Foundling

Foundling

"Renunciation... is a piercing virtue."
Emily Dickinson

But to be the one renounced
In name of virtue--that's a bad joke,
A taste in the mouth like last night's garlic.
Sweat it out. Comes the pain without the honor,
Like the martyr soldier's horse!
Insult to fibers moral and connective--
Do I shame you? So I do. --
Contamination borne in the blood.
Your secret's showing, not to be
Spoken. Hushed, refused, this applecart
Upsetter, homewerecker, mark of sin.
The hills above the city are scarred with infants' bones.

To the Muse

To the Muse

It isn't about men leaving.
Not my brother's gun.
I feel like shit
Most of the time
Thinking I forgive you but I don't
Understand you.
Only in the bad times,
The worst places, I find you in me.
Black juice of joy rant and storm
Surge of pain; this is the blood spring vital.

Your ghost screams in pain.
I can't believe I wrote that.
Your ghost screams in pain.
Biting itself, shredding its tongue,
Shredding its ghostly arms
With nightmare claws. Wake up now.
I'm writing this for you.
Everything is for you, these forget-me-nots,
These chocolates, this glass of gin, this rage.
The car run into a snowdrift, bottles of pills,
My crimes, my sacred enemies, lockdown
Ward two west and meds call.
What have I not given, endured?
I am faithfully yours.

Off to Provincetown

The Woodsman and I are off to Provincetown early tomorrow morning. My workshop is full and I have two manuscript conferences and a reading. This is my vacation. Actually, I should call it my "vacation from my vacation" since the whole summer is so lovely here.

When I return I will have my first two Vermont College packets waiting in the mail, and it really will be time to get to work. How can my book orders for Fall already be late? Why are students emailing me in July?

Full moon tomorrow--I hope it's clear over the harbor!

What shall I bring you all from the beach?

Part three of FREE BOOKS

Ask and you shall receive:

Creating True Prosperity, Shakti Gawain
Adobe Odes, Pat Mora

Faith

What world do you believe, which weather?
An overcast day shows the plainness of things,
like roof, chimney, stark. The river
under the highway, brown, choked with grass
standing in mud, and the car behind
pressing up, pushing for speed. Gentle lights of trucks
you have followed as guides in fog and snow,
steady, nosing forward like mastadons
wakened at dusk from their long sleep to reassure us
being leaves an imprint, all forms held
in the memory of mud enfolding time.
It's dusk, you know this road. You don't know
which world this is today, whether that black dog
regarding you from a doorstep is the buddha
or guardian of thieves, or just a black dog,
or if their is any difference really.
How can we say there were angels present at the creation
if there are no angels now? Every question
ends in unknowing, the vastest place,
ample and newly unrecognized,
though you believe you are following
a familiar road, going home at dusk.

Untitled

Now I am calling to my old loves,
asking them to help me remember myself, to redeem
whatever compromise we traded for joy.
It is not too late to remember and turn.
I live alone and a bird comes to my window.
I lie on the grass and the wind plays with my hair.
And if I don't feel a man's weight on my body
again, I won't stop wanting, reaching to taste.
Did you think you could shut up desire,
forget love for the world's body
and still be alive, that it would ever stop
hurting to desire? How many places
have we been lost, running from one another?
I lie in my bed, with the stove squatting black
in the corner, windows painted over with night,
silence of night overhead, then some curious
creature moving in the leaves, in its life,
and I listen. In memory, a small "oh"
when his hand finds the wet place, yielding
to open, breath catches, catches me up.
I won't tie up my hair, bolt the door, or stop
calling into the dark because there is a heart there
still answering, however it seems to have moved on,
however I seem to lie alone, each love in me
more alive. From many, one.

Reading

I am reading: Solution Simulacra, by Gloria Frym. United Artists Books. Recommended. I am learning from her. She does some things I do with language and sentence shifts, only better, more odd, more startling. I have the desire to steal whole lines, as if they were in fact already mine.

