ORE RIFT
The revelation that the Anasazi
were cannibals affected not so much
the Southwestern tourist trade
as the nature of its camouflage, e.g.
advertising. We insist on the particular.
That is, I insist on the particular, I.
In the Sierras I often hiked up into
the high passes to the old silver mines.
What I enjoyed was standing outside
the dark wedges
of their entrances. Some were large,
sculpted, braced in timber or quarried stone.
Some were merely holes, and some,
oddly, were sealed off by wooden doors,
little wooden doors set into the sides
of enormous mountains. Cue Peer Gynt.
The first gods mean to kill you
and thereby rejoice in the misfortunes
variously apprenticed to them, e.g.
synecdoche, the nightly news:
(Outside. Neutral. Disaster. Return).
Israel, your breath in January
moonlight, maps in four colors, cuneiform.
Except: Then what. Then what.
To assay: put to the proof, try, test.
As by fire, or blame. Hard to be exactly
sure of your role when the newspaper
keeps arriving by private car, hour by hour,
infinite regress of Carthaginian exposure.
The animals tolerate one another
and we like it, we frame the limited-edition
print and hang it in the labyrinth.
The players pause, study, move on.
The security camera holds its breath,
starts counting as if every little extinction
were an apocalypse gender
had been imagining, bored, locked
in its tower of insolence and hair.
It’s not as if I’m defending war, I say,
and you shrug again, as if to say
Me neither, why? Rather that sixteen boys
trapped in the pine forests of their bodies
will light fires, find a language,
then or in facsimile,
annihilate any rare-earth dream montage,
any roadside chapel. Mercury, Nev.,
deathwatch suburb of the nuclear state
now just waiting out the aliens.
Via fragment, again, synecdoche: the part
for the whole and the whole, clastic,
like the model of the body’s organs
in a hospital waiting room. I cannot
apologize for the body’s sugar
synthesis, its pale, dismantled stallion
of proteins and hormones. Its flesh-pasture.
Thought-organ, eternity-organ:
Apprehend. (It is easier in fairytales.)
Orogeny, the formation of mountains;
orography, the study of mountains
though from the root it seems to mean
“writing with mountains.” Über-
stylus for some text we sand down,
coal seam by coal seam.
Convulse vs. revulse, study in late Latin.
Language follows: obvulse, evulse, invulse.
Who keeps the young of the species
radiant, the body bathed in blood (literally)
a public exercise, a graduation.
Come out come out, wherever you are.
The proprietary mask,
not so much specie as sensation, i.e.
discovery: in possession of what
nobody else has, not yet. Thus:
driven by narrative, concealment
vs. disclosure, that tête-bêche.
We’ve been here before. It ends badly.
Congratulations, you tell me,
from over my shoulder: you’ve
only used “fire” 33 times
in your poem, 41 if you count
“fires,” “fire-tongue,” “firelight,”
“firetruck,” “fired.” (and now 47.)
Only once have you yourself
set fire to something, a story,
a null set, a nonce triangulation
you don’t believe in anyway.
Language masks. (Light. Faith.
Ambition. History.) Ergo, duration:
dilation of time in earth tones,
plangent bass diaphony, organum.
You chose not the owl, Raptor
but the owlette, Raptor-in-Training.
The acquiring angel in his combat fatigues
notes the tenderness of the exposed
pelt, small sores of subculture,
catastrophe. What splendid animals!
exclaim the prisoners in the castle
drawing-room (so rudely forc’d: no,
replete in their epaulets, their insignias).
If you “feel powerless” then
may I present to you the five senses
in which power works its embroidery
of gold thread across the sublime
surface of your physical person
over which the law hovers. The riddle
is not where in the body time
seeks to build its humming nest:
the riddle is that out of all the animals
only we have developed a form
of representational language. Us
and the bees, which are, of course, dying.
To try by touch or by tasting. Archaic,
one who tastes food and drink
before it is passed on to his superior.
(Use of the male pronoun as per the original.)
The material world rubs against us
and we hold elections,
plastic in the aesthetic sense, a photocopy
of a photocopy in acetate and rust.
the material world staggers zombie-like
among the oblivious townspeople
on their way into and out of the labyrinth.
