Sunday, October 31, 2010

To Irish Cathleen

O sensual beginnings
! Whispers in ears
shhh. Why not be
with me as waves lap
where we lie and walk
you home and I back
to smell your body
smell, remember lips
kissing mine, gulls
strutting by
where we lay
mid-day
O love!
your life with mine . . .
If the lake were clean
fish would leap up
and you would laugh
then help them back
where they thrive
and I always lived
thereafter
even though I’m here
where sun
turns to snow
as there rain
and nothing’s changed.

(8 October 2010)

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Looking for Sheila

or Sarah or Cynthia or some sibilant other
feminine ending "Time is the prose
that writes me down," to go with this:
Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it . . .

Dawn of the sixties. Old brown clapboard
Parrington Hall with its stone veranda
not far from the avenue where I last saw
Roethke, entering the café with Bluestone

and I had nothing to say I had not said
already, the thank yous, the encomiums,
and soon Roethke would die; Bluestone’s
work in film crucial to my dissertation.

But nothing can bring back the woman
I wonder is still alive, whose great line
of poetry has gone with me everywhere
I was alive over the last half-century.

No one knows her name. As the poet
I asked replied, We were so full of life
and did not add, How could anyone be
remembered in Shakespeare’s shadow?

Unless Marlowe were Shakespeare,
unless Sheila or Sarah or Cynthia or
. . . what her line of poetry meant
lies where all of her poem has gone.

I remember she loved The Jew of Malta.
Marlowe’s Faustus for me: why not care
Mephistopholes has all the answers
that will cost you no less than your soul.

Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it . . ."
Time is the prose that writes me down."
He walked into the office. His tennis limp
followed him in. Big bear of a man. Roethke

saw sitting there one to whom he thoughtfully
remarked, "Sometimes you wait half your life"
and I have, you have, we all have, the country
waits still. I was twenty-four the day he died.

Ms. Bishop came up from Rio for a year.
She wrote to Lowell about Roethke’s city.
She walked among the graves at Mukilteo.
She strolled the beach at Alki. She flew home.

The year before she arrived in Seattle to take
Roethke’s chair, the most natural poet of all
the young gifted with a voice they must find
once they found shepherds to tend their lambs

was not waiting but ready to learn what Bishop
taught her, and David Wagoner shepherded
her toward Elegies for the Hot Season,
the first book to engrave her name on its spine.

Brazil was always the beloved country
of the poet of maps of the illumined dark.
Elizabeth! her beloved cried. They embraced
on tarmac, renewing what little time was left.

Every poet dies with time, as do the poems
poets leave unfinished. Or so the odds are.
Lace your drink with literature. Wrap flesh
that’s left around the flesh that loves you.

If this is the midpoint, what will the end
be like, and will the day be warm or cold?
Each morning rise and learn to walk again
as far as the desk where little demons blink

on screen and fingers fit themselves to keys
where once you wrote in longhand and said
all of it aloud as many times as necessary
to memorize what you had not yet written,

it was strange now the way your words went
neither west nor south nor east nor north
but here, where I hear a wispy slip of a lass
say, "Time is the prose that writes me down."

               (for Mike, Joan, Henry, and Sandra)

(8–30 October 2010)

Friday, October 29, 2010

"If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem"

                         with apologies to Faulkner

1. OLD MAN


The old man goes to the boiler room to pick up the time card.
The kid has followed the rules to a T.
The old man feels lucky to have found a good worker.
Even though the kid is reading his way through the Great Books
of his world, the old man has no way to know
the kid prefers not the Western but the Middle World.

And then the fires went out when the storms started,
one per day and always in the afternoon after the sun moved
to let thunder, lightning, then rain
pour through a cloud or two.
Life in the boiler room? It was obsolete by the time the kid
was born. Now technology smooths the wrinkles in your skin.

The old man did not survive the winter without slipping on ice
and falling into a coma.
Hospitals south of here still were warmed by heat
from coal shoveled into the furnace in the boiler room.
The north was always up to date.
It’s not the Middle World but the North where the kid

was educated to seek the sources of the South, his birthplace.
Not the glorious but the bitter South. Where his father was taught
to get jobs by hating. The kid has had the job shoveling coal
so long he’s in charge now, the old man’s foreman
and at such a young age. The hospital is his main charge,
but also the theatre, where the girls need to be warm

when they shed their clothes. And here heat rises to fill
all the rooms, surgery included. Time passes as it did
between his boiler room beginnings and his first meeting
with the old man, who was by then even older,
had more power, money, women, and what else does a man need?
One day the kid was reading the memoirs of Beauregaard Solsby,

hero of the raid on Washington that never quite got off the ground,
lover of belles of the balls and beautiful paramours,
when the old man, this one, made a surprise appearance.
You think the kid’s going to get fired on the spot, don’t you?
You’ve never heard of Beauregaard Solsby, have you?
or his planned raid on the capitol that was not even begun.

Is that why you did not know, being so far north of south?
Women with no brothers here dress to the hilt and still do
the old man in private, where he can take his time.
If I am the kid, and I am, older now but I remember a war
between men and women nobody won
but the storm.

The floods took care of the theaters. And the hospitals.
When the water reached the roof I took my leave of the States.
I had no place to go but Paris. I had been reading the Adventures
of Val Engorged when I heard the thunder, saw the lightning rack
sky’s walls until they echoed. That was when the storms began
to run the world. I had thought men did.

Those who worked
were like women, the books said, and what I saw reflected
all I read and heard. Paris was new, always. You could travel
the world the rest of your days and never find freedom like here.
The rooms were small but their walls very wide.
Let me tell you,

if I’m not the kid anymore, the old man is older.
I’m never going to be him in any other way
but age. Where I go now the rowdy streets are not only dry
but full and I love this life. I can put in a day’s work
anywhere I go, and in the rowdy street we fall in love and go
into rooms where the world reaches from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.

If the time card is growing obsolete, maybe I will soon be punching in
what’s there. It’s all there at quitting time, though it all may be
in my head, who knows but the old man and he’s not to be found
where hours fly by with Baudelaire on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees,
Flaubert at home in his mother’s house by a river beyond Paris,
and both far from where Rimbaud is running guns, or is it poems?

What I had heard was not true, what I wanted to read was hard to find.
Not like days of yore when you didn’t need to worry,
before Freud went out of fashion and Marx was closely read.
Not that I bothered with either, I was too busy writing my own tales
of southern chivalry inherited from pen of The Amazing Don

who even in prison remained free as an eagle in the mind’s sky

as long as he wrote
and wrote
and wrote
and kept the furnace full of coal,
shovel after shovel and with half the day already over
settled down to saddle his horse and swear fealty to a duchess

who stayed poor while he rode off to tame the wilderness
of America as he had civilized Spain, driving heathens
to their doom and attacking an entire town
on his magnificent steed, the mighty brought low by power
always conceived between chapters, before the door opens
and he gets up to shut it tight against the wind.

And that’s the year the kid learns of Paris and Madrid
by being there in his mind, inside the books
like the coal he shoveled flamed up in the boiler room’s furnace.
When the old man wants to have a talk, he calls ahead
and never stays long. He always brings the latest news
of the theatre, the hospital, and where they need heat

today.
Tomorrow
each place will change owners again, and this old man will be
succeeded in turn by an old man who also was once young
and now has power, money, women, any and every thing
a free man could possibly want. He doesn’t need to ask.

In the line of succession one old man is like another,
but an old man is an old man and always wants to have his way
and does.
The kid
takes his time after the day gets under way.
His library moves with his chair. He’s in a new book each day.


2. THE WILD PALMS

Where are we now? you ask. Stick with me,
I’ll set you down safely
among the wild palms where between grief
and nothing I’ll take grief . . .
We’re on the Gulf Coast, of course.
We are still reading Faulkner back into ourselves.

If I knew Russian, though, I could keep my spirits up.
Maybe it’s good to know why a revolution fails
but I mean to go back before it happened,
to the Paris Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
inhabit to do the translations I trust
of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Tolstoy . . .

who saw coming far off the day of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,
Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin . . .
or so I say. It was like Shakespeare
putting all the voices into play
and Homer each time he recited remembering more precisely
how it was.

I’m not trying to repeat the past,
please understand.
I don’t want to make the same mistakes.
I did believe my past might have been different
if my father had not been taught to hate,
if my mother had better books to read . . .

I was glad to be gone once I awakened
from adolescence, its many confusions
somehow solved simply because I could see
the past and how I would have stopped
growing, like Gunter Grass’s Oskar . . .
You age too quickly in a country like his,

you find more ways to die than stay alive,
and because Grass didn’t come clean
he fought with Germany he should return his Nobel Prize
just as Pope Benedict should resign the papacy
because he served with Hitler’s Youth Corps . . .
and meanwhile my sister lives out all that I was spared.

My sister believes I am her problem: I never write
and when she does I turn a blind eye.
She knows I hate phones, at least she loves me that much . . .
Faulkner should have been harder on the despots.
He could have valorized dark skin
and denigrated his own. More truth was left to be told.

Trouble is, you can’t be someone you’re not.
I threw down the shovel and took a book up
–or did I take it down? too many storms lately
to remember, too much water, a surfeit
of tears from the sky welling up from under
the skin, the ecstasy at such a low ebb now

no one gets to do anything but survive,
if that, and men keep doing to women
what they learned too long ago to recall,
but who needs to? it’s in their DNA . . .
All you need do is talk, learn to give love,
trust your tongue has a mind and your skin is kind.

When I take over the boiler-room business,
I’ll hire only those who really want to work
above everything else they could be doing
if they were me. . . . I will look for those
who could never be me.
If they read books, they need not apply.

Don’t you realize you can’t live in this world
without giving in, becoming what the child
in you could never foresee?
And forget memory, that’s what William Blake
advised, though no one really knows
what he meant by the imagination.

So, enough. The stars are shining , afternoon
will soon be gone and we can see all the stars
for ourselves. When clouds go, the moon is visible,
and tomorrow, sunshine. Let the streets dry,
wet sprigs of grass are delicate enough
to lave bare feet, to lie down with your love

and make what you have between you
into someone else, a third who always walks
beside you . . . or will once we make it out
of this wasteland into the promised land
where no one has to shovel coal into fire,
where we will have all day to become who we are.

