the fifth story

in general

This is about no rain in particular,
just any rain, rain sounding on the roof,
any roof, slate or wood, tin or clay
or thatch, any rain among any trees,
rain in soft, soundless accumulation,
gathering rather than falling on the fir
of juniper and cedar, on a lace-community
of cobwebs, rain clicking off the rigid
leaves of oaks or magnolias, any kind
of rain, cold and smelling of ice or rising
again as steam off hot pavements
or stilling dust on country roads in August.
This is about rain as rain possessing
only the attributes of any rain in general.

 

And this is about night, any night
coming in its same immeasurably gradual
way, fulfilling expectations in its old
manner, creating heavens for lovers
and thieves, taking into itself the scarlet
of the scarlet sumac, the blue of the blue
vervain, no specific night, not a night
of birth or death, not the night forever
beyond the frightening side of the moon,
not the night always meeting itself
at the bottom of the sea, any sea, warm
and tropical or starless and stormy, night
meeting night beneath Arctic ice.
This attends to all nights but no night.

 

And this is about wind by itself,
not winter wind in particular lifting
the lightest snow off the mountaintop
into the thinnest air, not wind through
city streets, pushing people sideways,
rolling ash cans banging down the block,
not a prairie wind holding hawks suspended
mid-sky, not wind as straining sails
or as curtains on a spring evening, casually
in and back over the bed, not wind
as brother or wind as bully, not a lowing
wind, not a high howling wind. This is
about wind solely as pure wind in itself,
without moment, without witness.

 

Therefore this night tonight—
a midnight of late autumn winds shaking
the poplars and aspens by the fence, slamming
doors, rattling the porch swing, whipping
thundering black rains in gusts across
the hillsides, in batteries against the windows
as we lie together listening in the dark, our own
particular fingers touching—can never
be a subject of this specific conversation.

on the eve of the hearing

1.

The ear, being boneless and almost always
exposed, except in icy, windy weather,
possesses a rather charming vulnerability,
an innocent faith in the purpose of its presence.
Never changing its strange expression,
it waits patiently, a pure waiting in the flesh,
to apprehend all sounds coming its way,
the creaks and whines, the bangs and chirps
of the universe roiling and bubbling.

2.

The lobe of the ear is especially exquisite,
soft as a bud of rosebay, even softer,
being warm as well and smooth
as a moonstone. I once knew a woman
whose cat sucked the lobe of her ear
like a nipple, purring and humming
in a trance of nuzzling.

 

Lovers often seek the earlobe this way too.
And all those curves and crevices
and hidden places of the ear are tempting
to the exploring tongue of a lover probing
and searching as if believing there were god
inspired secrets, visions to be discovered
in the darkness of those bewildering ways.

 

Each ear is unique in its rare geography,
its particular hollows and furrows different
from any other, the rim rounded like an aspiring
hillock. The lover’s tongue can always
recognize the ear it possesses, the delved
and canyoned land it has traveled.

3.

There is a certain tuck in the outer ear,
a small fold, the vestige of a remote ancestor,
an ancient ancestor perhaps fanged
and clawed, nomadic and hard, an ancestor
who might sever our spines, puncture
our hearts, were we to meet each other today.
Put your finger on that fold. Touch
that old, old vanished kin, the dim
and perished who bore, the living ghost
you own but may never remember.

4.

There was a warrior who made a necklace
of the ears of his victims and wore it
daily with honor. Peter took his sword
and struck off the right ear of Malchus
in the Garden of Gethsemane. Researchers
recently grew a human ear on the back
of a mouse. Some babies have been born
with ears closed tight like fists, the flesh
curled into itself, as if the sounds
of the universe were too horrid to bear.
Elegant or protruding, loved or not,
the ear can be a comical feature. Clowns
wearing large rubber ears always
get laughs. The ear has its own stories,
its own myths. Listen.

in the terrace garden

He holds the flute to his mouth,
though all of his fingers are gone,
a portion of his face and one ear
broken away.

 

His head is slightly cocked,
his lips pursed, his pose casual,
as if he didn’t notice the tight
leaves of grey lichen growing
up his legs undisturbed, the greener
mosses in deeper, damper places,
the black bee resting near
the crack in his forehead.

 

His contemplative eyes,
where his eyes have vanished,
suggest he is listening to an inner
song before the song arrives.

 

He is unclothed, except for the skin
of a wildcat draped over one shoulder,
its boneless paws, its hollow head
hanging, seeming accustomed, evidently
from the first, to diminishment
and missing parts.

 

With a prophecy that hardly
matters, the shadow of the camphor
tree in bloom, beside which he stands,
spreads across his face and torso
through the day, passes him by
to touch and linger on the ledge
above the lake.

 

There is a definite music here
with him, though we remain
perplexed as to the harmonies
it employs, the odd key in which
it is composed, what breath it is
that sounds it.

