Monday, May 9, 2011

Aries Moon





4/3/11

Easter moon begins with Jehanne in Minneapolis then she’ll be away in Egypt over Easter; Sam is off for Chicago interviews this week; I have a reading at the end of this week & a reading at our house the following week.

The last weeks have been quiet, alone, dropped out of social connections that now come back. I never get used to how uneven this is, nor know what to make of it, where I am supposed to start from I see someone. I don’t know if its something I do or that the people I know are not my people.

Horrible Kate properly observed I have emotional upheavals around readings.

***

I don’t seem to mourn the same way Jehanne does might
be circumstance I was not close to my parents in last years
or at their home small bitters do come I drive down Anderson St.
by their old house here, but not places they just were
I am not worried she is gone or shocked and do not miss
her I had such felt loss years ago would overwhelm me sad
each parting at camp devastated I had not said ‘good-bye”
properly was angry anyway it was a warehouse deal & not
special, Ed and Bruce to Expo ’67 and Dad with the two girls
so shock they’d actually left me perhaps I felt guilt for noticing

***

Prayer day I astablish in the interregnum
ladder placed against the open as tryst call
rises from serpentine blanance I am set to
gone a hero, foottprints for the well rain will

fill. Call her into elements to make the four direction’d
house, the feather lifts anyway is rue and rude bark,
dreams baroque addition parts stream current prow—
set forth into the, sails where the sun crosses:
incessance must end at the last uphill &
spirit’s folded lake dragon you shift its shackles
lets go its gamine grip on asphalt, sighs

and drops its precious reed: stubborn reed
along a strand weighted with oranges, somehow
autumn, dark branches heavy accept bent.

***

4/4/11

Arc of a descending ball haunts what I say to Candy when she asks if I am somehow influencing social process to steer itself past me, ait, “its more that they’ve moved on to a different game, and I haven’t, a rhythm thing;” I drive past Forest View and the children are out in the sun & a sad thing, games end, episodes and wind, I watched some children long ago on Margaret St. in the North End, seagull towers of air and shadowed narrow downhill towards a bakery, a ball thrown and a rush like pigeons after and then again, and then a last & they wheeled off, ball forgotten in mid-arc bounces to rest against a grate; so children’s voices “ring-a-rosie” Tom and Robert heard, not so solace in a hide-and-seek, a gust the game goes elsewhere, no longer rose interior’s summer also, absent inrush

***

grew up in era of consumption not long ago disease of lung
and cough blood sputum in 7-11 aisles is now social duty we
had small eight-inch picture tube TV in console to watch
& Dad did not buy all gadgets but transistor radios you get
Motown skip across the lake it had to work was a good
principle at the start of the sell, more depression bomb shelter
horde strategy stacks of cans drove VW’s into the ground
cold mornings parked on a hill to start in neutral roll
down and bucking I rolled one VW bug onto its back and bent
the axel it just wanted to turn left you had to hold the wheel hard
to the right (unless turning) we drove two more years like
that did buy books though Horizon Caravel and Time Life
arrived month by month we’d pour through pictures of
old maps and paintings / but not things you fixed them

***

Called tikkun you fix a broken plate crazy glue
has a crack sign of loyalty I’ll take nothing else
than the porcelain sky for skin God leaked old
story of dissatisfied tenon farmers of the hinge

Elaine dreamt I dropped the crystal not God &
wildly spoke of an older Reichean man educated
her a smokey hippy dorm room washed in acid
was not a solution though for a few days I

wondered if I’d understood her suggestion—
but is not obedient or father or repair of
father’s semen slip among his daughters or

fair memory of such authority touches the
tall branches with first red light put
our stone down here.

***

4/5/11

dreams about our cats, one dead, but doubles all around, yard vector of Middleburg Heights side door to driveway down some steps from the kitchen & Edwin Ave here in Durham look out the back window into a dell of sorts ends by river or in other dreams high banked shore of a sea where great waves roll in

yesterday the pine pollen day bursts of yellow like Holi power explode in the heat and drift but then last night a frontal sweep with storms

Jehanne home in a few days closes that garage door; its been a mournful couple weeks and wane of the last moon seems like left me on a different shore

***

Weren’t we playing a different game I went across the street
an hour ago but was still parallel you don’t keep track of people
that way? Sometimes for me, participate means go down the
curb as you are for a moment demand such attention I cannot
lift my dress to show you its design. I can keep this single note
gone a long time though sustain and lift the week I am concentrate
you’ve gone onto something else? How’s that work you stopped
think of me I didn’t fit in the background? but help out, see what
you about and step away let you make your design. I am not
part of that? How’s that work?

***

Dough bank of ford truck stopped in dust
Papago guy on a flame walk to Mt. Taylor
& strange white guy wizard with hawk head staff
now Bedouin jeep and the dust settles

we get out start shaking Navaho hands have a plan
in English guy gets up talk in Athabaskin forty
minutes ‘till we walk away I start to doubt the fight
dead bodies and wreck of mosque or spire is

lost hope ain’t it? My brothers excite by news of
thrown stones I get that, have my own special
place for burnt lots of SUV’s and other persistence,

but this is a kid thing, huh? It goes the same way &
half die, thrown off a roof bad drug deal or cancer
wreck personal some still “sleeping where they fell”.

***

4/6/11

I come back from neighboring heights to say the deep fact of the things suggests God must be at least two by whatever name we say this. Not one (I typed onethetic slips to onanthetic) synthetic though of course we’d love to be but the deep difference within us already, that knowing self, stubbornly, and holding against all pull of the swoon sublime, holding further to stone from which sublime springs, plumb and plum fallen, we go farther down the hall and perhaps do not look back in betrayal.

Oh America, built on the bad sovereignty of the one we to make a symbol of the vast to hide in. I come from the early Maine woods to disrupt and otherwise “speak my peace” against the beautiful union. A house divided has many mansions and can remember—small, white, Northern memories of temple and the towering Amazon stories—relic bone scattered on Chesapeake salt flats. “What Jack knew” is that the vast settles down and ends in Pacific death or Florida, red sun poised over the Hudson beyond, the long rise, is still red, sun set into busier twilight, true telos story of bone.

***

walking through walls is for mages and angels, but to instead lean against the so tangible swelling nothing wall-papered in some earlier dream and through forty seasons,
still as-if-gone, to thus lean against being’s several—not pass through, but by a different heart, to take what’s not there’s touch—

half memory I wish you could have my cells can’t tell
& a thinking, a push, push you off that way; I used to
sit a lot in room’s settle, not like Niagara Falls but
close, sheeted & fast gone & still, and moves like
that we are supposed to keep track of & can’t
it was a good time in my twenties I liked where
I lived, and one night after hear I was Niagara Falls
was like what having a body was like I was
so gracious to touch the old anywhere walls of
the house I rented, second floor, that bees liked
I had to kill.