(7–29 October 2010)

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Beginning the Reading List Found in the Boiler Room

Tell me what happened when the encouragement of years went awry.
All the loving help turned out sour. I had no course but the hard way,
for I had asked and received unknowingly the seven tasks of Hercules.
I thought, I read too much, my father said when he stirred me from sleep.
I lay with too many women even though my mother had warned me . . .
Or I did not do any of these things, my eyes husked over like fresh corn,
the shelled vision Blake could not countenance, counseling, Look through
not with . . . I have imitated too long their sunbathing in their back yard
in London. I have read The Marriage until I am blue between the bones
with Heaven and Hell and how Milton was of the Devil’s Party unaware.
And when it was not Blake, it was John Clare in Northampton Asylum.
I rode up in the elevator, as I had ridden down an elevator in the city.
There was no one with me when I ascended. That is how it is, I am told,
with the ultimate elevator, the one that never stops and goes so very fast
you wonder why and never know. Some say there you find a new Eden,
I am not so sure, it may be a new Hell. Too many insist upon being correct
according to biblical injunction, the many I have fled whose teachings all
ape that voice. I have sinned, they say aloud where once they whispered.
Is that why when Milton was blind he justified the ways of God to men?
He feared for the eternal life of his soul, I’ll bet. What are the odds . . .

Ah yes, Blake stripped naked as did the Mrs. convinced no one could see
over the high hedge, not figuring on the invention of the airplane
or even the rise of the gas balloon, they never lived where Albuquerque
could see you masturbating in the bed left empty when she left you
with her smell clinging to the sheets and you could not even help yourself
you were so harrowed, like a field of sand where weeds were dragged off
behind the tractor you learned to drive before a car, before you could ride
a bicycle and not fall. Then you found your old friend and she arrived
to stay, but how long did you last, her lines filled with the skin of terror
and joy. She knew one from the other. Even now you think of the Roma
family, named for gypsies. They were never gypsy like she who married
you twice. You were always on the road with her. She pulled your wagon.
She was never a horse with blinders, but a proud mare whose stallions
would not leave her. She left them. She had no time for reading. He did
it all. All the dark things she taught him by proxy. All the time she left
to go to war with the future he was reading. Working that way. All day
at the court reporter’s office upstairs with the Willie Nelson woman
from Dallas reading transcripts. At home, such as it was, I cut coupons
from the Journal and Tribune and presented them at the checkout stand.
One checker smiled too long. I asked her when she got off work. She said,

Never. I told her I was on vacation, she should be too. She smiled no more.
Don’t ask me how I got my way. She emerged when she said she would.
I forgot to tell you she smiled then. After that she had her schedule down,
she'd spend the night wherever I asked her to be, she was so idolatrous
of poets. I mapped her skin like new land: that cliche goes nowhere,
as always. Next day the same cost-efficient office. Only when I was outed,
revealing I had married the communist from Latin America, did I end up
living on a street with her who married me again she was so disillusioned
with men who wanted only to sell her body. They, she knew by that time,
had never loved her like they said and she had never loved them that way,
so why not save yourself from the streets and take him with you anywhere
the future was? The woman from Dallas kept climbing the stairs, reading
eight hours or as long as the pages virgin to her eyes lay in front of her.
I took severance pay and skulked the alleys, a big cat with tail, albino free
unlike the black cats who curled their tails around her and wished to give
her children but I knew the secret she could not keep, her deflowered
childhood, the caravan she left too early not to regret her first wedding.
After that, Coleridge, selecting pieces from Dejection: An Ode to the night
wraith Christabel, and a segue to the Ancient Mariner’s wail in Rime,
then Kubla Khan cut short. He drank laudanum, I smoke opium. So what?

A widow said recently I was a true romantic. Then she lost the other love
of her life to cancer. So many had died in such a brief time she had known
would be her lot, she turned to writing short bursts of laughter and sorrow
in cyberspace. Because we live in the future now, the nineteenth century ends
whimpering, the twentieth with so many tasks left undone, like destruction . . .
you know the litany. And here we are back in the boiler room. We who had
thought ourselves immune from labor discover there is nothing but the sweat
of the brow. After all the masses, the sermons to go with the Catholic homilies,
children crying the whole hour, mothers restless to be away from husbands
whose attentions turn to their machines, priests and preachers fully aware
they have the only good jobs in any town up here with all who hunt and fish
for fun, you can’t tell me the caravans from the south don’t have lots of cash
to spend on their cabins winters like summers, it’s a way to flee the family,
better than smiling back at the painted women whose smiles are contagious.
You drive under an overpass and the car in front of you stops to pick up
a woman with a purse who resembles a goddess thrown off her pedestal.
She gets in the car, the car drives off and you keep going, your woman too
much in thought to care any longer, she knows where the woman goes . . .
In the boiler room the rules have changed. God, he’s called, this mere man.
He saves on time cards and machines. He sits there. He never ever leaves.

(5–28 October 2010)
 

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Aberdeen

1.

I don’t have an answer for you, she said through the speaker in the door.
On the other side she could see her dark brown nipples through the sheer
slip she was wearing in the mirror. They’d been closed, like she said, a year
and a half, adding in her best familiar, "boys." She was getting out now
and didn’t want any more stirring the pot occurring, but she didn’t know
where they could go to get what they said they were looking for, a throw
of hips around their own until the love one bed could make would be over
and the speaker’s friend, the callow one, she knew, would be through . . .

We’re here for business, he knew he said, no question, but what an answer:
said she was ready, but she didn’t have a girl in the house working for her
so coming out of retirement would be the personification of her companion
that would never let on she might be as dark brown down there as up here
and that’s way back when this fishing port’s working women still had hair
uncut on their heads and unshaven between their legs. Who knows but there
were other reasons men went to whores to get what ordinarily was never
where you lived to weasel out of those vows you take when you marry . . .

2.

Aberdeen, Washington, was not far from Seattle. Both were fishing towns
though Seattle was a city by then, its population increasing exponentially
daily, monthly, yearly, decadely (like we say now wearing bags of Lipton’s
under hats respectfully never worn until someone said, Let’s have a party
of our own! and said it with alarm mixed with surprise, you know how life is
when it seems nobody’s listening), and the fishing industry is all but ended,
so you can go into rock and roll but forget the sex, and drugs were always
illegal. All the fun had gone south of here to the City not in but by the Sea,

yet in the West, Poe said. Women there bedded you for next to nothing.
Someone still reads that poem when they can’t sleep and nothing’s on TV.
Or they pace all night, the boat going this way and that and how you stay
upright is up to you, you have to think about the words old age can’t see
without glasses you can’t afford on the social security they’ll take away,
their leaders say and will if they can this time: it’ll all go sailing off to Wall
in lower Manhattan where Arabs took down the two symbols of security
one fall day that started all this going to hell by putting a hole in the sky.

3.

You know damn well there are still speakers in doors and women, even men
now the world’s changed for us all, are on the other side of the same door.
You can hear, can’t you? Barely, the voice inside replies. The birds are gulls
still and the totem poles sport birds who were their ancestors before Seattle
became big enough to have garbage dumps. You know in Mexico people
outside the only city that is the world’s largest now live among catacombs
of debris, carving out rooms for themselves where corpses of slain women
are dumped, who sold their bodies to get here and took the only job around.

All this started out as a dithyramb in waking up to what would have been
Tuesday, but days seem all the same now that the whorehouses shut down
in your youth. You don’t so much miss the action as you miss the first thrill
down there, the birds coming in when the boats return and the sky’s so blue
you hear the music in your head turn back in time to saints marching in
a closer walk to thee, O yes the church is there but priests die more than ever,
after all their vows deter them from loving life as much as other men like you
who keep pacing, thinking, and turning what you remember into the big words.

(5 October 2010)

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Living the Life Inside and Beyond the Skin, with Ecstatic Kindness

It so happens
when I wake
I touch life
at its root
and am happy
in retrospect
the body is
not was

In such straits the horses come quickly from the other side of the fence where the grass grows highest when they do not need to stand under the shed and out of the rain even when it snows. The hired man has his eye on the wife in the largest cabin on the downward slope. She makes motions toward returning next summer. He appears pleased since his smile widens like thunder in the distance with rain streaking the horizon. Rainwalking it’s called. He has had no pleasure in many years. He had hoped the coyotes behind the house would thrive, but no, they are dying one after the other from sheer grief, unable to get through the wire surrounding them ever since they were uprooted from the wild and brought here as cubs.

In the middle
of the pasture
she sheds bra
and panties
and her man,
the one with her,
puts her on film
moving slowly

If I touch life at the root I have no other way to love a woman save through the avenues of my eyes. Such is the plaint of the widower. The man of whom I speak is unaware I am taking his measure. He will want to live longer now. He will live on and become a hundred, I hope. The young nurse loves him. He is the love of her life. He is fifty years older. I think a time machine has its uses. He has to have his sex, she says. She makes love on her knees, and he lives once more as he did in the days when he was free of children and too young for old age. He likes to be up early in deep winter to see the snow fall on the weeds that have taken the place of flowers. She will be here soon. He touches himself until he stays touched.

What if I slept
with you there
and did not wake
until my body
flowering
overflowed
flooding our skin
with rivers

You know what it will be like on the other side because you have so many loved ones living there, they must be happy, you never hear from them anymore where once their letters arrived one after the other as quickly as I could write one from this side and expect it to be delivered, and I was never wrong how I knew they would welcome my very ancient words, those one read like a soliloquy, the kind we grew up hearing, the Guild Theatre mausoleum London no longer uses the way the graves support New Orleans by floating on the watery beds where the French sold their citizens to the Spanish who sold themselves, both men and women, to the Americans, who buy and sell the earth once the world approves their loan.

(4 October 2010)

Monday, October 25, 2010

Exercise

Extra ordinary imp erious mys ter y
and the spaces between letters are also words
from another language, the one
Wittgenstein identified
as emblematic of a newly discovered wor ld.

If she dons her underthings she’s ready
to go party and smoke a j and drink vino
& screw, like an ampersand their bodies
in the back bedroom where the host says Go
and you went with him who has the long one.

Nietzsche raving mad on the bluff above
the town full of wolves and claws aloft
with wings in her it ed from the Bijou
we entered under exit lights at each end
when everyone was watching Spellbound

Seven years old and now seventy-one,
this wunderkind has Austria written on
his forehead. The mark of Cain or beast,
who knows trundles the wagon on down
the road. I want to live as long as I have to

to get my work done and being asked, What
is your work? silence follows, better to do
than to say, to show than to reveal, to be
than to have been, that way the war ends
inside the heart and the heart comes home.