They’re not surprised one of the stars
is half-beast (having been prepared
by the constellations and hotels,
the bitter arcade flotsam of youth).
They race past the dark aviary
at the center of town without recalling
which key the wind had tuned to
when the school bus filled with children
plunged over the embankment
or into the firetruck, or through
the caution barriers at the rail crossing.
The ghosts sidle through the puppet
theater and touch the marionettes
lightly, run their ectoplasmic hands
over the strings as if hoping
for some audible effect.
We in the audience can’t see them
but we know we’re hearing something
we’re not actually hearing.
Touch, taste; taste, touch. See the
high-quality orpiment, the vintage lapis
applied to the nerves of the neck
through audition, light
glancing off the hair’s-breadth
heddle knotting foot to ankle, shin to knee.
It is not quite the opposite of dancing.
The little ore carts—one on display
in downtown Bishop, California—
presumably required
somebody to push, or somebody to pull.
Primitive smelters in the valley,
arrastre the Spanish called them,
teeth in the otherwise unhinged jaw
of the high meadow country
we labor towards. Broken bottles.
In Roslin Glen, the ordnance map
plots “weir” where the gunpowder
factory sluice cut through.
Now it’s a nice place for shamans
I mean Hamas I mean young mothers
with their prams and gossip. BOOM.
I don’t understand the link
between imagination and intention,
the Boston editor writes to me,
and later: the ineffectiveness
of imagination vs. the unimportance
of intent. But I am in Scotland
and no, a tear in the retina is not
gendered, which is why my friend
Karen in Lagos has undergone surgery
and also my brother Myron in Pa.
is undergoing the same surgery
two weeks from now, assuming, that is,
his retina does not completely self-
destruct in what we call the meantime.
So if you want to be a predator
you emerge into this unworld
of taxation and caudal citizenship
which you can wield in your loneliness,
including the tall bodies of others.
It would have been easy to mistake
this place for a source of silver
or gold, possibly even uranium
once the atomic age kicked in.
I mean, for one thing, there’s this
castle, and for another, the owls,
raptors with their night-vision.
They have to be deriving substance
from somewhere, somehow.
From the castle tower, we watch
all the (other) animals watching us.
On rainy days this is diverting.
Predicate: nodal patterns
used in the design and construction
of acoustic instruments—
violins, guitars, cellos.
A little powder on a taut surface,
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
See, there in the dusty vitrines
of the municipal museum: pickaxe,
assayer’s scale. Not a bad place
for the blind, assuming they still
have use of their natural hands.
Here, fossil fuels removed as ribs
from the chest of the planet—
They have somebody to taste
their meals for them, you observe, out
walking against the wind. We don’t.
High above us dense clouds
of particles discharge their energy
into the atmosphere, and we love them
for it, we will always love them.
There, finally: something to love.
But do they not love us back?
No, they do not love us back.
The pearl does not love you back,
the novel does not love you back.
Mathematics loves the subatomic
particles inside of you, that are you, but
individually and would tear you apart
like Tinkertoys (remember the original
racist packaging?), like Lincoln Logs
(absurd historical reference)
in order to love them more effectively.
Gold loves us—silver too—but only
in quantities, and in very bright light.
You could trip, hiking in the desert
at night, and fall right into
one of those old prospects, you noted.
Meaning: the earth loves us
back, loves us back, loves us back.
If I said I loved you back, I would,
of course, be lying. If I said I.
First there was only a name
attached to the video, and then a second
name—misspelled, it turned out.
Eventually a full name,
an address, a biography.
—But it looked so fake, a friend said.
I watched the video
over and over, I read the articles.
She took singing lessons. In another
part of the desert, in the capital.
To smelt: the eye: croft of images
annealed, as if by lading, the dream’s factual
disembarkment. Invisible body
of the perpetrator seared, in some myths
a god who drank blood in the night, in some
a trickster. Yes to the future, its outrage
of brushed aluminum and glass. We dreamed
of falcons, kestrels, eagles soaring
amid these man-made canyons. Not for long,
as it turns out. (It always turns out.)
