You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down. The last good kiss you had was years ago. You walk these streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives. Only churches are kept up. The jail turned 70 this year. The only prisoner is always in, not knowing what he’s done.
The principal supporting business now is rage. Hatred of the various grays the mountain sends, hatred of the mill, The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls who leave each year for Butte. One good restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out. The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines, a dance floor built on springs— all memory resolves itself in gaze, in panoramic green you know the cattle eat or two stacks high above the town, two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.
Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat so accurate, the church bell simply seems a pure announcement: ring and no one comes? Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium and scorn sufficient to support a town, not just Philipsburg, but towns of towering blondes, good jazz and booze the world will never let you have until the town you came from dies inside?
Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty when the jail was built, still laughs although his lips collapse. Someday soon, he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up. You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself. The car that brought you here still runs. The money you buy lunch with, no matter where it’s mined, is silver and the girl who serves your food is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
My friends,
As it has been proven in the laboratory,
An empty pair of dance shoes
Will sit on the floor like a wart
Until it is given a reason to move.
Those of us who study inertia
(Those of us covered with wild hair and sleep)
Can state this without fear:
The energy in a pair of shoes at rest
Is about the same as that of a clown
Knocked flat by a sandbag.
This you can tell your friends with certainty:
A clown, flat on his back,
Is a lot like an empty pair of
dancing shoes.
An empty pair of dancing shoes
Is also a lot like a leaf
Pressed in a book.
And now you know a simple truth:
A leaf pressed in, say, The Colossus
by Sylvia Plath,
Is no different from an empty pair of dance shoes
Even if those shoes are in the middle of the Stardust Ballroom
With all the lights on, and hot music shakes the windows
up and down the block.
This is the secret of inertia:
The shoes run on their own sense of the world.
They are in sympathy with the rock the kid skips
over the lake
After it settles to the mud.
Not with the ripples,
But with the rock.
A practical and personal application of inertia
Can be found in the question:
Whose Turn Is It
To Take Out The Garbage?
An empty pair of dance shoes
Is a lot like the answer to this question,
As well as book-length poems
Set in the Midwest.
To sum up:
An empty pair of dance shoes
Is a lot like the sand the 98-pound weakling
brushes from his cheeks
As the bully tows away his girlfriend.
Later,
When he spies the coupon at the back of the comic book,
He is about to act upon a different set of scientific principles.
He is ready to dance.
Retired ballerinas on winter afternoons
walking their dogs
in Central Park West
(or their cats on leashes—
the cats themselves old highwire artists)
The ballerinas
leap and pirouette
through Columbus Circle
while winos on park benches
(laid back like drunken Goudonovs)
hear the taxis trumpet together
like horsemen of the apocalypse
in the dusk of the gods
It is the final witching hour
when swains are full of swan songs
And all return through the dark dusk
to their bright cells
in glass highrises
or sit down to oval cigarettes and cakes
in the Russian Tea Room
or climb four flights to back rooms
in Westside brownstones
where faded playbill photos
fall peeling from their frames
like last year’s autumn leaves
Blissful dance. Scream of the shadows in light. Night that pours its animal shrill into the morning’s joy. There it ramifies, bursts, intertwines itself. It blossoms on its clearest edge. It’s the allure of forms in their steep nearness, their engulfed proximity. Rivers become entangled with, yet do not merge, an obscure lightning, an arborescent flame. Fauna sliding between the blazes. It’s the pleasure of opposites: the scattered pondering, the swarming and resonant jungle.
She sings her heart out with a smile
like Louis Armstrong on the subway’s dusty platform
with her band, a bass, guitar, horn player,
and drummer. She keeps singing with a smile
even as an old demented man dances up and down,
keeping rhythm in front of her, blocking the audience view,
with his big rag of a coat, swollen leg and crutch.
Undaunted, smiling even at the old beggar who steals her
spotlight. “Music Under New York” says her sign, and she’s among
the good jazz musicians who play in the subways for quarters
and dollars collected in a hat or instrument case open
in front of them.
Making music amidst the rumble of trains and rush of people
who are made more cheerful by their tunes.
Evelyn Blakey knows that the homeless man
who dances on his crutch is comforted by her warble.