***

Empty the room takes time, as stickiness William
called tuber comes loose flop, muscles have their
own rhythm, your off by alone is already di’logue
gets marsh yr sunk in; comes a last time, comes

a time room gets last clean. Boxes from White Bear Lake
pile what even now remains of not-let-go of Dorothy’s
breath, skin Jehanne has to separate. Empty the room
someone carries off the chairs & swept

is hardly enough all this fear of author’s touch
we are obligate to manage after, when
“comes a time” we are referred elsewhere, a

fence at the edge of prairie runs angle swale to
St. Croix heights slope down south face & you
can almost still see the rabbits in what were fields.

**

4/7/11

Damien tucks his hat sweet is the sense he has drop between notes when he sings so high warbled, tucks his hat head again does not actually adjust but does is still angled to the right and so.

Tractor spreads seed nearby for quad grass I don’t quite get since the alumni tents put up tomorrow will cover, so perhaps in dark under & away from birds.

I let Mile’s “The Hen” go on & as usual, this gives some dimension, some relief, some texture let’s say makes sense in a library before 2 PM—urgent text lief mention, hen then what?

***

hear it under, the several times vectored here, close proximate but different you stand slightly apart—

a story I like “hah” Bruce and I in the woods talk about something and the mushrooms come on, situation begins to cluster & strange I suggest “hey, lets back two steps to where we were before” and this helps establish us better—an old kid trick, you range from yer mam as far and then scale back to sew was to there, or perhaps to measure what’s actual eye

astrologers say moon is first scale, a once around a moon, establishes a frame you carry to the next, go back to, which suggests time can be turned on edge, like a dime & right now, arced up over you like the space ship in 2001 &

I think a measure, what you can do in two steps across the floor a few notes’ time, bird dip or slide is obvious plural & yet grooved

***

Didn’t we find, Ma, it was not possible to sublime, that
feeling tells, must lean against its difference—a rut in the road
that fingers a track—not that play and spill were not
out task, but that what wicks off falls after as rain—

invisible is not grace & what the world wants is so-many
voiced, even the air speaks, even what is gone.
You were right that imagination’s bright, gauzy tent
is the best part of the sun,

but we do not disappear into it;
I could still see you, at the edge of the stove
black magic hair and sparrow hands,

stubbornly shutting your eyes to be “wicked”
still wanting, among the impossibly bad rhythms
of departing angels, to be taken out beyond.


***

4/8/11

Slipped behind over the reading weekend; hard to write when preparing to read. & Jehanne comes home from whirlwind of cleaning her mother’s house disbursement. Late afternoon & the sky is humid and dense. She looks tired, battered in atrium shuffle

I am into the tiring phase of imagining who will come not come to the reading & know I am misreading—I have that sense I do when a feeling is too large of wasted energy.

***

this once evidence of a good, fabric covered pillows & other charms, almost sufficient rafts of anonymous objects lit up out of the darkness anyway, come up out of sleep, (objectivist mimesis of battleship-colored silence is one strategy of make amplitude low enough to balance inner body of music, as necessary counter-weight to Stravinsky shaped emergent body but no refuge)

not enough to do no violence my love for self is not enough kindle these other, coffins afloat in the water, must bear me up; thin G.I. Joe fetishes and plastic soldiers as locus for erotic sympathies

***

Outside azaleas before pathos wilt a week writes
eros slack in grey spring gloom, a picture hung up
mansion in the infinite does not make immortal, is
still loyal to our desire to shelter/have shelter

that throws a candy bar across the bed “here
homesick kid” that first night in the desert enough
change to almost suffice as what mom got typical
backwards as “surrogate baby monkey”, a tell

for what she thought was being tested if her
milk would let down for dolls stones small
chairs in kitchen halflight she never

went down to open the door to the attic yard
her dreams left her to teach that absence among
unrelated contacts.

4/9/11

three days from now I will wake at 2:45 after apparently moaning and shrieking for twenty minutes. dream involves house on Williams St. with upstairs rooms and the side room I sometimes goes to upstairs that doesn’t seem like it belongs to the apartment which is like deep hidden place to sleep or withdraw; a huge group of Sam’s friends arrive—here the house is like Copley Hill with door by kitchen—apparently for a sleep over, so for awhile there is caos as all these people are doing things… kids in the back room, Glynn others, laying out sleeping bags, and two very strange little babies, one of whose head gets bigger and eyes as he crawls

a bit later it turns out these are Patrick Herron’s children, a woman introduces herself as Patrick’s wife, they are beginning to make up my room to sleep in & I suggest they might use the upstairs room

I go to check the room out and find it dark, lit just a bit, at one end there are cases with musical instruments in them as if this were a studio. I begin to get worried as I move around trying to turn the lights on and then go into the hall. Going into the hall apparently disturbs some guys who are there stealing furniture. Because the house is so big and upstairs areas are rarely visited, they come to steal furniture. Two guys drag a chest into the room and I am confronting them

I go back into the hall and advance away from what are my rooms into a new attic like space with small room. Homeless people have been sleeping here, and I am shouting to confront them and get them to leave.

The story goes through a change here. I am in the middle of a crowd of people who are dying, who have been attacked or are being attacked. I am not always able to help them and I struggle towards a tree copse. This becomes like I am shutting a door to the rooms I have been in. I am now in a new crowd of people, perhaps the people who had come over with Sam. As I go back through the crowd I begin to run into some of the folks I had left on the other side, who I thought were dead, but have “made it” after all. The first I see is an older woman, an actress type and I hug her a long time. Other people are “coming through” and now I struggle back through the crowd the other way explaining who they are—some of them are doubles of the people who came with Sam. Others are movie stars from 1940’s era films. I apparently look like Henry Fonda as at one point I am making fun of a woman who doesn’t know I have three Oscars.

I begin to announce that something special has happened. That these people are the first people to come from this other world. That they are from another world, and then my voice gets funny, high pitched and mantic. I wake up speaking in this voice, saying “And they are far more dangerous than you can imagine”. Jehanne is not next to me—I am yelling across the bed. She is in the other room & tells me I had been moaning and talking for twenty minutes like a shaman.

