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By Luristan to Thule

Delirium was the last country she saw clearly.

Mounting its exotic, riven flanks

on the back of a patient fever,

she left with regret the land of her hosts—

divisions of snow, upended stone threaded with tracks

between the goatskin houses with goatskin beds—

then left too the regret.

For decades she’d taken pleasure in imposing

the first white profile (with its great spinster nose)

upon such places, barely named,

as lay a few days’ journey beyond fable,

uplands that bore no showy gold or ziggurat,

only the shallow marks of laboring generations,

the central campfires repeated deep in their eyes.

Past rocks tipped early out of the cradle of myth,

she finally became separated from her pack

with its twenty pencils, the notorious hat,

coins and aspirin, equally useless,

and yielded to discovery of one state

that lacks the primary luxuries: return,

and the safely delivered story.

 

So Were the Animals

In that time,

before the sun wore red and yellow feathers,

before the sky’s umbilicus parted,

the Machiguengas were people but so

were the animals, so were the plants,

so were the stars. Then Yabireri

breathed on this one and that

and made them toucans, cacao trees,

orchids, or giant otters.

Until Yabireri blew his breath

they were all people,

consuming granite, changing red light to sugar,

swallowing twelve-foot anacondas;

they were all people,

pushing each other’s eggs from the nest,

streaming white fire that travels after they die,

changing from male to female;

they were all people,

weaving houses of grasses and bright blue trash,

folding dewlaps away and turning from orange to brown,

lapping blood from the small wounds of sleepers,

rolling themselves in balls, eating hot sulfur;

they were all people.

Two stopped the spirit god

before he could change them all.

There were still people

to drink ayahuasca and rise to the spirits,

to knit barbs in wire and string it wide,

to write down endless numbers,

to look into fire and sing till their eyes hurt

and still sing, to dam rivers,

to slit the belly of a thirteen-year-old girl,

to tear a mountain open and let it rust,

to trace an eyebrow with a wondering thumb,

to make stories out of everything.

There were still people

Yabireri could not blow out.

He watched from where they left him,

impaled on a wooden stake

at the mouth of the sky.

 

Constantinople, Plague Summer

Wind out of the north today, with the stench

from the towers across the Horn, where the emperor’s men

have packed the dead. I danced for a man last night

with black peas all over his arms. When I placed my hands

on the floor, reaching over my head, he began to scream.

Spilled red fish sauce, I think, ran over the table.

I took all the food I could carry.

Those the plague passes over are starving.

I dreamt of ortolans in a pastry nest,

woke to another slave bolting to drown his fever.

They say plum pickle wards it off, or lemons;

they say God sends it. I think it’s part of the world

that strikes and spares and never gives us the pattern.

Tertia, our best, went first.

They say the emperor prays all day.

Some say he is dying. He’s sent for me, nonetheless.

No chin, like a rat, and his small hands are never still,

but if any wine is left in the city he’ll have it,

olives and figs to push between my breasts,

perhaps little birds in a pie with fruit in their beaks

or spitted with their eyes open.

 

The Angel That Troubled the Waters

Who started this none of them can say,

not even those with tongues,

but families hear of the angel that troubles the waters

and deposit their last hopes beside the pool

in ragged rings.

And when the water ripples, what a surge

among the patients, hunched over their pain

in starting-line positions,

the broad-shouldered lame, the sniffing blind,

those clutching their bowels, their sores, their wild heads,

even the limbless ones—

but it’s only a frog, or breeze, or a feather

fallen from great height.

They settle again, and continue to endure

belief in an angel who might hold such a race

and award but one prize.

A small mercy that it was a moonless night

when the angel of curiosity, meaning no harm,

stirred the pool with one long finger,

startled to taste

how salt it is, and warm.

 

Hidden at the Zoo

At first the keepers amused themselves,

pairing Mondrian with the zebras, El Greco with giraffes,

but as rumors of the enemy’s approach

grew heads and teeth, sleepless curators

tried to run with straw-stuffed crates

and thrust their arms into dangerous cages

till half the museum was hidden at the zoo.

Throughout the occupation, the animals kept their secrets.

But their boredom was more stubborn

than a handful of hasty nails.

The elephant delicately picked straw

from the bust of Akhenaten;

the blue-cheeked mandrill bared its fangs

at the rival color patches of Rousseau.

