AMY
and then.
and then just walking out the door, and shutting it behind you.
Sitting in the dark at a back table in the Fort at Sidewalk Cafe,
the single candle glow softening the bottom of your chin
drunk and small and in love with your friends
and smiling the way that you so often did
which meant: I am feeling good right this minute
but of course it will not last.
Mid-afternoon sun through the window in the hospital room
because you had almost died twice
and you were in your pajamas,
Nan brought you a coloring book and you were so small
you held your hand out for the crayons like a child
and we held your hand
and you promised to take better care of yourself
and I looked out across Manhattan, glistening in the sunlight
and I remember thinking:
this is the daughter we can't reclaim.
and I have an email where you wrote that the "worst feeling in the world"
would be the "death of a family member or close friend."
The worst feeling in the world.
and then just walking out the door, and shutting it behind you.
********
TARA
Suddenly
As I was staring at Tara
trying to see if she was any taller than her guitar
she scowled and crouched under that beat up hat
throttling her guitar neck as if it might actually be Les Paul,
and he had done something
unspeakable to Mary Ford
Suddenly
as I was staring at Tara
my whole brain stuttered to hear her
caught short like a pause between curses
no rails braced me at that moment
no light quartered the darkness
no song could pierce the inferno
of my singular arousal
as I stood alone
near a wall
in a bar
in the heat
in the tense coiling snake of the pulsing crowd
Suddenly
as I was staring at Tara
she became alone in this world
as I became the world she would be alone in,
skin stretched infinitely fine in all directions
as she circled and patrolled the skin of me
forming the world she would be alone in
and then
as I vomited up the afterbirth
of the world she would be alone in
tasted the sourness of it
smelled the bitter ghastly smell of it
as she crouched and scowled,
fingers probing, twisting
straining to pull bloody life
from glistening womb of
Les Paul's round squat sunburst body
she midwifed Les Paul
as a woman
in the world
that she would be alone in.
Suddenly
as I was staring at Tara
she rocked forward dangerously
scattering her musicians
and their devices,
leaving only the after-image
burned into our brain:
pain dressed as rapture
and rapture bloodied
before it's slain
********
LIKE ROBERT JOHNSON IN REVERSE
Like Robert Johnson in reverse
sold his guitar
to the devil
so that he could play the fat strings of his soul
so that he could hold it,
arm outstretched and slowly moving in towards his body,
a slow exhale of breath, balancing the forces--
he wanted to step through the arched doorway into the
darkness, slowly
into the silent unguarded room
not leaving a trace except where he ran his finger along
the sideboard--
the dust track traced, unsettled
in the near-glow before sunrise
treading without a sound, effortless in concentration
things falling away from him.
Was that the curve of long-dead Africa
that passed through his body
like the sigh and breath of the choir before the hymn?
I was in his room.
It was night. We had to lock up one more time. It was an
effort to climb the stairs. The naked lightbulb shocked me. I
felt interrogated. Everyone had come before I had come.
The furniture had been removed. There was a single
garbage bag, half-full. His frightened cat in a corner, not yet
moved to a new location. Terry was getting the bass amp--
heavy, old, and square like a grave-stone. I carried it from
the bottom. I did not trust the handle.
I felt him in my body and yet
I did not feel him at all.
Bill stood
on the sidewalk in front of the church
pierced (it seemed to me, standing in front)
by a thin white streak of light stained faintly yellow
from the church doorway: the door ajar, leaking light
which pooled on the sidewalk,
even after traveling through us.
We could hear the minister intoning,
not the words but
the implication of the immortality of the soul.
The faint scent of the Hudson
tugged gently at our mortal bodies.
We understood at that moment
there was no soul
except our own remembrances,
the gone-ness of his body entire and complete.
And with the body, everything of him--
the string that tied together his voice and thoughts,
tied together the scent of him,
cigarettes. patchoulie, beer, rum, and incense
the confident stroke of his hand on a lover's thigh,
that string was unwound now, evaporated
like dew at midmorning.
