Almonds drop and temple the soil.
Carrots grow longways into earth.
The Mississippi carries clouds of soil
in gigantic purling. Winds erode soil,
making it savage to live above dirt,
always shifting. Listen as whispering soil
becomes a tropical opera of soil.
My immigrants build houses of sod
prairie afternoons, bury one another in sod
winter afternoons when snow covers soil
hard to farm, plowing between stones.
So, in my sleep tonight, there are these stones.
They roust me from bed and I panic my soul
caught on the nail of a drainpipe all night
outside my window. Slipped away, my soul
becomes my shadow; unshadowed by soul
I wander around card-house obligations,
find a broom, step to rescue my soul
hanging there like overalls, shoulder to sole,
and when I lift it with broom, my body
feels washed in a bath. Mimicking, bawdy,
five sensations tingle through my soul,
remember the plunge to which flesh belongs,
the scare to which it also belongs.
We stay up all night, sort of dancing
to the terror radio. At dawn I dress
and continue into daylight our dancing
steps into downtown’s thousands dancing
between bus stops and jobs, man’s seven stages
tumbling one before the other. Square dancing
follows feet; the shoulder leads slam dancing
to the invisible and everywhere-beaten drum.
The body’s designed for persuasion by drum.
The soul’s beaten. Reflections are dancing
although the drumset’s mute, the scaled guitar
plays nothing, nor the acoustic guitar
hanging from its nail. The sidewalks
where dancers wear suits of flax and wool
are not dancing, and an iguana slowly walks
on stones of ruined city sidewalks,
contentedly licking its chops, and it goes on
with sideways gait where builders took walks
to admire pyramids, the way Ray Charles walks
hot streets of New Orleans at dawn
cracking up but the cracking dawn
belongs to him now, not to nighthawks
winging back to boardinghouse beds they made,
smoothing away proof of the love they made.
The CD skips a track, an LP album’s turned,
the cassette tape unspools in its car stereo deck,
and all the songs danced to are turned
unrecognizable, and in traffic heads are turned
in brief confusion at melodies unexpected.
By the time the needle’s dusted and returned
to the only song I want to hear, the song’s turned
against me, no longer soothes, as if a thread
of pleasure’s been dropped, the looping thread
I’d need to navigate the maze turned
to the map all travelers have to oblivion,
as if guidebooks could rescue from oblivion
anyone who can be knocked down with stones
thrown in anxious defense of soil.
Some break in half. Geodes are less stones
than papayas, and the papaya seeds of stones,
chewed and spat on a bare spot of earth,
grow as we watch them into larger stones,
generations later become more than stones,
push beyond the easy gravities of dirt.
I would rather push a wheelbarrow of dirt
than take the heavy pick to stones,
or rebuild a frontier church of sod,
though some the arduous way have sought;
but could conjecture forget what belongs
of body to the permanent sod of my soul?
Not hip bone hooked where leg bone belongs,
but when part of the substance I could be longs
to merge with the spinached narrows of midnight,
could I lose sense of where my soul belongs?
Bargain doubt of where my soul belongs?
If I let midnight ringtone my obligations
of breath and love, and replace obligations
with worm or flame, will I forget what belongs
to those with claim to my name and body,
obligated to breathe, love, bury my body
under prairie suffering? I’ve tried to learn guitar,
to make my fingers fall into that dancing.
The harder I force, more they forget. Are
there instant powders for instilling guitar
skill for sale from women in regional dress
at some voodoo crossroads? Picking guitar,
I can strum the chords in Let’s Learn Guitar,
G, C, and D7, in garage; but up on stage,
my back would be against the wall of the stage.
I’d go shoegazer, and they’d yank the guitar
from my hands and make me bang the drum.
Red alert. Storm brewing. Alarmed by drum,
estuarine communities say prayers to who made
them eat mangrove; go on long mean walks
to hunt bushmeat; colonial ancestors who made
tactical mistakes. I often leave the bed unmade,
forget to pull tartan blanket weaved from wool
tight across the mattress the mattress factory made
and Mom had delivered to our door made
from an oak tree that could no longer go on
while the demand for front doors would go on.
And all the creatures that jug-band in the shade
have to find a new shade to hide in at dawn.
