A plague of crickets or an endless game of Yahtzee. Neon rainstorms and rat-pack martinis. Tin-foil hats and moon landings. She knows the game: you pays your money and you takes your choice. Enchiladas at Binion’s or veal Marsala at the Sands, a trapeze act overhead or Elvis at the wedding chapel, find the way to San Jose or just walk on by. The sun blooms like a nuclear blast. Someone draws up a plan for Paris. When the old hotels implode, such elegant debris, so many skeletons and shot glasses. The concrete billowing and glittering. For years a sky full of Liberace. For years a cart of dim sum rolling past. She sits beside the dancing fountain and says: it’s all a ghost town now. Heat shimmers as the Eiffel Tower leans in. She finds lobsters in a faux waterfall, in aquamarine pools of vodka, huddled on linen tablecloths waving feelers. Could anything be more alien to this world? She selects a queen from New Zealand and wonders about Trini Lopez, thinks about Caliban with his Sony Trinitron, feels exiled and washed up, like Paul Anka in a mezzanine lounge bar, singing to the drunks. She says Hunter Thompson was right, pulls meat out of the claw and dunks it in butter, flicks the brilliant shell with a fingernail, listens to it ring.
Poetry
A Reading from the Book of Jubilees
Begin with a brackish union. Then breathe space into salt. Then peel away the shin.
Or start with a page of steam, an origami moon, a mirror stained into memory, a lonely guitar in a small, slight sleep.
Or open with the parable of the drunken master who drinks only from broken teacups, or the hermit who lives in the horsehead clouds, or the anchorite who sleeps in ryegrass on the banks of the river.
Or rise in the pre-dawn rustle, the church bells ringing along the line of the bay, the trance of hollowness that drives a town from sleep to the beach before sunrise. And there, an expanse of carcasses in the shallowness, a found flounder gurgling in your mother’s hand, your father rinsing the mouth of a tiny catfish, water choking other water into peace.
Overhear someone say, “I’ll never join an orgy which would have me as a member.” Overhear someone respond to consolation by insisting that loss affects everyone in equal proportion.
Or remember the dream of asphyxiation, when you held the groundfish denser than your wrist, as if holding a tumor and whispering, “What secrets do you hold?” as when your brother took you to the sea and whispered a song into your feet.
Or begin with the rotting heat of morning, when among the carrion, a type of day break, the seagulls’ caterwaul, the beach disappearing under the weight of its own sand.
Double Memory with Train
Once, my mother cradled my head to her chest
& told me how she spread loose change
on the tracks that cut so close beside her house,
the good dishes shook when trains bellowed in.
She’d crush her belly to the yellow throats
of onion grass & tuck her chin as weight
& wheels smeared her pennies palm-flat.
I think even then she knew
how absence freights the memory:
her father’s chair empty at dinner,
his stethoscope always poised
over someone else’s heart.
In the memory I make for her, she leaps
from rail to rail, pockets clattering
with beaten copper. He waits for her
in the kitchen, hands open
to collect her bounty of ruin.
Heirloom
The sandpiper stares at the pickled sky,
whetted for tornadoes. Wind planes
off the plants, atrophied in their pots,
abreast to the thunderhead. I water,
and the leaves play harbinger rain
on my legs. Light washes the sandpiper,
knees high, white ruff to the wind.
A flicker on takeoff, then the screen
door springs open and I am in.
~
I finger the stems, the veins that pulse
blank chimes as a stream winds
from my watering can through the dirt.
Morning-gold leaves now skirt
the balcony, accordion from planters
to rail, like water striders.
~
And the limbs try on new souls,
scheme my hands to the soil that turns
my blood. I pick apart the stuck
buds, the spider’s lace of roots
tubed from the black, the original
feed. I bleed, strum the seed,
my fingers spool as if returning
from sleep. A white feather,
the fuzz of fronds, a green bulb, then
a small fruit—red as my thumb.
Almost Nothing
Two cotton slips, the larger hung on a hanger, lace at the bodice,
and the child’s, cross-stitched, draped over a chair.
Washed so often they are nearly transparent.