“Georgia, Georgia…just an old sweet tune keeps Georgia on my mind…” he sings along with her, grinning soul,
the sort of smile that says: “I’ve been
through it all, but sing anyway.” Evelyn Blakey, listens
to the horn jam, listens to the drums roll,
with ecstatic eyes closed, face full of music,
and the old beggar dances on his swollen foot,
his ragged coat swings back and forth with his tired bones,
his grey head bobs in rhythm,
and Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn Blakely sings,
her heart full of sonorous sound,
her foot tapping the ground,
her subway commuters gather around.
The wild geese approaching treason, now federated along one keep
May we find a rafter
2. I like the way you don’t
go into the cabin
That is how I like it: methodically, mythically, my accidents are protests,
are my only protests, they are never accidents
3. We even misprism the past
Turn our waltz on the face of another
To turn on
To turn against
Opposite statements that express the same, sometimes, or binary like the lines: Man is something to be overcome, what you you done to overcome him
or Just how far can you push the heroic guy to being evil and how far can you push the villain to being somebody you can care about
or Floodtide beneath you, I see you face to face
4. Check out your mind
Masquerading with dawn
It was invented by the press
Press harder (press not push)
The bell, the liquor, the deck of card crisp hardships surfacing as clovers and nights at his club getting low, if they ask you to sell them, don’t
On the Corner, (side 1) try
Thinking of one thing and doing another
4. Repeat: But we are
Only getting rich in order to repeat these trips
5. But we are getting rich in order…
So neither group can be understood except in relation to the other
as in/
as out/
as excuses for true stories—
It’s just that his passion costumes his thoughts,
not just his past
Not just a fat vacation Sunday
Also an emaciated smoke break
Also broken into images of smoke,
the way smoke moves
From tobacco
or factory chimney
your mouth
your vandalised memory
in order
to get rich
Someone has to work there and believe it into disappearance
6. Wealth: I am farmers/I am a thief.
Fame money/anonymous fame/factory farmed/black thief/by black I mean/
Buy black I mean
We are what sells
Thinking to ourselves:
Something in me wishes this wasn’t my poem—
That emotion is glory or— still?
7. Compliments: The only one I want is (the) speechless/
ness, (he) nestled in me bold and hip like a broken risk
8. Peaty Greene, Casius X (who’s that) Jack Johnson, Blind Tom Wiggans, Bama the Village Poet, Gregor Samson, Fred Hampton, Josephine Baker, Lester Young, will you give up your death for me? Teach me why I am a destiny
9. If you think about me, and you ain’t gonna do no revolutionary act, forget about me, I don’t want myself on your mind
10. Anyway, innocence. Man is something to be overcome, what have you done to overcome him. Digitally pacing the stage as his future and his past, a full body holograph of Tupac Shakur. But then when he got shot no bitches came out, no music, nothin’. Just some critics’ unphased mumblings: man you were marvelous but your co-star the gun was a bit over the top
11. Rehearsal for God Bless the Child.
I wanna get it right
Let’s start with ‘rich relations’
Green sides of goldsides
I immediately had to get a drum instructor a trumpet teacher and a sword twirling coach. Get your silence together. Hope is final
12. Super soul/supra soul/hip hop’s egoless self-agrandisement is the next
toll/phase on the free/way, high/way, autoroute, or space between proof and privacy in loose weather
13.The man you love is walking home in Hollywood. 5 or 6 police cars come up, about 8 cops around. You fit the description, you always fit the description, you fit the description of a robbery in the area. A black guy, wearing jeans, 5’8,” the whole thing
14. He had dreams of really hitting it big with his stereo store
He’d play samples of Caetano Veloso singing 9 out of ten movie stars make me cry, I’m alive!, or— One thing leads to another, but the kid is not my son or god bless the child that’s got his own
whiter I make it when walking right in
unswerved, sweating fluorescent bleach,
preaching a moon page that says its welts:
learn this by heart is empty but do it
to do it. I make it somehow whiter, zombied
and I opified allover the absolutely
whitest room. I say keep your lines in line
and look at me now just lining them,
some flogged orthodoxen, ploughed
down sillion shiny sacerdotal lines
I’m supposed to like and looky I do.
I like what I like. I just like what I like.
I like to say look: dissident anachronistics,
shambolic stuff in master rows but look
at me. I even early balded to enhance
the interrogation. I meander in and form more
order. I like to point with my pointer, to
indicate. The most afraid I like to get is
a little bit. I app my accounts and survey
the advantage. I tower under.
I oxiclean the ivory. I shower and shower.
