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Poems fromThe Body's Creeds |
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Poems from
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Proliferationwritten in Penn View Hotel, 34th St., NYC
The overhead light’s brutal glare, like when Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home Metropolis Notes
1 Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home Sometimes I Go There
Like an old ambition hardly remembered, Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home Afterwards
1 Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home Beyond
Knees parted more than Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home In Your Heart
Is there a morning when the maple's leaves don't reflect Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home A Lover's Meditation on the Florida Keys
1
Far offshore, the killer eel, gliding,
Of course, there's this too:
1963. The next weekend
The tide still ebbs. Seaweed and shells.
Destiny is everywhere, as are the sea's intestines. and begging Diego for a towel to wipe my irritated eyes
Morning wind blows through the swamp's saw grass, bending it
You are here, as transcendental the smell of it.
Decades later, talking to myself near a window
Be wary.
I'd be more sedate, but don't want to.
5 y luz entre las sábanas del sueno."
I hadn't yet learned to cry for real yet.
A red-throated loon searched the water
Waves rinsed my ankles, cleaning me Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home Dancing While Dressed in a Cape of Afterbirth
1 Absence is never all absence. You leave, but the blue aster’s still here, as is Meteor Rd., winding downhill, then up again to a crossroad. There, you can turn
right or left, without a significant difference in outcome, except one dependent not on which way you turn, but on whether or not you are ready, one day in Mexico, to study the Lake of the Moon, its depths
darker than where the monkey’s nasal passage, traveling inward toward the skull’s center, ends at our own evolution’s beginning. A forest
is there. In it, now-extinct species once screamed in primeval trees.
2 After you leave, I eat a mango, close my eyes and remember how Lolita, telling God “I didn’t come to kill, I came to die,” crept from the Virgin’s uterus, then washed, with cove water, the birth slime from her body, which so many men later wanted to fuck under palm trees not far from Aurora and Marina Streets -- there, where the blood of twenty corpses shot by police ran, like the barrio’s cantos backed up by hand-drums in the hills, through the gutter. How could I, or anyone, forget her? From that day on, Lolita walked the boulevards in a city inside the parrot’s song. Wherever she went, she cradled Ponce’s blood like an infant in her arms.
Arriving one day, sunlight in a back yard no one knew about, she showed me the forgotten. Here she said this
is an old island woman digging a tumor the size of a Brussel sprout from her breast with a knife and this is what a harpoon feels like as it quivers in the whale’s flesh while a ship rolls on whitecaps only a short distance away and this is what the two robbers feel as they tie their prey to a fencepost then pistol-whip him while the Wyoming night, having arrived across the eastern plains like emptiness spreading through the mind during meditation, slides under his eyelids, darkness filling every silo in the land while the cow feed’s silence reaches out to seaweed breathing underwater near the coast of an island used as target practice by a nation whose last broomstick has been discovered shoved up the ass of a Haitian arrested in Brooklyn.
“This is what the body looks like,” Lolita tells me, pointing to the man in the hospital bed and adding “This is what we use to make love.” A reused shipping box held together with tape, his bandaged face, containing broken teeth and random memories, sags on the pillow. A tube, transporting red urine from his kidney to a plastic bag, rises through the air: the imagination in search of notes to be played one day on a piano in an apartment building overlooking the mascara of a woman disappearing down a sidestreet that wanders into the sea-bass’s mind in a fish market next to an empty lot in which a stoned gangbanger huddles in the weeds in the twilight we all must learn to love.
Be careful. Here is Port-au-Prince with its marshy shanty towns guarded by the flamingo’s spirit while the ghosts of the leaf doctor’s ancestors huddle under the mapou tree’s bark discussing how the mountains hunch like lovers over the sea’s swarthy body on a night when the wind shivers in adulation in the grass. And here is Puerto Rico with its petrochemical plants: the future built on the sea turtle’s back on a beach where Columbus once reported seeing naked natives “so ingenious and free with all that’s theirs that no one who hasn’t seen their generosity would believe in it” -- I believe it. Here is the casava bread they gave to be dipped in the soup they made from the yucca’s juices. And here --
this is where the Spaniards knelt to give the land a kiss. This is where the palm trees slashed their wrists. This is where the longed-for sand is red. This is where we walk upon the decayed Taino dead.