Someone must have packed them, folded into almost nothing.
That’s what my grandmother said—folds into nothing.
As if everything could be carried in a suitcase if the cloth were fine enough.
Not her family Bible, each page thin as a slip of cotton
but so many pages, heavy with inked dates,
births, marriages, deaths; the cover unyielding.
Nor the deliberate sound of the fires,
their bitter odor, their flames engulfing the village.
Could not be folded away, then unpacked and aired on a hanger.
after the sun goes down our imitation
after the sun goes down our imitation
of the sun turns on
and someone must measure the distance between these street
lights—to assure ample road coverage of the jaundiced light and the mixture of the pitch
ground
into the deep gouged ridges of the roadway’s bony
back—they balance
illumination against the night
blindness that passing light causes: even before Achilles we
learned
to keep one eye
closed at night the other always
open and scanning for the enemy—the closed eye
to preserve itself from the shock
of flare the incendiary the tracer the Greek
fire—this is ancient wisdom that I share
with you
out of love that will keep you alive
when you may not want
to live passing through each revolution
of the lathe—reduced in mass but more
fully formed and brutal on our bellies
in our in-held breath
and blood coursing through your eye
feel it saturating—dilating between each streetlight
that you rush past this throb
you feel between each enemy each everyday
glory: the salvation of making
the rent getting ourselves dressed
and fed—then at last of cessation
the gravel and soot of the killing
field pushing its way into your pants under
the binding of the tight
belt around a final wound feel the roar
of its loosening of the dispersion
pinned under the work of the machine
gun—on our backs now and looking
up—the passing of the tracer rounds
like the afterglow of streetlights only makes the scar
of night more beautiful.
from Unmanned
In the natural history museum
paintings on the wall illustrate
the massive wingspans of certain
birds. The woman I am with is less
than a golden eagle + an Andean
condor. Outside it is hot + breezy
+ she turns in circles watching
real vultures, her head craned
back, circling on a thermal +
casting fast moving shadows
in the parking lot. I wonder what
is the oldest common dream among
modern humans. Though I suspect
it is something more basic than
flight, she continues to crane.
Behind the museum are chainlink
enclosures, as part of a raptor
center, housing injured birds
of prey, or those otherwise deemed
unable to survive out there, up there.
The Relics of Eulalia
A hundred men bear one girl’s bones
to catacombs. In her sarcophagus,
loose legs clink against a halfling pelvis,
pebble hard. Through cobbled tributaries,
bearers flow along a riverbed last lapped
by her red waters. Their alabaster cage
rides high and light on sea grass finger tips–
gleam of bone wafts through murk of dawn.
How each man aches to have a piece of her.
Hard bits gift the best kind of forgetting:
No more a knuckle but a worry stone,
marble light and smooth, to be rubbed raw
in the deep pockets of the pious, so many
boys with un-remembering eyes.
Before and After a Letter in English 9
She thinks Jimmy is a dolt,
all cows and Fords,
typical of her tenth-graders
retaking English 9. She could back
him into the sink and scrub his head with shampoo
and maybe some flea dip.
His Assignment 4: letter to a friend is to Blake,
dead a year from his own rifle.
Went to his dad’s field, shot the cows and then himself.
She can see him walking in grass waist high
touching his forehead to the soft, brown neck fur
brushing a fly off the rump.
She can see Jimmy casting a fly
into the river
smashing a rock against the skull
of an already dead fish
crushing the fine bones that socket an eye.
He writes
I wish I could see you once more
in a firm, childish hand why
did you take the cows?
Enough
Brother, we once walked through night snow,
past our childhood’s fast food joints.
The parking lots were deep with white fables.
Beyond the hum of yellow signs
and street lights, the moon wore a halo,
which meant the snow would start again,
you said. We went searching for something—
a hill to sled, the last mound
we could stand upon and dream upon—
the earth transfigured at our cold feet.
Collinsville was so still I can imagine
I remember the sound of your breath.
I’d like to say I held your mittened hand.
(You probably wore one of dad’s tube socks
instead.) It is enough we saw a world
that hadn’t been walked on.
