I. MY HISTORY
Nothing much happens. And so we begin.
So we begin to negotiate the alphabet of regrets
and passions such chronicles are written in.
Begun and, already, done. So soon, so easily?
In the end the house falls down. And so do we.
II. READING LATE
Reading late, globed in shaded lamplight,
the family long asleep, the house restored
to its timbre of groaning night sounds,
a nocturne of peeping tree frogs, the soft moans
of palm fronds and termite-ridden beams.
III. SYNTAX
Deep, sensual pleasure of the book—
crack of a taut spine, allure of the page
and its must, its skitter, its ply—
life as it exists
there, as we exist in it,
reflections in a drop of mercury,
all the letters
of all the alphabets of every language
harnessed to meaning by syntax.
IV. A PAPER BOAT
At last I can be free and alone
and fold my news
into a paper boat I step into and set sail at once
to live my life inside a dream.
V. DREAM #1
He dreams that a giraffe is eating his toes, he dreams of emolument, lucre, a jar of balm.
VI. DREAM #2
He dreams of espionage, a set of codes and tasks too complex to understand, even in the dream it is clear how pointless it all is, and he dismisses that dream, and moves on.
VII. SLEEPWORK
Heart’s calibration,
soul’s equivocation,
harmonic incandescence,
the proving of axioms,
tightening the weave,
stacking bales,
concourse with whales,
cavern travel
lantern trimming,
ore refining,
dream-mining.
VIII. WAKING
This is what I get paid for, he thinks—rising from bed to jot down in his notebook the poem streaming like a ticker tape through his dream—except for the part about getting paid.
IX. PROPAGANDA OF THE FRAGMENT
The recalcitrance of stars
in their medicinal bathwater, the ego
swaddled in power like the capsule
of the rocket borne on a pillar of flame,
narrative loosed within the text
like Cossacks upon the steppe.
The myth of junction is coterminous
with the dream of desired form,
a world in which parrots fly
into the wallpaper to complete its design.
Rivets replaced by carbon bonds,
women willowy as T’ang dynasty reeds,
trade wind carrying the sound of gunshots—
I’m awake now, I’m wide awake.
X. DREAM #3
He dreams of falling asleep, and waking up ravenous, and falling asleep again, and wonders within the dream whether he really did wake up, and if so, what he ate for breakfast.
XI. MY LIBRARY
Assembled with such care over the decades, with its shelves of well-thumbed Collected Poems, its ponderous chronicles, tea-stained chapbooks, and paperbacks asterisked with mildew, after all these years my library slips its anchor and sails ever more certainly into the past. Soon even the methods and substance of its origin—paper and ink, the printing press—will resemble fragments of ash and animal bone in an ancient digging, yet I feel no particular sense of regret that I will not live to see our futuristic tropes put to the final test, whatever dire exigency that might consist of. All I have ever wanted is to write a poem as ineradicable as the sun, singular as a wolf in its kingdom of moonlit ice. But who has time, anymore, for idle tasks? Why should anyone bother to adjudicate the petty crimes of language, border disputes between synonyms, lexical transgressions opaque as tax legislation? Pea vines are climbing the neighbor’s trellis, the kids are looking for a surfboard behind the garage, wind rustles the branches which respond with shrugs and apologetic bows. In the shelter of their anthologies, the poems talk softly in the darkness, huddled together for warmth, waiting.
XII. DREAM #4
He has never seen the river he is dreaming but it is full of nuclear submarines and his kayak is full of holes.
XIII. LINES
front lines credit lines bread lines / lines of demarcation / blood lines punch lines / lines of broken glass / lines of trees in windrows across a far field / blue hills in broken lines on the horizon / blurred lines white lines / lines in the sand lines of questioning / life lines tag lines stat lines / lines of code / stress lines fracture lines fate lines last lines / lines of birds flying south against the frost / lines of golden tiles in an unfinished mosaic
XIV. JAPANESE EGGPLANT
What was learned in the garden is not a dream
but a tactile memory, a prickling in the fingertips
at the border between waking and sleep—
that the leaves of the Japanese eggplant
hide in their profusion a host of invisible thorns.
XV. DREAM #5
He tries to name the city he is dreaming and when he smells tahini and poppy seeds he thinks, Atlantic Avenue, so this is Brooklyn.
XVI. A CONTINENT
Kids in Nebraska dreaming of volcanoes,
kids on the shore of Lake Managua
dreaming of jobs in shiny convenience stores—
go ahead, you can
walk there,
it’s a continent.
XVII. HONEY
O, muse, wake me now from troubled dreams.
Take me one more time into your salt
and kelp-entangled arms before the storm arrives.
Make me greedy.
Make me sop up spilled honey with your crusts.
XVIII. DREAM #6
He dreams of the old Italian restaurant in Washington with Chianti bottles covered in red wax, a jukebox of arias from Aïda and Don Giovanni, the courtyard fountain of Poseidon in which he floated boats made from corks and toothpicks with his brother, brackish water alive with black eels served to favored customers, swish of their tails below the surface like prehistoric creatures drowning in tar, like the downstroke of a dozen bows as the violins commence the second-movement adagio.
XIX. TERMITES
Look, the window of the dream is closing—
goodbye, monumental room
of snow globes and animal tusks.
Strip away the walls and what’s left:
strakes and laths of old wood against plaster
oozing like stale frosting between them.
Let the termites take it all.
XX. MY JUSTICE
will not be found in a bullet
or a bottle
or the paper ark of any poem.
Hives can’t hold enough bees
to pollinate all the wildflowers
watered by human tears.
The stone of your pain, no matter how tightly
you squeeze it, will never yield enough
to quench anybody’s thirst.
Go on now, go back to bed,
get back to work,
return to the dream-swarm harvesting the nectar
of whatever it is you love enough
to have risked
this journey into darkness for.