S.S.C.F

The trees on the ridge cut back
against the wide cleared plain of vision
and new growth, trees thin
and markedly straight
just trunks, like pencils
standing up, bare stalks
and the brush of leaves
on the top branches like a flowering...

A few white butts
scribble the dirt beneath the bench.
They look clean--tight rolled cylinders
of white paper.
The guard comes twice to ask me what;
he stays in his truck;
his face is sour like old sausage.
I am meeting the bondsman. I give
the guard the name. He owns
the names.

The surprise of a crow
rising immense and ink black
from the low field--wave of his soft wings,
and then a dozen more
and the low sun out of a crack in clouds.
The truck crawls the perimeter
covering sight lines.

You might think they
have some secret in there
--some treasure--
so careful and dour it is,
so tight
with sight lines and perimeters,
almost sacred, and you lose
everything to approach,
You give your name and your reason.
The hair blows against my cheek
from the west. That's the sun
settling, not yet down.
It warms my face, makes me squint.
Razor wire in silver curls
along the wall in straight sun.

The white lines of the parking spaces.
Two flags endlessly pluffing.
Poles, thin shadows.
Waiting a long time
the world all wrong here,
what I thought the world was
the heart of it here, what
was always there. I am being
videotaped as I wait.
They own that; I'm subscribed
in their world. They don't like me
walking around. My notebook and
wandering make me
unpredictable. So I wave my arms.
I'm not accused of a crime
but can they tell me what to do, in small
ways, in large ways, these are the rules
hard kernel in the tooth, the bolt
slung into the wall,
here where there are no exceptions.

Gher the Hound

I woke in bloody sheets,
the bandages undone,
the body's dream of pain
unwound, the torn
flesh gapes and yellow curds
of fat up from the maw swell pale--
the sweet fat that makes the curves of my arm
and calf round lovely, and blood
runs red as blessing
to clean the wound.

what flows away

I was walking
in the high meadow, parting waves
of insects in wild grass. The voice said,
lie down here
and be done with wandering.

My thoughts were philandering like bees.
I was transparent, safe as a maiden
in the garden.
No maiden is safe in the garden.
The animal came upon me and I fought,
and beat at its head and neck, went
for its eyes, red as if his shot-out eyes
bled bright and blood exploded
in his skull, a fiery, baleful light.
Claws ripped my arms
and nerves shot up like flames on a screen.
Dog's breath
on my face, sick with my own
blood on his tongue, so once we owned dominion.

And yes, the fruit turns into a bird
and flies away. The flower becomes a bee.

I am a woman and I would not be
meat for the dead.
Lie down here and be done with wandering
for the kingdom is at hand.

Free Books, Part Two

First to ask gets them


North True South Bright, Dan Beachy-Quick
Light from an Eclipse, Nancy Lagomarsino
I Have No Clue, Jack Wiler
Gloryland, Anne Marie Macari

Untitled

The American landscape painting of our time
should be sketched in a smear from a moving car.
The American landscape of our time is a parking lot
and we all agree we don't like it here
today, we'd rather be in the city, but not
the last city, or any city at war, and particularly not
any place where disaster has cut off the lights.
And I wish I could take off my shoes, here in the
office, in my vastly over-rated position,
exposing my walked-on soles; this is
the only world after all, I know of none better
and if it's what we make it, then any moment is creation.
One cell at a time, one cell at a time,
we are cousins with the trees, evolving
with green, before green, one line at a time
poems are dissolving in melting terraces, fallen
free of history, the news shoots out the lights
and testimony streams from holiday weekend backup
on the bridge and over the nest of the peregrine falcon
baffled into high-rise lodgings. Somebody locked the trees out
and they fumble the window, as if they remembered us.
The world is printed on our bones--today, today,
the blue light on the hills, ancestor of the birds,
the red-tail's wing, down the river vein--
one sky at a time, now is the time before
green, the dark eon, fractal, April's dementia,
stirring, exposing scars, the downed
power line sputtering code--who am I? who am I? --
thrashing, on fire with a holy fit, not consumed, no peace, no peace,
and the seed in self-agony swells, split out of itself
once, once again and again, and the voice of the dead
uproaring: Pick up if you're there.