I dig on fonts. I wake up singing I say
never start with that but one morning
I wake up singing the Fat Boys. I wikipede
The Fat Boys. One of them is no longer.
The other is no longer fat. I assess the Human
beatbox via a Schwittersian optic.
I exercise my massive rights. I have the right
to remain. I remain. I interview just
like a glacier. I hand dance. I like just
what I like. My skin is white not. It fits
just tight. It burns on will. My horizon
is fungible. My will is like whatever.
My SPF is infinity. People seem to like
me. I was just born just this way.
I’m the one in the back of the bar, drinking cachaça,
fingering the lip of the glass. Every dream has left
me now as I wait for the next song: Drag and drum.
They’ll be no humming in this room, only fragrance
of sweat and fuel. To make the animal go. To make it
Hungry. After that there is Thirst.
*
I danced in the border town until it wasn’t decent,
until I was my grandest self hitchhiking, my slim arm
out like the stalk of a tired flower, waving, silver rings
catch the headlights. I’m not sure what I wanted
as we rode on his motorcycle where Chinese signs blurred
past, flashing red, then blue, and I breathed in the scent
of fish and plum. My hands found their way to his pockets
as I rode without helmet, careening toward the cemetery,
the moon dripping light onto avenues of tombstones.
*
If the Tunisian black market was hidden within a maze.
If I couldn’t find my way, I asked. The wide eyes
of the boy who led me to the Mediterranean Sea.
If I took his kindness as a version of truth and stood
posing for a photo in front of bicycles leaned
against the sand colored walls. If I arrived
at the center of the market, women in black muslin
sold glazed tile on blankets. When I bent down,
the men surrounded me. If they asked for money
I had nothing. If they threw their bills around me,
I recall the purple and red faces crushed on paper.
*
Attempting to cross the border with no passport,
no money. The contents had fallen out of her
pocket as she ran for the bus. She made promises
to the officers, bared an inner thigh until their eyes
grew wide, until they stamped a sheet of official paper
with tri-colored emblems. The man’s fist
was large though it twitched as he pounded
the stamp onto the translucent page. The little
money she had inside an orange handkerchief tied
to her hair, coins rolling to the ground as she fled.
*
Perhaps it was chance that I ended on the far side
of the earth. Atrocities of our entanglement not on the bed
but beside it. Using our mouths as tools for betterment,
for seduction, for completion. The vertebra twists
into a question mark to conform to another’s.
In the Patanal, the cowboys steadied the horses
in the barn, the animal’s labored breathing, the sigh
as the coarse brush worked through the mane.
The owner’s daughter learning to move her hips
as she practiced her samba before the steaming pot,
and radio clicking, and lid drumming.
Of the men I’ve known, you were the most steady,
reliable one near the window killing mosquitoes,
gathering cool water to press to my scalp. One-sided
heart I was then. Selfish one. I wanted everything.
Macaws flew past in quick flock, pushing outward
toward the earth’s scattering filament and mystery.
*
I don’t ask myself questions anymore
(but it is not a question you ask yourself),
rather it was born, rather that the statement
was peeled like a film of dirt, (rather the words were meaning) wrapped inside
a scarf, stuffed into my carry bag, rather
that the camera caught all of it
(the hunter and the kill).
When danger itself was restless,
(it had four legs and it ran with speed & vengeance). Though there was
no purpose, (though the past had nothing to do with the chase now). This grand state
(pumped from its own engine of blood),
centuries of evolution, first as a red-eyed
embryo, then reptile, then mammal, then
man, pure racing, push of muscle and tendon,
the tongue loose and dragging as the body
made its way forward. Each time more
powerful, a new version of waking until
the species grew great wings and lifted.
No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number:
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
arms and legs made of Limoges,
lips like Vin Du Rhône,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes
open and shut.
Open to say,
Good Day Mama,
and shut for the thrust
of the unicorn.
She is unsoiled.
She is as white as a bonefish.
Once there was a lovely virgin
called Snow White.
Say she was thirteen.
Her stepmother,
a beauty in her own right,
though eaten, of course, by age,
would hear of no beauty surpassing her own.
Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
The stepmother had a mirror to which she referred–
something like the weather forecast–
a mirror that proclaimed
the one beauty of the land.
She would ask,
Looking glass upon the wall,
who is fairest of us all?
And the mirror would reply,
You are the fairest of us all.
