the match

The leg of one is hooked around
and forcing the knee of the other,
who is flipped, knocked suddenly
to the ground, a roll and thrust
to upright, quick turn, the full nelson,
hands pressing hard behind the neck.

Both struggle, sweaty, grimacing
and cursing. They spit with the effort,
snort and groan from their bellies
like hogs, red-faced, stamping. Dust
rises from the old boards. One heaves
and lifts the other on her back, off
her feet, breaks the hold, flips face
to face. Clinging body to body,
they fight to choke each other at the ribs,
encircling arms squeezing tight.

The rickety nightstand rocks.
The lamp dims, sways, tumbles,
snaps the connection. The foot
of one fights the ankle of the other,
maneuvering for position. Bare
soles and heels squeak on the waxed
wood. They fall to the floor, dragging
each other down. Nightgowns tangle
and rip, showing frayed cotton knickers.
A sleeve tears, a bodice slips as they claw
and scramble, one on top straddling,
then beneath, pressed and held to the floor.

The clock goes black. Atomic structure
falters. Teeth are deep in a shoulder.
A furious cry. There’s an odor here
of salt, of ozone, of chlorine, a sound
like ocean blowing and hissing, thudding
against the shore, energy of the ruthless,
power of the unrelenting.

The steam, the streaking mucous and slick
rancid reekings of each perspiring body
are assumed by the other, the harsh
gut breath. Were they to cease, to part,
were they to surrender or subdue, neither
would have a name, no spine of hell,
no hard grasp of heaven.

Out the door, bursting hinge
and lock, into the rain and storm—
a lightning bolt shows blue fire
on a boulder—they lurch down
the hillside pummeling each other,
over the rocks and assailing thorns,
through mud and rivulets, a melee
of knuckle and nail, scrambling
and flailing, latched together
forever—like moon and engine,
like fire and bell, like wren
and silence—for their own sakes.

god and his people

He must measure the average
length of the fangs and each claw
unsheathed, calculate the reach
of the forelimbs, the maximum
expanse of the leap.

By sleeping on the grasses
of their abandoned beds, he can become
accustomed to the smothering odors
of their fur and hide, learn to anticipate
the sudden dizzying musk of their resonant
bodies and thereby hope to maintain
equilibrium in their presence.

The clever feint and dodge, the pistol
loaded with blanks, the report of the whip
snapped in midair will often stay
a treachery. Fire of candle or small torch
thrust quickly forward by surprise
may momentarily keep desertion at bay.
Not one must be damaged.

He attends to the plaint of their roarings—
how the sound imitates in possibility
the breadth of the starry savannah,
in certainty the thunderous sky
of wildebeests in stampede. He must read
and absorb the entire vocal range
of their rages and victories, the lesser
growls and spittings of their lovemaking.

Here are the bones, the blackened blood
left from their feedings. All of them
eat flesh and lick the leavings.

Perhaps they will sit still on their small
stools and wait, watching him. Perhaps
they will saunter snarling in a line
around the ring and stop to rise reluctantly
on their hind legs before him, meet
his eyes, imitate prayer.

If the nuance of the fake charge
is mastered, if the dance of the tail
is interpreted, if the prophecy of pant
and crouch is forsworn, then the time
may arrive when pity will appear among them
and the door of the cage open, and he will
step out, released and resurrected.

genus whistler

One of the most common whistlers,
found everywhere on earth,
is the wind, whistling with the furl
and strafe of cattail marshes
in autumn or roughly around
the naked stone nymphs of formal
gardens, rasping across desert sands,
high-pitched and hardy in northern
blizzards above icy ocean plains,
or sounding the soft moan
of a spring night in easy sleep.

Some people claim stars belong
in this classification too, because stars,
comets and even the moon, have often
been heard all together whistling
in their multitudes of clear glass
tones late on solitary winter nights.

The whistling of the black-bellied
whistling ducks in their tree-top perches
is shrill in its refrains, while the Arctic
tundra actually becomes quite musical
with the whistlings of the whistling
swans in summer. Humpback whales
whistle underwater, a singular feat.
Some creatures whistle in warning,
as the hoary marmot and the woodchuck do;
some whistle in pain; some with relief.
Some whistle through their fingers
for fun, or through a blade of grass,
or through wood or wax contrivances
fashioned solely for this purpose.

Mephistopheles, surely a member
of this genus, whistled in agony,
a high screeching signal of ruin
as he rolled and writhed across the heavens,
defeated and banished, falling forever.
Such a piteously shrieking sound
he made disappearing like the whistle
of a train vanishing across a prairie.

Once at night I heard the low
beseeching whistle of someone
calling to me from a secret place,
calling to me to come, sounding
like the longing of a night bird
beseeching his lover to come
to his secret place.

I don’t know anything about god
whistling, unless god is the wind,
unless god is the black-bellied duck
whistling high in a tree, or the hoary
marmot alarmed, or a boy for fun
blowing on a blade of grass held
between his hands, or a lover calling,
invisible and loved, unless god
is the will to whistle, ancient,
abundant, perfectly expressive
in all its forms, a will that wills to be
every manifestation of its own will.

servant, birthright

If god was a cow, I could lead him
by a rope through a ring in his nose,
hang a bell around his neck, always
hear him wherever he was, even alone
in the open night. I could feed him
and fatten him. I could take him to clover
and fields of new grasses, put hay
on the snow for him in winter. I could
walk him to shelter out of hailstones
and thunderstorms, through the smoke
of summer fires, past trailing wolves, free him
from thorny bramble and cactus patches.