Incunabula
In the story I keep trying to tell, there’s a woman
handcuffed in the driveway.
She’s thrashing against the officers, cursing, spitting
on them, her breath rising in the cold air until it
disappears, and they shut the Charger’s back seat door.
All seven of us kids
are watching from her bedroom window overlooking
the garage, our faces
shocked with police light.
When my brother and I were smaller, we found
a bird in the backyard that had pecked itself
raw, almost featherless, and continued
digging into its own quivering flesh.
We rushed inside to tell our mother,
her hands still dripping with sink water
when she swept us into her arms and said
to stay away from the diseased thing,
there was nothing we could do.
Reunion
A stayed partition, the unwelcome place:
I draped hide round the hem of the wild and was.
There were holes in the outside pasture, fool’s gold
in the handfuls of dirt. I could have barreled my fortune there,
but the day was bruising, and the cleaved night pervasive,
rare in its fall. In the woods near the farmer,
three fingers missing to a baler and his deference,
wild dogs wore passions on their chests,
the garter snake weaved and bound the mid grass,
and I ran under the power lines, blown in sway, home to our kitchen,
a cratered embrace and flame.
From the tree line, an inaudible birth echoed,
a near darkness humming grace like bone meeting bone
for the first time in ages.
Years After
…yes my mountain flower…
–Molly (Ulysses)
Each night our house
empties itself of trouble
as all the small things scuttle out,
beetles from the shag rug
silverfish from bookshelves.
As you sleep I patch wormholes
with plaster, caulk crevices
in pearly loops. Our bedroom walls
tremble with mastication:
cockroaches gnawing on fingernail
clippings, termites on pine studs.
As our house crumbles
I whisper in you ear yes—
as if it all could be
reborn like a grafted blood
orange sprig, rewoven
hymen. As you drift half-
drunk, I rummage through
junk drawers, pairing
knives and forks. I count
off my lovers on each tine.
My heart leans inside of
me, laden with unpicked fruit.
The earwig in the cupboard
shudders, squeezing out
the first of her golden brood.
Apple River in Star Prairie
The woman found the apple of the earth
in a river, not the earth,
a fruit from the mouth of the duck, the swan,
wapato, abundant,
and the man in his delight called
the river apple, losing the right words
in translation (river abundant
with earth apples), simplifying
what was white as swans
on the river’s edge, what were arrowheads.
Take it in your hand
and eat, and you’ll know good
from evil finally,
offered the river, slowly curving,
and the man and woman ate the fruit, sharing
the temptation of lumber
to the mouth
of the river in its head.
Excoriate
Madame X’s
décolletage
stands bright
against her black dress,
shining and cinched
at the waist,
and my shirt, cotton
and crew-necked.
She balances
against the table,
her hand a vise
around the edge.
I imagine her hidden
fingers clawing
the underside,
and her leaning wrist snapping.
The elbow’s turned out,
straining en pointe.
Her head twists
away from me. Nape-curls
bezel her neck.
I stare, willing her
to snap, or flinch,
or crick to distract me
from her exposure,
her shock of skin
and its smoothness.
It arouses me. Her skin,
so unlike mine
with its scar
as eye-catching
as a diadem
on my shoulder.
I pose like her,
shoulder tight,
the scar rising
like a pearl I scored
into the nacre
of my own skin.
Worse still, it’s set
among the seed pearls
of scabs and pocks
and scoured pores
scattered like the syllables
of dermatillomania.
What shame I want
X to have:
Sargent forced
to shade her bottle
into that fan,
curtained rotten teeth
behind lips, or stare
her bloodshot eyes
away on the backdrop.
Civil War Reenactment, Look Park, Massachusetts
The bridge needs defending,
choke point between swingsets
and water park. A gray soldier
tells me not to go beyond
the picnic tables. A stealthy
Union man checks his phone.
We’re front seat, lunch spread out,
and while the battle rages
I eat cold corn on the cob,
which always takes a while
and requires looking down to see
what’s been consumed.
Children, there’s watermelon. They eat
watermelon. A man beside a tree crumples.
Another fixes a bayonet.