Pride pumped in her like poison.
Suddenly one day the mirror replied,
Queen, you are full fair, ’tis true,
but Snow White is fairer than you.
Until that moment Snow White
had been no more important
than a dust mouse under the bed.
But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand
and four whiskers over her lip
so she condemned Snow White
to be hacked to death.
Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter,
and I will salt it and eat it.
The hunter, however, let his prisoner go
and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle.
The queen chewed it up like a cube steak.
Now I am fairest, she said,
lapping her slim white fingers.
Snow White walked in the wildwood
for weeks and weeks.
At each turn there were twenty doorways
and at each stood a hungry wolf,
his tongue lolling out like a worm.
The birds called out lewdly,
talking like pink parrots,
and the snakes hung down in loops,
each a noose for her sweet white neck.
On the seventh week
she came to the seventh mountain
and there she found the dwarf house.
It was as droll as a honeymoon cottage
and completely equipped with
seven beds, seven chairs, seven forks
and seven chamber pots.
Snow White ate seven chicken livers
and lay down, at last, to sleep.
The dwarfs, those little hot dogs,
walked three times around Snow White,
the sleeping virgin. They were wise
and wattled like small czars.
Yes. It’s a good omen,
they said, and will bring us luck.
They stood on tiptoes to watch
Snow White wake up. She told them
about the mirror and the killer-queen
and they asked her to stay and keep house.
Beware of your stepmother,
they said.
Soon she will know you are here.
While we are away in the mines
during the day, you must not
open the door.
Looking glass upon the wall . . .
The mirror told
and so the queen dressed herself in rags
and went out like a peddler to trap Snow White.
She went across seven mountains.
She came to the dwarf house
and Snow White opened the door
and bought a bit of lacing.
The queen fastened it tightly
around her bodice,
as tight as an Ace bandage,
so tight that Snow White swooned.
She lay on the floor, a plucked daisy.
When the dwarfs came home they undid the lace
and she revived miraculously.
She was as full of life as soda pop.
Beware of your stepmother,
they said.
She will try once more.
Looking glass upon the wall. . .
Once more the mirror told
and once more the queen dressed in rags
and once more Snow White opened the door.
This time she bought a poison comb,
a curved eight-inch scorpion,
and put it in her hair and swooned again.
The dwarfs returned and took out the comb
and she revived miraculously.
She opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie.
Beware, beware, they said,
but the mirror told,
the queen came,
Snow White, the dumb bunny,
opened the door
and she bit into a poison apple
and fell down for the final time.
When the dwarfs returned
they undid her bodice,
they looked for a comb,
but it did no good.
Though they washed her with wine
and rubbed her with butter
it was to no avail.
She lay as still as a gold piece.
The seven dwarfs could not bring themselves
to bury her in the black ground
so they made a glass coffin
and set it upon the seventh mountain
so that all who passed by
could peek in upon her beauty.
A prince came one June day
and would not budge.
He stayed so long his hair turned green
and still he would not leave.
The dwarfs took pity upon him
and gave him the glass Snow White–
its doll’s eyes shut forever–
to keep in his far-off castle.
As the prince’s men carried the coffin
they stumbled and dropped it
and the chunk of apple flew out
of her throat and she woke up miraculously.
And thus Snow White became the prince’s bride.
The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast
and when she arrived there were
red-hot iron shoes,
in the manner of red-hot roller skates,
clamped upon her feet.
First your toes will smoke
and then your heels will turn black
and you will fry upward like a frog,
she was told.
And so she danced until she was dead,
a subterranean figure,
her tongue flicking in and out
like a gas jet.
Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do.
Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.
Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.
It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its
white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.
Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two
candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We began to believe
the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had
noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the
stars,
how small they were, how far away.
Not a study or a den, but El Florida
as my mother called it, a pretty name
for the room with the prettiest view
of the lipstick-red hibiscus puckered up
against the windows, the tepid breeze
laden with the brown-sugar scent
of loquats drifting in from the yard.
Not a sunroom, but where the sun
both rose and set, all day the shadows
of banana trees fan-dancing across
the floor, and if it rained, it rained
the loudest, like marbles plunking
across the roof under constant threat
of coconuts ready to fall from the sky.
Not a sitting room, but El Florida where
I sat alone for hours with butterflies
frozen on the polyester curtains
and faces of Lladró figurines: sad angels,
clowns, and princesses with eyes glazed
blue and gray, gazing from behind
the glass doors of the wall cabinet.
