Late January Cold Wave

Two A.M., Outside

After Being Arrested for Trespassing

1
A landscape that no one can touch

of empty purses hidden in the holes of tree trunks, of
a shotgun lying across the landlord's lap, of
an abandoned movie theater in which one
group of seats is bloodsoaked.
What happened here?

Then as now, the ghost audience won't talk.


2
Strange world, filled with bold streetsigns, where
the trucks of insomnia backfire
& everything goes up in smoke,
where even paraplegics in their wheelchairs, teetering
on the cliff's edge,
are mortgaged to banks.


3
When I stepped on this
little private plot of dirt
& the fuzz came
& I got busted,
I wasn't surprised; it wasn't
the first time.


4
It's warm inside where they keep us.
A woman in a holding cell talks angrily to the cops and won't
give any information until she sees
her lawyer.
She's about forty & when she talks
I can imagine her gnawing her way through the Utah desert
or slamming the sheriff
up against the wall in Battle Hill, Nevada, a town
I lived in once
where the local police ran the whorehouse
and collected the money
from gambling.


5
Doorknobs and lampposts give off a thin light.
Bone cancer has settled in.
Skin peels off the faces of otherwise handsome men
with important positions.
Under the ice, the river
eats away at the west bank.
The sound of fingernails breaking against brick walls
is the only music.

Night Skills

1
Memory: the cheap hotel room stinking of piss and ammonia
and in the night-table drawer
the moth-eaten Gideon bible,
& how I woke up in the morning, thinking
I had made it:
sunk down, at last, as far as I could go.


2
Last night, I had a dream. I was a boy. I went
to the town's edge to study
the burnt-out ex-cons weeping
next to the cemetery toolshed for their dead parents.
They had ash-gray faces & dirty teeth.
They were rude
& didn't tell stories.


3
Another dream.
I touch bottom
for the nine hundredth time: a firm
turf, pockmarked
with ragged footprints. It's four in the morning.
An empty street leads through the city 
beyond, then past a water-tower
to a cellar full of voices.
They're packed together
like four knuckles of the same fist:
the wino with his love of tigerlilies, the waitress
who knows the rape statistics inside out, my grandfather
who could bootleg good beer blindfolded, my wife
who cuts three ways at once when she talks.


4
The moon means nothing to me now.

Poetry, like everything else, comes in tin cans.

I've gone underground, with the others.
I'm whittling the stick of fear naked.
I'm learning to be skilled in selecting
who to get.

Something hovers over me as I sleep,
a black birdwing breaking into flame.
I hear the secret signal outside,
the pebble against the window,
I get up, put on my clothes, leave.

Eating Late at Night

1
They sit alone in their booths
in the diner.
In the past they wrote books
on papyrus leavesand stone tablets
that told nobles and common people alike
how to go from one world to another,
and how to survive, without selling out.


2
A strange strength:
a wind that travels,
as if across an open prairie,
a hundred miles an hour beneath the skin.

Listen.


3
The florescent light shines on my knuckles:
five stones in a roadside ditch, lit by the moon.
I think of New Mexico, of the dusty
entrances to the pueblos, of their cool
rock floors where old women
sleep wrapped in colorful blankets,
their knees thin starlings starving in a nest of sand and dry twigs.


4
Close your eyes.
Imagine a coffin
filled with an ocean.
Imagine the Bronx burning
while the landlords grow rich.
Now let loose. Focus
on the inner light. Twist
it into
a jagged tin can
& cut your way out.


5
From the surrounding streets, many people
come into the diner.
Breath-fogged windows,
Tony Bennet on the juke.
It is fabulous, being here.
Look at us:
it is impossible to tell which one is talking,
whose face goes with the voice you hear.

Anonymously

I've learned to smell out
cabbage fossils in the damp
open palms of men who drink
in the dirtiest bars in Chicago.
I'm nothing, standing here
on two legs, face smeared with a thin
film of greasy air & and old
smudges of book-knowledge.
This is where I'm most snug,
stuffed in a corner close
to the jukebox, my ear pressed
to this music that seems to explode
from the insides of cattle in the stockyards
in subzero weather.
I drink quietly with these others
whose spirits also have been sharpened
on the grinding-wheel wind that comes,
sparks flying, off the black
primitive lake.
This is what I know best, this
& that the vastness of my history
springs from my mother's side, her
with her father who died with one glass eye,
stone broke.

