Dreamawake Dream
At some point I began to realize I had written reams and reams of poems, little crystals of faceted thought in the otherwise chaotic circus of my life. How would I ever organize them? Among the poems were two kinds that were more numerous than others. I had ones birthed from conscious ideas, and others whose origins were from unconscious ideas: dreams. Putting the poems in chronological order seemed impossible because I hadn’t kept track of the dates of writing many of the poems and the linear organization of the arrow of time seemed boring anyway. It eventually struck me that our experiences and ideas may not in fact work in a chronological way. That there may be cycles, or interlaced weavings like the braided rivers of Alaska. There may be themes that our psyches return to over and over as needed, based on hurts, pleasures, personality traits, perceptions, amazements. And, most importantly, that these themes manifested themselves outside the confines of time and beyond the limits of consciousness. You might have an experience one day, write a poem about it, and ten years later have a dream that in some way echoed that experience – or the reverse. Just as I felt liberated when unifying my teaching and creative selves, I now felt liberated by the idea that I could establish a more accurate rendition of my art and experience if I connected conscious and unconscious poems via another organizing principle, inspired by the Japanese process of writing called Renga.
Renga means “linked poem.” Renga-practicing poets work in pairs or small groups to create them. One person writes a stanza, then another person writes a stanza that is connected by mood, image, theme, whatever, to the first stanza. Another person then writes a third stanza that connects to the second stanza but doesn’t worry about connections to the first stanza. On it goes. You can look up the form easily and get more information about it if you want, collaborating reader. I encourage that. For my purposes here, it’s enough to know that the poems in this section of my work are connected through mood, image, or theme, not necessarily rationally. I call this section Dreamawake Dream because other poets already used the idea of “Nights and Days.” (I have a personal story about one of those other poets, if you ever want to get drunk together and talk about it.) I think Dreamawake Dream is more evocative anyway, less Hesiod-like and far hipper, though the new-agey sound does bother me a bit.
At first I had the idea that I could organize all of my poems using this method, but I ran out of steam at 60. Here they are. The embarrassing thing about them is that, while the connections between the poems were clear to me at the time, they are obscure now. But this is just as it might be with Renga. “What were those authors thinking when they were making those connections?” It’s a mystery, a puzzle, that one just might have to live with. Maybe the not-knowing leaves us in a more expansive space. I hope you enjoy the poems, maybe sense the connection, and don’t feel inclined to heap aspersions on me if you put energy into reading them and can’t figure out why I grouped them together the way I did.
One other note: some of the poems that appear in the Dreamawake Dream sequence may be found elsewhere in this overall opus, for lack of organization on my part, or for a feeling that it may not be a bad idea to reread them in different contexts…if you even read into this work enough to find both, or could remember reading both if you did.
Contents
Drafting Board
The Day Takes You Up
I Waited Too Long
Love
Einstein’s Eyeball
Emotions Upon Gaze at a Wingnut Tree
Red Dog
If You See Something
Orchid Petals
Instinct
The Road Through the Playground
God in the Public Schools
Teacher Burnout
Dedekind’s Toes
Amputee
Healthy Hands
Falling on the Map
Atop Hawk Mountain
A Raptor Sups
Red Composition
The Good Person
A Useful Way to Think
Of Humanists and Hormones
Deepening the Shadows
Reality Waves
Animal World
Invite the Cat In
The Lost Samaritan
Puzzles
Freeing the Animals
Ghazal on the Mapped Genome
University Life
A Golden Thread
Perpetual Motion
Sunrise Highway
The Ghosts at the Edge of the Plaza
Anteroom
The Lake in Prospect Park
Bathtub Family
Predictions
All is Serene
Vireo
Releasing the Sparrows
A Salute to the Ancestors
Rubble Horse
Microbes
Anterior Cingulate
What About the Shadows?
Mysterious Man Emerges
In the Blink of an Eye
When We Travel to Work Near Where We Were Young
Madonna and Child with Saints
Family Dialects
DNA
Prodigal Sister
Mineral Designs
Father in Paris
Some of the Dead
Lost Knives
This Is the Thing
THE DRAFTING BOARD
This is a fine drafting board.
Maple an inch thick, broad and solid,
set at the best ergonomic angle,
up near the window where
it gets a steady stream of sunlight.
Permanently pinned to the top
is a sheet of indestructible paper,
upon which is thickly inked
the sketches of the tools I use.
At some point every day I’m
sitting in the tall chair studying
the designs – which to keep
and which are obsolete. If I’m not
getting by with the ones I have,
I take up the pen to worry out
a new device. When you stand
back to look at the array on the whole
board, it’s productive to notice
that some of the forms are complex,
ornate with patterns: rosettes, French
curves. Others are so simple
they’re nearly absurd: the pry bars
and the scrapers. When you count,
you find the most numerous of the
instruments is the knife: so many
lengths, shapes and thicknesses
of blade. So many handles,
depending on whether the need
is to slice, to penetrate, or to whittle.
Who would have guessed, until
we looked at the numbers, that
the most frequent need in life
is to have a tool for cutting?
THE DAY TAKES YOU UP
You think you wake up and take up the day.
You think you take the subway but the train takes you up
into its society of i-podders, bible thumpers,
romance readers and starers into the air,
incomplete without you there to be, to see,
to hear the bag gentleman bark without elaboration,
“240 million children across the world at risk!”
You think you take a job but the job takes you up
and moves you along through the chores and storms
of brain, exchange and submission, requiring
that time-punched surrender to the haze of effort
guided by what forces beyond any one of us
toward a reward every now and then beyond mere survival.
You think you go out to take the air
but the air moves about, through, within
and without you, takes you up into
its various spirits, connecting you to
the pyramids of Egypt and the slums of Brazil
from whence it has recently blown commingled
with the particles from Alaska and the Persian Gulf.
You think you take lunch but the molecules
of sweet, salt, sour and bitter transport
your taste buds (if you pay attention) to the fields
and highways from whence they have recently arrived
in reverse motion to the sources who never knew
the outcomes but sensed there would one day be ones.
You think you take a lover but the lover, or,
rather, the ancient ritual of love embedded
in the genes of the lover from the moment
of life’s advent on Earth (or wherever)
enfolds and either warms or chills you. You see
you can’t take any person up – no, impossible to,
what with every being not taking but being taken up.
You think you have an idea, or maybe a feeling
(and where exactly is the border between them?)
but these excitations come to you unbidden
and sweep you up into their clutches – to caress?
To choke? Who knows? But you only trap yourself
in the hell of self if you persist in believing
you’re the responsible party in this physics lesson.
It’s what you do when taken up that counts,
since what you take up takes you up. Do you
take up what takes you up? Just relax and be taken.
That’s my advice. Take it let it take you up.
I WAITED TOO LONG
I waited too long to retrieve the dream.
Yesterday it blazed in my brain.
Today it’s lost in a haze
because I’m far too alert to reality.
“The train is being held in the station
by the dispatcher. Please be patient.
We will be moving shortly.”
“Atlantic Avenue” hand-written in black
on paper pegged to a blue wall.
“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”
Lost dreams are like giant squid.
They make their murky appearance
and die or descend, their only effect
the suction scars on the skin of whales
(a sensation of hunger, a blurry face….)
Yesterday’s dream’s mostly gone,
but last night’s is still alive:
I’m making love to a woman
who is and isn’t my wife
in a home that is and isn’t ours.
Her aged father in the next room
rises from his easy chair in a rage,
a brittle warrior, to take up an ax
and smash the wall by our bed.
This is why I got up so early,
meditated, and find myself now
so clear-minded on the train amid
the way things look to the eye,
sound to the ear, and feel to these fingers
curled around the hexagonal shaft
of a warm plastic ballpoint pen.
LOVE
Do you find love?
Do you make it?
Can you bake good love
from bad flour?
This is alchemy.
Love must be alchemy, then,
because my lover says,
“It was a long time ago”
when I ask how she feels
about my old misdeeds.
EINSTEIN'S EYEBALL
I’m in New York now, far away from the days
in Baton Rouge when I played by the lake and
took trips across the blood-soaked prairies
to Pasadena where we visited with Grandma
Sheene and her maiden sister Aunt Inga Howard
who worked for the president of Cal Tech
and took Albert Einstein to the philharmonic.