 

The Villa Serbelloni
Bellagio, Italy

mischief in the madrigal

“Throughout the evening the purpling
yellow signatures of the sky appear
and disappear as ragged
changelings
between the flittering leaves
of the lombardy hedges.

Then begins the mad tittering
of mad frogs lumpy as gold
nuggets in the glinting gold light
of sun through pond waters.

 

All around stand, unmoving,
many one-legged beings—cadres
of cattails, a hollow cottonwood,

 

windfall willow of willow, blue stilt
of heron resting in reedy brush.

 

The sparks of the shad flies,
orbiting themselves in the slant
light, are self-replicating
testaments to the orbiting starry
spheres of the night, their own begotten

 

children. Single and virgin,
the slender gypsum moon comes
glancing either right

 

or left. As a pale orb weaver plucks
his nuptial cadenza,
the glimmering strands
of the web tremble

a flourish like a small and hopeful
aria of fire,”

 

so sing at once in the attentive hall
the concert’s
six-part voices.

interdisciplinary studies

A coyoteevening cries with orange
and scarlet howls, then thrice
circles itself before settling into sleep.

 

The wingleaves of freed poplar birds
never lift to circumnavigate the seas;
nevertheless they disappear periodically,
make untraceable journeys alone
and return to themselves every spring.

 

Only a cactuswolf can lick and smooth
the thorns of another cactuswolf
without sustaining multiple injuries
to the tongue. Taming the cactuswolf,
which often implies transplanting cur,
bitch and sire, involves days of harsh
sun, much finesse and patience,
and unique equipment beyond rope,
muzzle, shovel and leather gloves.

 

The crowberry and the batberry,
cultivated exclusively in large
light-controlled cages, are pure
and alluring. Their fat bodies hang
or perch in clusters from their summer
vines. They are especially prized
for the floating sky-visions induced
by both blackbatberry wine
and crowberry cobbler.

 

Fernghosts of lost rainforests
often haunt the conservatories
of the wealthy, drifting down the aisles,
passing through the latticework
to chill, with their icy fingerfronds
and invisible snow-like spores,
guests, lovers and gardeners alike.

The Sabbathrose never blooms;
for the Sabbath, as we know, is strictly
a day of rest. The Sabbathrose
is, therefore, self-contradictory
and simply the fabrication
of a heathen imagination.

 

These interdisciplinary studies
are being assembled by those venerated
experts responsible for discovering
and translating heretofore lost
beetlescrolls, sanddunedocuments,
the ritual anthems of tumbleweedchoirs
and the webscriptures of orchard spiders.

from a simple vanilla vortex come voices of the faithful

1.

Here is sweet vanilla grass
for flavoring fine-cut tobacco,
for scenting the houses of the poor,
for strengthening the brain, for filling
bed pillows to induce lucid, mellow
sleep and dreams of a mild-tempered god.

2.

No one has ever been murdered
on forest trails among trees having
bark that smells of vanilla, not even
inside the last winter midnight
of the new moon.

3.

To cure rude disposition and mal de tete
of summer, take ice cold oranges
with vanilla ice cream at sunset

4.

“Four-and-twenty vanilla birds
baked in a pie,” was recited long before
there were kings or queens, pastries
or ovens, eons before there were
numbers or melodies, even before
the first knife executed the first
opening cut of the crust and the release
of the beginning began in wild flurries
flying forth across the realm.

5.

Ritual Chants from the Insane advise:
Choose for sacrament the golden vanilla
wafer (wafer of the divine), in contrast
to the burnt-sugar and anise biscuit
(black biscuit of mad minions).

6.

Remember, it is into the vortex
of the white orchid of V. planiforia
(from which comes the vanilla bean
and its sensual oils), it is upon the soft
fluted lips of that flower and into the deep
funnel of its elaborate spread that the truly
devout servant must place ears, mouth,
tongue, fingers, so as to receive fully
into the vortex of the soul all messages
of transcendence inherent to that hallowed space.

come, drink here

Drink from this circle of night right here,
blind and sudden with currents and waves
like the wellside of the moon.

 

Put your mouth here where I’m showing you,
against this darkness as full of the taste
of sky as snow water caught early
in clean cave rock.

 

Easy between your lips again and again,
roll this slight berry possessing
the texture of violet at the root,
having the nature of a solid grain
of clear, flowing river.

 

Swallow at this narrow crevassing
shadow of faint salt whose ending can never
be savored or known. Tongue this tight,
gathered petal and that other small winding
of rose too, with its glassy sap.

 

Lick here, round and round this warm
nub, a taste a little like butter and sea,
a little like liquid sun left
on dense green mosses after dusk.

 

Close your eyes, and where I’m placing
your finger, here at this single flume,
like a funnel of iris leaf lithe
and rolled at the stem, suck
morning.

