FOSSILS, A POEM IN VOICES

When the cherry was a flower,

Then hadde it no stone.  Anon.

I

Trilobite Euripides, sarcophagus Shakespeare,

Gogol the archaeological digs of Leningrad—

dust of species dead to the last blood cell—

civilizations evolve to misspelled one word poems.

No sane man sings of anger, hears the dream voice

ringing the clapper of his consciousness

anymore; some things you just don’t do.  God daunts,

whatever shape he takes.  Less if he’s something you say.

II

“As for what they’ve done, they have done it.

Let it be their heads.  No one is immune.

I move my hand, like this, and block the sight

of fools who think they see their own eyeballs.”

“The buzzards came upon us—hands clapping

a thunderous beat; they squawked and coughed

shreds of meat and moldy grain, spraying us with filth.

We covered our candles but left the tables as they were.”

“Thus, I escape the painful, the mystery,

into a womb the forecaster says

will bear a child with signs of a new man.

Shave my head.  Dress me in orange.  Leave me homeless.”

“Not even the dead are free of being.

We feed like birds on the seed of all flesh and blood.

We stuff incense like snuff up our noses.  We dance

on the grave mounds beneath the pines in ecstasy.”

III

I know only one good thing, said the Angel.  Understanding

is movement, and movement cannot end in variety.

My will is not obstinate in evil, said the Devil.  I know

everything and one thing, what you call the one good thing.

The bridegroom’s thinning pate wags,

loins stirred by eraser-nippled Aphrodite.

His free will dictated falsehoods by misinformed reason,

he shrivels at the thought of fucking Eve.

IV

“Tonight you may go to your wives.

God sees you’ve betrayed yourselves.  He pardons you.

Sleep with them, find out what awaits you.

White threads fray from black cloth at dawn.”

“Her left hand with tent peg, her right with mallet

struck and crushed the head.

She struck again and the peg entered the ground.

‘Come,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you the man you want.’”

“Oh, exquisite company, you’ve all taken a bride!

Nowhere a bachelor, everyone true and tried.

Look!  The earth gapes to drink the handsome revel!

Quick!  The priest escapes!  After the devil!”

“Wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen a milk bottle

painted white we are too wise to sip from,

here in this vegetable garden of delight,

we tooth-picked avocado pits rooting in green glasses.

V

Two rocks fight for a third rock, make progress—

a corner will fit a corner, that kind of strategy.

A man walking by takes advantage of the row

to put the rock in his mouth and cite the law.

Another humpback breaches the tumultuous birthplace,

lolls on his back in cataracts of blood and fire;

a flick of his tailfin upends the proud metropolis;

the bodies stack like cordwood on the ocean floor.

VI

“The surgeon’s knife probed her entrails and withdrew,

leaving a jagged gash on her belly.

I see dark, suffering eyes, beautiful as eyes

of an antelope.  Oh, cruel wound, libidinous God!”

“Two boys in the front seat bob against the flashing

windshield, laughing obvious insults in rewinding

rhythms of thought forgotten and thought again,

laughing back at me, it is all laughing back at me.”

“I didn’t wince when Mother stitched the shirt

to my back.  I laughed when Father yanked it off.

I ate bread I baked with flour from a bag of rats.

I bit my shield and my blade and my enemy’s face.”

“I cut them in two, as you’d cut apples for preserves.

Each face on half of each neck turned to the incision;

in contemplation, each man and woman was made more orderly.

I closed their skins around them like zipping coats.”

“Let us pass on to the lesson of the lesson.  Let us

follow the thread of the demonstration through

the apparently unquestionable facts.  The point of the incident

supports an enormous theoretical edifice.”

“I shoot the boy in the neck some place try shoot

him twice with a .22.  I shoot the old man

two times, he had on blue P.J. light blue, he lade

on the wall as you go out the door with a .44.”

VII

Exempla accelerating decay, rusting lugnuts, Bloom

and Sweeney sip absinthe-mournful toasts to thee,

epitome of art, the verities locked in their garages

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages.)

And poetry proliferates like cancer cells,

rock-hard burl on trunks of ageless redwoods.

The imperturbable trees speed every root westward

because the wind always blows from the sundown.

Return 1 (Brice Marden), Sonnet #627

 

The structured residue of brilliance,

A layering of the lesser or least

Into a visual and mental feast,

Or, gestures, moveless, the dimliest dance —

Paint rules the kingdom it created,

The painter’s invisible intent, fingers

Drawing on experience that lingers,

Slowly diminished, subtly ablated,

Of null paintings seen or contemplated.

(Or call them conscious unconscious singers,

For all music without words is abstract,

The furthest thing from an idea or fact.)

The painter has brushes to think or say.

He motions — his eye makes or takes away.

Thanks to Jeffrey Strayer for posting the Marden painting

and for suggesting two lines of the sonnet.

Mountain Brook (John Singer Sargent)

 

The brook ran through high mountain pasture

From failing glacier to pool to pond to lake,

Between banks limned with moss and aster

Rooted in cascades of shattered igneous flake.

I straddled the water running slow over stones,

My boots precariously gripping boulders

The water’s rilling shaped into hipbones.

Further up hunched matching shoulders.

I found a head and rolled it in, midstream.

The shallow, muttering water, unperturbed,

Flowed around and on like a vanquished dream.

Provoked, I left not a rock undisturbed

And rolled them in -- the addled stream burst

Banks and drowned the mountain pasture’s thirst.

A Fable

I set a pebble on a table by a spoon

And tried to tell the difference between

My mind and the surface of the table.

 

Evening stole the light and soon

The rest of the rest of the room seemed

As far as the spoon was from the pebble.

 

It was not the pebble or the spoon

That took the center of the scene

But the impulse to discover this fable.

 

There is no finer thought than this:

All that might be is not what is.

Of a Blackbird Looking at Thin Trees Sway (with apologies to Wallace Stevens)

 1. 

The trees move and I am
Not moving.

2.
My eye is not the only eye.
There is one other.

3.
I fly between the branches
But do not find a perch--too many leaves falling.

4.
I am alone as a blind eye. I was once
Not alone. I have forgotten why.

5. 
The wind whistles in the branches
And I whistle--the sounds exactly the same.

6.
Ice on the grass this morning. Soon the snow
Will catch my shadow as I pass from tree to tree.
I know exactly why I am here.

7.
I watch for the one with talons.
I cannot chase him like the little ones.
I think of him, at night, huddled on the opposite
Side of the black bole. 

8.
I know all the inflections of birds and of branches.
They know
That I can sing louder than the moon.

9.
From above, the trees look like black suns
Against the dying grass. There is no
Perch at the center of a sun.

10.
My fellows cry out as they pass.
They see these trees with my eye
And do not want them for their own.

11.
I do not fear anything
And nothing fears me
Except the trees.

12. 
I must be going soon--
Once the river and the trees
Stop moving.

13.
The dark grows long as day
And there are no more leaves.
The snow stings my eye.
I have already left 
Before I fly.

On Buson’s Portrait of Basho

Old grinner,
what's under your sky blue cap?
Not haiku!

Waking

Is it only dullness,

   the courage the eye

requires to watch itself,

   white circling hue

circling black?  Perhaps

   a life of seeing

greens infinitely shaded

   teaches us to take

the shock of the red

   without equanimity

or as a joke.  Morning

   headache, the renewed

blur of sense, release

   of energy, all that

awakening can make

   of itself, explains,

“You’ve come this far.”

   To take responsibility

for the rainbow beneath

   the water glass, or

the dogs we’ve run with

   all night long, we

must make a choice:

   watch the light blister,

or close our eyes tight.