Eulogist

 

Some people love to kiss a navel;
my heart breaks if I can’t tongue its disappearance.
I teach myself to insert my finger
in an emptiness so plush that when I stroke it
magnolia blossoms shudder miles away, then quiet down again.
What is more amazing than the stillness on a stage
when the dancer leaves and the abandoned seats hold their breaths,
anticipating the eulogist’s arrival from the wings, he
who makes sense of everything?
I, who once found the unfound everywhere, now dress loneliness in flesh
and become its lover, as I gently raise the blue cap
from its head and gaze into its eyes,
which aren’t really eyes, but rather their nonexistence.
A failed explorer, I am the awaited eulogist,
the one who, when making love,
speaks most beautifully in the loved one’s ear
when the ear, disappeared, is just
a memory in a universe that isn’t even here.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

A Hint of the Lyrical

 

It’s persuasive, like the leech’s
slow gulp of blood
through skin. Or the way

a rat snake, draining a wren’s egg
of yoke, feels it slide, an elation

into its long belly. What is best, though,
is how Helen’s baby Marie, in need
of milk and reaching for a nipple,

can be fooled into sucking
Uncle Sonny’s cock instead -- and the infant doesn’t
even complain when it’s time to swallow. This is

the lyricism of the real. As is how, years later
at nineteen, she cajoles
a Floridian accountant into thinking
his cock’s the first and that

no he doesn’t remind her
of beaches where the tortoise’s extinction
is imminent, and that no it also isn’t true

that in Louisiana
someone rots in a drainage ditch,
in his back a knife which every night
she pulls out, then uses as a dildo until

she wakes up, hands soppy
with juices every one who woos her
would gladly lose their souls to see.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

From Kosovo To Macedonia

for S.

 

“And here I am before torn glimmers of light and rent veils . . .”
-- al-Hallaj


They come along the mountain path, rawboned faces
the color of boulders to the left,
while to the right dirty snow patches
stretch among rocks and weeds, toward more
of the same drab land, while some of them cough up
bloody mucous and others, bundles slung over shoulders, stumble
because of loose boot soles or an absence
of philosophical footing, and still others,
holding babies on their hips, stare vacantly ahead
at a grapevine that isn’t there or a butchered lamb,
blood dripping from the cutting table
into the guts tub beneath -- and they all, no matter
who they are, trudge forward, rounding the bend
where winter’s just beginning, the worst still to come,
as they count their steps or don’t count them
depending on their superstitions, and all they want
is nothing, just the perfect blank
of one foot and then the other, the gray daylight dying,
a ringworm of memory festering on an old man’s belly,
the dank ravine to the right a crease in Allah’s mind,
and at this moment a white-kerchiefed woman,
parka open, blouse open, tit hanging out
into an infant’s mouth, trudges
stubbornly ahead of everyone, her big nose
and mineshaft-dark eyes the epitome
of reason’s limits and the ugly beauty
of the mindless traipsing
required of the person in the lead, and so
it continues, her grunting onward
slowly, thick-thighed
while hissing at the child
“Don’t you fucking die”
which is when the snow begins again
as it always does
and so glum-faced the bewildered plod
forward in her wake, heading
toward you, only to claim,
“If we don’t make it
to Macedonia, remember:
someone who talks about more than seagulls told us to say . . .”
Leaning into the wind, snowflakes whirling wildly in their faces,
they are, like the rest of us,
a sign of future times:
the living who are dead
and the dead who live
and the love that either will
or won’t survive winter
as the days again grow longer
and the time for dying in the light extends.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

Private Emotion

 

An awareness,
the Monongahela laps reeds, seeking
nothing, not even
its own ebb and flow.

Where is
the steel mill, in the shadow of which
Yusef, the day done at the foundry,
once drank grain whiskey while picturing
a sand dune in another place, sloping
upward, more prayer than land?

Some people don’t know what it means
living here. A dead fish floats
to the surface, another curiosity
beyond the milk’s secrets in an udder
old Tim wants to pull.

If not careful, even the best might learn
a trick or two from Frau Gruden,
the Lutheran mother who, all those years ago,
memorized the pine root’s silence
so she wouldn’t have to tell the baker
“Death is the Mister from Deutschland. His eyes are blue.”

When a horse vomits in the field
north of the mill that’s no longer there
and Jimmy Zia, sluggish from the news commentators and in need
of victory, flees into a sorrow bigger
than the distance that the sunlight travels to the clam,
it’s not gentleness that licks
the windowsill when he rests his head on it
but something queasier. Afterwards
resentment’s slobber drips
onto the baseboard, then slides further down
towards a depth
we didn’t want to know was there.

