In the Dark Thinking

You imagine yourself, in the far future, limping
into a Brooklyn apartment building,
the sciatica nerve in your left leg acting up.
With a jack‑knife, you pry open mailboxes, stuff them
with old plum pits and photos of family reunions in Texas wheatfields.
Also, you leave exotic notes, lewd
descriptions of pieces of collected treebark
or of an onyx ring robbed long ago
off the finger of a drunk sideshow magician
just north of Twin Falls, Idaho.
All this helps you value the resemblance between
a future footfall’s muffled sound and the grunting
of the woman with a stranger’s hand clasped over her mouth.
You're a man with a fanatical message, although
unsure of what it is.
Through the window the black-eyed Susan seduces you, as does
the halfback’s photo on the sports page.
While sitting in the corner of a rented room
you whimper something to Aunty Esther.
"Oh, I'm so glad to hear that," she remarks,
unstopped by not
being there, having died years ago.

The Inside Scoop

According to Frieda,
it happened this way.
Hungarians, Slovaks and Lithuanians
all huddled around the first televisions
and forgot the languages they used to speak.
After that, even the annual church picnics couldn't revive
the choked poetry.
Something had been lost forever.
The kids grew up with terrible tempers.
The unions got weaker.
Flab replaced once solid meat.

Mountain Madness

At dusk, the truth trudged through
bunches of little purple asters.
This is the way
the bounty hunters came:
the ex-sheriff whose one gold tooth
was his only bank account
and the crazed Legionnaire slobbering over
his supper of cartridge grease.

As they approached,
Charlie squatted on a knoll and sniffed the air,
obsessed with willing himself invisible: a tree spirit.
"But I couldn't do it. No one ever taught me how," he later chortled.

His first arrest,
a vet collared in the foothills
after a gas station heist,
1975.

Now, somewhere in the night
of meaning’s arrival,
in one of the local villages
our platoon reassembles ‑‑

men in colorful bandannas
blockade roads with concertina wire,
then set the post office on fire.

Bandoleers slung Pancho Villa‑like across our chests,
we call an impromptu tribunal
at the end of which we sentence
all the little flagwavers and their wives to death.

The Legend

1. Winter, 1954

Like the sound of an oar repeatedly slapping water,
a name in his head:
the Eagle‑Picher Zinc & Lead Company.
At the 400 Club: drunk, he gulps bourbon straight up.
The wife waits at home.
Mules drag cans of ore toward mine shafts.
With 16 lb. sledgehammers, screen apes smash boulders
into rocks the size
of fragments of old brain pictures disintegrated by time.
He's a baseball player now, a pro, back in Commerce
during the off‑season.
Toward morning, he dives into a car with pals, wakes up
hours later in Lead Hill, Arkansas: fishing.
2 days afterwards he arrives home
"with a nice catch of fresh bass."

The days grow wilder. His dead father,
who taught him the trick of using a magic bat
to launch baseballs like Okie sputniks,
sprawls in the GAR cemetery, ghost ears filled
with the Neosho River's gasp as it once poured over its banks
and wiped out an already teetering farm venture:
oats, wheat, corn, all flood‑wrecked.
Back to the mines. Back to the noise ‑‑
chains, pulleys ‑‑ of ore buckets hauled upward:
sunlight
blue sky

One night (again, again) the young legend returns home drunk.
The wife's gone. House dark. No key.
Like a music box's sentimental melody:
the tinkle of broken glass as he punches out
mini, paneled door windows. He reaches in, shreds
his hand on jagged glass, locates the inside latch,
opens it and walks in.
But soon he's gone again, runs all the way
to his wife Merlyn's family's house.
Her old man answers the door. Words are exchanged.
Then the legend's in the car he claims
M stole from him.
Blurrily he shifts from reverse to first,
accelerates, smashes sideways
into a telephone pole, veers off it and roars forward into a ditch.

The journey's temporarily over now.

Next season back in NY, he hits .306
and slams 37 home runs, his best year yet.