Ray Charles’s sleeves grow damp at dawn.
A potter I know knows about oblivion.
For every decorative dish she’s turned
on her heel and sent to the possible oblivion
of the kiln, she’s had to forget oblivion.
She presses sign into clay, so when the deck
her products rest on decomposes into oblivion,
her sign will become part of oblivion;
in some geologic time nobody has expected,
future diggers will strike the unexpected
shards and have to contemplate oblivion
the way she did, that knotted thread
that through the centuries’ eyes may thread,
so let the Maya build without sod
more pyramids from Yucatecan stones.
The old ones have been covered with sod.
(And cover the rebuilt ones again with sod.)
Let astronauts terrafirm alien soil
for pioneers to condition their fear of sod
away from where pioneers have divorced sod.
For I’m tired of studying only this Earth,
happy and unhappy families scarring the earth,
and want to expand past the mysteries of sod,
ramble around on something not called dirt.
As dirt extinguishes me, let me extinguish dirt.
It twists in the wind. Soul spoke to body:
inhale whatever mists, to what they belong,
burl the random stones of wordless body,
dream to tour thighs of a nectarine body.
Even if I knock, it’s not kick of soul
gestating within, but a new set of obligations.
Possession sets its own obligations.
It can be argued that it never ends, night,
the way sun has to break it. The default is night.
Night renders to day, often, a dead body,
renders like a trawler a maw of obligations
not to shrimp, but to the shrimp boat obligations,
slick jackets backed against the oil drum,
and each eye the black hole of a guitar.
On the river, I hear the war drum
in every birdcall. The early radio’s all drum,
and the nightmare cartoon keeps dancing
to some inner unstoppable drum
of mine, which evolves the body into a drum,
skin stretched tight as the dancer’s dress
at some nightclub going on without address,
with all my lovers playing drum
up on the crepe paper and bunting of the stage,
until I’m summoned to appear onstage.
What seems staged, emerging from dawn
solid as last night’s settling dusk made
seem knock the harsh scenery of dawn,
rosy cutout fingers from classical dawn,
millifleur yards where the gardener walks,
first one awake. He sprays on the dawn
nutrients and poisons so the next dawn
may urge aubades from bards with wool
cloaks drawn down over their pallid wool-
white visages. In red pajamas on the lawn
I walk to allow the project to go on.
Morning wears hardest: I can’t go on.
Centuries are not made of thread,
but I don’t know what they, or oblivion,
are made of, sugarplums and, if any thread,
red and black of licorice. Pull sweater thread
and see how the equator has always turned,
like a top, though more fuse than thread;
centuries are not made from simple thread,
but of hours drying on the lakehouse deck.
Straps of swimwear lace the deck.
Fate’s rigged with rope, not thread.
Death’s kiss tastes ripe plum: unexpected.
Flamenco plays behind the arras, unexpected.
Is it sufficient to believe in dirt?
The mind will join eventually with sod,
merging memory of a lovely kiss with dirt
and its caress; the hands I wash dirt
from will become cleansed of hands. Stones
are mountain range and pebble and dirt.
Would the king would sign a treaty with dirt,
a truce to let dirt stay dirt, soil
soil, and my body can stay above soil,
keep sweeping, from kitchen floors, dirt.
No more watching my heart disappear in earth.
Then it would be worth staying put on Earth,
worth obeying the animal obligations,
worth the butchery to feed the body
at the dinner table. Shun your obligations
and others will abandon their obligations.
Part of the sky decides what belongs
to the body. Fate is what’s next. Obligations
presume an obligator. If my obligations
wake up soon and live with you, soul,
then what contract? Who souls the soul?
At the beach, one loses obligations.
The hatchet gets sharpened at night.
Moths trade candleflame for moonlight?
Leather heels mash my name into the stage.
Bending my body back to the drum
means what it looks like. The stage
is not sufficient to contain all the stages
of my play-grief, exaggerated by guitar.
But real grief is relayed here, too, on stage.
My soul’s red dress spins across the stage,
means that not only my body is dancing.
Everything dead and alive is also dancing.
The entire world is only this stage,
these boards swept clean by my dress.
As the dance goes on, you’d think I’d undress.