Your poem is not a target
so you write a longer poem and declare
“Now they must make of my poem a target.”
A delicate silver instrument draped
in a black shawl is one way of phrasing it.
Three deer swift against a garden close
and men running, they’re not sure
why, they have no guns, nothing
but deer, the idea of deer. Something to see.
Atmosphere encrypts twenty-seven
sodium vapor lamps
while we watch! Place your bets:
The Cherokee did not practice the ghost dance.
Animal to police, painting to predicate
(to have written, wanted, read).
Palpate her throat. You know you want to.
The trial begins. You go as spectator,
get called
to the jury box, to the witness box,
to the defendant’s seat, to the judge’s chamber.
Outside the courthouse, the hills are
alive with orange flame. In this rifted rock
I’m resting, beautiful country burn again.
We are asked to choose between the men
and the men. Yes, this is a problem:
the moral imagination on dialysis,
bent low over its block of obdurate stone.
This problem of gender, a chisel.
You will take a new name from a man
if you privilege the antiquity of his song
(for medicinal purposes).
And if the blood (for medicinal purposes).
And if the silence (for medicinal do).
And if the rain (for medicinal—you get
the idea, it’s not a large one, emotion
beats against the walls of the pineal gland
but MapQuest gets us there on time).
We move inside the inanimate and
devise rules, those magnificent Rossettis,
the approved script specifies
a quaint ethnic tonsure
down which soldiers climb, Rapunzel
a glyph you don’t speak, breathe rather
as the tongue makes its slow way
along the glabrous inside of a glove.
(Language watches attentively
from its manacle chair in the labyrinth,
in full surround-sound stereo.)
Trade: to make a wish, to examine
for the sake of information, to learn
or know by experience, to try
with affections, temptations, force.
To assail with words, arguments, love-
proposals. A glyph for this: “money”
crossed with “world,” Weltgeld.
You get to choose: The light.
You get to choose: The language.
History, not so much. Faith?
In Nevada, it’s illegal to reveal
the locations of ancient petroglyphs.
In California, it’s legal, but nobody will—
just a vague wave into desert wash
towards bridal chamber, birthing cave.
And so they went up again
to Nablus, to Bethesda, to Jerusalem.
—Here, try this, you say. It’s good.
in the basement of the old rectory,
among the musty hymnals. (Some music
lives in the tongue,
some has its mail forwarded.)
A CHILD IS NOT A CHOICE
the decals on the 18-wheelers read
and this seems indisputable, I mean
as an assertion taking place
in language, grammatically correct.
If you are reading this and feel dead
then you have a choice, a wing
on which gender prays
something like nine times a day.
This oriency, this brilliance, this luster.
Artesian well in winter.
The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes
just in time for his passport photo.
Even her nine-year-old niece knew
she was too poor to afford that coat.
Somebody gave it to her, her mother
explained, and that was all.
We live in bodies, unlike, say, Sagittarius,
agitprop of the machine spectrum
funicular glands and a shake of the dice
cup’s museum-quality astragals.
Edvard Munch drew light-lines
nobody else could see and called them
disembodied bell-curve spectra.
—No he didn’t, not in English anyway,
The mood lighting, the zodiac rung?
Pretty orphans, decked out for Christmas.
The law of magic says imagine
cherubim, now imagine them as friendly fire
you can’t scrape from your clothing,
phosphorescent cutouts in the cardboard
of old refrigerator boxes.
In Cassiopeia’s house, scorpions
cover the floor, some living, some dead.
Nobody seems to notice.
Here, the latest of her sheet music scrapbooks.
She’s a conscientious collector.
All that time in the night sky, choice
is something she’s heard of. She’s interested,
you have her attention. Go on, tell her.
You can’t hear what the dead are saying
because they are still trying to speak
in the language of predators and men pressed
from bread, from a broken academy.
Here are some rules for any extra ribs
you may find lying around: use as clavicle,
bowsprit, as assisted walking mechanism.
As corset stay. As architrave.
As musical instrument. As target for lasers
you train. As subject for future artwork
or dramedy. Really they are very useful, ribs.
