We thought nothing of it, he says,
though some came so close to where we slept.
I try to see him as a boy,
back in the Philippines, waking
to the sound of machine guns.
His family would spend their morning
spreading a paste over the sores
of the house’ s thick walls.
He tells how he touched
points where bullets entered,
his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes,
as if inside there existed a space
where everything from this world could vanish.
In the harsh glare of an easily
reprehensible life. The channel changer is lost
in the crack of an infinite sofa.
Everything falls apart, everything breaks
down, torn into a million
fragments, Jericho everyday.
I want to be the blameless
victim in this canceled puppet show,
the marionette every mother loves, the one
souvenirs are modeled from.
1. X-Ray
Light a match. Watch the blue part
flare like a shocked piñata
from the beating
into the sky,
watch how fast thin
wood burns & turns toward the skin,
the olive-orange skin of your thumb
1.
I have no idea what priests
dream of on Christmas Eve, what prayer
a crippled dog might whine before the shotgun.
I have no more sense of what is sacred
than a monk might have, sweeping the temple
floor, slow gestures of honor to the left,
the right. Maybe the leaf of grass tells us
what is worthwhile. Maybe it tells us nothing.
Perhaps a sacred moment is a photograph
you look at over and over again, the one
of you and her, hands lightly clasped like you
did before prayer became necessary, the one
I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table
Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare
Of electric lights and a strange arranged
Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council.
I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters
On stage suddenly wanting to say, I am.
I was almost all eye: they weighed me down,
Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face
Which did not yet know struggle, burden;
After our rendez-vous — this the last word he said,
Waving to me as the train pulled away from the station.
And so it seemed: harmless. Till evening brought
The first prick of fever, which soon trellised my veins;
At 2 AM came that knock on the city gates,
Little pig, little pig, let me come in....
Ha! ever a bold and warlike people, we didn’ t.
When I take my scissors to your shirts,
I am frightened: not that they will whimper
But that they won’ t understand the violence I mean.
That kind of violence is the other side of love,
Bright as a light-saber and permanent
As the angel’ s swords above Eden
Barring that couple with a final X,
That violence means a love strong as death.
Once Sie ist mein leben, you said, meaning me
And I took those words personally
And knocked upon the door of my heart
Until all its birds flooded to you, in a rush —
Where was it that we went that night?
That long, low building: floodlights
rimmed in lavender, the moon ringed
in rose. I would rather, then, have stayed
outside, where spiderwebs glowed
like jellyfish in the damp yew hedges,
where the paths were chalky pebbles
set with giant stepping stones.
But the film was starting. In the air-
conditioned dark, a crowd of strangers,
strange families (not from our church)
in rows of metal folding chairs to see