But last night I beamed the genius
near and met him in a dusty and long forgotten
Soho gallery of odd ideas. He haunted
the room in his turned-up collar and tie,
baggy pants and woolen jacket (just the way
he looks in the photo above my desk,
signed Im liebenswürdigen und stets
helfsbereiten Miss Howard Albert
Einstein 1931.) He seemed to need to
indulge in one last gedankenexperiment
before releasing his spirit into the paradoxically
particle-filled interstices of the universe when
he sat me down at a worn oak table
to focus tightly on his eye. How
baby-fresh the skin of his wizened face
looked up close, the seconds slowing to a
crawl in the light of his proximity. Focus,
he said, on the event horizon of my iris.
And so I did, and he fixed his view on mine,
and they began to disappear, leaving
only the black holes of our pupils,
which merged and began ascending
through the distant galaxies where they
vanished into that most youth-bestowing
of all events, the so-called Big Bang.
“Interesting, eh?” he said, as we unlocked
the chain of gravity that connected
our straining pupils. I was on the street
before it came to me that I had forgotten
to ask what it was like to hear symphonies
with Aunt Inga, and if he had ever collected
shells and polished shards of glass with her
in the tide pools of Laguna Beach, as had I.
EMOTIONS UPON GAZING AT A WINGNUT TREE
These are just emotions, I know, but when
I study the geometric seedpods
dangling from your branches (illustrating
gravity’s power to summon beauty
out of tension), built on the columnar
structure of your trunk (exemplifying
chemistry’s ability to piece life
from the psychedelic complexity
of the carbon atom), I feel a kind
of kinship born from the ancient common
origins of our forms, which enfold as
well the cardinal chipping its warnings
from the shadows of your leaves, Caucasian
Wingnut from West Asia, surviving for
my pleasure now in a byway of the
Brooklyn Botanic Garden with your roots
so gnarled and thick, seeming so much older than
the foundation of this institution. How
did you get here? How, for that matter, did
I? And how did this loud airplane knifing
its way through the clouds in the hapless sky?
RED DOG
The short hair’s brick red, no collar.
Maybe it came straight from hell.
I don’t know.
It trots up quick,
heels down the cracked sidewalk
in one of those lost parts of town
that wasn’t planned by anyone:
a cinderblock warehouse here, a pile
of rusty junk in the weeds there,
a barbeque joint, a body shop….
Its snout, its head are rounded off,
smooth, good for biting tight,
gripping long. I pick the child up.
It sniffs with its wet nose. My old friend,
walking beside us, backs away.
If I reach out, it’ll lunge.
If I do nothing…
The empty street’s not going
anywhere safe any time soon.
I look over my shoulder at my friend…
He glances at me as if, well…
I recall the last time I felt
this depth of terror, pinned on my back
under a tiger’s leaden paws,
my face bathed in the rotten exhalations,
having to inhale with steady perfection.
A mere trace of fear
and I would be gone.
But I was alone then. The only one
I had to breathe for was myself.
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.
BE SUSPICIOUS OF ANYTHING UNATTENDED.
warns the panel at the end of the car
on the downtown Number Three.
Across the aisle I see the slenderest of
passengers, with henna-colored strands
of hair, high cheekbones, and fine
brown eyes. She wears a black
leather jacket that must be the size two
envied by so many ever so slightly
larger cosmopolitan women.
And the jeans are tight on her slender legs.
I see that she is discreetly suspicious
of what I had hoped to be a more
glancing notation of her features, but
she presses on, opening and reading
and closing and opening again and
reading some more her textbook titled
Art, where from a page bursts a picture
of the naked fat-packed Paleolithic oolitic
limestone Woman from Willendorf.
The other thing I see on the Number
Three that must be reported to
the employees of the MTA are the
sharp points of the passenger’s narrow
black shoes, which are blemished by
scuff marks colored a disconcerting white.
ORCHID PETALS
A broken nest of orchid petals
rests near a discarded neon purple tag
on the speckled floor of the 3 train.
Earlier today I had a dream
of conflict wherein my wife said,
“I don’t want to be married anymore.”
I asked my friend, who was
driving us through the suburbs,
to stop the car.
We fought in a parking lot
while he watched us through
the window of a diner.
“Fine,” I spat, conceding
the battle. I got back
into the car, and she got back
into the car, and my friend returned
from the diner and nothing,
it turned out, had happened at all.
The orchid petals, I notice,
are losing their luster
and becoming transparent
like cave fish out of water
and into the deadly air. A
woman dressed for business strides
into the train and blindly crushes
them with her shiny high heels,
releasing a heady perfume.
INSTINCT
A woman I know who raised children
of her own once told me how amazed
she was to think, when she looked
around at people on the street, that
each person walking there had been
brought up for so many years at
such great cost of human effort.
Thinking of that today as I look
around the city I compare
our expenditure to the expenditure
of the snake, the fish, the bird, the insect
when the pivotal question emerges:
What is it about the way we not only
nurture our own but breed and engineer
every other organism? What
illumination comes from distilling
our practice of the world purely into
a focus on the energy of nurture?
It seems like a liquor, a liquor of instinct
that’s make the planet giddy – god knows
I’ve had a deep enough draft of it myself.
THE ROAD THROUGH THE PLAYGROUND
I think I’m walking alone down my pathway
among the silver birches in the fall woods
until I stumble through a side gate
into a chain-link fenced lawn of mown
green grass where everyone’s trying
to get organized for lack of a better idea.
Committees form. Roles emerge.
People take charge of what they see,
what they imagine, what they believe.
It won’t be long before some
control the fates of others
and commence to enjoy
their power too much
but this hasn’t happened
in our zone of space yet,
the Big Bang having banged
only a minute ago, with
energy still jelling into matter,
and nobody having anything
on anybody so far.
Me? I’m posted near the shouting
children in their multicolored clothes.
They only want to dig in the sandboxes,
toss their balls in pleasant arcs
and swing in complementary curves on the sets.
This is where I find myself.
My question?
How can we protect our offspring
from the traffic, which is hurtling fast
past the main gate right
through the playground?
I have to stand so close to the asphalt
the bumpers brush the pleats of my pants.
When evening comes, the teachers,
the builders, the cooks and I meet
in a Thing to ponder the future.
What if the drivers of the cars
decide to stop on their way through?
Should we let outsiders in? For how long?
Doesn’t our balance work as it stands?
They can stay if they pay,
the group decides, and I agree.
Some of the cash going to guardrails
won’t rip our moral fiber.
Still, I wonder if this isn’t where
the history of trouble starts:
seeking safety at the curbs of roads
that are dangerous by design.
GOD IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
How many people have I talked to today?
I could list them, but I’d prefer to paint their faces
or mount a montage of their faces talking, listening.
The look of a face listening. Really listening.
The angelic look of a face listening.
It’s the idea of attention. Focus.
A face focused, in focus. A look of attention
drawing our attention,
and God paying attention to us.
Is that the reason we and the Big Guy invented each other?
To pay attention to our paying of attention?
TEACHER BURNOUT
I’ve crossed the bay and countless millions
of cubic feet of freeway concrete on
my mission to salvage civilization
in the dark hallways of this high school.
Homer, Virgil, Dante, Rabelais…how
am I going to persuade my students
to pay attention? Look at these two
scoundrels hiding in the science lab now,
breaking pipettes – experimenting all right:
with the chemistry of their impulses.
They follow me down the stairs towards class
but I find myself alone after a flight
or two. They’ve ducked into an empty
history room where the little peckerwood
with the crew cut and a paddle whacks
the taller punk — and he takes it, in some
adolescent rite of domination.
I’m angry at all we have to do
to reverse the course of history,
even though I know it’s useless to
invest any feelings. So what if we’ve
had a few millennia to know better?
Who’s counting? It has to be learned all
over from birth in every case.
We’ll do better when we can implant
wisdom in the genes. Whatever wisdom is.
It feels like a heavy weight today.
DEDEKIND'S TOES
Dedekind, taking a walk
from Point A to Point B,
decides to conduct
a thought experiment
on what it would be like
to amputate his toes,
so he stops. He slices
with his mental knife.
