Saturday, February 26, 2005

He bends to pick a Dogen

Scenes From The Met
On a February Tuesday,
Kasyapa at Cristo's Gates


Near Marie Victoire Lemoine's Atelier of a Painter named LeBrun, a woman in a pair of oversized eyeglasses passes. She mistakes me for the corner of a house let by a crazy lady. Hans Memling's Woman With a Pink hangs near orange brocaded robes and a triptyched Gabriel,
poernucharisitic,
lost things, gaping putrefactions, open asses wrapped in white Carthusian albs, last things. Hermetic physiognomy in holy golden light, when tipped, ghastly typologie against a background of green, a green deeper than an emerald fish scale. There's an enormity of blue where city-workers place the snow.

Soon, this all becomes a blur. Soon, this contemplation of a skull, this dreaming Aeneus, this crucifixion and patrons all in ruinous frames, in pavilions of splitting arches, this aching in my back, this craving for wine assails the hall. Round bottom wrapped, trapped, tight denim moves past.

Sounds--

an accordion in the corner and a geometrical line of Ibo voices, bright flesh tones and ridiculous unintention, color-nuanced gouache, a 33rd canto sung by Ugolino, conducted by Carpeaux, chorused gift to Calais Burghers. Reliquary of a monstranced eye, from ass to Perseus and Salome, a Roman General and a daughter of Japhthah, Ajax and Theseus, collaborations brought to bear on a sublime disclosure, a taglined contrapuntal discourse.

Outside the museum benches line an enormous blue flourish, peopled benches and an emanation, the natal, soldered patois of enamel and pot-metal. I open my mouth wide enough to eat, and cry. Textiled park drying in the sun, cold orange breeze waving overhead, blowing like a function of memory, places and friends swallowed in emblematic saffron, an elite, chequered range of clutter on a path, chiffon of a gray tribunal.

If not for bareness there'd be nothing there at all. Five platformed chairs on an otherwise barren stage, Hecuban superfluity, frailty's glorious infiltration, wine of tears, peremptory peace that makes a guest of light, the light that precedes a gray capitulation. Throngs of people in a curtained park, strident smilers, prattling chatterers, rapacious joggers, limpid photographers, unceremonious twins, numbers of French, teens out of school, cold asses on benches, hats on heads, dogs, kids behind trees, an occasional sled, the

curtains lend the park their manufactured

tenor, despite all this celebratory noise.

Soon, crocuses.

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Lemon Rinpoche

Ash and Bone
I have not grieved on a page like this one,
never so eager a page, bare page of
days filled with red caps of sorrow cracked
against her pulp, page of ash and bone, a
magdelene page that expiates the issue of a
wound, sober page of a wiser knowing,
ground-page and root, a flow and purgative
remedy of tiny hours, a scrabbled page of
voices, body scored by storm-swept sand,
empty scabbard, full sword that
absorbs its mark in steel, this
lion page braving all the passing world.

Without any tears

Olds Mobile

I shredded an entire book of Sharon Olds poems, cut them out
and strung them from the ceiling with strands of yarn and tape.

Every time the wind sweeps through they flutter
weightlessly, not at all like matter.

Their chimes shimmer like lights on ears, oxygenate the house like the wave of a hand. These are poems that move out of lived-in spaces. Their bodies fly up in the essential aloneness of poems that connect, fleshy poems stayed by flimsy threads, the muscularity of poems that open, intrinsically, to a comedy of days and the incommunicable history of a life sung in jagged Mahlerian liber, this airy, tangled bivouac, tossed leaves encamped beneath the

momentary
elusive
harmonic
bridge of a line drawn, of bodies inside bodies, until they grow so heavy with the other that they threaten to pull the ceiling down.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Let's hope it's a good one

Full Impact
He emerges from the tall reeds to straddle the tracks that split the town, east
from west, where the sounds of an approaching freight train fill the surrounding hills--
noises like a steel mill falling from the sky.
A bottle grasped in one hand, with the other he cocks and aims for
the blinding white heart of the charge.
He lifts the bottle to his lips. It is like trying to bear the terrible weight of history skyward. He manages to get off several rounds. A whistle sounds out of the catapulting light, the undetectable bang of white, the shattered bluster of air, blood and bone born like a hair in wind.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

Have a happy New Year

Brattleboro

Shadows of a curtain on a facing wall,
The tingling of a cut nerve,
A man without a bed buys a table frequented by ghosts,
A woman and a child cross the lot across the street each day at nine,
Medicine on a nightstand,
crumbs,
a pen,
Pregnant women read menus in a restaurant,
A forest hag exchanges redemption for a small white dog to whom she constantly tells lies, a dog that discerns the passing hour by the lengthening shadows of a windblown curtain on a wall.

And so this is Christmas

Late Dispatch

They say a writer must write everyday. They say the world is a brutal place. He puts faith in each proposition, each palpable fear. When he puts one and one together it becomes a daily practice full of redemption. Centered beauty arrests him, once,
draws him, again,
soothingly,
out of the complacent and the dull.