to fluff
some months ago. Tonight I took it down
because I thought that I had had enough
of staring at it. Brittle, dry and brown,
it seemed to speak too plainly of a waste
of friendship, forced to flower, culled in haste.
When History turns soldiers into battles, you turn them into grass.
Bashō, Sweet, is it honorable? But for these men who died with grunts
and clangs in their ears, for their horses with snapped legs, I haven’ t got
the art to make them into anything. I fold the grass in the shape
of a man, very literal, very primitive and leave it on
the field and say, “Forgive me valorous men for my ineptitude.”
Just then, the little man falls down in the wind and — huh! — there is art.
The cliff above where we stand is crumbling
and up on the Palisades
the sidewalks buckle like a broken conveyer belt.
Art Deco palm trees sway their hula skirts
in perfect unison
against a backdrop of gorgeous blue,
and for you I would try it,
though I have always forbidden myself to write
poems about the beach at sunset.
All the clichés for it sputter
like the first generation of neon,
and what attracts me anyway
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
Filled with old lovers, in the clutch of the chair,
you are a bloom of uncombed hair.
With a collection of roses, bowls of mashed petals,
I make a clear cup of sky.
Fold away clouds. Roll up blankets of blue.
I am a body of empty husks.
Indian corn is in your hair, the tassels,
the pollen, fertility.
Indelible ink is tattooing our lungs.
We speak smoke.
We exchange our lunacy for reverence.
Respect tornados.
Windy Woman. Four Winds.
We have extended the edge of expectation
by merely living.
Spanish captive, Hoahwah, married twin sisters.
The one wife called Double
turned into a snake
after eating a nest of glossy eggs.
Snake Woman still lives on Mt. Scott,
sleeps facing west.
The sun a white skull itself
bathes her on the cedar breaks.
In rectangular dreams
she calls the young men grandson.
The other sister Tsi-yee, named after a war deed
(her father charged a cavalry office
knocked him off his horse then lanced him to the prairie)
bore three children: Tabe titah, Namnetse, and Sam Hoahwah.
