Listening for the Prayer at the Heart of Things

War came natural to him, not
the killing but sitting motionless
at a jungle LP
in the middle of the night. The art
of focus
seduced him early. Already at 13
not moving a muscle
he hunched in a low sedge-covered boat in the pre-dawn dark,
a 12-gauge
across his lap, waiting for the ducks
to give themselves away. Stillness
appealed to him, not
the restful type but the kind that turned
his whole body
into a sensor. Nothing
escaped his attention then. Years later
telling other grunts about
the quiet wait in flatboat or duck blind, it wasn’t
the hunter in him who spoke
but the one who delighted in sensing the first
flap of a duck’s wing even before
the sound wave arrived, and so
no one was surprised how one day
while waiting to hear if his wife Myra
had given birth yet
in the states, he studied
for almost 30 minutes
a red dragonfly
going from leaf to leaf. When
a few months after the child was born
Myra died in a car crash
and he was discharged, he returned home
where day after day he listened
to the sounds
her eyelids once made when they blinked.
Eventually, thinking he had no choice,
he dug in for the long haul:
living for his daughter.
Sometimes his worst days mentally
were his best as a father:
his withdrawals taught her how
wordlessness wasn’t
just the absence of words, but the substance
from which they were made.
After she entered high school, they still walked
most evenings along the shore.
Once as they strolled, Aaron tore open
his shirt and jumped around, pretending
to be King David dancing crazily before
the Ark of the Covenant until
falling to the sand and staring at Rachel
he laughed
“Who needs an old fairytale hero when I have you!”
Although she was never quite sure
whether she was his daughter or mother,
she knew one thing for certain: they were linked.

revised song fragment

no don’t be scared dig for chicken bones at bottom of dumpster
listen somebody’s singing, “whoopsie-daisey blabber-jabber”
Truth Cleaners gather in the alley together
shove mindscraps in a portable shredder
each hen bone is a piece in the jigsaw puzzle
that shows the human brain in its muzzle
late now the city is dark
wild dogs howl & bark

A Slave of Will, the Intrinsic Is What We Make It
for Joyce Steins

I won’t degrade what we did, won’t call
that mix of beer and humping
sex. It was much more
than that: a spectacular
failure to connect even when connected. I held on

to you as I
went in, falling

it seemed

past the logic of things, beyond why
shale crumbles or the right woman’s
thigh is like

the infinite. That’s when

there on he floor

from below me
your mid
section slammed up

against my belly, trying
to rise straight through me
and escape through the ceiling, hating

my over
drinking and punching of walls. It was then
that I

came, each of us
so slick with sweat
in the downtown walkup that we slid
out of each others’ clutches, you

sliding out the door and me
slipping
off to sleep. We
never

saw each other after that, our
on-again off-again love-thing
finished at last. So now

42 years later, I’m not sure what
I feel when

googling you
I locate

your 14-year-old obituary
in the Times. The writing
is very clear
but predictably

says nothing about
us, which means

I can’t find anything to anchor me
in the fact of your death, although there is
mention of details which indicate
your trajectory, how
you never stopped going
after getting away from me: a year

later you received
your anthropology degree and following that there was
a stint working at
the American Museum of Natural History. You were still then

more or less
the woman I knew, angular-
faced, tallish, in your
20s, hanging

out with west side motorcycle riders, your old flame Bobby Dane bragging
that no matter ho much education you got
you still had room in your heart
for the scrappers you knew when young. The part

of the obit in which you end up
owning your own
trendy restaurants and drinkjoints, even that
is no surprise, I guess, particularly

that one place you had, Le Bar Bat
on W. 57th St., with its

blue handblown glass bats gliding
wings spread
in dim light
on this side of that line beyond which

the ambience ends
and whatever is out there returns, as did

also
and repeatedly

the unsublimated you, with your
art and child abuse fundraisers and
long before them

(the obit writers didn’t know about this, did they?)

you once getting
multiple sclerosis mixed up with
rheumatoid arthritis in your panic to rid the world

of pain. About that same time
one night you dubbed yourself
Moon Madonna in my flat
on Thompson St. in the Village, then years later

according to the Times
you became
“the self-styled Mama Iguana”
at your Tex-Mex cafe on 19th, going
from table to table, talking up
the patrons while secretly

(this is the info I bring to the picture)

every bit of you was still
your Slavic building-supervisor daddy’s
big-boned daughter in love

with his toolbox, in which he lugged
around, you once claimed, everything
one needed in order to take apart

cubism and understand it
inside out. A Coney Island night
was when you said it, us swigging
from a Schlitz quart while you
pontificated about

everything, including
one of your favorite topics:
the amusement park’s Wonder Wheel, which symbolized
you maintained
all that sucked about people, our

circular logic in particular, “the way
we think our thoughts are actually going someplace
when the mind gets on
its ferris wheel, but eventually it gets off
in the same fucking spot where it got on!” Staring

at me, you laughed
grumpily then, a lover-of-life
brought low by your own

gifts. But you
figured a way

out, didn’t
cave in, didn’t
let yourself or anyone else

hold you back.

Earlier, I didn’t know what to feel
about your death. Now I do:
that it’s one of those moments
when what I feel doesn’t count.

Your life spoke for itself.

P. J. Harvey’s Black Dress

hangs loosely
as it should

from straps on
slender shoulders, the rest
of the garment draping down

and stopping
just above

the floor. A rhythm
coming from
no one knows where

writhes under the dress. It isn’t
just the body but the body taking on

another shape while drawing
new substance from the smoke
of North Philly’s arsoned buildings and from ash-

flakes blowing
this way and that in the wind above

refineries along the river. God is she

hot when she sings, the smoke
and ashes filling out
the dress, giving it

more curves than it could ever have
imagined before. Each note
now becoming

flesh, the

body further evolves, after which she slithers
toward us across
the floor, her
red-lipsticked mouth

wide open, the jaw
unhinged. Peering inside it and following
the tongue’s slope
down into the dark

dark throat, we still can’t see
where the song comes from. Then

almost unnoticed, one

of the body’s hands lifts up
the dress hem, swishes it
back and forth while

smoke and flames and
everything else that’s there escape
into the air as the dress

dances around the stage in circles
whirling and whirling
without end, until

it ends.

The song over, none of us
needs anything now.