If god was a cow, I could slaughter him.
I could bludgeon him in the head
between the eyes with a hammer,
crack his skull, see his brains seeping.
I could watch his legs crumple under him
as he sank to the ground. I could feel
in the shake of the earth, and remember,
the weight of him as he fell.

I could eat him, drain his blood,
cook his blood and spoon it in
like soup. I could roast him, savor
his flanks and ribs and simmering
fat, absorb his fragrances, the perfumes
of his waft and smoke. I could skin him
and tan his hide and fashion his hide
and wear his hide as shoes, as hat,
as weskit, be covered by the pelt
of god, walk inside of god.

I could say, “I know you, god.
It was I who named you cow.
I have kept you, prepared you,
honored you, watched over you.
I have borne witness to you. After all,
I butchered you with care and skill.
I cut you open to the core. I uncovered
your parts. I touched all of your parts,
your secret parts. I have tasted you,
chewed you up, swallowed you,
sucked your bones and spit them out,
bleached your empty skull and hung it
high on my wall. I have wanted
you. I have needed you. You
have become and forsaken me.
In this we must both be satisfied.”

ventriloquist

If he chooses, his voice can come
directly from a sycamore in the voice
of the sycamore,

for instance, the words
seeming to rise right out of the branches
and broad, ovate leaves, intoning
like autumn in its hanging balls of nutlet
seeds.

By him, the damp summer grasses
in their limber statement ask the question
he poses.

The fat cattails in their statuary
marsh

give his response. Rain striking
the lake delivers his soliloquy in its periodic
constancy. This is the soliloquy he recites
as the speech of falling rain.

He cries
as the coyote wailing with his mother’s
grief. He bemoans as an evening shadow
suffering his brother’s passing.

As himself,
he addresses himself as the wind,
its voice his voice in stone narrative
along the sheer edge

of the bluff where
they appear momentarily together
in this act.

When he discourses
as the lead glass vase of yellow tulips
on the sill, some might wonder who
directs this conversation.
He talks

with himself, so the street lamp and its circle
of light always tell him.

Does he speak as death
with dry leaves vanishing

in an open fire?
Or are the burning tongues of dry leaves
the oratory of fiery life

he translates?
Or does the language of fire illuminate
death vanishing

like dry leaves
in translation?

Can’t you hear the abyss
speaking now as the soul

of the wooden
puppet he holds on his lap

and answers,
moving its mouth, whispering in its ear?

bearings on a winter evening

Masked and tooled, I begin
moving through the rock
corridors of these underground
waters, through the black

channels and caves of these rivers
existing far beneath the white
expanse of forests and roofs
and fields so open to the sky,

so still within the spatial
silence of snow. I imagine
moving deliberately in the night
beneath this winter landscape,

pausing and proceeding, mapping
the many passageways carved
and flooded by the rising seas
of past retreating glaciers

and ancient mountains of ice,
the welling of freshwater springs.
As I inch along the stone
hallways, marking the network

of their patterns, the complex
flow of their tidal and rainfall
currents, I imagine I am sitting
in this chair beside this window

watching the pale grey edge
of the horizon slowly blur
with snow and vanish. I can see
that the universe of winter snow
is merely light lit from within,
illumination suffused and expanding
in all dimensions. I recognize
myself residing within the equation

of this configuration. I close my eyes
and rest there. The torch I carry
in these black river tunnels, mazed
like catacombs, sputters inside its glass.

I falter. It re-ignites. I remember
and resume. Through time and time
again, without stars or sun, among
the cilia of tiny albino creatures,

the swirl of transparent fish,
the fragile weave of their skeletons
more imagined than witnessed,
among the staring blindness

of the primordial and the unidentified,
I adhere to the turns and necessities
of my direction. In the chair beside
this window, I hold my wrappings close,

will my way along these submerged
galleries, aim for the juncture
where all rivers flowing from all
dimensions converge. I imagine

I will be indivisible—so the solid
night of rivers underground,
so the light of winter, so fact
and anti-fact—in the confluence
of that creation.

the body and the soul

Coming, cursing, with his stick raised,
he routs the geese from the garden,
the chickens from the kitchen, the phantom
from the marsh, the alleyway. Swinging
and swishing, he thrashes severely
the fearsome nothing behind the door.

He uses the stick in April to draw
furrows, to prod, to make spaces
in the plowed earth where he plants
pieces of potato, seeds of carrots,
corn, marigold.

In the forest, he flips over a stone
with his stick, beneath which we find
eleven pill bugs, one white spider, a hard,
glistening spot of land snail. With the tip
of the stick, he discovers and touches
lightly the fleshy stem of the wild celery,
the pungent rootstock of the sweet flag.

He measures the depth of the pool,
lowering the stick straight down
to the bottom where the mud
salamander settles and the brown clam
lies. Almost submerged entirely,
it’s nearly lost in the process.

He holds it to his eye in the field.
He sights along its length to find true
north, to fix our location. With his stick
he can strike the cross of the coordinates
exactly. He can write directions
in soft soil or sands.

At night he holds it high as it points
to Rigel, Capella, the Great Galaxy
in Andromeda. He circles it above
his head to trace the diurnal motion
of the stars around Polaris.

Later, he hobbles a little. He leans
on his stick. It makes his way home.