In his silence, bullets shatter window glass in another city,
one more synagogue or city hall in ruin.
Ignorant like God, he later inserts a flower in the table vase.
Inside the wall nearest him, plaster clings
to the heart’s lath strips, keeping the unnecessary out.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

After Falling Asleep in the Chair

 

The llama strolls out of a dream into an actual field
east of Lantana Sq.

Aging hands creak, trees in the wind.

One thing I know about need is this: how
once a younger me crawled through mustard flowers
toward a farmhouse, only inches from the city.

Later, the man with wide-brimmed hat laughed in front
of Tony’s Groceries. That evening like many others,
my crazy uncles butchered the buffalo-sun on the Palisades.
Blood dripped down dark rock and seeped brightly
into water.
I watched from the river’s Yonkers side.

That was when I first thought of you, realizing how,
far beyond the cliffs, there was fear
and, beyond the fear, grasses taller
than I’d ever seen before and also
so many other things to touch.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

Prophet Totem

 

Where the dead squirrel is, in the underbrush
near the streambed, reminds me
of a place I used to go

near Mrs. Taylor’s before she moved
to a pensione along the Arno. There was an apple tree. Not
in Florence. In that other place where I would go
hung over or stoned, knowing nothing except

how soon I would end up asleep
at her house in a room
whose silence scared me. Even if there were apples
on the tree, I never thought to eat one. Eating

my mother told me once in a rage
was the mouth’s most loony hobby. Its real task in life, she yelled,
was to spew words that could kill quicker
than the electric chair killed killers. What you must do
she explained
is hit quick then watch your target have a seizure and maybe

while he’s convulsing on the floor you’ll get lucky and he’ll accidentally
stick his finger in an electrical socket, after which
you’ll inhale, as if in the Big House,
burning flesh’s after-smell. All of this
I remember here. Dead in the underbrush, the squirrel
rots, reminding me of nothing now, except

how the other day, in a taco’s shadow that the jelly fish
knows nothing about, a maize stalk pissed
on the Alamo, as a Pakistani man, further north

in Dallas, was shot to death by a gunman who thought
this was the fellow who owned the camel that was allowed
to pass through the needle’s eye
before some Americans. Oh boy

did mama laugh then. What
a fucking show, she shouted, not realizing
it was the news, not Law and Order. I went back once
but couldn’t find
the house where Mrs. Taylor lived. Behind

my own, though, there is
this dead squirrel. I cut off its face, stretch out
the skin and wear it as a mask
through which I look
at what must be seen.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

You Will Make Me Weep Soon

 

Like a collection of the illusions you created,
the embalmed body, posed on its pillows,
is the ventriloquist whose mouth stays closed, no matter what.
“I think I can hear him thinking,” Aunt Emily says,
suckered as usual by any hint of mystery.
“But I can’t think, don’t you know that?” I reply, realizing
I’m the guy in the box.
Alive, I wanted something, a purity of passion, so invented it
but screwed up the inventing, and this is what I got.
Now, after all these days or years, do I hear rain falling
on the Front St. tracks, or is that you weeping daintily
in a room with glass doors that look out on everything?
I wonder if Mr. Grace owns all of India’s neem trees yet
or what the last paleontologist will do, lowered
into one of Cripple Creek’s oldest mines, hunting
in rock and carbon for a hint
of the falcon’s wings’ beginnings, or the origins
of state militiamen burning miners’ children in a tent
erected on a knoll so holy no known language is now spoken there.
You see, even dead, what I’m best at
is being one of your diversions, wily enough
to ask prophetic questions without parting my lips.
I hope I entertained you.
I hope my poems were fun sex-toys from which you got good use.
This is what my epitaph should state:
“Once he was alive. Now he’s not.”

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

Cochin Forgotten and Other Things as Well

 

The leaf burns in the light
outside the window. Or does it?

That was morning; now
it’s night.
Cars pass, barely audible, on Rt. 27. The sound
of memory’s movement.

I know you’re out there somewhere
on the other side of town.
If you’ve reached the abandoned steelmill
you’ve gone too far.

This afternoon in the field off Narrow Crescent Trail, close to
the lavender speck
at the Queen Ann’s Lace’s center,
I fingered you and sucked your clit.
Beyond your shoulders, bees swarmed white clover.
Like an idea that saturates an era,
milky cum soaked my hand and beard.