Bring my backstage robe. Sorry, I can’t go on
with my act. Help me limp back, Dawn,
ignore the audience’s terror, let them go on
chanting and screaming for me to go on.
The time I saw him, James Brown made
it almost to the edge of the stage. “Can’t go on!”
His agony was our air. But then he could go on.
Rejecting his robe, he ran because nobody walks
to the microphone when the spirit walks
within each vein that formerly couldn’t go on.
The robe he lets fall, five more times, is wool.
Audience produces a green wool.
Vision ends, but even this is not unexpected,
because the eyes seem woven from iron thread.
Snowman of plums in a bowl can be unexpected,
tart skin breaking under tooth: unexpected,
like any small kindness faced with oblivion,
a proposition. This is when the unexpected
tears entreaties, citing conflicts unexpected.
Punches in diplomatic pouches are returned,
and hopes for a blue-sky solution are turned
to sorrow. Regroup when time unexpected
grants us leave to stretch across the deck
of the lakehouse with the deck.
Black plum in green bowl stands for Earth
as I try to remember the taste of dirt,
beaten by bullies who inherit the earth,
and when dinosaurs roamed the earth
it didn’t strike them to build out of the sod
a covering, an interior, a private Earth.
They ran snapping all over the earth,
through ferns & tar. Now turned into stones.
Emotional ancestors launch stones
until survivors sort rubble from earth,
bury kin in rectangles of soil
until vision of love is image of soil.
Lions lose shape, become pure tooth, at night.
Disfigurement is one of night’s obligations,
and the soul can become disfigured at night
as well as the body. I have spent all night
hanging on this drainpipe, lost from my body.
Maybe I’ve been changing slowly all night
as the moon passed over your chimney, as night
told its dim stories where half of sorrow belongs,
heart attack, taxicab, or fire belongs,
belonging to invisible gunships firing at night.
I almost forgot my body. The radio plays soul.
The market trades a black plum for each soul.
Black plums fall from pockets in your dress
and roll like near thunder across the stage.
You billowed in clouds instead of a dress,
but no hurricane warning is fierce as your dress,
nor shakes the heart with its mildred drum.
Beginning dancers may imagine an absolute dress
that binds the dance to whoever wears the dress,
like Orpheus winding the world around his guitar.
The dancer is unable to go on despite the guitar,
its grief not cobbled together by the dress,
last dance for this round of dancing,
this topple-forward war-tear of dancing.
To be sure, I’m asking around for wool.
That’s why I’m calling, in order to go on.
My mistress can only make love on a bed of wool,
so I’m trying to lay my hands on as much wool
as my hands can carry before the dawn
offers up loneliness and undimpled wool.
I’m desperate, baby. No arguing with wool.
She says it’s the finest touch ever made.
Concern for fineness is not American-made.
No one will help out this poor fool.
Already I see her leaving, and the way she walks
consigns me to prattle on the catwalks.
My mistress could teach how fortune’s turned
away from delight, to project the unexpected,
its grabbery. Blackjack tables are overturned.
The deck chairs are overturned.
Look for more when you run out of thread,
count on more than four aces in a deck.
At night a cartoonishness paces the deck
looking for residual icebergs of oblivion.
I walked beside the captain, debating oblivion,
the ways we pictured it. Quiet on the deck.
A figure snoozed against a lifeboat turned
upside down for shade. The captain turned
and told me kings go mad and dine on soil
when their soldiers run out of stones,
that the poor go somewhere else to cut sod
and measure their rectangles of dirt,
that this is it, spaceman: life on Earth,
this dancing, my dancing, her dancing.
I wish my body would become a guitar,
when my soul is just beginning to drum
the lines that separate self from stage.
Crossed, they ghost the body a dress.
Failure’s no problem for one who walks
without destination. The promise I’ve made
is to stay glad every dawn,
with one moment enough to go on,
shorn from time’s fullest wool,
though its fabric is sometimes returned
and exchanged for cheaper oblivion,
preferring with its infinite thread
the confusion that reigns on deck
when repetition wearies the soul,
though its fabric sometimes belongs
tucked tight across my sleeping body
as my soul slips away from obligations
and steps outside to glare at the night.