The Road to Franklin

Why not begin

with the saw mill, which never angers

the air its addiction to light,

the light its mimcry

of sound, how it happens

all over, always

on the mountain road

you pass the tree farm—

fir, spruce—so many

ladies in waiting

in the painting of it

the artist forgets

to give them faces

nevertheless they greet you

with the difficult heft and hipswish

of their hoopskirts

some hope might gather there.

or is it

a hidden binge of winter air?

Hunger

— the kind

that would stab you

in the eye, keep moving

a bird-shaped hole

in the back of your head

for hunger-released in the rubble:

a cigarette the color

of bread, a candy wrapper —

the cold morning.

*

Shadow you thought

was your soul, flew in

through the fifth

floor window, across

the classroom

and down the hall.

But about the soul:

it doesn't mean, necessarily,

The Lord's un-clutched hand invisible gift . . .

nor omen,

nor flap-gift emissary

while you were teaching.

*

On the sidewalk, your way

to lunch, 

a good writing desk:

dark wood, with

a drawer out like a tongue.

Would it speak, it would say

My hunger, my thirst for someone

to come, dip his finger in ink,

touch my lips,

feel around my mouth toward

the throat, dead desert of 
unutterable words . . .

*

A crow

in the drawer, or

a squirrel

when you return

in half an hour. None of it,

really, requires the soul.

Dinner (this is a poem of Joel's I'm posting for him)

So you sat next to Peter Orszag at an East Village restaurant?

What do you know about the CBO,

or the vermicelli he lifted with dexterous financial fingers

via a stainless steel fork?
The only thing you know for sure
is that Orszag is not a chopstick man,
and this knowledge is a tugboat

pushing the great barge of commerce
down the widening mouth of foreign policy.

I once ate there with friends and was silent
watching the senator perch atop his chair

like Franklin's bald eagle.

After coffee and dessert,
there was the car ride through this city of forests.

There is usually a car ride.

Taken from chair to chair I saw in the window

the diaphanous shadow of your phone's shallow face.

It fixed with tenacious reason on the shatter resistant passenger side

as if it were a giant night insect attracted to the darkness.

I saw the rows of text, the sublime back-lit miracle of liquid crystal

digalized before my eyes, and could see nothing else.

Not the trees, or the sky, or the ghosts of the great burning.

I only saw it:

The ephermeral rectangle; the small glass doorway;

The place where we make sense of what we do not know.

Arbus

Not hunted really, but trapped—

the light made it difficult to look.

Her first eye, through a second eye,

captured her subjects' eyes.

The subjects' eyes, when captured,

saw her second eye first. 

Later she fixed them in solutions,
neither knowing any better nor any worse.

Nothing's Easy

Yes, my dear, nothing's easy.
Most things are hard, the rest
we make hard for ourselves.

                     *

Sometimes
the best we can hope
to bear is to open
ourselves to light,

to  r e f r a c t
                          our suffering . . .

Walking the Dog

Pulling her now, by the throat, from whatever

may distract her — squirrels, runners, a ball

bouncing, birds in the grass — a clean jerk

of the leather loop, buckle and chain,

tethered shortly to his side,

if that's anything like

what we need from each other — loyalty, or

the right kind of focus — to anchor the leash

in his left, the other to grip more gently

for slack, should she need it,

to nose in the dirt,

or to yank her from another, more fierce, who

would end her — to know a jump or the faintest

growl means another quick snap — Hey, that's not

how you say hello . . . him saying, as if she were a child.

High School Diaries

Some people post pictures of themselves on the internet

posing over the speckled carcass of a kudu

they’ve killed in Tanzania.

It’s usual to dig the uncocked rifle butt

into the ground and grip the spiral horns

like ski poles, for people love a virile huntsman with a viral smile.

Fathers and sons

bond by hunting. Husbands and wives bond by holding

opposite ends of a gun.

Hunting game, if you are gay, probably bores and horrifies you. Write this

down in your diary: What a sad, proud lion lying there in the dust

between the khaki musculature, jugular-struck, mane-pulled

like a passed-out frat boy

having his hair held back. What a miserable zebra with a hole in its throat.

What a wildebeest running

red from nostril and ear.

And, oh,

the cape buffalo crumpled next to a folding chair, a bottle of grey goose

under the fuzzy groin of the thorn acacia,

under the jackalberry tree, under the baobab, under

the jarrah tree, the candelabra

pulling all its shade back into itself.