When Necessary

Lon Nol the Night before His Departure

A shadow falls from his face
forming a puddle on the ground
deep as the South China Sea
or the Gulf of Siam.
In his imagination he walks along the beach listening to the surf:
far out, underwater, the octopus whirls
a beautiful planet with arms
while clerks, drowning, disappear
into caves covered with cold hair.
Tomorrow the general must leave his ancestral home!
Already he can barely remember
rice paddies in moonlight or the oldest
roads.
His grief is a round
small stone
a pearl
changing many hands in back alleys smelling
of piss & afterbirth.
Shouts in the bazaar,
rotting cantaloupes,
flies --
all inside!
The telegraph offices, floating in blood,
close down. The suede briefcase
of the American official
drifts into the Buddha's open mouth. Now
the wind is a lean dog with teeth of stars entering
everything
while in the hills
the artillery
briefly sleeps
& in the palace servants put pet birds
in cages for the long trip.

Yonkers. In August

Sweltering city. Month
of the hot lioness nursing her cubs, raising them
to kill or be eaten. A guy
in the park drinks wine
from a brown paper bag.
Somewhere
the grand jury convenes,
the assistant DA delivers a powerful statement
demanding that the ocean's blueness
be strapped to a table
& given shock treatments. Nothing
surprises the population,
German, Puerto Rican, black, Italian.
My uncle, old labor man, son of an immigrant, says
"Listen, kid. There ain't no angels out there in them streets
tossing lilies.
It's a bleak magic
what Houdini left us.
Watch your ass, hard
times is comin'. "
I punch him lightly in the ribs to let him know
I understand.

Following the Central Plan

I remember:
a field
in the mining-district,
the anthracite burning slowly,
a low flame
the color of wild strawberry.

From generation to generation the dust is passed on
in the pit of the stomach,
in the lungs.

Now the field is far behind. I'm separated
from it by many lakes
& roads patrolled
by state troopers.
As I approach new homes, no one hears:
the lawns I walk on
are wet green pillows
swallowing my footsteps & leaving no trace
as I slip from house to house
& peek in through uncurtained windows.
It's important to know
what occurs
in these theaters.
Look at this one.
Inside
a man in silk bathrobe is cutting off a woman's right arm
with a saber saw
while she, with her left hand,
pulls the cotton out of his ears, forcing him
to listen to her small
cries of humiliation.
Before leaving
I scratch a sign on the door
with my knife.
It's spring
& each house must be marked in a certain way
& then each mark
recorded in a journal
that will be relayed back to the garrison waiting
in a little valley
far from these suburbs.
Only those who know
how to move
democratically forward
will be saved.
Already to the west, the city has disappeared
into a river flowing inside
a war-banjo being played furiously
beyond the hills.
Listen to that
sweet, bloodred music.
I do my job
& go on.

Waking in the Middle of the Night

I wake up
& hear a sound, like an asthmatic animal
wheezing behind the walls
or a lung long collapsed, suddenly inflating.
The wind.
Something woke me up, a dream:
statues of ancient generals on a public terrace,
then a narrow, upward-winding trail.
A baldheaded woman with open
cheek-sores is with me.
As we climb the mountain, she holds
my elbow.
Half way up, near a field of wildflowers,
she says
"Don't be frightened. The volcano
is its own manifesto."
We go higher. From a rocky ledge
I look down at the wide plane
at the mountain's base:
a sound, people chanting, far below.
The same sound also comes from above
out of the volcano's open neck.
"A passage like a throat
move up through the mountain, making
a sort of megaphone"
the woman explains, seeming to know
too many things.
When we reach the crater's rim
we talk until the stars come out, then
she disappears.
Her last words are
"Don't be a fool & pretend you're alone."

Letter to Father Ernesto Cardenal

Over the rivers of North America
& over Mexican dust
dotted with wheelbarrows

Over desert ice on top of the mountains

& over the press conference where the general's uniform
in a boiling vat
in which the cacao flowers you love become pale vegetables.

Over these things

& over the beautiful rum bottles of the living

& out of the starry night, with its lucid Saturn, favorite
of unemployed salesgirls who hoard rice in their skirt-hems

this letter comes to you, stashed in a satchel,
in the luggage compartment of a Boeing 707.
Far below, the coyote's howl on the town square
is a fallen meteor around which
men from the north, dressed in tropical suits, walk, talking.
Later with metal instruments, they check the rock's pitted surface,
hoping to find gold or blood from another planet.
Meanwhile, blind fish with whiskery antennae
swim in the huge glass prisons of the aquarium, throwing off
a pale light.

Time stops. Our minds' naked elbows meet. In Nicaragua.

Lats night, before going to bed,
I thought of you.
& today. Around noon. When the heat went off and the walls became white fur.
When the data banks
seemed to have the last word.

