MEXICO
Loss
like a dry wind across us
fields gone to seed,
stems
parched by time and absence
that undefined not-ness,
gone-ness
as the chips scatter by.
Yes I remember as lovers,
your supple musculature beneath me--
how I worshiped it at that time,
clumsy as I was in my own skin.
The sureness of your every movement
arrested me.
But
time challenges:
a transparent hand reached through
and gripped your spine,
and you, unable to move, had to bear it as it came.
Possibly fighting,
possibly letting it just
wash
over you--
whichever you chose
went unheeded in the end.
Yesterday in the
tunnel by the 7 train
I came upon a Ranchera guitarist delicately finger-
picking the old songs from memory.
The old songs!
You said when you were there, the heat
was shimmering
through your body.
You said you visited old cemeteries, like everybody does,
smiled at skeletons dressed for the day of the dead.
I said death is closer there,
they understand how it brushes up against us.
You smiled at that,
not yet knowing
what you were about to be knowing.
And as each loss held you,
cradled your head in its spidery arms,
you stiffened yourself against its hollow chest,
discarding gracefulness and pleasure as you
armored up against it.
That car you possessed, that possessed you,
sweaty afternoon on the midwestern interstate,
hair blowing across your face (I looked sideways,
blocked by the sun, it seemed like an hour before we spoke).
The ghost of that desire
standing by the road,
thumb out as we passed.
What a memory is stirred up by the old songs!
And the same moon
is centered on a blue-black sky,
no matter how far we've come from home
******
THE COSTA RICA OF THE MIND
In the Costa Rica of the mind languid Iguanas bask in the terrace half-shade
bars of sunlight cross their wrinkled backs and shoulders as they eye
glass-winged butterflies who unroll the stems of their mouths
delicately toward the stems of flowers
glistening with equatorial dew
In the Costa Rica of the mind the green of the pungent forest
disintegrates all other greens, touches the glaze-blue of sky over water,
penetrates the blueness of water, illuminates the grey-green of water
beneath blueness, water slithered with brazen hungry fish
and punctured by white coral, pierced by your two legs
and framed by the shadow of your body on the wavetops--
In the Costa Rica of the mind Specked -glass sand particles cling to your foot
as you stumble, naked, face toward the white sun
drenched with laughter and the salt-quick tongue of the ocean
as the crabs scurry sideways to avoid their calamity
In the Costa Rica of the mind you are attempting to buy marijuana
in fractured Spanish he answers back in broken English--
the world is disintegrating
where wholes once stood, only pieces are left in their place
In the New York City of the mind I arrive at Delancey Street,
fatigued and sweat-soaked
under the worn flourescents, shivering like ghosts
up to the pavement, moonlit and streetIamp-lit,
missing everyone, hoping some bar will contain
a familiar face or two
the growl and shriek of the train cars almost drowns
the conversations of the new arrivals:
Spanish in a torrent, one story in words
and another in the breathing beneath the words--
keeping their distance, they eye me, nervously.
They have reached for their precious sliver of prosperity
only to have it shatter beneath them
in this distant dark and noisy turmoil
where the shadow of the elevated train is always overhead.
In the Costa Rica of the mind
those that have stayed behind
look for a brief moment
out over your pale naked shining body
reddening beneath their sun
and they feel the shrug of the stone pyramid shoulders
buried deep in the thick damp mountain of the jungle
and they watch you riding the stallion of their history
the knife-points of the spurs drawing fresh blood
as you thunder past.
********
CLIMBING WEST MOUNTAIN
As always, I followed Margaret.
Branch tops split sunlight like fish line over a calm lake
We walked upward into the wind's eye
We needed to rest
although she did not.
Patiently chaperoning the city folks
through the dark cleavage of the mountain,
cool earth and damp moss
a pierced rock,
half drowned in shadows as we rumbled past,
talking like morning sparrows,
but feeling the person-weight on our two legs.
I smelled the leaf smell,
as the wind shivered leaf sweat off their veined backs,
water clinging to our backs and shoulders as we passed.
Quite suddenly we opened out into the empty sky
blue-white like a blow-torch tip,
impossibly far and deep below.
I turned toward Margaret
she looked southeast toward Lake Luzerne
Her thoughts as opaque to me
as the green and slate-gray surface
of the water in the distance.
******
POSEIDON'S COVE
The seventh wave is
the wave desired.
There, you can see it
from this
vantage point right here,
the orange day-end
glinting off the foam top.
Angry below it, driven before the wind,
Driven to shore, beach stones embrace it.
A feral cat strides across the beach,
observing,
questioning,
making decisions
based on pure, unsullied reason.
