Un-Sexual, Un-Healing

Oh, That I Were a Dog

( Where I are Plural )

.

It has always seemed unsustainable,

this lying side by side,

this sliding in and out daily,

hourly,

like teaching or selling,

acting is less of a performance art

--the stage floor subsumes,

is less of an

"other."

I have never been able to make due

beneath the weight of sheets,

the confinement of thighs,

the heavy allure of breasts,

breasts of varying size and tenor,

beautiful, yes, but

the gravity of being a man,

the multitude of beds,

open thighs,

fingers,

toes,

lips, yes, lips . . .

such cumbersome light

this losing one's self,

this becoming a tongue

writhing in the dark.

A part of me wants to make love to

every woman, every woman I have known,

or met, or that has walked a little while

in the earth, women tending gardens,

women healing the world, women

knotting a kerchief over the eyes of

Justice, but even that part of me has doubts,

reservations.

It seems too much for me, this lying here

with you, my stomach asks me what it is all

about, my nose juts forward, suggesting this

is the smell of mother or those long-legged

sisters of my father who, by nature, coddled

and enticed. I remember their limbs,

what their skin smelled like, how their hair

fell along the cheek I set against their

shoulders. Safe arms of incredible women.

You lack the ephemeral nets of those girls I

consumed at the newsagent stand.

They turned into birds and clouds, flight itself,

yes, whatever I asked them to be they became,

and I did the same for them. But, this lying here

with you is so palpable, filled with fleshy rolls

and scars and unexpected patches of hair,

every manner of imaginable alteration.

Your body makes me fear my own.

It is a body I have feared from very early times,

from centuries far removed from this bed,

your walls, the drawers that secret away your

pleasure life, and the closets of your chosen

wardrobe, your desired reds and golds.

Desire enters every choice you make, every

meal you decide to eat, leaves it mark on every

orange peel your fingers tear, every place your

bare foot touches, remains behind every time

your hand wraps around the doorknob to your

apartment, infuses every sweep your tongue

makes over your lips, fills every labored breath
you breathe as you sweat in the park, walking

vigorously, jiggling beneath your loose clothing,

wishing a man of my caliber could lie still, one

night, beneath your canopy, hold and take what

is his, give you his own desire as if nothing else

grew from the earth as it spins under the stars

that shine even as they remain invisible in the

day, the day of a thousand failed loves, the light

of self-conscious stains, of awakening, axis of

light that so diminishes the interminable appeal

of a boy let loose upon the earth, dabbled on by

well-meaning women, and by entrepeneurs who

imprint early monolithic self-doubt on every

perfect being.

Oh, that I were a dog.

This newborn fire

Little red rooster

.

January, 1958, The Year of Brother Rooster

.

This newborn fire

scampers across the yard,

stamps the ground with

hardscrabbled feet,

skinny, orange-scaled, tipped with nail.

.

Inside the house the mother's belly erupts in

Procession, through the window groans may

be heard, the air inside is full of sweaty faith,

serious business, women's work.

.

Somewhere, someone has written

an efficient volume on the

dismemberment of your lovers' bodies;

beneath the glare of a consumptive interest

you are, like a wick, gone out of yourself.

.

But, you are no black wick, resplendent

in your quick, provincial plumáge, muted

only by the dust spurred ascendently into

the air where it hangs around you like an

antique atonement with wood and wire and

the cackling of your thorny brood.

.

Brahma bird, you dance a firery dance of

love. Inside a woman labors. You have

announced the death of gods,

proved prophesies,

are born to war.

.

Blood cauled priest of the red carbuncle,

sturdy, turgid bird,

prodigious and possessive lover whose

heat the egging bodies of your charges

crave, plain white lovers press themselves

against your fire.

.

Behind the house, a silo full of grain, and

beyond that then the trees that lift the

January sun. Through the window the break

and snap of midwifery is heard. In the yard

the rooster's call is raised. Through a blowing

curtain, a nascent yowl springs forward. A gasp.

Exhaustion and relief.

.

The rumpled hens of morning pass the word,

garbled pidgin spreads from roost to roost,

infiltrates the busy air like droppings

everywhere, like feathers plucked, like blood

and semen, like bodies intertwined in the

cracked shell of a summer night.