So he takes it out and puts it in her, his love.
She lets him. She moves around and around
and he lets her. Pretty soon the trailer park
is ablaze with ecstasy, the residents fast asleep
and Marin on notice: the resurgence on its way

(4 October 2010)

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Business

He said who sent him. She told him to come in.
The room was warm and full of a good smell.
She was wearing a see-through negligee.
Her feet were tucked in fuck-me shoes he’d heard
her man call them, said he’d be turned on pronto,
using the Wild West vernacular of the place.
He knew she was wearing a wig and he knew why.
You didn’t have to tell him everything, not at all.
He grew up on the other side of the tracks,
after all. He asked what he owed her. He knew
she like all of them would want it up front.
She asked what he wanted, he told her the usual,
and she said, Fifty. He put five tens in her hand
and she asked if he’d like a drink or prefer to smoke
a joint, and he took the drink, bourbon and soda.
She excused herself and left him alone with his glass,
closing the bathroom door behind her. She changed
her ankle-length negligee for one barely reaching
her thighs, and returning she got down to work.
He let her bring him up slowly with her mouth.
He made sounds he could not help but make.
When she could feel the sap rising she rolled
over and guided him on top of her and on in.
Soon he was flaccid and dressed and sat a while
at her invitation getting to know her, she him,
though she doubted they would ever do this again.
He was the same as when she met him at the house
where she went now as soon as she could get away.
She kept three tens and he two. He took her in bed
all the ways she loved and next morning added
some she had not yet known but he was nothing
if not versatile. She was pleased she gave pleasure
to one who seemed so appreciative. She took off
her wig, finally. Her man asked her if she knew
how much he loved her and said it all over again
when he realized she was taking a minute to think.
She would do this every night the rest of the month.
He’d sit at the Marriott bar and give her a call
when he’d found a man to send up for her to love.
She went on living the life she had lived before.
Sure, she loved him. She knew he didn’t love her.

(3 October 2010)

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Roots of a Tree Dead at the Top

What dies at the top is already dead at the root.
Little wonder people I meet on the street turn
away when I tell them where I came from,
why I’m here. There is a photograph: mother
leads son by one hand, she’s wearing glasses,
walking Fort Smith’s main street, Garrison,
he’s dressed like a little man, they said then,
it’s a week day and we’re in town to shop
and this guy with a camera caught us on film.
He didn’t know where the one surviving son
of this woman came from, it wasn’t her fault
he had no older brother to hold her other hand.
We both came from down there by the river
originally. You could see it that way. You had
to hear me tell it, now all the others are dead.
I could gussy it up, give it rein, get a laugh
where those before me wept in church aisles
to hear such stuff as your mama used to whore,
your papa had his own, you’ll never know who
you are. All I knew was my family tree died
long before I was born. The poisoned roots
killed my brother Bobby, sure as he was born
and died before the year was out and I, born
three hours before another year ended, lived.
No, it didn’t happen so neatly you could say
we were a doomed family because one root
died and poisoned the tree entirely. No, can’t
you see how a story can sway history one way
–happiness after the many years of struggle–
before time’s passed and the truth comes out.
Walking with my mother along Garrison Street
–or was it, is it, Boulevard?–I had little idea
I would be writing this one day in dour silence.
Yes, dour. I am no happier than you to know
instinct used to be greater than reason but now
hardly exists at all–up here, I mean, where men
and women gather and send old codes across
–across what? the room that is no longer there?
two sides of the same street? from one car
to the other also waiting for the light to change?
–call them ancient habits of the human animal,
they are never for sale save in the past’s brothels,
they are innocent as lambs, courageous as lions,
wise as grandfolks, and they have never sinned.
Still, there are stories my father’s mother’s father
gallivanted along The Row by the Arkansas
where on the other side lies Oklahoma, red earth
it translates. And his mother took up with a man
who rode a horse across country to sell his songs
by passing the hat, growing so famous his name
my grandmother gave my father, and in the South
it’s your first and middle name you are known by.
On the other side, my mother’s mother’s mother
opened an establishment over there, in Oklahoma,
up the river and a little west of here, east of Tulsa,
where nothing was established, it was all on view
but who had time to look with all those lovely
lovelies loving or looking to give love for pleasure.
That’s another story. My father’s mother’s father's
gone to whores when his wife, the Cherokee, is in town,
one much smaller than Fort Smith, her daughter
playing in the plaza while her mother, fully wooed,
lies down in the hotel bed under Manuel Romain
conceiving a son who will be stillborn and she will
bleed to death and they will be buried together
in a common grave, the widower too poor to buy
a second casket let alone pay for the one lowered
into the shoveled grave, he’s given it all to whores.
Or so say the righteous, the irredeemably saved.
Saved from what? from themselves, from us . . .
The street photographer was not called an artist,
he sold his pictures for money. No Polaroids yet,
he took your name and address and printed up
a picture from the negative and send it to you
and you sent him his money back. In those days
people trusted one another it’s no surprise sin
was scarce in the streets of Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Just ask anyone where I come from, they’ll say
in a kind of historical chorus, We have no idea.

(3 October 2010)

Friday, October 22, 2010

Latin

You want to know what language fellatio
and cunnilingus
are. Why am I the only man you asked.
The rest were too busy making love
with you in the ways such words intend.
I can understand. There were women
I had to ask more than once
if they knew the Latin for cocksucking,
cuntlicking, . . . that’s the trouble
being a working stiff. You grow coarse
with vocabulary unbefitting a minor poet
in the making, or so my ambition tells me
makes me rise each day with an erection
and newfound energy at age seventy-one.
In memory I can’t find any place
but yours to go. You live in a house
on a hill called The Citadel. You keep
a small apartment there, the door opens
and closes from early till late at night,
the phone keeps ringing and then stops
and you are alone but with one last stop
to make before sleep. No need to go
into that. You were sad all seven years.
Women came around and asked to stay
"just a little while till I find my own place"
and I said no. There was one from a town
I was from. She took over from the woman
I stole from the mathematician, the one
Betty Ruth knew and called me to ask
if I would file for the divorce. And I did.
And the woman eloped with an old flame
from Honolulu, with or without a mumu,
I did not see her again until one stoplight
in Sunnyside was red and she crossed
the crosswalk holding a little boy’s hand.
She looked up, I stared back. She went on
to the sidewalk and did not look back.
I should have put my head out the window
and asked for my Bible back. You were
in the seat beside me. I didn’t bother.
But I’ve got my chronology all wrong.
It was then you went to The Citadel,
and only later did I find out why
it was not because you needed privacy.
I could tell you stories you never knew
I knew. Who told me? You, sleeping.
That’s not true. I was born in a city
with a reputation. No, not New Orleans
but Fort Smith, I had folks in my past
who frequented The Row by the river.
I knew lots of stories. They talked back
to me when you left for The Citadel
and one man’s long experience selling it.
As it is, we’ve both had two years Latin.
We have no excuse for staying home
save I’m too old to walk far, and you
are not happy staying home. I pick up
Virgil, Catullus, Juvenal and go back
to the boiler room, where I belong.

(3 October 2010)

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Work

I don’t mean to hog the limelight, you too
have your woes. Work is not a man’s world
anymore. You tell me it’s better now than then.
You can choose to work when you’re free, you say.
You had this man, wouldn’t take no for an answer.
You loved him as much as you’d ever loved anyone.
He said he knew a way for you to make money . . .
Dear reader, need I go on? You’ve already sensed
where this is heading. So now we are going back
to the boiler room, the real one not the night club.
I’m growing lazy in my old age, don’t know how long
I can keep rising at dawn, arriving just after sunrise,
working all day and going homeward after it’s dark
outside. It’s dark in here all the time. I wish you too
worked here, you could keep me entertained as long
as the work stayed hard. But no, I am reading books
on the job now, something I used to do for a living
when I was young inspecting corn along the river
valley, drinking home brew with the Swedish farmers
and making a special trip into town to be seen eating
a long lunch. Sometimes my boss came out to find me
and always did, even though I walked to the middle
of the field, sat down and read, then moved on to pick
ears of corn to take back for inspection to see how ripe
and ready to pick they were and going in for a late lunch
with the boss and his colleague, another boss, at the Barn
Burgers and Shakes outside the remote city of Grandview
where my father died many years later, long before you
worked for your man but only after saying he could never
marry you, you were white and his family would never
acceept you. "But learn how to do this and we can be the next
best thing." If you wind up in jail you’ll have yourself
a subject to write about. I was night manager of a motel
during the world’s fair and the woman who worked with me
said, Come down to Lake Union and visit me in my houseboat.
She also lived on Queen Anne Hill. Your mother could see
the ships from there before your father lost his job and had
to move to the remote city where much later you were born.
I knew a girl in your town went to bed to pay for a hit of speed
and got pregnant, had an abortion before Roe, got married
to a poet who started drinking with the people in his seminars
as he glided toward a master’s he thought would get him hired
and she left him but it took weeks, months, years for him to dry
out. You had no bidet, it took you longer to get to sleep nights
you took the night’s take to his place and divided it with him
and he showed you the rest of what he knew one night at a time.
But it isn’t my business. I have taken to reading books between
half hour periods before each blaze begins to die down and here
I am happy, as happy as a man can be lucky to have you for wife.
But don’t get me wrong, I love you more than I’ve loved any lass
who loves me back and well after she’s prayed to God to take
her needs away and give her the strength to be chaste and happy
sleeping in a separate bed on another floor but giving me fellatio.

(2 October 2010)

Snake Days

Carimba and brilliance of nostrums
pealing from the altar, the dias of hate
in the old days, when wahine arrived
with their crimes written in the holy
doublespeak of the future we all fear
with the beloved glistening in our arms.
You do not need to hear this rant again
but you listen until more fails to arrive
and so arise in silence looking around
to see who’s looking before you stroll
nonchalantly back to the still-open door
awaiting the arrival of the wind and rain
and here they are, dressed in dark clouds
and trees bowing under the sky’s weight.

You were awaiting the arrival of snakes.
They curl and strike or spit and slither
away. There are no snakes on this island.
So they say, the brilliant ones, tongues
curled to fit their shining teeth and lips
pursed with lovingness. Or so they say.