***

its as if Dorothy has come into the room, is closer or an easier
spirit’s talk one way I say about cinqo de mayo reading Jehanne
parses through piles of letters, shows me one her mom wrote Anne
Sexton-style to a best friend all hip about her divorce finally
her voice amazes I’ll have to quote:

mom wrote more sternum fine in equal latters her proud
what her eyes proll could not see but Modigliani or
Kubrick, an inch away some slide filled with desire she
slid in across whatever else

***

In between the bright departure’s H.D.did not reckon would
follow wars; knew the gone boys but not that those black
angeled birds crow gathering Miles struck up was actual
pied piper at the crack of the tomb;

I mean lived under that in clotheslines of Ohio sky mom
stood at and didn’t leave with them even Jack got out maybe
before language became Styx was tar river outside
Asphodel, ruined factory town

we had left to us. What “Stand by her man” was 1950
was the boat left, last cruise of the end of wharf, streamers
and black trunk with left out tray remembered;

that’s where we were; neither of us going with
them, you turned back to Daphne stone & like loyal
me goin’ with you back to loss.


4/10/11

reading last night Pete is kind to make better by insisting I wait until a clatter of floutist parents does their hallway buffet & this reads well despite I am so bright with desire to be seen & clouds spire, a storm whips through before it & I can’t do dinner at the ballpark with the guy who visits; a strange new place “Tobacco Road” I am furious as soon as I begin to circle for parking; I don’t “reach for my machete” and leave for pad tai left overs at home with “J” before I’ve called any one out their disgusting American recreation in slacks, the Master’s on fifteen TVs

***

sometimes the break is a long time that is I am about other matters and murmer
don’t get down, being prow, that kind of thing sail my life lets I have to run from
one class to the next among weathers/whether & the notice of this as a measure
I cross too they say some is follow I mean fall, fallow, that time not doing I pick
up the phone I am meditating not so special

but undersigned here, breaks between if you read is
stitch, weathery fence all brick “the day” you might
minimal or a log on the stove but there, like knots
Bill puts in each painting to tie his teacher in
he is elsewhere and Bill wanders Winston-Salem
never left his room

***

It is time to speak to the unsinger angels
who have just begun to pause, as maple silver
saplings are, as new and children
fall among themselves to play—

to more serious say that gravity
takes writ tikkun the shy fallen
weights of their interest in gowns
veils we will resplendent



4/11/11

days shift between cool and sun; a hard almost spiraling grieve I am at the edge of a lot of work and more strongly than ever before things fall away because I am not held, not even close to held—people say they liked the reading but I am on my own own own in no town

***

I’ve not heard a thing since Mom’s service now a two week’s
back and no haunt is if by rule she cannot help me has nothing,
had, though maybe its her dip that dippered Sam now towards
Ward Chicago, sears and wolf—I am at the edge of alternate
“look no more” at her gardens & letters, put none of that quilt
on; maybe someone else’s dead mother will pass me by to
bright, but, as Pattie, said, “not mine”

***

Wind night the guy’s who don’t like
ghosts or God, in brick art are done
what all young anger does its first leash
broken, take down not the lord but

the Kulak who is easier to fork
in piles on the “ash heap of history”
cause unless you ask, unless you break
yourself, unless you tie your hatred

to the fig tree, you have it too, and
all that “lips” and notion spectacles of
what party could be is hunger

all your want is just magnetic north
to be in your home, on your mantle
no longer points to love.

***

4/12/11

***

The saying will be
they don’t know
why I say they betray me; but
they have already left, me

to starve, like the disappointed
angels, like the end of
a book, the way clouds have to
lift away lake birds

beyond the cartoon of it—
I said I was would lose all
didn’t mean to be left

and was. The road is empty of children
an hour too long in the late long
lake like afternoon.

***


4/13/11

long col of it begins; col spring among birds, slope and smooth in the always alone of twenty (we perhaps return to, running the last uphill “running up that hill”)

two days later I am in Cameron Stadium for Blue Devil Days talk to parents smile in my best approximation of what the mediator called “Duke” attire; to get here we have to walk, like servants up from a distant parking lot to a “Mansion on the Hill” its early morning; later today I will begin my walk away from ICS program

***

in Tenn I am in androgynous teen phase with long hair gets
greasy each day and sleeve cut athletic tee with tunic forced
summer trip with parents and sisters—Bruce and Ed stay home
the “big boys” I pick a scab on my in-step, something metal
fell in the car and cut it, scar still today there, white sickle

in Oak Ridge a strange meet blonde Anne there’s pictures of
me with at two walks out of a lawn at street circle I am
maybe playing ball, and talk, there’s a pause/spell that comes
up and like a dream, maybe a dream, I go with her to
have lemonade or some magnolia backporch suburban that
richer Oak Ridge scientists by then had we make now as
“fake town squares” Southern Village the dead apparent live at

***

Read metynomic some facts said
theology undoes— “the bread of life”
among loaves, the guy who brought bread marked
as line interpolate

can be two—broken, given between
the phoros for as for us forest, needs
comma, his tendency I’d call surfaces
among, fragrant or savor.

& through resonant time my mom’s
hands hold this heart in
difficult knot; break of light

not for me, nor the hard pale at
gray Atlantic the sun spangles
over the wreckless shore

4/14/11

I wanna be the rolling stones bend was a sound climbed up over climbed up over you can ehar when your drunk goes a blastin

but goes by fast, all printemps

should be disturbed as a loss but “knock it off”—there’s a thing gone on in Provosts end table the deep dark where dah blood gets spilled we are other wise Allen Building doing it

is a rue brick for it

***

I am before God someone called Samson in red head minister
pulpit West Parish Church across the Rock Creek and back up
at St John Divine someone reads the Gita then the Cutter, in French
& the next day & the next day we are down by the UN some statue
I actually lay against a wall to sleep some hours & we got visits
of Jains, suicide girls, so white where prayin’ and the next day’s
march down wherever Ave a gal comes out a nowhere from Lisa’s
story, says “wow, she was doing threesomes with John Cale who
used to do laundry with back at the green, the green brick Apart
meant “up where da withc lives, that’d play Jonnie D all ripped
that’s come to play all Jimmie’s Neptune Nepture ah turn dem tides

***

All occasioned there’s a rough
we most certain we must trill through,
eye ma pain, Jah she was—(she whazz
I’d a flat mute that studyin’ Jack

rose a salt dah, “sea gone higher ‘Dan da Shore’”—
ma’s a twirl, slat, a slat salt shack)—
all the nights, all the nights since
Lawrence Popal Vue bar Russell’d drive to

all the music erewhere
rough crossing naught—
ha’ you bin dere:

dares and deir’s and weir and wear
their there’s dart and tear
riz up true me.

4/15/11

I smash the vase this day. Terrible meeting in ICS I won’t write details of here except I could not leave the office for two hours, could not move from my chair, but—as so often you can do in the midst of trauma—get a letter of recommendation off, doing the other world of those words quite well thank you until Jehanne calls worried about where I am.