Brown bears bedded down for the winter

in a cave lined with peaceable Rembrandts.

At night the slow loris watched

with its everlastingly startled eyes

as the aye-aye touched

its wire-thin long third finger

to a rosy Renoir chin.

In the reptile house a flying gecko

established that its purple-brown toes

adhered to Raphael’s angels as to any wall,

and the Indian long-nosed tree snake

tested its rare binocular vision

and the whisper of its ventral scales

on the torso of an Apollonian youth.

As supplies ran short, one keeper discovered

he didn’t mind his koalas gnawing

the frames of Renaissance triptychs. Another

covered his face and cursed his cowardly hands

as drunken soldiers played target practice,

as the white rhino knelt, taking the bullets

that could have pierced the Vermeer.

A month later the broken aviary emptied,

deserted by the orange minivet, the mandarin ducks,

the blue-backed fairy bluebird,

but the sociable weaverbirds stayed

at their communal tree, and threaded

the thatch of their nest with canvas strands

to which clung flecks of paint,

while next door in the butterfly house,

the ripening eggs of Morpho,

Papilio, Melanitis, and the rest prepared

to hatch their ravenous larvae.

 

Nachtmusik

Like him, she is old. Her neck curves like the violin’s,

whose long harsh kiss shows on her jaw when she turns

to the tuning fork she’s spanked on her knee,

her pursed lips drawing in the long thin A.

“Beethoven tonight? Mozart, Haydn? Brahms?”

she gloats absently over the sheets to his usual shrug;

he goes back to touching the cello strings with his thumbs.

She lifts her bow, and its hair falls loose from the frog

like a girl’s. “Ach. It’s always something, isn’t it?

How we play such fragile things, I don’t know,

they could fall apart in our hands.” With her second bow

she tunes again. He doesn’t see her rosin it;

bent over the cello’s shoulder he has the sense

of remembering Berlin, the night a bomb

buried the bridegroom and all but one of his friends,

the night he knelt outside his gaping home

and heard the grand piano fall five floors—

heard its last five monstrous chords

that blotted out for years all the Bach he knew.

“Mozart, then,” he says, and so they play.

 

Voladora

Naked and obedient in the moonless clearing

she rises on tiptoe, lifts her arms wide,

swallows her instructor’s bitter syrup,

and vomits her entrails into the copper dish.

Loosed, lightened, with birdwings sprouting

so fast they hurt, she can barely stay

for the message of the invisible ones;

she carries it screaming high

through night air full of devils that brush her skin.

Mother, Mother—it is too late to pray

since she stood forty days forty nights half drowned

under Thraiguén waterfall and her true baptism

was plundered away and she begged for the bits

of toasted bread they held out on pointed sticks.

Most beautiful sister of a Brujería initiate

(who killed his best friend, who flayed the corpse

and made a vest of its skin that glows in the dark,

who passed other tests), she was chosen.

She begged them, the male witches.

Voladora, her brother whispers so no one else can hear,

Voladora, tonight. She walks to the forest.

Meets the dish. She flies screaming.

The Brujería, they change themselves to animals,

they enter men’s dreams and drive them mad.

They alter the courses of rivers,

spread sickness that has no cure.

They injure whom they choose. Voladora, tonight.

She mounts the reeking velvet air,

lunges over the trees, unbalanced, high

where the weak lights scattered below can’t see her.

Every secret message she bears

is a chain locked tight to her throat, a medallion

weight on her breast, red hot. Thirty years

she has done their bidding just so she can crouch

at dawn by the copper basin, furtively

wolf down her intestines,

and be human again, to the eye.

The poisonous night-moths fold away

and a bird speaks of dawn. She circles the place

where the bloody dish still shines. Is she hungry?

How long since she has been hungry?

What does she need with those innards, what need

for the form of that beautiful girl?

Let them look for her with the short-eared owl,

the carrion hawk, the mockingbird.

She flies silently. They will never get her back.

 

Slumgullion

The red-eyed pigeons disdain my suet

and chalky bread that once, as I remember,

enthralled them and all their cousins. “Rats with wings,”

sniffs the old lady around whose sensible shoes

they bowed smooth heads, in times gone by,

to a semicircle of peanuts. “Rats with wings.”