These days that arrived with missionaries
will never leave. We must accommodate
the heathens. They have no shame. Love
is a word in their minds but unembodied.
I wish I could tell you all they came for,
but how would I know, I who welcomed

no one. The dark-souled one. The one
who was already two, then three, whose
woman was with child once more
and trees bending now with weight
of bounty, soft and lush as her body
and fields always waiting for harvest.

Then the snakes appeared on schedule.
The prophecy was fulfilled and hatred
invaded the sea-crowded earth we had
adored as though we were its children.

(2 October 2010)

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Boiler Room

Not the one I work in, it opens at midnight
and the horns come to play with the reeds.
And we dance until we are wet with desire.
I put my hands all over her and she is naked
everywhere they go. The crowd presses in
to consume our space and we press back,
nakedly. You see, this is fun, and she is hot
for some sex after her legs are loose enough
to lie down and let me in. I am full of what
she wants. Working and nothing but work
will do that to you: make you horny, make
you glad to see her with her bare legs under
her skirt twirling as she moves with the beat.
The horns keep going and so do the reeds.
They stay on the bandstand as long as night
wears on. At dawn we cup our bodies’ cool
resplendent flesh and go down the street
looking for home, finding it where we lie
in shadows, the sun already starting to rise
and voices all around us asking who we are.

(2 October 2010)

Monday, October 18, 2010

In the Lap of Summer

There is more to life than labor,
there is the soul’s need to be a child in old age,
beginning with the wiping of the father’s brow
then the mother’s
as they die from so long attending the fields
and the shadows of the house
and there is no end but death, no, nor for any
one alone does the long cloud arrive.

I put away my shovel when I reached this age.
I closed the door of the boiler room
and returned to the cafeteria and my book of days.
I had saved all there was to save.
The sweat had poured, the body was dry now.
The aches, the pains, the lingering of them.
So this is what those who begat me suffered
gladly. And I was among the lucky.

Here I am, free of the curse of the brow.
I look under her shadow where her breasts fall.
I see where he goes and his hands tremble
for no reason. A child follows behind them.
The food waits under glass. It was meant
to be taken in small bites, not the raven’s
purchase that rends its prey, rather the young,
the loving, the immaculate care the body

gives to a body not its own but of its own flesh.
Not that the nights are over
even if days come easier on the body’s weight,
no, there is the love the thighs encourage,
with which the loins spring forth,
and I do not know if there will be time
remaining to recall the light in her light step,
how he glided with her to the long, wide bed.

Now it’s time. The night has moon to shine
and does, the deer come to the empty streets,
the birds wake when dawn gathers the light,
the streets swept, water drying, the echoing
of voices and footsteps and doors beginning
to open and close, rise and fall, even laughter
among the morning dazed, the jabbering mad,
perhaps words too–these?–to carry them along.

That is when the door is closed to the boiler room.
The boss is back. He was the one you could not see.
He would not look you in the eye. He says nothing
even now. And there is nothing of him to be seen.
You punch in, pick up your shovel, open the door
and feel the great heat enter the pores of flesh
that also open as you scoop and swing the coal
that keeps us warm here, in the lap of summer.

(1 October 2010)

Sunday, October 17, 2010

The First and Last Job

I’m completely yours.
I left my shovel home
but I’ll use yours.
I won’t take any time
to eat lunch
or take a break, I’m
completely happy
having a job at all.

Went downstairs after punching
the time card.
Took off my shirt and vest
undershirt,
my socks, my drawers,
slipped back into pants
and Go-Aheads
and got down to work.

The morning goes fast
by the time a full day is over.
The afternoon is the hardest.
You have to think here
before you scoop and throw
the coal into the boiler.
You have to learn to step back
when the fire flares up.

I want to be the best
I can be.
I want to do this for a living.
It’s good for the body
and pays the bills.
I never planned to do
what I’m doing,
but it’s a job and pays well.

The poetry is in the fire.
The flame is mixed with black
coals and is the color
of Stendhal’s greatest novel
Le Rouge et le noir.

I read it once in late autumn
in Seattle.
Everyone in the city was there.

I mean they were Julien Sorel
and Company:
the wife who mistress’d him,
her husband, the fool,
the priests, the jailers,
the soldiers, the judges,
the hangman, they stopped by
to ask what I was reading.

You learn how to do this first
on a ship. That’s why
young men go off to sea very early,
they want the experience
they need, most of them, those
ambitious ones
who have their eye on the future.
They learn how to shovel fast.

The ship cuts through waves
in storms, makes good time
in calmer weather,
and I love to feel the roll
when I’m on deck.
It’s what I miss down here,
that shifting footwork you need
to practice to stay upright.

The boiler room away from
the ship, then, is the place
I hunted for work because
Faulkner was a night watchman
when he couldn’t find work
in a brothel.
Like Melville I was a sailor
just to kiss dry land.

This is called, as you can see,
Life in the Boiler Room

but it’s not about me.
It takes up the ordinary and
puts you there. Could be you
digging into the coal pile,
scooping up a shovelful
and arcing it into the boiler

where it gives another heartbeat
of the beast this building is,
no more, no less than the ship.
Melville set pins in a bowling alley
in Honolulu.
He didn’t stay on dry land long.
He loved the island women.
They loved the white man he was.

I’m straying from my work.
I am getting weary, must go home
directly after punching out,
pass by the saloon
and the taxi dancers’ ballroom
heading home to feed my animal
with her mouth and pussy cat,
and stay in bed to cash in

the sleep I earned.
I think about vacation time
accrued if I don’t take time
to stay home.
I’ll go to work sick if I have to.
I need the long journeys
somewhere I’ve never been,
Tahiti, say, or Natchez, Mississippi.

And when I retire I will have
enough laid by to keep warm
even in winter.
There are others who will freeze,
I fear, they are too prodigal
and easy on themselves.
I keep remembering Captain Bligh
like I was Fletcher Christian.

The girls fall into my wahine arms.
They give me pleasure and keep
a little for themselves.
The men smile and go about
their business, what
I will never know. That world
is theirs. The one I live in is mine.
I have the right there to work

for a living.
I want to say
thank you to someone.
The boss is never around.
He must think I can do the work
well by now.
The boiler keeps burning,
I’m not the only one here.

(30 September 2010)

Saturday, October 16, 2010

A Day in the Boiler Room

You know the days are growing short by how little you see inside,
the sun outside nudging aside the clouds inside, how much light
survives divided by the number of dreams you cannot remember,
the spurious sleep, the moment unprepared for, the wild clamber
to the top of the rock where the goats look up, their legs restless
to climb higher but the sea washes against rock and it all erodes.


Machines fail. A being has been, we say. Burial is more humane,
I am told, than the furnace. How do we know? How do you know
it is not? Our human ways conflict, the power rush, the long turn
over, the short sprint now, breath growing shorter, harder to draw,
. . . The word is out: It’s over, the hope, the glory, the American
feeling. Now we settle down to our long night of going backward.


Yet reason keeps on making sense by multiplying the brain waves
intersecting with flesh and bones down there walking a body home.
I would understand, the philosopher says, what is good by goodness
if evil were absent, and that being not the case I gauge evil by loss.
The philosopher walks away to think through a thought like this
and comes back chortling, believing he’s broken through, he’s free


to keep going out and coming back, to making love and dying little
deaths one at a time and with short spaces between bodies touching
and parting and joining again only to spend themselves together,
or do they spin until they stop? Is that what making love was here?
where small creatures appeared near the end of a year to languish
never, so alive were they, the little storms in their body’s cells . . .


All this I was remembering before I ended my shift with a shovel
in the boiler room under the ground floor where all the footfalls
occur all day and all those with white shirts and ties stay above
the fray. I keep motioning to the shadows to spell me, my name
begins disappearing into the mist of sweat and grime. I’m blind
with love. I’m happy to have no appearances to salvage from loss.


If the machine failed it was only to give my heart fresh quickening.
If the seagoat ended on top it was only because rain was turning
rock slick, hooves sliding akimbo, time to stop and breathe the air
for breath itself. And if there were no sky there would be no rain.
And if there were no rain, there would be no water to sate a thirst
impossible to quench forever. And if I could not write what’s to read?


Don’t Faulkner me my Melville. I don’t need a grass-growing mood.
I have Hawthornes everywhere to dedicate my master work to, no
need to keep on incessantly attempting to fill the emptiness of words
when so many speak so well and even learn to think words through.
Else the poet make his story’s stand a stalemate, a moment of crisis
Aristotle may have understood but not Moby Dick or Light in August.

In the car the motor propels us into a heaven of human imagination
where gas is free and speed no factor in how fast we get from here
to there. In the room where we end memory of life in the boiler room
disappears, the shovel leans against one wall, the furnace is consumed
from the outside in, and I have cautioned those I know to go their own
way out or in, or stay and learn to put in a day of work the long way.


(30 September 2010)

Coming Up on Quitting Time

All day at the boiler room door, dreaming fishing must follow,
after the shovelful I’m sending through the door’s fiery maw.
The place at the gravel pit? No, the pond stocked with rainbows.
Use a bluetail fly, there are no worms this time of year, the lure
outwaits any lack of hunger. But I’m still shoveling at the door,
which never opens. You can tell by the absence of everything.
Oxygen. Perfume. Smooth skin’s feel. The opening and closing
of whatever is missing here, which will be found above water
where the red haired high school friend waits with her Healey
running, wondering if I’m coming, wondering if I have money,
hoping I’m thirsty not only for the Paisano but for her body–
or so I think, thinking nothing is to be thought, neither Fear
or Trembling nor its sequel, The Sickness unto Death. Who is
reading Wittgenstein now that Kierkegaard has outlived him.
That’s no question any laborer in the boiling rooms of world
renown would ask. A new language posits a new world. Or does
the proposition in German go the other way around? Most likely,
I lost the verb opening the open mouth of the fire without a word.


(30 September 2010)

Friday, October 15, 2010

Off the Road

Side trips, said Lenore, take you off the road
and you end up nowhere you said you were
going when you left me with my nightgown
around my neck and my pussy wet with heat
and frost on the windows, the cats on the bed,
maybe this, maybe that, but silence for certain.


Lenore smoked another Kool. She had a jones
for men who worked with their hands, she liked
to smile. Driving up the perilous mountain path,
eyes shifting from side to side searching for deer,
staring hard into the dark–moonless blackness–
turning into the curve and correcting in time


to stay on asphalt, a man must have his woman
between two arms and two legs and let go . . .
Lenore, you were straight from Poe. Wet rose
of time to be remembered in a solitude of dust
curling in motes up the laddered air in daylight
and with one hand on the door you lean out


breathe in take a step, pitch forward, but catch
your body before it falls the rest of the way
down, and here come the men just in time
with beer and cigarettes and conversation
when the main man, not me or you or any one
she knows, but the one she loves, arrives home.