You appear in my peripheral vision,
walking in step with the mathematics of
first, fifth, seventh wave—the ocean recedes again and again.
Beach glass, fine silt of old bottles,
diamond bright and blood wet, hides just under the sand.
Are you this close now? I will step back
to maintain the distance between us.
This close?
Cat footprints,
clams burying themselves,
shivering their soft bodies
in the pleasure of hiding:
unfound, unseen, unsullied.
******
Excerpts from CBGBs
6
Right.....now ha ha ha ha!
We heard him first on the jukebox,
Here
In the dark recess, a candle on each table
spitting through that first line
Churning giant noise behind him
We waited for our nation to be formed.
We had to have it again
and again.
We forgot Baudelaire, embraced guttersnipes,
the largest voice in the room
waiting to peel away the skin of disuse
I want to be, I want to be ahhh--
We wailed, thwarted, re-dreaming our dreams, ourselves,
gasping for breath each time and then sinking back,
renewed, strapping ourselves to it again,
only to fail again,only to let ourselves sink into it,
only to be buoyed up again by its subversive turbulence (the only way to be!)
only to taste it again and again and again
get pissed, destroy.
10
Dandelion seed of 1979 drifted down onto the flat plain of 1980.
I remember wind that year, my imagination I guess, there's always wind.
My coat too thin, always too thin. I wore leather and two sweatshirts.
The sun seemed to hover on the horizon, never arriving.
Threats and whispers, dangerous.
It was dangerous to be moving around.
I noticed you could no longer hitch-hike.
Strangers rolled up their windows as they went past, looking glumly straight ahead.
Whatever power we once had in being young was lost now.
He spoke on the TV.
It was very calm.
Morning in America.
To just catch your own reflection in a window was to be free.
To think your thoughts.
Bombs hovered in the air, catching the pale sunlight, their shivering reflective skin waiting for dark when they would be truly beautiful.
A bomb hovered over each of us, paused, waiting.
We built up our nerve and dashed out through the open door.
Morning in America.
11
the partial birth of reluctant adult-essence.
the partial birth of the great fluttering, preening, presence.
The great ship bearing out to sea, the gulls, grouped and relaxed.
the partial birth, two legs out, wet and bloody,
trailing remains and fluid--a road across the pristine floor.
Thirty stars behind a cloud,
thinking I, transfixed and stubborn among them,
blinking in time with all of them,
partial this time,
yes, the next year more full, I hoped.
12
I think I remember this table,
already chipped and pockmarked when I sat here so long ago--
I think Stiv Bators, throwing up on stage, barely missed me that night
I grabbed a napkin, just in case.
Now stretching my thumb and forefinger across the wood
I measure the space in the candle-shadow.
The feel of warm wax, now as then,
head thrown back, below ancient neon beer signs,
dirt-stained piping and electrical conduit, a century of dust,
old tin and the heads of rusted bolts--
just below heaven in other words, with hell vibrating beneath my feet.
Outside, the sun rises and sets.
There's a fancy restaurant across the street now.
Everyone I meet seems very young.
I have no claim on this place, it has very little use for me.
My history here is forgotten--
unlike St. Peter's, there are no tombs for the dead Dead Boys,
the lost Heartbreakers,
DNV,
or Joey or Dee Dee.
We have all vanished from this place.
And yet.
We return, never so alone as the night air leads us to believe,
and much more substantial
than the ghosts we think we have become
******
THAT WOULD LET YOU KNOW
late.
sudden hum and whine of the compressor
starting in the old coke machine over by the gas station
chips the night without shattering it through.
Maybe a possum or raccoon stops and looks up--
maybe not.
Maybe a tom cat going between yards puts his ears up--
maybe a cricket goes silent for a second or two.
I voice a dry hum in the damp air:
Maybe I could be standing under your dark window
until your face arrived on the other side
that would let you know--
I could run up your fire escape double time
shake off the first dew with the edges of my fingers,
make the old iron fairly sing with my bootsteps,
throw open the door and rush into your room--
surely, then--
Instead I stared at your empty window for a long time
I was in the darkness out in the yard
even the dogs and all their owners were asleep--
I stood in the world of mice and cats and nightcrawlers
and glow worms, crickets and moths going
from light to light to light
I stared at your empty window
I tried to stare through your house:
dreamed the stucco into
dust
I was in the darkness out in the yard, dreaming--
you couldn't see me:
invisibility.
I dreamed I told you I was invisible, you disagreed.
We watched an old silent film
and you needed comforting: I
comforted.
"What a relic," I laughed, but you weren't in that mood.