& had a chance to spelunk further into reaches of my relationship with Mom, that long ago, back before I could keep a scene, something happened, a betrayal or just gesture, in which time to come, the whole structure of our relationship and the duration of it, that she’d left or decided not to count my feelings, was suddenly apparent—it’s a guess, but I am thinking of these other eruptions, with Ken and then others, the structure of these as a clue—

and folks’ll say its me then making it, project forward, but that’s based on a bad theory of mind, some fantasy of agency & not related to notion Merleau Ponty gets about pereception and the whole & that what so disturbs me is the duration, the sentence I’ll be under, in which the slow execution of a punishing separation will be enacted and I can do nothing with the information to change it

as if, and I did, I saw suddenly a future divorce and the limits of a relationship but in the absence of the terms by which that separation could come to be I could either act Nietaschian-like no one can make sense of to walk away, or wait the slow collapse my fight makes no difference in all the while it gets heaped at my doorstep

***

driving to Candy’s days from now
I think “mamba on your bones is most dangerous
shake; summer beckons with retreats into
memory, a drive by Barrimore Ave to see
how far gone a time becomes reduced to black
names I know but no longer live in
which illuminates & death, such a great
vibration in the web, world that touches you
shudders; I write this not memorial but of
the stone given; not to be decent, but as
required or reliquary, you want to say—

***

No body likes ruin in its colors of shame,
its rung peel; inconosolate shines entwined
in flame-like candesce, methane haunt,
lit on flesh we can almost

see the pictures by; such hours dome,
soar above any of us, sister oar or
wounded caul that ceiling plaster cracks,
season’s flint bezel mistook for heart—

even the stones are embers,
long after the room accommodated
its newest vacancy,

there, on the bed, the place
everything spills into,
a stranger lays.

****

4/16/11

a line of storms casts off tornado south of Raleigh—J and I drive down into, shafts of darkest clouds and strange light, find the Burning Coal Theatre, where she’ll read from Gulag Voices her oral history of what we do, each to each. Last day of Lent. Trees shattered in yards and streetlight signals off down Blount St.

later Murat comes to read, elegant and self-styled, and yet bent over a heat; the strange threshold difficulty we’ve had persists, but at least I stand there, the door frame between us, and comment on it; his work, like mine I think, attentive to the gravity of disparate dictions; beautiful wings and blades of grass lifted against/among the crucible lines of quotes and explanation, places eye

***

somehow I become responsible for your departure, as if by
seeing the way your face turned before you began to see
where this would take you, and by crying out “oh, oh”
dismaid, oh dismayed, dispowered (I write psi); I carry
the water of your leaving, Ma, your leaven, but cannot
drink from springs displaced, dutiful suitcase in the dream
hotel, if you can read it, feel the weight I lean against
you
you’ll know the way

***

once my sister was tied up
the way I’d dreamed I think on
Mom and Dad’s bed someone had
broken in Mom always thought would

happen; Tom and I were smoking pot on
the high school hill, felt rishi big as the sky
a cop car stopped us walking back two miles
from home sister kept calling the guy

“David” I’d do pranks, and so was not scared,
wasn’t hurt I walked right up to my room past cops
read it hadn’t been me or Tom what’d Mom

think—we never figured it, thumb through a
rolodex of possible, an Ice Storm of possible
out of my dreams someone had.


4/17/11

Day calmer I start to make plans like “Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm” write a letter to this effect to my Dean.

grade through the afternoon and gym in quiet, “Chilly Winds” blues at night later I can
barely hold Jehanne and, anyway, bones are angled white held by nothing in the deep
marrow hollow

***

I’d feel wind or bitter “at the edge of” in heart-soul
I assume to be effects of neurotransmitter moods in flush
flashed on moan passes over me like a cloud shadow
I make romantic angel, but periodic or alteric in relation
means seasons that feel like this I have trouble
try to get my head above, out of—in Sometimes a Great Notion
it takes some 60 pages for the flood to drown trapped
Joe sits quiet like Theophanes icon as the water rises
slaps against the painted board

***

As it is love tries, I can account that her skin
has a duration I recognize as related to
what we try to say by spoke of “sky” or
“river”, these long, obdurant, impossible deep

endless requirements no adjustment finds scale;
not her soul-self but a condition of fact like
oak bracket, lobed and utter fact I took
as imprint, like a street washes black in

autumn & traces of once was and salt form
what is just a footprint left “Buddha mark”
as knot of bee’s mystery

in granite where lichen water pocks or
in cave deep you go far enough around a
corner, you can see.

***

4/18/11

uneven spring takes distant Middle East off the pages of the Atlantic it appears, we cannot hear what has become locust or Klaus there, as in ratchet of weapons an arc of sport bodes nothing well; the hatred which thatches arms, we see ourselves but do not stop

Monday in the oasis I leak through classes in apparently meaningful or perhaps, to say it better, I leak beautiful arced bones

***

I am the child Mom left to God as
her limit, her stop in the deal
as you leave to God to fend for himself
when there is no more to offer
(down the street, the neighbor called “Lambchops”
when she’d see me, nick name I thought
“sacrifice more than you know” would peek
the corner of the house Rockwell;
a dry spring, dusty hands in the rock desert
left me for salt & even twenty years later
full moon good Friday birthday, me and Russell
steal some lambchops from the Amherst Stop & Shop
& Russell serves me raw, blood on his beard &
Amy back at the dorm screaming because
suddenly we all looked like vampires to her

I’m not God but was sacrifice & left to the wind to raise me

still feels like for narrative purposes

Mom doing as much napkin or apron as she could, mustard yellow
paste spread on the window “don’t come close to this bitter”
she was up to her arms separating the mythic twins
and wrestling with them like Hercules baby snakes
and laid me close but fallow

***

Spring of rose and darkness
as another measure of a man ,
loc or lok old way of saying
a space that opens, lake like look

in the otherwise dense finds; for
tune or step, a place to chance
new shape in the ridge fold,
glance in the day pole.

A guy in a yellow hard hat
stands listless in the street, stop
and slow sign slack. A different

Irene walks Mick Jagger home
to a one woman red house set in the same small
distance across.

***

4/19/11

Draw a line to say where day stops and dream begins, with diction’s knife or the drift of shape to extend, we want to say both, our bodies’ imitate and thus word muscles to be free of tongue or stylus wren; isn’t this what Mallarme does the more intensely saying grey weights of ordinary air to make us notice smoke? Against the different angle of the thing un ding the whole open bears down, is held against more stellar pulls, to be rain or other kinds of trails, is twice and pregnant full, called swollen empty.

