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for Che Prasad

 

The pond leech’s dumb elation as it suckles at the grunt’s thigh
north of Nha Trang.
The trail, winding through elephant grass, clings
to itself. The grunt clings to it.

Tar sticks to the ancient bison bone
at Rancho Le Brea
in Excavation Pit 91, Los Angeles.

Barnacle locked to rock. Mind
locked to barnacle.

My left eyeball nailed to a telephone pole,
I think about telephone poles.
The right eyeball, a bloated tick attached to an animal’s neck.
The third eyeball: claw sunk permanently in the government’s back.

The world’s prefigured in this: you’re at the nipple
and won’t let go. Focus
gets us through the night. Silence
follows so much crying.

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Again

 

Light as the wasp wing in the porch corner,
the weight
of what can’t be.

The Rabbi’s eyes, unlit candelabra
in a house by the bay.

Water sucks whatever it finds
from cracks in the jetty’s stilts;
the infant cries for its dead mother.

Aaron returns from the war too late,
suspicious of telephones and pianos.
He wakes in the middle of the night
when the child claws its cell’s wooden bars
with gnarled fingernails the size of owl beaks.

A year later I arrive.
“The rice paddies are almost all burned,” I say, standing
in the doorway.
“Who are you?” Aaron asks, refusing to let me in.
He’s drunk, with a child in his arms.

The wife’s absence, still here: the bay
on a winter evening.
The wind pounds the storm windows
day and night.

Working for the municipality,
he plows snow from roads.
An hour later, the plowed roads:
snowed under again.

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Legacy

 

In childhood
by the barbed wire fence,
an act of violence.

A stranger, passing in the night,
strangled to death
an iris’s scent.

Under an apartment window,
his cigarette flickered, a signal
to no one
of absence’s arrival.

That night, a woman, unaware
of eyes browsing her hair, slept
while in her dream wolves howled long ago
in Idaho. She awoke
in the Brass Rail Bar on the corner.
“Mommy, let’s go home,”
her daughter begged.

Where is the strangler now,
where the sleeper?
And if she returns, what kind
of noises will she make,
a human’s or a blackbird’s?

Once Bill Muller thought he saw her walking
near the gully west of Stensen’s house.

On the wall above my kitchen table
hangs a picture of her daughter. I cut it
from a milk carton
a long time ago

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Fire Sutra

 

Staring in the mirror, I disappeared
through the door behind me, then walked
left to the window and stood, hands on the sill,
staring down at a woman who didn’t

stare up at me. Like
a premonition of a fresh loaf of bread
appearing out of thin air on a work bench
in a shed on a rocky

North Yonkers slope, her belly
came alive for me under her dress
while I soaped my aching cock as she
finally noticed me, her eyes disguised

as my eyes staring back at me from the mirror
into which I stared as I came in my hand, thinking
of her sodden pussy, then, later, of bees
buzzing in a sunflower patch by the abandoned gunpowder mill
a few miles north of here years before

I was born. Much later in ‘59, Allen said, with such delicacy
about the unreal ones, that they ate in a plum tree grove
at the meadow’s edge. Of course, the old Negro
whom he fantasized being there wasn’t. However,
other things were real: for instance, a stretch of land

with children’s bodies buried in it
that was blocked from view by corn stalks taller
than any you’ve ever seen. Sun

blood on hills at day’s end
burns a smoking road for us. Walk it. In
the sutra that you chant, be the flames
that roar. Listen

behind the apartment building
where you grew up:
the sound of soot settling
on everything.

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Parent

 

In a dream about my mother, I break open
a child’s breast bone,
then reach in
and pull out a fish from Lake Ronkonkoma
long ago.
“Very good,” my mother says, “you did that nice”
as I wake up. The fish flops around
on a lake shore different from what
the realtor promised: bones are scattered
here and there and a snow of ashes blows in my eyes. As I
look over my shoulder, a rabbi
approaches, runs his fingers through his beard and says,
“You’re not a Jew. You’re a Lutheran.”
Confused, I shake you next to me in bed and beg, “Wake up!”
You do but then refuse to cooperate, insisting
“You’re still asleep, you just think you’re awake.”
At that moment our son calls from the other room,
“It’s nice visiting with you both again.”
He’s a good boy, although not quite right
having died in childbirth years ago.
Ever since his brother Tony returned
from Kosovo a few days back, rain has threatened,
although, as yet, we haven’t seen a drop.

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Dusk to Night

 

“The only thing in the world
worth beginning:
the end of the world of course.”
-- Aime Cesaire


Silence’s birth: a dog
drools in the grass.

“No,” she tells the man,
“I won’t do it.”

Trees, the tops of which
touch clouds. The dog’s
gone. Beyond
the bushes behind the statue
of the war-dead, the river.
Listen. Either wind
or water moves. This
should be remembered. Written down.

“Why?” he asks.
“What?” she answers, forgetting
her earlier words.

This is what’s important: how,
from a playground we can’t see, the girls’
singing comes through cedars
as they skip rope. I hear
the rhythm, not the words.