He discovers that,
to his distress,
though he can divide
the quarks contained therein,
he cannot cut the strings
that play like an orchestra
from one of those
hypothetical dimensions
those pesky physicists
are dreaming up these days.
AMPUTEE
The way I face the vision
of the hacking off of hands and feet
is far too cool.
I take pity but I
feel nothing in my heart,
not even when
the butchers knock
on my door to extract
that part from me.
HEALTHY HANDS
Images of the day against the gray:
The sunlight piercing my eyes over the subway station, and the long shadow of the trees.
The ancient pastel door akimbo on its hinges of the subway station at 9th Street stop atop the R/M line, which I push open with respect for the decades of working hands that have likewise pushed the door how many millions of times?
Are these the numbers that matter, then? The hands that touch the doors?
And how many coats of paint? The hands, likewise, that brush the paint?
The rotund crossing guard with her orange vest and clever hat that must have been designed the year WACs or the Girl Scouts were conceived.
Ms. Schuler the security guard at the school. “Good morning. Miss Schuler.” “Good morning, Mr. Dale.”
The faces of the Hispanic children, their glowing skin, their humility.
The concentrating faces of the black Americans and the white Americans who design the lessons for the immigrants.
The faces of the Hispanic countermen at the bagel place reflecting the faces of the children down at the school.
The gleaming silver teapot set out on the sidewalk on 4th Avenue between 13th and 12th Streets. Why? Whose hands will pick it up? Is the sidewalk now a stove?
The filigreed branches of the trees in the park across the street, and I did listen for the sounds of any birds along the sidewalk.
The junkie sitting next to Elly on the subway bench, dropping his money, and my returning it to him, then leering over her in the subway car and me reminding him time after time to stand up! Hey, man, stand up!
The Capra film You Can’t Take it With You, with its reassuring themes of family and friendship and joy.
A picture lingering from the film of an accountant punching in the numbers from a register.
How many waste their lives over registers?
How well are we hanging on here, anyway? Are we any better than the junkie with his groping fingers?
Yes, I think we are better, with our healthy hands, even if they are not squeaky clean.
We grip what we can grasp.
FALLING ON THE MAP
Here I am overweight and old now,
sweating in this gray wool suit
I swore like Thoreau, when I was young,
that nothing would ever make me wear.
Some kind of work – I’ve forgotten –
I’m on the job – I’m stumbling
through the metallic city,
the fabric stretching and the seams
splitting, the sidewalk beating
its rhythm of concrete
into the bones of my feet.
A wounded wolf on this urban tundra,
I’ve reached the end.
Do I even have a pack anymore?
I can’t see them anywhere
when I crumple onto this map
that has been so artfully etched
into the sidewalk in this upscale
sector of the metropolis.
From this level the roadways
are only jagged grooves
that cut across the eye.
How did I become a fallen figure?
Exactly what steps were they
that brought me down?
What happened to the days when any map
had the potential to take me any where:
hear a blind chanteuse in a Paris bistro,
taste fresh jugo de naranjilla in the Andes,
make hay in the hilltop meadows
of West Virginia, the vistas of leafy mountains
stretching fifty miles all around?
This set of youngsters hiking
through town on their way
to the woods in their colored parkas –
are they a hallucination? They stop
with their hands and pull me
to my feet as if it were nothing.
ATOP HAWK MOUNTAIN
The juvenile bald eagle
climbing the thermals
among the turkey vultures,
the light glinting off its back
as off an old penny.
The Cooper’s hawk
wedging its airy way
flap flap flap glide
flap flap flap glide
above the shaggy
fall oaks and maples.
The sharpie
zipping along
flappity flappity no glide
directly overhead
against the saturated
blue blue sky.
The redtails
in the distance
circling and circling
over the rise
their tailfeathers winking
terra cotta when they
mediate the sun.
The lone black vulture
turning and turning
looking lost
off the hillside away
from its red-headed brethren.
Not so many hawks today.
Well past the time
of the broadwings
who like to
rise up in funnels
by the hundreds
before they peel off
to glide south
along the ridgeline.
Plenty to see
in this bright weather,
but nothing profound to say.
What is authentic, anyway?
A RAPTOR SUPS
I take my boss bird-watching
in the sweetest fields where today,
I don’t know why, the red-tails
hunt in soaring numbers,
stooping after prey one after another.
Along the fenceline close by
one crashes downward from nowhere,
comes up with claws full of weeds,
sorts out a robin from the strands
and with its beak twists off a leg
of the living bird, like a bleeding
drumstick at Christmas dinner.
The air was so soft caressing the face,
the heathery colors so rich to the eye…
how was I to predict the person
scanning the field of my fate would
get ideas from this raw act? His talons?
They’re already pricking my neck.
RED COMPOSITION
Across the street
from this parking lot in Yonkers,
a red tree. A maple, maybe?
Too much distance between us to tell,
and I’m too serene relaxing in my car to go see.
What gets me about it
is the way the beckoning leaves
begin black at the bottom in the shade
before rising in a speckled transition
to the solid hue of the back
of a shiny New York water bug.
Above the bug, luminescent garnets.
Now my eyes wake up to the cherry
lollipop of a van at the curb.
Hungry for red now, they find
the coral paint on the fence and porch rails.
The brake light lenses at the rear
of the silver car in the driveway.
The orange basketball hoop tilted distressingly
backward just beyond the car.
Barely visible in the back yard,
the ghostly maroon double of the first maple.
Next door the bursting
hot lipstick pink of the azalea bush,
as healthy as anything I’ve seen
this particular incarnation.
This is it,
the complete scarlet composition
that fell into place of its own volition
here on a green and white block.
And no wealthy collectors to buy it at auction
I’m thinking, triumphant, having
pulled one over on the bloated art market…
…when the mockingbird glides by,
inscribing sine waves in the muggy air
with its rowing wings, the red not on,
but in the animal, waiting for release.
THE GOOD PERSON
I’m working in the school
and doing well enough
but punch in one day naked,
only a few tattered rags
of a t-shirt hanging
from my neck
when a good person
takes me by the shoulders
and guides me
through the labyrinth
of leering hallways,
a refugee from shame
unshamed because
of the way the arms
parry every last touch
of humiliation.
I will be able
to teach tomorrow
but want to know
who is this person?
Though everyone alive
has a different answer,
I can safely say
from inside knowledge
that this figure
figures for them all.
We create a savior
every time we
make a mistake,
don’t we?
If we didn’t,
our errors would
kill us, every one.
A USEFUL WAY TO THINK
On the subway with a moment to think
I’m thinking it’s useful sometimes
to break out of the way of seeing
that binds us in our skin.
It’s useful, I think, to look across
the broad spectrum of the phenomenon.
For instance to think not of your own desire
but of all the flesh of all the species
that share the sensation of pleasure
(love? blessed loss of self?) at contact.
Break it down to the cells in common,
all the nerves in skin connected now,
all the lights in all the brains illuminating
that one original act we all share.
For instance also to think of breathing –
the world of life one ballooning struggle
for oxygen. How we swim in a sea of it,
trade each and every molecule. (I read
somewhere that each breath we breathe
contains amounts exhaled by Caesar
and by extension the dinosaurs and diatoms.)
For instance also to think of anger,
the chemical fires in the neurons flashing
hither and yon across the genera
for who knows how many reasons –
to think when you’re angry you’re part
of the great ocean of magnificent emotion
striving to find an object of hate.
Inner, outer – forget the direction the force
might take, just see it for this moment
as the common conflagration it is.
Sex, breath, anger—mere beginnings
in this exercise. The tears of the world
a constant quantity. That’s the idea.
It’s hard to think this way but useful,
as the skin is an awfully lonely place
to be in.
OF HUMANISTS AND HORMONES
We’re supposed to be in class, learning
the history of civilization.
The great Humanists are supposed to be
murmuring in our ears.
What are dogma, greed, corruption and repression?
How can we be saved?
We are ready for the Enlightenment
and the Enlightenment is ready for us.
It has always been so, since before its
alleged emergence in history as well as after.
But we lounge on this hammock,
trapped in a bubble of torpor on a hot afternoon.
We’re hypnotized by the hormones that drive
our eyes to gaze into each other’s eyes.
