2003-11-29 - 10:50 p.m.
Winter Accident at the Koke Mill Bridge

The road's been lined
with chicken wire,
the tow trucks have knifed
to the shoulder's torn rail.
Everyone wears their attic scarves
and amber fear flashes
on each face. First, hooks.
Great ugly things, graceless
as they jag and gnash the ice.
Then their slumbering fall
through lightless water,
searching bumber, chassis-gap,
all the places steel
could cling to steel, after hope
and breath and warmth
have fled. This is no scene
for film. You won't learn
any names here, watching this --
later, perhaps, with your hot tea
and short story, the reflex
of newsy chatter later on.
Here, now, it's only cold
and taillight red seeps through
a wall of blue-white beauty.

2003-11-29 - 1:07 a.m.
Telephone Sonnet #27

There's a logic to speech,
a geometry simple as Mondrian's
dividing phrases, paring
each lean utterance from the next.


And there's a mandala
in listings -- how you met Sara
who set you up with Anthony
and now you know Barbara's
though she hates to give it out.
Look, there was one person wanted,

one sweet task of talking
to be done in elegant symmetry;
one link the same steel as the rest now making up the chain-fence.

2003-11-27 - 11:40 a.m.
The Dive

for A.G., il miglior fabbrio

The feet were cut carefully
by shine on the tricklebed,
spate of gravel lined by trinkets
littered from cars passing above
on the rusting, curse-hatched bridge.
What the curious hand found,
the eye caught away
from the wounded heel,
was less than treasure
of two summers' drought
killing the slate-pale creek.
The trivia of passage
in acute pieces, irrelevant
as the rubble of Olympus --
there a glittering chariot's axle,
a gap-toothed bone comb,
here shard of coffee mug, steel jaw
of lighter, wheel of washing machine.
That scar and plastic sliver
now the scrapbook of your body,
proof of the bridge-dare,
the trestle-jump catcalled high
and sweet. Someone's name was sprayed
by the edge where you hung,
jagged and white. That's the book
you'd want written for you.

2003-11-27 - 12:27 a.m.
Elegy for Elisabeth of Bavaria


Thanks to K.L.

It was vanishing, not beauty,
that was her art. The perfection
of the pillbug's talent,
curling into her layered accoutrements
upon sight, rolling smaller
and smaller until nothing remained.
Whether needlepointed into
her tightlace or adrift
on the mane of some spurred horse,
she always threatened bounty
by her wick-slim figure,
her body burned away like sunlit paper
under the focative lens.
Flight was always in her form.
She slipped free from Court
with the ease of throwing off covers,
and though lashed to the bed
by marriage, refused bridling
by anything like love.
At sixty, she raised
her fan and veil, and the memory
of her figure survived it.
Dying was a simple trick --
history, too, cherished
the skill of this great escapist:
an assassin's second choice,
she died as the dress rehearsal
for her husband, for World War.
In a hotel room in Cromer
she died, unwilling to be seen,
unable to undo the corset
binding, hiding the wound.

2003-11-26 - 1:15 a.m.
Typewriter

In the tall-grass graveyard
beside ribcage of steam locomotive
and the rusted reaping wheel,
this one mourns. Hear it
test its teeth against
one another, its black band
wound terse as winter seedlings.
It is the same small sound
repeated until operatic clarity
emerges in the cumulative.
Beating victim, abandoned lover,
grief-singer for real machines
that needed slag and black lung
to be cast towards birth,
these monkey chatter games
of glitter only survive you.

2003-11-24 - 7:24 p.m.
Nostalgia

In the odor of old lavender,
the attic-found bit
of a broken glass ornament,
your knee-skin scars,
popsicle sticks -- that moment
where you would fit
intimately as water
sliding aroundthe swimmer.
With ropes and untrue measures,
someone had raised a house
amid the sorghum fields,
and should have built you
a bed there. Your name
would be carved crudely
on the third slat in,
and the mornings would be bright
as just-made butter.
This could only be invention.