I'm writing to tell you that my country is dying & being reborn every second.

I'm writing to tell you that in spite of once having woken up naked in my own shit under the El in Queens,
I now come to you clearmindedly.
Look!
The Virgin's menses boil in my cupped palms
while seagulls caterwaul above the 49th St. Bridge.

I'm writing to tell you this:
that the earth's eyelids are painted with creosote
as it tries to lure
the right ones to their deaths.
That, in Detroit, on the assembly lines, in the great
auto factories,
the workers perform sacred acts:
one, in a state of paranormal dementia, sets the back seat of a car on fire
& claimed it was God burning
in his pitiful bush.
Others, with second sight, notice
that tire irons can be used for digging out apples from between the teeth of the extinct brontosaurus.
Furtively they cross the wires in car radios
so future passengers will receive signals
from transmitters hidden under
tree bark & inside crates piled on abandoned docks.

And this is only one city. One speck on one continent.

We stumble around, looking for the ancient herbs,
the ones that cure insomnia
& transform love into a principled hatred.

Things that someone might describe as "unexplainable" have happened.
When the angry woman, with a child on her lap, spoke at the public meeting,
the smell of giant ferns suddenly filled the welfare building,
& when the bum, bleeding after falling on the subway platform,
stood up and clumsily tried to dance,
people watched expectantly, rooting for him to continue, as if
all their lives were at stake.
It was then that the shadows, like opening safety deposit boxes,
released their memories
of the moon shining
on lakes and formica tabletops.

Things like this happen now.

Gangs of teen girls and boys steal Geiger counters from government warehouses
& backstage at the theater
it's always possible that the scheduled is being cancelled
by guerrillas with wet handkerchiefs stuffed in their pockets.

Listen:
there's so much shouting
I can hardly hear what I'm saying,
Let alone decipher the cockroach's syntax.
People are talking about a new "precise" science,
something about protecting our last windowbox gardenias
with guns.
Everyone's calmer now, more loving,
more violent.

I've even heard a few mention your name
as a
"person from another place who's worth listening to."

It's true.

You are the planet's circumference, possibility's border: man, woman, both & neither. Your strength
staggers into North America's dingiest barrooms,
it goes down into stones that are beginning to crack open,
it blocks the door to the post office,
it throws
Spanish-speaking anemones in the faces of hysterical cops.

If I had a camera
I'd force it into your mouth and film your interior life.
It would make a splendid documentary
that could be shown on the walls of public buildings at rush hour.

I want, like you, to hand my heart to the butcher
& dare him to sell it
on the open market.

The world's getting nakeder by the minute.
Even as I write, I'm out in the streets.
The saxophone in the pawnshop window wants to give cold lectures like the wind
while dust fills the bra
of the suicide movie star.

You & I, two birds of the same feather.

Priest & antipriest we marimba here & there
then nest in the gutter, ears cocked
for what might otherwise go unheard.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

1
One night, not far from here, a Korean woman got arrested:
she walked into the street naked,
banging together two glass jars.
They took her to the hospital, wrapped in a blanket,
as she laughed & sang in a language no one could understand.


2
After drinking beer, I fall asleep
& dream I am here, in this same town,
having entered by York Rd. late at night.
Near the national cemetery
I see the tall shadow of Lincoln standing waist-deep in grass
swallowing stones.
I step into the shadow's place, wearing a black cape made
of human hair.
Later I pass a diner by the railroad tracks,
the yarrow thickens, I know I shouldn't have come this far.
I retrace my steps, planning
to break into the Zerfing's Hardware and steal enough cash
for my many selves, all of whom want to get out of here.


3
Now I am somewhere else in the dream: another state
with my father in an old house.
He is seventy & obsessed with figuring out
what's wrong with the oil burner in the basement.
He wants to repair everything, even wants to reconstruct
the highways so they all wind past an ocean.
He says he has secretly taken an engineering course by mail
and is going to rewire the world so that hills
are lit by moonlight all the time.
He's crazy: St. Francis of Assisi on another psychological planet,
talking with birds.
I carry this man within me.

In spring I give him cold snow-water to drink.


4
It's still late at night
but no one's asleep.
In each living room, the television is on.
Men, women, children lean forward in their chairs
dreading the next news bulletin, yet curious.
Somewhere at a field's edge a blue deer appears, riddled with bullets.
I climb over the body, looking for something else.
The road heads toward Baltimore.
I am not afraid.

Graffiti Painted on the Wall of an Enemy Institution

This poem, a tulip
wearing
black rubbers
in the rain.