***

Jack called words like that a pile of shit stacked up after four months to dry didn’t he, knew the limit of love; I might of read “Town and City” first in my teenage “realist novel” phase as more similar access to Madame Bovary or Lawrence’s red red Hen. Starneg divagated boy in chords of novels under what passed as the historic pressure of the sun on Andover high south bank of the further down Merrimack. I put my thumb out seventeen it was more like “old weird America” of the Basement Tapes’ “tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come” than 40’s Hudsons and hobo coop.

When’d I read Cody first, or Dr. Sax I can’t remember? Burrough’s is more easy, angel of care hid in Naked Lunch I found (fall of 1976 between the Charlesgate Hotel near Kenmore & 1st National Bank Building cafeteria financial district I threw dishes occasionally at the wall) stepped out at the border, showed me how to cross, and what was left had to circle back, you travel in two directions at once.

Lisa gave me The Ticket that Exploded read in dorm bathtub I don’t think could have existed & years later Sam told me “beauty is a ferry ticket” the way he remembered stroke sequence stroke for Chinese calligram, and I sure did.

Parts of me still not recovered.

***

Death’s close watch as sky we kicked
footballs high up into between hardwood
in a shingle street, wasn’t far off since
years fold & cross decent’s

arrival thought keeps near; & how we pause
along canals in drowse above a bee
and don’t get down the hour book
done for yesterday, into its atelier:

& how we make glass to suggest, tentative
expression, the constant flowering for sale
& there on green house paths, far beneath

cloud that’s now pastoral and coal ash
a place that was before my birth stains this
spring in angles of it’s dark and light.

***

4/20/11

I put Jehanne on a plan to Egypt in the bright first day I see the coming summer’s hard green mantle. She’s next week by the Red Sea. A Sad comes up like a bruise as I go down the stairs in a hurtle up, sudden from dream. Maybe you can see the red oak floors & the light the sky lights let down, but I don’t know how. Just that reading sometimes does this. Get leapt from thought to thought & I say enough you get a picture, you have the right receiver.

***

leaving the house, leaving home, there was so much breakage
hitched 6000 miles twice a long way to just ride, didn’t achieve
what John Glenn mighta called “escape velocity”, no speed of
sound the X-15 left thunder over Berea afternoons, some days
the hit of it, exactly how undone I let the strings get, how dispersed
unended rhythms, makes me stagger shame I came from that—
ragged cocoon I gesture hospitality and wisdom from and
otherwise leak light too hard others call “gentle”

***

In twilight over Boulder a small boy lit by fire light
rolls restless in blankets, calls out “where’s my sister”
1978 and down below, Italian filmmakers follow Old Bill
Burrough’s seersucker along the steet and we are almost

high enough to see the far east Mississippi and the sky
you see from a Ford window you lean against—“where is she”—
sshh the coals down and go to sleep;
tomorrow Lisa will steal The Spy in the House of Love

from a corner store book stand, press a garnet
in my hand I’ll lose in Boston whispers “don’t touch”
and it’ll be almost five years later

she’ll be at my open trouble door, a daughter three years old
walks around the house her shoes in Converse boxes, moves back to Boulder &
I’ll hear about later when Anne reads poems ‘bout her sons in the backyard.

***

4/21/11

heart & chest ache and weep this morning like bright blue-red pains we try to say by thinking of a girl in jeans and a red farm shirt, or a flower somehow sky and shame and flame; Jehanne calls from the apartment she’s in, house frame and platform up above Cairo, across from “the most beautiful square” I can hear is a garden—our voices attempt to shape place for ear in the clink-shaped distance echoes at the edge of audible

those of us who have sought silence or to blend into walls learn to attend to the background as a mode of establishment, a track set down at ambient angles, where goal is to find the most in-between that clatter your sounds fade to “not there” like the rest of the crickets

***

Northampton 1978 I was working talking down awnings without much money and lived in a transient motel on King St. It was a time I sometimes walked out on a dinner check, and I did that at this diner. A girl had served me sitting at the counter, and I went back the next night, she was there & didn’t recognize me, so I did the same thing, again blent in. I could see it was okay because I could see no one was looking I was not registering in figural terms but at the periphery of the main show and made no one look.

I found out later its not always a good skill. Friends could walk past me on the street and not see me, or I’d be at a show and have no way to stand out profile, femme fatale
and I was such a tragic heroine, Brontean, unbelievably Cindarella, held in the cusp I’d bent around myself, a slight slip in the fabric, scotoma, no one could see

***

Up from some depth look back, they
were saying imaginal breaks about the social
as thetic, which, you pull it apart, is twitch
or clock record—is why the old man

dreamed of hours in Wild Strawberries—
there is no way to sort out death,
not rows of corn, knot notate or spell,
word slant of it into imagines of two,

into parse—day-and-night-sequence base,
world comes in caves of
image we are thrown up in the sky of

six o-clock place just off the highway
beyond myth and other forms of fire
we look across.

***

4/22/11

It was that we I was alarmed by is supposed agreement about the matters at hand, what some call surface I call reflections off city windows and the light that makes and the inside made to look like roof angled sky; the we were in classes, or we played in the band my French Horn off beats and flubbed attacks a part of what we were, was written how?
Not anyhow realized (John fucking Nina in the stairwell) I don’t recognize anyone twenty five years later, so we were something else; a bad party member warned by “Homage to Catalonia” in a hotel basement flat girls legs go by the half transom is okay; that we hope someone calls community I call paying specific inattention, that we are one a popsicle aisle someone sees Whitman in

***

Eros involves lying on a blanket at Plum Island lips blue from Atlantic cold, in zipper sweat shirt, head turned south to see the plum grove tufted highest crest of dune; involves drives there early AM summers with Mom first thing with the “feed bags” we packed towels and lunch; involves shivering and then the back of the dune heat out of the wind; involves the roads to the beach laid out by Melville & reading D.H. Lawrence on my side, my hand cupped over my eye to shade the sun—all the different ways I would lie to read the hour past; involves “hidden back there” and watching, shepherd, at the edge of Mom

***

Tidal windows are a dream of flight in ungiven flesh,
the further into the ocean we are let across two bays in the sparkle
in dense current of inlet, in reduced elements of surround;
much reduced to salt trace in the milk reeds,

brine effect on profile squint. We are at the beach in yellows,
a dented peach dries in the shore breeze by a striped blanket,
books on the corners we are half into, half real;
no one around us knows who Manet was or why I am

sad this has been forgotten—every child is born to become
a large American with stubbed fingers and small hidden eyes
& even here, in the movement from spirit to polis modal tries

an old man in spectral at the edge of the shore sees some Hercules or Man-
Lion hold golden-haired protean change into the starved air of reason,
still hopes muscle will justify his tactics of refusal.

