Collected Poems (3 page)

are like anvils to them the world an

anvil they want to take whole buildings

in their arms they want

to come in the windows to run antennas

through their ducts like ramrods and women

these poor women who dream and dream of

the flower they can’t sniff it sends buds

into their brain they feel their neural

river clot with moist fingers the ganglia

hardening like ant eggs the ends

burning off

pity them these people there are no wars

for them there is no news no

summer no reason they are so humble they want

nothing they have no hands or faces

pity them at night whispering I love

you to themselves and during the day how they

walk along smiling and suffering pity

them love them they are

angels

The Long Naked Walk of the Dead

for Arthur Atkins

As long as they trample the sad smiles of guitars

the world won’t burn. The mother speaks to her daughter

and explains: it is the breath of money in the trees

that drives angels; it is the stillness from morning

to morning when the horses of life have fallen

under their traces in the street and shudder and vanish.

It is the man who meets no one who will touch us

with sharp hands that shake over the concrete

like branches. Or the songs muttering on the paths

crisscrossing the grasses. A bench leaning back.

The sweet arms of gardeners. An enemy passing

with sons and grandsons, all just soldiers.

In flesh that only moves and speaks, the players

slide out like empty trailers to the temple country.

Six hundred thousand on the mountain when it opened.

Every word of the scream, six hundred thousand faces.

The dark metal man gleaming in the talons of silence.

Halfway down in the house of suffering, it is starting.

In There

Here I am, walking along your eyelid again

toward your tear duct. Here are your eyelashes

like elephant grass and one tear

blocking the way like a boulder.

It probably takes me a long time

to figure it out, chatting with neighbors,

trying penicillin, steam baths, meditation

on the Shekinah and sonnet cycles

and then six more months blasting

with my jackhammer before I get in there

and can wander through your face, meeting you

on the sly, kissing you from this side.

I am your own personal verb now. Here I come,

“dancing,” “loving,” “making poems.”

I find a telescope

and an old astronomer

to study my own face with,

and then, well, I am dreaming behind your cheekbone

about Bolivia and tangerines and the country

and here I come again, along your eyelid, walking.

Loss

In this day and age Lord

you are like one of those poor farmers

who burns the forests off

and murders his land and then

can’t leave and goes sullen and lean

among the rusting yard junk, the scrub

and the famished stock.

Lord I have felt myself raked

into the earth like manure,

harrowed and plowed under,

but I am still enough like you

to stand on the porch

chewing a stalk or drinking

while tall weeds come up dead

and the house dogs, snapping

their chains like moths, howl

and point towards the withering

meadows at nothing.

The Hard Part

Do you remember when we dreamed about the owl

and the skeleton, and the shoe

opened and there was the angel

with his finger in the book, his smile like chocolate?

And remember? Everything that had been crushed

or burned, we changed back.

We turned the heart around

in the beginning, we closed the blossom, we let the drum go.

But you’re missing now. Every night I feel us crying

together, but it’s late —

the white bear and the lawyer

are locking the house up and where are you?

The wind walking, the rock turning over with worms

stuck to its haunches —

how will I know what loves me now

and what doesn’t? How will I forgive you?

The World’s Greatest Tricycle-Rider

The world’s greatest tricycle-rider

is in my heart, riding like a wildman,

no hands, almost upside down along

the walls and over the high curbs

and stoops, his bell rapid firing,

the sun spinning in his spokes like a flame.

But he is growing older. His feet

overshoot the pedals. His teeth set

too hard against the jolts, and I am afraid

that what I’ve kept from him is what

tightens his fingers on the rubber grips

and drives him again and again on the same block.

The Sorrow

with huge jowls that wobble with sad o

horribly sad eyes with bristles with

clothes torn tie a rag hands trembling this

burnt man in my arms won’t listen he

struggles pulls loose and is going

and I am crying again Poppa Poppa it’s me Poppa

but it’s not it’s not me I am not

someone who with these long years will

so easily retreat I am not someone after

these torments who simply cries so

I am not so unquestionably a son or

even daughter or have I face or voice

bear with me perhaps it was me who

went away perhaps I did dream it and give

birth again it doesn’t matter now I stay

in my truck now I am loaded with

fruit with cold bottles with documents

of arrest and execution Father do you

remember me? how I hid and cried to you?

how my lovely genitals were bound up?

I am too small again my voice thins my

small wrists won’t hold the weight again

what is forgiven? am I forgiven again?

The Man Who Owns Sleep

The man who owns sleep

is watching the prisoners being beaten

behind the fence.

His eye pressed to the knothole,

he sees the leather curling into smiles

and snapping, he sees the intricate geography

of ruined backs,

the faces propped

open like suitcases

in the sunlight.

Who is this man

who’s cornered the market

on sleeping?

He’s not quite finished.

He bends over with a hand on his knee

to balance him

and from the other side they see

that clear eye in the wall

watching unblinking.

They see it has slept,

prisoners and guards: it drives them

to frenzies. The whips hiccup

and shriek. Those dead already roll over

and rub their retinas into the pebbles.