No quarter given, no quarter sought. We are most ourselves

forgiving what we’ve written of the human heart, though most Americans

report they’d rather post pornographic pictures of themselves

than excerpts from their high school diaries.

All the Animals in the Smoke

All the animals in the smoke
live inside each other,
romp like samba dancers,
disturb this world's night.
They are hairy beasts that swallow hearts whole,
until
you, like them, are gone.
They are an ethical menagerie
bound by no creed, freed
to step from the lines of day.

Their fears cannot be replaced.
They are feathers and long teeth.
They drift upward.

I do not imagine
this damp base of twigs will jump to flame.
However, there is a tower of gray.
Though I cannot carve it,
there is an order.
Few understand the face of the bear,
the fish, and the raven.
Or know there are more.

Anemophily

On a street without light, in a place I would not leave,

I left the windows open to hear the drone of cars

on the highway three winding miles below.

Two miles down in the other direction

the bell from a gray, stone church tolled each hour.

At noon its congested hymn struggled to uplift me.

When I moved to the valley the sound did not carry.

I no longer measured time with the tools and percussion

of drum, hammer, anvil, or stirrup.

I measured it with stamen, pistil, bees, and wind,

then closed the windows; these  difficult, temporal imbalances

could not survive the valley of their making. * 

I See Myself in the Sea

I see myself in the sea, the jagged mirror

of the sea. Behind the shards of me

     is the moving mass of water, the feint fins

     of the big fish swirling the undertow,

     the liquid calligraphy of sound within sound,

     the ghosts of a creature who would consume
me whole.

I see myself in the sea.  The jagged mirror

of the sea underneath the shards of me

     contains the terror of the fact that
     the sea is the soul, gargantuan and entire,

     the liquid calligraphy of me within me, palpably

     unfathomable, except for the tides that keep

time all its own.

The Truth

As in the sea — the sea both hiding

and revealing the rubble below, bits

of shell, seaweed — or, as in more often

the wind — the wind-as-indifference

we learn to accept, finally, in nature —

despite some lucid reflection we hope

the water hurls back as we wade

in the shallows, shy almost, reluctant

or just returning from full

immersion, though as we stood there

it would seem no different . . .

I know, the waves no longer whisper,

I know what you've always been . . . no shame,

no need to confess . . .

*

Soon we were dry — half awake, half naked —

in the sand. Now the crest and momentum

toward us the shore, the roar and glide

beyond which there is no regret, as

the thinning sprawl of sea barely visible now,

now vanishing, leaving only the sand,

slightly darker than the rest, the rest

of the innocent shore . . .

*

And then we stood, as if in surrender . . .

We walked toward where the sea would meet us.

Abstract Art

abstract art

yesterday at the national gallery

some kids said of a frankenthaler

it reminded them of mario kart

the numeral seven rainbows

by the sea a row of taffy thrown

off a float in a parade a bloody nose

spring came and everything

was possible the possibilities

seemed endless you fag

I whisper when he calls

newman’s stations of the cross

fabulous black boughs shorn

of bark charred tibia telephone

poles in a morning fog you fag

he says when I disappear

into the jasper johns

as if it were some shrubbery

a child could hide in

a changeless symbol taut skin

a silent drum delectable

it’s true

I want

to tell

the children

if you

lick it

art will

kil you

Ads in the Heart of a Ferryman

Ads in the Heart of a Ferryman

The silver paper, silver like cigarette wrappings

kept behind glass at bowling alleys and dispensed with

the pinball mechanism of dowel and handle,

falls. In the touch of foil and fingers

I taste giandojòt, Portmarnock’s beach and the Irish coast.

Harbour ghosts stretch banners, celebratory and immaterial,

ads in the heart of a ferryman.

The ocean stretches.

A thousand Smiths bring forth their saving work

with all the strength of dandelions.

Over moon barren, moon besotted hills

the darkness of Jericho, the darkness of New Canaan

falls the same.

Cold clarifies the brain.

Butter burns in a pan.

She says she has forgotten herself.

For dinner, poulet de Bresse and a storm.

Fictions flit upon the soul and on the ground bats’ false shadows.

The short pulse she expected to go on did not. There is escape, the quiet loss of summer heat.

The orchid in the room has Victorian leaves,

a fracture, oblique, blood peppered blooms.

It is how we stamp the land:

cut and letter pressed, split and spread eagled,

black and white.

The night traces the plane; the earth lopes the map.

Advent falls. Lent Falls.

Fee-fi-fo-fum, I am tethered,

a man with confidence,

both coasts in sight.