Lenore, you love the working class, literally.
You could have sold yourself for good money.
Lenore, you had a future and said, Fuck it!
I’m going to do what I want, nobody can stop
me, they all should give up before they start
in on me telling me how to live and how to die.


Up the road to the top, then. And off the road
to reach the house in the woods where Lenore
never left, she had so many beaus, and a friend
who came mornings to act the part of mother.
She leaned over to kiss Lenore on her dry lips,
gussied up the house, talked a while, then left.


Lenore, Lenore, Lenore! Your body was dead
but your words brought them all back to life,
the men of no home, the woman who mothered
and fathered all at once your childhood’s end,
your womanly motherless beginnings without
end . . .
and I have said of her what I have said.

(29 September 2010)

Thursday, October 14, 2010

THE OLD MAN & A REVISION OF "THE OLD MAN"

THE OLD MAN

The old man goes to the boiler room to pick up the time card.
The kid has followed the rules to a T.
The old man is proud to have been so lucky to find a good worker.
The kid is reading his way through the Great Books
of his world. The old man has no way to know
the kid prefers not the Western but the Middle World.


And then the fires went out when the storms started, one a day
and always in the afternoon after the sun moved over
to let them pour through a cloud or two.
Why worry about life in the boiler room? It was obsolete
when you were born. Now as long as life remains
technology will smooth the wrinkles in your skin.


The old man did not survive the winter. He slipped on ice and fell
into a coma. Hospitals south of here still were warmed
by heat from the coal shoveled into the boiler.
The north was always up to date.
And it wasn’t the Middle World the kid was educated in
but the North when he sought the sources of the South.


The South that was his birthplace. Not the glorious but the bitter
South. Where his father was taught to hate
to get a job. The kid was in charge now, and at such a young age.
The hospital was his main charge, but also the theater,
where the girls needed to be warm when they shed their clothes.
Here heat rose through all the rooms, surgery included.


Then he met the old man. Again. This time he was even older,
he had more power, money, women, and what else did a man need?
One day the kid was reading the memoirs of Beauregard Solsby,
hero of the raid on Washington that never quite got off the ground,
lover of belles of the ball and beautiful paramours,
when the old man, this one, made a surprise appearance.


You think the kid’s going to get fired on the spot, don’t you?
You’ve never heard of Beauregard Solsby
or his planned raid on the capitol even if it was never begun,
have you? Did you know we are south of where you are?
Women not in brothers* here dress to the hilt and still do
the old man in private, where he can take his time.


You see, I’m that kid. I may be older now but I remember the war
between men and women that nobody won. The storm won.
The floods took care of the theaters. The hospitals too.
I took my leave of the States when the water reached the roof.
I had no place to go save Paris. I had been reading the Adventures
of Val Engorged when I heard the thunder, saw the lightning rack


sky’s walls until they echoed. That was when the storms began
to run the world. I had thought men did. Those who worked
were like women, the books said, and what I saw reflected
all I read and heard. Paris was new, always. A guy could
travel around the world the rest of his life and never find
freedom like here. The rooms were small but their walls wide.


Let me tell you, I’m not the kid anymore. The old man
is the old man. I’m never going to be him except in age.
The rowdy streets are where I go. They are dry and full again
and I love the life I live where I can put in a hard day’s work
and fall in love afterwards all over again and in a room
where the world reaches from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.


If the time card is obsolete, maybe I am too. I punch in
what’s there. It’s still there at quitting time, though it all
may be in my head, who knows but the old man
and he’s not to be found while the hours fly by and I read
of Baudelaire on the Champs-Elysees, Flaubert at home
in his mother’s house, Rimbaud running guns or is it poems?


What I had heard was not true. What I read was hard to find.
But those were the days when you didn’t need to hide.
Before Freud went out of fashion. When Marx was still read.
Not that I bothered with either, I was reading what I wrote,
tales of southern chivalry inherited from The Amazing Donwho even in prison remained free as an eagle in the mind’s sky


as long as he wrote
and wrote
and wrote
and kept the boiler full of coal,
shovelful after shovelful and with half the day already gone
settled down to saddle his horse and swear fealty to a duchess


who stayed poor while he rode off to tame the wilderness
of America as he had civilized Spain, driving heathens
to their doom and charging an entire town
on his magnificent steed, the mighty brought low by power
always conceived between chapters, before the door opens
and he gets up to shut it tight against the wind.


And that’s the year the kid learned about Paris and Madrid
by going there in his mind, by being inside the books
like the coal he shoveled took flame inside the boiler.
When the old man wanted to have a talk, he called ahead.
The old man didn’t stay long. He always brought the news
about the theater, the hospital, and where they needed heat


today.
Tomorrow
each place will change owners again, and this old man will be
succeeded in turn by an old man who also was once young
and now has power, money, women, any and every thing
a free man could possibly want. He doesn’t need to ask.


In the line of succession one old man is like another,
but an old man is an old man and always wants to have his way
and does.
The kid
takes his time after the day gets under way.
His library moves with his bed. He’s in a new book each day.

 A REVISION OF "THE OLD MAN"

That’s fine, I’ll set you straight then,
I replied. I wish I knew how to read Russian,
I could keep my spirits up. It’s always good
to know what it’s like after a revolution fails
to be certain why.
I’ve had to go back before it happened
just so I could trust the translations.
Before Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin
and Gorbachev, back when Dostoevsky
and Tolstoy could see it coming,
or so I say. It was like Shakespeare
putting all the voices into play
and Homer telling how it was so he could remember
even better the next time.

Anyway I wasn’t trying to repeat the past
or make the same mistakes. I did believe the past
might have been different if my father
had not been taught to hate,
if my mother had better books to read . . .
I was glad to be gone once I awakened
to adolescence, its many confusions
somehow solved simply because I could see
the past and how I would have stopped
growing like Gunter Grass’s Oskar . . .
Talk about Grass and immediately all you hear
is how he should give back his Nobel Prize
because he didn’t come clean with the Nazi stuff.

You grow up in a country like he did
there are more ways to die than to stay alive.
My sister is living out everything I was glad
to be spared. I am, of course, her problem,
so much so I never write and when she does
I turn a blind eye. She knows I hate phones,
at least she loves me that much . . .
I guess the trouble all began with Faulkner.
He could have been harder on the despots.
He could have valorized dark skin
and denigrated his own.
Trouble is, you can’t be someone you’re not.
Why I fucked up the original draft
of "The Old Man" . . .

It was the word *brothers in the fifth line
of the sixth stanza that rang the alarm.
I threw down the shovel and took a book up
–or was it down? too many storms lately
to remember, too much water, a surfeit
of tears from the sky welling up from under
the skin, the ecstasy at such a low ebb now
no one gets to do anything but survive,
if that, and men keep doing to women
what they learned too long ago to remember,
but they don’t need to now, it’s in their DNA,
don’t you know? I know how to reply,
how to give love. What else do I need
but a tongue with a mind and skin to be kind?

I guess I wanted the old man dead
so I did him in.
You would think so, the way I act,
taking over the boiler-room business,
hiring only those who really want to work
above everything they could be doing
if they were me . . . I look for those
who could never be me.
Don’t you realize you can’t live in this world
without giving in, becoming what the child
in you could never foresee?
And forget memory, that’s what William Blake
advised, though no one really knows
that he meant by recalling the imagination.

So, enough. The stars are shining , afternoon
will soon be gone and we can see them
for ourselves, or is it themselves?
The moon will be visible if we’re fortunate
to have fewer clouds succeed the sunshine
than lately. Let the streets dry,
wet sprigs of grass are delicate enough
to lave bare feet, to lie down with your love
and make what you have between you
into someone else, a third who always walks
beside you . . . or will once we make it out
of this wasteland into the promised land
where no one has to shovel coal into fire,
where we will have all day to become who we are.

(7 October 2010)

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

APARTMENT HOUSE MANAGER

Stephanie lived across the plaza
with her two sons.
Gwen Sun, who lived next door,
pointed to her, said
we grow hornier as we grow older.
Stephanie recalled Sandy years before
in L.A.; a tryst that went nowhere,
I was that innocent.

Gwen said in her Taiwan way,
You don’t have to marry her!
We chortled. She knew being married
and having one daughter
didn’t mean she couldn’t fool around
in secret. I had dreamed the name
Gwen Sun next day emblazoned
in characters I could read in the dream.

I wrote all night once the phone shut up.
I was married, but few knew
she didn’t live with me now.
Even so, we had known
each other so long
she came around all the time.
She said she loved me still
even though she was fucking another.

I was tossing a salad one night
when Stephanie came by to say
she’d locked herself out
and hoped the manager had a key.
Come back and share some salad,
I said. She went to her place
and soon brought back the key.
I was watching TV:

A Star Is Born,
Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson
in the remake of remakes,
where the guy’s the star at the start
and in the end she’s the star
and he’s a has-been.
Years before in Seattle we saw it
in a theater and never forgot.

Stephanie put her legs up
stretching her short shorts,
blonde (all over?) with nails painted red;
I, always a sucker for such womanly flair,
Albuquerque by now evolved from L.A.–
but saying her sons had been awake
when she left, she got up to go,
and I said, Come back some time.

Not long after I heard the daytime
maintenance man stayed the night with her.
My, my, how a body does get around . . .
And whose busybody business was it?
Or did the gent crow like a fighting cock?
But why not trust
the blessings of love had returned to her life:
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, . . .

(6 October 2010)

BEGINNING THE READING LIST FOUND IN THE BOILER ROOM

Tell me what happened when the encouragement of years went awry.
All the loving help turned out sour. I had no course but the hard way,
for I had asked and received unknowingly the seven tasks of Hercules.
I thought, I read too much, my father said when he stirred me out of sleep.
I lay with too many women even though my mother had warned me . . .
Or I did not do any of these things, my eyes husked over like fresh corn,
the shelled vision Blake could not countenance, counseling, Look through
not with . . . I have imitated too long their sunbathing in their back yard
in London. I have read The Marriage until I am blue between the bones
with Heaven and Hell and how Milton was of the Devil’s Party unawares.
And when it was not Blake, it was John Clare in Northampton Asylum.
I rode up in the elevator, as I had ridden down an elevator in the city.
There was no one with me when I ascended. That is how it is, I am told,
with the ultimate elevator, the one that never stops and goes so very fast
you wonder why and never know. Some say you find a new Eden there,
I am not so sure it is not a new Hell. Too many insist upon being correct
according to biblical injunction, so many I have fled from all teachings
in that voice. I have sinned, they say aloud where once they whispered.
Is that why when Milton was blind he justified the ways of God to men?
He feared for the eternal life of his soul, I’ll bet. What are the odds . . .