***

4/23/11

Some storm from Sunny Sharock comes up on the shuffle—“Many Mansions”, a Pharaoh’s take on cold train spiritual, the drum’s doing a “stay around inside here” circling bit. Perhaps you take it.

Is alright as propulsion this AM. Dream particulars are gone. Last night’s scene at Joe’s has me thinking about people who don’t consider depths they talk to you. I see it coming sometimes go on the attack all Orestes. I should be so lucky it’d really be mythic. Is instead something close to suburban basements we all come from.

That “we “ I am not here for that takes the place of us.

***

Jimi’s “A Merman I Should Turn To Be” comes up that I or Lisa put on she came to the form to give me the finger hook two days after I’d suggested it over tarot. A decent sort, she’d checked with Pat first, see what she had to say she took my suggestion home? A black cat came in the window at dawn from a strange airshaft kind of no-place lawn between wings of the apartment complex, stepped down into the half basement cinder block room. I am inside Lisa’s dreams looking out through the thin lens of a story at this, at the light falling from the edge of the lawn, as if looking out from an open grave.

Its small & something like “Sugar Mountain” inside.

***

Verlaine’s next I saw unstrung a memphis yellow guitar,
lake I want to widen undone words, arc’d still electric,
& he plays, way out on the silver ox-bow E-string
pulls it back, shows form’s distent surface taut

can be put careful, child to bed, you sit in the ambit dark by.
Oh, at least come to know this—surfaces divide in light
and shadow, But we are that only in the depths,
leviathan, our bodies drift that concert

makes a place for—not stars or fetish planet nodes but
sunk reeds that end, merced clump, roots where
a clime permits. & the fighting in the captain’s tower

makes a bright poetic spire, lights up one shadow’d bank,
the Brazos cut the shepherds walk at dawn,
bodies hidden in the sugar, where we’ve halved them.


***

4/24/11

Easter as if I am in a hallway or empty offices of a distal building. I do prefer at times such large space around me. The light and air made possible by a slight phase shift makes me angel alongside—this is the dream side of the difficult parallel, Attic, out of time, sepia and formal.

For the first time I wonder if the bearing down of grief has released a notch, time gathering itself to simply require I undo my armor, unstrung shoulder and open lea.

I am a month offshore June whose clover storms.

***

Bruce was always finding books or music he’d pass on, and thus worlds. Epics about WWII, or the biography of Jean d’Arc, the Lord of the Rings when it surfaced in the mid-sixties I read part of one summer maybe ten slumbering in the green hammock in suburban backyard (Lolita) under the yellow honey locust. It wasn’t until I met Lisa and through the list Burroughs gave her established my own groove in trance direction (Eno, Djuna Barnes); but how did he, in the dim library, find unerring way to our time’s thrill? An ear for a heart & the necessity of dream—the other dreamer, migraine child, in thin so white saint sebastian angles, like the boy with the grenade Diane Arbus shot, hunched over the TV 1968 on the screen.

***

Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” comes on Bruce’s plastic green
stereo, record jacket tossed aside, and we sling across the bed, hid
in the basement as ever, Bruce’s rooms tucked away like that since he
was 12, in one curtained corner or a nook behind metal shelves; Dad put up

peaches and his bomb shelter depression era cans of beans and food stores
on ceiling high scaffolds according to tool box industry habitus and
half finished skeleton frames for future rooms sketched out towards
the stairs; Bruce tosses me Fritz Perls “Ego, Hunger and Agression”

we try to make sense of how we were fed and anger we are carrying around
like a torch, gets in the way of being ourselves, kind of a “you, stay in your
room until you’ve figured this out” as stagger and flail at invisible incubi

to express simple “pass me the water” indications does not accomplish;
he’ll ride, walk, carry, drive a bike across the country as far as he can get,
at some point forgives Mom I don’t, or forgets.

***

4/25/11

from here it feels as if the moon is on a long reach towards next week’s new moon; its rose season (Taurus) sleep and everything abounds in green; Miles’ “Little Blue Frog” is urgent under the work of grading last papers; I’ve found an atrium to work in, and there are tall gray shapes lifted around me; Jehanne was alounge at the Red Sea sparkle when we talked, out of the warm water, Muhammed reading Arabic newspapers beside her, her hair all dare exposed and bare arms

***

if brief glissandos of the 1970’s would explain what needs to be whispered, what can perhaps only be found in sun dance faint, occurs vertical to the work of retaining a house’s walls; we trace ourselves by suggestion and the domestic better sense required of spigots hidden in spider web close, like a bandaged wound; I could say how it was possible even then to be lost in exactly the way I am now, half caught in perfume and landscape, half surfaced alone outside Redding on an exit ramp and on my certain way towards the further alone of the whole of Rt 5 north;

you can get a ride anyhow; a gay hippie trucker drives the Oregon seacoast or other buried men—people do this, not so much anymore as the underscape became bent past rows of bungalows to Detroit acres and broke America takes a long, almost beautiful you look at it Clifford Still-like, time to die

but free’s as much a lie as rational relations and requires a significant misread and blocked up ears; no matter how the music’s played it ends somewhere and knows it, bends towards it, says it in sustained fifth rows—like something was going to grow where we’d asked angles to land

***

Stone in my shoe was never gone catch up Ma
& the house burned down, statue of Mary where
the crab apple used to be; trees grown old forgot,
I wasn’t ever there.

Cadillac’s a bright poison many of us drank
wasn’t a way to get big again or small; in the
wrong story, you start so far back no way to climb,
might be better to die in a war;

corn muffins in the pewter pot fridge and Anna
Karenina’s open on the dish racks; some kind of
desperate flirtation, 25 year-old cook and prettier

waitress, is very Waltham & haunted by dead
Andover witches & cranberry & vanished
Mashpee troubadours, once sang that song.

***

4/26/11

Almost two years ago now, I went with Ed Foster to the Lake Pleasant psychic fair—its around Turner’s Falls, but hard to find, and then you are there, a small turn-of-the-century set of vacation bungalows around a kettle pond taken over by a psychic community that, according to the literature out front you read while waiting, had a schism in the 1940’s over an issue about re-incarnation that was probably really about power and sex; I got a reading from an older guy who’d started training after retirement—he was gay, had been a professor at UMASS, sweet, and not without attention—told me I was in a bitter period, but this would relax, it would be good to be comtemplative & listening I had the sense he meant last spring, but perhaps the “little time” meant something else as I remain almost on fire with bitterness—corrosive, compulsive protest; I keep slamming the door on people I am disappointed by & seems like door after door I go knock at opens on yet another Bosch-like scene, people automaton are not looking at each other, everyone’s need, need, need jets on very loud, lake boom box breaks my heart I have to listen Mom or someone said.

