Prologue

 

 

 

 

 

“I don’t understand my son’s poetry.  He was a non-violent child.  He was a gifted child.  How can he put himself into the mind of the retarded, the mind of the mad, the mind of those who follow their instincts to the point of slaughter of fellow humans?  His poetry does not “portray” the violent nature of man; it celebrates, sings, and understands the evil.  What is going on?”

—Eloise Hamann

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

I

Easter

The End of Youth 

Transubstantiation 

Fragment 

The Kite 

Good Friday 

Hiroshima Diary

The Peony 

TheViolent Imagination 

The Daffodil 

The Marigold 

Beauty 

The Carpenter and the Moon

 

II

The Babysitter 

When Does a Bride Wear Black? 

Redemption 

Flicker 

The Farm 

The Body Burners

The Day's Eye 

Hide 

THREE 

And the Earth Moved  

Park Avenue, February 14 

The Wind 

 

III

Natalie 

Stalk 

Biblia Pauperum 

The House of Cards 

A Note on the Refrigerator 

Possess-possess 

Niagara Falls 

Best Friend 

Quince 

July 1991 

A Dream Day

Love 

 

IV

The Ice Prince

The Garden 

Man’s Fate

The Flood

Deconstruction

The Last Supper

The F of W Civilization

Response

Poem

Haikus for my wife

Dionysian Brew

The Toy by Kate

The Terrible Bed

 

V

The Sinking

The View

The Cycle

The Affirmation

Staying Indoors in an Unfriendly Home

Apartment 4A

The Promised Land by Kate

Deathdoubledactyl

Parts

The Glove

Parasitic Twin

The Trial

The Ravens 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I

 

Easter

 

 

 

Death is stubborn this year,

and by now has shed all its christmassy vanity.

The sky is painted a plain Jane shade of heather and the mercury is shy—

Spring has come only to the calendar,

but this is rebirth North Dakota-style:     

The newborn is born ugly, shivering or born dead

or not born at all—

                        all just to illustrate the ignorance of certainty?

 

An iced-over stew of last year’s leaves lines the gutters.                      

Last summer’s wishes for temperature plunges come true.                       

It is colder for expecting warmth.

Buds don’t bud.

Daffodils don’t daff.

Heather doesn’t doesn’t.  Tomato

plants  panic and die and shrivel and rot and go away.

 

It is the time one finds a spot of blood on an egg

and one is tired of seeing one’s breath.

My sister writes she’s been crying a lot lately.

Trees don’t fatten.

Birch bark flakes and birds huddle and cry.

The cat doesn’t shed—he knows.

The water in the glass an elderly neighbor leaves her teeth in

has cooled cooler still overnight and the set of teeth

shocks her gums in the morning and sends a chill through her body.

She dies.

                   Nothing blooms. 

                                        

                        Not nothing, but less yet—

                   there, in the shame-filled room,

                   spilled children, there, at the writing table

                   the muse implodes—

 

It is the time when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts that would make a whore puke.

 

On Easter, my own grandmother dies.

I cook a plum jam-glazed and unlucky turkey

(who does not see from the standpoint of Christian Orthodoxy)

which friends do not make it over to eat. This is snow country.

I write my sister to tell her that I’ve been crying a lot lately.

 

God is crucified, dead, and buried.

The ground is frozen but He needs no gravedigger.

God is cruel.  He prefers to sleep.

God is a coward.  He prefers to sleep.

For His is the kingdom of indifference,

And ours is frustration,

                        despair,

                        and enclosure

                        forever.

On Easter,      

The ground is a gizzard gravy gray-brown .

The only green grass is Easter Grass

from Eggsville, USA (discounted at Reliable Drug).

Buds don’t bud.

Cocoons don’t open.

It is the time when everything is restless.

It is the time when we  hear the wind wander under the window,

and we whisper back, “Defrost, defrost.  Awaken,”

and we hear in our minds

the tiptoe step between self-sabotage and self-murder,

and we hear the choice echo, “which one? Which one?”

It is the time when you realize, my God,

death is the meat and potatoes; life is gravy.

A squirrel throws itself against the back porch screen door

and you realize

It is time to take everything you ever thought and stop thinking it.

A deer starves

And we hear the mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The End of Youth

 

 

 

I haggle with the ticket girl at Notre Dame

for the cheaper price to ascend to the towers,

refusing to show her proof of age,

my youth having legally ended

the previous March fifteenth.

But my lips and hair are full as a child’s,

I am looked at suspiciously

when ordering bourbon,

I have no wife,

I am poor,

in short, I haven’t grown up,

it’s only fair

I visit the gargoyles half price

on a day that began in a Parisian phone booth

listening to sobs from Iowa

as time clicks away unit by unit.

In this sky sentried by stone monsters

(my favorite devours a cat

            devours a cat

devours a cat)

                        you can see the Sacred Heart.

 

Across the sea a friend lies in a coma,

the flames of hell licking at his heels—

he’d passed out drunk,

choked on his vomit—

I light a candle for him

in Notre Dame Cathedral,

and then another

and another,

and try to pray

                       “Est-ce qu’il y a un saint 

à qui je devrais prier dans ce cas?”

A nun responds with what

(taking tone into account)

can only be translated as

“There is no patron of the comatose, fool;

you’re in Notre Dame—

pray to the Virgin.”

 

When I exit, it’s dusk and then night,

sightseers are joyful, coupled or grouped.

 

I go to the bridge—

three giggling boys run over

pour flour

onto a boat of rich tourists

passing underneath

(blaring New York, New York,  New York, New York).

            The boys run to the other side

look down on the boat

                                      emerging,

to laugh      gloat

see the passengers

wearing “la farine!” 

mimic their futile protests,

                                           perfectly.

Paris wears their laughter like a pearl necklace—

 

I could kiss them.  I turn,

wondering if it was them I prayed to 

unaware.  I cross the bridge

happy to let this be the event of the day,

   

sick to death of importance.

 

The rich, the old can go to hell

                            where we will all burn with equal brilliance

 

Transubstantiation

 

 

 

A friend of a friend of a friend lived so near a bakery

she could not make unleavened bread:

the yeast infiltrated every inch of air

                                                           like the Holy Spirit.

In each breath you take there is likely to be

 

a molecule from Christ’s last breath.  Last breaths

disperse and disperse:

even on the freshest spring morning

the first whispers of the Final Solution

fill your lungs.  And particles

from the curses of the tortured

and the torturers fill a clown’s balloon.

The breath from a sibilant from a word in one of

der Führer’s speeches nestles in a bubble in a Communion wafer

or a champagne bubble(Happy New Year! ).

Twelve million last breaths fuel the winds across Europe.

The dead are alive

in breezes and pear trees.

History surrounds us like laughter.

This is transubstantiation, and it is utterly real.

Pieces of Christ are in your cocaine,

            your bath water, your birthday cake, your dime novel, the ink of your lottery ticket,

            your virus, the tapes that keep your spit curls in place, and you—

They cover you primordially like a variety of ivy

like Munch’s red vine.

Wine becomes blood.

Ideas become ink.

This is not fancy—it’s science.

 

As a child, there was one thought that would stop me cold:

Why isn’t there nothing at all?

                                                 Not just

no people or no world,

but no sun, no universe, no single atom, zero.

And still more chilling is the thought that someday this question will be

what people think moot means because

our Waterloo will find us—

                                                Chatterton’s arsenic, Foucault’s AIDS, Plath’s oven,

Your Calvary will knock—

                                           Flannery O’Connor’s lupus, the liver cancer of Hans Christian Andersen, Dickens’s stroke

                                            (Knock knock)                                    

I’m so afraid. 

                        (Who’s there?)

Even Lazarus died for good.

 

When I am only bones or less

who will eat me as the scale of an anchovy

in a salad?

What I’m really asking is,

may I please have some more?

 

Recently in Los Angeles a man drove himself to the emergency

room with an axe in his cranium,

walked up to the counter,

and dropped dead.

It’s true what they say about truth.

It took fourteen tries to decapitate Mary

Stuart.  After a whack that only exposed her brain

like a pod dehiscing, she cried out, “Sweet Jesus!”

 

Did Christ on the cross cry out for Mary?

 

Did He cry out for His grandma,

                                                     “Anne!  Anne!”

                                                                               ?

 

or mutter the names of His brothers...Jimmy...Simon.?

 

No: His speech was unpeopled. He said (according to the gospel of John)

simply, “It is done.”

 

But in the gospel of Matthew He beseeches, “My God,

My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

 

But in the gospel of Mark

 

as He bleeds from His brown tiara on His bleached rack,

 

absolutely nothing

 

comes out His piehole.

 

 

Fragment

 

 

 

 

—sing in disguise because he met a nurse named May,

who was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen,

and as his leg mended he courted her, and she liked his eyes,

the glint of his teeth, and she requited his love drop for drop,

and Jack and May were married, and before they had a chance

to worry how they would live, they won the lottery,

each of them, and would never want. 