The dismemberment of the saints
is a historical fact
only if you believe in all their relics.
The puppets jerk in their even-drowse,
their shellacked boxes of camel-hair velvet.
They know something photographs don’t
about the refugee camps, the blueprints
for the high school gymnasium destroyed
by fire. Letters addressed to the body
are returned to the body, COD.
The tribal version is also available,
shreds of bone and clothing asperged artfully
in the bio-muck by the Japanese concessionaire.
Known as “the father of acoustics,” Chladni
was also the first modern scientist
to seriously propose that meteorites
originate in space, rather than terrestrially
in the gullets of active volcanoes.
Some powder, then, on a membrane;
some basic sand. The dream hums along
in its register of grit and peppermint and we see
more Green Men! is one explanation,
masculine counterpoint to the sheila.
We want to imagine something older
than Christ because (a) we’ve made Him
very small, (b) we don’t want
to be saved (see CHOICE), (c) we want
to believe the original was inhuman
or, alternately, too human, not human enough
or not in our sophisticated human way.
The dream of the primitive:
once we all lived in the forest
where nobody died, the animals spoke
in languages we understood, and everybody
got plenty to eat. Wasn’t it nice?
And it’s true, or close enough, only
we weren’t there. An idea of us,
rhizome in the reedbeds and the redbuds.
And a flaming sword this idea of us
mistook for a sun, in the night watches.
which interests us also
as an object is distracting.” Carla
Harryman: “Did we live in a constellation?
Did it explode?” —Every particle
of music swept up, as if by ants, and hoarded.
We pick through lentils and ashes
(or better yet, have the help do it).
I am not saying the body doubles.
I am saying we were children once
and wanted something like fire, that wasn’t
fire. Rachel Zucker: “I’m sorry, but there is
no new place for anyone to touch me.”
Night. Nablus. Nebulous. Jacob’s Well,
a Cistercian brotherhood
for coercion. Inside your thumb
is another thumb: here, the sidewalk art
proves my point in garish 3-D.
No longer can I “jew” you down on
anything, and “gyp” is in taste almost
as bad—but I can still call you “thuggish.”
The power of Caucasia is also
a function of distance, of time and space.
So you choose fate, I mean faith.
(Und der anderen Maria.) The sphinx
asks her riddle, and you ride off
into the sunset,
stage-struck, precocious in your role.
Some Christians believe the dead
will rise with their constituent atomic
particles intact. This creates yet another
set of problems, imbrication
of matter, and matter’s children.
Yes, I watched many different versions
of the video. Hoping
there would be some different
outcome? Yes, I suppose. Or
some different context. Some explanation.
We pare the maps away from the body
with only the sharpest of knives.
“Context” is not the same as “explanation.”
Inside your second thumb is a mirror.
Fresh from chromotherapy
we wash the black and white residue
from the backs of our hands.
You ask me, Did my relationship
with my sister “improve”
after she came to see me
on what she thought was my deathbed.
It’s more accurate to say
that after that, we had a relationship.
She asked me to dinner once in
Las Vegas, a four-hour drive each way
across a desert, a bruise in the archive,
more undeveloped film. I went.
Magritte’s art consisted of
identifying archetypes, isolating them
and then repeating them, in various
combinations, over and over again.
We “like” his paintings
not because they’re good paintings
but because we recognize something
it feels as though we’d forgotten.
Cylindrical, conic, azimuthal.
“The familiar Mercator projection
has many advantages
in spite of the great distortions it causes
at the higher latitudes.”
Clarke’s spheroid of 1866.
Chronic landscape fatigue, the republic.
A face burns a hole in the retina
and we call it memory, or
obsession. Peel back the eyegrain.
Gentle solfège of the pulse,
close your soul. Now open it again.
It’s hard not to take one’s gaze
off the ambient’s threadbare perimeter.
The ribs, fingers resting
lightly on the lungs’ abacus. How long
did that take to paint, in dabs and daubs?
The deer people are silly, yes,
and not very bright
but we follow them when no better
option presents itself. A wrong turn
on the ice: bruised spleen,
something calculated, a tally
of dirigible hydraulics,
sum and carry. The deer people
nurse their young like we do.