We spoke about him, quietly
raising our voices only when
the parishioners began to shout.
I would have liked to have been there. When he went down
to the crossroads. And the devil revealed to him that there is
no god--
********
FARRELL
I first encountered her
not inside her song but poised on its front lawn,
amidst the ornaments and suburban finery.
Looking through the gate, I saw:
reflected in the steep, lace-bordered windows,
phrases that seemed as docile and naive
as the sun-drunk sleeping lioness,
but growled and spit as I recalled them moments later
like a page written in the book of what it is.
I was determined, almost desperate to talk
but then of course struck dumb at the sight of her
sitting across from me at the table
When she spoke it was so pure and strange
voice balanced on breath like a child
but with the careful diction of a woman who had been-
where?
a place wholly foreign to me and yet within walking
distance,
a street I might have seen
while exploring the solitary suburban precincts
on a bicycle just before dusk,
or a place driven past, me glancing at the back of my
mother's head in the driver's seat
--and yet not that place.
More likely a mirage town, green-grassed, tree-spewed
suburbs suspended over a lake of hallucinatory
translucence,
where every tiny particle of reflected moonlight
seeks its meaning.
Well,
I managed the smallest small talk ever
and then it got late.
I followed her out toward the street
(her car parked in a lot nearby, she had to get to it before
they closed)
the cool early summer night air made me hesitate by the
door--
I leaned against the inner doorway,
took a breath, and put my collar up.
I was worried she might think I would attack her, I was so
intent--
but all she got was a pointless story about something I did
in junior high school, which she no doubt would forget
by the time she got home.
As we parted (I had a long subway ride back) I said
"Adios"--
the only thing I could think of, trying to sound
cosmopolitan.
Because there was no book of what it was,
I found myself trying to write it on my way
I wrote in block letters across the top of the page,
crossed it out, destroyed the page, started again,
drew two lines, listed everything I knew--
a silhouette meticulously torn from
the dark nebula of the brain--mostly dust
but solidly real, nonetheless.
And because I had no book of what it would be,
in another bar on Houston Street
I inadvertently brushed too hard against her shadow
even at ten paces I could feel the sting of it,
and vowed silently to avoid it next time if possible.
And although by the end of the night
the surface of her ocean calmed, beneath it--
well, I wouldn't know--
although I thought I could still feel the occasional
electric pulse
of distant lightning striking.
But of course it is the songs--isn't it always about the songs?
each a mirage construction,
the particles reinforced with steel, riveted--
somehow illuminated (through a miracle of science) from
the inside
every corner worked so perfectly that it anticipates nature
and then goes one better and springs
fully formed into the air,
as if you had already dreamed it
and merely forgotten your dream.
But the volume of it, the sheer sense of it,
the congealed rage and revealed bursts of rapture,
the whisper and the roar of it
reveals her:
still in the center of it
slightly smiling (if it is a night when you are lucky),
wearing cool shoes
black guitar dipped hipward
hair streaking damply across her face
the curve of her arm as she holds the chord
cutting knifelike
as she interprets the pleasure
of the unseen spiral expanding inside her--
as she announces her condition
reads from the book of what it is
eyes somehow illuminated from the inside
in a face weary with possibilities
as we beg desperately to disagree with her own
anguished lyric
no
not a poor lost soul
not a
poor
poor
poor
lost--
********
14 LETTERS TO JUSTINE
Un, deux, trois,Justine qui fais comme sa ma cherie?
Un, deux, trois,Justine qui fais comme sa ma cherie?
Maman dit oui, papa dit non,Celui mo lais, celui mo prends.
Maman dit oui, papa dit non,Celui mo lais, celui mo prends.