Now exotic dinners are spread wherever they go:

clots in the streets, puddles and pockets

in the dirt, in the buckling grass,

of everything we let go, pass by, lose.

Three miners headed west to peck at any rich stain in the rocks.

(So say the brown letters one of them sent his grandson.)

Starving on the edge of a desert,

they found in a shallow cave some kind of molasses,

a chunky brittle secreted by stone. Like manna.

They ate till they were full at last,

and a little sick later. That candy was a pack-rat midden,

grass twigs leaves seeds cactus-spines and feathers,

bugs and pebbles, all ambered for the fossil record

with decades of pack-rat pee.

This is our nonelectronic diary now,

to go with the archives of car parts and mattress springs:

waste, all kinds, escaped and mingled in mats

becoming one mat, one flow of tepid lava.

Crumbs, tobacco, toothpaste, phlegm,

sticky half-inches in foam cups and reeking bottles,

sugar, ketchup, vials, diamonds,

unguents, tabloid drool, cough syrup, blood.

Unmentionable or unnoticed, in such volume

fat cockroaches can’t keep up.

Rasped with stinking salt, the tongue

makes for itself a fugitive sweetness, like green

one sees after too much red. Stare at this dumping ground

long enough and angels appear in the sky.

But no one really minds his own smell,

or gnawing a bone if the spit on it is hers.

So sludge of gossip philosophy pudding and lint

lips at our ankles; later, when there are more of us,

we can mark its tides on our walls. And in the wilderness,

the fires of abandoned coal mines burning forty years

will be fed, or slaked at last.

 

Superman in Sunglasses

Little Clark, scuffing the toes of his Keds in the dirt,

lost in boredom wide as Nebraska, looked down.

Saw a pebble pinned under the arch of his foot,

saw earthworms tinily mouthing their way grain by grain,

tyrannosaur bones, articulate, spine strained back,

a seething fiery darkness of molten rock,

and the chipped red-painted sole of a Chinese clog.

Then the other sky. Wherever he looked after that for weeks

he saw space, the black outer space behind even the sun.

Needing to watch girls, he tried not to burn when he peeked

but saw past her underwear, past her secret skin

to viscera, ribs, and the writhing of her heart.

And saw a first egg begin its calm descent

before his steely focus came apart.

Later, with glasses, with practice by accident mostly,

he saw how his dried parents wanted him bound,

changing their tires forever, how compact Lois

was an angular mess of desire, and looking down

from Metropolis windows saw onion-skin slides stained

with lurid angers, gloating, love in vain,

the black familiar nodules in a villain’s brain.

Now the curved lens’s magnified rainbow reflection

shows him straggling eyebrow hairs, the step of the crow

on one side, the stare half an inch away

of his open blue-black blank eye.

 

US

This is not a country that needs me to speak for it

This is not a country with one great wound

at which I can cry out

and be heard

This is no place small enough for a cradle,

no green palm of a hand, embraceable chain of red

mountains

It will not condense, it will not yield to a single music,

no two of its horizons take the same line

This is not a country that counts me

when it goes to its storehouse to count,

when it dials up majority wedges of pie,

when it tunes in its screens with their Nielsen boxes

Not my mother, not my father,

scatterer of sisters and brothers

among the prairie-dog holes, the skyscraper ant farms

It’s too big, too built to bury love in

The love spilled on it, viscous white, sticky red,

won’t soak in—scours the mere ground

and bears it downhill

Dry rock lies by swollen rivers

and the dry rocks groan

and the rivers shout

and sometimes they’re on TV

This is not a country that asks me to speak

 

Life on Earth, Part Twelve: The Business Salmon

When the season comes, unquestioningly

they abandon the ocean and thread themselves

through the mouths of their native rivers—

the males in their double-breasted suits,

their necktie stripes of steelhead, rainbow,

cutthroat, Dolly Varden, eastern brook;

the females in stern skirts and silky blouses.

Knees together, arms against their sides,

they swim against a current for the first time and the last,

convulsing up ladders, hurling themselves at rapids.

They forget to be tired, forget to eat.

The sunny, unsalt water flies apart on their padded shoulders.

By the time they reach the waters of their infancy,

their good leather shoes are scuffed, their briefcases battered,

buttons missing, hair undone. Sides heaving in and out.

Here the females deposit piles of paperwork

for the males to cover with blizzards of contracts and memos.

