find your grandfather working in the dark,
putting in a post to protect peaches,
watering tomatoes, corn, beans—making them grow
out of sand, barren sand.
Written the Day I Was to Begin a Residency at the Penitentiary of New Mexico
Inmates put an acetylene torch to another inmate’s face,
seared out his eyes.
Others were tortured, lacerated with barbed wire,
knifed, clobbered with lead pipes.
I remember going to the state pen to see a performance of Beckett.
I see two inmates play Hamm and Clov.
Clov lifts weights all day,
his biceps are huge.
And Hamm, in a wheelchair with a bloody handkerchief,
dark purple shades,
is wheeled around and around
in a circle in the gym:
as guards watch, talk on walkie-talkies, slam doors,
as a television crew tapes segments.
I do not know whether these two inmates died or lived.
But they are now the parts they played:
locked in a scenario of bondage and desperate need,
needing each other to define themselves.
I tell myself to be open to all experience,
to take what is ugly and find something nourishing in it:
as penicillin may be found in green moldy bread,
or as, in the morning, a child of the earth
floating in a porcelain jar full of rainwater
is something astonishing.
But after the SWAT team has moved in and taken over
the flotsam and jetsam of a prison,
and the inmates are lined up and handcuffed to a chain-link fence,
I figure their chances, without people caring,
are “an ice cube’s chance in hell.”
Gold Leaf
Is the sun a miner, a thief, a gambler,
an assassin? We think the world
is a gold leaf spinning down in silence
to clear water? The deer watch us in the blue leaves.
The sun shines in the June river. We flit
from joy to grief to joy as a passing
shadow passes? And we who think the sun a miner,
a thief, a gambler, an assassin,
find the world in a gold leaf spinning down
in silence to clear water.
*
Dazzled
Reality
is like a contemporary string
quartet:
the first violinist puts on a crow’s head.
And the cellist
soliloquizes on a white lotus
in the rain.
The violist discusses
love, rage, and terror.
And the second violinist reports on the latest coup
in Afghanistan.
A gazelle leaps
in October light.
I am dazzled.
Magnetized
Jimson weed
has nothing to do
with the blueprint of a house,
or a white macaw.
But an iron bar,
magnetized, has a north and south
pole that attract.
Demagnetized, it has nothing
at either end.
The mind magnetizes
everything it touches.
A knife in a dog
has nothing to do
with the carburetor of an engine:
to all appearances,
to all appearances.
Knife at the Jugular
Sentenced to two consecutive
life terms, Robert Francis may be
paroled in twenty years. He may
walk out of jail at forty,
a free man. But the world travels
at the speed of light.
He will be a miner staggering
out of a collapsed mine. People
will have assumed he died
years ago. And, at forty,
the world will feel like jamais
vu.