Books to Give Away

I begin the PURGE.

Voices: Eleven Narrative Poems, James Magorian
Astoria, Malena Morling
Terrain Tracks, Purvi Shah
Kitchen Heat, Ava Leavell Haymon
The Book of the Rotten Daughter, Alice Friman
Floating Girl (Angel of War) Robert Randolph
Paradiso Daspora, John Yau
In Which Language Do I Keep Silent, Earl Sherman Braggs
Tests of Time, William Gass

First to ask gets it--I'll need an address.

Not everything here is a poem. Some are thoughts, some fragments. There is too much struggle to speak transparently. Let me speak through intermediaries.

Shape shifter.


Begin:

Poem

Womb

Bomb

Song

Tomb

Home

Moan

So manypoems


FRAGMENT: a lying bitch, a life sentence. Razor wire glinting in the sun, this is Vermont ? flat plain upon the hill, video watching me move. A door opens--wide, from above, like a garage door, and in the emptiness he stands, not framed, but made small, comes forward, received into the sky he was refused. I stand waiting beside the The Humvee, the bail bondsman in black wrap glasses, the fugitive recovery agent muscling tatttoos, former NFl, runs his fingers throught the other's hair, we sign the deal, we go.

Cameras watch us drive away, silent always awake.

Yet there are birds here, nesting in the flattened sight lines.



STILL: Tonight the black window, the blood too full in my flesh, a neurological event as if, like the lightning storm. Black window. So black a mirror, in color, I wave my arms over my head, weaving, hands limp following. Anenome.

Dread the telephone.

The rain comes up again, blessing, drowning. Thick air, it is feeding us, but like a tube-fed specimen I cannot move. Fattened for the altar. Don't take this personally; we all are that. That Thou Art. Worms moving in the rich dirt, riching the dirt, eat and feed... I am dirty, sweat and oil, sour smell of flesh, my hair limp and dirty, with woodsmoke and exhaust, and oil of hands touching. I breathe out -HA- and sniff the air hard. Hair growing on me, I want to crawl these woods leaning into the house like an animal, sure, growling into the dark.

Worm-white. Mushroom angel thorazine shock white. These separate words will not suffice. yet the sentence locks the cell door. (pun) a phrase a phase... ? I am groping in the dark. Relax: I meant that literally, not having turned on the light when I went to search for paper. Writing here past (beyond) hope.

This will not suffice.

\
__________________________________________
A thing written, not made... (follows)

Three days of rain and wind.
Last night cathedrals of lightning
sculpted the dark:

brief ghostly visions
of distant catastrophes.

"Go and help your brothers, who are on fire..."

Between the first deluge and the next
driving back roads, to avoid
the downed tree, the washed-out bridge, we were silent
leaving the lights of another house,
the supper toasts, the jokes and stories decades old.
It's harder to pray now
when we lie apart in the dark, to say
"we are not so cast out,"
but our sadness is bitter, how bitter

I can not taste to tell you.
A clot in my brain keeps refusing
to move, to dissolve the ancient "this can not be"
with which all who suffer and are torn forever greet
unimagined pain, imagining
it could not be intended for us, exempt: this is our greatest failing
of wisdom, how horror is forever an aberration to us,
to bow and admit
the strange angel who accuses, who prevents

peace and pierces breath and stations us here
in the dark, threading an empty road
beneath apocalyptic firestorms we will pass beyond.

Here where we may not pass, behind us
the tree down on the road, the bridge washed out
the door of the welcoming house closing
behind us, stories going on after, when
we aren't there to hear them.

We lie apart in the dark, afraid
of what is leaving us, of the banging
against the highest wall by the attic stair,
angel of probability I refuse to believe
what is

(I can't finish this right now)

You and Lulu

Whatchu doin' with Lulu?
Lulu, who you
don't even care for,
do you?

