Don’t hope for an elsewhere.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
You’ve wasted it everywhere in the world.
—CAVAFY
She used to pull them
from herself and count:
Have mercy, have mercy—
blackeyed peas flicked into a pot.
Why go out into the sunshine
and blustery azaleas, why leave
this overcrowded bed?
She’s fat now, she stinks in warm weather.
She’ll pin on a hat, groan into a pew,
spend the hour watching stained glass
swirl through Michael’s boat
like holy water.
Between her knees, each had been
a neat hunger,
each one a freedom.
So many now, perishing under the rafters!
They are like the tin replicas of eyes and limbs
hung up in small churches,
meticulous
cages, medallions
swinging in the dazed air.
GENIE’S PRAYER UNDER THE KITCHEN SINK
Housebuilding was conceived as a heroic effort to stop time, suspend decay and interrupt the ordained flow to ruin that started with Adam’s fall.
—from House by TRACY KIDDER
Hair and bacon grease, pearl button
popped in the search for a shawl, smashed radiant aluminum
foil, blunt shreds of wax paper—
nothing gets lost, you can’t flush the shit
without it floating back in the rheumy eye of the bowl
or coagulating in the drop-belly of transitional pipes.
And who gets to drag his bad leg
into the kitchen and under the sink,
flashlight scattering roaches, rusted brillo pads
his earned divan?
The hot water squeezed
to a trickle so she counted out the finger holes
and dialed her least-loved son.
I don’t believe in stepping
in the goddam shoes of any other man
but I came because I’m good at this, I’m good
with my hands; last March I bought some 2 by 4s
at Home Depot and honed them down
to the sleekest, blondest, free-standing bar
any mildewed basement in a cardboard housing tract
under the glass gloom of a factory clock
ever saw. I put the best bottles
behind it: Dimple scotch, crystal Gordon,
one mean nigger rye. I stacked the records.
Called two girls who like to perform on shag rugs,
spun my mirrored globe and watched.
They were sweet, like pet monkeys. I know
Mom called me over so I’d have to lurch up
the porch steps and she could click her tongue
and say, That’s what you get for evil living. Christ,
she took in wash through fourteen children and
he left her every time, went off on a 9-month binge
while the ripening babies ate her rich thighs
to sticks.
I was the last one; I’m Genie,
Eugene June Bug; the others made me
call them “Aunt” and “Uncle” in public.
All except Annalee—cancer screwed her.
She withered like my leg. She dragged her body
through the house like a favorite doll.
Yes, I’m a man born too late for
Ain’t-that-a-shame, I’m a monkey
with a message and a heart like
my father who fell laughing to his knees
when it burst and 24 crows spilled
from his mouth and they were all named Jim.
When I’m finished here
I’m gonna build a breezeway next,
with real nice wicker on some astroturf.
I.
Little Cuyahoga’s done up left town.
No one saw it leaving.
No one saw it leaving
Though it left a twig or two,
And a snaky line of rotting
Fish, a dead man’s shoes,
Gnats, scarred pocket-
Books, a rusted garden nozzle,
Rats and crows. April
In bone and marrow. Soaked
With sugary dogwood, the gorge floats
In the season’s morass,
Remembering its walnut, its hickory,
Its oak, its elm,
Its sassafras. Ah,
II.
April’s arthritic magnitude!
Little Joe ran away
From the swollen man
On the porch, ran across
The muck to the railroad track.
Lost his penny and sat
Right down by the rail,
There where his father
Couldn’t see him crying.
That’s why the express
Stayed on the track.
That’s why a man
On a porch shouted out
Because his son forgot
His glass of iced water. That’s
Why they carried little Joe
Home and why his toe
Ain’t never coming back. Oh
III.
This town reeks mercy.
This gorge leaves a trail
Of anecdotes,
The poor man’s history.
for Michael S. Harper
Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.
(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)
Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.
If you can’t be free, be a mystery.
skim from curb to curb like regatta,
from Pont Neuf to the Quai de la Rappe
in cool negotiation with traffic,
each a country to herself
transposed to this city
by a fluke called “imperial courtesy.”
The island women glide past held aloft
by a wire running straight to heaven.
Who can ignore their ornamental bearing,
turbans haughty as parrots,
or deft braids carved into airy cages
transfixed on their manifest brows?