They traveled and saw every beautiful thing we have,

and Jack dove and gardened, and May wrote poetry

and became famous for her sparkling images and unblinking

views on love.  Her love poetry was relished in many countries

and even saved many lives.  One of her best-known is called

“The Farmer, the Hog, and the Carp” and begins like this,

 

One day a farmer was fishing in the pond on his land

and he caught a carp, a fish that very few people are willing to eat. 

The farmer loved fish so much that he brought it in

for his wife to cook nevertheless.  The wife refused,

 

because the carp is a lowly fish who feeds on unsavory muck. 

So the farmer threw the carp to the hog. 

 

The hog contemplates the carp for several stanzas

and then takes it in its jaws and begins masticating it noisily. 

 

The incisors sliced through her scales and flesh

and severed her spine, ripped into her stomach,

opened her heart. A row of molars shattered her ribs

to crush the long tube-like kidney and burst the swim bladder. 

 

Her blood and urine filled the hog’s mouth,

her bones, tiny and sharp, tickled his tongue. 

He snorted as the fish’s head wagged from his chewing

that made a sound like husking corn. 

 

Later in the poem,

 

Her gills still heaving, a canine tooth

pierced her cornea and entered the vitreous humor.

Blood squirted from her nostrils. It is the end of eyesight. 

Her brain was cleaved and stuffed into her mute throat.

It is the end of pain. 

 

Soon all forty-four teeth snapped and ground and mixed.

The delicate and discreet became uniform—

colorful dumplings on their way to the acidy gullet. 

She was delicious, the carp.

 

Later in the poem the hog too is slaughtered.

The poem ends with May’s most quoted couplet,

“It doesn’t matter in the least, how we become one.

We must burn all the books that do not take this position.”

 

Jack and May’s love and happiness only increased as the years marched on.

They raised two children who grew up wonderfully happy

and became wildly successful, and Jack and May grew very old

enjoying perfect health all the while. 

Jack continued his diving and May took up painting,

and it never occurred to them, not for a moment,

that one of them would die first and leave the other

desperately sad and alone.

But that didn’t happen because they both died

one night, painlessly, in their sleep, at the exact same moment,

and they ascended to heaven, a place of unspeakable bliss

where they were met by Jesus Christ, our Lord,

who stood bathed in a gorgeous music and golden light,

stood in exquisitely tailored satin robes

on a platinum platform trimmed with ivory and encrusted with diamonds

and beamed at Jack and May with a gaze of infinite wisdom and mercy

and greeted them lovingly and said that though He loved all people,

He and God had loved them best of all,

and addressing May, Jesus said of the Almighty,

“He particularly liked how you represented Him as a farmer in some of your work.” 

“And that you retold Genesis with Eve as a mackerel,” an angel chimed in.

“Carp,” Jack corrected. 

“Carp, mackerel, oh Jack I am so happy,” May said,

and Jack said, “May, I love you so much.” And he turned to look into her eyes,

but her face was gone, and in its place was that of a

serpent because not even God can cont—
The Kite

 

 

 

A boy on a hill flew a kite his father had given him.

What a beautiful Sunday.  The grass had returned

And was thicker and greener.  Rabbits wandered

Fearlessly about.  Fields were fields again

On the French countryside.  Mother’s hair had grown back.

It wasn’t Spring but a spring of sorts.

Death had fled, sated.  Trees shook away sleep.

The odd stares were less odd.  The baker

Said to Mother, “What’s past is past.”  And the butcher

Included a little extra fat for the boy.

Soap was allowed in the house again,

And the dogs were no longer given coffee

On the new moon.  There was money too—not much

But some—and Mother spoke now and then finally

But never of Papa.  Parcels came from relatives

Who from that distance said they understood.

 

The kite had come one day. Papa had wanted

Him to have it, the relative wrote.

It was a fine kite—not made from paper or fabric

But a light, soft leather.

And as soon as the day was suitable and work was done,

The boy freed the heirloom from its box and let the sky

Pull it away until barely a meter of slack remained.

The dora1 –kite pitched and turned so high above the hill

It had a good start on Paradise. 

                        To look down from

That point would reveal a magnificent spread—

The village and far beyond.  The church to the west

Was set against a field of tombs, and those

Who still believed filed out.

                        In the east,

Past Blood Creek, beyond two abandoned cottages,

Beyond the acreage owned by the bloodless Schmidts,

A family of ghosts had returned to their home:

The mother ran her hands

Along the smooth, cold

Walls of the corridor

                        (Because when you’re a ghost

                        You feel feverish).

Outside the father pried

Turtles from their shells

                        (For soup they cannot eat).

Dogs chase the ugly child

Into the mint patch—

                        The beautiful child is watching.

 

 

Walking up the hill itself was a solemn, solitary

Figure dressed in uniform.

                        It moved with a quick gait

As it approached the boy.  The head was carried tucked

Under one arm so that when the boy turned to face the

Figure and then turned his head away and then turned it

Back again and uttered, “Papa,” he was for the first time

Eye to eye with his father. 

                        “Is it true?” the boy asked.

“They say you were not a conventional soldier.”

The kite careened and the cord ripped at his fleshy palms.

Papa said, “They persecute you because I am German.”

“And Mother, they called her ‘un collabo’,” said the boy.

“All women are collaborators,” Papa said. “Your mother

Did nothing.”  The kite rattled and swooped and knifed

At the blue.  “Then it’s true,” said the boy. 

His hand bled.

                         “Ah, Dora2 “ Papa said fondly.  The kite

Swerved and somersaulted.  The cord cut deeper.

“What we did there, while reprehensible,

Was not uninteresting.

                         After all, beauty is all we have.”

“Beauty!” scoffed the boy.  “There is no beauty

In human suffering.”

                        Papa said, “There is only beauty

In human suffering.

                                                It was sublime, a heaven on earth

To which the heaven where I now reside cannot compare.

If all of human history were a single week, this was

Our Saturday night out.

                        Think of the shiver you felt

When you tore into your first blood orange that Christmas

Or the bliss when skinning rabbits—

                        The hankering

To relive that shiver again and again, to multiply it,

To see, to touch that which the flesh conceals, to hear

The hollers no opera can duplicate, to bathe in the blood

Of virgins, to participate in what will henceforward be

Seen as an occasion for poetry...it

                        It overwhelms! 

It comes slowly, it comes like sleep, but it [nonsense words].”

The kite trembled and made eights.  The boy winced

And said, “You are decadent. 

                         You’ve lost.”

“No,” Papa said, “we’ve won.  You’ll see—

From now on the world will be a world of images.”

 

Papa turned and walked away, and the cruciform frame

Of the kite snapped, and the legacy flapped and fell

And rose, and the tattooed kite

Bows from its thank you thank you heights

Good Friday

 

 

 

Q: What did Christ say when someone wished Him a happy Good Friday?

A: “What’s good about it?” 

 

 

Is it out of irony we use the word

Good to remember that nightmarish Passover,

Our Savior dying on a device, stoically, true to His Capricorn nature?

Is it the mocking spirit with which the Romans wrote

                        INRI?

Maybe it’s because it meant we were no longer doomed to hell.

Maybe it’s because He looks peaceful in Crucifixion depictions.

But look at Grunewald’s Christ from the Isenheim Altarpiece—

twisted, agonized, His skin a gangrenous hue

with sores rioting on his flesh.  He appears

to have vomited midsentence.  His ministry

has been as brief as strawberry season

is to a strawberry plant.  Look

at the hands, fingers tensed into claws, anemones or

stars of pain.

 

On my thirtieth birthday, I had a dream in which He came to see me.

In my dreams I can cry, and Christ asked me why

I was crying.  I said, “I dreamed that You died and You

suffered so much...You suffered so much... that You...”

Christ said, “Spit it out; it’s not like it happened to you.”

“...That You had two mouths,” I said.  “Because of the pain

You chewed another hole in Your own face.”

“I do have two mouths,” Christ said.  “I have My Father’s

mouth, and it is here.”  He placed my hand to His lips.

“And the second mouth, the imperfect mouth, the chewed one

is from man:  It’s called the Church.”

 

Christ says He loves us all equally (He is polite!)

but I can barely muster the love it takes to send a postcard.

I am a fraud and a faker.

I am effeminate and foppish.

I have a grating voice.

I am the nastiest person Doug Dorph knows.

According to Donna Janosik I am useless.

I’m fat, slow and weak,

and I drink too much.

My poems have too many adjectives.

I am a coward,

I confess.

I would like the ear of the Pope.

Am I evil?

If they opened my chest to look at my heart

would mine be surprising to the surgeon

either because of its complete absence, its raisin-like size and appearance

or its black color?

Or would it be slick and garish

with loud music and smoke pouring from it, done up rococo

in four lipstick shades (none of them as ordinary as crimson)

but cold, all show?