Ah yes, he stripped naked as did the Mrs. convinced no one could see
over the high hedge, not figuring on the invention of the airplane
or even the rise of the gas balloon, they never lived where Albuquerque
could see you masturbating in the bed left empty when she left you
with her smell clinging to the sheets and you could not even help yourself
you were so harrowed, like a field of sand where weeds were dragged off
behind the tractor you learned to drive before a car, before you could ride
a bicycle and not fall. Then you found your old friend and she arrived
to stay, but how long did you last, her lines filled with the skin of terror
and joy. She knew one from the other. Even now you think of the Roma
family, named for gypsies. They were never gypsy like she who married
you twice. You were always on the road with her. She pulled your wagon.
She was never a horse with blinders, but a proud mare whose stallions
would not leave her. She left them. She had no time for reading. He did
it all. All the dark things she taught him by proxy. All the time she left
to go to war with the future he was reading. Working that way. All day
at the court attorney’s office upstairs with the Willie Nelson woman
from Dallas reading transcripts. At home, such as it was, I cut coupons
from the Journal and Tribune and presented them at the checkout stand.
One woman smiled too long. I asked her when she got off work. She said,

Never. I told her I was on vacation, she should be too. She smiled no more.
Don’t ask me how I got my way. She emerged when she said she would.
I forgot to tell you she smiled then. After that she had her schedule down,
she'd spend the night wherever I asked her to be, she was so idolatrous
of poets. I mapped her skin like new land: that cliche goes nowhere,
as always. Next day the same cost-efficient office. Only when I was outed,
revealing I had married the communist from Latin America, did I end up
living on a street with her who married me again she was so disillusioned
with men who wanted only to sell her body. They, she knew by that time,
had never loved her like they said and she had never loved them that way,
so why not save yourself from the streets and take him with you anywhere
the future was? The woman from Dallas kept climbing the stairs, reading
eight hours or as long as the pages virgin to her eyes lay in front of her.
I took severance pay and skulked the alleys, a big cat with tail, albino free
unlike the black cats who curled their tails around her and wished to give
her children but I knew the secret she could not keep, her deflowered
childhood, the caravan she left too early not to regret her first wedding.
After that, Coleridge, selecting pieces like Dejection: An Ode, the one
about the night wraith Christabel, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
ending with Kubla Khan. I smoked opium, he drank laudanum. So what?

A widow said recently I was a true romantic. Then she lost the other love
of her life to cancer. So many had died in such a short time she had known
would be her lot, she turned to writing short bursts of laughter and sorrow
in cyberspace. Because we live in the future, the nineteenth century ends
whimpering, the twentieth with so many tasks left to do, like destruction,
you know the litany. Here we are, back in the boiler room. We who had
thought ourselves immune from labor know there's nothing but the sweat
of the brow. After the masses, the sermons to go with Catholic homilies,
children crying the whole hour, mothers restless to be away from husbands
whose attentions turn to their machines, priests and preachers fully aware
they have the only good jobs in any town here with all who hunt and fish
for fun, you can’t tell me caravans from the south don’t have lots of cash
to spend on their cabins winters like summers, it’s a way to flee the family,
better than smiling back at a painted woman whose smiles are contagious.
You drive under an overpass and the car in front of you stops to pick up
a woman with a purse who resembles a goddess thrown off her pedestal.

She gets in the car, the car drives off and you keep going, your woman too
much in thought to care anymore, she knows where the woman goes . . .
In the boiler room the rules are changed. God, he’s called, this mere man.
He saves on time cards and machines. He sits there. He never ever leaves.

(5 October 2010)

Monday, October 4, 2010

Floyce Alexander

OFF THE ROAD

Side trips, said Lenore, take you off the road
and you end up nowhere you said you were
going when you left me with my nightgown
around my neck and my pussy wet with heat
and frost on the windows, the cats on the bed,
maybe this, maybe that, but silence for certain.

Lenore smoked another Kool. She had a jones
for men who worked with their hands, she liked
to smile. Driving up the perilous mountain path,
eyes shifting from side to side searching for deer,
staring hard into the dark–moonless blackness–
turning into the curve and correcting in time

to stay on asphalt, a man must have his woman
between two arms and two legs and let go . . .
Lenore, you were straight from Poe. Wet rose
of time to be remembered in a solitude of dust
curling in motes up the laddered air in daylight
and with one hand on the door you lean out

breathe in take a step, pitch forward, but catch
your body before it falls the rest of the way
down, and here come the men just in time
with beer and cigarettes and conversation
when the main man, not me or you or any one
she knows, but the one she loves, arrives home.

Lenore, you love the working class, literally.
You could have sold yourself for good money.
Lenore, you had a future and said, Fuck it!
I’m going to do what I want, nobody can stop
me, they all should give up before they start
in on me telling me how to live and how to die.

Up the road to the top, then. And off the road
to reach the house in the woods where Lenore
never left, she had so many beaus, and a friend
who came mornings to act the part of mother.
She leaned over to kiss Lenore on her dry lips,
gussied up the house, talked a while, then left.

Lenore, Lenore, Lenore! Your body was dead
but your words brought them all back to life,
the men of no home, the woman who mothered
and fathered all at once your childhood’s end,
your womanly motherless beginnings without
end . . .
and I have said of her what I have said.


COMING UP ON QUITTING TIME

All day at the boiler room door, dreaming fishing must follow,
after the shovelful I’m sending through the door’s fiery maw.
The place at the gravel pit? No, the pond stocked with rainbows.
Use a bluetail fly, there are no worms this time of year, the lure
outwaits any lack of hunger. But I’m still shoveling at the door,
which never opens. You can tell by the absence of everything.
Oxygen. Perfume. Smooth skin’s feel. The opening and closing
of whatever is missing here, which will be found above water
where the red haired high school friend waits with her Healey
running, wondering if I’m coming, wondering if I have money,
hoping I’m thirsty not only for the Paisano but for her body–
or so I think, thinking nothing is to be thought, neither Fear

or Trembling nor its sequel, The Sickness unto Death. Who is
reading Wittgenstein now that Kierkegaard has outlived him.
That’s no question any laborer in the boiling rooms of world
renown would ask. A new language posits a new world. Or does
the proposition in German go the other way around? Most likely,
I lost the verb opening the open mouth of the fire without a word.


A DAY IN THE BOILER ROOM

You know the days are growing short by how little you see inside,
the sun outside nudging aside the clouds inside, how much light
survives divided by the number of dreams you cannot remember,
the spurious sleep, the moment unprepared for, the wild clamber
to the top of the rock where the goats look up, their legs restless
to climb higher but the sea washes against rock and it all erodes.

Machines fail. A being has been, we say. Burial is more humane,
I am told, than the furnace. How do we know? How do you know
it is not? Our human ways conflict, the power rush, the long turn
over, the short sprint now, breath growing shorter, harder to draw,
. . . The word is out: It’s over, the hope, the glory, the American
feeling. Now we settle down to our long night of going backward.

Yet reason keeps on making sense by multiplying the brain waves
intersecting with flesh and bones down there walking a body home.
I would understand, the philosopher says, what is good by goodness
if evil were absent, and that being not the case I gauge evil by loss.
The philosopher walks away to think through a thought like this
and comes back chortling, believing he’s broken through, he’s free

to keep going out and coming back, to making love and dying little
deaths one at a time and with short spaces between bodies touching
and parting and joining again only to spend themselves together,
or do they spin until they stop? Is that what making love was here?
where small creatures appeared near the end of a year to languish
never, so alive were they, the little storms in their body’s cells . . .

All this I was remembering before I ended my shift with a shovel
in the boiler room under the ground floor where all the footfalls
occur all day and all those with white shirts and ties stay above
the fray. I keep motioning to the shadows to spell me, my name
begins disappearing into the mist of sweat and grime. I’m blind
with love. I’m happy to have no appearances to salvage from loss.

If the machine failed it was only to give my heart fresh quickening.
If the seagoat ended on top it was only because rain was turning
rock slick, hooves sliding akimbo, time to stop and breathe the air
for breath itself. And if there were no sky there would be no rain.
And if there were no rain, there would be no water to sate a thirst
impossible to quench forever. And if I could not write what’s to read?

Don’t Faulkner me my Melville. I don’t need a grass-growing mood.
I have Hawthornes everywhere to dedicate my master work to, no
need to keep on incessantly attempting to fill the emptiness of words
when so many speak so well and even learn to think words through.
Else the poet make his story’s stand a stalemate, a moment of crisis
Aristotle may have understood but not Moby Dick or Light in August.

In the car the motor propels us into a heaven of human imagination
where gas is free and speed no factor in how fast we get from here
to there. In the room where we end memory of life in the boiler room
disappears, the shovel leans against one wall, the furnace is consumed
from the outside in, and I have cautioned those I know to go their own
way out or in, or stay and learn to put in a day of work the long way.


THE FIRST AND LAST JOB

I’m completely yours.
I left my shovel home
but I’ll use yours.
I won’t take any time
to eat lunch
or take a break, I’m
completely happy
having a job at all.

Went downstairs after punching
the time card.
Took off my shirt and vest
undershirt,
my socks, my drawers,
slipped back into pants
and Go-Aheads
and got down to work.

The morning goes fast
by the time a full day is over.
The afternoon is the hardest.
You have to think here
before you scoop and throw
the coal into the boiler.
You have to learn to step back
when the fire flares up.

I want to be the best
I can be.
I want to do this for a living.
It’s good for the body
and pays the bills.
I never planned to do
what I’m doing,
but it’s a job and pays well.

The poetry is in the fire.
The flame is mixed with black
coals and is the color
of Stendhal’s greatest novel
Le Rouge et le noir.

I read it once in late autumn
in Seattle.
Everyone in the city was there.

I mean they were Julian
and company.
The wife who mistress’d him,
her husband, the fool,
the priests, the jailers,
the soldiers, the judges,
the hangman, they stopped by
to ask what I was reading.