Not a TV room, but where I watched Creature Feature as a boy, clinging
to my brother, safe from vampires
in the same sofa where I fell in love
with Clint Eastwood and my Abuelo
watching westerns, or pitying women
crying in telenovelas with my Abuela.
Not a family room, but the room where
my father twirled his hair while listening
to 8-tracks of Elvis, and read Nietzsche
and Kant a few months before he died,
where my mother learned to dance alone
as she swept, and I learned Salsa pressed
against my Tía Julia’s enormous breasts.
At the edge of the city, in the company
of crickets, beside the empty clothesline,
telephone wires and the moon, tonight
my life is an old friend sitting with me
not in the living room, but in the light
of El Florida, as quiet and necessary
as any star shining above it.
in memory of Reetika Vazirani (1962-2003) and Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009)
Sewanee, Tennessee.
Summer of ‘96, I went there for
booze and poetry and rest.
I danced a little dance;
I talked a little shop.
I forgot a recent ghost.
“Invitation to a Ghost”
was my favorite poem in Tennessee.
And Justice taught my workshop.
(God love him, he called me decadent for
ending a line with an anapest.) At the dance
party with Allison and the rest
of the poets from Rebel’s Rest,
ambition was the ghost
unseen, but always in attendance.
And I misplaced my faith in Tennessee,
upon a hill: I gave an undergrad what-for
after priming him with lines of Bishop.
Gossip is another word for talking shop.
But Rachel, sharper than the rest,
winner of things I hoped for,
was above all that, like a charming host.
She spoke of posterity in Tennessee.
And every day felt like a dance
preparing us for a bigger dance.
In the bookstore, I pretended to shop
with Reetika, Rachel’s roommate in Tennessee,
wicked-funny and stunning and rest-
less. We flirted like we stood a ghost
of a chance. I was twenty-four.
I wonder now what it’s all been for:
that summer; the words; the awful dance
that followed. So many ghosts.
Let the muses close the horror shop.
Let Rachel and Reetika rest.
—Years ago, there was Tennessee.
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
2
I take a wolf’s rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.
And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.
And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.
3
On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.
4
On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.
I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.
I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.
5
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.
6
Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,
blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.
7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?
If music plays with film
then film is an illustration
of music’s movement.
Snap, blast, sever, sever, stop.
Even the dog twitching his ears.
If islands nestle in the ocean,
and a statue rises above the pilgrim,
then we are standing on a cliff
and the pilgrim has reached her goal.
The light is as pale as the back of her hand.
If the dancers twitch arrythmically
their dance is only partly kept.
At twenty-four frames per second,
film makes a lonely memory.
They sway staccato, staggered, stretched.
If drums repeat the pace
of film’s slip through the gate,
then the song’s refrain
retells film’s fades and cutaways.
Even its night-quiet darks.
If horns evoke an antique joy,
lens flares and close-ups send
their renderings into red relief.
How has mankind managed grief?
Light, noise, movement, breath.
If blood is to the body
as film is to the camera,
if film is a flat and lucid eye,
if light is a perishable gift,
then the night is the gate of the dark.
If light falls away with always
then film is a parcel of rest.
Panoramas, linked and strung
as castle-steps, lawns, the fine
iron bars of the castle gate.
If drums pace the beat of blood
and film is the speed of the rattle
of breath, then the dancers have
truly escaped us. We slow
as they quicken. We go and go.
I have more love than ever.
Our kids have kids soon to have kids.
I need them. I need everyone
to come over to the house,
sleep on the floor, on the couches
in the front room. I need noise,
too many people in too small a space,
I need dancing, the spilling of drinks,
the loud pronouncements
over music, the verbal sparring,
the broken dishes, the wealth.
I need it all flying apart.
My friends to slam against me,
to hold me, to say they love me.
I need mornings to ask for favors
and forgiveness. I need to give,
have all my emotions rattled,
my family to be greedy,
to keep coming, to keep asking
and taking. I need no resolution,
just the constant turmoil of living.
Give me the bottom of the river,
all the unadorned, unfinished,
unpraised moments, one good turn
on the luxuriant wheel.
Paradise lies beneath the feet of your mother. A verse I’ve heard recited so frequently I do not know if it is scripture or hadith.