 

Though Christ loves the wretched

it doesn’t mean He doesn’t want us to be perfect.

He wants us to have perfect attendance

and excellent penmanship.

He wants us to master pool and physics

and light each other’s cigarettes with a single flick of a Zippo.

He wants us in the latest colors and to be hot dogs on the slopes.

He wants us to be Brigitte Bardot straddling a Harley Davidson.

He wants us to sing like Johnny Mathis or Tanya Donelly

or at least Agnetha Faltskog

or at least make an attempt like Nancy Sinatra.

(Of course if you can do no better than Shannon Hamann

it’s better to just mouth the words.)

He wants us to be lampshades

diffusing His light.

He wants us to be noble enough to take a bullet for a stranger on the street,

the lowliest alcoholic or retard.

He wants us to be dipped

                                          in honey.

 

Educate yourself because life is a conversation with God

and He wants it to be interesting. 

 

And though Christ forgives us our sins

that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be sorry

because we are wretched

and saucy and have wronged others:

 

One time a blind man touched my face

and I said, “Don’t,”

and he said, “I want to see what you look like,”

and I said, “That isn’t looking.”
Hiroshima Diary

 

 

Even here in my neighborhood of concrete

above rice paddies, east and west

greet each other

casually.  Mozart spills from

some badly-tuned piano

while ancient women

bent at the waist like sevens

(already leaning into the grave)

gaze up at me (six feet and blond)

as if I were a demon.

Children chirp hello, “Herro!”

They think I am from television, a hero

                                                                except on August 6

in Hiroshima (I am kicked by a crone in kimono).

 

This is the way things are:

Love and hate swirled into a taffy.  For

 

example, at the place I buy stamps

there is a large, retarded girl

with filthy glasses.

                               Each time,

an impatient grandmother

must show her how to fold the page

to tear the stamps free. 

Each time, concentrating stupidly,

the girl begins creasing it mid-stamp.

Scorn rolls from the old woman’s

fishy mouth: “My God, what have you done?”

she might be saying.  “No...

like this...at the perforations.”

Tiny, cocoa hands puppeteer larger,

incapable fingers to remove a swatch of stamps

that will end up in trash bins in Illinois.

           

On the other hand,

I don’t know her rapid tongue.

Could she instead be saying,

“Wretched girl, listen to that beautiful

music.  Why can’t your fingers do that?”

                                                                  or

“This man’s people bombed us,

so your mother is crippled, so you are slow.”

                                                                           

In a land of bland perfection,

honey voices, and yellow tailored suits,

this girl is a clod

                             but I remember her best—

like a mole on a lover.  She is radiant.

She is Miss Japan.
The Peony

 

 

 

Blessed be the peony, vomited from its sepals,

Adjacent to the callow, craning bud, a green globe

On which the ants toil  It will soon see

the sea of fluffy velveteen that composes its family,

That the sun favors so shamelessly,

That butterflies change directions in mid-butterflight to see

And light upon.  If indeed the peonies were any brighter, blind

People would see them.  They

Would gather and gaze, and the neighbors would say,

“Those are the blind, and it’s the peonies they have congregated to behold.”

Despite the efforts of the industrious anemones,

Roses, perfidious forsythia, and crocuses,

No thing outblooms, outshines the peonies

That line the driveway.

 

The peony is a home:

Once, an ant walked across its middle, 

Hesitated in the middle’s midst,

And thought, “Here I am, and there is where I must go”

Before walking to the other side.

A small grasshopper escaped a sparrow and hopped in the peony

And hid and waited in the shade of the petals

That conceal the stigma, the style (and the pedicel);

And the sun went down behind the garage

And cast a pink cast on the siding

That complemented the peonies which are pink and yellow and fat—

A child is being beaten in the house the peonies are at.
The Violent Imagination

 

 

 

What’s the worst thing you could ever do?

 

I think about the two young boys in Liverpool who killed a toddler

—his body found cut in two

                                     on the railroad tracks

                                                             on Valentine’s Day 1993—

and I remember myself at their age, when I gathered wildflowers

for my mother

                and other women in the neighborhood,

and how beautiful they were, the handfuls of goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace,

                black-eyed Susans—

and how talented and sensitive I was considered—

and how we planted snapdragons, moss roses, and chrysanthemums

                in the yard—

 

And then I see Robert Thompson and Jon Venables carrying Jamie Bulger

through crowded streets,

one of them like a beauty queen with an armload of tulips,

the runner-up tagging along, 

a casual audience flanking

the three mile walk to the spot:

“No,” someone observed,

“they were like doctors—one had the body,

the other held the head, purposefully—

like rushing an epileptic to a hospital bed.”

“No, it was more like carrying a wriggling cat,” said another witness—

Jamie’s veined belly shown like a ball,

as he squirmed and cried

crossing the cemetery.

“It wasn’t like that at all, when I saw them,” confided yet another.

“The baby trusted them, 

they just held hands

                                 and walked.”

 

The world watches, posing

stunned questions.  It can’t remember

anything so...

                (speech fails)

                                   

But didn’t Mary Bell, at the age of ten,

kill a toddler

                     with scissors

                                    in England?

Who but the neighborhood children

tortured Sylvia Likens to death?

Didn’t Georges Bataille theorize that Bluebeard

was himself a child (inside)?

And at seven, I took three-year-old Blake Baily on his own front lawn

beating him ecstatically

                              until a babysitter tore him away

and took him inside.

 

Is this what form desire takes

before it shifts to moist and oystery musings?

 

One minute kindergartners lick the lids of their Snak Paks,

the next they make puppet maim puppet

or fashion guns from Legos,

playing and replaying

                            killing and dying

with orgiastic fervor.

                                   They will draw

blood if you let them, watch it ooze

like a cat with a parakeet. 

A holocaust is at the fingertips of any kid’s imagination.

Do we really want to peel away our petals

and look into the face of the inner child?

...loves me, loves me not...

When is it we learn empathy?

No, this is not the right question.

When do we unlearn empathy?

To giggle into our grape drink

as Judy weeps while Punch is hanged.

 

Let’s go back further:

I am six.

A February morning.

I am accosted at the bus stop,

swung to the ground by my corduroy coat sleeve,

snow rubbed in my face,

my things scattering, my

Valentines reddening through their envelopes

                in the slush.

 

The Daffodil

 

 

 

The daffodils watched the dinosaurs die on Christmas Eve of the cosmic calendar.

These first flowers (jonquils, daffodils, or proto-daffodils)

waved indifferently, a horn section swinging mutely in the sooty air,

a silent requiem for Rex and Sue who coughed on meteor dust,

stumbling crazily, weak with hunger, falling.

 

See, long before there were people to think them up,

ideas were operating, and the idea had been that if you were

endowed with sharp enough fists to dethroat your neighbor

or swift enough legs to make off with her eggs,

you got to have another lunch, and that was good.

The daffodil stood for a new idea,

and that was, go ahead and be fragile,

but be beautiful and have a fierce sense of irony,

and be sweet enough to rope others into doing your bidding.

Enslave the bees of prehistory, have sex delivered

to your petals and serve a sugary potion there.

 

“Hello my name is Jeff Dahmer; I like the way you dance.”

 

The daffodil’s shape anticipates the old fashioned telephone earpiece,

simultaneously phallic and vulvic.

With its genitals defining its very form,

a flower’s principal role is sex.

The other job of flowers has always been to watch funerals.

From its first triceratops to last week’s obituary,

the daffodil has been there for death—

adorning the sickroom, the mass, and the tomb.

 

“You’ll just die when I tell you this, but I’m in love with you already.”

 

This duality mirrors that of the human libido:

One aspect wanting to (pro)create, the other to kill—

One noticing the curve of buttocks, the lips’ portrayal of labia;

the other aroused by the tenderness of the neck’s arteries,

the softness of the eyelid and its proximity to the brain. 

One man anticipates taking his wife as he drives from the office;

Another can’t wait to come home from the Ambrosia Chocolate Company

and dine on real ambrosia—oh yes, real ambrosia has to be flesh.

 

Gilles de Rais is forgiven, Sagawa is worshipped, 

J. W. G. sits plump in his hospital painting scarlet hollyhocks,

while you suffered.  I sent you that arrangement, Jeff,

(jonquils and wild pansies).

 

“I love you so completely, I’ll suck the marrow from your bones”

 

See, in a better world you could love someone that completely;

you could cook and eat sixteen brown boys without shame

(and new ones would sprout up in their places like warts)

and you would be whisked away, not to a court of law,

but to a court of aesthetics, where the question would not be

“How could you?” but “What did it taste like?”

 

 

The Marigold

 

 

 

As the eyelash moon grazes the roof

of the bar where the actresses drink,

and the blue blink of the neon martini icon

eclipses her light,

a satin pump leads a leg over the bar stool:

You are safe for now, my love.

 

It is remarkable how the female genitalia

can resemble the lily.