You were whispering a lot
I could barely understand what you were saying
If only I could think of
what it is you could do for me, exactly
that would let you know something
but
******
Loss
like a dry wind across us
fields gone to seed,
stems
parched by time and absence
that undefined not-ness,
gone-ness
as the chips scatter by.
Yes I remember as lovers,
your supple musculature beneath me--
how I worshiped it at that time,
clumsy as I was in my own skin.
The sureness of your every movement
arrested me.
But
time challenges:
a transparent hand reached through
and gripped your spine,
and you, unable to move, had to bear it as it came.
Possibly fighting,
possibly letting it just
wash
over you--
whichever you chose
went unheeded in the end.
Yesterday in the
tunnel by the 7 train
I came upon a Ranchera guitarist delicately finger-
picking the old songs from memory.
The old songs!
You said when you were there, the heat
was shimmering
through your body.
You said you visited old cemeteries, like everybody does,
smiled at skeletons dressed for the day of the dead.
I said death is closer there,
they understand how it brushes up against us.
You smiled at that,
not yet knowing
what you were about to be knowing.
And as each loss held you,
cradled your head in its spidery arms,
you stiffened yourself against its hollow chest,
discarding gracefulness and pleasure as you
armored up against it.
That car you possessed, that possessed you,
sweaty afternoon on the midwestern interstate,
hair blowing across your face (I looked sideways,
blocked by the sun, it seemed like an hour before we spoke).
The ghost of that desire
standing by the road,
thumb out as we passed.
What a memory is stirred up by the old songs!
And the same moon
is centered on a blue-black sky,
no matter how far we've come from home
******
THE COSTA RICA OF THE MIND
In the Costa Rica of the mind languid Iguanas bask in the terrace half-shade
bars of sunlight cross their wrinkled backs and shoulders as they eye
glass-winged butterflies who unroll the stems of their mouths
delicately toward the stems of flowers
glistening with equatorial dew
In the Costa Rica of the mind the green of the pungent forest
disintegrates all other greens, touches the glaze-blue of sky over water,
penetrates the blueness of water, illuminates the grey-green of water
beneath blueness, water slithered with brazen hungry fish
and punctured by white coral, pierced by your two legs
and framed by the shadow of your body on the wavetops--
In the Costa Rica of the mind Specked -glass sand particles cling to your foot
as you stumble, naked, face toward the white sun
drenched with laughter and the salt-quick tongue of the ocean
as the crabs scurry sideways to avoid their calamity
In the Costa Rica of the mind you are attempting to buy marijuana
in fractured Spanish he answers back in broken English--
the world is disintegrating
where wholes once stood, only pieces are left in their place
In the New York City of the mind I arrive at Delancey Street,
fatigued and sweat-soaked
under the worn flourescents, shivering like ghosts
up to the pavement, moonlit and streetIamp-lit,
missing everyone, hoping some bar will contain
a familiar face or two
the growl and shriek of the train cars almost drowns
the conversations of the new arrivals:
Spanish in a torrent, one story in words
and another in the breathing beneath the words--
keeping their distance, they eye me, nervously.
They have reached for their precious sliver of prosperity
only to have it shatter beneath them
in this distant dark and noisy turmoil
where the shadow of the elevated train is always overhead.
In the Costa Rica of the mind
those that have stayed behind
look for a brief moment
out over your pale naked shining body
reddening beneath their sun
and they feel the shrug of the stone pyramid shoulders
buried deep in the thick damp mountain of the jungle
and they watch you riding the stallion of their history
the knife-points of the spurs drawing fresh blood
as you thunder past.
********
CLIMBING WEST MOUNTAIN
As always, I followed Margaret.
Branch tops split sunlight like fish line over a calm lake
We walked upward into the wind's eye
We needed to rest
although she did not.
Patiently chaperoning the city folks
through the dark cleavage of the mountain,
cool earth and damp moss
a pierced rock,
half drowned in shadows as we rumbled past,
talking like morning sparrows,
but feeling the person-weight on our two legs.
I smelled the leaf smell,
as the wind shivered leaf sweat off their veined backs,
water clinging to our backs and shoulders as we passed.
Quite suddenly we opened out into the empty sky
blue-white like a blow-torch tip,
impossibly far and deep below.
I turned toward Margaret
she looked southeast toward Lake Luzerne
Her thoughts as opaque to me
as the green and slate-gray surface
of the water in the distance.
******
POSEIDON'S COVE
The seventh wave is
the wave desired.
There, you can see it
from this
vantage point right here,
the orange day-end
glinting off the foam top.
Angry below it, driven before the wind,
Driven to shore, beach stones embrace it.
A feral cat strides across the beach,
observing,
questioning,
making decisions
based on pure, unsullied reason.
