43 - Complications of Believing So Long

Most of all, we feared the flight of reasons —

Birdly light as wings, slim and pored as leaves —

For finding suspect flesh and stone;

For rejecting basicness in baser ores, of trees,

cadmium, hibiscus, mollusca and fur;

For pitying hearts thralled in glut of earth.

To not realize that privative, deep hunger is different

from depth — we ate our smoke

thin notions, dwindled, and shed credence

in the matterlusts now well beyond our breadth.

Capable only of dreams, we dreamed up

torments and lacks in the full red belly

of masterless delight,

and feared them.

Most of all, we feared it was simple.

That when scales alight from eyes and eyes

awash on solid shoals of sight,

all dreamed demons tatter on

the harsh, the brisking smack of happy

hardened hearts

brimful, combly-chambered

and abuzz with blooming joys,

nectar-drunk and sunned.

And nothing lay beneath this.

                     

— That by then we would have lost the taste

for anything but burnt incense, on its way elsewhere.

42 - A Portrait of the Artist as a Cheese

Like you, I came from curdling in milky heat
pressed out in cloth a daubing podge of butter-bright
fat, and full like a jelly sun
gemly glows, ungiving.
But I loved the feeling of being
promising so much
I stayed this way, too young for use,
too unclarified.
As you pressed yourself gone upon the world's tongue,
I regarded from a distance my rich
unpurchased food's improper beauty, kept
like honey for its topaz,
marmalade in garnet,
onyx bulbs of ripe
bobbing olives, those globed
saltfishes in a canned black sea.
This is life in glass and brine against
processing spoil riddling kingly jewels.
For now, I imagine I'm egg-pure.
I am not afraid of teeth,
but of villi, finger-combing my slender proteins
to find my chemistry--
that I am already made of rennet's animal death,
cannibal cream,
salt crystals that dissolve.

41 - First Impressions of the West

I spent some time on an isle a blown

bubbled globe sufficiently wide, puffed of

breath, of spirit, of ideas to accessorize.

The people there wear feathered earrings,

bird fluff brush heads to

cerebral something like

paint in the colors of wind,

and catch Nature wending

in leylines strung between well-

tuned souls, feathers catching

a new dream of Tribe.

Their song is the sound

of it sounds like, thought

is the feels how

it looked like, and Knowing

is the buckskin on blonde

sign of an idea

of Knowing.

Natural.

At the border the sea

is the changing Same, they say,

loving recycling and rights claims.

But turquoise and copper didn’t make me feel

more authentic. Just pale

and different, some flightless bird.

40 - Mobility

Easy, these shields

are light as beetleshells

protecting and unfelt but off

carapace carom some things

I can’t know now.

Look back to see what I saw

new child, tell

the shames of a then-child

too well in it to flame in

flush confessing its guilt

of low-class stain —

accuse with the bite

of a tidy kept babe

palate clean to taste tang

of humid shag and unwash pride

the slim slick inch above hunger

above the floor by height

of a secondhand bedframe

having only found that

one time vermin in

the vermicelli

left the bedding pissed

for a few days because what

what does an animal really care?

but our used clothes

had no holes in,

not even the sock-bottoms:

that kind of unselfaware

willingtodowhatever

then wave the flag

of a last remaining dignity —

show me its outside,

show me seeing me shameful.

Groping for my own life

in dark senses

I can’t tell you how bad it was.

But I can tell you the precise

moment when some food

is still just okay enough to eat.

39 - Suburbia, and Every Home a Lighthouse

Houses under a moon are vague.

In dim pulses, restless ghosts aether beat against windows

making us omen-readers all, who pass them on return

from day labor to this necropolis of light.

Somewhere in fabled despondence this scene

was a metaphor of exclusion; the bright interior

outside me, and thought warm, full.

But domestic glow correlates with nothing definite, save

for these soft adulteries with easy feelings

against a frigid night’s withholding.

The spirits are opaque, as blinded windows

and I discover my longings in the meaningless Morse

of TV lights, practiced as a hotline psychic

at embellishing eager leads.

I live in a broad circle, this its paranoid nadir —

the bright, regular pulses so much like a signal

made for a passenger of dark, heart sparked

to the meaninglike contrast that cloaks its own

being nothing in particular.

38 - Going Lightly

Do you remember that famous Christian book about cults?
On the cover spun rainbow waters in a down-drain spiral —

America the melting pot, or, an oil slick was in our sink but it’s going away!

What were we doing on the rim of it?

What was I doing, learning how subtle variations in the gradient out

from pure light all end in the same darkest gone-away?

