Selected Poems

The sun still rises bright in the windows,
and rain still pours from the sky, collecting
in little pools like so many mirrors
reflecting so little
as God rubs his cigarette butts into the world
and reclines.

I also recline, outside,
and send little puffs of smoke
to mix with the rain,
reflecting very little on God’s cigarette ash
and how it muddies up the puddles
and the sky.

To a lost dream

You came to me, my eyes still wet with dew,
and your image, so clear, is now like isopropyl
on the watercolor of my memory,
so hastily painted on glass with a brush of my lashes,
and coated with the clear gesso of uncaffeinated wakefulness.

And now I am like a beginning artist:
already so satisfied with my sketch,
afraid that if I put ink over graphite
I will not justify the image of the image in my mind—
that I will lose the could-be’s for an is.

And so I store your scrap of paper
for when I have really figured you out.

Yet you are not the bouquet I make you:
you are the rain of spring, muse of October,
my mug of earl grey in deep December,
the heavy liquid heat of summer,
you are my Firechild.

Sometimes I glimpse your footprints in my mind
or the gold between tree leaves at evening’s turn,
and then I wonder in awed wonder there:
am I really talking to myself?
Are you really mine to make?

White and yellow, flight from cage to ring of
death. Or did you think this was freedom?
Wide yet shallow—You know as well as I
we are not free. Can’t be classical or quantum.
Why’d we follow? Two bright colors too bright to shine.
Stay put for your own good.

The first time I met you, you were only words:
Vibrations of my mother’s breath in air.
You had taken what you wanted:
not the body, but the life.
You left the carcass hot with death in the neighbor’s flowers.

The second time, you were present only in
the blood of one chicken, fresh red-plumed,
and the head of one you left:
spine and matter and dirt—an original
skunk-Pollock. Medium: blood.

The third time, I saw you for the first.
As I walked up hill at night,
you swam under bush and car,
stopping only to share
the hard glint of your eyes, then
evaporated instantly into the darkness.

In that moment, how could I blame you?
Kids kill ants for fun. You had some reason:
instinctive hunger, pulsing life.
I pitied you like a doctor tasked
with putting down a friend’s rabid dog.
Tomorrow you were cold with death in the neighbor’s cage.

The country road I am driving home on tonight
knows no sophistry. It shows how artificial
is my own small vestibule of light.
The sky outside knows no boundaries, no stars,
no midnight cars drift beside me,
carrying their twin torches
in vigil against the void.

This is the natural state of things.
Before the universe began,
there was a darkness like this;
if nature take her course,
there will be such darkness after it ends.

Small wonder kids ask for prayers at bedtime,
keep close small lanterns in bedroom outlets,
pry open the hallway door just a hair—
this is it, the vast expanse of nothingness
cities and nations exist to hold off
with street lamps and headlights and neon signs:
so many adult night lights
showing how like children we are
when it gets dark.

Soli Deo gloria
qui facit solem orti

Car lights like cats’ eyes catch in coruscation
 the new day’s coronation as I climb up
 the hill. The Will! The sheer huefulness coup-
les sight to soul-sight; orange, red, red carnation
overbrims the sky. What liteful captivation!
 You flame our fires, feigh life, full-fill our cup.
 I fall with my heart rising, seeing rup-
tured pink blake purple, blaze black culmination.

How do we not burst? As a firebarrow, bringing
dangerous light, we feel you are too much, yet flinging
the seas you are never doused, but brightened, ringing
loud. We can only stop your full-hue stinging
 by singing, singing, ah! thy name love-awed,
 oh sunrise-, sunset-, sungang-setter, God.

is
  helpless
    a feathered marshmallow

mother
  a fresh red highway stripe

outside
  nose hairs bristle

look
  a frozen dumpling
    just baking in the belly
      of the tabby next door

It always was the closest that you pushed away—
your mirror you’s.

You were afraid that they would grow too close
and push the world away—
a cult of two.

It took me long to realize I was one of these,
and so I tried too much to mend us,
and drove you further away—
not that I knew.

