II. So Much Floating Underneath

Cries from Home in China

First the bird about to sing
the blueness vast around him
women in the river washing clothes
traffic beginning on the bridge
open rusty lorries lumbering by

all sounds he could just make out

Then trying not to waken
thinking who else would hear them
if it was no dream
who but he could see
so much floating underneath

Till the bird suddenly was nowhere
and the women washing clothes
the river and the bridge gone by
and just the empty daily sky
with nothing else to witness

he thought he must be the sky

Pessoa’s Last Masquerade

“Be admitted to the heart of your own self
dismissal,” he proposed, choking on the effort to waken
the hidden one, the only shifter he kept subtracting,
more vehement, more drastic and diminished each day,
than he’d admit. (Admit? To whom? His selflessness?
The real self was his tool of scrutiny.) Lashed,
it cried, “Admit, admit!” but this he could not bear.

The shifter, now colliding with him, spat out: “Who are
you if not myself?” “Yourself –” he crowed, “therefore
a friend?” “Be nothing,” it snapped at him again.
“Be yourself in silence but something less than a friend.
Be anything not your own, no selfless self prolonger.
Practice a face for life’s sake but be someone else!”

A day to reckon with & he’d roused the last one just
to give it life, and with this, start something new:
the opening to let them . . . let out all the self
shifters fed daily on his remorseless words. Happening
so swiftly, so it passed, the last one to drift
way down through some pinpoint hole growing
in the remembered dark until he felt them all sucked in.

Then, with nothing to elude, nothing to feed in him,
the absence began & an absence, he saw, of all-become-him:
the one who might be, the one who was, the someone unborn
or long dead and never to come at him again.
Enemy friend admitted it, waking only for that,
with no words to forgive & as if even so little
were too much to give his briefly final being.

Remember the Famous Chinese Water Torture?

(for Nicolaus Kogon)

…on your mother’s lap watching
the William S. Hart silent Western
of the big dusty old cowboy

sweaty head tilted forward to catch
the drip drip trickling
down the nape of the neck

strapped and gagged in a chair
with bad hombre greaser outside
aching to finish him off as soon

as he wriggles free to stagger
out of the cardboard shack
into the blinding daylight

eyes hotly clued that can take it
until the very last drop
when he is blown all over the map

Cathedral Country

What peeled back night is this
caught in the mist
with saints’ heads shimmering
down in the pea vines
their golden haloes
shooting over the stars?

What milky blue eyes
follow the gnats
dancing in circlets
under midsummer fog
dispersing the towers
and all weathervanes stopped?

A Late Visit to Robert Graves

I
Sing fast
for the poet
who is eighty-eight
has stopped singing

gazing into the fire
speaking names
he alone hears.
II

Speak his name fast
for the poet’s
quiet blue eye
follows his fingers
over the glass
turning the green
bright intimate wine

under the mountain
where he has been living
three thousand years

breathing the names
of the Celts and Iberians
back to the fire
backed into stone
where in the burn
he sees returning
the lies
in ten thousand faces.

III
Speak fast
for the poet
has almost stopped breathing
underwater
under his mind where
his gaze is sinking

into the light
that wavers under his feet
where the Achaians and Trojans
ripple their shell-blackened armor
the bone of their faces
eaten away.

IV
His lips as we part
brush the back of our hand
and we kiss in turn
the hills of his knuckles.

The door closes behind
the poet curled up
by the fire
shutting his eye
in the stone.

And the world
is alone.

(for Elaine Kerrigan)

History of the Book

How books in their heedless bulk,
their numbing displacements of space and air
on a shelf, a table, or wedged back
of the bed, imprison the unforgivable
seething of infinitely humdrum finalities
until the fraying and closing
of faces blacken in darkness.

How books in their sullen entrapments
of the luckless and lost, paper the age
that’s gone — all thens and now, even
the one to come — as page after page
unreconciled lives in their raddled remains
blot out the inklings of light they shed.

From the Dark

Under gray silt
in the eyeless deep
cries of the dead

slow fallen leaves
sunk from the surface
the river stills

Emptying the Bead

A weightless bead is falling
with swirling murky insides,
marrow of doused light,
falls and does not break.

Falls on hardest rind,
oldest earth, as on
a pillow, endless being,
colder than winter ground.

It was the gem sweat of mind
that went on lifelong dying
in strict containment, a tear
kept falling unalive.

It is the light of the soon
lost insight, the answer
that never shone, that was,
and trapped itself in Adam.

God Talk

I

Tell me
where the willow
grows
and where
the runover dog
goes
for comforting.