We were prodigies of collapsing space

forgetting pipes to waterways covering two-thirds

of a planet made just for men, who don’t swim far.

We were forging the ways our bodies go as minds move —

that is, self-limiting, or, why I can’t now unfold all

the crushed wax-paper skies above regions I belatedly see.

The weight of our bones in the world is decided early.

And even as I’ve strained to widen my eyes

for the dim of unholy wilderness I know

the being-in-it feeling is no known quantity of light.

Others muscle in pressing-going through the friction-real;

I stay thin air, where solid things vanish.

37 - Passing

Footbridge west, in wire sheath shooing suicides to privater places

The air is close in agreement — go!

Souls of bleached stars transmigrate earthward as

Fools gold flecks of east hill homes electric test the resistance of viscous night.

Lawnfronts studded with grenade-weight cones

The rot bombs of spendthrift flora, I heft

A good palm-feel and sap-swell

To launch them, plant air in the sedentary fog.

Posters all-over-plastered in town tell me

Find your inner light!

There are so few places, any more.

I catch an errant breath of redwood pine

But it diminishes, like a teacher.

36 - For the Bird Who Carries and Lightens

Stone beach a bed

bird spreads pebbles

to ease

the weight from heavy places

in the piled-up day.

Sleeps on rock, too tired

from evening-out

our crushing castles

to fly home.

Feet in the night clutch

at daystones ferried

place to place,

even dreaming.

At sea height

the beached are beautiful.

Jellies light and stars

stud the ocean’s coronet rim;

drowsy eyes the dazzle

washing fin and feather

in the watery ink of

all the hard light-lines

unpainting fade of

land to liquid

at the sun’s egress.

Plume sighs little billows

bird on warm

rocks heard the water

helping him

equal the beach.

It smooths the sea glass

for his soft bones,

sending shell-gifts up

as shields from the deep.

35 - Borderline

There’s a mad devil at my center,

drives me out to my fingertips

and feet to live gutlessly

by touch and taking. I press

my hands on anything to keep

nerve fires alive on the outskirts of

my bad neighborhood heart. I

empty pleasures into other skins,

fluoresce along electric spines

and ride the spin of rooms

adrift in foamy wash of spirits,

slip through bends of typeset notes

on truth and fictions

overstating certainty in black.

But dark is fear of not seeing

what roams about in here.

They say my empty

is only God-need.

But it’s God threw everything

of use out, put up fences, and now 

there’s a mad devil at my center

rattling the ribcage

that keeps me out.

34 - Eating Spam for Dinner Again, Looking Out into the Yard

Divorce brings all manner

of truth to light; a plant

can become a corpse.

There lay Charlie Tree,

a Norfolk Island Pine

older than me and raised indoors,

mom told him daily she

loved him, told him

he was a beautiful tree.

Still gave him up.

Dad dumped him

under the backyard hedge

of his bachelor pad,

a new duplex

with sliding glass patio doors

for easy viewing.

We watched him,

being dead out there,

thinking about why

custody is called a battle.

33 - This Is What You're Supposed To Do

There are still half-feral cats

in the back gnawing dog food

poured into dented tin trays,

still the pool table, drab felt

chalky, ripped and piled with

flashlights, shoeboxes of papers

bolts in zipper bags, nickels.

There is still wood stove heat

slow-burning the empty

kettle’s thin copper base on top,

front door propped a crack

and drying enormous wool socks.

There are still endtables piled

high with library paperback

mysteries, lent VHS tapes in crates,

baskets of junk mail, all

addressed to “Loser.” There

are still two separate beds

in two separate rooms, still

that proud solid pine carved

stopped clock and fine

undisturbed fur coats on the rack.

I am still seated at the kids’ table,

twenty-three years running,

and I find a turkey bone

in the stuffing you assured me

would be vegetarian this year,

so I could still eat something.

I’ve never yet heard you

tell my father you love him,

but everyone, even

my aunt’s butch girlfriend

and those damned cats

get fed when they come.

32 - Help Yourself

Drunken, the soil

throws up its worms.

Guts-raw, glossy coils

thrashing the walk

knot my stomach,

reaching me.

I choose one, pinch

at his middle, lift

and learn how the most

vulnerable ones rage:

shuddering, snakely whipping

to punish the air

that exposes.

Forgetting myself, then,

I was actually afraid

I am like this.

31 - So Insulting, So Enlightened

One year, my sister and I

subjected Christmas mythology

to empirical testing.

“Sign here,” scrawled on

cardstock, “if you, Greenie

the Wonder Dog, who we love

so so much, are truly real.”

Then a hand-dotted line,

the length of a linchpin.