Now I hope that I can reconnect by giving space,
that I can sew the hole by tearing out the seam.
If you cannot reconcile the fraying past,
it is not the thread that needs to change—
it is the cloth.

The birds sing when it’s not yet day
and neither is it night.
In those hours between, when all is gray,
the birds sing. When it’s not yet day,
and earth half moon- half sunlit bathes
in fragmented, fatal light,
the birds sing then, “It’s not yet day,
and neither is it night."

Incense still stains the air inside,
as summer days unroll like smoke
and cicadas sound themselves. My pride,
in a sense, still stains: the air inside
like smoke, so clouds the soul. To be freed
from one’s selves is to be one self, but brok-
en sense still stains the air; inside,
the summer days unroll like smoke.

The hours ape the chilling weather: now
the mind’s an icicle-drip in dripping cast.
And one last work to do, I can’t, although
the hours take. The stilling weather now
holds me, embraces me in age-locked snow:
dead days beget two worthless more–—I gasp
as hours gape their stealing wither-boughs
and mine the eyes. It’ll stop in stopping past.

Why We Get to Know Each Other
Often I think of how often
we have not touched.
If I embrace you,
O, my jacket still comes between us.
If I hang it on the coat rack,
O, my shirt still rubs between us.
If I toss it on the floor,
O, our skin still slides between us.
If we slip out of it,
O, our muscles are still between us.
If we unlace and unstring them,
O, our viscera still ooze between us;
our atria and ventricles beat side by side
but are not one.
If we pluck them out
like ripe grapefruits,
O, our bone-cages still clatter between us.
If we crack the great brain-eggs,
let matter spill onto matter,
let nerve caress nerve,
Do we touch?

But atom repels atom.
All substance is lonely:
to touch is forbidden.

So we’ll go for silver.
We’ll invade ourselves,
legislate anti-Balkanization,
be Englishmen sipping Assam
and Indians reading Dante.
We’ll wear mismatched socks
and listen to Armenian jazz
while we press our soft bodies
close, and see our ghosts
pressing closer
because we can only touch
if I become you
and you become me
and there is no other—
no two,
only we.

Streetlights stare down at me
Striping the asphalt below
Like bumblebees lined in a row,
And buzzing all the same.

Bookstores and coffee shops
View me with blackened glass panes,
Still charred from the heat of the flames
That burned them in the dawn.

Vacant now, Silent now,
Drowned in the night and withdrawn,
I hear all around me the song
Of raindrops dripping down.

And now when I think of these
Bumblebee streets and their sounds,
Their buzzing and dripping and flaming around,
I smell the ash and feel the heat as well.

And here I am, speaking with r’s not my own,
the t’s like the ice cubes clinking
as they fall into a cocktail glass,
and the taste of tobacco
as sour as your aloofness,
and what was I becoming to you?
And the question, hanging—

people were so strange
back then did you know they gave birth like rats
with wombs of course you did you are me but they weren’t
and what were we talking about humans
yes humans funny word sounds like dirt
and we guess that’s about right they lived on it
how gross
but you’re past that now it’s so nice here
or is it it doesn’t matter

it’s all the same and well maybe it does it’s all matter
we figured that out eons ago but they hadn’t how curious
what silly lives they had
yes lives not like us but they were on their way
with what was it yes internet internet
how quaint internet and they cared so much
about the newest version of course
that means nothing

it’s all the same always changing always more
i think they had a term for that addiction
or maybe capitalism or anorgasmic lust
such queer ideas they had

but it’s all the same the world is just like that
and speaking of more it’s our time to go
how fun! we think they called that death
but there are more important processes than persons
and besides we aren’t really leaving
we just don’t need
to—

Nighttime. Upon a massive hunk of rock
Above a cobwebbed crashing ocean, sky
Starless and weeping, there she runs, fangs flung
From the wind that is her howl; eyes, two floodlights
Dancing towards me, criss-cross waterspouts—
An inverse forest, growing down to depths—
She bounds between those spires as if the sea
Were her agility course, and I her prize.
No, no, not me. She’s come to take my mother.
No, no, no, NO! And yet I cannot move,
As in one last lightning leap she scrapes her claws
Into the cliff like clay under fingernails
And hurdles the whole dark mass of herself
Before us: billowing, writhing, nothing
Caresses two dead pearls, hulks her breath—
Talons unfold, and jaws unhinge—I scream.