“Leave me be!” she yells, yanking
an arm free from his grip. When
she goes, he walks the other way.

This is how night arrives: it drifts
toward Mr. Red sitting on the porch
on 21st. The park is here. The dog
returns, a thought
that defecates in grass. And what
about the steel beam, how it
knocks sense into a head
as the tall building falls
into whose lover’s arms?

The racoon’s paw print years ago still befuddles us.
“Don’t write about those things!” the mother writes.
“Leave me alone!” the daughter will respond.

Tonight will be a night no one forgets.
The leaves on Mr. Bailey’s peach tree
hang there, not a care.
One night only blocks from here
Alamari was shot dead.
“Tapioca pudding, it’s my favorite,” Pauley says
toward the kitchen door while studying, on
the TV news, how
the plane hits the building, which is when
someone rings the bell.
He answers and goes out.

Night now.
The streets are holy. Unprofane. Ours.

In the tree’s shadow behind
the Watter’s house, a swing
and broken rake. Is this
where the worm crawls through the dead robin’s belly, climbs up
its throat, pries open the beak, leaps out and becomes
the end of what is known?
Years ago, on call, Dr. Rab arrived
with his syringe.
He’s retired now. No longer calm
I can see.

Someone’s been here. Look: footprints in the grass . . . down Monkey Hill.
I go too.

At last. Here is where Mickey and I discuss the river’s ideograms on the rocks
and here is where Imani laughs when Leon, brushing
away mosquitoes with his hand, says
“Sometimes I disperse God’s tiny parables just to let Him know I can.”

Tomorrow the children will be tested.
And so will the mums.
Some will survive, others
won’t.

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Beyond the Sentimental

 

Unlike the dead, I get
to grieve the dead. Here
is a pig in a barnyard
in a children’s book. Here
is the department store into which I traipse
through the revolving door and then
emerge again. Here is Amos
grouting tile in Mr. Herbert’s tub. Each moment’s
so full of here it’s voluptuous,
with a luscious ass and breasts. This
is what I get to know, which
the dead don’t get to. I don’t grieve for them by wishing
it was me not them, but by being glad
it was them. If I was dead
who would remember what they can’t?
The living’s job is to make
a pedestal upon which to place
a bust of the uncertain, with its large nostrils
quivering like a post-race horse’s.
The only way to grieve
is to feed our babies ashes
while talking with the mullah and the abbess
about the complexities of is
as pilots explode in midair
and smoke rises everywhere.
Someone alive today
is better than someone dead. Ask the plains shaman
how to grieve the wild petunia
growing from a calculus
of skulls. Stand solemnly
by the hearse with the state’s poets if you want
and weep the tears of weepers
who love to weep. Real grief’s
beyond the eyelash imitating
an eyelash in a poem. It requires
learning the crustacean’s epics, the Kaba’s
black stone’s silence, why Abu-Jamal
writes from death row but you don’t, and other things
it’s good for us
to figure out.

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Details

 

        In the movie, the sight of deep snow beneath hillside pines was a big occasion for the hero whose silence was more loquacious than the memory of childhood birds.
        An El Salvadoran in a bar borrowed my knife to slice off a blouse button’s loose thread. Alicia smiled.
        The other night S. inserted her hand in a green box with a beige lizard painted on it.
        This evening I walked along the river, heard the wind and marveled at how its hideous lullabies echoed sweetly in my ears.
        “Jesus Fucking Christ!” I chuckled as Leon joked, after which I spat a toothpick into the bus station urinal.
        Had a vision in which in 1991 a foreign soldier fucked a stacked Iraqi woman whose children had just died of typhus in a hospital where the medicine bottles were filled with absences too visible to understand.
        Conversed with my son about his 14-hour workdays and the intricate logic of a gladiola’s braggadocio on a morning when the trees whisper among themselves about how light foams on Rosie’s eyelids. 
        Listened to a banjo player on a scratchy record from another era sing about a Tennessee mountain at the foot of which is a meadow where somebody’s buried. 
        Fell asleep on the sofa, then woke up not wanting to swallow my pills years ago at South Oaks. 
        An ant’s footsteps thump in my head like the music of a South Indian hand-drummer playing on a coconut-treed beach close to Mahabalipuram. 
        I take out the garbage. It’s 1 a.m.

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Note to Emma

 

Drink your tea.

Its taste, like the chlorophyll’s silence
inside the yarrow stalk, hints at how
the mind journeys at night
on its own, wearing
a coat in the rain.

Eyes closed, I think of the distance
between one side of the grassblade
and the other, and also of the space between
the tea on your tongue
and the tongue. 

A cold night.
I’ve adjusted the thermostat
just right.

Don’t forget, Emma: drink your tea.