Folded over, addressed,

blessed with a gold star sticker,

scotch-taped to the pebbly wall

above the obligatory cookies.

We’d play the powers that be like

cheap psychics fed false

leads on how to flatter us best.

Come morning, bypassing presents

we opened the card to find

our stepfather’s scrawl

dyslexically confirming

the existence of a recently

invented flying dog.

We frowned a little at the gifts,

realizing they had been sacrificed

to the idols of magical thinking.

We both got just what we wanted.

30 - Passer Aux

God fell the morning we kids found

a baby starling on the lawn.

Stepping close cat-softly

our gasping pupils gulped

the light off thick grass

swelled with verdant juice,

arrogant to outdo the absurdity

of a bird in the dirt. Everything

was strange. I pictured

his feet black roots, feathers

shoots and fronds of night

and scattered white seeds

for planting flight in Earth.

But silent, hurt, and sunk in

adolescent bloat his downy

starscape a wilt of absent heaven,

stolen on the descent.

Order: passeriforme, passeri

same as those penny-sparrows who

never fall without the Father.

We tucked the little aeronaut

into a shoebox bed and blanket,

cradled as the car flew to

wherever white-gloved

ministers could right this

blot on invincible birdhood.

We couldn’t stay to see

if he would fly again, though

they all smiled nicely

in that lying way.

Who is responsible for flight?

Where does it go when birds die?

De passer à travers ma vie,

passer aux oubliettes,

mes passereaux infinie.

29 - I Turned My Face to Funerary Skies

The hermit moon is sheathed

again in midnight’s sable purse.

Stars pinprick dull and depthless points,

frail phantoms comforting starved eyes.

My let breath stops short, goes nowhere.

There is just the fact of night.

In darkness past, I might have prayed

my heart into the hot rapture of bats

roiling smoky through the shapely,

generous black. Following echoes of

my own cries. But I’m no longer lofty.

Bent, I read the blank book of moonless dusk,

soul a cool bone cup to hold night’s ink.

To write, again and once again, the joy

of a black and indifferent heaven.

28 - Fluid Offenses

At dinner, sat in a high-backed wood chair,

trained to gulp tepid milk silently.

He coached me to open my throat so the drink

could pour down without resistance,

no deep inside churn of wet gush heard,

taught soundlessness so no prim ear

could tell that I did things to live.

Swallowing was the first way I learned

that my body, traitor, was an unfit home.

I would also learn, later, some other ways.

I sat by the bay, listening, all the water safe

out there and my mind became an ocean.

In nautical lore, the swallow is an omen

a sign of the shore, to follow for harbor

by cries from their velvet brown throats.

But I, I in my wood boat flung far from the earth

knew no birds could find me to sing.

For the roaring wide sea sprawls

and swallows my edges and anchors.

27 - At the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary

They sell dried yellow corn in

fifty cent brown paper sacks

taken past the concrete embankment

on down to fowl pondside, where

goose beaks bicker on

my corn cup palms,

hard plastic tong mouths of need

pinching kernels, me.

I, five, am flushed with an eminent

sense of importance.

We kids learn on these educational trips.

My grain-grown flock would do

anything for cheap gold

magic beans. And I

made them eat off my shoes.

Learn, and repeat.

Back home, my father

would dangle Circus Peanuts

over my head, saying

“Dance like a dog.”

26 - The Sacrament of Depression

The lull draws down our pious bows

to lie with dying incense, let the cloy

of unwash weigh us low in a droop of undone space.

Heavy with turbid midday’s wine and idle

in thick, a tame god’s granting

foolish prayers to bathe in substance.

Now I am here like air in bread.

Homesick for the whisk of passage

censer swing alighting gusting’s kin.

But all smoke settles, remains.

Was the world ever thin enough for we

who live in going?

This hollow now is some death,

the inert ferment robbing body, blood.

25 - You Only Get What You Give

Girl knew she would have troubles.

The church handed her womanhood

on a silver platter. They said:

“Make sure everyone is served.”

24 - Empty Circles

Once, hunters thanked the patrician frailty of beasts

for their takeable flesh.

We punched the bloom of exit in buckskin hearts

shucked the husk from souls

exhaled into the mouths of leaves.

Or wherever we imagined they went.

But we are choked in ghost-thick air

laden with refugees from presumed pardon.

Where are the ebon eyes of the dead as they die?

Where is the skin that bounds off the wronged?

The jelly of tomatoflesh slips from its hide

a boiled heart. And on the cutting board

a tap head weeps off wet beads of seed citrine

strung with clusters of soap’s hollow pearls—

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forgive this too.