2. The Spirit Muscles Its Way to Where?

'50, '51, '52, '53.
Each winter the legend returns, works
for Harry Youngman, the construction guy;
also, he hunts.
In the cold, near hedgerows,
quail huddle in gullies
away from the bitter Okie wind.
Flat land all around: a table surface
at which muleskinners yell rudely
for more bourbon while flakes
of the first snow flurry enter nearby Spavinaw
(a Cherokee name).
One of the cousins rifles through a do‑it‑yourself kit
then assembles from the parts
a jet fighter, the X-1A.
The Christmas spruce's red lights smolder like the insides
of a toy crematorium's tiny ovens, doors open.
"Mademoiselle,
she went to the well,"
a father remembers.
Tired of cooking, old women remove wax from children's ears
with splinters from broken hatchet handles while outside
the wind makes an odd sound among ragged weeds:
the family's men, all with Hodgkin's disease, scrape
at the iron gratings that separate plus from minus.
Close by: an unpainted shack,
2 rooms, on a hill crest ‑‑
in it, in '31,
the "Commerce Comet" was born.
Now, further south in Dallas,
the retired legend wonders about an old business venture:
a failed bowling alley.
He signs autographs in a mall.

from New Beginnings

Section 5

Was domiciled that June
in the soot‑grimed, yellow‑brick
Daniel Boone Hotel, Charleston, West Virginia.
There to write a story, one evening I wandered
north of the Olive Branch Baptist Church.
A few days before my arrival, someone
drowned a baby in a nearby creek.
I found the spot, thick with trees
and underbrush. The water, darker
than the tree hole in which the owl sleeps,
told me stories about the music
of the dead's footfalls, those heralds
of what language should be like
in the night but isn't.
In my cramped room before dawn
the next day, I wrote to the rhythm
of Bill O'Rourke's wife years ago in Yonkers
madly sucking light from his slit wrists.

Death Sentence and After

When I wake on the dawn sofa,
the ex-hipster, no more zoot suit, out of jail at last, says
"The chickens, they coming home to roost."

Once I was an elevator operator, transporting people
to different levels
of being.
The sixth floor was where Helen lived.
On the tenth, Benny held court.
Hugh the actor dwelled on the top floor, but I hardly
ever saw him.

The ex-hipster's name was Red.
ALet me learn from you," I begged.
"But you're the wrong color!" he warned.
I retorted, "My skin maybe, but not my brain!"
He laughed, then said, "Let's go to Dixie's," the luncheonette.
Once there, he drank tea, I strawed
a chocolate malted.
"It's no joyride watching the familiar die," he remarked.
"Oh . . ." I fumbled for an answer.

Later, on the subway platform, a junkie tugged my arm and bummed a quarter
as a train hurtled by.
We caught the next one.
Rattling, it drilled through a silence too thick to question.
When it finally stopped and the doors opened
at 125th, Red stated,
"Mecca's nice, it's around the corner, but first
you gotta get off here,"

After that, he disappeared.
I didn't.

For César Vallejo

It was stale, your bread.
When you wrote poetry, crust‑crumbs
got mixed in with it:
idiotically gritty.
Sometimes you blabbed in the shadows
of opera houses but you didn't go in.
Instead, you once made a poem
about observing a spider
with a big abdomen croak.
You were a real nobody, how you came
paupering from Peru, scratched by awhile in France
then died, 1938, in an obsolete clinic
somewhere in Spain.
Your death was like your poetry:
ugly and reeking of pain.
Who gave you the right
to be like that,
sticking your nose in street‑ick
and preferring doorknobs to abstractions
and behaving like governments owed you something
just because you were poor?
What a monumental
ego you must have had!
Yes, it's interesting: how although
your spittle was as meaningless as thin
wax incrustations in the ears of birds,
you nonetheless stared
magistrates in the eye and acted
with dignity, like a human.
I remember the poem you composed
for your little brother
who died:
it was
so gentle, nostalgic.
Better than most, you knew:
even slime like us can be poets
if we try.