The island women move through Paris
as if they had just finished inventing
their destinations. It’s better
not to get in their way. And better
not look an island woman in the eye—
unless you like feeling unnecessary.
A friend, blonde pigtail flung over an ear,
consoles her with cheek kisses.
They take no notice of the police
ranged down the steps in two lanes
from the marbled interior
where a delegation is
happening—someone famous, perhaps.
More friends arrive. Of them the boys,
correct in their flannels, kiss her too,
and with the ironic grace of the French
take her briefly to their chests.
Now the police block off the boulevard,
traffic snorting at their backs;
and though I wait for fifteen minutes
in the doorway of a corner café
no dignitary ever descends,
nor does she stop crying.
Consider that I have loved you for forty-nine years, that I have loved you since childhood despite the storms that have wasted my life. . . . I have loved you. I love you and will continue to love you, and I am sixty-one years old, I know the world and have no illusions.
—HECTOR BERLIOZ to Madame F.
Patrons talk and talk and nothing
comes. His thighs shift, the cup flies
sending dish and creamed tea
spinning, a corona of perfect disgrace.
The murmured solicitudes, the gloves.
He could debate the existence of God, describe
the vexed look on the face of the timpanist
who had never heard of felt-tips. Or the trumpets
failing their entrance in Iphegenie—
I fear I suffer from poplar blossoms,
so profuse this season.
The entire summer he was twelve she wore pink shoes.
Invisible command, the enemy everywhere.
Beneath the brushed wing of the mallard
an awkward loveliness.
Under the cedar lid a mirror
and a box in a box.
Blue is all around
like an overturned bowl.
What to do with this noise
and persistent lint,
the larder filled past caring?
How good to revolve
on the edge of a system—
small, unimaginable, cold.
1
Stone kettles on the beach by Sidon.
Salt and slime, colorless juice:
murex brandaris,
murex trunculus,
simmering.
Two kettles
on the salt beach:
dark red,
dark blue.
2
By the sign of his hand
you shall know him, holy slave.
By the litmus mark on his earlobe
you shall know the Jew, the wretched dyer.
3
Zebulun wails:
I received only mountains &
hills, oceans & rivers.
God replies:
Because of the purple snail
all will be in need of your service.
Zebulun says:
You gave my brother countries;
me you gave the snail.
God answers:
After all, I made them dependent on you
for the snail.
4
A slave practised in the labor
of red-purple and blue
was sent from Tyre to the Temple
to ferment an unpierceable scrim.
5
The Romans had their Jews,
the Greeks their Abyssinians—
red-haired Thaddaeus,
blue-skinned Muhammed.
6
Slave’s work, to wring and dry and drape;
man’s work to adorn the unspeakable.
Evening lavishes shade on a cold battlefield
as God retreats
before a fanfare of trumpets and heliotrope.
And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me. And I fell to the ground . . .
ACTS 22:6–7
They say I was struck down by the voice of an angel:
flames poured through the radiant fabric of heaven
as I cried out and fell to my knees.
My first recollection was of Unbroken Blue—
but two of the guards have already sworn by
the tip of my tongue set ablaze. As an official,
I recognize the lure of a good story:
useless to suggest that my mount
had stumbled, that I was pitched into a clump
of wild chamomile, its familiar stink
soothing even as my palms sprang blisters
under the nicked leaves. I heard shouts,
the horse pissing in terror—but my eyes
had dropped to my knees, and I saw nothing.
I was a Roman and had my business
among the clouded towers of Damascus.
I had not counted on earth rearing,
honey streaming down a parched sky,
a spear skewering me to the dust of the road
on the way to the city I would never
enter now, her markets steaming with vendors
and compatriots in careless armor lifting a hand
in greeting as they call out my name,
only to find no one home.
for Harry Timar
Evening, the bees fled, the honeysuckle
in its golden dotage, all the sickrooms ajar.
Law of the Innocents: What doesn’t end, sloshes over . . .
even here, where destiny girds the cucumber.
So you wrote a few poems. The horned
thumbnail hooked into an ear doesn’t care.
The gray underwear wadded over a belt says So what.
The night air is minimalist,
a needlepoint with raw moon as signature.
In this desert the question’s not
Can you see? but How far off?
Valley settlements put on their lights
like armor; there’s finch chit and my sandal’s
inconsequential crunch.
Everyone waiting here was once in love.