It is remarkable: your milky skin and delicate neck

atop your die-in-childbirth frame—if I had a tail I would wag it.

Your eyes are dull and fearless on a night no other girl is out.

We drink to your boldness—you fitting the (victim) profile to a T 

and the Disemboweler still at large.

 

Rumor has it he beat one victim with her own arm

torn out at the shoulder; yanked another’s uterus out with his teeth.

I heard that he lay next to his victims afterwards

mimicking their broken bodies, sprawled out

like swastikas,  their frozen expressions,                    , records of

losing one’s soul

Can I interest you in a tangerine?

I met the farmer up in Bakersfield.  He said,

one day God ate an orange and spit out the seeds. 

The trees that grew bore tangerines.

 

You impart your past with less discretion with each gin and tonic.

I reveal nothing because I want to go back and kill who I was

and those who knew me then.  An orgasm of the soul—

that must be how killing feels.

(Of course the key to killing is not to brag about it afterwards.)

But you wouldn’t understand because you are green—

I had lived and died and been reborn and died and been reborn

when you were just the violence he would someday do to you in your father’s eyes.

You are a lily: slender, pale, and hollow.

I do not think I’m better than you; it’s only a suspicion.

Your courage comes from ignorance, from liquor,

but if I wanted you for your mind, I’d fuck your

ear. You pout and watch the dancers, an old cowboy and his lady,

so let’s change the subject and dance that way

and rub and kiss and dance the way the lilies sway

as we hear the tortured voice of Miss Kitty Wells,

sweeter than the tangerine section in your mouth,

or even whole groves of tangerines,

or the tangerine (on the bar),

with its tangerine-colored color,

oranger than oranges, marigolds, or the flame of the soul.

Agriculture is violence. The soul is what’s looking out your eyes

Beauty

 

 

 

You can lead a horse to water,

But there is only one Catherine Deneuve.

 

There are many beautiful women in the world,

But you can’t make them drink.

 

The Carpenter and the Moon

 

 

 

The Carpenter wastes there in the cool night,

hands that held many nails now held by nails.

His ears ring.  You can tell by the moon

that it’s almost Easter.  A thief has died.

 

“For God so loved the world, that He sacrificed His only begotten Son...”

In other words, when you love somebody, kill it something

special.  The moon observes this Child abuse

upon which a world is built and thinks,

“This reminds me of that thing with Abraham,

only this is much worse.”

 

The Carpenter has descended to collect the good people of hell.

His mother weeps.  The moon remarks,

“A good father marries your mother.”

A toolbox is auctioned:

because when a carpenter dies, the world has an extra one.

 

The moon becomes jealous, remembering

when she was worshipped, not some Senseless Act.

She wanes to nothing, but she doesn’t

blame the diet industry or glossy waifs from Mirabella—

she is just turning in her black bed

regular as a drum beat.

 

Apollo defines her fairly

 

yet she is saddled with lunacy, menstruation, and Monday.

Yes, she too is useless,

but there is a difference between gratuitous cruelty and gratuitous beauty.

 

Her aluminum glow adorns like a rosary

but warms no one.

She hasn’t washed anyone’s feet lately,

and she’s done nothing for the people of hell,

who are: gamblers, fools, and dreamers, 

suicides, different drummers, and wasted drummers
like Karen Carpenter and Keith Moon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

II

 

 

 

 

 

The Babysitter

 

 

 

And God

created woman,

and she was boyish

and tall, and she was

ignored when her lips were unlacquered

or her legs were unwaxed.

 

Eve talked to other bachelorettes, bled,

talked to her cat, looked in the mirror, smoked,

looked in the mirror, smoked, talked to herself,

but something

was missing:

something stocky and crass,

something that would smack her and then bring her flowers,

something that would smack her and then kiss her and bring her flowers.

 

“Yo.  Wallflower.”

“Yes, stocky one?”

and she knew,

yes then she knew

that this was her lunch ticket.

 

Time passed and

one day, Eve invented the colon:

She wrote:

            There is a word for what I do:

            I brood.

 

Eve wrote:

            I dusted today. God came over.  I washed the walls.

            I sharpened the knife.  I read a little.  Oh, I have to

            remember to buy mutton

                                                mutton

                                                bread

                                                cheese

                                                wax paper

            I wonder if I’m getting enough iron.  I really wonder

            if I get enough.

 

And she wrote:

            The bastards are with the babysitter.

            I love them so.

            I love their father not.

            He is not very other-worldly

            but he is my lunch ticket and

            the lunch ticket of the children—

            I am no longer it.

            I am no longer

            boy crazy.

 

Eve forgot to make lunch.

She sang.  She imagined other things

and she wrote:

            I imagine I have a lover.

            He is tall and pessimistic.

            He wears cotton things on his tall, pessimistic frame.

            He is bookish and we go out Dutch treat.

            I lick the stamps on the postcards he sends me.

            I lick the stamps and this is our kiss.

            This is our kiss and I love him with all my being.

            He is away now but he will return.

            I stick my finger in the proof that he will return

            and I taste the fruit

            and I roll in the proof that he will.

 

Eve changed and she wrote:

            Today I made apple pie.

            I must remember to make Medieval beef.

            I wonder if I should poison some of the animals that come in the garden.

            I wonder if I should put poison on small pieces of food

            and leave it out for the animals that come in the garden.

            I feel like maybe taking the children’s milk money

            and buying a pair of those white stockings everybody’s wearing.

            Maybe then I would be happy.

           

Eve looked in the mirror

and she wrote:

            I am a heifer.

            Every day I become less attractive.

            I no longer bleed

            but there is a word for how I bruise.

            He spoke to me today.

            He said, “What can I give you?

            What can I give you

            never to sing again?”

 

 

 

Eve was no longer attractive or

prolific, she bruised “prolifically,”

and the guy, well, he

found someone younger:

we’ll call her

“Jenny.”

 

When Does a Bride Wear Black?

 

 

 

When she is Christ’s bride.

                                             But anyway

not very long ago there was

a very rich woman who’d fired her maid

and had to prepare a dinner for thirteen

herself.  She listened to the radio

as she basted the lamb.  There had been

a terrible earthquake in Tokyo.

To her dismay she discovered

she was missing a salt spoon

and she began to weep.  Soon

Christ appeared to her

with the tiny spoon in His

palm.  “I scoured the pawn

shops,” He said.  “It is a miracle.”

“Why,” said the woman, “are you helping

me when thousands lay dead in Japan?  I am

just a rich and silly woman.”

Christ said, “You are rich because you are beautiful—

you glow with charm and intelligence.

You are devout and good.

You are the stars in my sky.

You are the ripples on the water I walk on.

You, the faithful.

We are each other’s prisoner.

We couldn’t be more intimate

if we jumped into a jet engine together.”

 

Miracles take muscle.

Christ’s eyes are constantly running back and forth

over the earth

                        like the eyes of a poet—

the opium dream eyes of Walt Whitman

the black and piercing eyes of Emily Dickinson

the suave, rueful eyes of Beaudelaire

the kind and canine eyes of Frost

Auden, with one angry eye, one frightened

eye, the birdlike eyes of John Ashbery

William Carlos Williams with the eyes of

birds of prey, Robert Creeley with a flap of elephant

flesh where an eye is missing, Blake’s huge and wronged

and womanish eyes, Byron with those thundering eyes.

 

Thunder is Christ’s applause

(His hands of special design:

holes to cut down on wind resistance).

 

He takes in the whole show:

a child’s supermarket tantrum (“Who do you

have to fuck to get a piece of gum around here?”),

a homosexual struck from the list

of those who get to live,

two Jewish teenagers vomiting

after the break-fast of Yom Kippur,

an idiot child clapping while his father weeps.

Christ regrets he has but two eyes

to cry with,

                   and in the Orient, where the riddle goes,

“What is the sound of one hand clapping,”

a hand inches out

from under a ruined pagoda.

                                                All are wanting.

 

I have seen a woodcut of conquistadors

chopping off the hands of Indians

resistant to conversion.

But what of the Zen master

who chopped off a student’s finger

to make a point?

 

Eastern religion is bunk

(like a wolf wearing wool)

with its wise and gentle posturing:

its trickiness is really an act of aggression

against the healthy mind.

Dismembering children is unacceptable in any pedagogy.

Which is why I am a nun.

Zen is forbidden

here—a ruler on the knuckles

leaves the child intact

if bloody.  The only Riddle in town is Christ

because clapping, by definition, takes two hands.

 

 

 

 

 

Redemption

 

 

 

I learned about Santa Claus, about Christ,

before I learned we were Jews

                                                 and about the oil that burned for eight days

instead of only one

                               and heard how my mother

watched her sister beaten to death

by Irma Grese in Auschwitz.

 

The artificial Christmas

tree—with its felt stars of David—

dwarfed in every way the menorah

my mother told us came with them from Poland.

