Saturday, June 23, 2007

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.

Friday, June 22, 2007

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.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Dirt Cowboy

to be continued