No mere idea has the power to unstick us from
this web of viscous contact.
Nor does any understanding of responsibility
for ourselves, or for the future of the breed.
We are thinking animals, but all we can imagine
now are scenes from the senses.
No free will here as we re-enact the drama
of the lovers Estrogen and Testosterone.
DEEPENING THE SHADOWS
Shadows overlap with
different degrees
of intensity…
one fatigue…
one fear…
one anxiety….
It is the light
that makes
the shadow.
All of one.
All of the other.
No such thing.
So when we say
“enlightenment”
we are talking
about deepening
the shadows,
are we not?
REALITY WAVES
We are different people
with different people.
The bending of light by
massive objects in space
is nothing next to the warp
of individuals pulling each
other into the fields of
their reality waves.
I am always impressed
that anyone could act
on the premise that
some kind of objectivity
hovers out there ethereally
in absolute time and
absolute space like a
ruler keeping us straight.
ANIMAL WORLD
We are both here for the loving,
instruments of lust plucked by
the African night, the breeze caressing
our skin through the starry windows
of the plantation house and
then I’m alone on the cherry wood deck
clutching a towel around my waist.
Duty waits in another room.
I pass by the salon full of guests
all light and music—a shadow
on the verandah between them and
the grassy savannah crowded with wild
dogs who lift the bodies of gazelles
in ecstasy toward the sky while the big
cats stare with yellow eyes from
the brush at the edge of the garden.
I step along the passageway between
these mirroring worlds until
I’m safe in the other room where duty has
become a soft undressing second woman.
We get set for sex as well and I see how
I am caught up in the magnet
of circumstances beyond my ken.
All I am tonight is what I do, the people
I am with, a sense of faith and
a helpless curiosity about this void
of familiar values: loyalty, trust, fidelity.
INVITE THE CAT IN
When the yellow cat
with white paws
that prowls
from house to house
and purveys
its fearsome message
with the softest of miaous
visits your front door
and purrs to think how stiff
it’s raised the hairs
on the back of your neck
invite it in and feed it
then send it on its way
with its belly full.
THE LOST SAMARITAN
This time it was a car wreck.
I was coasting toward town
in the smooth lanes of the status quo
when I noticed the terrible sculpture
down the bank. No one bothered to stop.
I couldn’t help myself.
The bodies in the twisted metal
were equally contorted, as if we adapt
to our containers by courtesy
of our plastic natures.
I left my car unlocked on the shoulder
to penetrate the nearby suburb on foot
in search of a home with a phone.
Ringing unanswered doorbells among
the coves, the lanes, and the circles,
I got lost. It became apparent,
with no way back to the highway, that I
would live forever where I strayed.
I was carrying the overnighter
passed down from my father,
an indestructible monogrammed
Samsonite American Tourister
whose handles still emanated heat
from his engineer’s hands that spanned
the depression, three wars, 1984
and beyond. I used it now
sentimentally to haul the books
that had become the tools
of my workshop trade. In a lapse of sense –
was I getting senile? –
I left it – my inheritance, my
occupation – in a pile of trash
and turned around too late only
to see it crushed in the compactor
of a garbage truck. Later in my
wanderings on the sidewalks
among the Tudors and the split levels
a memory of my father
brought me to a halt:
the day the old man dropped
the guise of the hard Republican
to tell me his soft dream
of traveling on business
to a strange city where he, like me,
got lost in the labyrinth.
Forced by the policeman
to produce his license,
he found himself naked.
“What does it mean?” he asked,
eyes a miracle of wonder,
“That I couldn’t even find my wallet?”
No ID for him,
no door key for me…
I freeze here in the twilight puzzling
such difference as there may be
between this seeming impasse
and simply being free.
PUZZLES
Puzzling. Puzzling.
What can we make
of all this puzzling?
The bees puzzling their way to the pollen
among the petals of the flowers.
Cats puzzling their way to the food bowl
in the morning around each other’s tails,
and the plethora of legs –
of people, of tables, of chairs.
Commuters puzzling their way
through the confusing streets of the city
after a storm has left the subways inert.
The curious unease of puzzles,
one problem replacing the next
from moment to moment to moment….
Old folks puzzling their way to the grave,
and younger people on their heels
putting in overtime
to solve puzzles ahead and behind:
how to comfort the elders
how to cultivate the children.
Then the bambini themselves,
puzzling themselves into being with their toys,
trying to answer the riddle of the programs
pitched at them from the industry of images.
When it comes to my own identity
I’m always wondering
if the manufacturer didn’t slip
and make a piece that didn’t fit.
The big bang and the genesis of life
are easier for me to puzzle out
than the perfidies of my species.
But I puzzle away,
steadily or recklessly,
as the case may be.
FREEING THE ANIMALS
At four o’clock in the morning,
both awake,
we tell the dreams:
how, within the arctic circle,
your seals, your bears, your walruses and foxes,
your wolves, your bowheads and your snowy owls
were cornered on the ice
and struggled, the whole nation of them,
against a net that had captured them,
that had been dropped from the skies above them,
that had turned them from a living system
into a dying collection,
and they fought so
pathetically to escape
how, soaring above the earth,
I searched for the route to my address
on the web site that started
with the blue sphere of the planet and
brought me closer by orders
of magnitude through the hemisphere,
the continent, the nation, the state and city,
until it dropped me mistakenly
into the dangerous neighborhood next door—
an Escher knot of streets
too twisted to untangle
We tell, then touch.
By five o’clock
the animals are free
and I have found my way home.
GHAZAL ON THE MAPPED GENOME OF HOMO SAPIENS
The act of a cat getting shot by a gat and yowling
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacgt.
A little bible in each of my cells. I’m a walking library,
bigger than the one at Alexandria, ready to be set afire.
The stream onto the screen of my computer will not cease:
keep those post-cards coming, I reply e-mail to Mendel.
The mice, the bacteria and myself. What does the word
beauty mean anymore? Who is the measure of all things?
All of it codes for chemicals reacting to chemicals and heat
and light and what would we be without our oxygen, anyway?
Who cares if you clone? My codes, your codes, the cat’s
codes…just different spoonfuls of hot alphabet soup, that’s all.
Until my mind is still, and the air is still, and the cat is napping.
The letters lie down like marching ants on bivouac, and sleep.
UNIVERSITY LIFE
But this is a dark university,
where orientation begins on a
note like this, with a debate that allows
the demagogue to spin his sticky webs
and frame deceptive definitions while
true scholars lay out a weak case about
the suspect’s blood at the gate but nothing
at the center of the compound. “This will
make an excellent Hollywood movie,”
says the Einstein beside me before the
plot becomes too complex and the crowd breaks
up to meander the hallways seeking
urinals, popcorn and pinball machines.
Next on my schedule is the mixer for
meeting the members of my department.
The head is an empress in a brown silk
dress who comes across too friendly, making
me wonder what I’m expected to do
to hold onto this temporary job.
It’s when another teacher interrupts
to talk about her diet despite the
fact she’s delighted to be the weighty way
she is that I feel relieved to find out
that someone here’s not wanting something else
that I’m not prepared to give. Now there’s a
banquet outdoors in the central quad where
speakers discuss issues in voices too
low to hear and everyone worries
about consequential blunders. The storm
clouds gather and pelt the plaza with rain,
sending us scattered to shelters of choice
to watch the lightning strike and listen to
the weather talk. It’s a chance to witness
for a minute a purging of the great
institution. Later a notion draws
me out of my room to the wet deck at
the edge of the campus that overlooks
the valley and the woods. A number of
souls have gathered here not to utter their
names but to contemplate the stars that shine
in the black bowl overhead as if they’d
been polished. On my solitary walk
back through the concrete canyons between
the tall, empty buildings I overhear
a blues man shouting a bawdy tale of
lust and betrayal to a couple of
sophomores who don’t know what to make of
him. He belts the news out anyway, his
voice an echo in the cubic spaces,
bouncing off metallic walls. It doesn’t
matter to him if he is heard or
not. Now’s the time to sing. This is the crowd
that’s ready to listen. Luck will provide
hot food and a warm enough place to rest.
A GOLDEN THREAD
Okay, William
and William,
what is it
about this
golden thread?
What is it
exactly?