On my desk back home, a book lay open to a painting
in which two crows sat on a table in a field
in Malabar along the coast.
I didn’t think of it with your flesh so near.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

Near the Downspout

for another writer

 

The slug, a tumor that has learned
to crawl, inches across the walkway. A tiny
mutant horse, it pulls an unseen wagon
loaded with minuscule boulders. Time’s slowness
on a normal day. The slug

moves, an almost-nothing
that is something nonetheless: the poem
you hope to write, compact enough

so no
language burdens it
with meaning.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

Evening

 

Not far from the mushroom farm, the oak’s
shadow lengthens as old lady Lumas turns away
from the pond north of the Korean church
while birds migrate in the sky toward a south
we'll never know is real, or if we do know
it will be only after taking medication at day’s end
then sinking into a drowsiness in which
nothing’s near and distance, more beautiful
than we’d supposed, overwhelms us everywhere.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

Foretold Cradles for Rosa’s Uncle Jimmy, and for Marcos

 

1
Near the 2nd St. alley,
Emma, an hour after her pimp breaks her nose with a toaster,
shoots up. A mind at rest
dawn inches quietly across the East River. How deep
the world’s orifices are
doesn’t matter now.

On the TV, before
anyone awakes, a cheetah
bounds across the plain and fells
the antelope.

My father rolls over in bed, shit oozing
from his diaper onto the sheet.
That’s what I remember at least.

Another day begins.


2
In the bank, I hand the withdrawal slip
to the teller. She opens the drawer,
smiles and gives me
piles of images.

Outside, a man climbs the subway exit stairs, then sprints
into the building, holding
a scissors with which he snips
her eyelids off.

“Now you’ll see what real seeing’s like!” he laughs
and runs away, stabbing
the security guard with the scissors
before scooting out the door.

In the confusion, I finger the seashell
in my pocket. Later
I’ll crawl into it, climb down
its winding stairs and discover
oceans in universes no astronomer knows about.



3
Morning.

Becoming what it isn’t, the air pecks the tulip poplar trunk
with its beak, focusing only on that one pecking‑spot while ruffling
its feathers, which it, of course, doesn’t have, not being
an actual bird, although the air, more feathery
than most things, eventually, bird‑like, flies away, leaving us
gasping for breath.

his is what breathlessness is: oxygen
hijacked by a conspiracy to trick us into seeing
the orderly’s white jacket putrefy on his back.
Behind him, the corridor, a truth, stretches for miles.

“Where am I? And why?” somebody might ask.

If they do ask, they better not start whining
when the planet replies.


4
I close my eyes and listen.
Syllables clack, dice on the craps table
in silence’s casino.
Your vagina, soaked like the paddy in which the white crane wades
toward the sound of fading light, imitates
an Asia you’ve never seen.
I roll over, the night breeze brushing my naked thighs.
When Gabriel, sent by Allah, snuggles
next to me, speaking in my ear, I warn him,
“Don’t you fucking mess up my good luck streak!”


5
In an ancient poem, somebody queries a young woman,
“Why are you staring at the floor? Did you lose something?”
Quick‑tongued, she replies, “Are you as big an idiot as you seem?
Can’t you feel death in the middle of the day?
A jewel of a moment
has just slipped away.”


6
The imagination: a cowboy
drunk at a bar in a ghost town in a movie
I haven’t seen in years. He staggers
from his stool, stumbles outside and rides
in his mind
on a monarch butterfly’s back, as if,
one hand waving in the air, he’s riding
a bucking bronco at a rodeo in which
all the other cowboys wear roses and coneflowers in their hair
while sitting in lawn chairs
in Calamity Jane’s back yard, thankful
for the sunlight’s gentleness
and anything else the day has to give.


7
Bent over, as if about to shove his car’s oil dipstick angrily
back into its tube, the cop pokes his billy club into the sleeper’s ribs
then orders, “Get the fuck up, this ain’t no tourist hotel!”
The guy’s in a booze stupor under a Bryant Park bench, not far
from a deli that’s closed for the night. The street still smells
of Korean mustard leaking from the jar Mickey broke, throwing it
like a baseball at the fire hydrant, a perfect strike, bullseye, 1966.
“What?” the muddled fellow grunts, which is when
the cop cracks him on the skull, blood dripping down
as the man stands up, the stars going round and round
in his eyes, which, thirty‑fives years later, view
the same park once again, but at a different
time: 7 a.m. The sunlight
on the grass is your breath on my flesh, me here in New York, you
far south, listening
as the Gulf of Mexico’s waters recite a story
in which starving Spaniards cook horsemeat over a fire
that soon goes out. As
the 17th century dawns, the snowy egret,
standing in a tidal marsh, looks around: the mind
in perfect focus.