 

Though Jews, my parents exulted in Christmas.

There was something perverse

about their attention to every detail—

they wore the traditions of the goyim

like a garish Easter hat.

                                      Once, my father told us he’d bribed Santa Claus

to overlook the rules and visit us.

                                                       My mother taught us hymns

and Bible verses she’d learned to fool the Nazis.

 

One night I dreamed that Christ

                                                   came down the chimney

instead of Santa Claus

and emerged from the fireplace, sweaty, His hands

caked with blood (He’d killed Santa).

He leered at me and said, “The charade is over,

Jewboy.” 

                 I was attracted.

 

                                            Now,

also in my thirty-third year,

                                             and dying,

I feel closer than ever to Him.

                                                 I have converted.

My stigmata appear in livid lesions on my hands and face,

plum blue, the hue of ink used to stamp

the expiration day on meat.

I read one of the Gospels and ask,

“Is this God’s punishment?”

The priest says, “No, that’s what hell is for.”

 

It’s the coldest Christmas on record.

The dogs are curled up

in front of the hearth like cocktail shrimp.

In the woods you hear the false gunshots

of sap freezing and cracking.

The air itself freezes

and clatters to the ground

like a lie.

If you bother to look,

everything is clearer

as if cut out with sharp scissors,

and you see, as if seeing

through a new pair of glasses,

you see the truth for the first time:

 

My parents did leave Europe in a hurry,

but no Jew smuggles a menorah

into a death camp and what’s more,

comes out holding it.

It is the kind of thing that got left behind,

with everything

when the soldiers’ boots pounded on the stairway.

One took only the clothes on his back

and perhaps a photograph

to throw from the train window

to say, “I was here.”

 

                        My parents were like the soldiers.

Like mistletoe

strangling an elm,

they occupied the home

of disappeared and wealthy Jews,

and when they came to America as “Jewish refugees,”

the stolen menorah was their story, their passport.

 

This is admitted

with an honesty reserved for those

baptized nightly by night-sweats.

My flesh sucked into a teetering frame

sparks their memories of Auschwitz.

 

There is a monster in the mirror.

My eyelashes fall out.

The lines on my face are

an elegy for enthusiasm.

The latest pill doesn’t work.

I read the Gospels and ask,

“Is this all there is?”

The priest says:

                         “It may seem that the teachings of Our Lord

are somewhat commonplace, devoid of profundity—

‘be nice,’ ‘don’t sell stuff in church,’

            and so on… But that simply isn’t the point:

            if we liked Jesus because He was witty, original,

            that would be decadent.

                                                   One must have faith—

            especially now that no one will kill us if we don’t.”

 

They say that to love others

you have to love yourself.

This is a non sequitur.

Self-hatred is underrated.

The most liberating feeling in the world

is to let go of all sympathy for oneself.

You must look at yourself

as you would a neighbor’s silly child.

This is where Redemption begins.

This is where you go beyond shame—

you feel the looks of horror in the video store,

the fatigue, the weeping sores, and you feel

this is what being Christ is like,

His fey aura clings like a soaking blanket.  Oh,

 

and I saw my murderer today

at the newsstand.  His tiny

obituary caught my eye

like a brightly-wrapped present.

 

Contrary to the greeting card,

the message is not about forgiveness

                                                              but accepting Mystery.

This Christmas,

with all the adoration for the Holy Infant the season inspires,

 

we must remember to feel a little bit of hate

                                                                      for His killers

and those who just stood there.

Flicker

 

 

These new holidays,

Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Earth Day—who needs them?

Integration is a failure, the Dream is a charred carcass,

and the earth is overrated.

 

We need a holiday called “Flicker”

so named because on this day

stoplights blink from red to green

with a rapid,  irregular rhythm

causing car crashes.

Flicker is a celebration of menopause hot flashes,

a reflection on genocide, a Halloween of behaviors,

a time of confusion, perversity, turning inward,

a nod to the fragility of stability, the fickleness of physics.

Flicker is on April 20.

On Flicker, a woman might set fire to her sleeping man.
Each Flicker, children set fire to men who are asleep on trains.

On Flicker, feel panic go all through you:

You Are Alone,

                           and no one—not Lassie, not even Flipper—can save you.

Christmas has It’s a Wonderful Life,

Easter has The Greatest Story Ever Told,

and Flicker has the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination;

and at that frame when the top off his head flies off,

you can’t help but think of Emily Dickinson.

“Domenique-Nique-Nique-Nique,” the singing nun sang that week—

boy was her life sad.

On Flicker in 1889, Hitler debuted from the womb.

He cried and cried,

taking huge quotas of air between each noisy exhalation

of fear and discomfort.

Frau Hitler held him when he was finally out of danger.

He was soft.  She was joyous. 

All those miscarriages.

So many tears.

She gazed into his face thinking, “I should name him ‘Mirakel’,” and

“When does the soul enter the body?”

Is it, to paraphrase one heretical poetess, still pouring

in through the fontanelle up to the moment it slams shut?

This theory has profound implications vis-à-vis the abortion debate:

One could legally throw infants out windows, do in a harelipped toddler.

Or is the soul intact at conception?

Well, does a match light as soon as you strike it?


No, it does not.  There is that split second

where the match whispers “church!

Inhales

            and is alight.

That moment is Flicker,

when you can kill.
The Farm

 

 

 

And there you are, the last pin-up,  in your stockings and fur coat,

your pale face gorgeous with mischief, tarty.  You were December.

Remember the farm, in December?

A junked car hood for a sled, being yanked through

the dead white field behind the pick-up,

the iced air summoning blood to our cheeks...

I associate you with velocity:

your skiing, your lead foot (taking out a mailbox while fixing your lipstick),

the way you piled a lifetime into 23 years.

As stunning as you were, you didn’t make a pretty corpse:

the windshield bruise, the draining coma,

they did your hair wrong, the dress was frowzy,

and worst of all, Natalie, they farmed you—

plucking organs from you before you were cold.

A letter they sent your mother lists

what they used and couldn’t use, what part went to whom

in what neighboring town.

Economics pollutes everything.

The haggling with the funeral home. 

That soloist who couldn’t sing beautifully.

A bogus diamond on your earlobe, fodder for the coffin robber at the wake,

a boyfriend.

 

And now, in this new December,

A vision haunts me:

Your mother wanders some hardware store

(a chandelier fell, she needs some wire)

when she spots a stranger, and although he is wholly unremarkable,

she is attracted, filled with ache.

She follows him, forgetting her shopping

She heads him off in automotive

and stares—he looks back dully—until it hits her:

You have my daughter’s eyes

The Body Burners

 

 

 

The doms hoist onto the pyre the body

bundled in cloth, a fat merchant who in life they never could have touched.  They are untouchables,

people who are said to grieve

when a child is born

and celebrate when one dies.

You may not believe it,

but it is said we live in the time of Kali,

the goddess of destruction,

the one with green skin and a skirt of human arms.

You see her on cigarette packages,

on buses, she is beloved

in Varanasi, like this minute’s calendar girl.

Varanasi, the holiest city,

is lit gold in the morning;

the sun reflects off the flood plane sands

white as butter

on the far bank of the Ganges.

Close to river, under the watch of the temples,

the doms burn bodies around the clock

like mortician Sisyphuses.  The fire,

older than Christ and as sacred,

is kept blazing by death.

A dom lights a new one with sticks

from another.  Another dom

tongs legs back over a pyre

which has consumed everything else,

He does it with the flair of a ham actor.

Fat drips and spatters.

Mourners are tearless.

They glower at you or chatter or smoke pot

or just watch.

Kali’s tongue hangs from her mouth

in anticipation of drinking the blood of everyone

when she has lain everything to waste.

Even motion will cease.

But that is good,

because Vishnu can go to sleep,

and when he wakes

it will start again, a new “day.”

Ten or more corpses are burning

at any hour on discreet mounds of wood.

It smells like the meal

of a bad cook.

Widows used to commit suttee;

Now they chain smoke.

People are bathing in the filth of the Ganges

into which the ashes are raked.

Boats of wood pull up and park.

There is no silence:

Crackle, crackle,

dogs fight over a finger,

wood is stacked, hiss,

footsteps.

Kali used to have flesh, her demon blood coursed through it,

impulses roiled in her.

Now she is only an image...

 

But that is the age of Kali for you.

The world is already dying.

Things lose their bodies, their creature-ness.

Everything becomes metaphor.

Things do not exist,

but mean.

No one believes

in belief.

Like a loud champagne cork

the merchant’s skull pops when its

contents boil, gases blow out the back of the head.

It is the climax,

it is the moment

the soul is released from its prison.

Mourners disperse

and cannot look back.

A centipede crawls over your foot.

Your body is a church of nerves.

The breath on the back of your neck

is not Christ’s. 

                         India changes your life:

You have so much to learn.

