LIFE WITH AUTOMOBILE
He was going to take it to the next town.
Though the park was empty
the pond bristled with life. He had
not an answer within 100 sq. acres
or it was only answers that tweeted about.
Who was this lonely figure in a landscape
and once he is made known
would the narrative slack and come
to a warm bed and slippers?
It was no no and yes yes all afternoon
on the thruway. It was a big state said the signs
and so did the sky say big state.
THIRTY SENTENCES FOR NO ONE
It begins with socks in a drawer and continues to laundry bags to the future. In the Food Mart everything is above the child’s head. Always looking up. Always lifting our eyes to heaven. The horizon is your mother’s repose on the divan after daily chores. Outside rain repeats rain. I remember wanting hugs but was given food. I have grown into the sweater my aunt gave me. I was born on the third chapter of the novel forever asking what happened in the beginning. In the beginning sky. In the beginning earth. The aquarium is a prism at sunset in the library which articulates light on the spines as both a constant and ephemeral beauty. Come over to our house. I have grown into this sky I wear about my shoulders everywhere I am. The hamper in the mind is endless. Let me work my image into soil and treebark and leafstem. This is not who I remember. The first body was an environment a land-mark on the frontier of tomorrow. The body of discourse is an apology of abuses and I am without reparation. In the meaning of the day the way one turns and looks—eyes for hands. Today the stranger the exile and spook are in my shaving mirror. In my dream you are real. I am as one who each day stands behind the tapestry and receives the needle to pull the thread taut and pass it back through. The design is no one’s. Is there justice in every sentence? Then I read “death is not being unable to communicate but no longer being able to be understood” or something like that. Grass was the first species to cover the earth. I am incomplete. Indeed. All that was left is the state and the miles under my feet.
POEM FOR JOHN WIENERS
I am not a poet
because I live in the actual world
where fear divides light
I have no protection against
the real evils and money
which is the world
where most lives are spent
I am not a poet
because I cannot sing about
lost kingdoms of righteousness
instead I see a woman in a blue parka
crying on the street today
without hope from despair
I am not a poet
for there is nothing I can say
in smart turns to deflect
oncoming blows of every day’s
inexistence that creeps into
the contemporary horizon
I am not a poet
but a witness to bear the empty
space that becomes our hearts
if left to loiter or linger
without a life to share
I’ve seen sorrow on joy street
and heard the blur of the hurdy-gurdy
and I too know what evening means
but this is not real—poetry is
and from this have I partaken
as my eyes grow into the evolved dark
DESPITE YOUR NOTICES
This is my poem. The one I was afraid to show you. A poem to provide against the voices that will ultimately ensure my failure in this endeavor. This poem is a pillow, small and embroidered, the satin death pillow used to prop up the face for one last viewing. All attempts of understanding finally and thoroughly erased. This is my poem. The one I tuck under my eyelids when looking inhibits the distinctions of what can be seen. And air always present, always there to stimulate the hair at the base of my neck. Insert this chill exactly where you presume to have found me, only to uncover an abandoned parking lot for eyes. Look harder and you will discover we are all matched to this swatch of steel gray that is as wide as the seam on my scrotum but longer than the chalk ray on the board in the classroom to represent infinity. Silent and irreversible. A fault line running from one hole to another. Forever. That we are drawn, together. So see you on the other side. Even if we can’t represent that which we were hoping to resemble. But for one day heaven. See the tips of buds swaying in union beneath a spring sky so faint so blue that it could only suggest a further devastation, as if we were fated to repeat this day, as if we could. It came and went without the anxiety of anticipation and its finality of passage and unannounced significance stains us good. Even the colors fade so we can only imagine we were once so alive. Sad nothing can be held so thoroughly we might assimilate it. Only in the letting go will the full concentration of tone bleed into the periphery of our lives and settle into a patina that can never be altered. I surrender my vision thus. Because I don’t understand. That joke isn’t funny anymore. It cuts me precisely where laughter is a departure from this parlor. I live on flight 405 departing into an icy altitude—cold and detached. I’m here despite your notices and obituary. That plane didn’t crash. It still hovers around my head. The constant hum of its engines reminds me I still haven’t landed. I know this by the way a hand like a landing strip will reach over to wave here, here, here. So here again is the earth. Not the idea of it, but that clump of dirt and weeds outside my door each day—humiliates me. So long. I’m off to my job, alone in the clouds where my fathers live perhaps younger than I am now. Having left me to dinners, movies, books and with this incredible sickness you call enthusiasm. It’s a smoke screen though. For it was me they stuck out there in that winter hole. Earth so frozen it came up in slags that still get caught in my throat every time you tell me you love me. So don’t. I mate with these voices on the other side. Their memos become the mottos of my solo walk into emblem. As the torn metal of all industrial accidents flowers in my brain. Yeah, I saw the broadcast. Transmission deceived.
PSALM
No one lives there
X and delirium
—barely wider
than a sun
How many