In the Moment of the Plastic Tulip's Lecterns

in memory of Seta Rampersad

1
After she dies, people ask where
she came from, Trinidad or India, and what
was the name of the boat her ancestors
traveled on, The Rose or Morning Star, and how exactly
they also query
did she end up here?
But soon the questions fade.
In the lime's shadow on a shelf,
steel drum, tambora, castanet, all echo
in a house where a single chanted om
cracks like an egret egg under a bullock cart's wheel
on a road through rice paddies during the monsoon
in a country she never saw.
Going down now,
muse of twisted tree root
and mica's origins,
she, pretty girlie though she might be,
doesn't exist anymore.


2
The DA in his office on the main drag
gazes out the window at a gray Olds
turning the corner, to where?
A pen lies on his desk, simply being what it is.
It was day, now it's not.
Far out in space beyond Neptune,
lightrays are bent by
the gravitational tug of big masses of matter, just as thoughts
are reshaped as they pass through the spaces
between aster petals or the junkie's fungus-eaten toes,
and so we know that a thing's beginning doesn't necessarily
prefigure its form at the end.
Meanwhile in a South Deerfield motel, a woman, trapped
by the red pulsing
prick of the dog of death, sees more
than Nostradamus, dying of dropsy, viewed
from the upstairs library where he scrawled:
AThe sea's battalions will assemble at the gates of the metropolis!"
What questions must we answer now?
Are yes and no incompatible?
When's the Northampton County Fair?
Rest now. Be careful where you poke. So much
is balanced on the silverfish's back
in the cupboard beneath the basement sink.


3
Pumpkins grow in September fields:
all the nice college kids, back in school.
Indian summer. Polish farmers
disappear on tractors down dirt roads.
Vaguely, certain people sense the nearness
of dark monetary forests, in which
secret contractual obligations are fulfilled.
We slosh downwards. Sweating, we drink our beers in the VFW. Later
we try lurching across the highway
but a blaze of headlights blinds us; we freeze
like startled raccoons.


4
In the Whately Inn, it's
Ladies Night.
Jimmy the Greek rules the roost
from a back room.
The whole county, approaching sleep, hears
the Connecticut River
rubbing itself raw
against bridge pilings on a night
when nuclear stars devour what's left of the unclear.
Wherever Jimmy goes, an army
of hired lawyers follow. And when Jimmy kills
for dope or a little bit of pussy
he does it big, the moon
on its stem of black space
flowering in his lapel.


5
A bedpan-pusher in a Boston hospital, the mother shuffles
down a hallway which leads to the fringes of what she is.
Later, a Sears repairman, her husband, holds her elbow
as they watch the sky sink, a parody
of disappearance, below the horizon.
At supper, they eat silently, like old friends in a museum
wandering mutely under the shadowy wingspreads
of prehistoric birds.
Beyond the city, stone walls separate farmsteads in disrepair
and gnarled apples decompose in November earth
near a pond that will ice over within the month.
Then the snows come and what was here isn't anymore.
Only the wind, whining through the pines, is.


6
At night,
near a parking lot
across the street from a 7 & Eleven in another state,
people disappear, as if through a time warp, into
all we've got of paradise
(walk 2 blocks, then make
a left off Rt. 9; keep going
until you find a location where you can feel
your senses drifting outward,
flakes of rust breaking loose
from submerged tangles of scrap metal
south of Atlas Point in the river
pouring seaward through what you are).

And what about the state militia years ago,
crowding into milltowns where the babble of foreign tongues
couldn't be heard
above the looms' thunder?

Or how about George, grinding valves in Framingham?

Remember Joanne, swaying to a Cuban trombone?
At work, she was the one who typed
"double mastectomy" and "osteoporosis" on the old IBM Selectric.
She quit years ago.

7
It's quiet time now:
close your eyes
relax your mind
fantasize. Picture
a plastic tulip on a group grave.
Listen to the wind piss on it
while everywhere from lecterns
invented sentiments slide toward us
like yogurt leaking from a damaged cup.