What is at
the other end of it
for me?
I have been standing
far too long now
at the gate
built in
Jerusalem’s wall
and need a chair.
For me
what will be
at the other end
of the thread
is a chair?
When I
look close,
I see two:
a desk chair
followed
by a rocking
chair.
So that’s
the golden thread
for me,
then?
To sit at a desk
chair until it’s
time to
shuffle over
to the rocking
chair?
All right.
I
accept that.
But tell me
where
does the thread
lead
after
the rocking
chair?
Is that it
circling
back to
the spot
where
I find
myself
standing?
PERPETUAL MOTION
Most days I don’t think about it much,
but today I’m having the sensation
that I came into this world traveling.
I know it’s in the genes to move along.
I’m aware of all the motion in germination,
adaptation, natural selection,
all the amino acids combining and recombining
to drive the lusty organisms
seeking out with sensors
the best ways to keep going.
Today the destination of this specimen
is marked with an X on the grid,
far across the endlessly expanding city.
I study the map,
plan the errands I have to run on the way,
calculate which of the parallel avenues to travel,
which of the cross streets yields the best position.
One duty I can’t avoid puts me at the convention center.
I deliver my package to the registration desk
where the pale woman with red lipstick
and black hair in the long dress says
I have to climb the stairs three flights
to find the bathroom.
These are the pieces
you can’t always account for:
urination, lunch, construction delays.
Thunderbursts.
As usual, like an arrow shot by Zeno,
I’m not going to make it to my target.
Though I’ve known this all along,
the understanding that I may be able to choose my route
but can’t opt to stop
is hitting me afresh back on the street
beneath a cloudy sky.
SUNRISE HIGHWAY
I can feel alive on the Sunrise Highway
if I put the right music on
and pay attention to the stoplights,
with their inner glow.
I can wake up to the detail
in the chaos around me:
other cars also stopping
with the glint in their windows,
gas stations with the air
dancing above the pumps,
electric lines slicing the clouds
into sagging rhomboids.
I can wake up to the way
my speed slows as the speed
of the train on the elevated track
nearby inversely quickens
and the silhouettes of the passengers
pull away farther, faster,
toward the event horizon
in the distance on Long Island.
THE GHOSTS AT THE EDGE OF THE PLAZA
We’ve all matured, become friends again,
as we always had the potential to remain,
here at this dreamy beach house.
We’ve all spiraled in close to the center,
and know how to stay connected
directly to the sun’s rays that wash us
along with the green lawn that
spreads out through the shadows cast by trees.
We cross this carpet of manicured grass
with rough hands in our pockets,
admire the scenery, drink in the sight
of the ex-wife of the friend who
walks beside me. Now she’s my woman,
proud, a straight-backed dancer fleshed out,
her calm gaze out over the sea.
Everyone’s found some satisfaction here.
Now it’s time to take a ride up the coastline:
the lanes and bridges, the cobbled streets,
the restored villages, gingerbread, Victorian,
registered, a sign of the taste of the culture.
I’m the one who drives us along the road
that curves through the scalloped hills
beside the beaches and the bays, the rocks
between the hamlets. The car is so well made
it almost steers itself. I hold the wheel
at arm’s length until we approach one
of the tight, dark tunnels along the way.
This is where I have to grip it better so
we can break through the tricky places
to find our final spot in a precious square
where we get out to stretch our legs,
celebrate the moment, look back with wonder
at all the accidents we avoided in our timelines
by luck as much as skill. Lurking around
the edges of the plaza: the patient ghosts
of those who didn’t make it through.
ANTEROOM
I lose myself alone in the white-walled anteroom
where only those who have attained are allowed.
Only one object in the laboratory here, the helmet
that illuminates the structure of the universe.
Here you finally understand that your brother,
floating below you in space, is your backer.
Here you understand that your family is the force
that pushed you so much farther than the rest.
Imagine the disappointment you’re going to feel
when you have to put the helmet back on the shelf.
How hard it’s going to be to have to look at flat panels
now and study earthquakes, how they break roads.
But the odds of evolution bring your old friend, who
drives you down the trembling blacktop toward a lake.
It’s there in his boat that you’ll have a chance to
find your legs, one shiver at a time on the unsteady water.
THE LAKE IN PROSPECT PARK
Sitting on a broken bench by the lake in Prospect Partk
near Wollman Rink the day after Thanksgiving, watching
the gallinules, the ruddy ducks, the mallards, having
conversations with strangers, pondering
how people feed the geese – their different styles.
One clucks as he scatters the crumbs, and the geese follow.
Another later tries tearing pieces from a hard roll but
runs afraid when the goose closes in. “Why are you chasing
me?” she shrieks, “When I’m trying to feed you!” Why
are you chasing me when I’m trying to feed you?
We hear the question often enough from the pulpits of the land.
It’s a pointer to the core of ignorance. And the landscape
of earthy tones and sunny glitter on the wavelets of the lake
is also disturbed by the bright red and white vision
of a Coca-Cola delivery truck, whose fumes cloud the troubled air.
Lifting my binoculars to my eyeglasses I look out
over the water, isolate my field of view to the distant
raft of northern shovelers and think about how they keep
their minds on the business of paddling and dabbling,
with a penchant for oblivion to the drama on the shore.
BATHTUB FAMILY
Part One: The Dream
We’d just strolled away from a safe public institution.
We were discussing the issues of the day.
I speculated that it would be possible
to have fires burning right here in our own city.
My eyes were cast at the solid pavement.
When I looked up I saw flames licking sensuously
at the tall apartment buildings along the parkway,
the liquified petals of an orchid.
The word lambent came to mind—a word I loved
for its qualities since first finding it in the dictionary.
We studied these lambent flames with idle curiosity.
We didn’t take them seriously because
they were only images after all, maybe inspired
(if that’s the right word) by the silly action movie
I saw last night, with a cargo plane crashing for a seeming eternity
through the flashy streets of Las Vegas.
Then they weren’t mere images anymore. The flames
weren’t just caressing the surfaces of the buildings. Now
they dug deep beneath the bricks to root out flesh. And
we weren’t just observers, but reporters. And
the institution we’d left behind was a press building:
the New York Times? Yes, the New York Times. And
we had something real, not merely speculative and
imagined, to tell. Something cataclysmic. Something
important for the world to hear. But the story didn’t stop
at the combustion digging in after the flesh. My own feet were now
bare and bleeding as I fled the hungry flames.
Did I have the capacity to go further, wounded like this? How
would I ever be able to report these awesome events to a
skeptical and unsuspecting world if I was myself a refugee?
Part Two: Reality
I give my only daughter—the actual runner from the flames—
baths. A plastic toy family meets for drama on the edge of the tub:
Woody the father, Mrs. Whistle the mother, Sabrina the sister,
Bert the clown brother always falling into unrequited love with mermaids,
Albert the candy bar loving cousin whose leg kicks with the action of a lever in his back,
a pinkly dressed blonde Fairy Godmother who lives on the near corner,
a sinister Uncle Vampire banished to the far corner near the drain.
Last night a new character joined us from the playroom: Pixie.
Pixie swam alone until Sabrina splashed into the water beside her.
Why are you swimming by yourself? Sabrina asked her.
Are you angry? Are you anxious? Are you afraid? Are you sad?
Pixie allowed Sad.
Because my home burned down. Because I had seven sisters and one died
that I saw. Because I haven’t seen the rest and I don’t know if they’re alive.
Sabrina extended her hand: Why not be my sister until you find out?
PREDICTIONS
I predict that I will never become as well known as Nostradamus.
That as a bacteria-like infection on the surface of the earth we will nearly kill our host, but that we won’t be able to administer the final coup de grace.
That my fingernails will continue to grow for at least another 24 hours.
That I will not live to be twice my current age.
That while my neural structures may become cheesy, they will remain intact enough to enjoy an occasional state of meditative serenity.
That when all is said and done, the universe will prove to be a most fascinating idea.
That ice cream will taste good to me for the rest of my life.
That my daughter will not break my heart, and if she does, she won’t do it too many times, and if she does it too many times, it won’t be fatal.
I predict that my country will not be able to resist the impulse to become more repressive.
I predict that while my country becomes more repressive, it will also develop strands that are more progressive.