The man appeared upon my step today
gesturing at the color of the cedar
that sides my home. I smile and show the way
beyond the corn-blue shake and kernel door.

Inside, we sit and smell the steam, the vapor:
the air perfumed with tea—our tongues endure
the wait, so all the sweeter: as a flower
blooms after long, lives short; as none can keep her.

this poem is not
a haiku: five-seven-five
is just one symptom.

dew on white mushroom.
a sticky wrapper my lie—
death lurks in white gills.

midnight. plum-red sleep
bears my neighbor’s dreams, and you—
goose-flight in winter.

two blank headlights
bathe her dancing to crickets—
milling, milling ants

walking by your house
without headphones—without wait—
a summer sun sets.

clink! the ice cube cries
itself on scotch and cherry—
late autumn sunset

walking past,
she tries to shut her dog up—
words at my lips

fresh-licked envelopes…
New Year, will you too
limp home like a lame soldier?

family card games—
there’s still no soft water here
for imported tea

back from post, I give
my tongue its first jade dew bath—
golden spring sun!

bush-rustle; the hare
grips my eyes, then an orange cat—
pipe smoke, vanishing.

two starlings waddle
in my back yard, searching—
play-shrieks from next door.

She comes across the ocean now
And leaves her wrinkled man,
The golden one who bears the day
Upon her cold sedan.

Why do you hasten, O Aurora?
Stay put: so with such gore
The birds will sacrifice themselves
To Memnon, evermore!

Now help me lie in tender arms
Of womanly embrace;
If ever, now a girl’s well joined
Close to my side and face.

My rest is deep and lazy now,
And air beyond sheets chills,
And all the birds with slender throats
melodiously trill.

Where do you hurry, O Aurora,
Noisome to men and girls?
Hold back your dewy reins today,
With rosy hands in curls.

Before your rise, the man at sea
can better keep his stars,
Nor lose his place in deepest waters
And wander off afar.

Your advent wakes the traveler,
No matter how he wearies,
And sets the soldier to engage
The savage with war’s furies.

You’re first to see those in the fields,
Laboring with their hoes,
You’re first to call the sluggish cows
Under their crooked yokes.

You rob young boys of sleep and rest,
And hand them off to teachers
So they endure harsh blows on hands,
Despite their tender features.

And you’re the same who sends those men
Before the courts, well-groomed,
That one’s own words may bring upon
Himself a weighty doom.

Nor are you sweet to barristers;
Solicitors you sicken:
For each is compelled to rise and tend
To novel litigations.

And when the women have a chance
To cease from such exertion,
You turn the spinner’s hand again
Back to its unworked portion.

And still I could bear all of this—
But, oh, that girls should rise,
Who’d stand, save he who has no girl
On earth to call his prize?

How often have I wished that night
Not leave your bright embrace,
That all the moving constellations
Not flee your august face.

How often have I wished the wind
Would dash your car to pieces,
Or that a horse would fall, held back
By some dense cloud’s caprices.

O envious one, why do you speed?
Becuase, perhaps, your son
Was black; the same dark shade from which
His mother’s heart was spun.

I only wish it were permitted
Tithonus to speak true:
In heaven there is not a woman
Unsightlier than you.

And while you run away from him,
Since older by long ages,
You rise to ride those wheels at dawn,
At which he so much rages.

But should you hold some Cephalus
Embraced in youthful light,
Then rather you would shout aloud:
“Run gently, steeds of night!”

Why should I suffer in romance,
since your love’s thinned by spans?
Was it with me consulting then
You married this old man?

Just look how many nights of sleep
Selene did gift her youth;
Nor is her form the less than yours
In beauty or in truth.

The father of the gods himself,
So he might see you less,
Gathered together two whole nights
To feed his own excess.

I’d finished my reproaches—
You might be sure she’d heard:
She blushed: and yet the day was not
A moment later stirred.