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.

Smoke

There is a dancing light,

no more than a streetlamp two

hundred yards away, its fine

filament shattered by heaviness

of wet air, which jackets

seeing like a concept laid

upon the purity of fact.

I sit at the typewriter,

cigarette between my lips,

staring at smoke, then at words,

not knowing the difference.

Of course I do know if I ask,

“What do I believe?” Funny,

no one else seems to know.

I mean, we say we do,

but that is only by decision.

We jump to conclusions,

jump as high as light

is long and fast, but without

arrival. Things simply stop.

There is nothing quite as real

as smoke. It smells and has

a taste. It comes between

us and what we know. Smoke

is very welcome. Like light,

born of fire, it stings

and makes us close our eyes.

Light

A beam of light cutting the skin of space
travels at the speed of time to the beginning,
the end of things, seeing everything between,

without being seen.

Or a single photon released into a sphere
lined with silver, instantaneously covering
all of space, repeating that cold cycle endlessly,

as if someone might see.

It is a discrete miracle, like a man’s soul,
a point on a continuum proliferating one day
to saturate the universe with something better

than heat, light, matter.

It is moonlight, the boxes sketched on the floor
at two thirty three in the morning, a lighter
shade of light. Watch it turn the earth.

It is promiscuous,

infecting its neighbors, or looking to.
It stretches across the sky like an eyelid
and proliferates color like a drug dream.

It splits the prism

into living spectra, dulls the magnifying glass,
blanches the dead leaf, burns the cloud white;
it is nothing at all—until it strikes something.

Pentwater

When I look at the water
at the height of the horizon,
the wave becomes the measure
of distraction—one from one.

Thought without language,
apparition of ecstasy,
the dappled expanse of gray
is a pure solution of age.

A glint in glinting tangles,
perturbation of the lens.
Light, facets, and the angles
form a lid, a cloud of sense.

The shadows of clouds roam,
dousing the frenetic foam,
like jealous ghosts of ideas
haunting insistent memories.

The wind dies. The waves turn
into breakers, cresting, lurch
beyond themselves and churn
the trough line of their search

to the end of their sameness
on the slanted, abrupt shore,
or in further, final caresses
of the afterthoughtful shore.

Or I dive into their crests,
heaving breast upon breast,
then stand and see them dead
beneath receding waves ahead.

Only the sun is witness, red
as an old apple on a bed,
as an old eye as it slides
beneath its trembling eyelid.

The gulls scream, adding song
to the air, fish, water, refuse,
light—the things that they use—
sing the meaning in their songs.

Our Winter

Mid-January and winter has arrived at last.

The branches droop beneath the snow of two

Storms. No bird has sung for us in days.

I have read of winters so cold, so long,

The birds fell like leaves from the trees.

Always war is raging nearby or the smoke

Of the crematorium has smeared the snow,

Like a gray, vague, indecipherable rubbing.

No bird in my backyard falls from a branch

That doesn't catch the air beneath its wings

And swoop off into the wind with a kind

Of triumph. I have never been shot at either.

Yet, in the next county, a man

Was dismembered and his body parts used

In a ritual with no better purpose than

The resurrection of some long dead devil.

Not forty miles from here, a girl of sixteen

Was hog-tied and set on fire by two brothers

Who confessed she had teased them with her

Body. One brother accused the other

Of dancing to the rhythm of her screams.

Each day, I watch the birds. This morning,

A cardinal sits hunched on a limb --

As if I'd mistake him for a bloody fist.

A Painting

The manner erotic, the content savage:

death as functional as hard, black blood;

ideas, the tines of sharpened teeth

ridged along the dry broken jaw,

wielded with the broken rhythm of warning,

rhyming with human emotions never expressed,

turned mechanism as they encounter flesh.

No murder, she thinks, in self defense,

no sanctity in dying for what you have,

conceived as if in some forgotten life,

the rushed act vicious and reciprocal

as the father once his trembling kill embraced.

Her stone heels crush the wolf’s skull.

She clutches the bitch’s cub on her hip;

the organs in its belly churn and moan.

Her double sleeps nude in a hayfield,

dreams only echoes of spoken images.

The noonday sun has bleached her body.

New blood clashes with the white flower

she clutches like a palpable madness—

paranoia reconciled with satisfaction.

Men cross the reaped fields like clouds.

Sly grin a facial scar, eye

a mask, the fox, with delicate paw prods

her breastbone to further impersonal hunger.

His tapeworm nestles in her rigid belly.

The innocent shivers, pointed to pluck—

act as fruit; sibilant utterances

convolve a desire for color like a gravity,

a dream of odor, a lust for god. Words.

The medium is flesh, her flesh, and his

desire. She does not desire his flesh.

Hidden eyes spy upon them, winking,

blue-hearted, otiose flowers whose own

languid adulteries are with the brief bee.

Her keening awakens her clockwork cock,

who’s all but forgotten to exist since she

left his island of sand to wander the mist.

His senses agitated by her loud exit

into absolute intensity left for him

as a maelstrom between her parted lips,

he speaks to her, cramming knuckles

in his dry mouth, about the end of silence:

Your aching . . . your violent . . . your body.

Song For An Old Tree

The birds stripped the old tree

Of its fruit

In a single night.

Was it a dream, how they descended

From the sun--

The ravening eclipse?

Thirty years, not a stump remains

Of the orchard,

Only a field of mown grass.

Where the roots sucked everything

From the soil

There are shallow bowls.

My two girls appear, one singing,

One shouting,

Beseeching with arms wide.

Each day I reach up like branches

Into the light

To be devoured by caresses.