Eh la-la Lulu,
she pursued you
down Sepulveda Avenue.
Chased you. Wooed you.
Yoo-hoo hoo-ed you.

Whatchue doin' with Lulu, up in Santa Cruz-zoo?
Drinkin' ouzo?
Where'd you run so suddenly, after drinks in Albany?

Totally
lonely
up here on the second floor,
out the door in Baltimore,
neither nor Norfolk, Kansas City two-step, bad bet,
once a night in New Orleans,
with a dinner in between.

Don't you know I'm shook up
from this hookup?
Can't you see through
all her hoodoo?

Stay with me one time,
will you?

I was in my sick bed
I was on the psyche ward
I was at the seashore
I was at a conference,
no one there was making sense
I was home by the phone--
where were you?
Off with Lulu. Well screw you.

A Fly A Little Fever

I believe what I feel in my body, my knowing
skin and nerves and muscles. It's 5am
the stars are out but a storm is calling
in from Michigan, now over Lake Erie. A late-
season fly has waked from the sill
now bumbles the lamp like a drunk, and I consult my fear
which has been sleeping at the base of my spine
like a retrovirus and now is broadcasting to charge every organ
green like plutonium, like the god of the underworld
who swallows everything. These days when the mail bombards
my desk with useless complaint and the wireless ether
of the internet crackles annihilation,
remember we come here to lose everything. This makes me anxious,
which leads to regret, which is bad for me.
I'm going too far into thought. And it's true I haven't prepared
for the hour of my death, in my life
that clarity has often been lacking
so I fumbled into error. I have let down the cause.
I have spoken harshly, as if the other's ears were not my own.
All I have left undone which I ought to have
done wars with all I've done which cannot be
undone. I stand accused of laziness,
of loving this hour with my book and a single light
more than work or humanity, and furthermore of taking
injuries to heart when I know the universe
is never personal. It's still black at the window.
I'm drinking tea. I'm ignoring my correspondence.
I think I am coming down with something.
Tumor bacteria cancer a major artery.
My sore right shoulder throbs like a broken heart. I talk to it quietly
saying it's nothing, it's nothing, don't worry, we've come
from nothing you and I my body be quiet
now remember--the sweet tea steaming in the mug--
how together we love the night the storm how far it goes on, and listen
to how it says absolutely nothing, then the fly
comes alive, then the refrigerator alerting the dark kitchen
and a slight ringing in my ears
that's been there since a fever years ago, it's nothing
I don't really hear it unless I try,
like the fly, like the virus, it's not going
away without us even trying without us it all goes on.

Visions of the Actual Sky

Verde, verde. There is no god but God,
a lavendar cloud. The woman down the hill
comes out to smoke in evening light.
Her large, brain-damaged son
stands in the doorway, wide,
head hung, and a great load of firewood sprawls
on the yard. Daylight is green to the grass.

What light seared his sweet brain,
a vision fixed in Bergen, New Jersey?
The hills flow green and fantastic birds
erupt from leaves; the apple detonates in blossom.
My beloved lies in bed before dark,
naked warrior. The cells of his skull roughed up
by vandals, the burned bits stiff, with dirt adhering.
Memory like a worker's hands, layering
dirt and blood. A vision of White River Junction
when your sister drove you to the falls
and left you there, mad, a tree thief,
personal arsonist,

Better than under the bridge at any rate,
with those wild companions and little rest,
and trains on schedule force unrelenting--
remember we are dirt and blood--
all night grind stones on the track to powder.

Out there the sound of the river
plashing over rivermens' bones
the deep pool above the falls where nothing goes
over, just endlessly roiling. I hear the clack
of log runners' teeth, rocks in skulls, and bones
of animals swept downstream, and ribs of
wrecked boats, wheels and lost bicycles,
chains, engine parts, tin cans and turtles--
it all swirls round I swear I'm dumb
to say how cold the eyes that abandon us.