I predict that even the most evil inhabitants of the planet will find occasional redemption in song.
I predict that humans will not advance significantly in their ability to tolerate ambiguity within my lifetime.
I predict that this will be one of the main reasons that my country will be unable to resist the impulse to become more repressive.
I predict that I will continue to write passages that contain many flaws invisible to my eye for several years to come.
I predict that I will write the passages anyway, with the subversive hope that there won’t be so many flaws that the passages are complete nonsense.
I predict that I will continue to have interesting insights, or at least the frisson of pleasure often associated with clever aperçus, for at least two more years.
I predict that the use of French loans to American vocabulary will alienate only a minor percentage of the readers of this poem, given that those who would object are unlikely to cross paths with it.
I predict that teachers will continue for at least a century to enlighten school children with a passion for helping them to realize their voices.
I predict that teachers will continue for just as long to abuse schoolchildren.
I predict that these will only occasionally be the same individuals.
I predict that mathematics will never lose its elegance even without conscious beings to appreciate it, and that the laws of probability that regulate both the measurement of subatomic particles and the assortment of genes will hold for constructivists and Platonists alike.
I predict that this set of predictions will end on this line.
I predict that the lady with the crumpled poster with charmingly bad graphics who collects money for the starving Ethiopian Falasha Jews and the man with the baseball size fuzz growing from both of his ears who says over and over “God is love” will be up to their usual practices in the Atlantic Avenue Subway station next time I transfer from the 2/3 line to the R/M line.
I predict that I will write an unorthodox haiku at the end of this list of predictions.
The man with ear fuzz
in the subway tunnel says,
“…love. God is love. God is…”
ALL IS SERENE
They came to my door
with open handcuffs.
I didn’t resist.
I offered my wrists.
I couldn’t recall
committing a crime.
It didn’t really matter
if I was guilty.
I don’t mind it here.
The prison is just
another building
made of cinderblocks.
Indeed, all is serene:
through the window
a valley of singing birds.
VIREO
it’s hard to
replicate
the song of
the red-eyed
vireo
in mere words
the way it
trills up first
down second
in three syl-
lable counts
all day long
day after
day one sings
beyond my
windowpane
it’s a bird
few see but
many hear
no one pays
attention
it’s too much
a part of
the weather
hill folk call
it the name
preacher bird
because of
the way it
repeats and
repeats and
repeats its
message of
love and war
to rivals
and females
they go on
and on and
on like the
cable news
announcers
you hear at
airports and
in the homes
of those who
are hooked up
for constant
stimula-
tion the birds
are okay
by me but
I wonder
whether we
really need
these so called
news reports
the question
has no more
relevance
than a fart
in a field
of peanuts
there was a
juncture in
a long past
cladogram
where we lost
all of our
power of
attorney
I suppose
I still feel
compelled to
ask in knee
jerk fashion
whenever
I hear them
why we must
have them and
whether we
really want
them with their
weary throats
and busy
busy tongues
RELEASING THE SPARROWS
We visit our dead less often
as the years unfurl.
It’s the way the math works:
more deceased, more distance
between now and the fatal days.
On the ancestors’ side, they have
less time in their schedules
to exit that busy cloud of synaptic
electricity called the nether world
for social calls on the living.
So it felt like some kind of perfection
when through tricks of memory
and my mind’s eye I was able
to rekindle the substance of my father,
gone seventeen years.
Artist and opportunist that I am,
I took the engineer by the hand
and guided him to a bench away from traffic
in a leafy corner park under the sanctuary
of the clear Camden sky.
We sat on the dry slats with the paint
peeling off until the breeze built up
and folded the pages of a flying newspaper
over a flock of scavenging sparrows.
Trapped, they chattered and pecked for their lives.
They hammered at the obits, attacked the gossip,
and shredded the news of unholy politics
until the black flecks of ink sooted the air.
It didn’t take much to reach over,
open the envelope, free the birds,
send the paper off in the wind,
and bring calm back, at least for a moment,
to our tidy urban brush arbor.
When I did, the sunshine proved
alchemically golden, the way it
massaged our intertwined fingers
and dissolved the harsh words
that lingered in the atmosphere.
A SALUTE TO THE ANCESTORS
To my Viking ancestors and related Carolingian,
English and Varangian noblemen
Louis III the Stammerer, Ivar Ragnarsson the Boneless,
Harald Harefoot, Harald Bluetooth, Harald Finehair,
Edward the Confessor, Edward the Martyr,
Eric the Bloodax, Aelthlered II the Unready,
Arnulf the Bastard, Bragi Boddason the Old,
Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, Charles III the Simple,
Gorm the Old, Harald Greycloak, Harald Klak,
Harald Kyrri the Quiet, Harald Sigurdsson Hardradi (The Ruthless),
Helgi the Lean, Erik the Red, Leif Eriksson the Lucky,
Louis the German, Louis the Pious, Magnus the Good,
Odo, Olaf Haraldsson the Stout, Olaf Hoskuldsson the Peacock,
Pepin the Short, Sigurd the Stout, Thorkell the Tall,
Unn the Deep-Minded, and Yaroslav the Wise (at last)
I raise the drinking skull of Sviatoslav, murdered by
Turkomen Pecheneg thugs, to you, your libidos and
your limbic systems, without which I wouldn’t be here
expounding peace and good will like a bloodshot berserker
on our embattled little monastery of a planet today.
RUBBLE HORSE
We’ve been here for hours
poking through the jagged
blocks of concrete with iron
umbilici snapped from connection
to the mother building,
fragments of shattered furniture
mixed in here and there,
the stack a grotesque party mix,
reflections of the sun winking
from shards of window glass.
We sense but don’t say how we
used to be reinforced, comfortable,
able to see out from within, see
what we needed to safely see
in the stormy elements.
Why was I elected to find
the ragged tip of the rope and
follow it to its end: the carcass
of the horse decayed to a skeleton
dressed fashionably in torn hide
(reminding me of the dead cows
I pondered as a teenager on levees
in Louisiana?) The loop
of the rope, when I pull it free
of the neck, is still coated with
the moist gelatin of what used
to be flesh. It’s only natural
to feel squeamish when you
touch it. You know where you’re
headed. But if you can stand
back far enough you might also
see some of the benefits to
your location here between
the archaea and the dust your
wet body will all too soon
become after its day in the sun.
MICROBES
Dude swept
the darkest ocean
and discovered
six million new kinds
of microbial DNA
today, said
we know one percent
about what
there is to know
about those
fancy little helices.
Made me feel
like an oyster cracker
on a soup
of amino acids.
I walk through the park,
who knows how many
billions of microbes
beneath each step.
The open fields,
flag-tailed dogs
using space
like rockets
use the stratosphere,
nary a thought
of meiosis
on their minds.
ANTERIOR CINGULATE
In humans, the experience of any intense
emotion—love, anger, lust—activates
the anterior cingulate. It is active during
demanding tasks and when people make
errors. The harder the task, the more
activation. — “Humanity? Maybe
It’s in the Wiring”, by Sandra Blakeslee,
The New York Times, December 9, 2003.
I thought I knew where I was: in my home,
in my city, and who I was, all my identities,
secure or insecure as the case may be.
I thought I knew how to behave, civilly,
to make a contribution and to whom I
belonged, to my family, to my colleagues,
to all of the citizens in public places, even
the plants and animals in the parks who
breathed the same air. So it was until I
passed into a landscape painting where I
wandered among the lush grasses, a solitary
inquisitive primate wondering why I no
longer sensed heat in the hot harvest time,
why no humidity, and where were the insects?
Why couldn’t I address the woman I found
sitting on the ground alone plucking at
the whiskers of the wheat stalks? Why
wouldn’t she look at me? A cyclist pedaled
down the road wearing glasses, too intent to
wave back when I waved. He could enter and
exit the frame at will. Why couldn’t I?
It was in the golden fields contemplating
the young peasant women silently harvesting,
poised over their baskets, skirts ballooning,
blouses revealing a shoulder here, there
the swelling of a breast, that I thought I
stopped caring. They had no eyes for me,
and I couldn’t approach, but a raptor’s call
started in my gut, shrieked through my teeth,
and they, despite themselves, sang out also,
first one, then more, then all in an obscene
and primal litany in this oily enigmatic
medium that fixed us where we were painted.