***

Little boy body emergent sexuality was an issue at home—
Mom and Dad put intercoms in our bedroom when Bruce maybe ten &
started talk about sex, and he and Ed touch (a phase up from smelling
each other’s butts at night we change into pajamas);
it was likely not known Bruce dreamt of black-haired women with penises
dancing as would any sensitive lad alert to the not yet visible Darger
understory of the era; Dad did not like men and this became more intense
the older we got, so that, when he retired he went completely male (from a different angle) and bared teeth at every last fucker—he was particular fury about
Apollo-types, and thus, you twist it far enough, about poets I suspected
& Mom was mostly from the Lindbergh kidnapping men in shadows school of desire
and so, generally, though it was the late sixties
early seventies, our house was a place of, let’s say restraint,
and several of us lingered between genders or species a long time
a kind of disguise—shape shift as escape strategy in the face of projection
and simple wrath.

***

Which catches me up? unfolded, a city
demands a profile, so many dreams so close;
I make several places in my chest
for you, breath like a bird &

a dissatisfied tumultuous I ride along to
takes me out of time—it is three o’clock in
Thompkin’s Sq., but I did not nap—
it should not be so hard to rest.

Unfolded a city covers, is veil, smoke
that drives you back into your body, your
allotment, the familiar blue trash bins

and effort at garden & tin swans—
the intuited shape we make by arriving
at the corner we had passed.

***

4/27/11

Topaz threw up on the sheets yesterday and so at White Star laundry AM, clothes in the dryer; restless alarms go off in my head/heart about what the deans are doing about ICS; seems like just a new version of yesterday’s dissatisfaction and sense of betrayal;

from the way people act, writing above kind of fugitive record elicits no desire from the reader, hence, unable to imagine and becomes white noise or wave lap and lull—nursery mumble, though not unpleasant; but what sharp response, what out-of-a-sleep surprised riposte, should I complain, suddenly, have something to say about the assumption

this is gendered girl, to be shale or background, “lay low”

***

Between seventeen and twenty two I passed beyond, Mom and since you were sensate, there was no way to explain I was carried by a rush, a purple bloom gathering day after day I read; Dad was right, I was gone & never came back, though maybe he was unkind to say “some seed doesn’t grow”, dust his physicist gardener’s hand; this was the one time you were a Mom, you waited by the window, looked at immediate laundry or census forms through some rose Schiller eyes I can’t imagine—sensate and romantic—but then you had been cross-eyed; you did wait by the window I came back to try an approximate reassurance, bustle like some Beatrice Potter mother animal, a new sheath you’d donned & much different than the thin wicked grief you’d been, cast off like a branch.

It was nice but perhaps not fair. I’d gone past the ends of the earth, had fallen & you got better according to some other story maybe you could of let me in on you were intuitive instead of plodding surface to surface.

I don’t know if it was the right thing Mom, I still don’t, but the people who found me, talking about “New York is Atlantis”, whose backyard I walked into gonna be a shaman, the whole muscle of polis I ran into, wrecked my VW station wagon, the sweat lodges and folks I took sage to, picked me up I was a small fish and threw me back into the water.

***

If you wait long enough, through your twenties at least
and sit quiet let time spill over you seasons of purple cone flower
and radish; stubborn & demand,
someone will take mercy, it won’t heal

it’ll be crickets you’ll make do, small
and low Lao Tzu suggests, be like water for
someone else is over planting the field
I complain—

I have a large bald head and heavy,
brown eyes, I’ll wear a green shirt
you’ll put signal to flower,

I don’t know how to tell the back story give
you context I am from here or there in Atlantic America
doesn’t tell & maybe concepts you don’t have.

***

4/28/11

I must be a boy version of Joe’s mother I’ll bet he didn’t see coming (I typed “buy version” maybe vision, the stone skips) “Catholic piety turned into scroll I can accomplish mom”, his description of her sad, the sad quiet house in Dallas, suburban, at the edge of the atomic bomb & thus “keep a wild thing close, and care for it, burden to carry across the field for Dad, lake Milarepa’s guru made him build and move a stone tower (symbol of tantric mandala) five times, crooked, layered Goldsworthy cairns”

and, like all systems making better, adaptive choices over time, the few suicides or Joans

if he was like me anyway

***

no cats or dogs because of dad’s allergies but I was allowed to have mice
the way mom toyed with me, pinto Eleanor Rigby was the first sat
in ten year-old bed room alert & moved to MA with me
Debbie, blue-black,, smartest who knew the door lifted and would free her cage
mate Janice I smothered by mistake when she was in my bed (top bunk)
and I was reading, they’d tunnel under the covers along my legs
white one’s after that & then Barbara had some—one had babies the mother
slept with only when nursing otherwise her sisters would sleep with
and she’d curl up opposite end of the aquarium; the night before I left, 17,
to hitch cross Canada, parents and girls away, there was a huge party, cars down the
street I ended up on the roof at dawn too many people & someone blew
pot smoke into the cage a long time, and in the morning one, a large female
of Barbara’s I don’t remember the name, had lost an eye

Ed fixed the canopy bed someone had fallen through and other disasters I was
going through Wawa towards Winnepeg & called, he was so lonesome I figure saw the future

***

What are versions are the way the story begins—
in the dark classroom watching Vivre Sa Vie avec
Lisa, or the ten steps down into the Redwing
Bookstore on Newbury where Susan worked

brought a water-damaged copy of “The Jewel
Ornament of Liberation” home I read winter 1982
and got emptiness was yellow—the sudden blossom
of Andrea’s attention high school library I looked

up out of As I Lay Dying into & the unkissed
epileptic dancer & grave Wasp Geddes gray threads
in her hair made me breathless I had to laugh with

Greg afterwards “I am so fucked” burst upon me
or out a clap of thunder leaves an absence at the core
of sonic waves—of you Ma. Who could say different.

***

4/29/11

massive tornados rip Alabama in this disturbed, sharp, and beautiful dark spring, funnels a mile wide—someone filming keeps praying “lord Jesus protect them” and then the YouTube comments page fills up someone has trouble with Jesus and has to say.

I can’t participate in vehicles like Facebook because its a “what you are thinking” space, and that is often some pissed off & impatient fish I have trouble allowing to surface in its flickered scales or muscled flow—thing I am not going to say as a kind of polite social or care requires, but if I complain you’ll tell me its my problem

Osip Mandlestam in the bath this AM:

Hillocks of human heads into the horizon,
and I am diminished—they won’t notice me,
but I’ll come back, resurrected in tender books and
children games saying: See? The sun is shining.

sweet thought of what one hopes.