 

The Day’s Eye

 

 

 

My knee is not a flower,

Bee.  On this deck, five floors

Up, miles from any meadow,

How is it that you are plump?

Do you suck

The soda pop from the sidewalk?

Did you notice the broken heart

Shape box spilling from the trash

And taste a discarded creme?

Or visit a cut daisy at the Korean

Market?  Dead like that,

Is the nectar as sweet?

Is there nectar?

 

I saw you on a pigeon carcass on Attorney Street—

                                                                                 is there nectar there?

Do you know?

 

The guilt of drowning a bee as a child

            stung long after the swollen bite had healed,

 

And that was because I could see

 

The delicate legs patting the side of the pail

 

Trying to escape something so slippery

 

            Plastering my wound,

            Grandma stiffened

            When I sought to dry

            My tears in her apron.

            “Saints come back as bees

            And sting sinners,” she said.

 

Bouncing up to my head

Stinger poised, do you smell

My memories of killing?

When you explore a shirt

Button, do you see my heart?

Is my heart black?

When you buzz and hover,

Does the soul pour out the skin

For inspection?  Far from the hive

In this baked and flowerless

Landscape, are you St. Joan

On her pyre longing for a

Drink?  Here among the clouds

Are you St. Peter

Examining me from scarred

Knee to shampooed hair?

Who are you?

And what have I done?
Hide

 

 

 

You did. You really did.

You put it there and then you did it.

You walked over to it.

                        You looked at it.

It was the first or the second of May.

You did it in secret with the smell of sycamore wafting in.

You did it with the green green joy of looking.

You did do the horrible thing.

 

I suppose you did it because you wanted to.

You did it in your house the afternoon they hauled the bricks in.

You did it quick with your mouth full of fruit,

with the juice running down your chin,

the juice running down it and then

dripping on your bare chest

where it dried and became sticky

there.

            You did do it.

 

You covered it in blankets.

You gave a piece to the dogs.

You got it off you.  You

liked the blue part, you

set it on the books, you became

calm, it had a calming effect.

You thought about it and then you did it.

The neighbors smelled it.

 

They’re erecting a gas station nearby.

They’ve dug a hole and they’re going to build it.

This area is growing.

They’re building with abandon.

They’re digging holes and then they build places.

Sometimes it rains and there is a great deal of mud in the neighborhood.

It rained the day you did it.

You ate ham and took the fruit and looked out the window

and you did it.

You separated parts by hue

and then regrouped them by feel.

You moved the ironing board to make more room.

You stacked the chairs.

You stretched out in front of it.

You strapped it together.

A dog came downstairs.

 

You walked through the kitchen and sat down in the hall,

you got up and tried something,

you lost the scissors and looked in boxes.

You sat on the floor and began doing it to it.

The juice dripped on the paper you rolled out.

The phone rang.

 

There’s been a fire at mother’s.

You washed well that evening.

You did, you really did.

When you woke up you almost didn’t but you did.

It was May first.

You did do it.  I know you did.

Just ask the woman you keep locked in your house


 

 

THREE

 

 

 

 

The Deal

 

After trying for years and years, the Adderleys

Finally succeeded in having a baby,

And it was a boy at that.  Well, the child

Fell ill, and when it appeared that he might

Die, Mrs. Adderley fell to her knees and wept

And prayed to God, “Please God, let my son live!

Please, please, please, please, please, please, please

Please, please, please, please, please, please, God, oh please

Let him live!”  (As embarrassing as it is, it is what she said.)

The child only grew sicker as she prayed late into the night.

Finally, beside herself with anguish, she announced,

“I would kill a thousand children so that my one might live!”

At this point God answered her,

                        “I will spare your son

On one condition...” 

                        “Anything!” Mrs. Adderley responded.

Said God, “You must kill one thousand children.

By tomorrow night.” 

                        “Tomorrow night?  What time?”

“Oh, eightish.”

 

                        Mrs. Adderley choked back her tears

And forced herself into a semblance of composure.

She knew what she had to do. 

                        She had to begin immediately

 

 

 

Occupied Paris, 1994

 

A mother explains to her child

That when the exterminator comes that afternoon

Even his favorite beetle cannot be spared.

“We cannot differentiate between insects in cages

And those that get into the onions,” she says.

The subsequent regard from her child

Nearly breaks her heart.

                       

“Let me

Put it this way:  Every German officer

Had a favorite Jew—a ‘good’ Jew

—But each one understood

That none, not one Jew, could be spared.”

The child seems to understand

And the mother holds the child’s hand as he opens

The cage and caves the beetle’s head in with his thumb.

They stand there then, gazing out the sunny window

Onto to the cracked pavement of rue Goebbels

The child’s face against his mother’s thigh

Her hand in his black hair until the exterminator’s

Knock is heard.

           

                        It is the tenderness

Of moments like these, that nothing,

Not even history, can change.

 

 

 

Indian Summer

 

A mother calls for her son another time.

It is the time before the time before the time to begin worrying.

There was that time he’d been playing at the swamp late she’d worried

And on Halloween only days ago when she’d sent him out as Death,

His first year unescorted, he stayed out an extra hour enjoying himself so;

But on this beautiful and very warm day in November

When everything is dead but the whole world seems to be grinning,

Her call contributes pleasingly to the neighborhood’s evening opera

Of calls of children’s names and “dinner!” and “come home!”.

 

Come inside, my precious beautiful one, she thinks in the spotless kitchen

Where the meat loaf is baked and though her husband is out of town

There sits a chilled pitcher of martinis.  Her skirt rustles with a comforting

Authority as she charm-school walks to the door to which a knock has

Beckoned her.  Her heart quickens in anticipation of her sweet blond boy

As she (her whole life has been a masquerade it turns out) opens the door

To reveal a policeman holding her son’s ripped shirt.  They look

At each other and there is that moment—that sick moment

Before everything is understood.
And the Earth Moved

 

 

 

One day there will be another earthquake

in California.  Transcontinental phone lines

will be jammed, impossible.

The next day, reports of the dead, squashed,

and the cost in money.

A squashed person is like you or me, only fancier, a halo of brains,

a cape of slick crimson.  Squirted entrails glimmering like a Rembrandt.

You think of Flatland

or the iconoclast Saint Emygdius, patron invoked against earthquakes,

and how it’s late for praying

now.

          This is like a love affair

that failed.

 

He saw her sitting on the bumper of a truck.

She was reading Danielle Steel or Michel Foucault or some such hack.

She was at the same time a pimply tomboy and a Botticelli.

He was foreign film, with a back like David.

“Michael.”

“Carolyn.”

He plied her with Wild Turkey and Lucky Strikes.

“Her body was perfect for 69.”

She slept with him twice

and became friends with his ex.

“I want him to leave me alone.”

Was it rape?

She took his job.

He becomes theatrical.

He plots to run into her.

He looks in her window.

He becomes Gladys Crabitz.

It was unAmerican what she did.

He is crushed

and leaves town

raging like King Lear

eternally wandering the earth like the soldier who punched Christ.

I see an ad for wildlife on the subway from Brooklyn.

Did you know there are hundreds of fish in New York?

Park Avenue, February 14

 

 

 

Snow banks are melting

leaving a skeleton of filthy lace.

I can hear the rush of the sewers

through ermine ear muffs.  The city

is ugly with the last bloody coughs

of winter, but I am happy.

Now I’m sad.  Now I’m happy.

In my short suede skirt I imagine

I’m a flower in the sludge.

In my slick eel skin heels

I am happy to have animals die for me—

it makes me feel like a Hungarian countess

with subjects.  Now I’m falling (help),

but at once

                   a man I hadn’t seen

has me firmly by the shoulders

I look up,

                happy that I’m a woman

and that he is a man.
The Wind

 

 

 

The wind (and not the baby) sprang up at 4 A.M.

and woke Cousin Nancy

and whispered of mortality among the nightingales

She looked then in the mirror at eyes that last she saw in tears

and sat and spent the morning mourning at the window,

watching the nightingales as their flight revealed the wind,

which, though unseeable, contained, she ascertained, the spirit of death.

 

Beside the sill lay The Boston Evening Transcript

with the headline “PRIEST DROWNS BABY IN BAPTISM”.

Her child was no death by water but was claimed by wind-fanned flames

She hadn’t even named him before he’d fallen kill.

What do you call something that is born and then dies in April?

 

She was a hollow woman.  He’d gone

without a bang a whimper or a gurgle.

 

She looked then at the cat, the pitch-blackened bassinet, the TV set blaring sportsspeech,

and the bisque porcelain children (and such kitsch) on the bureau;

and she thought she’d eat a peach

and name the baby T.S.—after her hero,

Tom Seaver.  Boy, was he a pleasure to watch pitch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

III

 

 

 

 

 

 

Natalie

 

 

 

Why should this lesson be at your expense?

The loss is big,

And graceless—                 

                        it can’t be so,

                        it can’t be so,

 

As if my heart has been twisted backwards in my body—

                        it is so.