Love me two times times two

.

Love Is Never Having To

Say You're Crushed

.

I don't know that I have ever been

as in love with anyone as I have

been with you. There was that

golden girl, the one with the cello

standing in the corner of her room,

the one whose hands were sculpted

by Michelangelo, a love many years

old, much distanced now. And, even

that cannot compare.

The quality of that dream love was

that of children playing. But,

our love

--it feels like life and death,

quite adult you know--like a blade

edging meat from bone, precise and

earthy,

our love.

Plans fold--you must fight very

hard to hold yours up against

our love.

I know it will not be. I have chosen

too, another thing,

some-thing-not-this-love.

It was too big for us,

our love.

Life's a long song

Heart Song

Today is a day for a song.

An elucidatory song that draws you

and I further along toward our

destinytions, a song that rings

unbroken until each can say,

finally, "I am my own country."

First we listen, and after we hear,

we sing--

auricular sidereal tarrying at the

speed of sound, a song sung

somewhere between light and

solidity, composed of each, a great

Mass of praise meant for no one in

particular except the poet-praiser,

moved to sing simply because he is

moved at all.

This is the miracle, read in pages

of a day and flung outward, toward

the sea, a churning-wave-song, a

sound not unlike that unsufferable

cat whose purring sleep-song rises

out of a basket of blankets, sifts

through soft savannah grasses,

along heavy chains constructed of

bone and conjured in the muffled

ease of dream where feet pound

earth, elder sages heal the sick,

where otters hunt great salmon,

where, along the banks of a silver

river the rising smoke of funeral

pyres builds and joins in billowing

clouds of passing, where fruits

grow fat and fall at the feet of

children, children laughing,

children singing, "Gone, gone,

gone to the other shore, gone

together

to the other shore . . ."

A diadem song to stand against

the visceral gods of carnage.

These children dance. They tie

flowers in their hair. And in their

voices, in their one voice, they sing

an unceasing song, "Gone, gone,

gone to the other shore, gone

together to the other shore.

O Awakening!

All hail!"

Loosing in the sky with diamonds

Mine, Not Yours--Fear and Anger, Lust

and Possession, Murder--of Course

I will take twenty minutes now,
not to think or ponder, not to regret
nor brood nor fear, but just to say

I hurt, that I have entered an ugly

time, the dark thing that has always

stood between you and me. And,

because its mere potentiality was

what stretched your distancing arm,

I thought I'd call it forth--a stupid,

angry thing to do, I know. But I could

not bear being shut away by you

because of something that did not

happen, as if betrayed for holding

onto light, unrewarded for fending

off the dark (as if that was not its own

reward).

I walked to the morning sun,

but this darkness would not budge.

Who invited this thing that stars shun

into my life? What sentient being said,

give him wine to drink until his feet are

thick with darkness?

If only I could extrapolate light from a

sticky piece of warm rice, the red-gold

light of tea made from forty-seven roots

of sorrow. Having sipped it, a man may

step inside its center.

After that I can say, God, I release you.

Ex-wife, I release you. Mother, father, I

release you. Teacher, you are released.

It is a lesson learned. Letting go so as not

to lose one's grip. Twenty minutes are up

so I must end now.

But you, best girl ever, you are harder to

let go of than the rest. Loosing you may

take another twenty minutes yet.

Kasyapa at the gates

Rain Maker

Shaman

My name is Joaquin Tirado, and I have just arrived back from the dead. For me, this is just a little night walk to the thatched huts of the elders. They are not the kind that whisper behind the backs of children. These ancestors know the stars and the sky and the brown earth beneath our feet are only a universe riding a body of sand. They speak in sparse, accented lyric.

Myself, I take a little wine each morning. Though only a youth, I live in an old body, worn. I can tell you there is a moment when the Deep unfurls its tipped, penumbrous head, in fields of things best left where they stand, tall stalks of the dead, heads weighed and bent like the fat seeded pods of November sunflowers. There I am a black bird sheltering beneath their husks. They tie the smallest whispers, laments and stories of love, stories of love to my feathers. As I fly up and away, back to my own, these rain from my bird-body like little torches. I have been told that from the ground they look like stars.

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.

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.

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.

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.