You appear in my peripheral vision,
walking in step with the mathematics of
first, fifth, seventh wave—the ocean recedes again and again.
Beach glass, fine silt of old bottles,
diamond bright and blood wet, hides just under the sand.
Are you this close now? I will step back
to maintain the distance between us.
This close?
Cat footprints,
clams burying themselves,
shivering their soft bodies
in the pleasure of hiding:
unfound, unseen, unsullied.
******
Excerpts from CBGBs
6
Right.....now ha ha ha ha!
We heard him first on the jukebox,
Here
In the dark recess, a candle on each table
spitting through that first line
Churning giant noise behind him
We waited for our nation to be formed.
We had to have it again
and again.
We forgot Baudelaire, embraced guttersnipes,
the largest voice in the room
waiting to peel away the skin of disuse
I want to be, I want to be ahhh--
We wailed, thwarted, re-dreaming our dreams, ourselves,
gasping for breath each time and then sinking back,
renewed, strapping ourselves to it again,
only to fail again,only to let ourselves sink into it,
only to be buoyed up again by its subversive turbulence (the only way to be!)
only to taste it again and again and again
get pissed, destroy.
10
Dandelion seed of 1979 drifted down onto the flat plain of 1980.
I remember wind that year, my imagination I guess, there's always wind.
My coat too thin, always too thin. I wore leather and two sweatshirts.
The sun seemed to hover on the horizon, never arriving.
Threats and whispers, dangerous.
It was dangerous to be moving around.
I noticed you could no longer hitch-hike.
Strangers rolled up their windows as they went past, looking glumly straight ahead.
Whatever power we once had in being young was lost now.
He spoke on the TV.
It was very calm.
Morning in America.
To just catch your own reflection in a window was to be free.
To think your thoughts.
Bombs hovered in the air, catching the pale sunlight, their shivering reflective skin waiting for dark when they would be truly beautiful.
A bomb hovered over each of us, paused, waiting.
We built up our nerve and dashed out through the open door.
Morning in America.
11
the partial birth of reluctant adult-essence.
the partial birth of the great fluttering, preening, presence.
The great ship bearing out to sea, the gulls, grouped and relaxed.
the partial birth, two legs out, wet and bloody,
trailing remains and fluid--a road across the pristine floor.
Thirty stars behind a cloud,
thinking I, transfixed and stubborn among them,
blinking in time with all of them,
partial this time,
yes, the next year more full, I hoped.
12
I think I remember this table,
already chipped and pockmarked when I sat here so long ago--
I think Stiv Bators, throwing up on stage, barely missed me that night
I grabbed a napkin, just in case.
Now stretching my thumb and forefinger across the wood
I measure the space in the candle-shadow.
The feel of warm wax, now as then,
head thrown back, below ancient neon beer signs,
dirt-stained piping and electrical conduit, a century of dust,
old tin and the heads of rusted bolts--
just below heaven in other words, with hell vibrating beneath my feet.
Outside, the sun rises and sets.
There's a fancy restaurant across the street now.
Everyone I meet seems very young.
I have no claim on this place, it has very little use for me.
My history here is forgotten--
unlike St. Peter's, there are no tombs for the dead Dead Boys,
the lost Heartbreakers,
DNV,
or Joey or Dee Dee.
We have all vanished from this place.
And yet.
We return, never so alone as the night air leads us to believe,
and much more substantial
than the ghosts we think we have become
******
THAT WOULD LET YOU KNOW
late.
sudden hum and whine of the compressor
starting in the old coke machine over by the gas station
chips the night without shattering it through.
Maybe a possum or raccoon stops and looks up--
maybe not.
Maybe a tom cat going between yards puts his ears up--
maybe a cricket goes silent for a second or two.
I voice a dry hum in the damp air:
Maybe I could be standing under your dark window
until your face arrived on the other side
that would let you know--
I could run up your fire escape double time
shake off the first dew with the edges of my fingers,
make the old iron fairly sing with my bootsteps,
throw open the door and rush into your room--
surely, then--
Instead I stared at your empty window for a long time
I was in the darkness out in the yard
even the dogs and all their owners were asleep--
I stood in the world of mice and cats and nightcrawlers
and glow worms, crickets and moths going
from light to light to light
I stared at your empty window
I tried to stare through your house:
dreamed the stucco into
dust
I was in the darkness out in the yard, dreaming--
you couldn't see me:
invisibility.
I dreamed I told you I was invisible, you disagreed.
We watched an old silent film
and you needed comforting: I
comforted.
"What a relic," I laughed, but you weren't in that mood.
You were whispering a lot
I could barely understand what you were saying
If only I could think of
what it is you could do for me, exactly
that would let you know something
but
******