WHAT ABOUT THE SHADOWS?
What about shadows? Has anyone noticed how, a couple of days a year, the sun shoots straight down the streets of Manhattan, creating a symphony of light and shade, from the slender darkness revealed by the body that extends a hundred feet or more, to the dancing forms made by ragged faeries of litter, to the miniature moonscapes created by the tiniest protuberances?
What about the way the shadows overtake the matter of the concrete and the garbage cans and the bodies of the pedestrians? Are they ghosts? Is this the emergence of dark matter from obscurity, come to dominate the universe at last?
What about those weird, empty moments when what you expected to happen didn’t happen, opening a hole in your sense of reality? Has anyone appreciated the opportunity offered by these lacunae for liberation from the machinery of schedules?
What about just being gentle with each other for a few minutes?
What about the effect of that? Might it not too stretch out a little way and stop injurious acts?
Conversely, what about yelling? Have we undersold the value of yelling, at just the right volume, at just the right person, at just the right time, for just the right reason?
But then there’s the problem of being yelled at. Maybe we need to be yelled at sometimes, to keep us honest.
What about my own personal preference not to be yelled at, though?
I will try to be gentle.
It’s hard, I find, to be gentle every conscious moment of every day, given the nature of time to blow into our faces from the stream of the future occasional shards of misfortune.
What about people very different and very far away? The kindly Bhutanese, for instance?
Or secretive Amazonian jivaros like the Huaorani, for whom there is no distinction between the physical and spiritual worlds, some groups of whom avoid contact with outsiders at all cost? Have we stopped for a moment to imagine them? Is it really worth the time and effort when it’s so difficult to touch them or make any kind of difference?
What about the custodian Tino, gray-haired stick-ball player, who advises me that I’m staying late to work with teachers “Because you’re good at it, and because it’s important.” Has anyone else stopped to talk to Tino today?
What about letting Tino be? It may not matter much to Tino, whether people stop to talk or not.
What about the way Tino sings as cleans the bathrooms, wearing his rubber gloves, pitching himself into his work? Is there any difference, in those moments, between his physical and spiritual worlds?
What about sentiment? Is it so terrible to massage sentiment into a few words here and there as they hover between the batteries of information that assault us and the indescribable beauty that consoles us?
What about the generation of personal rules to protect ourselves from bullies who don’t know any better than to bruise our feelings? Can we make those rules work? Can we afford not to?
What about my doubts about the validity of this work? Do they count? Why? Why not?
What about the mind invaded by the doubts? Doesn’t it have any way of writing rules that force the doubts to pay their dues?
What is the mind, anyway?
And, too, what about simple endings, where you don’t strive to prove any points, but just let the language peacefully rest where it lies?
MYSTERIOUS MAN EMERGES
Larry wears black pants and white shoes like
a big band jazz man. He drives his new black
Mercedes Benz. We go out to dinner
at the Visionary Art Museum
where schizophrenics and other outsiders
show us what flashes among the nerves
beneath the skin. Larry’s thinking of
quitting his bank job to buy a piece of
land and build a house. I helped him put up
a log cabin twenty-five years ago
in his first crack at country living. He’s
one of those I wouldn’t be here today
without. “It would give me an excuse to
drive a pickup again,” he says. And that
night I am with him on a foggy mountain
pass in a light blue sixties Ford 150.
We’re inching along the highway at five
or ten miles an hour with the hillside
falling off steeply at the side of the road
when a drifter looms up on the white line
at the center of the asphalt. We stop
to help him. We’ve had days of our own.
We see too late that he has a pistol, which
he points at us through the open window.
You see the eyes. You see the barrel. You
think good-bye. But he turns the weapon on
the truck instead and fires rounds through the hood,
then falls back into the mist, out of sight.
Drifter Emerges from Fog in Mountains,
Threatens Travelers, Shoots Truck, Vanishes.
So the headline would read in the local
papers. I see a banner on the front
page of The Times, one that aims at the way
friendship works, the way events from the past
take up in your mind, the surprising way
little things pay off over the decades.
IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE
Encased in our skin
we blink our eyelids
and the other world’s
invited in,
or shut out.
With our
stroboscopic vision
we inscribe
the atmosphere
between each other.
It’s a mutual zone
and we ‘re
communally aware,
no matter what
our politics.
This area extends
throughout the city
and far,
but not infinitely,
beyond
our point of view.
It’s a limited space,
the one
we live in together,
sharing air,
sharing light.
WHEN WE TRAVEL TO WORK NEAR WHERE WE WERE YOUNG
Reasonable people hired me to be
a reasonable person who could give
a persuasive presentation at the
Convention Center in New Orleans, yes
where the sad lady appeared dead in her
wheelchair after Katrina a few years
later. The trouble was, I had grown up
only a few miles north, in Baton Rouge.
That night in my hotel room my pirogue
of a bed winked and blinked me into the
cypress swamps outside town to dip into
the muck after crawfish. The space of the place
torqued adulthood into boyhood and time
took on a circadian cycle that put
me to the task sunup to sundown.
I took to sleeping on the berms they built
between rice paddies, dreaming within dreams
that I kept missing my appointments and
waking up within slumber happy to
be back at one with the egrets and the
herons. There was the temptation to let
go and sink like an ironwood log into
the caressing silt and persist through the
eons still and uncorrupted. The light
in the pearly clouds encouraged me as
did the talking raccoons, in chorus with
the possums and the armadillos, who
advised in their voices, “Whenever you
can connect the past to the future, and
find peace in a moment, do it. Submit.”
MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS
Sitting in the European Paintings gallery
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Eleanor
reading The Bad Beginning episode
of A Series of Unfortunate Events
in front of a fifteen foot frame holding
a twelve foot painting by Girolamo dai Libri
of the Madonna and Child with Saints,
wherein a laurel tree admired by Vasari
sprouts up behind the magical woman
with the womb of gold and her anatomically
correct child, who she holds up for all to see.
The expression on her face is tranquilly
certain that she really is the mother
of one special kid, as my mom might have said
about any of her children. (Though my
first name is Christopher I am not the Christ
nor was she the Madonna, except in that
we are all so—the message to take home
from these hopeful Italians.) Beside the wondrous
Resurrection Laurel is a dead tree inhabited
by a peacock, suggesting immortality.
In the background rise the hills and towns
with castles beneath the clouds.
In the foreground stand the various angels
and modest saints with downcast eyes
and one pompous and richly garbed priest.
One saint holds a green book.
The other holds a pair of tongs
with handcuffs on the prongs—
the essence of impurity. Transcended?
I sense the sadomasochistic impulse
and can’t help but notice the sinister wheel
on the rocks at Catherine’s feet
with its sharp shark fin shaped blades
sticking out from all around.
Oh, one figure next to the priest
is a pregnant woman in extravagant
green gown and red robes draped in folds
over the bulging mound of her belly.
I have irreverent thoughts about the role
of the priest in her compromised condition.
The light pervades the gallery space
and I feel Eleanor’s back against mine
as she continues to read sitting with crossed legs.
We’d been trying to get here for hours,
waiting in lines at the entrance, the coat check,
admissions, the cafeteria, the bathroom
and the elevator. The Girolamo dai Libri
(and why shouldn’t Elly read here?)
is nearly five hundred years old.
How many people will remember it
well enough tonight to dream of it?
As long as my child retains the feel
of my back somewhere in her unconscious
mind? And will she somehow, in her way,
pass the impression on to her children?
FAMILY DIALECTS
Having cast away my seed family
for the time being, I attached myself to
another that served to return the senses
from the suburbs to the taste of grains,
the odors of the earth and visions
of the mountains. When this family
fell away in turn like an obsolete hull
to reveal a more intimate one contained
therein, we left in an old truck like Okies,
descended the spiral drive to the road
that curved so pleasantly through
the slopes of the valley, crossed the river
and approached with hope and dread
for the first time a local clan striving
to survive in a doublewide. Lacking
any pretensions, they welcomed us into
a gracious space that believed in its
mail-order couch, its plywood paneling
and its seaside and sunset paintings
from the department store in town.