I’m confused.

My head is the clapper.

The sides of the bell are the knowledge.

The bell tolls, and it hurts, and it is so, and the hearts

Twisted backwards there in our bodies, and our

Hands squeeze at our sides as we sing at the dull church service,

And we sing, but our heads bang against that hard, cold metal—

                        we need her,

                        we need her—

God, what makes You think You need her more?

For You, Asshole, have eternity. 

Our lives are the time it takes You to spit.

 

                        Natalie, I dreamed I walked with you

                        and you were strong.

 

                        Last week I spoke to you

                        on the phone.

 

                        I have a picture of you in Hawaii.

                        You were laughing.

 

                        How can we honor you?

                        Spray-paint your name on every Toyota?

                        Contribute to your stoic mother’s Sad Book?

                        Begin stitching the car crash quilt?

 

There is a tribe in North America that divvies up

The possessions of their dead.  I carry books in your black

Tennis bag bearing the brand name “Head”. 

I want something else.

I know what it is.

It’s clear now—

                        As clear as the windshield that was your exit:

                        I’ll take your unapologetic smirk.

                        I’ll put it on right now.

                        There.

                        Now.  Just one question:

 

How can we heal when your memory follows every brunette?

 Stalk

 

 

 

Even her footsteps were sexy.

Still, it was clear she was seeing another man:

the disappearing, returning exhausted and empty-handed

after day-long shopping sprees, the telephone call she thought I didn’t hear.

“No, nobody knows.  I love you.  Good-bye.”

I followed her to his house

                                            and waited.

I barged in. 

She was rocking him in her arms.

It was her brother Bob, dying.

She looked at me.

“It was a secret,” she wept.

 

She rode with him on his roller coaster of health.

She brought him pills for each new infection,

but AIDS thinks of everything.

I had met him

blushing, strapping.

Now he’d vomited blood on her.

What a cruel June, July and August

without even a lemonade’s worth of happiness.

My black and cloven heart.

I have no faith—

I even look at my fingers when I type.

I am shamed by the wanton compassion of others.

The Italian nuns who went to the hospital in Kikwit to care for the sick

knowing they too would die

horribly.

The river is swollen with corpses.

Even the worst parts of hell are more luxurious.

 

Death is like that:

always the same, always different.

You can almost hear in the rush of the falls,

“give up poetry, give up poetry...”

 

Biblia Pauperum

(a poor man’s Bible told in pictures)

 

Memories are

like a wound inside the cheek that gets bitten and rebitten.

 

I am here to talk about Christ

but, age before beauty, I will talk about my mother first.

She resembles Gericault’s Portrait of a Child Murderess,

to which she would respond, “Murderer.  ‘Murderess’ is demeaning.”

 

Velasquez’s Christ, on the other hand, is fetching, a rock star.

 

Christ says to the sister of Lazarus,

“Where have you laid him?” 

Missing entirely the double-entendre.

Yes, He is no Dorothy Parker.

 

An old woman in a  pharmacy tells her friend

“The point to living a long life is that you can pray for the souls in purgatory.”

Will even the devout be met with a God angered by their zeal

like the gang boss who says,

“Yes I asked you to break his legs, but I didn’t want you to bring them to me.”

Saint Adrian, patron of arms dealers and butchers, was martyred

by having his legs severed.

 

Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Infant Son.  His wife looked on.

Every ass has its jenny.

All art is about its own beauty.

                                                 Listen to your stinking heart.

 

Are my complaints just runaway self-love?

A photograph of Saint Shannon at his desk.  He hears the bleats of a lamb

coming from his computer screen.

It is the sound of cats mating outside echoing off

the police say, and don’t bother them again.  Sometimes

questions to God are answered:

            “People ask Me why I allow so much suffering in the world,

            why I sat by and watched the Holocaust.

            These are weakling questions.

            Do you care when rats are poisoned, when an anthill is destroyed?

            I watched it like you would a bad karate movie, fast-forwarding

            to the violentest parts, eating soul after soul like hot-buttered popcorn.

            People who broadcast their misfortunes are trying to hog all the compassion.”

 

God flexes His enormous muscles and continues,

            “Don’t flatter yourselves—I didn’t find it entertaining.

            The stuff I watch for entertainment is so entertaining, it would

            kill a man just to gaze upon one second of it.”

 

When I was a kid we had to kill insects with ether

like Victorian assassins.  I tired of this method and stuck a moth in the freezer.

I tacked it through the thorax onto the Styrofoam board.

It thawed, survived and tried to fly, wings flailing on its pin.

This is what belief is like.

 

The sign in front of the fountain of youth says “Die young.”

The House of Cards

 

 

 

Have you ever followed a beautiful woman?

The one who wore no nylons,

tapped her foot to an interior tune,

and blew on her soup

                                   just for you,

whose thick black hair bounced on her sweater

as she left the café everyday

to freshen the street with her wrap-around skirt.  Oh

where do beautiful women go?

 

Do they return to where they are kept in a stack?

Do they have jobs as visions in dreams?

Does desire steer them to me?

                                                No.

She holds her book to her breast and walks

several blocks to the nursing home

on the south side of town.

She signs in and goes to a room

and takes The History of Civilization from her bosom

and balances it on the gate,

the gate in the door frame,

like the kind for a dog,

that keeps in a skeletal girl—

legs splayed like blades in a Swiss Army knife—

who sits in a puddle

and clutches in oversized knuckles

a doll whose facial buttons she’s bitten off.

Her skirt’s filled with diaper.

Her teeth are ground flat.

Her spine is curved

like a carnival mirror.

From her lip goes a delicate string

to the chewed food on her breasts.

She doesn’t look up but scoots to the gate.

Despite her gnarled body and her IQ

(lower than the number of cards in a deck)

make no mistake—you can see

by her elegant neck,

by that wavy black hair down her back—

                                                                 they are twins

(life is so unfair).

 

Grunts come—she cannot form words—her twisted arms

contort to the two signs she knows:

                                                          “Hug”

                                                                      “Please”

Civilization will topple like an infant giraffe

succumbing to anthrax.

A Note on the Refrigerator

 

 

 

The fruit drawer is empty.

The ham is in its tub.

Don’t look in the butter dish.

Tonight let’s talk about what you did.

That’s aspic in the gravy boat—

don’t do what I did, expecting something sweet.

All in all, it’s a pretty good refrigerator full—

those beets are old and the pearl onions peaked,

but that cauliflower, and Christ, those watercress sandwiches

from the shower, the juice, the soup, the spoo...

If that ham were a steak I’d put it on my wound.

Not that I’m mad about it at all

because we’re all human

and when we do things like borrow someone’s soap

or eat someone’s plums or mislay a skate

key, it’s not that we’re selfish or inconsiderate or anything bad.

It’s just that we are aardvarks,

sucking up ants like there’s no tomorrow.
Possess-possess

 

 

 

            I give you 7:39 p.m.,

            I give you peonies, peas, me—

 

Shut up, I’m saying a poem,

but it isn’t about a sunset, you, or a garden,

Those things I grind my cigarette out on,

the world is my grapefruit, I don’t stop for cars.

 

            I love you, you’re my army, my grapes,

            you’re my syringe—

 

What?  (Yawn), this is my song:  my gun, my wine, my heroin

are for me, I have what is my oyster by the hair.  I am.

Complete—so you are

a parasite—I’m more sans you, 30% more.

 

            Then:  I am your mistletoe, your insect, your toothbrush, your

            suitcase, I know.

 

Wait, I’m saying something,

my golf course, my coffee, my guitar, my finger

need no mower, no sugar, no strings, no ring.

I came in your store, didn’t find what I wanted, excuse me I belched.

           

            My shop has a turnstile, a lock, wet paint, a policy:

            You Break Something You Pay.

 

 

Ha, I see, but this is my story, my

breakfast, my park bench, my river:  you’re not my cocoon,

nor my trampoline nor my spittoon, nor my soap with which I wash—

 

            You listen, you fucker, I am your green tea, your cloak, your sash,

            I am your river, that which is my oyster is you—

 

May I tell you this, what you think is yours is actually—

 

            and furthermore I’m your plug-in, your bottle, your blinker, your keyboard,

            your door, your pistol, your pestle, your nest, your Blistex, your shower,

            your mirror, your wafer, your bright florid Doris Day day.  


Niagara Falls

 

 

A poet can’t change the world

but he can ruin your evening.

No wonder poets are paid less

than the homeless:

they annoy you longer.

On the other hand, a painter can change the world:

look at Hitler.

I am painting my apartment in May.

It’s a beautiful spring day in the State of New York.

It sounds like a conceit,

but I dream in poetry.

I dreamed I was dancing on a hillside and singing,

 

"It's a beautiful day,

and Doris Day is in town.

Let's grab a lemonade

and hit the fairground.

Let's kiss a butterfly

and kill twenty-four hours.