They are finished. In the quiet shallows they hover,

then lay their meager flesh on the riffled gravel.

Mouths wide open. Eyes wide open.

It does not look like rest. But they are

mostly washed away before

the children arise in thousands like snow falling upward

and careen toward the sea in their little toboggan bodies,

without an idea in the world that deep in their brains some

kink,

some microscopic hook, will make them want

to put on business clothes and swim upstream.

 

Thor Swimming

The polar bear comes to devour you.

Your destiny at last. You draw the door wide

open—he stands taller than the frame—

and fall back before him, come in, come in,

respectfully await his embrace.

I knew you would find me. I’m ready.

Surprisingly ready, even your gladness

stiff with expectation, as if with cold.

He will carry you, crushed and engulfed, north to the pack ice,

will hold you beneath his heart all the starving months,

his muscles sipping you just to keep moving—

the trace of you released through his nostrils

the only warmth to rise for aching miles around.

You’ve waited for him since you saw Thor swimming.

The Lincoln Park Zoo male in dead summer

took the false pool in his arms. Below

the surface on one side, a small blue window

showed him in oval, and how perfectly

he did not care that you watched

his mass in flight, a mountain bending,

a planet with blowing hair.

Of this movement, grace is an imitation.

Of his black eyes without depth

in the wedge of his face,

arrogance is a shadow.

You heard of his wicked ways:

baiting his cage with flung peanuts, pretending

sleep for hours till a duped squirrel

flickered near his paw and was struck by lightning.

Later, “napping” by the keeper’s lost shoe.

On the ice where you will be going

there is no boredom, only expanse, and cold

too cold for smell. There are two kinds of taste:

the blade of the wind, and salt flesh

of anything that swims and is slow, which

the bear tastes no more than

he tastes his own tongue. There are

blue white and yellow white; nothing is dark

but what moves and is edible, or

what moves unbreathable under the ice.

The wonder before you, the throat cantilevered

in uncaressable fur. He drops to four paws

and opens his heavy mouth.

His teeth are brown stumps in a reek

of banana peel, rancid pork rind, battery acid.

The garbage bears of Churchill

live in the dump. They skip the nine-month fast,

rip open their stinking half-warm prey’s

loose black plastic skin.

He shuffles around your spread hands to the couch

and, as you begin your miserable shiver,

drops. Sighs. Appears to watch TV.

 

Blue Oranges

One thousand miles inland from the original tree,

one in the box of leathery glowing globes begins

earlier than the others a web of brown lines on its skin.

Inside, the pale intricate membranes stretch and toughen.

They secretly drink the juice. The close-held seeds go dry.

The ball is less and less a ball, its flat spots sunken.

No more nourished or nourishing, the tender polyps

turn acid in their envelopes packed around the starry center,

decline from gorgeous orange to thin yellow, fermenting.

Superior fruits prefer to be removed from such

corruption, lest it prove contagious to the touch

despite its clear connection to some lack of moral fiber,

whereas the sagging browning merely overripe

may hate it simply, as the dim the blind,

consumingly, as the halt may hate the lame,

and in its powdery final rot and transmutation,

the closer the pale blue orange draws to its dusty cave-in

the more urgent its desire for something else to blame.

 

Aluminum Chlorohydrate

Am I then to understand

that with every matins’ sociable embalming of the armpit

molecular aluminum insinuates itself, through sheared follicles,

bright fleck by bright invisible fleck, into the tiny tender kinks

of capillaries? slides along their permeable wisps

into the jostling rivers of depleted scarlet doughnuts and white

ghosts,

into a hectic Amazon, through endlessly wrung chambers,

out the roaring wide aorta, rising blandly through the neck

by ever subtler pulses toward the tingling gray curd

all flushed with its matted electrical storms? and lays

a glinting finger on one sparked synaptic mouth

that hushes. Whose voice may never be missed.

A number, a name, the Latin for greed,

clopping upstairs that March day in Florence with brand-new

clogs,

the blister they raised. But supposing senility

takes the brain in its soft retriever’s mouth

and carries it to be gutted, supposing all

the recent layers plucked away and memory’s microscopic

doors flung wide

for the oldest to come forth: Would third-grade Ruth be missing

and unmissed, or Mary or Brenda, with random trivial

comrades,

or would the whole host stagger out, one missing legs, another

clothes,

with synthetic pearls for eyes or carrot noses?