Diary of a Cyborg

Diary of a Cyborg


This is a pilot study
to make numbers intelligible for self-evaluation.
A woman with an iron voice clanks we must
surrender certain rights
in the face of declining resources.

If I can't keep my eyes open, who
will evaluate me, now in self-absence?
I feel my resources declining, my face
declining, growing old in this room.
Electric chandeliers and dead birds hanging
by their feet. Suck on the plastic bottle,

rehydrate, now decouple and undo
the Travis Reform Techniques.
I have dosed. Missed a connection.
Reform promotes corruption in systems.
The heart of the matter:
Those who have experienced the surveillance regime
and those who have not experienced
the surveillance regime. Density of matter.

There are some false couplings. It's my right
to surrender. I just lived my life firing sparks
in a continuous feedback loop,
never consulted with the legal department
and so I hang by my feet,
obsolete.

Dirt Cowboy

Dirt Cowboy

Oh heart, oh heart,
I sit here writing your name
on pieces of paper, folded,
hidden, misplaced.

There is the element of saying
and there is the element of making:
one needn't choose.
I am singing the dream out from the ice,
asking it to carry me like a horse
or a river, down and away.

This day, here in paned-glass sun,
the young waitress shaking out her apron
and retying it flat across her stomach--
a bit of vanity, her hair
brushed from her neck,
crash of milk bottle, granite counter, cream,
and the roots of habit and longing
briefly siezed by the mind.
So noisy here! The sound echoes up
out of all years, brought
to this showing forth.
Unrehearsed! It seems we
wake and find ourselves
doing, embodying,
the ancient gestures
by which we recognize
ourselves completed.
Not one of us could be born
and invent
life--it must show through us--
the arm flung in the air,
the coffee poured,
and down the street
someone hurrying by
head down against wind.

And a man and a woman
come to an old grief
carved in them, carved
into them--
the old way of water wearing rock
by law, and the hatred
between them is equal to the hope
neither will release.

Each wants to be whole,
to be all of time, when nothing
in this world is whole, and
this is by law.

When my father said bitterly
to my mother: you have changed,
he meant, without meaning to say,
how she had changed him. A man
holds his head down against the wind.
Yet the wind fills him
with the dust of temples,
the breath of the dead.
The dream of the light
inside the branches--
a gleam of wet, glimmer
that is a bud, the leaf
within the bud.

The photographer comes inside
and closes the lens of his camera. Then he
is the lens. Then my eye
is the light. This
is the element of saying.
The young waitress flings a
paper cup behind her, into the trash can.
That is a saying. The cream swirled
into the coffee, the sugar
dissolved, disembodied,
and the body of the
manager disappears,
swallowed behind a door.

The element of making is slow,
uncertain as a temple,
a falling forward, stitching back,
like a stone wall,
like the panes in an
arched window, like a repetiton
chosen beyond necessity.

Yet somehow we have seen
all this before--
the girl in the fur hat
speaking syrup into a phone;
the falseness of her charm
is an ancient imposter, familiar and
therefore true.
A door is opened and falls
closed. Suddenly at every table
someone looks down and is reading--
books, newspapers, calendars,
reading tea leaves, reading bones.

A woman in a periwinkle jacket: I am reading
her shoulders as the day introspects.

In dream the passive construction
and the past perfect tense prevail:
she was being pushed on a swing.
The woman with many
television credits
gazes out the window,
forgetting herself,
heavy with age, forgetting
this, forgetting sorrow, the
false husband, the crippled child,
old plots forgetting,

and it is suddenly beautiful
as something read or dreamed, the young
waitress with sun on her
face, her unblemished face,
forgetting eternity.

When a face is beautiful
above all others--your name--
when a woman appears as a
bird of prey
and we turn away
hoping not to be recognized--
oh heart!--

when the light on the branches
flares in a window with no sky,
this is old story reading us, these are springs
from words laid down before
and ahead of us,
and in the moment we are
making an answer.

Dirt Cowboy

to be continued