 

Leave Grandma in the car

and hold hands and kill a child.

We'll kill a butterfly

and kiss twenty-four hours.

It's a gorgeous afternoon

and Susan George is here to stay."

 

I am bursting with joy!

And the reason is:

money:  the State of New York gave me some money.

Let’s rename New York, New Yellow

for its tremendous sunshine.

Even if I am hit by a bus,

I will be shipped to Paradise!

(the town in California where my parents live)

I would kiss Mussolini if he gave me $7000.

Did you hear we’re going to Italy,

my money and me?

I so love this world,

this better mousetrap world,

a world where Money and Joy are twins

at a fork in the road,

a world I am changing in tiny, tiny ways.

I shop and shop!

I kiss Voltaire!

I love the state of New York!

Did you hear the good news?

Christ, Jesus is coming         and

Icarus didn’t fall for the reason you think: he was shot.

Best Friend

 

 

 

It was as if having survived the Bush administration, she could let go,

the teenaged dog, white-faced,

geriatric, blind, she

simply trotted into traffic on November fourth,

but heartbreakingest of all is the question

a child asks, “Do dogs go to heaven?”

because we must say no.

 

Here’s why:

There once were three women

who were beside themselves with grief.

A mob had nabbed a friend of theirs,

tortured Him, and killed Him.

When, in a few days,

they went to visit the grave,

His body was gone.  Said the first woman,

“Our friend has somehow survived and escaped!”

The second woman said, “No, He has risen above the world

and resides with God.”

The third woman was silent.  She looked

around the landscape where

crucifixes stood like a putrid forest,

listened to the howling,

saw the paw prints,

and the third woman

knew, Our friend has been eaten by dogs.

 

Yes, as profane as it is:

Christ is dogshit.

But when you cross Christ, you fall:

Just look at the Romans, the poor Jews,

and didn’t the Indians seal their fate, early on, when they

torched a church?  And when you hear of famine in Africa,

floods in Bangladesh, or an earthquake in Japan,

it crosses your mind that it is because they are heathens.

And look at deferent dogs,

our speechless servants

you can beat them even,

and they grovel back to you,

eyes marinated in a panicky love:

the holy spirit dances before them,

an ass’s carrot,

                          just out of reach
Quince

 

 

 

My students see history as a single

moment they call “back then”

like a flash of tinsel turning

on the Christmas tree in an unfelt air current.

 

We overlook how modern

medieval and Renaissance painters were—

Take Robert Campin’s Annunciation

with Mary in a little Dutch house,

unwimpled,  not even glancing up from her book—

Joseph is in the next room building

mousetraps.  Everything is brand

spanking up-to-date circa 1425:  Mary’s gold-brocaded

red dress pouring like blood toward the angel,

oak and walnut furniture with dog and lion finials,

and Mr. And Mrs. Ingelbrecht at the door, spying in. 

It’s like a twentieth-century painter putting

the Virgin in Capri pants and Italian sunglasses

(angels come to you with a great

deal of light) while Joseph restrings

a tennis racket with new cat gut. 

                              

But that’s how it is also with

God, for Whom everything that’s ever

happened and will ever happen happens

all at once. 

                   Shakespeare pens the final

line of Othello—“This heavy act with

heavy heart relate”—as O. J. Simpson

vows to stop at nothing to find the killer

of the ex-

wife he’s killing.

In a nano-second barbed wire is invented, used,

and reinvented: today the barbs are longer,

flatter, and stainless  as a kitchen.

Jenny and I look at the unicorns and Campin’s

triptych hanging in the Cloisters

in the same instant that the last brush strokes dry on

it and everything else that ever got

a fresh coat of paint,

                                 like the door

on the third floor of the Humanities building—

when I went to class this morning it had “hittler”

scrawled on it in black supermarket magic marker. 

The swastika that accompanied it was comically

wrong, the hooks backwards,

facing each other. 

                              After class it was history,

red enamel concealing, hardening.

 

 

And just as the earth, with all its mountains and abysses,

would be smoother than the smoothest billiard ball

were it shrunk to that size,

                                           so too do human events

flatten out before God—

Jenny selecting a mineral

water at the bodega and Sophie’s choice

loom with equal significance or insignificance

while polar ice caps melt in the time of Exodus.

 

When You’re God, eternity is already over,

but at the Cloisters, Jenny gives me

a quince she plucked from a tree in the courtyard,

her eyes like eightballs, eyes

that could heat Russia, shining

with the mischief of every woman

who ever offered

a boy fruit...

 

 

July 1991

 

 

Alone in the streets of Paris

I adopt the ways of a tom cat.

I run out of restaurants

my stomach full of snails &

the check stuck with chewing gum

to the bottom of the table. 

On the left bank I steal

The Encyclopedia of Murder

from Shakespeare & Co.

I rob a drunk prostitute

on the rue Saint Denis.

 

Days have passed since

the knockout calanques and the drop dead

gorgeous water of Cassis,

at my side a freckled Jewess

whose large breasts spread

like pudding over her ribcage,

our backs on the baked gravel of En Vau

as we wait for the boat that brings watermelon.

 

Last night, an Italian man with Etruscan eyes

gave me a couch to sleep on

promising not to touch me.

This morning I accompanied him

to the squalor of the suburbs

where he had to babysit

the child of a friend,

who spent the day

in the Joan of Arc Clinic

aborting twins.

 

This is the day that

thousands of miles from here

in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

a man named Jeffrey Dahmer is arrested,

his refrigerator stocked

with the hearts of young men

who trusted a stranger.

 

I want to be with Rebecca in Cassis

spitting seeds into the sand

taking turns reading to each other

murder after murder after murder.

A Dream Day

 

 

 

is a day one refuses to quit his nest of quilts

in favor of dreaming,

                                  waking,

 

dreaming, waking, dreaming some more.

 

            I snorkel around my mind overturning

     blurred hallways of strange schools,

grandmothers’ houses, impossible sex

 

:  interrupted by the revolting miracle

in the next room:

                             The dog

pumps out black and slickened and behemoth

larvae

            I am able to fly.  I eat with-

out satiation.

Emaciated cur with her plump, whimpering puppies,

I was not won over.

I worry about myself

sometimes.

                    Later when one died

she buried it in blue jeans

her eyes oozed confusion

and guilt.  I threw it off the roof.

It clanged on the fire escape.  Clang!

                                                            So...

hard (I’d expected a thud) I named her Statue.

The house stunk, Statue.

At times like these, Statue, we should be followed around by a cellist.

I am so hungry.

                           I jump off precipice

after precipice, O

 

poetry,

             the vomit of my soul.

I would be happy in a meadow!

I want to skin Louise Glück.

 

 

 

 

 Love

 

 

 

Here is a joke I made up on the airplane to Mexico:

            What do you get when you cross a flight attendant

            with a sea trout?

This is a flight where I fell in love with another passenger

I never spoke to. 

            The punchline is, a smarter flight attendant,

but I’ll never see this green-eyed beauty again.

I went to Puerto Vallarta to visit

Casa Kimberly, a former home of Liz Taylor.

I admit this.  I dragged my companion

and her senile mother into the baked hills of Gringo Gulch,

coughed up the fifty pesos to recline on her day bed

look through her photo albums,

have a drink from her crystal,

play with her billiards,

but most memorable was the little footbridge

that stretched over the street to Richard Burton’s house.

First it was called “the bridge of love,”

then “the broken bridge,”

then “the bridge of reconciliation,”

and finally “broken bridge” again.

The point is:

we could all use a better understanding of Elizabeth Taylor:

Here is a woman who, above everything, stood for love.

This was the day that, in America,

Susan Smith drowned her two sons to please her lover.

How can we read that as anything but a triumph for love?

Love is the horror show that fuels economies.

It chauffeurs history.

If you could see it,

it would be a pinkish fog

swirling out of doorways,

covering people like fur,

mixing with the yellow fog of hate

or the blue fog of sorrow.

It has even been found in the sand,

still pink, by archaeologists.

And today,

it travels through wires,

it pours from missing children milk cartons—

                        one time in graduate school, a clever and cynical roommate wrote under

                        the picture of one of those missing children, “Ceci n’est pas un enfant.” 

                        Ah, who am I trying to fool:  I wrote it.  As far as I can tell,

I don’t love.

When I see a beautiful face

I want to rip it off and eat it.

The things I want to do in bed

would make Sade blush.

But love isn’t the most important thing in the world.

Education is.

I believe in excellence.

I believe in training and virtuosity.

“merit, ultra in the night/ (rag of old iconography)...”

says Ann Lauterbach.

Remember when geniuses made sense?

 

Two things are said about Pisces that ring true:

First is our fetish for feet.

Second is that we are souls returned from future lives.

Okay, not true, but intriguing.

Anyway, I imagine myself in some distant century,

in some other body,

a teacher

resurrecting for my class

the obscure last-millennia poet, Shannon Hamann.