3 Broken in the shoals during a storm, a Spanish galleon drifted aimlessly just short of triumph’s harbor. My god my god why has thou forsaken me an Iberian priest on deck howled into the squall, seeing in his own approaching death something comparable to Jesus’s on the cross as the ship went down and horses, transported from the peninsula between Spain and Portugal, broke loose, swimming toward an unknown shore.
Hundreds of years later, the mustangs’ offspring, neighing beyond the tourist spots, roam the outer banks, galloping along the dunes, stopping to eat beach grasses and sweetbriar, standing in the surf to escape the flies. Repeatedly, the ocean slams into the sand, rocking the clam inside its shell, as if the borders between was and is are ripped apart at the seams. Another storm approaches: thunder drowns out the sound of pounding sea and horses’ hooves, lightning rives the universe’s body more violently than any Roman spear ever ripped open Christ’s side. Only in a summer storm like this, the thunder cracking like a whip cutting a slave’s back, do we glimpse the intrinsic.
Arrested for stockpiling swords and pikes, some slaves were hung while others were hurled into Elizabeth City’s jail. Wild horses stampeded along the beach, sand flying everywhere, each grain a hint of lands too far off to see.
Slaves made boats of juniper and white oak.
They tonged for oysters even when it snowed.
The sea: our Yoruba drum. The evening star: a tiny golden bird that speaks of how the zebra there like the feral beach mare here runs.
4 Again, summer thunder. The poisoned overseer groans in bed. Eventually, the torrential rain comes, blowing through his mind. Briefly, he glimpses the lightning-lit sky through trees. Filled with a wild hope that he might live, he dies
as I step out the door two centuries later, the wind bending the tulip poplar almost to the ground, a thought about to snap, as, off to the side, the rain beats cesspool vent and stacked wood. Soaked, I make my way
past the fallen birdfeeder toward the path along the rain-swollen creek, not far from where Harriet once slapped a man, making him shut up, while hunting dogs, yelping in the distance, missed them, following
an illusionary scent in the wrong direction toward a field in which a stone wall rose and fell with the land, the cracks in its mortar filled with a perfect emptiness: that nothing which is
a creation-wave too big to leave its mark on anything, until you walk out into it, the rain billowing through the night like the will to know soaking through the body, as the body traipses toward the coast
where horses gallop in the storm and giant whitecaps explode like ideas out of darkness toward being’s outer banks. And over there is a house with too many people in it and you lying on a bed
which I beg you to leave, so you can join me here in the storm, the rain battering us as we make love in the sand, the sea eating the very land beneath us, our hearts beating
like the horses that, frantic from thunder and lightning bolts, neigh in the dark, stampeding toward an uncanny fate, us quaking in the wind, the sea as violent as the death of the nation’s prophetic precedents.
5 To touch you. To believe in the knee’s antediluvian truth. To enter that one wrinkle to the right of your mouth, the ravine in which I never slept drunk or discovered an agate fragment chiseled into an earring that dangles in the air’s turbulent depths which foam like waves onto each moment’s beach, time never running out, my hand enticed by your thigh, the bobwhite west of the marsh calling to those who listen. And we listen
and listen more. In the estuary, in the quahog buried in mud, in a silence no human ear can hear deep inside the mollusk’s shell, water’s siphoned in through a tiny tube, after which the gills, like the imagination seeking fragments of melody in the noisy chaos all around us, separate out bits of algae, then eject the unneeded water through another tube, and afterwards all that is left is the quahog’s food, is poetry’s essence, is
not a thing but the impulse toward the thing’s evolution.
