Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car;
your office door closes behind you and at that moment
you turn invisible — not even a ghost in that hall
from the hall’ s point of view.
If the halls don’ t know you, the halls and the rooms
of the buildings where you worked for seven years —
if the halls don’ t know you,
and they don’ t —
some new woman or two new men come clattering
Pure veins of bogus blue-blood and such fancy hungers
~
In the end no surprise of reports of you dying younger than your gods
~
Kicked back in the classic toilet scene
~
With a spike in your arm and twelve large in pocket
~
Thanks to a lucky day scamming the dumb Social Services folks
~
It’ s a human thing, pants at your ankles, leaving unclean
~
Because life’ s road is only one night in a bad motel
~
Harry, you could play basketball in your bare feet, and win
~
Amongst dogs are listeners and singers.
My big dog sang with me so purely,
puckering her ruffled lips into an O,
beginning with small, swallowing sounds
like Coltrane musing, then rising to power
and resonance, gulping air to continue —
her passion and sense of flawless form —
singing not with me, but for the art of dogs.
We joined in many fine songs — "Stardust,"
"Naima," "The Trout," "My Rosary," "Perdido."
She was a great master and died young,
leaving me with unrelieved grief,
her talents known to only a few.
child,
in the august of your life
you come barefoot to me
the blisters of events
having worn through to the
soles of your shoes.
it is not the time
this is not the time
If a tree falls in a forest,
does it make a sound?
If a rifle fires a shot in the woods,
whose body first hits the ground?
If a group of angry hunters
surrounds, curses at, and accosts you
for wandering onto their land
If you apologize for being lost,
inform you saw no posted signs, swallow
their chinks this and gooks taking over that;
are walking away over mud and fallen leaves when a loud
crack far behind you kicks up black earth
There's a structure for idiocy — lamplight —
all over the nation; it's an illumination
with such sheer creative force it is misrecognized genius.
I have misunderstood people's duplicitous ways — their lightbulbs —
as righteous forms of complexity;
not calculated obfuscations.
Much like the voice in a poem that insists it sing
the most important seer of light.
Am I providing this luxury as well?
Or is this my radical assertion in order to
call into question what an aesthetic authority looks like?
And I didn't see that now you were here on the page
So much sky
Because we canbecause we can
a new kind, our new people
this is us now
we didn't know we were here
we don't know how it happened
we flew out of their arms.
1.
Last night I dreamt I was Pancho Villa —
ragged, bandoliered, reckless.
I dreamt my poetry at the end of a pistol,
felt it kick nearly out of my hand.
But this morning I awoke again
white and assimilated into these cobwebs
of my half-self. When did I forget
my mother? Sometimes Spanish
syllables creak like wobbly shopping cart
wheels, I have to lean against accent,
fill myself with verbs: necesitar, hablar, poder.
A cigarette kiss in the desert. The wind-proof arc
of flame sparks inside the speeding Buick. Menthol:
a break from the monotony of highway nicotine —
most intimate of drugs. Make this mean sorrow
or thermodynamics, whatever small gesture
there is time for. Light another one, the vainglorious