I tell them what I know of war,
the battle charge to come. They want to know
why you don’t hold bayonets like knives.
I say, to keep your distance.
Still so close
the distance between two bodies.
I don’t say, for leverage.
To drive the bayonet deeper,
to force the point into the stomach of a man.
The firing stops. The yells of men and boys.
When two grapple and one falls dead,
I look back to my corn, which I’ve neglected.
Later they’ll help each other up, brush
each other off, but in the charge I heard them
wanting.
At the First Battle of Bull Run,
spectators dressed up.
Women with opera glasses. Women
selling pies. Far enough away
that when the big artillery began,
they applauded, sure the war
would be contained in one weekend,
in this bowl
of grass and stone.
Later we ride the kiddie train,
through the tents of soldiers and civilians
in knickers and long skirts.
Look, they took their kids! my two
exclaim, glad. The tracks hairpin
by the amputation demo.
I remind them about starvation and disease.
My daughter wants to know
about dysentery, smallpox.
Yellow fever! She likes the sound
of this. Her favorite color’s yellow.
The train rumbles through a tunnel.
Beyond it, men in gray – bandits, rebels –
are set to rob the train.
The children clutch
play coins given in advance
and hand them gleefully to a smiling man.
The children are not scared
and the children are not scared
and when I say you know this is not
what real war is like they say I know, I know
and when the train stops
they run off to feed the deer
behind the bars.
The Lily Dale Psychics Promised You
Each day will be the soft
susurrations of silk
against a window ledge.
All your cakes will rise bloom-like
over their cake pans and you’ll own
all the proper lawn care products. But
one day traveling through the landscape
of your birth, you’ll cup air
in your palm out the car window,
waving to where you left your childhood,
and under the colored glass
that has become your life, you’ll feel
unease—like smoke
from an unseen cigar. But that’s
all. You’ll keep driving. The days
will swallow you, and the many days
afterwards, like coins dropped
into a fountain, with the ease of wishing.
What They Left Behind
A carpet stain that will never come out,
a toy fire truck with no wheels,
a doll with one arm, naked,
one eye permanently closed,
four extra squares of kitchen linoleum tile,
a worn broom, straw tips blackened with soot,
an overlooked drawer containing
a tin box of assorted Band-Aids
with only the smallest size left,
one leaky D-cell battery, some rubber washers,
twist ties, bottle brush, a box
of strike-anywhere matches, paper clips,
and an extra stopper for the bathroom sink.
In a closet, a half-used can of Comet Cleanser
with a rusty lid, a dozen wire hangers,
most of them bent, a paper grocery bag
full of plastic grocery bags,
about eighty-percent of a broken dust pan,
one tennis shoe, child-sized,
for the left foot, still tied
in a double-knot with a muddy sock
stuffed in the toe.
After Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World
She awoke
to an empty house,
the corn crib hollow,
ladder to the roof
untended, the tire tracks
ending at the house
the sentence
she can’t quite finish.
So she crawled
into the field
like a skink to sun,
her legs dragging
behind her like a tail.
She is pink
in the dying grass.
Tell Me a Story
Father, tell me about the Moor
who moored his boat in a moor,
how he ate petrified alligator toes
and hid his prayers in snail shells,
how he turned into a bear, refused to hunt,
spent his days licking the shadows
of crows that stretched before him.
Brother, tell me the one about the woman who planted
her husband’s pool cue in the ochre loam
of her childhood creek, the smooth ash knotting
into dogwood, the blue tip’s sobering blooms.
Tell me about the woman at the dump,
her eyes large and dark as a mule’s,
how she enters our dreams when she gathers our junk.
Mother, tell me about the bricklayer who was taken away
to rebuild the city of God, how he didn’t need
a plumb line to lay the golden courses,
how his trowel turned into a crappie when he was done.
But this time let me finish: his son mixed
what he’d learned in Sunday school and comic books
to try to make sense of it all,
wished he were Thor, winged crown of tinfoil on his head,
his father’s brick hammer dangling from a belt loop,
how he descended into the underworld
of the basement to find his father
after the burning bush was just burning brush
and the rainbow bridge was merely
the long frown of the morning storm.