I was involved in the serious business
of ripping apart my own body.
I’ d run my fingers over it,
seeking but never finding
the right point of entry,
so having to tear one myself,
though midway through
I’ d always tire,
and let night enter
like a silver needle,
sewing my eyelids shut.
This was not an original practice,
but thinking, for a time, that it was
felt like being able to choose
when spring would arrive:
engineering an April
A man who’ s trying to be a good man
but isn’ t, because he can’ t not take
whatever’ s said to him as judgement.
It causes him, as he puts it, to react.
His face and neck redden and bloat,
a thick blue vein bulges up his forehead
and bisects his bald pate, scaring his children
but provoking hilarity at work
where one guy likes to get his goat
by pasting pro-choice bumper stickers
on his computer screen while he’ s in the john,
When his owner died in 2000 and a new family
moved into their Moscow apartment,
he went to live with mongrels in the park.
In summer there was plenty of food, kids
often left behind sandwiches, hotdogs and other stuff.
He didn’ t have a big appetite,
still missing his old guy.
He too was old, the ladies no longer excited him,
and he didn’ t burn calories chasing them around.
Then winter came and the little folk abandoned the park.
The idea of eating from the trash occurred to him
His death in Benares
Won’ t save the assassin
From certain hell,
Any more than a dip
In the Ganges will send
Frogs — or you — to paradise.
My home, says Kabir,
Is where there’ s no day, no night,
And no holy book in sight
To squat on our lives.
How do you,
Asks the chief of police,
Patrol a city
Where the butcher shops
Are guarded by vultures;
Where bulls get pregnant,
Cows are barren,
And calves give milk
Three times a day;
Where mice are boatmen
And tomcats the boats
They row;
Where frogs keep snakes
As watchdogs,
And jackals
Go after lions?
Does anyone know
What I’ m talking about?
Says Kabir.
And into the heavens, as on a bright day after rain,
there came the shapes of four creatures,
and they each had the likeness of a man,
and each man had four wings outstretched
and each wing had four eyes emblazoned, wide open,
given to weeping at the worlds they contained:
Money is also a kind of music.
I don't mean the slight sleigh bell
of a pocketed change purse
or an old-time till's single tap
of triangle, ringing
up sale, or even the percussion
of post-pillage coffers filling
up, plink by plink. I think
I mean that current
of classically trained breath
certain amounts of currency
can call forth
and blow through brass.
I mean the mean
current of electricity
Carol Kaye's bass drew
from Capitol Records in the sixties,
Missionary girl reports that Chinese addicts say
your heart begs you to stay away
even while your legs are carrying you back.
After the merry little jitter of the filter
and the smack dancing in the spoon, after
the absorbed, childlike, assassin-like procedure —
citric, water, flame — I’ m back in the basement,
heartsick, digging for a vein in February
as in a February gone and a February
still to come, spitting prayers through the tourniquet
Glove box rummages itself & dumps: fuzzy cough
droppings & stuck (menthol) among them a misdirectional
map intrigues me: say clotheslines’
fripperies hopping the breeze off the alley & garbage
lids clanging downhill to the sea: say there
in the sea floes
of penguins bobbing up to Argentine flamingos.
Because I gazed out the window at birds
doing backflips when the subject turned
to diamonds, because my eyes glazed over
with the slightly sleepy sheen your cake will wear,
never let it be said that I’ d rather be
firing arrows at heart-shaped dartboards
or in a cave composing polyglot puns.
I crave, I long for transforming love
as surely as leaves need water and mouths seek bread.
But I also fear the colder changes
that lie in wait and threaten to turn
moons of honey to pools of molasses,