A trenchcoat is thrown over
its green shoulders.

Smoking a cigarette
it arrives
unseen
like a private detective
in a cheap novel.

It wants to solve the crime that is your life.
It wants you to see each pebble clearly
& each lost nickel of moonlight
that the ex-mental patient hunts for in the gutter.

In the end the tulip
will strip off its trenchcoat & rubbers , revealing all
its material glory --
as a warning to the father who would dare
teach his son to smear
emptiness, like jam,
on the bread common people eat.

This poem: a tulip, a naked
skull of petals
on a sharp stick
pointing
at you

Sleeping

for Nikos


1
. . . the night sky,
a photograph
of the inside
of your eyelid . . .


2
The wild turkey plunges
through the underbrush:
a quick glimpse of feathers,
then nothing.
It is like your dream, seen from the outside:
a brief facial twitch,
then, again, stillness.


3
Your hand, a fishing vessel
floating on far water.
The Indian Ocean is wide,
the coast is near,
the people sleeping on the moonlit beach
do not know you're approaching.


4
You have gone away,
taking only a single lantern.


5
I wait for you.
I belong to the dark minerals shining on the planet's rock surface.
You are not only
my son,
we are brothers.

Variations: Two Ancient Chinese Poems

1.  War
Last night along the river bank
the first blood flowers rose up & ate the moon
Now great warships & old barges float
on dawn water
They glide down river
On both banks white blossoms fall in apple orchards
In villages people wring their hands cry go insane
Then again night silence moon stars


2.  Spring
When I look in the mirror the whole world appears
I am an old man
My cobweb arms are broken by the white flowers
Each year meteors spitting fire rain down on nearer deserts
The shadow of someone's money swirls burning at our feet
Every spring I fill my cup
with cold snow water
while the rich court poets write about huge wine flasks
Too slowly we learn
Now I am an old man
If only my heart could sprint across the fields
like a wind that no
stone wall could stop

Apology

for B.

1
In his observatory,
the liberal astronomer believes laws can be passed
that will alter the movements of planets,
the speed of light.
But he does nothing, just sits & waits.
When he dies, they peel off his eyelids,
bury them in a government cemetery
& build a big monument above the grave.


2
Class hatred is a terrible thing. But soothing.


3
The first night we met, you talked about
a paranoid alcoholic woman from Hartford.
I noticed your tone
& thought
"If only I could get that gentleness into my poems."


4
Another night, about two months later, we talked in the car
about Cuba,
revolution.
You were uneasy.
My mind wandered: I saw a mole
burrowing under the earth,
its claws
dark, red stone.
When I looked up
you were crying
because of something I'd said.


5
I'm the son of a crippled mother, the daughter
of a German immigrant, a janitor.
She hated books,
unlike my father.

ometimes I dream of her wheelchair, empty, speeding down
a starlit highway under a huge sky.
This is buried inside me
& I am trying to dig it out.
All my adult life
I've been trying to carve it into a perfect poem.
Sometimes, though, I get confused
& apply it in the wrong place,
abstractly,
clumsily.


6
The symbols pile up:
some are roads forward,
others
obstacles. 


7
I'd like to step into your skin
& look through your eyes
at this poem, to see
if it's at all clear
that I'm saying
I'm sorry.


8
I used to be different, I think.
I went for long walks in the woods
& tried to identify herbs that were good for healing.
I was calmer
& practiced yoga
& thought I was "mastering" life.
I think now
that I was sick then,
although less violent.


9
Revolution is a profession. Like being an auto mechanic.
Or a window-washer who cuts messages into the windows
of tall buildings
with prehistoric diamonds.


10
I want to be many things.
I want to be a Poosepatuck warrior who has memorized the moon's phases
& who, crouched in tall grass,
imitates, perfectly, the wild turkey's clucking.
I want to be an arsonist, obsessed
with liberating cities.
I want to be gentle,
I want my hands to be delicate Japanese parasols,
I want them to be gigantic fists.
I want to be who I am
yet slightly different.
This is as honest as I can get.


11
In a month & a half, the daylilies will blossom.
Mercilessly, the police will hunt them down.


12
The ally's collarbone: always
scarred by the nitric acid splashing
from the beakers carried on her shoulders.

The enemy:
always two tongues, one for each cheek.

I was wrong, not noticing your burns.

The Awed Ego

Here are all these people, the salt of the earth,
salt to be rubbed in the right wounds,
salt that is a slow & lovely snow of fire falling
on the world, its streets, parks, skyscraper roofs.
& I am a single flake of this snow-fire, delighting in the long fall.