2003-11-23 - 10:51 p.m.
On Pigeons

As immaterial as morning's
mirror vision, fading
swiftly before the rush of hours,
the rustle of these uglier doves
does not dare loudly
while split vision guides
ungainly forms in dive and peel
between the train rails.

Raucous motion makes them up.
Their too-quick hearts
and the squawk and tick
of their rapine against concrete
are a town council in miniature,
the curious bravery
of these mostly-belly citizens
who opine two baby thoughts
continually. But what
wild heights they achieve
from the massed filth
signing and prodding
their gathering towards wisdom.

2003-11-21 - 6:51 p.m.
The Reverend Donny Blue

Yes, you've raised it up
in jagged green (oh, don't
get caught), to save your elders
and numb the eating thing,
and, yeah, to turntable
those CNN orators, make trip-hop
out of utility jackhammers
and repo distraction phonecalls.
(Donny lives in green camo tent
with lantern, book, and hand-spade.
He works the land, a pioneer.) You make good money,
do not give out your address.
Old pail of water -- the plants
thirst is good enough for it
to slake you too, your feast
of campfire Ramen, your postbox
twenty miles south, waiting
open-jawed for ordination
from the sacred Navajo church.
(So the magazine offer said.) Watch the road for lights, this is no UFO drill,
those sirens will not
sing you down
like girls of feather and scale
in the Mediterranean straits.
Springfield can't lose
its ballad street preacher,
its open-mike haunter
teaching us sports bottle of vodka,
dandelion wine 4am rooftops,
breath held towards
music-box strangeness,
and the lick of glued roll paper.
(Asleep, he owns no gun,
cannot believe in carbon atoms
and writes nothing down,
just recites the litany of hours
and American crime against all.)
Our reverend Donny Blue,
never let us read your real name
or hear it said beyond
the choir of old dogs
and sexed stray cats. Amen.

2003-11-20 - 9:22 p.m.
Over Water

They've dyed the fountain red
in Trafalgar Square.
They tore Leader down
and will not raise
his stone head up again.
The ocean rolls the Earth
around to half another continent,
where we will be heroes,
it's certain. Thin-shadow kingdoms
erupt in pale-striped sand,
sketched out by iron shards
and the wreckage of museums.
In the fields the rigs
dodder and pulse like old men
who preach the enemy logic,
the you-them riddle
with the same old ending.
There, someone not named
Johnny wears his tan shirt
and steel tags and cradles
his fertile fear, wears
the crescent of his gunstrap
and carries textbooks
and packets of food.
He leaves small barefoot prints
and has never shot a man.
He stands salute to watch
the Air Force jockeys pitch
and roll, enjoying the curvature
of sky while it's still blue.
An arc is made, spark leaps the gap,
and two hands made the burst.
Leader's head fell down
but he kept talking.
In the just-dyed fountain
you can see old castles
and clocktowers, flush
as evening at crimsonpoint,
wavering just a little
with the wind-stirred water.

2003-11-19 - 9:23 p.m.
Nabokov

A slight kingly frost
on your mountain-bald pate,
the skin still fluch with triumph
capturing Vanessas among the Alps.

I see you, bent compositor
of the bestiary lurking
in the looking-glass,
letting those fragile monsters
of ego alight like leaves
and rustle within the pages.

2003-11-18 - 8:52 p.m.
Pomegranate Ode

Separation the root of sweetness
in sun's langour, leathered leaves
brightening the ashen field
where spring's daughter
and hell's queen alike may pick
a multitude of tart consequence
out of one steel-sounding
bright ball. To eat one
is to pillage and delectate
the primal crime of propogation,
the implicit demand of fingers,
breeze, and summer. Pomegranate,
for whom the sin
of gluttony by delicacy
should be named.

2003-11-18 - 12:03 a.m.
The Lives of Saints

Always, they began in cruelty.
Perhaps it was the cruelty
of poverty, or a morbid streak,
or a tyrant. But something sashed
them red against white,
something marked them
to stand out, so common
in their holiness like the stars,
valueless because they stretch
to infinity. A hand held out
for birds, a gauzy light,
and they were fixed overhead,
these wise faces, to peer down
from painted ceiling glass
and birth their surrogate virtues.