The man who owns sleep has had it.

He’s tired.

Taking an ice-cream cone

from the little wagon

he yawns and licks it.

Walking away, he yawns, licking it.

Before This

we got rid of the big people

finally we took grandpa and put half

on the mack truck and half on

the bottom grandma

we locked in with her watches

mommy and daddy had to be cut apart but they

are in separate icebergs you can’t

see them under

the red lid

one place or another they are all gone

and it’s hard to remember

cars? furcoats? the office?

now all there are

are roomfuls of children sleeping as far

as you can see little mattresses and

between them socks balled up and

underwear and scuffed shoes

with their mouths open.

but how am I here? I feel

my lips move I count breaths I hear somebody

cry out
MOTHER HELP ME
somebody’s hand

touches me peacefully across boundaries

kiss? hit? die? the blankets

harden with urine the fuzz

thins holes come

HOW AM I HERE? MOTHER

HOW AM I HERE
?

Dimensions

There is a world somewhere else that is unendurable.

Those who live in it are helpless in the hands of elements,

they are like branches in the deep woods in wind

that whip their leaves off and slice the heart of the night

and sob. They are like boats bleating wearily in fog.

But here, no matter what, we know where we stand.

We know more or less what comes next. We hold out.

Sometimes a dream will shake us like little dogs, a fever

hang on so we’re not ourselves or love wring us out,

but we prevail, we certify and make sure, we go on.

There is a world that uses its soldiers and widows

for flour, its orphans for building stone, its legs for pens.

In that place, eyes are softened and harmless like God’s

and all blend in the traffic of their tragedy and pass by

like people. And sometimes one of us, losing the way,

will drift over the border and see them there, dying,

laughing, being revived. When we come home, we are half way.

Our screams heal the torn silence. We are the scars.

To Market

suppose I move a factory

in here in my head in my

breast in my left hand I’m moving

dark machines in with gear boxes

and floaters and steel cams

that turn over and start things

I’m moving in fibers through

my left nostril and trucks

under my nipples and the union

has its bathroom where I think

and the stockbroker his desk

where I love

and then if I started turning

out goods and opening

shops with glass counters and rugs

what if I said

to you this is how men live and I

want to would you believe me

and love me I have my little

lunch box and my thermos and

I walk along like one leg

on the way to work swearing

I love you and we have lunch

behind the boiler and I promise

I love you and meanwhile the oil

flowing switches steam wrenches

metal I love

you and things finish get shined

up packed in streamers

mailed and I love you

meanwhile all this while I love

you and I’m being bought pieces

of me at five dollars

and parts at ten cents and

here I am still saying I love

you under the stacks under

the windows with wires the smoke

going up I love

you I love you

What Is and Is Not

I’m a long way from that place,

but I can still hear

the impatient stamp of its hoof

near the fire, and the green clicking

of its voices and its body flowing.

At my window, the usual spirits,

the same silence. A child would see it

as my clothes hanging like killers

on the door, but I don’t, and it

doesn’t creak in the hallway for me.

It’s not death. In your face

I glimpse it. You are reaching

a hand out comfortingly

though it snarls, plunges,

and you know that the baby

won’t look up from its game

of beauty. It isn’t love or hate

or passion. It doesn’t touch us,

dream us, speak, sing or

come closer, yet we consume it.

Hood

Remember me? I was the one

in high school you were always afraid of.

I kept cigarettes in my sleeve, wore

engineer’s boots, long hair, my collar

up in back and there were always

girls with me in the hallways.

You were nothing. I had it in for you —

when I peeled rubber at the lights

you cringed like a teacher.

And when I crashed and broke both lungs

on the wheel, you were so relieved

that you stroked the hard Ford paint

like a breast and your hands shook.

On the Roof

The trouble with me is that whether I get love or not

I suffer from it. My heart always seems to be prowling

a mile ahead of me, and, by the time I get there to surround it,

it’s chewing fences in the next county, clawing

the bank-vault wall down or smashing in the window

I’d just started etching my name on with my diamond.

And that’s how come I end up on the roof. Because even if I talk

into my fist everyone still hears my voice like the ocean

in theirs, and so they solace me and I have to keep

breaking toes with my gun-boots and coming up here

to live — by myself, like an aerial, with a hand on the ledge,

one eye glued to the tin door and one to the skylight.

It Is This Way with Men

They are pounded into the earth

like nails; move an inch,

they are driven down again.

The earth is sore with them.

It is a spiny fruit

that has lost hope

of being raised and eaten.

It can only ripen and ripen.

And men, they too are wounded.

They too are sifted from their loss

and are without hope. The core

softens. The pure flesh softens

and melts. There are thorns, there

are the dark seeds, and they end.

Sleeping Over

for Dave and Mark Rothstein

There hasn’t been any rain

since I arrived. The lawns

are bleached and tonight goldenrod

and burnt grass reflect

across my walls like ponds.

After all these days

the textures and scents of my room