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Remembering Dimitri on his Deathbed

 

You hardly had to touch them and the vineyard's dead vines
snapped, the sound of an uncle's mind

cracking. The drought
did it, you thought. There, your sister and behind her
in afternoon light
a stony field in which

the buzzard ripped out
the cow's entrails, which splattered
the lemon tree with blood, as someone in a scarf

read a poem. It's
so hot today no one can believe it.
The dried up pond's
sun‑baked mud, hard
and cracked like a stale breadcrust.
Real and more real intermix
at the Feast
of the Starved Mary. The half‑blind crow

on the ground squawks
“I am she! I am she!”
The last milk boils in the dead cow's
udder.

“You used to talk a lot, but what
did it mean?” I asked you.

One day someone ordered,
“Be careful now . . . see, it's happening . . . he's breaking into
flame.” A week later, turned
to ash, you blew away

on a cliff above the Aegean. Below,
the surf thundered. Odysseus
held his hands over his ears. The wind
howled in his brain.

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Homage

 

Not the Greek
Orthodox priest’s words but
the corpse inside the small
communion dress, that’s

the prayer. One
yellow petal
of a St. John’s Wort
catches the mother’s eye

years later. Pointing
at it she remarks, “Most people don’t
notice the tiny black
dots at the petals’ edges. It’s

strange what we ignore.” Where
the path forks left
toward the pond, we
bear right through

a tree strand into
another field. Thistle seeds
carried by
windblown plumed tufts

float all around us
on a trail that curves
back to where
we came from: the car

on the roadside, miles, oceans
away from Mykonos’s stony hills where
in the lemon trees’ shade it’s too hot
to breathe and there is no breeze.

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Volsky, Age 64, Long Beach, NY

 

The color of a mackerel frozen in ice:
the hollow cheeks.
Shivering, he leans against the wall.
The January wind,
language’s beginning, sweeps across the boardwalk, not far
from the Peep Club, nailed shut for years.
Like a fir needle tapering to nothing in the Russian forest he’ll never see,
history leads to him.
“When me and your papa first comes here from Novgorod,”
his mother used to say,
“We lose track what real cold is.”
That was then, he thinks.
The granite Atlantic beneath a drab sky as seen by gray eyes
makes him feel triumphant.
This place, the pure
dead weight of it, possesses
the solidity he needs.
No junk in his veins for eight years now, he dares
the wind to fuck with him.
Decades earlier, in ‘59
when the Nautilus Hotel burned down,
black smoke billowed above snowpiles, carrying
with it everything but the icicles that even then
pried open his eyes.

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Note to O'Carroll

 

I didn’t need a book or map maker
to get there.

The club at the alley’s end
and the pierced‑lip woman
huddled on the stoop
were where they should be.

Her eyes unambiguous
as a boar’s paw print in Londa District
toward the Goan coast,
I gave her
my heart’s address: first bench
on Foglietta Plaza by the river.

The newspaper: a murder on the front page,
a rape on the next. I want
to be victimized too, but differently:
my fingers chopped off at the bottom knuckle so I can write
without them getting in the way.

Voices pour through me.
The pierced-lip woman smiles
at leaves blowing into the alley
from a tree she can’t see.

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Anniversary Death Prayer Coda

 

Tony, the old Italian with the throat hole
and a gadget he spoke through
told me in 1982, “They’ll blow up some day,” meaning

the apartments on Thompson St.
where he swore he’d smelled gas leaking
for weeks, which made him nervous, he confided, because
of Bergheim’s, the building super’s, story

years before about a girl who, looking
up into nonexistent water, inhaled
in another country
a surprise from the shower nozzle: the Jews’
collective destiny. But that’s not
it. That’s not what

we chant Kaddish for today. Evening’s birds
screaming in the tulip poplars
confuse things: the amnesia
in their eyes, their misleading wings. When was it that,

at the edge
of what is known, leg hair burned, part of the rubble
of fallen buildings?

Even when we mourn
fate gilds the world for us, so if we want
we can bomb a celebration in Uruzgan;
before we arrive, drums boom in the mountain courtyard, faceless women sing.
Look at the dancers whirl and swirl.
The nakhod taste good. And so do the olives.

The twirling dancers die.
In the background, a subtlety born but barely known: the sound
of a child landing on the ground, dropped from the rooftop by her mother.
Is Omar here or in a cave or somewhere else?
It’s all forgotten long before notice of the dancers’ deaths reaches us.

In the poplars, birds scream.
After too much seeing, there is none.

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It's Where

 

I turned
the corner. There, the dirty river
in which are plunged
the castrated dog's balls.

The water's
dark swirl, Jesus's
toothless universe of a mouth,
in which, in which . . .

What marches toward me?
Is it the rose stem's thorn?
OD'd Jimmy's lost guitar?
Maggie's dirty tampon?

Pigeons roam the sidewalk, hunting
the one crumb in which resides
the key to pigeon heaven.

How did a sperm gob
get on the public litter‑basket's rim, sliding
downward, the ooze
that's left from another
century's sonnets?

The soup factory across the river, closed.
How many people don't have work now?
The mayor's being sued for graft.
A bad-assed bearded man once walked
somewhere over there, looking
for huckleberries. Do you
fucking care?

This is where I live,
where I seek solace
when my lover disappears.

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