Circles on the Water Read online

  to memorize certain poems.

  My generation too craves posterity.

  Accept this dish of well aged meat.

  In the warrens of our rotting cities

  where those small eggs

  round as earth wait,

  spread the Word.

  Visiting a dead man on a summer day

  In flat America, in Chicago,

  Graceland cemetery on the German North Side.

  Forty feet of Corinthian candle

  celebrate Pullman embedded

  lonely raisin in a cake of concrete.

  The Potter Palmers float

  in an island parthenon.

  Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat

  are postmarked with angels and lambs.

  But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned

  in a triangle of trees swims dappled with leaf shadow,

  sketched light arch within arch

  delicate as fingernail moons.

  The green doors should not be locked.

  Doors of fern and flower should not be shut.

  Louis Sullivan, I sit on your grave.

  It is not now good weather for prophets.

  Sun eddies on the steelsmoke air like sinking honey.

  On the inner green door of the Getty tomb

  (a thighbone’s throw from your stone)

  a marvel of growing, blooming, thrusting into seed:

  how all living wreathe and insinuate

  in the circlet of repetition that never repeats:

  ever new birth never rebirth.

  Each tide pool microcosm spiraling from your hand.

  Sullivan, you had another five years

  when your society would give you work.

  Thirty years with want crackling in your hands.

  Thirty after years with cities

  flowering and turning grey in your beard.

  All poets are unemployed nowadays.

  My country marches in its sleep.

  The past structures a heavy mausoleum

  hiding its iron frame in masonry.

  Men burn like grass

  while armies grow.

  Thirty years in the vast rumbling gut

  of this society you stormed

  to be used, screamed

  no louder than any other breaking voice.

  The waste of a good man

  bleeds the future that’s come

  in Chicago, in flat America,

  where the poor still bleed from the teeth,

  housed in sewers and filing cabinets,

  where prophets may spit into the wind

  till anger sleets their eyes shut,

  where this house that dances the seasons

  and the braid of all living

  and the joy of a man making his new good thing

  is strange, irrelevant as a meteor,

  in Chicago, in flat America

  in this year of our burning.

  Girl in white

  Don’t think

  because her petal thighs

  leap and her slight

  breasts flatten

  against your chest

  that you warm her

  alligator mind.

  In August

  her hand of snow

  rests on your back.

  Follow her through the mirror.

  My wan sister.

  Love is a trap

  that would tear her

  like a rabbit.

  Noon of the sunbather

  The sun struts over the asphalt world

  arching his gaudy plumes till the streets smoke

  and the city sweats oil under his metal feet.

  A woman nude on a rooftop lifts her arms:

  “Men have swarmed like ants over my thighs,

  held their Sunday picnics of gripe and crumb,

  the twitch and nip of all their gristle traffic.

  When will my brain pitch like a burning tower?

  Lion, come down! explode the city of my bones.”

  The god stands on the steel blue arch and listens.

  Then he strides the hills of igniting air,

  straight to the roof he hastens, wings outspread.

  In his first breath she blackens and curls like paper.

  The limp winds of noon disperse her ashes.

  But the ashes dance. Each ashfleck leaps at the sun.

  A valley where I don’t belong

  The first cocks begin clearing the throat of morning—

  Who’s that walking up on Pettijean mountain?—

  rasping their brass cries from outflung necks

  as they dig their spurs in the clammy cellar air.

  Windows upon the mountain trap the first light.

  Their bronze and copper plumage is emerging

  from the pool of dusk. Lustily they drill the ear

  with a falsetto clangor strident as mustard

  raising alarm I I I live I live!

  I stand with a damp wind licking my face

  outside this shabby motel where a man snores

  who is tiring of me so fast my throat parches

  and I twist the hem of my coat thinking of it.

  “The rooster, or cock, is a symbol of male sexuality,”

  the instructor said, elucidating Herrick.

  You stuck me with spiky elbow and matchspurt glance.

  We were eighteen: we both were dancers in the woods,

  you a white doe leaping with your Brooklyn satyr.

  Bones and sap, I rode in the mothering earth

  tasting the tough grass and my dear’s salty mouth,

  open and swept, in a gale of dark feathers.

  We owned the poems they taught us, Leda and Europa.

  We struck the earth with our heels and it pivoted,

  sacred wood of blossoming crab and hanging snake,

  wet smoke close to the grass and a rearing sun.

  That fruit has fallen. You were burned like a Greek

  just before the last solstice, but without games.

  I was not there. For a long while I hadn’t been.