A muscular father in a tight t-shirt
brought us lemonade while his
long-haired hillbilly hippie of a son
dug innocently into a shoebox after
marijuana that the father said to
put away as he didn’t want to make
any assumptions. In this encounter
between two rootless tribes we began to
change each other’s understanding
about how to live in a world of laws
that didn’t work but relationships
that needed to. We define our reality
as we go, do we not? It opens up before
us if we’re awake like the clear hard
edges of continents. It opens up before
us until it re-encircles those members
of our lost bloodlines who have managed
to survive to witness the prodigal return,
for return we do, by body or by mind.
DNA
Cytosine, Guanine,
Adenine and Thymine:
Three nines, one mine.
All agog at the sexy
Sugar Phosphate,
who dances in naked spirals
in the flesh bar
down on Protein Street
between Hydrogen and Bond.
PRODIGAL SISTER
Let’s say that your sister,
fellow flesh of your parents’ flesh,
fellow bones of their long gone bones,
suffering from that neural anomaly
that makes one want to flee one’s identity
as well as one’s vicinity,
vanishes from both for seeming good.
Let’s say that this disturbs you
as a brother and a being
enough from the slumbers of your assumptions
to search at first in the Halloween home
of a mind bereft
where the grey walls sweat
and the floors are wet and slimy.
Let’s say that by lucky instinct
you develop the dream wit
to imagine that every home contains
two houses, the one for nightmares
and the one anyone can live in,
with views out the picture window of the bay,
comfortable enough for the ghosts of parents,
and stylish enough to entertain shady strangers.
Indeed you find waiting around
the coffee table in the sundrenched den
three guests: authoritative gentlemen
in gabardine suits with corporate icons
pinned to the lapels like clown flowers,
who take your offer of cheese and tea
as if entitled to a claim on anyone.
They criticize each other
for speaking when they shouldn’t
and don’t say what they mean, but
their compliments of you seem sincere —
enough to give you pause.
Given the way quests stage distractions,
you are seduced into thinking
these noumenae must be important
and you’ll be asking, Who are they?
Where did they come from?
Why are they here?
as your sister appears.
Lost for a decade, she waits in the hall,
come back to now from elsewhere.
Will you take note soon enough?
You will because you must,
brother and specimen that you are,
and when you do you will wrap
her body in your arms (a shroud?)
and hold her. You will be sobbing
with deep relief (or is it dark grief?)
but in this narrow waist of the hourglass
you will be as free as you are
united for the time, being.
MINERAL DESIGNS
Standing to take a fresh look at the breakers
in August at Newport Beach, California,
noticing how they build, propelled by distant storms
and the pull of the gravity of the moon,
how the volume of the water swells
as it finds less of the yielding further liquid
and more of the rising resistant sand
I’m noticing how the wave becomes a cylinder
with black walls turning turquoise, then blue,
and stirs in the streaks of sand before
becoming the sizzling foam patterned like archipelagoes.
Undertow and overthrow, regular, through the millennia.
This particular August the Caspian terns have no leisure
to decide whether the waves are too big,
or the tide too strong:
to live they have to dive in.
They don’t have the leisure, but I do,
to notice the nuances of the line where the water ends
and the sand begins.
It’s a line that shifts on the surface and penetrates below the surface,
becoming a descending plane,
where the seemingly infinite depths of the water become finite
and disappear altogether,
turning over responsibility for the occupation of the space
to the now seemingly numberless fine hard grains of silica
which, under enough heat, would not boil like water,
but would fuse together into glass,
only resembling water in color and form.
While many forms of life may have adapted to the habitat of the sand,
they originated in the sea…or so it seems to me
after contemplating the life histories of creatures like the lobefin,
whose primitive lungs promoted its evolution into the frog.
Lobefin, frog, tern, human being, temporary species all —
evolution guaranteeing devolution —
we are no more fixed than the fluctuating line between sea and sand.
Even the particles that make up our bodies,
the raw ores that realize our genetic designs,
may not be so fixed,
given the heat cycles of the universe that create and destroy the elements.
For today, though, for this species, for this individual, with this identity,
to pour my mother’s ashes from a paper cup into the water
and watch them mix with the suds of the surf,
the little breakers, fractals of the larger breakers,
gives me a sense of a cycle being complete,
life from the water taking on the substance of the sand,
returning that substance to the sea.
FATHER IN PARIS
Who is your father when he reappears
in the plush suite of a European hotel
a young man, younger than yourself,
solemnly sporting a goatee? He visits
only a moment as he sorts the papers
in his suitcase for something important there.
There is no time for you, only a glance,
a last look of acknowledgment
from the land of the sometime dead.
The old Republican sends this message:
“I’m sorry. I built our mighty fortress
in the suburbs for you. I labored,
a workhorse from dawn to dusk,
refining oil into gasoline for you. I
tithed at that pinko Presbyterian church
of your mother’s choice – for you. I kept
my temper when wounded by your
green judgments. I applauded your Bohemian
successes in France. Now it’s my turn to
paint in the fields and roam the demimonde.”
That one deracinating glance then the door
is shut behind him and all I retain
is the memory of his adamant eyes,
which hollow me out like scraping knives.
SOME OF THE DEAD
Some of the dead lie lonely
on the concrete.
Some float downstream in the muddy river,
clustering on occasion in the eddies.
Some of the dead lie in stacks,
thrown atop each other willy-nilly in the ditches.
Some lie face down, gripping the ground,
as if they’ve forgotten they’ve lost
what those alive grip for.
Some of the dead lie face up,
broken cups, spilling the sky onto the earth.
Some of the dead tremble gracefully
nestled among the spears
of grass where they have
been blown by fate.
Some lie crushed where they slipped beneath the boot,
flattened in fear and grief.
Look up from where you rest and you can see
some of the dead clinging to their families.
They haven’t heard the news yet that they’ve passed on.
Many of the dead fall together
in rain, in wind, in storm.
A few are torn from the branches alone
before their time,
thrown to dance in the air before they fall.
All of the dead were young once.
They stole the light from the sun.
Now they dream their dry fragments into the breeze.
LOST KNIVES
I’ve been with this crowd of Buddhists how long now?
Days out here in the park pavilion,
packed shoulder to shoulder despite
the empty fields all around, the orange blossoms
of butterfly weed – little bursts of napalm
in the fields hazy with purple vetch –
then the hardwood forests, the canopies
steaming in the sun, the clever shapes of the leaves,
the various shades of green, species using strategies
to compete for access to the light.
The Great Monk himself sits only two rows
ahead of me. When he’s had enough
of sweating he twists back and with
a leaderly look in his eye says rise up, says
let’s vanish, and so it happens,
the evaporation of the humid bodies into the air – except for me.
Must be my job to hang back and gather up
the pocket knives that clattered to the floor out
of the sleeves of the monks’ robes: box cutters,
penknives, buck knives, Swiss army knives,
all sharp, all well oiled. They feel good to the touch,
the handles warm and smooth. But what
can I possibly do with so many? They weigh me down,
and I can’t seem to find my own little keeper,
the gift from my wife that’s held me up in so many airports,
with the screwdriver broken off and the point
chipped away from the unhoned blade.
THIS IS THE THING
What is there to grieve?
Nothing.
This is the thing: I grieve anyway, grief being as inevitable as breath to the living.
Just wait. You will feel it.
This is the thing: Though it may be as dense as lead, grief is sweet nonetheless.
Think sweet sorrow. Think rum cakes.
This is the thing: Grief comes, grief goes.
I should know. It has curled me up like the fist of a corpse. Afterwards, my spirits have opened like the bud of a peony.
This is the thing. Everything is on the table when you notice the light.
This is the thing: The light is here. The light is now, be it sunlight, incandescence or fluorescence.
This is the thing: The photons loved us enough to call for the creation of our eyes.
This is daVinci’s thing: When making his recommendations for the development of a complete mind, he exhorted us to develop our senses, especially to “learn how to see.”
This is the thing: I am still in the school of perception, but I am studying hard.
This is the thing: No diplomas in this program.
What is the problem with that, exactly? Who wouldn’t want the security of school for a lifetime?
This is the thing: Today, despite the light, my heart is dense and the taste of rum and butter is heavy on my tongue.