2003-11-16 - 10:50 p.m.
Excavating Egypt

They're watching amber slough over.
As prepared as a gilt book,
their kestrel eyes and cradled sacks
of air move out before them.

Knife, spade, and fence-post,
the curdled wire spooled
with its own undoing in mind,
the supplies of every undertaking

fresh at hand, they knead
sand to clay, ground to flesh
aged dry these six thousand years
where a boy prince did cartwheels

under a smaller sun. Where the lady
knew the snake, and called Anthony
in her last few moments,
frozen into poetry and lies

(the same thing) only later,
but then it was the writhing death
and now the sharp breaking sounds
and chopping motion of return

in the same old undone body,
Back from the immortal reign.
It's the one thing marking
all overturned soil, the truth

these Brits learn in their khakis
and pith helmets and safari hats.
Death on swift wings, but cut
still and cool into stone.

2003-11-15 - 11:17 p.m.
Kate’s Revolution
We are waiting on her army,
bright smiles and burning absolution
naked and cheerful on the doorstep.
I do not fear the Other side.
They’ve gorged on more of history
than ours has eaten of hope.
In my dream, pearl-toned in luster
And dull smear of gauzy light,
I saw a wasted, old conservative
in an attic, singing songs
by Berthold Brecht.
I saw the dresses
Columbia wore by torchlight torn
and tied into bandanas
by the daughters
of a fiercer, bolder ship.
The weapons
had ceased to be rockets or words
or love. No, the suits and skirts
were rent and all the thread was broken, no hope
for their reweaving.
The world as it is went and hid
under plastic burp lids
and leafpiles
beside solitary green rakes.
In this new war-language, quieter
and therefore more painful than before, only symbols endured –
the painted face,
the unpastoral hairstyle,
the many-punctured flesh
that knew metal and bone and ink.
An expanse of skin, the new vellum,
the law that would never
assign itself as law.
We wait to raise our arms and cry.
Come forth.

2003-11-14 - 11:08 p.m.
Telephone Sonnet #24

It was always early morning
and tomorrow, which didn't begin
until you'd actually slept
and reawakened, slowly veined
the sky into white weight
of marble. Cigs wreathed your bed
to bier, an impossible game
of word golf and your stories swam
frantic as the Emperor's celestial

replied.

Telephone Sonnet #25

The voice was not born in a body
but of lightning, and proves this
in the spark-ragged edges
of its machine syllables,
endless litanies of coordinate,
name, robot information.
It resides in the wires, can ghost
over airport intercom, bus stop,
and is the tickle-twitch of spine
in sleep opposing midnight's absence.
Like the old humming winter blanket
I welcome it, call it, turn it up,
knowing that at the world's end
it will still be a same sound.

2003-11-13 - 8:44 p.m.
Letter Found in an Invented Alphabet

It must have begun before birth
with her, the twin-celled urge
to recreate into words
the bodiless beasts ghost-tattooed
on the forebrain she didn't have
yet and lingering at the back
of a tongue still an empty promise
unclothed in the floating helix,
the all-afloat universe of water.
And like promises made
in carefully arrayed stones,
the work she was budded and sinewed
into body, beyond. She coughed
four coins of varied metals
before the first MD elicited
primal crying's usual reply.
Twenty-four, she'd already founded
the superstring dictionary,
shedding unmade language
through rites of fierce needing
and its cognate voodoo love.
But not enough. So impelled
her greater work, the other alphabet
she forged strange -- paper, steel,
dreams, plastic, drug
-- and then perfected. Each disc
a sound mouths extended
invisible to make alike,
sharp as clever sound
and pinned fast to coat or pack
in the wanderings of prophets,
poets, every wise fool angel
versed together in uncanny breath.
I found one yesterday,
shining on a riverbed paved
with perfectly round pebbles.
It was the sign of bees, opals,
half-heard beautiful music,
red wine, and fallen saints.
Whether she made it
or the river did,
who can tell?

Happy Birthday, Anna Voodootoaster!

 

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