Or would each corridor dead-end on a scaly tinfoil mirror

showing nothing but the scowling smear

of some old unfamiliar woman’s face?

 

What All It Takes

Up and down its red and blue chutes

my defective blood bumps: Oreos and gumballs one hour,

famished soap bubbles the next. Christmas survived,

I find with the special sugarless candy’s

mild laxative effect time to wonder

at what all it takes to keep me up.

The patches and stitches, the little glucose computer,

plastic packaging every day to the landfill,

and needles, a whole iron mine

could have run dry for me. The operations,

don’t-touch bins all heaped with trays and

tubes and rubber gloves and miles of gauze.

Where it all comes from. The truckers, line workers,

underprivileged South American harvesters,

and patent holders that put together

one lousy just-in-case Snickers bar

that maybe one time saved my life.

And don’t forget last year’s electrodes,

stuck to my leg, the centuries of science

reviving one blue foot. Years from now

I’ll be walking around on plastic legs

with a battery-powered heart and silicon eyes,

eating imported apricots and flash-frozen

chicken hormones. I’ll think, again:

In an Ice Age cave I’d be dead.

In a Roman villa with household gods and servants

I’d be dead. In a Gothic wheatfield town,

even before the plague came I’d be dead.

As for how I’d make out if some terrorist explosion

disassembles the running water and highways

and burns the air, well, I guess

I’d place in the race to die. Last one left,

I figure, will be that weevil yesterday

that walked out the door of my microwave

right after I’d done the potatoes.

But here I am alive in a brand-new sweater,

using things, using things up. Mom asked,

those times I wouldn’t eat my peas,

or sneaked away from the dishes to watch TV,

What makes you so special?

Meant, I suppose, to deny it,

I never did. And still say, I don’t know.

 

Tyrannosaurus Sex

Did he make you scream?

In the middle of ripping shoulder meat

from a dead mound did you rock back weak on your haunches,

yellow eyes puddling cataract blue,

a pulse parting your messy lips?

No blinds drawn,

no struggle bulging over a narrow sofa,

no face-to-face reflection of cosmic bewilderment and glee;

he didn’t gasp Faster Now God and no salt drops

fell from his armpit onto your breast.

Your arms too short

to reach anything, and the teasing air

open in every direction he might have gone.

Carrion no longer the sole desire

of your thickest muscles.

The moon so close

and the wild noise of insect millions

had nothing to do with your hunt through the cycad dark

to see if it was his teeth you needed

champing shut through your spine.

 

Musk Oxen Do Not Run Away

Got itself called a musk ox, never mind that half the year and

more

its great Roman muzzle can only breathe ice and blow smoke.

Tell you another: These great stamping chunks of gristle and

blubber

and hoarded hairy warmth are partial entirely to salad—

hearts of Arctic grass and willow tips. All ravenous winter

their round cow eyes strain over the ice for lichens and moss;

they chop their frozen vegetables from the snow

with hooves like patient gray plow-breaking stones.

Yes, they’ve come in for their share of guff

for those Fifties-hairdo horns. But they don’t laugh much.

They’re busy pumping all the blood it takes to live under half a

sun.

When wolves come streaking in fire-tongues over the freeze,

they circle tight. Barricading the babies and mothers,

their bleating heart, and lowering like the sky, the old bulls and

cows

kill wolves, kill wolves—with one bludgeoning pulse

strike out at last at an enemy they can see.

 

Neanderthal

Walking home from my powerless car

I pass through a dozen supper smells, each

more promising than anything I’ve ever cooked.

But then my neighbors long since left me behind.

They know just how to use sage and cumin.

They change their own spark plugs, prune shrubs, and feed roses.

In that garage a woman is caning a chair,

tight straw stars. My chin recedes,

my knuckles scrape the street I’m crossing.

My skills come from the wrong past.

I know how, in a team of two,

to bring down a marriage heavy with years,

cut out its tongue and liver, flay the skin,

break its mastodon limbs across,

and suck the bitter marrow;

you can last awhile like that.

I know how to forage.

I know how to sleep in the cold.