Tell me above the sweep
of rivers
where
the fishing is
and luck
for the fisherman

and in deeper flow
the weight
and play
of the lure
to hook
a tense mouth.

There let me live
to die
where I may
still eat
my fill
with god,
the caught fish.

II

Seek me
and all I know of time
to show you

the game played
in the barbed wire city
with the fallen

where what you seek
already sees you
fallen

who before rising
to answer time
still question

the dim dead
panting
to live again

who pray only
to feel time
slip away again

while you and what
you know lie
unforgiven

by the stony brook
in the long weeds
and dry vervain.

Either believe me
or keep believing
nothing goes away.

III

If then and now are afterward
then everything’s your history —
a legendary had-to-be.
*
Did you have to be?
Rebel heart, crawl back
to your narrowing space
and tick on.
*
Empty station, enter rain.
Empty rain, no train.
Empty heart, no tracks lain.
*
What is long kept crumbles.
Cold giant of the night sky
falls heavy with rain
into the melting ground.
*
Sun-up dust and fog
punish the windowpane.

IV

Who could and did not
didn’t and would not.

Who wasn’t and would be
target and arrow,
dutiful hand, punishing fist,

learned to resist and desist
grown past the wanting.

The Old New War

Backed into barren winter
I think of plenty stored
inside abandoned houses
near the shore
that loll on stilts
barnacled and silvery green imagining the appetite
of absent hurricanes
come sniffing in
to batter and consume.

The sloping Stone Age boulder ocean-liner size
opening on the road behind invites lost histories
back to loggers driving sleds down some erased
now heavily snowed-in trail.

*

Do lions beg permission
of their prey?
Some natives still do
who kill to eat

the hungry lion
till trophy hunters avid
for pride and prey
slide in.

*

Let the lioness protect her pride.
Even in drastic beginnings
there’s time to play the cub
watching a slaughter of the innocents

in shady camouflage
paradisal to any being
living for the day.

Lives needing not to know
inside from out
drive into a sudden emptiness
where turkey buzzards
circling over prey to come
with springtime calving

trace in airy patterns
childhood’s dream
of stringless gliding.

The Shout

Do you want me?
Do I want you?

Wanting to want
one another
we become
our parents
unselved in love.

Trying to be
lovingly
one-and-one
we become
anyone.

Wanting somehow
to be
each other’s other
we stay
strictly apart.

*

When for yourself
you mutter
Can’t we get closer?
I for myself
(pressed under years
of being another
to suit others
still churning
inside me)
will answer
I’m closer to you
than I am to myself.

Moving in for the kiss
I hear
through lips clenched
for a bite
that voiceless shout
Leave me alone.

Now and Then

(In Sarasota Suddenly Seen)

In Florida now till the world
in Pompeii then — wiping its eyes
people breaks free
sauntering off once again
some in pursuit Now the pelican
some in retreat still
as if sun antediluvian bird
were an afterthought anachronistically

on the way up clacks a beak —
on the way down gray tongs
surely clamped over
without them some entrails

One day a fisher discards
catches fire after flaying
sooner the trout
than thought he just caught

The pursuer caught And one’s heart
the retreater shrinks in black rain
found pouring under
unbreathing — remonstrative thunder

last gesture as here and there
hand over mouth on stick feet
against a blue heron
the black fumes follows ashore

hard body glazed its particular meal
as if wading closer
to encase pausing intent
masterly stone then gazes stricken

away

Bagatelles I

1

Practically well
the first time
in years
(though you think yourself
barely alive)
when out
of the fog
comes the old dog
to squat —
who as you look
gets to be more & more
distinctly
all there & now
maybe all
the rest of your life

2

After the skids
and bad starts
one night
your machine
turns itself on
Next day
in soft rain
dies the dog
with your darts
thrown in the dark
hung from his eyes

3

Nothing more prone than
the half-eaten dog
on your doorstep
in his heart
the smile
of a pig
just beginning
to eat him
alive

4

That time
someone laughed
and you
stopped talking
she didn’t
mean you
but something sure
made you think
you’d always
heard sounds
like hers
sassing
nobody else

Bagatelles II

1

We act as though art preceded us
and we caught onto meaning to handle it —
like the idea of cup
before cuppiness took hold
to have us drink out of it
or drank from bare hands
before hands knew to cup themselves.
What more do we need to quench thirst
than the lips and straight down the hatch?

2

When things suddenly happen
we think without thought.
We understand the ploy
that begs neighbor reason
to witness the act and slip in
with some blind superflash.

3

You might say Why do anything
if everything’s possible —
while we still act as though
believing we’d be happy
if only we had an opening
to everything we wanted
when we wanted it.