--Creole folk song
1
Does it start in a singular place?
a place where I might have been seen
sitting by the curb knees up,
arms around knees, as Frankie Valli
wailed the ending of Rag Doll
somewhere in the distance
as a moist and solitary dusk
enveloped me,
as I curled up tighter into the small spiral that I was becoming
as the dusk enveloped my self
as the spike-winged Long Island bats flew,
dancing like the tattoo needle--blood and black ink, ever darker
over the seamless hem of
summer night slowly crawling
through the branches of the dark caterpillar webbed trees
I think it began then.
2
and in my picture of you
(when I first heard)
it appeared this way:
spinning on the concrete
and
finally you
taking your hands off the wheel
putting your hands in front of your face
surrendering to it in that moment--
it was going to go its own way now,
you saw that
and that humming you heard
in the dark space after the breaking of the glass
was the soft mourning call of the background radiation
as it made the journey
passing even that close to your untouched face
in your ruined car
3
he
delights in delighting, has found
the single filament, that
once lit, burns in such a way that
it fills even that dark space just past the jaw,
(yes trace your finger over it
if you are thinking about it, it is OK to do it.)
Mona said:
"If I were her lover,
I would always need to touch her."
to feel what warmth there?
to touch her is
to be pulled along through her ferocious wake
to be troubled by desire
to know she is still in our world
Mona showed me: flesh to flesh, we always need
the reassurance of physical presence.
And he
surrenders to flesh
by unconsciously stroking her forehead
so delicately
that even the transfer of perspiration
finger to face
is captured, each molecule, one
by one.
4
turn slowly, I.
One thought having split
into segments, I
recognize the prism it
creates.
turning slowly, I
seize one thought,
but having it split into segments,
and in reaching out ungracefully,
seizing what I think are
the segments, after the split, I
turn too slowly. I
can only
recognize the polished edge
of what I think I would seize,
or a segment of one thought
if only I
was not turning so
slowly.
5
Who are these children?
having stood endlessly on lines in the filthy street
having been frisked and eyed suspiciously
now poised under the spotlights in the Twilo men's room
now nervously approaching the dance floor
like colts at the starting gate for the first time:
skittish and hesitant, but so anxious to be finally set free--
now grabbing for that desperate breaking
of the holy boundaries that separate them
as they whirl and grasp each other
eyes narrowed in concentration
eerie in the faint greenish light of the glowsticks,
soiled discarded water bottles at their feet-- Who?
Steam lingers in the air from smoke machines,
the chemical smell marks it as both artificial and real,
and, like all smoke, both there
and not there.
(Sweat and near-intimacy:
I touch a hand. Your hand? Maybe not.
I treasure the warmth of it.)
You imagine silence
in a way that pierces the din
and renders the vast delicious throb of the bass drum
distant as late summer thunder--
Half-seen reflections of
half-perceived faces
in the great transforming darkness:
as it absorbs, excretes, is still, undulates.
It is the darkness underwater, in the train tunnel,
the back of the empty theater as the ending credits roll,
soy bean fields under a new moon,
dissolving into what might soon be luminescence.
And
through a hallway,
and out a door and you turn
(and wasn't I asking something
about children?
Sometime during this long long night
I seem to have forgotten the question)
and through another door
and finally out --
and with blinding, painful suddenness
into the shining sun-flecked world,
just coming out of its coma, with birds, to greet you.
6
She's the outlaw driver
don't care when or where she goes
she's the outlaw driver
don't care when or where she goes
looking for the bed of thorns
now that the bloom is off the rose
He's acting the wounded martyr
she's acting the injured wife
he's acting the wounded martyr
she's acting the injured wife
each is telling the other
"I won't lose control of my life"
On a day like this
I feel so anti-personnel
On a day like this
I feel so anti-personnel
just like Justine in her golden car
driving all the way to hell
7
Among these graffiti is the name of someone I love.
Now you see how hard it is to translate
these haiku.
The Zen masters wait
for the moment of satori
and when it comes,
in all its sudden brevity
they understand that it is not the way of the world.