You learn how to do this first
on a ship. That’s why
young men go off to sea very early,
they want the experience
they need, most of them, those
ambitious ones
who have their eye on the future.
They learn how to shovel fast.

The ship cuts through waves
in storms, makes good time
in calmer weather,
and I love to feel the roll
when I’m on deck.
It’s what I miss down here,
that shifting footwork you need
to practice to stay upright.

The boiler room away from
the ship, then, is the place
I hunted for work because
Faulkner was a night watchman
when he couldn’t find work
in a brothel.
Like Melville I was a sailor
just to kiss dry land.

This is called, as you can see,
Life in the Boiler Room

but it’s not about me.
It takes up the ordinary and
puts you there. Could be you
digging into the coal pile,
scooping up a shovelful
and arcing it into the boiler

where it gives another heartbeat
of the beast this building is,
no more, no less than the ship.
Melville set pins in a bowling alley
in Honolulu.
He didn’t stay on dry land long.
He loved the island women.
They loved the white man he was.

I’m straying from my work.
I am getting weary, must go home
directly after punching out,
pass by the saloon
and the taxi dancers’ ballroom
heading home to feed my animal
with her mouth and pussy cat,
and stay in bed to cash in

the sleep I earned.
I think about vacation time
accrued if I don’t take time
to stay home.
I’ll go to work sick if I have to.
I need the long journeys
somewhere I’ve never been,
Tahiti, say, or Natchez, Mississippi.

And when I retire I will have
enough laid by to keep warm
even in winter.
There are others who will freeze,
I fear, they are too prodigal
and easy on themselves.
I keep remembering Captain Bligh
like I was Fletcher Christian.

The girls fall into my wahine arms.
They give me pleasure and keep
a little for themselves.
The men smile and go about
their business, what
I will never know. That world
is theirs. The one I live in is mine.
I have the right there to work

for a living.
I want to say
thank you to someone.
The boss is never around.
He must think I can do the work
well by now.
The boiler keeps burning,
I’m not the only one here.


IN THE LAP OF SUMMER

There is more to life than labor,
there is the soul’s need to be a child in old age,
beginning with the wiping of the father’s brow
then the mother’s
as they die from so long attending the fields
and the shadows of the house
where there is no end but death, no, nor for any
one alone does the long cloud arrive.

I put away my shovel when I reached this age.
I closed the door of the boiler room
and returned to the cafeteria and my book of days.
I had saved all there was to save.
The sweat had poured, the body was dry now.
The aches, the pains, the lingering of them.
So this is what those who begat me suffered
gladly. And I was among the lucky.

Here I am, free of the curse of the brow.
I look under her shadow where her breasts fall.
I see where he goes and his hands tremble
for no reason. A child follows behind them.
The food waits under glass. It was meant
to be taken in small bites, not the raven’s
purchase that rends its prey, rather the young,
the loving, the immaculate care the body

gives to a body not its own but of its own flesh.
Not that the nights are over
even if days come easier on the body’s weight,
no, there is the love the thighs encourage,
with which the loins spring forth,
and I do not know if there will be time
remaining to recall the light in her light step,
how he glided with her to the long, wide bed.

Now it’s time. The night has moon to shine
and does, the deer come to the empty streets,
the birds wake when dawn gathers the light,
the streets swept, water drying, the echoing
of voices and footsteps and doors beginning
to open and close, rise and fall, even laughter
among the morning dazed, the jabbering mad,
perhaps words too–these?–to carry them along.

That is when the door is closed to the boiler room.
The boss is back. He was the one you could not see.
He would not look you in the eye. He says nothing
even now. And there is nothing of him to be seen.
You punch in, pick up your shovel, open the door
and feel the great heat enter the pores of flesh
that also open as you scoop and swing the coal
that keeps us warm here, in the lap of summer.


THE BOILER ROOM

Not the one I work in, it opens at midnight
and the horns come to play with the reeds.
And we dance until we are wet with desire.
I put my hands all over her and she is naked
everywhere they go. The crowd presses in
to consume our space and we press back,
nakedly. You see, this is fun, and she is hot
for some sex after her legs are loose enough
to lie down and let me in. I am full of what
she wants. Working and nothing but work
will do that to you: make you horny, make
you glad to see her with her bare legs under
her skirt twirling as she moves with the beat.
The horns keep going and so do the reeds.
They stay on the bandstand as long as night
wears on. At dawn we cup our bodies’ cool
resplendent flesh and go down the street
looking for home, finding it where we lie
in shadows, the sun already starting to rise
and voices all around us asking who we are.


SNAKE DAYS
 
Carimba and brilliance of nostrums
pealing from the altar, the dias of hate
in the old days, when wahine arrived
with their crimes written in the holy
doublespeak of the future we all fear
with the beloved glistening in our arms.
You do not need to hear this rant again
but you listen until more fails to arrive
and so arise in silence looking around
to see who’s looking before you stroll
nonchalantly back to the still-open door
awaiting the arrival of the wind and rain
and here they are, dressed in dark clouds
and trees bowing under the sky’s weight.

You were awaiting the arrival of snakes.
They curl and strike or spit and slither
away. There are no snakes on this island.
So they say, the brilliant ones, tongues
curled to fit their shining teeth and lips
pursed with lovingness. Or so they say.

These days that arrived with missionaries
will never leave. We must accommodate
the heathens. They have no shame. Love
is a word in their minds but unembodied.
I wish I could tell you all they came for,
but how would I know, I who welcomed

no one. The dark-souled one. The one
who was already two, then three, whose
woman was with child once more
and trees bending now with weight
of bounty, soft and lush as her body
and fields always waiting for harvest.

Then the snakes appeared on schedule.
The prophecy was fulfilled and hatred
invaded the sea-crowded earth we had
adored as though we were its children.


WORK

I don’t mean to hog the limelight, you too
have your woes. Work is not a man’s world
anymore. You tell me it’s better now than then.
You can choose to work when you’re free, you say.
You had this man, wouldn’t take no for an answer.
You loved him as much as you’d ever loved anyone.
He said he knew a way for you to make money . . .
Dear reader, need I go on? You’ve already sensed
where this is heading. So now we are going back
to the boiler room, the real one not the night club.
I’m growing lazy in my old age, don’t know how long
I can keep rising at dawn, arriving just after sunrise,
working all day and going homeward after it’s dark
outside. It’s dark in here all the time. I wish you too
worked here, you could keep me entertained as long
as the work stayed hard. But no, I am reading books
on the job now, something I used to do for a living
when I was young inspecting corn along the river
valley, drinking home brew with the Swedish farmers
and making a special trip into town to be seen eating
a long lunch. Sometimes my boss came out to find me
and always did, even though I walked to the middle
of the field, sat down and read, then moved on to pick
ears of corn to take back for inspection to see how ripe
and ready to pick they were and going in for a late lunch
with the boss and his colleague, another boss, at the Barn
Burgers and Shakes outside the remote city of Grandview
where my father died many years later, long before you
worked for your man but only after saying he could never
marry you, you were white and his family would never
accept you. But learn how to do this and we can be the next
best thing. If you wind up in jail you’ll have yourself
a subject to write about. I was night manager of a motel
during the world’s fair and the woman who worked with me
said, Come down to Lake Union and visit me in my houseboat.
She also lived on Queen Anne Hill. Your mother could see
the ships from there before your father lost his job and had
to move to the remote city where much later you were born.
I knew a girl in your town went to bed to pay for a hit of speed
and got pregnant, had an abortion before Roe, got married
to a poet who started drinking with the people in his seminars
as he glided toward a master’s he thought would get him hired
and she left him but it took weeks, months, years for him to dry
out. You had no bidet, it took you longer to get to sleep nights
you took the night’s take to his place and divided it with him
and he showed you the rest of what he knew one night at a time.
But it isn’t my business. I have taken to reading books between
half hour periods before each blaze begins to die down and here
I am happy, as happy as a man can be lucky to have you for wife.
But don’t get me wrong, I love you more than I’ve loved any lass
who loves me back and well after she’s prayed to God to take
her needs away and give her the strength to be chaste and happy
sleeping in a separate bed on another floor but giving me fellatio.

LATIN

You want to know what language fellatio
and cunnilingus
are. Why am I the only man you asked.
The rest were too busy making love
with you in the ways such words intend.
I can understand. There were women
I had to ask more than once
if they knew the Latin for cocksucking,
cuntlicking, . . . that’s the trouble
being a working stiff. You grow coarse
with vocabulary unbefitting a minor poet
in the making, or so my ambition tells me
makes me rise each day with an erection
and newfound energy at age seventy-one
In memory I can’t find any place
but yours to go. You live in a house
on a hill called The Citadel. You keep
a small apartment there, the door opens
and closes from early till late at night,
the phone keeps ringing and then stops
and you are alone but with one last stop
to make before sleep. No need to go
into that. You were sad all seven years.
Women came around and asked to stay
"just a little while till I find my own place"
and I said no. There was one from a town
I was from. She took over from the woman
I stole from the mathematician, the one
Betty Ruth knew and called me to ask
if I would file for the divorce. And I did.
And the woman eloped with an old flame
from Honolulu, with or without a mumu,
I did not see her again until one stoplight
in Sunnyside was red and she crossed
the crosswalk holding a little boy’s hand.
She looked up, I stared back. She went on
to the sidewalk and did not look back.
I should have put my head out the window
and asked for my Bible back. You were
in the seat beside me. I didn’t bother.
But I’ve got my chronology all wrong.
It was then you went to The Citadel,
and only later did I find out why
it was not because you needed privacy.
I could tell you stories you never knew
I knew. Who told me? You, sleeping.
That’s not true. I was born in a city
with a reputation. No, not New Orleans
but Fort Smith, I had folks in my past
who frequented The Row by the river.
I knew lots of stories. They talked back
to me when you left for The Citadel
and one man’s long experience selling it.
As it is, we’ve both had two years Latin.
We have no excuse for staying home
save I’m too old to walk far, and you
are not happy staying home. I pick up
Virgil, Catullus, Juvenal and go back
to the boiler room, where I belong.


