For Emily Dickinson
She always reported to herself
first, then the world, then
nature or what the mythic poem
might someday become. The idea.
And it cost her: the butter-
flies she mistook for mari-
golds, the blank blackboards.
As Thoreau said to a friend,
‘One world at a time.’ Only
faster, she might have added.
And in the end, for radio, for
television, if it wasn’t, she
could not become ‘the purest
of poets,’ or even assume the
role. Genuine culture was an
unreasonable aspiration & poetry.
She left behind even the frissons.
We are reminded of a new
gas station inserting the
million gallon storage tank
beneath its inviting apron
The sun continues to set and
the sounds of traffic
you call the auto harp
Why is it
we can get nothing on the radio
today but Johnny Ace singing of
his suicide and that tinselly
background piano
1
There’s no voice to my wife
the FBI took it away with them on the phone today
all she could get from them
was fear
our kid sits in her belly
waiting to grow fingernails to bite
hair to pull out
in the face of such subtle suppression
no goddamit
he waits to get even
which is worse
2
There is always the sound
of women
crying
(in the hallways of my head)
do I know them?
are they ‘mine’?
when the door is closed
I must feel my stomach for wounds
& continue to suck at dry eggs
why?
do they know me?
so I destroy the calendar (paint it blue)
take down Marlon Brando for Che Guevera
pretend it is the wind
and you?
when I lived in a cemetery on a hill
played with a birch tree
called the wind lover
read sermons to Five Mile Valley
& taught lessons to the snow like:
The wooden clock was
invented by an American
Negro
there was a trenchcoated redhead.
So I wore brand new shirts & drank beer
leaving the headstones to weather
still
one day I came across some black sedan against my birch
from the back seat she smiled over his shoulder
snow
fell
my face went through the shattering glass laughing
my hair turned red, my eyes, my words, I said:
| The traffic light was invented by an American Negro. |
This had been my home.
for Boles
Never been sick
never been sick a day in my life
until today
Until this machine moved over me
until I couldn’t move no more
couldn’t move over, couldn’t make room
Make room, they said
make time while the match still glows
make yourself presentable
I didn’t move, I couldn’t
move, I wouldn’t move if I could’ve
I didn’t even scream
or stroke your leg and purr
like they taught us to do in school
No legs, no sound, no way out
until they moved
until I could see the glow from the flames
until I could feel the fire
This machine felt like what is left
what couldn’t be moved
but burned
For Greg Millard
Today
your back, cocked hat, thick clothes for cold
the way you turned around to look again for
what? It wasn’t there last night
We were there, ‘it’ wasnt, why, why not
The world is all around us, even at night, in bed
in each others arms
distilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others
backs & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay
down in the dark to pick up in the morning
I like your brown eyes when you talk
you know who you are, I like your knowing this
maybe that’s not enough
Let’s talk, go to plays, see each other sometimes just to
see each other
If we lie down in each others bodies again
let it be for the music we hold
not the music we might make
When the back of my swan
divides your body with feathers
it doesn’t matter that they are
white or black
only that they are soft
Sometimes early, the children
or maybe one child begins
to coo to herself or maybe
someone we cannot see
inventing sounds we
only remember while we hear them
like knowing the sea intimately
Like women children
sometimes see us saying: love
not saying anything
but moving the floor in time to
their vibrations from everything
and us. The incredible smallness
of their heads.
Living with us
they are constant reminders of
what we had hoped to be by now.
I have a brother made of cockroaches.
Every morning I wake him and the bugs rustle
make noises like breakfast cereal until
he gets out of bed and starts shaving.
Then they’re all quiet watching him scrape off
the unlucky eggs of his chin roaches.
I have to help him start moving and
help him sit down and so on because
the roaches in his joints die from the heat
of his energy at the end of the day
but his heart roaches and lung roaches never die
and the roaches of his eyes and mouth are
always fucking so that everyday he sees
new things and tells me words
I never heard before
and never remember.
Someday the roaches in his throat will
choke him or the ones in his stomach will have
cancerous babies that will kill him as though
he’d starved but until then all I can do
is help him around the house
keep him covered when we go out
find women who don’t care who they embrace or
what enters them . . .
Why couldn’t I have had a brother
made of butterflies
like other people.