 

Lungfish Conquers Depression

Where the bladderwort and water lily

give way to bulrushes and pickerelweed,

and cattail heads nod hugely high,

every day for a thousand thousand

she keeps her eyes in the pond,

under the wind. Everything here

is as cool as everything else.

In the filtered visibility

she can set her chin in the muck

and submit her gills to the endless wet feed,

her skin to the close, slack hold all over.

No questions. Everything here is here.

Now and now and now.

She doesn’t know

why this time she pushes past the surface tension

and wimples up the minute incline

on jellied stumps. She doesn’t know

how far to the loblolly pines or what they are.

How heavy her body, wobbling on the peat

without support, in a shower of dry infrared.

So many edges. She feels a pocket

flex inside her neck, she gapes

at the scoured entry of demanding air.

 

Instead of Acceptance

I sank right down, it was a skill more needful,

more evident than swimming,

I wrapped all my three-fingered claws

around the rocks of the bottom.

No well-meaning dredge would get me,

or the cold hands of delicate scuba divers.

At drowning I failed; it turned out I knew how

to breathe under fathoms of pressure

that held my eyes closed, that worked in my fissures and

washed some parts of me loose,

and the cold that would not kill me kept the rest

from rotting away.

It took more time than death, but the whale I sank

to be swallowed by I swallowed,

and surfaced, not your tombstone after all, not an island,

my gray hulk steaming, purple and green

with disease that means

survival, and barnacle mouths in dazed Os all over my skin.

 

Dinosaur to Dragon

The predictable bell-curve brontosaurus,

dumb with tons and years, raises its head.

Extinction has come at last. No more swallowing rocks

to grind the endless meal of green needles.

No more subsiding to sleep, a carrion mountain,

under the bowed head of hunger on two legs.

No more need to love the Jurassic.

The little face lifted on the long brown throat

sags, it widens, grows lips and eyelids,

whiskers, fleshy spines, warts and spangles.

New bones, new colors open in its skin,

new toes flex and take hold.

New claws, oh it scratches the itch on its back at last

and the back sprouts feathers, the feathers have feathers,

the feathers on feathers grow feathers; gladly intricate

and hard to see as anything living,

its infinite edges intimate with air,

the dragon unfurls its wings peacock and tangerine,

leaves the ground ruby murex indigo,

lashes its fractal tail.

 

They Live Here

Bacteria live here where the river flows

acid and erratic, chocolate one hour,

navy beans the next. They form

little mats of excess, let go, float,

resume in a similar place the same

busy extraction of all they need,

mining or feeding. They don’t take,

only change it. Absorb and split,

absorb and split. Making gas

too small to be bubbles,

not their concern. Not their concern

that there is no light here,

scarcely air, that all water is polluted.

And what matter if their continent

discovers alone an abandoned

North Dakota movie drive-in

and sits on the merry-go-round

for one whole hour crooning John Denver songs,

or heaps on a motel bed

before the Hitchcock television

with three music majors and a pre-med

and laughs to crying.

If generations hence it receives a glib final letter,

their wallow is slightly more bilious.

If generations hence at last it rests

an appendage on a desired knee,

they are swamped in unaccustomed

sweetness, which kills some,

encourages others. They don’t strike back.

They need my life too.

 

Manatee in Honey

At first when the end of the heavy gold rope

filled and moved down my windpipe

I thought I might be supposed to choke,

but instead this too was breathing, only better,

and drinking, too, or eating—it didn’t matter—

the heavy new surrounding that made me lighter,

the thick suspense whose pressure just matched mine,

that didn’t dissolve, or muddy, or settle in sediment down

but rippled, caramel, on and on and on and on and on.

I thought I might die of foolishness at last,

being fed every time I opened my mouth, my lashes

held beautifully shut by pure molasses,

and a smile on all my lips that wouldn’t go

because of a furtive belief that somehow

all this syrup for me was from me, too,

in spite of my own spite whispering I ought to

feel undeserving and moreover trap-caught, or

at least crave my old cold cabbage and thin salt water.

 

Honeysuckle

Helpless as an apricot in heavy sun

blushing into softness

or a sliced strawberry

drawing sugar into its flesh,

she turns on the couch to face east,

his house, she eats the limp scraps

of honeysuckle dropped on the chocolate box,

drifts over midnight wet grass

as if drowned by a single star—

feels a cool leaf edge, unmelting, draw her arm.

