Portal


Those armed and glaring forms,
seeming guardians
that deputize for mountains
on either side of the gorge,
reveal no origin, yet one may sense
their why and whence.  They were evil
forbidden to act
by some enormous spell,
which made no other mark,
displays no energy,
but leaves it to its object
to petrify and swell.




Drink to That


Sunset; a bland, composite skyline
that empties onto prairie, veldt, and steppe.
Pedestrians, once turbulent and violent,
here fearful, hurrying home.
The mirror behind the bar reveals
a mouth pursed by the sharpest sweetness
or memory of pain.
You know this is the wrong eternity;
the knowledge guarantees you will remain.




The Paper


At least on weekends, time reads me,
culling ads, skimming editorials
and cartoons.
But I no longer read the paper.
We are both failed technologies
for transmitting the lies, spin,
and human-interest stories
of time.  We both lose money.
Nor have I to do
with other media.  The rants
that replaced news issue
predictably from giant forms
in my mind; I’m in touch
with their feelings, the streets of their dreams
filled with the bodies of their enemies.
At parties, people
who will follow papers
to the end find
the abstractions I come out with
sufficiently informed, even
thoughtful.  But meanwhile
I’m waiting to slip into
the yard.  There, the pines
give way to ferns.  Vast ruminants
waddle past, trampling cameras,
summoning predators, that higher niche.
Endless unchronicled battles, migrations,
insects swarming in ground-mist … and
eventually it’s morning.  There’s no paper.




After the Rehearsal


I wanted to celebrate The Dance … but the woman
in charge (choreographer? director?)
asked how I could, and why she should let me,
me with no experience of dance,
not even the terms, and broken down
enough to be disturbing here –
at best a dirty old man, at worst
a *memento mori*?  Truthfully
she asked not in words
but with the stance of her body,
as old as mine but vastly
more limber: a squint
of the hips, one mournful shoulder.  While
her dancers, having rehearsed for hours,
stood but were never still – flexing
eyebrows and thighs, impassive,
perfect in tights and leotards
(though the room smelled like a stable).
Heartbroken, I moaned how
the phrase The Dance had always
annoyed me, sloppy metaphor
for everything, sex and life.
But with the least shift
of their weight, the corps and their chief
accused me of a lack
not only of vitality but vital focus!
So I left, staggered out.  Or no,
not staggering – placing
my left foot to the left,
right to the right, bridging
the gap with my cane,
eventually my walker … Outside,
the clouds of that sunset
remained themselves, rooted,
only their colors moving,
colors of love and ash and glaciers.



Note to Self


When hope that has no image comes,
you think you should store it deep
in earth, cellar, or cask;
circle and return, as if to love;
watch, like a banker or gardener, the thing grow.
But hope that has no image strikes
no roots and bears no interest.
Is a gift extended by a goddess,
and must be eaten swiftly to retain
the taste, effect hallucinations
of her realm.




The Warehouse


Trucks the color of the army
and those, more vivid, of its contractors
merge at the loading dock,
so that each gives, each receives.
From my sublime sergeant
and the lieutenants and captain beyond,
all bosses blossom.
The smell of mice and creosote
fills the tent of self;
the laughter of women
from evanescent shacks on the edge of town
jams other signals.
Bombers and fighters
proceed in endless triumph
at the frontier of the sky,
while somber containers
return parts of questions
answered obliquely but decisively.
I check them off on a list.
My cot in the barracks
is wider than a grave,
or beds in the wards of the future.
When I climb the earthen street
past the parade ground
I pause for my friends the moss,
the metastasizing
vine, the foraging sparrows;
and would bless them in my heart,
except they assure me
that they serve nature as I serve the state.




Watching the Detectives


Imagine being promoted
beyond uniform, rewarded
for observation and reason.
Allowed to delegate
the task of knocking on doors,
reluctantly opened
by those who know nothing,
see nothing, are hiding something,
don’t want to talk,
yet yield up secrets …

They seem like gods, the
detectives.  They move
with that weight, whether in offices
or pursuing
bad men who die
beside curbs, on rooftops:
that nightly holocaust,
mysteriously tidied
before the sun rises
and capitalism seems near again …

Their women are far,
in a paradise of laundry
or divorce and regret;
or beyond all glass
and other ceilings,
mourned, a cause.
Or they are themselves –
amused and dry,
with the aim and conscience
of a sniper – women.

I was standing in a crowd.
There was nothing to see
and I should have moved
along.  But I had a grievance,
which is as bad as
a record.  Slowly they turned
and brought me in
to the horrible cells, the famous
delayed call, the labyrinth.
And I am still here.



Rebar Mountain


Workers water the slurry
with their sweat or,
asleep, with tears that come
from laughter unreflected in their dreams,
which leaves them exhausted in the mornings.
They pour the mixture on the braided bars
and smooth it with their hands and dry it
with their breath,
and so the mountain rises, layer by layer.
Then leaves are taped to supple wire
for bushes, sturdy plastic tubes
for trees.  Animals
form around fiber-optic cables,
graze the completed peak, burrow in foam.




For George Grosz


His shirt was soldered onto him
during the war.  He can’t get it off;
it wouldn’t occur to him
that he should.  His companions
are feeding themselves to a machine
and won’t be interrupted.  It got him
earlier: the bolt in the neck,
the face forever turned aside.
His fists lie on the table like commas,
distinguishing, emphasizing
one phrase amidst a universe
of drivel.  An ectoplasmic outline
as if from another dimension
intersects him: women.
Some look strangely blank, or away,
but will bleed, calculate,
decay at their own pace to the right level.

The fat and muscle of men are subject
to endless emendation; they are sites
for salvage, even for construction.
But the phrase he mulls among the knives
and broken glass is neither,
surprisingly, harsh nor bitter:
*Man is Good*.  How might that apply?
How could one make money from it?
Or wrap it and give it
to the freshest-remaining nude?  A fight
breaks out.  The familiar noise
lulls him.  Almost, his phrase
becomes thought.  Almost the thought
becomes the sort of nonsense speech
that nevertheless gets one over
the parapet again,
advancing a few yards before one falls.




Advanced Studies


There was a man who antagonized
everyone and was therefore
excluded or quickly
expelled from all intimacy
and power.  At the end
he began to consider
not, as before, his anger, his
excuses, his side of things
(which were all very familiar
to him), but what he had learned.
First, the mysterious smile and eyes
averted from whoever
would have been berating him,
however justly – as if smile and eyes
were listening to a kindly voice
(or stern on his behalf) that said
a world in which he deserved blame
was the wrong one.  Next,
his immense elongations
of time on the rare occasions
he was in the right and someone else
apologizing – his ability
to guide apology
towards tears while tempting
himself with it: measuring it
against absolute grievance and finding it wanting.
Then his own tears.  And his friendships
with hostages unaware of
their status: repairmen, waitresses,
seatmates on trains, who would
testify in the never-ending
trial that he was nice, a regular guy.
At the end he imagined
himself testifying, but not
as defendant – rather
an honored witness or interviewee,
sitting with no need to be
afraid and obsequious among
killers and torturers.
Those greatly without conscience,
wanting to record
the secrets of their craft
and other, inmost secrets;
all eager, at last, to give.