We survive or die because of what we see. Or if.
This is the festering mango, this . . . 


8 
I know where I am.

The 59th St. Bridge, arcing
across the East River
into Manhattan, descends
into a zone where placebos smoke cigars
in tanning salons
long after sunset.
In the July heat wave, while drought spreads
in the open wound in the dead possum’s belly, a crucifix
carried here in a suitcase from Campo Bolontina
decays at the edge of the papaya’s aroma
on W. 109th St. while the bee flies
from dumpster to dumpster in an alley where the gladiola’s absence
is a language spoken by frail abuelas
who rock their grandchildren to sleep
in prophetic cradles foretold by Puerto Rican seamen
who once played ukuleles in the shadows all night.

‑‑ Here, where the kingdoms
of your body’s complexities
spread across every continent there is,
the outlaw lives. Until
holding on isn’t worth it anymore.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

House of Ice Cream Ations

 

A whipped cream pile with a cherry on it
isn’t all you get when, dark sideburned
with onanistic eyes
I bring the split:
all these banana slices and nuts, and the three huge scoopfuls
that you crave. See
how lovingly I raise the dish from the tray.
It’s just for you or so
it seems.

Here I come again. Tiny specks of sea‑cliff stone
are caught under my fingernails from that day
Judy went bye‑bye in the car wreck
years go. Rt. 1's
the winding scratch on the tray, dug there
one night last week by a junkie
with a visionary fork. And further south: the hot
Chula Vista dragstrip all sundaes melt on. What you get
is slop.

See what happens when you play? Not only
is there nothing on the tray, there is no tray.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

Staccato Morning

 

Rat-a-tat-tat,
how many dead in your lap?
The hillside, pink with rockrose, slants
upward, not to escape, but just to be.
Far beyond the alley where Haneefa lives,
the ibex’s horn, a crescent moon with legs,
climbs to nibble wind between the grasses.
The Jordan River knows none of that.
Rat-a-tat-tat,
how many dead in your lap?

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

What Can I Say and Why Should I Say It Even If I Can?

 

voum rooh oh
voum rooh oh

the unsaid, ugly because unsaid, grunts
Mr. Frog clucking like a prince

why language when
sound of sea battering Owen’s head one April is enough
why sound
why -- when Herr parrot ist dead as doornail in the cage
why -- when Uzi in suitcase eats whole breadloaf before spying black olives in the hand of the waiter riding on a humpback’s houlders while trapped in the phlegm I cough into the urinal of love
why -- when woman in the mountains won’t come to me, won’t

leave that meadow, won’t descend

to see me on the plains blowing my eagle scout whistle next to a campfire at the edge of a streambed winding under the cradle in which an ancient Mesopotamian silversmith’s baby sleeps

my friend Cesaire
he watched the maple walk its chest out glaring at the stars in the heavens under the snail’s foot as the snail crawled toward verything that wasn’t what it was

aagggh oowed xycuth

why language when language doesn’t work
what’s the word for the rainforest
hidden by one flake of dry ankle skin
under your sock inside the sneaker
that was born inside the brain
of another planet’s chieftain

what is the word for, how doth one bespeaketh
cunt that can’t be kissed
mouth that won’t open so I can pour universes in

language
that Dachau where every meaning is a Jew that dies
that . . .

aagggh

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home

Saying Goodnight to God from Gander Hill Prison

 

Place your cock in your mouth, my Almighty. Suck
yourself to sleep while praying for love
in your own embrace. Forget

your mind, that space in which
Centaurus 99's quantum physics
rumbas on a dance floor you can't see. Have

you come yet, spurting silence
in your throat and swallowing it like sleep
as night rinses the iris stamens outside your palace gates?

Don't worry. If you panic in the dark, calm yourself
by contemplating uranium's half life
or the Dali Lama's popularity. But stay away

from Brooklyn where a plunger handle, shoved up
Louima's ass, became
a conductor's baton directing background music

in Kosovo as the moon's fuse blew
and more than the lights went out.
Stop whining, God. Close your eyes. Goodnight.

Top | Poetry Manuscripts Page | Home