Hadith, meaning traditions of the prophet, are always accompanied by a careful oral lineage of who said what to whom, and who heard who say they heard what. Usually back to one of the prophet’s wives who heard the prophet say it.
The veil also between what you want to see and cannot see, what you wish to have heard but did not hear.
In butoh the dancers are rendered in white smoke, ghosts traversing the stage-as-womb, moving so slowly you do not even know they are there.
If paradise lies beneath the feet of my mother then how will I find my way inside unless she admits me.
Now I look at each face, each body, as it moves around the subway platform, down the stairs and around the platform, onto trains, off of them.
After my aunt Chand-mumani’s death I thought of them each as flames, in each the body is combusting, burning up the fuel of the soul.
Michelle after giving birth walked around the city imagining everyone glistening, bordered in amniotic grit.
But is it really like Fanny writes, the body only a car the soul is driving.
Or something of us sunk into the matter of the body, part of us actually flesh, inseparable from it and upon death, truly dispersed, smoke.
The body of the prophet’s wife always between us. Who said what.
In which case there really is something to grieve at death: that the soul is wind, not immortal.
A middle-aged woman, in the seat in front of me on the train, wearing a green puffy winter jacket. Her hair, though pulled back, frizzy and unkempt.
It’s the unkempt I feel tenderness towards.
Have always felt about myself a messiness, an awkwardness, an ugliness.
As a child, such an envy of birds, of graceful slopes, of muscular boys.
In the train rushing above ground at125th Street. Thinking about stumbling.
House by house, walking down this street or the other one. Going into the library, going into the school.
Where every middle-aged woman is my mother.
Waiting to be trusted with the truth.
I have nearly as much silver in my hair as she does.
Any pronoun here can be misread. He can mean you can mean I.
An odd list of things I want to do in the next five years: study butoh. Write an autobiography. Go back toParis. Get lost somewhere I haven’t been.
Also begin to say it.
Marco and I moved to Marble Hill in the summer of 2006.
Let me tell you a story about a city that floats onto the ocean. Opposite of Atlantis which fell into the sea or Cascadia which threatens to rise back out of it.
Marble Hill, a real hill, perched at the northernmost tip ofManhattanIsland, a promontory out into the conjunction of the Hudson River andSpuyten Duyvil Creek.
The wind is an instrument, its own section of the sky orchestra.
Today I read of a Turkish mullah who is canceling 800 different hadith regarding treatment of women found now or believed at least to be untrue.
Untrue is it.
Untrue the laws that were graven in fire or graven in stone.
Says the Quran, “This is the Book. In it there is no doubt.”
All for a belief that a human animal is a wicked one and requires a law.
Which requires if not actual violence then at least the threat of it.
At least fury.
Here in Marble Hill you are where you aren’t.
Orchestral the river that curves and curves north of the island.
Ships bound for the upper east side fromAlbanyhave a harder and harder time negotiating the torturous and twisting Spuyten Duyvil.
So a canal is blasted through and what was once the northern tip ofManhattanbecame an island.
Walking across one of the bridges inParisI came to a place called Les Mauvaises Garçons. Being afraid to enter I crossed the street to another tavern.
I stayed for three hours.
Radiant with traffic, the streets do not remember the gone.
The pillar at the Place de Bastille does not put back brick or bar.
Ten miles out of Chartres nothing but grain across and gray above a dark raven emerges screaming from the fields.
These thoughts are nothing, following one after the other.
Somali lesbians scheduled for their execution. Two boys in Iran convicted of drunken and lewd behavior and hanged for it. Boys. 16 and 18. There was video footage of the actual hanging on the internet.
I watched it myself.
“You wear your fingers down copying sacred texts,” sang Lalla, “but still the rage inside you has no way to leave.”
The Arabic line “This is the Book. In it there is no doubt” can also be read as “This is, no doubt, the Book . . . ”
Dear mother, there is a folder of my loose poems lost somewhere during the summer of 2006 when I traveled between Pennsylvania, New York City, Virginia, Maine, and your house in Buffalo. There was a letter inside the folder to you.
Though I’ve looked and looked and failed to find it, I am sure it is still in the house in Buffalo somewhere. An envelope with a folder inside. Inside the folder loose poems. Tucked into poems, there was a letter.
The veil between what you want to see and what you cannot see.
Emily Dickinson sent her first letter to Thomas Higginson unsigned. She included with the unsigned letter a smaller sealed envelope in which there was a calling card upon which she had written her name.