When I wear my dead president mask
they’re no more afraid
than we know they already were.
Faintish data receptors, the tongue’s
awash in what now? Only
a little bleeding. Or do you want me
to bring you something already dead,
we have met | and do I know you?”
A brief word about Marx (Karl).
He was a child once and
London was a story Dickens was telling
Boston, in all the best magazines.
The gods contain both male and
female, and survive thereby in time.
Prescription vs. description:
elementary. If you don’t care
the rhetorical cleavage
evaporates, why not exile
in some brutal Irish laundromat
patrolled by sadistic nuns.
Yes, it was (is) horrible.
No, we should not blame our bodies
lightly. Circumambient:
appetite for formula, something
that will lie flat and be easily read.
Something to wear in the rain.
It was a Mormon desert,
the man at the pizzeria explained to me
(by way of adding context, I guess).
Bishop, California segregated
in three wedges, tourist/Mormon/Paiute.
Our clothes grow on us
like transparent lichens, a symbiosis
of affect and colonial inheritance.
At least Joseph Smith understood
the need for a new alphabet
to make his point, also a semi-private
translation mechanism.
The best archives expand outward
from a single frame of film
projected onto the rear wall of a cave
and allowed to stutter there.
Entire governments follow this plan.
You remember love as something
like fire, but not fire, exactly.
More like a transponder, you say.
Little black boxes, glass negatives
on which the skeleton imprints cleanly.
The Nephites: said to be South American
Jews granted eternal life, or else
vague dust-devils in the desert
but we move so slowly
in this vicious, unfriendly climate
it’s hard to map that motion.
We make easy targets
from the mesas, the mined-out cliffs.
Hey you, yes you there on the hillside,
you in the defiled pharmacy
of inheld breaths and adrenal hush money:
drop the tablets. Drop them now,
while we preserve this one
primitive emotion. It’s all we have.
That, and absurdly complicated
water rights. Some cattle we can’t trust.
Presumably there is love there:
Mormon love, tourist love. Paiute love.
Survival is a thing Mormons learned
early, and how not to split
the body from the intellect. (Organon:
an instrument of thought
or knowledge, of the soul or mind.)
Not a tame Cartesian space,
the beaver said.
(Faith. Language. Light. Mystery.)
More about the Nephites, courtesy the American Folk-Motif Index:
“Nephite is described as a venerable man with saintly mien and very clear complexion.” “Nephite is an old man with a white beard.” “Nephite wears ordinary clothing.” “Nephite wears white.” “Nephite invisible to some bystanders.” “Nephites provide food miraculously for those in need.” “Nephites heal or prevent illness.” “Nephites bring spiritual message or uplift or prophecy.” “Nephites travel with miraculous speed.” “Nephites disappear miraculously.” “Nephite appears in several places at once.” “Food which Nephite has eaten is discovered to be untouched after he has gone.” “Nephite leaves no tracks in snow.”
—Pretty nifty, those Nephites.
The Egyptian novelist disputes
the place of the image in contemporary
Arabic poetry, i.e. Adonis, Mahmoud
Darwish. A particularity of vision
reduces the violence, but only
in terms of perception, that is, scale.
Sky Burial, my friend is thinking
of entitling her new manuscript,
now that the Palestinians
have the right to choose. I’m less
sanguine, more phlegmatic.
Glasgow of the 1930s is in my veins.
We take from the desert, and
the desert waits. That’s why saints
went there. You’re wrong
not to touch them, the tour guide
told us, gently but firmly.
Of course they are there for you.
(A poetry that honors the distance
it transposes. Or subverts it. This,
then, the moral imagination.)
St. Swithin’s Day, the British poets
come together now to dine,
the expat poet, the Irish novelist
and the Egyptian—we’re all standing
together in the photograph,
lightning flashing in the background.
We have to get out of here,
music is humming, if only to itself.
It hurts, the doctor explained
from his shabby clinic in the desert
—in answer to my question
(and with a strange look on his face,
almost pity but not quite)—
because once there was something
there, and now there’s not.