Where ever something breathes
Heart beating the rise and fall
Of mountains, the waves upon the sky
Of seas, the terror is our ignorance, that’ s
Why it is named after our home, earth
Where art is locked between
Gone and Destination
The destiny of some other where and feeling
The ape knew this, when his old lady pulled him up
Off the ground. Was he grateful, ask him he’ s still sitting up there
Watching the sky’ s adventures, leaving two holes for his own. Oh sing
Ida and Isidor Straus sleep side by side
eternally in an Egyptian galley
fronting their Woodlawn mausoleum.
Symbolically they lie. Their boat is small;
nor was her body recovered from the Titanic.
And yet the image of the voyage holds.
Why not embark? A river runs behind me
on the other side of this dark window.
A dream called Night Boat
arranged us side by side in a black craft,
sailing the river of forgetfulness
until the stars went out.
If one saves a butterfly, has one saved the world?
Rabbi says: If one saves one butterfly, even with long wings,
one butterfly that has fallen into water, it may be said:
“He has saved the whole world.”
If one saves a motley moth, is it the same?
"Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave."
Then, Yeats, what gave that Easter dawn
A hue so radiantly brave?
There was a rain of blood that day,
Red rain in gay blue April weather.
It blessed the earth till it gave birth
To valour thick as blooms of heather.
My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).
Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).
I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.
(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy agony of Bloody Sweat?)
My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).
Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.
As phantoms direct life from the shadows,
I feel
I leaned on something,
and it broke.
My father on the porch with his crosswords said,
this must be what it feels like to be dead;
When I returned from the dead there was no one to greet me,
but still you are glad —
I wander the ruins the way my tongue
wanders my missing teeth,
the bricks and mortar of Deep Deuce
rotted like molars in an ancient mouth;
Here Charlie Christian might have walked —
The astrologer counseled patience
and creative imaging:
If only God would save me,
I would know how to hurt you.
If only God would save me,
I would know who to sell my soul to.
Anything is an autobiography,
but this is a conversation —
William Burroughs insisted
literature lagged 50 years behind painting,
thinking no doubt about abstraction, collage,
fragmentation, his cut-ups.
But whatever that meant (why always 50 years?), or however
he presumed to rile other writers,
poetry probably does lag behind any credible media theory about it —
I can no longer blush. Half-face towards the starchy scape.
Birds limn the spindle trees, their Listerine-hued eyes dart
as they trill mechanical dirges tabulating not again, not
again / I can no longer blush. The flat arctic sky
boundlessly jogs to another hemisphere / She grows!
Or her pectoral grows or all her pectorals grow / A drop of body
oil the size of a water balloon splooshes down on a man as a graceless
anointing, atomizing into tears / How delicate the sounds are from
Overheard in the heat, the air, the fruit fly’ s drone
of the perfect helix, overheard in science’ s repartee
of right and wrong, in the gossip of perfumed women
basking in London’ s charmless sun,
Overheard in the gasps of penny sideshows, the formulas
of doctors summing up freaks in taxidermic clinics,
Overheard in the echo of cubic hallways,
in the speculum’ s wand first tested on the slave woman,
Overheard in history’ s senile tympanum
was a Song.
Staring up into the tank's belly lit
by a bare bulb hanging down off
the exhaust, a mechanic's hands are up
inside the dark metallic innards doing something
that looks personal, private. This tank is nothing
like the ones the Americans deploy.
Those have uranium piercing shells that could melt
right through this tank's armor and set off
the ammo box: nothing can withstand the American tanks.