They had all along been gathering blossoms for this event.
Truth of self doesn't come alone
the selves interlock--
we reach satori all or never.
Among the graffiti
the name of sacred you.
8
The day will come when
I will lose you
yes I remember you once said friends even after
civilization is destroyed and all we
have to eat are rats and vermin
but the connection is
so tenuous even now.
And I don't mean to be watching
the last reel of the movie before the first
(although of course the film can never stop moving or else the celluloid burns right through)
it's not that the future is clear to me:
I get no clues from the movements of stars,
or the secret logic of the cards,
I've never been one for divining by bones and circles of fire,
but I know it.
I didn't get the phone call I expected, the promised visit,
that unexpected talk on a cool night by the public beach road.
I mean two human beings facing each other. You know what I mean.
Why couldn't you ever acknowledge
our shared secret? What is it that is frightening you?
And me, alone at home, up late
writing poem after poem,
punching the air
as the shadows advance along the far wall
and out across the hallway,
and you not really worrying about it,
because after all what is it really?
and I wrote you a letter titled:
"are you there?"
and I promised and promised
and you took those promises
and stored them
as if you had been expecting them.
And you are the one that I write for, always
and you are the one that started me on this descent into this ring of fire
and you can't ever stop vibrating long enough to let me near you
and you are describing a circle
that is so large
you can never tell if it is complete
and you are describing your future plans that will
remove you from me
and even then I know you will be
surprised
to learn that I know
I will lose you.
9
through you
glides wind down
glides lately down breathes
through you it slides faintly down
to you.
through you
sand stops wave
wave stops air
wind beats waves
tarnished soft pools glow,
sand trickles through water
pulsed with light
pink, white, white on white with gray--
wind glides wind down
glides lately down,
breathes.
10
Joys impregnate, Sorrows bring forth.
--Blake
And so finally it was over.
what was built, stone on stone,
the late nights, the anger, the drawn-out
pleasure.
Could you mourn the desire of it,
implied or deliberate, real and imagined?
In the end, you had fused that body to your own --
if it breathed, you took a breath.
And now, abandoned in the smoke and static and PA music,
you helped each other pile the instrument cases together
in the corner by the stage for the last time
and Louise sobbed on my shoulder
because it was the nearest available shoulder
and this time nobody wanted to stay around afterward.
I have a snapshot of us, watching it
flash-struck staring faces, caught
straining to declone ourselves, to take back that part of us
we had loaned out to you
but of course you had fused our bodies
to your own and there could be no separating them,
no relief, the pleasure stolen from it,
leaving only a long and bitter silence.
11
what is the delicious kiss
and desire of chaos?
it howls mightily through the night, and then
pierces through at daybreak, arms bare and brittle,
lips slightly moist, just licked,
the king of the universe beginning his journey
yet one more time.
you cannot organize the world
just because you acknowledge it.
12
And in the end
I have nothing to offer you
except maybe a
terra cotta circle,
Fired for a day and a night deep underground
Bathed in molten glass that puddles
in glistening irregularity all around it
Embracing it tighter and tighter
as it cools and cracks and shivers
still confining warmth deep within it
And in the end
I have nothing to offer you
But this clockwork model of the universe
Each miniature star and planet on a stem of cold steel
Rotating endlessly to the whir and click of machinery
Each planet contains a tiny emerald -- each star a diamond,
obsidian for black holes,
nebulae, a sprinkle of tiny pearls.
13
I give you a flower you give me a bar of gold. no. that is not the gift I mean to get. you
can understand biology but not the drop of moisture that sticks to a single bristle just below the half-formed bottom layer of petals. I cannot make myself small enough to keep you from knowing, that is not the gift I mean to get. you offer, imploring. there is a piercing rod just below your gift if I reach for it. there is a tiny drop of blood just out of sight. I offer a flower you offer a bar of gold but the knife edge of it forces me to drop it again and again, slick edge stained cold as the floor clatters with expectation.