A single grain of sand on your kneecap. Above it is the thigh, and then
everything else is love
6 Lolita says, “You want her, don’t you?” “Sure,” I reply. “Well, then,” she remarks, her once dark hair gray now, “You must be at least as tough as the snowy egret, with its white plumes and yellow feet.” “What are you talking about?” I snap. Grabbing me by the shoulders, she mocks: “Do you think love is easier than surviving the hunter’s gun? Do you think that when your lady bleeds between the legs, you won’t remember the blood flowing in Marina St.’s gutters in 1937 or how your granddaddy lost his eye in the machine shop, a pool of blood gathering, a sea in which the mind’s flotillas sink, on the floor, and what about Lenny, still in federal prison? Let me tell you something, Robert, the world’s infants, all their mouths working overtime, couldn’t suck the blood of the crime Lenny didn’t commit from his fingers fast enough to satisfy judges who would sentence even the lilies of the field to death!”
After yelling, she says nothing for an hour.
Finally, while getting ready to leave, she announces, “I have something to announce,” then announces nothing. When I approach her at the door she weeps, an old crucifix clenched in her fist. “Am I a fool for believing in Campos?” she mutters, not mentioning the religious symbol in her grasp. “I don’t think so,” I answer as she opens the door. It’s raining. “I love the rain,” she says.
7 . . . Once in Colorado, above Estes Park on a rocky path, I saw a bighorn sheep disappear down a slope. I followed it but couldn’t find it. Later in a meadow, the scent of old pine and mountain aster everywhere, I watched the moon rise, simplicity’s signal to the world. In a bar that night, I lied to a woman. “I saw the moon, a Blackfoot squaw,” I said, “walk along the treetops, shyly showing her elktooth necklace to the world.” The woman replied, “You really are a poet.” An hour later I got laid, poetry being in those days as now not an instrument of vision but a useful come-on if you want to fuck a member of the art crowd.
8 When did I grow so serious, turning even love into philosophy, as if a kissed armpit might reveal . . . what? How to penetrate the bay’s morning haze? How to find, in the osprey’s shadow, the scar on my right cheek from when, stoned and drunk once, I stabbed myself there with a knife?
In the boutique filled with Afghanistani necklaces arrayed in glass cases and ceramic plates painted with Guatemalan designs, who buys what and why? And look here at the sterling silver rose, each petal hand-polished by the tiny hand of a child working in a locked room next to a butcher shop in which each goat screams before it is killed.
Be careful. The familiar’s unfamiliarity rebegins everything. Turn here just as you always do. This is the driveway at the end of which the casual dies as your eyes, gazing at what you know, look away, afraid, not of the trees or your home, but of your mind.
At night as you sleep, something approaches -- you tell me the next day -- in your dream, making horrid throatsounds. A black bear, outside the windows of the ego’s flimsy house, breaks in, splintering the wall and shattering glass, until its claws, leaving gouges the size of small streambeds, caress your legs. Crying out as if for the first time in eons, you become at last what you are. When the bear leaves, you masturbate, remembering how the animal annihilated everything you thought was life. Long before dawn, you jump to your feet and dance before the mirror for the rest of the night.
9 Rooted in the planet’s murky body at the bottom of the coastal pond, the plant’s stem snakes to the water’s surface, breaks through and shoves white flowers into the sky. On the day when Mt. Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii, lava boiled everywhere, even inside the crow’s beak. I come to you as I should, one step at a time. Great blue herons stand in your eyes’ sun-brightened shallows at noon when the killer is injected with the darkness stolen from the octopus’s sac. When your old lover, the motorcyclist, pierced your nipples with a black needlerush ripped from the sea-marsh’s mud, you cried out for the gladiators of ancient Rome. Your shoulder points toward the riverside cliffs at the base of which machinists with gnarled hands once groped under the skirts of women who smoked cigarettes as they came. These are the things I know, these are the things I am. I’m also what I don’t know and what I’m not. The Potawatomi rock’s long-dead hieroglyphs awake in a bassinet made of buffalo bones. In Borinquin, the rainforest’s orchids taunt authority by arrogantly showing their colors’ revolutionary nudity to anyone who wants to take a peek. In Queens Brooklyn Yonkers Bronx Manhattan Staten Island the Virgin Mother Muhammad and Buddha are born.