ROOTS OF A TREE DEAD AT THE TOP

What dies at the top is already dead at the root.
Little wonder people I meet on the street turn
away when I tell them where I came from,
why I’m here. There is a photograph: mother
leads son by one hand, she’s wearing glasses,
walking Fort Smith’s main street, Garrison,
he’s dressed like a little man, they said then,
it’s a week day and we’re in town to shop
and this guy with a camera caught us on film.
He didn’t know where the one surviving son
of this woman came from, it wasn’t her fault
he had no older brother to hold her other hand.
We both came from down there by the river
originally. You could see it that way. You had
to hear me tell it, now all the others are dead.
I could gussy it up, give it rein, get a laugh
where those before me wept in church aisles
to hear such stuff as your mama used to whore,
your papa had his own, you’ll never know who
you are. All I knew was my family tree died
long before I was born. The poisoned roots
killed my brother Bobby, sure as he was born
and died before the year was out and I, born
three hours before another year ended, lived.
No, it didn’t happen so neatly you could say
we were a doomed family because one root
died and poisoned the tree entirely. No, can’t
you see how a story can sway history one way
–happiness after the many years of struggle–
before time’s passed and the truth comes out.
Walking with my mother along Garrison Street
–or was it, is it, Boulevard?–I had little idea
I would be writing this one day in dour silence.
Yes, dour. I am no happier than you to know
instinct used to be greater than reason but now
hardly exists at all–up here, I mean, where men
and women gather and send old codes across
–across what? the room that is no longer there?
two sides of the same street? from one car
to the other also waiting for the light to change?
–call them ancient habits of the human animal,
they are never for sale save in the past’s brothels,
they are innocent as lambs, courageous as lions,
wise as grandfolks, and they have never sinned.
Still, there are stories my father’s mother’s father
gallivanted along The Row by the Arkansas
where on the other side lies Oklahoma, red earth
it translates. And his mother took up with a man
who rode a horse across country to sell his songs
by passing the hat, growing so famous his name
my grandmother gave my father, and in the South
it’s your first and middle name you are known by.
On the other side, my mother’s mother’s mother
opened an establishment over there, in Oklahoma,
up the river and a little west of here, east of Tulsa,
where nothing was established, it was all on view
but who had time to look with all those lovely
lovelies loving or looking to give love for pleasure.
That’s another story. My father’s mother’s father's

gone to whores and his wife, the Cherokee, is in town,
one much smaller than Fort Smith, her daughter
playing in the plaza while her mother, fully wooed,
lies down in the hotel bed under Manuel Romain
conceiving a son who will be stillborn and she will
bleed to death and they will be buried together
in a common grave, the widower too poor to buy
a second casket let alone pay for the one lowered
into the shoveled grave, he’s given it all to whores.
Or so say the righteous, the irredeemably saved.
Saved from what? from themselves, from us . . .
The street photographer was not called an artist,
he sold his pictures for money. No Polaroids yet,
he took your name and address and printed up
a picture from the negative and send it to you
and you sent him his money back. In those days
people trusted one another it’s no surprise sin
was scarce in the streets of Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Just ask anyone where I come from, they’ll say
in a kind of historical chorus, We have no idea.

Who's he?

BUSINESS

He said who sent him. She told him to come in.
The room was warm and full of a good smell.
She was wearing a see-through negligee.
Her feet were tucked in fuck-me shoes he’d heard
her man call them, said he’d be turned on pronto,
using the Wild West vernacular of the place.
He knew she was wearing a wig and he knew why.
You didn’t have to tell him everything, not at all.
He grew up on the other side of the tracks,
after all. He asked what he owed her. He knew
she like all of them would ask for it up front.
She asked what he wanted, he told her the usual,
and she said, Fifty. He put five tens in her hand
and she asked if he’d like a drink, would he like
to smoke a joint, and he took the drink, bourbon
and soda. She excused herself and left him alone
with his glass, closing the bathroom door behind
her. She changed her ankle-length negligee for
one barely reaching her thighs and returned.
He let her bring him up slowly with her mouth.
He made sounds he could not help but make.
When she could feel the sap rising she rolled
over and guided him on top of her and on in.
Soon he was flaccid and dressed and sat a while
at her invitation getting to know her, her him,
though she knew they would never meet again.
At least she’d met him first at her man’s house,
where she went now as soon as she could get away.
She kept three tens and he two. He took her in bed
all the ways she loved and next morning added
some she had not yet known but he was nothing
if not versatile. She was pleased she gave pleasure
to one who seemed so appreciative. She took off
her wig, finally. Her man asked her if she knew
how much he loved her and said it all over again
when he realized she was taking a minute to think.
She would do this every night the rest of the month.
He’d sit at the Marriott bar and give her a call
when he’d found a man to send up for her to love.
She went on living the life she had lived before.
Sure, she loved him. She knew he didn’t love her.


EXERCISE

Extra ordinary imp erious mys ter y
and the spaces between letters are also words
from another language, the one
Wittgenstein identified
as emblematic of a newly discovered wor ld.

If she dons her underthings she’s ready
to go party and smoke a j and drink vino
& screw, like an ampersand their bodies
in the back bedroom where the host says Go
and you went with him who has the long one.

Nietzsche raving mad on the bluff above
the town full of wolves and claws aloft
with wings in her it ed from the Bijou
we entered under exit lights at each end
when everyone was watching Spellbound


Seven years old and now seventy-one,
this wunderkind has Austria written on
his forehead. The mark of Cain or beast,
who knows trundles the wagon on down
the road. I want to live as long as I have to

to get my work done and being asked, What
is your work? silence follows, better to do
than to say, to show than to reveal, to be
than to have been, that way the war ends
inside the heart and the heart comes home.

So he takes it out and puts it in her, his love.
She lets him. She moves around and around
and he lets her. Pretty soon the trailer park
is ablaze with ecstasy, the residents fast asleep
and Marin on notice: the resurgence on its way


LIVING THE LIFE INSIDE AND BEYOND THE SKIN, WITH ECSTATIC KINDNESS

It so happens
when I wake
I touch life
at its root
and am happy
in retrospect
the body is
not was

In such straits the horses come quickly from the other side of the fence where the grass grows highest when they do not need to stand under the shed and out of the rain even when it snows. The hired man has his eye on the wife in the largest cabin on the downward slope. She makes motions toward returning next summer. He appears pleased since his smile widens like thunder in the distance with rain streaking the horizon. Rainwalking it’s called. He has had no pleasure in many years. He had hoped the coyotes behind the house would thrive, but no, they are dying one after the other from sheer grief, unable to get through the wire surrounding them ever since they were uprooted from the wild and brought here as cubs.

In the middle
of the pasture
she sheds bra
and panties
and her man,
the one with her,
puts her on film
moving slowly

If I touch life at the root I have no other way to love a woman save through the avenues of my eyes. Such is the plaint of the widower. The man of whom I speak is unaware I am taking his measure. He will want to live longer now. He will live on and become a hundred, I hope. The young nurse loves him. He is the love of her life. He is fifty years older. I think a time machine has its uses. He has to have his sex, she says. She makes love on her knees, and he lives once more as he did in the days when he was free of children and too young for old age. He likes to be up early in deep winter to see the snow fall on the weeds that have taken the place of flowers. She will be here soon. He touches himself until he stays touched.

What if I slept
with you there
and did not wake
until my body
flowering
overflowed
flooding our skin
with rivers

You know what it will be like on the other side because you have so many loved ones living there, they must be happy, you never hear from them anymore where once their letters arrived one after the other as quickly as I could write one from this side and expect it to be delivered, and I was never wrong how I knew they would welcome my very ancient words,
those one read like a soliloquy, the kind we grew up hearing, the Guild Theatre mausoleum London no longer uses the way the graves support New Orleans by floating on the watery beds where the French sold their citizens to the Spanish who sold themselves, both men and women, to the Americans, who buy and sell the earth once the world approves their loan.


ABERDEEN

1.

I don’t have an answer for you, she said through the speaker in the door.
On the other side she could see her dark brown nipples through the sheer
slip she was wearing in the mirror. They’d been closed, like she said, a year
and a half, adding, in her best familiar, "boys." She was getting out now
and didn’t want any more stirring the pot occurring, but she didn’t know
where they could go to get what they said they were looking for, a throw
of hips around their own until the love one bed could make would be over and the speaker’s friend, the callow one, she knew, would be through . . .

We’re here for business, he knew he said, no question but what an answer:
said she was ready, but she didn’t have a girl in the house working for her
so coming out of retirement would be the personification of her familiar

that would never let on she might be as dark brown up here as down there
and that’s way back when this fishing port's working women still had hair
uncut on their heads, unshaved between their legs. Who knows but there
were other reasons men went to whores to get what ordinarily was never

where you lived to weasel out of those vows you take when you marry . . .

2.

Aberdeen, Washington, was not far from Seattle. Both were fishing towns
though Seattle was a city by then, the population increasing exponentially
daily, monthly, yearly, decadely (like we say now wearing bags of Liptons
under hats respectfully never worn until someone said, Let’s have a party
of our own! saying it with alarm mixed with surprise, you know how life is
when it seems nobody’s listening), and the fishing industry is all but ended,
so you can go into rock and roll but forget the sex, and drugs were always
illegal. All the fun had gone south of here to the City not in but by the Sea,

yet in the West, as Poe said. Women there bedded you for next to nothing.

Someone still reads that poem when they can’t sleep and nothing’s on TV.
Or they pace all night, the boat going this way and that and how you stay
upright is up to you, you have to think about the words old age can’t see
without glasses you can’t afford on the social security they'll take away,
their leaders say and will if they can this time it'll all go sailing off to Wall
in lower Manhattan where Arabs took down the two symbols of security
one fall day that started all this going to hell by putting a hole in the sky.

3.

You know damn well there are still speakers in doors women, even men
now the world’s changed for us all, are on the other side of the same door.
You can hear, can’t you? Barely, the voice replies. The birds are gulls still
and the totem poles sport birds who were their ancestors before Seattle
became big enough to have garbage dumps. You know in Mexico people
outside the only city that is the world’s largest now live among debris where they have rooms in the very place federales find murdered women
who sell themselves once they get here, it’s the only so-called job around.

All this started out as a dithyramb in waking up to what would have been
Tuesday, but days seem all the same now that the whorehouses shut down
in your youth. You don’t so much miss the action as you miss the first thrill
down there, birds coming in when the boats return and the sky’s so blue
you hear the music in your head turn back in time to saints marching in
a closer walk to thee, O yes the church is there, but priests die more than
ever, after all their vows deter them from loving life as much as other men
save you who keep pacing, thinking, turning memory into the big words.