14
this is your brain
this is your brain on fire
cindered once, twice
picking through charred particles
eating its own heart forever
this is the night a DJ saved my life
radiant with holy expectation
this is the night the Sufi said
to truly know fire
you must first be burned
this is the bewildered infant face
of making into being
filling its tiny lungs ready to
roar and cry louder than the ocean
as we pray uselessly for another vision
that might be nearly as good as the last,
the moon floating overhead: the silent traveler
two dogs howling at its gate
this is what it could look like
this is the first and best
this is the demon abducting a goddess
this is the ransom note
this is the glow that makes the glow
the stark shine of semen in the morning coffee
this is the lazy river, the broken clock
this is the truest straight line the lazer beam
the ruby light just below my shoulder
this is the one tear full of all tears brushed away
stung out of me by the burnished crisp lavender of air
cold as a damped fire
this is your icon patron saint as she stares down
from her billboard, two round eyes and no mouth
as she stares passively down on us on earth
this is you wandering as a goddess of your own making
this is the demon abducting a goddess
to truly know fire
you must first be burned
******
TO SKIP JAMES
Anger
took that part in you
and the shallow breath of pleasures never opened.
You
looked back on it with regret but cut your losses.
Cold clean slit still stings
piping like a single bird
perched on
the frayed casing
of the neglected phone line
casting its thin shadow
on the parched churchyard lawn.
******
UNEXPECTED DAUGHTER
Well
When I read that you loved that game "Operation"
when you were a kid and how you laughed and screamed
when you touched the side with those metal tweezers
and it completed the circuit and that buzzer went off--
that home movie was in my mind
with the greenish uncorrected color
and that flat harsh light with deep shadows
moving across the living room.
And that empty space on the couch behind you
was me
And the warmth that you did not feel
on your small hand was me.
Reaching for that screen-door handle--
cricketed summer night, fireflies like exclamation points--
who was quietly touching your forehead?
who was softly stroking your hair,
in that moment when the force behind a sullen look
carried itself right through you and out, exploding, into the
world--
who understood that
this night would not come again?
And who was awakened
by that slight change in your breathing
in the cold hours before dawn,
your whispered signal permeating
like the lowest bass note, shattering the surface
even while straining to comprehend it--
but as the door to your room opened slowly
both you and I knew
that shadow cast by the night-light was not my shadow.
And who, appearing before you now,
nodding slightly, is looking just past you
imagining another way you might have arrived:
not unscathed,
but without your deepest wounds.
And sometimes
exhausted and charmed by your fragile radiance
you remind me
of those moments when
I wanted so badly to have held
the unexpected daughter.
And sometimes you make me think
I have ordained a poor substitute for the beauty of
possibility--
but what's done is done
someone always says "well I have no regrets"
but someone is lying, I think
I have tried to harness the engine of regret--
and it has served me reluctantly, but well.
******
HELLHOUND
I got to keep movin'
blues fallin down like hail
I got to keep movin'
blues fallin down like
Fuck you and the car you drove in on.
Fuck your sweet boy back country drawl
and your beer and tee shirts
Fuck your half smile
and your eyes in the 3 AM half-light
I wrote two songs for you
but you only hear your own song now
Fuck the guilt and pain that strangles like
a thick black snake
burrowing through your heart and
into my heart now, too
fuck your lonely mission that
you can't explain
Fuck you and the car you drove in on.
I tried to move heaven through my door for you
but you brought your hell with you
when you crossed the threshold
and you left your hell with me
when you crossed back over the state line.
The damned cry out over the telephone lines
when we talk long distance
now what creatures will enter into me
through your fiery doorway?
I can tell the wind is rising
the leaves trembling on the tree
I can tell the wind is rising
the leaves trembling on the tree
a hellhound on my trail
hellhound on my trail
hellhound on my trail
******