 

At this swelling, from this soft
cistern, from this heated damp like wet
day on summer grasses, drink first.

 

Then answer me.

another principle in the plot

Monet painted his wife dressed in white
standing on a rise against the summer
sky, holding a white parasol. Madama
Butterfly’s maidens, wending up the hillside
to her wedding, carried small parasols
to shade their faces. And haughty Miss Rosie,
on her way to the warden to free her man,
rested her umbrella casually on her shoulder.

 

I once saw tap dancers in yellow
slickers twirling their black umbrellas
around and around before them
as they clicked and clacked across the stage.

 

Centuries ago a Princess of Ethiopia,
wearing a robe of apple-green satin,
rode beneath one, its gold tassels
swaying and flashing with sun
like strings of fire around her head
as the people watched her majesty pass.
Like the moon, like music, like anger,
an umbrella is an event in any design
through which it moves.

 

Somewhere on earth right now,
a large-bosomed clown finally opens
her wobbly parasol of bare stick
ribs, ribs as bare as the skeleton
of a fish an alley cat has left,
lifts it high and promenades
proudly around the circus ring,
a scattered parade of clowns
marching out of step behind her.

 

Like rolling pins and brooms,
umbrellas have often been used
effectively by women as weapons.
Some are made of silk, some of oiled
leather or skin, some of feathers.
Sun umbrellas with bamboo staves
are of translucent colored paper painted
with plum or cherry blossoms, a cricket
perched on a stem, three geese in flight
before the full moon. Maybe the very first
was a leaf taken from an umbrella tree,
a subtle suggestion offered by god.

 

Stories as shelter, like umbrellas,
open and expand and they close
and fold away.

watching the living

I.

We watched each closely, strolling
and stopping from one to the next.
We saw a woman with a pearl-fringed
parasol standing in the sun on an arching
bridge, and a panther, small within the equatorial
forests, lurking alone in the wild eyes
of his own moonless night.

 

In the hall where we were, a warrior
with grey and purple face held a dripping
sword in one hand, the severed head
of his enemy in the other. Wind and dust
were swirling in from the east.

 

Once we were lost in an expanding
caucus of spring grasses, red poppies
and violet asters. Once a feathered
goddess of war, sneering and posturing,
showed her sharpened teeth and fat
tongue. Once, nearly falling off, a clown
rode before us on a long-legged rooster.

 

We stared, five gold and black-pearl fish
in a pond of lilies, the glistening metal
svelte of their bodies in the still water.

II.

We were of them all momentarily until
we left the place, wondering after the living
presence manifest in the dead dimensions
of each event with its scope of light.

 

What nature compelled the signal blue
of the violet asters? What engaging force
defined the character of the word
lurking in the panther’s moon-brilliant
green eyes, the unique vision seen
within the blind eyes of the severed
head held aloft in the wind by its hair?

 

How were we to distinquish
the red life in the field poppies
from the red life in the spilled blood
dripping on the ground from the red
life of red and its living color from
the invisible red life implicit inside
each fish suspended in still water
from the fat red tongue in the living
mouth of war?

 

We knew, above all, we had to make
friends quickly with the prankster
holding on, riding a crowing white
rooster much bigger than himself.

gehenna

Throw them into the pit, dump
them all in, the sacks of bones
and baskets of ashes, shovel in
the shards, the dusty chaff, corn
shucks, potsherds, smoking clinkers,
piles of snuffed candle stubs.

 

In they go, bundles of oily rags
and nappies, caskets of poxy
bedclothes, tattered burlap bags
of spent shells, armless dolls
and wheelless wheelbarrows,
the stripped spokes of slaughtered
umbrellas, everything bulldozed in,
cracked cups and dented kettles,
tarnished brass bells without clappers,
ball joints, steering columns and bent
axles, wagonloads of smoldering
tires, crushed hubcaps, the half
hulls of bottomless boats.

 

Haul them over and push them in,
carcasses of bedsprings, stained
velvet sofas and overstuffed chairs
spilling stuffing, splintered tables,
smashed pianos, scorched shoes
and burnt brooms, tangles of chains,
handcuffs and busted locks,
buckets of rusty wires, nails, bolts,
leaking batteries, empty paint cans,
frozen hinges and headless hammers.
Up to the edge, over the side,
into the pit, shove them in, all away.

 

There they go catapulting
and crashing down, a continuous
clattering racket thundering
dust and reeking smoke of tar,
one odd ping of a piano string,
a few brief flames spitting
and hissing, the entire roaring
mischief falling away, down,
dimming, deeper, farther.

 

A hollow of quiet begins to rise
as the clanking tumult vanishes
into the depths, beyond sight,
beyond sound, maybe beyond
the moon beyond the planets,
maybe beyond motion itself, past
the midway to everything else.
And I know for certain
salvation exists. Beautiful,
blessed pit.