***

Mom reads along the surface and thus takes an effort
to tell the truth as gambit driven by motives
she projects; or worse cannot fathom as I try to explain depth
& therefore assumes motive. I have to try most painful
mode of establishing proof in her terms which is
philosophical logic I work out in airless locations as
if solitary, w/no room but fence-line I have to pretend
is a path—just goes around the circuit; in my most ardent
she smiles and is proud I can think better than she who is
Faust, but this does not unlock the door—I cannot show
her the vertical step that implies fall.

This is Mom at the doctors, mom at dinner, mom
ironing, mom driving me somewhere; we live farther apart
than two worlds can survive; I keep trying to show
her the plumb line that makes hung veil possible, show her
how to step through, that two is heart and soul and she
should know

I have to teach her but can never teach her in time
to take care of me.

***

Day gone red with broken
there is no time now for
the everyday carries & misread
as sublime indifferent white

what will become solid as ruin;
crows I can understand but not
the shallows of your sense,
thin scoops of world

like clear soup, a beautiful shadow
you can’t taste—“I watch a few lifetime
movies on Saturday and Sunday go to church”

you are saying the way we are supposed to
in a bar & the future gets smaller where you
do not walk through walls.

***

4/30/11

in at up against //call it//a bright silent 10 AM; thought rises in me to say “polis does not exist, is the son of a barren woman”, to try that on; that polis is a line we have imagined in order to think without; that Olsen’s slogged Dogtown streets tell this—there are no maps of the stars without myth; a dragon steps across the plane of the possible, one foot in the sky, one foot having crossed the shore to step on sand—the waves bisect a furrow—no city can stand there, no dream of “the populace”

even if all appearance lacks ground, what is not is different, at best hope, at worst fictive hedge for a room that does not exist; rooms exist, and carefully woven brocade & linen panels full of bright water, but there is no polis by which these are arranged

son of a barren woman is hope not yet circumcised in trade

***

At the top of the slanted cement grade beneath an
underpass, there is a four foot wide flat lip, three
feet or so under the bridge; you can sleep there,
the trucks pass loud over head, an uneasy sleep, almost
any exit has a place you get used to the task, find
a place its unlikely people will stop, if its not raining
only a quilt is necessary; the one I used had 4 x 4
squares of shirt or dress cotton Mom’s mother had made,
Steiner-like pure tone red and blues, and traces of Easter, or
the effects of supremicist angles on design.

***

Polis is cardboard from yr dress shirt
you save for art projects in a green cabinet, pulled
off the curb and brought home like a promise; nearby, a radio
plays King—“you can’t have it”—an astrolabe shadow

on Monday’s lawn is my side you can’t sit near just ‘cause
an attractively described fold of time and air occurs
where I breath—call it “community”—
why don’t you go to ticket claims?

Way back at the start of
the century of ruin ease this dream
of the common wasn’t enough

and yr still plying— the fabric between
us is yr fault line too, you have to ask to touch
what right to assume.

***

5/1/11

Disappointment is not meeting or an unsatisfactory position, a thread that slips; like Ezra I make a show of anger as a form of reverse echo-location—you just walked passed me; in order to realize that for both of us I will be terrible. You will have many excuses, and, at some point, you won’t want to know any more. I will be in a black sea that stretches for miles.

Over and over your famished self-absorption I am absent to is not made reconcile. You have arranged the days so that I have no part.

I am not the last door I closed or the tactical problem my face or body poses for the bargaining you must do today.

***

Dismemberment is facsimile of disappointment, as a severed hand or scar at least realizes the mistake for the public, were there a commons, hopes to make the square more than the open distance a field does better. At least then a category or genre, “out of place” as social duty I can do better.

Semaphore.

Data.

Masturbation as facsimile of dismemberment or contract. A fake cut. In the cellar, in Bruce’s room, with Playboys’ bought furtive, Paul Mauriat album covers, Sears catalogs, any ankle or skirt. My loyalty to fury in a gesture of bad synthesis.

An unsatisfactory position, Mum.

To be the mirror body of your choked ambition, so you could be mirror body for something or someone else.

***

Slipped out the backdoor Mom, fair enough, for barns &
the cool moon will always be as bright & my heart be
set on the dark hills; sky holds me up and you would wonder
why I grieve at you so; what the banging screen door won’t

do; you are right that mountains and time justify whatever
is done; such glory cancels all & that more perfect way
we are lit, however blind in our more perfect unawakened forms,
we are lifted out of & I should let you slip out into the fields

out under what we call a parliament of owls, I should be able
to give that slight grace, to let you up for once, not haggle, and
stand at the door in a more easy looking after, the way

a mother follows her blue shoed son into dreams or watches
as he goes into the larger and different of his own appointments,
knowing love is to let happen, this still black score.

***

5/2/11

again at the end of a moon; roses and honeysuckle scent in the almost; once again fragrant air around our brutal, dances in the street; the morning papers say Osama dead in Pakistan & black sports announcers look at each other before the basketball game and try to figure how to say something even, how to walk that line through America to speak to the cost; the tipped scale spills aromatic candles & patchouli and my physical therapist this week after Easter suggests we might want to euthanize polis seein’ what’s done in it name

***

I remember I was outside on the blonde concrete
driveway maybe shooting hoops at a basket we’d built
someone said Wallace had been shot but was
going to live; I remember asked my Mom how come
just once one of theirs couldn’t die when he was shot,
not even knowing yet how Reagan would lift his arm
and wave away a curse, just a kid’s feeling, I’d feel
again after I saw the North tower fall “who do we have
to hit” asking my brother Bruce on the phone and
he says “naw, that’s what we cannot do” better than I
at the moment I understand what’s human and what’s
not like the Unitarian minister tells us from the pulpit we
have to go into Afghanistan its like a police mission
& he claims that free pulpit that is only his to say it.
So, my insane and murderous uncle’s dead
in some Pakistan river shot like a
video game—

as I recall Mom felt the same way about Wallace as
I was saying. Squeeky Fromme is America.

***

When I got there, your rooms were already empty of you,
filled with light, your cat hidden under the bed & it was
hard not to feel how happy you were at last to be free of
your body, rushing in the wind of a meadow you’d been

at last permitted to enter; later I felt how this initial joy
came apart & recalled that in China they say the three
souls separate at death & for several days things broke
around me, and the bad girl’s jaw looked out your eyes,

showed it teeth; I have not sensed you close or dreamed since
and I don’t know what has become of the pieces—three is
a good number, a waltz, maybe you are learning at last

how a third related field falls open between all possible
qualities, how the bodies shift to catch, and how truly the
desire of your collar’s fabric could lead you.