  Now you are my literary ghost.

  I with broken suitcase and plump hips, about

  to be expelled from this man to whom I’m bound

  by the moist cord of want and the skeins of habit,

  a hitchhiker in the hinterland of Ozarks.

  You hardened to an edge that slashed yourself

  while I have eased into flesh and accommodation.

  The cry of the mouse shrill and covetous in my fingers,

  I cannot keep my hands from anything.

  My curiosity has been a long disaster.

  I fear myself as once I feared my mother.

  Still I know no more inexorable fact

  than that thin red leap of bone: I live, I live.

  I and my worn symbols see up the sun.

  S. dead

  You were unreasonably kind

  three different years

  and unasked defended me

  in public squabble.

  I praised a poem.

  Gently drunk, you

  gave me it.

  I never saw you

  again. Three

  tooth yellow pages.

  The fossil fern tracery

  of kindness unearned

  as death.

  Day like a grey sponge

  the car spun out in mud.

  My head broke the windshield:

  long streamered impact star.

  When Robert pulled me out

  waking I asked

  who he was. Later

  I pissed blood and screamed,

  I rehearsed your act.

  Your face is gone, and now

  what will they

  do with your poems?

  Both poems and cars:

  artifacts that move.

  Loss of control smashes.

  Skill looks organic.

  But poems do not

  (outs
ide of Gaelic)

  kill: or save.

  There’s nothing

  of you here,

  only words moving

  from anger at waste

  from an itch

  sorry, self seeking

  from bowels and breath

  entering a longer arc

  than the car that killed you

  toward oblivion.

  Hallow Eve with spaces for ghosts

  The joy of wax teeth,

  to run masked through crackling bat black streets

  a bag on the arm heavy with penny bars,

  licorice, popcorn balls, suckers.

  I knew that when I was grown out of me into glory,

  doors would open every night to a reign of sugar,

  into my cupped hands patter of kisses and coins.

  When the last porch lights doused at the end of streets

  I drifted home with stray glutted skeletons

  to count over all I’d begged and for once got.

  The pumpkins and pasteboard bones bore me.

  I brush past tinseled children. The night

  is low and noisy with a reddish neon glare

  yet still a holy night ancient and silly.

  My hands itch.

  I light a candle and yawn, kicking the table,

  but though I wait with meal and honey

  no ghosts rise.

  Lovers manage without ritual or the worn bits

  mumbled over their hairiness damage nothing.

  Birth is fat and has rooms.

  But the dead sink like water into the ground.

  While we are brushing our teeth a friend dies.

  A month later someone tells us in a bar.

  By the time we believe, everybody is embarrassed.

  Then, then, we have to start wearing him out

  month after month wearing down

  till there’s a hole where he used to be in the mind.

  My nothings, grey lambs I count on my back,

  shriveled sea deep babies, why can’t

  one night be allowed for adding postscripts,

  urgent burrowing footnotes to frozen business?

  Help the Poor! Utterly robbed, how could people

  pray to their dead? You whom we slip over

  our minds occasionally like costumes.

  Don’t chip off my mural. Please prune my roses.

  Now it is late and cold. The wind

  twiddles leaves into rattling gutter dervishes.

  The last lost witch has gone home

  complaining of too much popcorn, not enough love.

  Put the dolls of the dead back in their box:

  they do not know

  you have been talking to their faces.

  Landed fish

  Danny dead of heart attack,

  mid-forties, pretzel thin

  just out of the pen for passing bad checks.

  He made it as he could

  and the world narrowed on him,

  aluminum funnel of hot California sky.

  In family my mother tells a story.

  My uncle is sitting on the front steps,

  it is late in the Depression,

  my brother has dropped out of school.

  Somehow today they got staked and the horses ran.

  My uncle sits on the rickety front steps

  under wisteria pale mauve and littering scent.

  I climb in his lap: I say

  This is my Uncle Danny, I call him Donald for short,

  oh how beautiful he is,

  he has green eyes like my pussycat.

  A Good Humor man comes jingling and Danny carries me

  to buy a green ice on a stick,

  first ice burning to sweet water on the tongue

  in the long Depression

  with cornmeal and potatoes and beans in the house to eat.

  This story is told by my mother

  to show how even at four I was cunning.

  Danny’s eyes were milky blue-green,

  sea colors I had never known.

  The eyes of my cat were yellow. I was lying

  but not for gain, mama. I squirm on his lap,

  I am tangling my hands in his fiberglass hair.