Donning their afterbirth like a cape of light I whirl around the dance floor, holding you in my arms.
You fit against me perfectly, each rhythmic move a quantum physics calculation that brings us nearer to flesh’s infinity.
Spiritbody spiritbody only you matter now
10 I wake long before dawn, listening. The Atlantic pounds the coast beyond the trees east of the lighthouse on the outer banks. Night and surf merge. Waves crash, windblown foam sprays the sea oats growing thickly on the dunes. I reach toward you, thinking how I will lift your tiny nightie and slide my cock into you just as you open your eyes, but . . .
I wake before dawn, listening to the ocean’s roar. Next to me in bed sprawls an obscurity too sensual to ignore, yet beyond my grasp. It smells of sand primrose and dense clumps of ox-eye flowers and tastes like the arm of a woman who’s been sweating all day in the sun, loading fish into big baskets. I can see her, although she’s not here . . .
I wake before dawn. Still groggy, I listen to the Atlantic’s noise, a lost thought droning its way back into existence. When Owen drowned forty years ago further north in a storm on the Great South Bay in an April in which the heart’s Brazil closed its carnival, forcing masked dancers and musicians to eat a chowder made from the octopus’s eyes, from that moment on we should have known how the sea’s salt wind only hints at the salty taste of the blood on our hands when we wake before dawn in a time of the ghostcrab’s transcendence, as it searches the beach for whatever decays . . .
Before dawn, I wake up, wondering where I am. Too restless to stay in bed, I go out into the night with a flashlight, hoping to find my way to you as I trudge clumsily forward through pennywort and then, over here, past a pink-flowered mallow and then -- but there are no more “then’s,” only now, only the stars doing nothing in the sky, only the condemned bomber sitting stoically in his cell, not knowing how close he is to where an ex-city clerk once spoke, making the mobs in the railroad yard go wild. Close your eyes. Listen to the steel drums as we rumba on the dance floor on 98th St. in history’s ballroom in which the earringed merchant seamen’s shadow combs the hair of the Virgin of Guadalupe who leans against the wall . . .
“Before dawn.” What dawn? -- the dawn that didn’t come then and doesn’t come now? No dew on the pokeberry. No sand in the body’s crevices from lovemaking out in the open the night before. This, the absent dawn of the tongue’s discovery of the vagina’s circuitry pulsing with voltages that charge the black skimmer’s beak. This the unknown moment when first light is your finger running up my spine, when you yourself are the insight I seek as I grope out of sleep toward the embrace of a remorse that is filled with a manual washing machine’s din in Texas long before you ran off, leaving your younger sister behind. Dawn of nothing, dawn of everything.
This is the you whom I want these are the hips that I bathe this is your body its simplicity its all
this is the flesh that’s somewhere but not no NOT! here
(except all around)
11 . . . One night four decades ago, drunk, I blacked out in Topps on the West Side. Hours later I woke up in Queens, perched on a barstool talking with my grandfather’s friend, Mr. Salerian. “Look,” he said, showing me as he had done more than once before how he kept his money in a pouch made from a camel’s scrotum. “What country did you get it from?” I asked. On the jukebox, Dinah Washington wailed. I couldn’t hear the answer.
About 4 a.m., I boarded a train back to Manhattan. Not caring who watched, I snuggled in my seat, yawning as the train rattled forward toward a sanity I thought was there. Rocking back and forth, the train lulled me and everybody in it almost to sleep. The mind, a bit of plankton riding a gentle wave toward shore, swayed to the rhythm of a current that washed the smuggler’s ankles as he stood in the surf, holding to his chest a contraband of stolen knowledge. Meanwhile the train sped forward, a complexity of flesh seeking limits.
Wild horses run on the outer banks’ beaches all night long. Taino women clothe the truth in a skimpy nagua. The last time I saw Lolita she stood on a stage while behind her Rafael Cancel Miranda’s mustache thickened like the rainforest. Parachutists, my eyes land in your body’s fields. War guns boom in the distance. Inside the parrot’s song, I wander a city. Redeemed by Lolita, I bring peace. Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home |
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