Puts all five fingers into a rose

and makes it open too.

 

Honey

Perhaps love means no more to the millennium

than saying, “I was there, it’s true,

one bright drop fell from the mulberry onto the rose,”

or, “I saw this green branch bow and shake

when a squirrel chose it and no other,”

and perhaps the apparent favor of the universe

is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman

breathing hard and about to be hungry,

or the sun that makes a thousand prisms

wink in a blackened gull’s petroleum coat,

but the racket and glow in this body, whose fluids

you have changed all to corn oil by kissing four times

the end of my thumb, knows otherwise,

and the very odds, billion to one, against great joy

confess its occasional visitation,

if not its relation to the clear brown band

around each of your tender pupils, or to

the note you just made in the margin of Insect Life.

To Drosophila melanogaster is vouchsafed honey.

To us, eternal verities, and this kiss.

 

Legend of the Woolly Mammoth

The eyes of these two fish imprinted in stone

look sad, small rusty sidelong blots

on traces of their bodies curved

like a question asked two times.

Theophrastus explained

that when the flood rose fish swam over the land

and laid their eggs, so once it subsided

their puzzled children

hatched in rock and were mineral.

They swam with difficulty,

whereas the giant red-haired Siberian mole,

big as two tents,

fairly flew underground, slicing

through permafrost as if through curd

with its terrible ivory weapons.

Only a blunder could stop it,

so the cold hunters said,

if it dug too far and erupted

like a mountain from the snow:

When it saw sunlight it died.

The trunk, the surprised splayed forefeet,

were eaten by wolves.

When I was eight reading dinosaur books

I didn’t know any dead people outside pictures;

when I was nineteen I still hadn’t met you,

thought I knew loss and didn’t.

With you I learned to breathe stone,

to swallow Siberia.

Some days you played the intricate scales

that made your thin skin. Some days

you were only a silent roar

with impossible bright red hair.

But how you have changed me,

how you will always have changed me.

Don’t you know better than anyone

how I still try to be your wife, your discoverer,

your frustrated music, your life, your violin?

—how I have to go sometimes

and stand on corners,

hold up my little slab of marked limestone,

my only surviving sketch

of you rotting in winter,

and say to passersby, You see, you see,

you must see why I loved him.

 

Where Thieves Break In and Steal

Tonight the backhand sweep of passing headlights

does not rake the front rooms too deeply

and the spot on the ceiling will not be a spider,

and though there is never nothing to be afraid of

the window is mended, the laundry has swallowed

the invisible broken glass from my heaped soft clothes.

Just now I do not need to walk through the house

touching, not quite trusting, the things we have left—

the turquoise heart, the gold pen, my grandad’s viola—

or checking the clock, the doorknob, the eyes

of the stove, the bathroom taps

(the tarnished christening cup, the bone horse).

No one is walking where we have no attic.

No one will see the holes eaten in my suit

if I don’t wear it. (The cedar box, the tin box inside,

the drawing inside of a face.) Meanwhile the sheets of our bed

lie on us so square and clean, we feel like guests.

But my hand is on your arm across my ribs.

We will get up in the morning. We can afford to hear

the traveling distant groan and crash

of night trains in their ungainly coupling

and the grassblade net of crickets just outside

where the little rags of petunias are ready

to be purple and white one more day.

 

Lassie’s Left Eye

Lassie’s left eye, rumor has it, was given to science;

the right one, at some charity auction,

went to a mystery bidder for thousands of dollars.

(Or maybe the other way around.)

So what was their last sight, the crocodile going for Timmy,

or the canine fleshpots of Hollywood?

Stupid questions pass the time

as he drives around Lincoln County for med school money,

harvesting eyes from people who died at home.

Like, is it true the retina keeps

a print of the last thing it saw?

The car picks up speed down bony old hills full of snakes,

four eyes jiggling behind him in the cooler,

and he wishes Bluebird Hamilton or Junior Sims

would pull him over, and have to look—

let their greater disgust wipe his away.

He left the faces closed and looking peaceful;

they don’t have to wake to any more surprises.

Good thing only the corneas are transplanted,

what if a retina recipient blinked

and saw the heavy green flank of Mr. Fee’s tractor

rolling onto his chest, or every time

he shut his eyes it was Mr. Story’s nurse

pointing a spoonful of mush at his mouth like a dagger.