  The hook is that it pleases him

  and that he is beautiful on the steps laughing

  with money in the pockets of his desperate George Raft pants.

  His eyes flicker like leaves,

  his laugh breaks in his throat to pieces of sun.

  Three years and he will be drafted and refuse to fight.

  He will rot in stockade. He will swing an ax on his foot:

  the total dropout who believed in his own luck.

  I am still climbing into men’s laps

  and telling them how beautiful they are.

  Green ices are still brief and wet and sweet.

  Laughing, Danny leaves on the trolley with my brother.

  He is feeling lucky, their luck is running

  —like smelt, Danny—and is hustled clean

  and comes home and will not eat boiled mush.

  Late, late the wall by my bed shakes with yelling.

  Fish, proud nosed conman, sea eyed tomcat:

  you are salted away in the dry expensive California dirt

  under a big neon sign shaped like a boomerang

  that coaxes Last Chance Stop Here Last Chance.

  A few ashes for Sunday morning

  Uproot that burning tree of lightning struck veins.

  Spine, wither like a paper match.

  I’m telling you, this body could bake bread,

  heat a house, cure rheumatic pains,

  warm at least a bed.

  Green wood won’t catch

  but I held against my belly a green stone

  frog colored with remorse and oozing words

  pressed to me till the night was fagged and wan.

  Reek of charred hair clotting in my lungs.

  My teeth are cinders,

  cured my lecherous tongue.

  Only me burnt, and warmed:

  no one.

  Concerning the mathematician

  In the livingroom you are someplace else like a cat.

  You go fathoms down into abstraction

  where the pressure and the cold would squeeze the juice from my tissues.

  The diving bell of your head descends.

  You cut the murk and peer at luminous razorthin creatures who peer back,

  creatures with eyes and ears sticking out of their backsides

  lit up like skyscrapers or planes taking off.

  You are at home, you nod, you take notes and pictures.

  You surface with a matter-of-fact pout,

  obscene and full of questions and shouting for supper.

  You talk to me and I get the bends.

  Your eyes are bright and curious as robins

  and your hands and your chest where I lay my head are warm.

  Postcard from the garden

  I live in an orchard. Confetti of bruised petals.

  Scents cascade over the gold furred bees,

  over hummingbirds whose throats break light,

  whose silver matings glint among the twigs.

  Sun drips through those nets to puddle the grass.

  If I eat from the wrong tree (whose sign I cannot

  guess from bark cuneiform) my plumpness will wither,

  the orchard crab and rot, the leaves blow

  like cicada wings on dry winds, and dunes bury

  the grey upclawing talons of choked trees.

  My father was a harrier. My mother a thornbush.

  My first seven years I crawled on the underside

  of leaves offering at the world with soft tentative horns.

  Then with lithe dun body and quick-sorting nose

  I crept through a forest of snakegrass, nibbling seeds.

  Before the razor shadow streaked for my hole.

  With starved shanks
and pumping ribs of matchstick

  I squeaked my fears and scrabbling, burrowed my hopes.

  Seven years a fox, meat on the wind

  setting the hot nerve jangling in my throat.

  Silence like dew clung to my thick brush.

  The splintering lunge. Scorch of blood on my teeth.

  Then a pond. Brown and brackish, alkali rimmed.

  In drought a cracked net of fly-tunneled sores.

  After rain, brimming and polluted by wading cattle,

  sudden swarming claws and bearded larvae.

  Now I live in an orchard. My breasts

  are vulnerable as ripe apricots and fragrant.

  To and fro my bare feet graze on the lawn,

  deer sleek with plenty. My hair is loose.

  These trees only intrude upon the desert.

  There, in crannies and wind scraped crevices,

  digging in chaparral, among rock and spine

  live all the others I love except my love.

  I sit on a rock on the border and call and call

  in voice of cricket and coyote, of fox and mouse,

  in my voice that the rocks smash back on me.

  The wings of the hawk beat overhead as he hovers,

  baffled but waiting, on the warm reek of my flesh.

  The cats of Greece

  The cats of Greece have

  eyes grey as plague.

  Their voices are limpid,

  all hunger.

  As they dodge in the gutters

  their bones clack.

  Dogs run from them.

  In tavernas they sit

  at tableside and

  watch you eat.

  Their moonpale cries

  hurl themselves

  against your full spoon.

  If you touch one gently

  it goes crazy.

  Its eyes turn up.

  It wraps itself

  around your ankle

  and purrs a rusty millennium,

  you liar,

  you tourist.

  Sign

  The first white hair coils in my hand,

  more wire than down.