Seta isn't dead.
Hot to trot,
she went for a swim in the melting pot.

The Other Drummers

In port, merchant seamen shouted
screw you to their captain, whom
they called Monsieur Napoleon

Outside Pittsburgh, Italian women
sewed collars in huts
when they grew too old to thread screws
in the factory anymore

1890: the bankers
raised freightrates,
the wheatprice fell
49 cents a bushel,
the farmers in Kansas freaked out
when the mortgages on their farms were foreclosed

And look: the children
rickets
teeth falling out at age 6
they worked in the Paterson silkmills
and some of them somehow
sucking hunks of porkfat for dinner
didn't disappear
but lived

And in Minnesota, Norwegian immigrants
labored long
under the stars

And in the background
of everything
Cato the slave
almost escaped by parading
over the mutilated
and unsaved --

behind him
making a joyful ruckus
his followers thumped drums
smudged with blood and the pollen
of flowers

This, the Naked Poem

This, the Naked Poem,
the poem lying stripped in a casket
in a cathedral where flowers and tears are illegal
and the Bishop
has ovens for eyes.

This is the only poem I want to show you:
this x‑ray of a lens‑grinder's powerful hands.

This is what we need:
the moment's nuts and bolts,
search parties that return from the heart’s terrariums
with sperm dripping between their toes,
basic rants that hate
the chocolate éclair's indolence
and that crush underfoot
everything but the silverfish, the syllable
that taught itself to walk.

This, the Naked Poem,
the poem in lead boots that struts away
from the conclave of the saved.
Here, the cheapskate's forced to spend his last cent.
Here, someone rototills what’s left of the truth-teller’s gallbladder
in the disappearing
rainforests of Brazil.
And here is where the poem
washes its dirty asshole, behind
the warehouse in which
its stanzas play craps, trade stories
and whoop it up
all night long.

This, the Naked Poem,
the poem that is wholly human,
wanting to be only what it is:
standing on its own 2 legs and eating what's edible
and spitting out what isn't.

This, the Naked Poem's end,
where the words stop and the fun begins.
This is where nakedness gets what it wants. At last.

Gettysburg

The old battlefield, with its stone wall, slopes
downhill into the quiet meadow. Night.

In a bar a mile from where apple pickers bunk in sheds,
Mr. Lupinksi says, "He were our boy, his mama's and mine.
It broke our hearts, what he done."

In the laundromat, Myra reads Hot Rod magazine.

The wind tongues rainwet leaves
far off, on sanity's other side,
in extraterrestrial trees.

This is order's beauty, too often unseen.

Shadow Figures

As he stumbles forward, a man holds up
a white truce rag:
Colorado, 1914.
Maybe once he worked at the Spring & Moon Mine
in Idaho Springs, then
had gone on:
Telluride, Cripple Creek, Trinidad, and now
Ludlow.
As he inches forward, he remembers
starlit lake water
and also sleeping one night
in a barn filled with horsesmells
and hair from the beards
of Swedish farmers.
Then
(truce rag
or no truce rag)
the state militia
creams him good:
dead.
Behind him,
other strikers,
taken off guard,
turn and flee
arms flailing
through the woods.
They continue sprinting until
70 years later
taking a breather at a hicktown newsstand
they huddle around a magazine photo
of an American official
seated on a stone verandah overseas
as he pursues his hobby --
tape‑recording
the exotic songs
of tropical birds.

In the end, the ex‑miners,
gripping mini truce flags,
twitch forward on all 4s across dead rhododendrons --

"Lithen to uth! Lithen to uth!"
they lisp and slobber, barely able to talk.

from New Beginnings (second excerpt)

Power Rising from the Bottom

City of Transformative Silence

Close by, a river and a mile
to the east of it, rotting tenements in falling snow.

A man trades the one photo he has of his mother
for a picture book called Glories of Istanbul.

Through a peephole, an eye sees
a legless vet getting it on with Miss Belinda.

Lying under the snow, more snow, down
and down until the white cries softly I am dirt.

Because there are no phones here,
there are no telephone books either.