He drives the back road for a change, but outside Pearl

it’s nothing but slow vines taking down houses,

and what if he skids off the curve beyond Coldwater—

he’d like to see Bluebird’s and Junior’s faces,

supposing they couldn’t help but notice

the back walls of his two eyes and all four in the box

glowing with the robes of Jesus.

 

Accidentals

Mozart sighs and rubs his nose

and heaves his feet from bed.

He bends to glare at a blistered toe,

and eighth notes spill from his head.

Beset by chill and dustballs,

they fail to catch his ear.

They twitch the bedclothes’ trailing edge:

Constanze does not hear.

Mistaken for bright beetles,

they are flattened by the maid,

who sweeps them to the gutter,

where they try to modulate;

then, sprouting into sixteenths,

they imitate black birds

that dot across the sky and sing

with neither end nor words—

but since they move in straight lines,

they stray out with the stars

and sound with other tuneless tones

beyond all staves and bars.

 

Chang and Eng View a Giraffe

Only the animal, from its laughingstock height,

looks at them without change of expression,

stuffed and a little dusty. They look back,

the joined Siamese boys, their connection bare

between their twin white shirts, their inside arms

crossed to each other’s shoulders.

Chang thinks, If everyone looked that strange

we’d still be selling duck eggs. Eng:

If everyone looked like that but us,

they’d pay to see our short necks.

Behind them a lurking reporter scribbles,

“don’t talk much to each other.”

The giraffe holds its lumpy head high, as though

it might still spy acacias.

The brothers, wordless, turn as one to leave.

Back to the boardinghouse, back to the usual

evening compromises, when one wants to drink

and drink and fall to bed early, and one

craves a long night of cards and cigars.

In their room, beneath some stranger’s tread,

they maneuver among their boots, umbrellas, canaries,

and retie their silk cravats. Shadows of specks

on the lamp’s dirty chimney dapple their ligature.

They hurry on downstairs to order oysters.

All night behind locks the dry giraffe imagines

bending its goitrous knees, its mouth reaching water.

 

Really Big Shew

Probably God doesn’t do it this way.

God’s dinner-plate galaxies are nearly unbreakable

and twirl steadily, without the support

of any sticks we can see,

whereas this man in tails and brilliantine

bolts around the stage, sweating and grinning,

his zigzag attention in fifty places at once,

to twiddle this stick, that stick, and on to the next.

He nearly bumps, he never bumps his tables.

The audience loves it, almost as if

they love him, as long as he keeps moving

and all his white plates overhead,

boring unlikely holes in the air

like notes of music.

Long ago he almost died of tedium

in a desert river city, before he grasped

that a mind will balance more gracefully

on the unsatisfactory stick of a human body

if it spins.

Perhaps God, meanwhile, is more like Ed Sullivan,

poker-faced in the wings,

watching with a kind of wonder

things he knew would happen.

 

Borodin: Symphony in B Minor

Saturday Borodin answered the door

where Rimsky-Korsakov towered, blue specs on his forehead,

his arms full of tubas and oboes; they blundered in

through relatives, students, and cats,

through the samovar steam,

the wide firm chords of Borodin’s wife’s piano;

and they chewed on reeds

all weekend, twiddled keys and strained their lips

till Monday, when through the door went Borodin:

Chemistry Professor

to acquire new exotic stains, to fascinate his classes

without a single explosion since the first,

whose little glass shark’s teeth still sometimes

grow out of his arm; casually he might pluck one out

late at night while the B minor keeps proliferating,

new black formulas opening over the page—

a suspension of flutes in solution, precipitate cellos,

a sudden expanding solid of orchestra chorus,

later a French horn pure as oxygen—

under the small lamp, a cat between his feet.

Nothing ignoble about this precision, this resolve

to eat half the apple, to choose and aim

for Point C between dim A and extravagant B

for Berlioz, not so far away, raving with love,

staggering half dressed over the fields beyond Paris

ghastly with grief, one smitten howl mounting the next

and all for Harriet Smithson, while his friends—

Chopin coughing, Liszt now late for the night’s assignation,

Mendelssohn smiling at the sky—attempt his rescue,

wander in circles one meteor might erase

past tall oaks pregnant with mistletoe,

past low pre-Impressionist mounds of hay.