When Colin Powell spoke at the UN about the invasion of Iraq, workers were asked to hang a black drape over Picasso’s Guernica.
Which would have otherwise been in the background, surrounding him, as he spoke.
There is a body and a boy between you and utterance, the boy you were who could never speak.
Bright red bracelet of time.
“Fury,” is how Galway Kinnell explained Dickinson’s intent in writing her poems.
Poetry and fury in the time of war. Civil War for her.
What is my war? Not the one you think.
I won’t say.
Constant state, sure as the white noise on the television after the station has gone off the air.
But who goes off the air any more.
And whose air.
Come to Marble Hill then.
Each night sleep is pierced by someone outside gunning their car engine over and over again before driving off.
A car alarm or two.
There is a streetlight outside the window that shines into the bedroom, bright as the moon but more orange.
Orange like the saffron scarf I wore to Tokudo.—”leaving home.” When Ansho became a monk and took a new name.
The day I sat down next to a young man with a sweet smile. A gardener. Name of Marco.
The train runs the next block over. We are on the second floor so hear it if we really pay attention.
By now its rumble on the tracks, the chiming when the doors are about to close, are on the order of background noise.
I have not yet learned how to sleep through the night.
Marble Hill was an island for twenty years before the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, still running, underground below 228th Street, was filled in and joined to the mainland.
The city itself, my life, that first butoh performance I saw.
A man with such slow and intense movements, so internal.
You hardly knew he had moved at all and suddenly he was all the way across the stage, contorted, holding a glass bowl aloft in which a fish swam.
None of which you had even noticed was on the stage.
I wind my way across a black donut hole
and space that clunks.
Once I saw on a stage,
as if at the bottom of a mineshaft,
the precise footwork
of some mechanical ballet.
It was like looking into the brain
of a cuckoo clock and it carried
some part of me away forever.
No one knows when they first see a thing,
how long its after image will last.
Proust could stare at the symptom of a face
for years, while Frank O’Hara, like anyone with a job,
was always looking at his watch.
My favorite way of remembering is to forget.
Please start the record of the sea over again.
Call up a shadow below the pendulum of a gull’s wing.
In a city of eight million sundials, nobody has any idea
how long a minute really is.
Plumbline of disaster, shadow storage of the way thought travels, the opinion, the sentiment, only assertion following silence, only a way of everlasting breathing, a verb searching for grammar too devoted to making sense so that the self interrupts with a final pitch. From stop to stop the mouth makes music by holding sound in a razz mixed with spit, air pushing through idea to a new phrase, followed by a chill, then riding on the other air. So the moment might live outside itself, lips vibrate against the mouthpiece of the horn, the face blooms in concentration, the idea of interval.
2
Anoint the valves, they stick — my it is bright when you bring out your trumpet William, standing there, tapping your right foot, bent like a cricket at the knee, slouching. Whoever hears your Ode to Joy hears your knocking then setting down of carrying case, cradling of brass. Dizzy said it took his whole life to learn what not to play but in one month you deny nothing, not even the feel of your embouchere, who’d been in school all day. Lubricate the valves, once neighbors lifted up their heads like lilies in the field, and wind rolled over the need to stay away.
3
It’s beauty people fear, bright rose riding on Aunt Billie’s forehead, the way light makes green everything after her pickled okra, stubble in the hands of day labor, callouses of a parade of things and touching them without seeing or hearing without knowledge, dumbstruck by a brooding need to define or look without a place to grieve, beauty and not faith in truth in the light of justice — just reach and nothing’s there but what’s there already.
4
William — where — is — your — horn, did you leave it in math class again with Fibonacci’s sequence, flaring bell, flex and curve in sunlight leaning at a forty-five degree angle, your teacher Mr. Fletcher having cranked open the classroom window with an allen wrench, merged with sunlight so a horsefly wheeled blue-green in its own wingbeat by a rote it answered to in music, lesser to the greater as the greater to the whole, tube twice bent on itself, Sin curve on the line of displacement, sending sound backwards until it’s now?
5
William, when thirty kids try out for basketball calculate the odds, the tendency of mind to see itself in transition — feminine green light like call waiting — you might be playing trumpet into the speaker, your girlfriend Corrine might be listening, exhausting her telephone allotment of fifteen minutes, holding her ear inches away, glint of a clipboard watching you both. You might move out of the paint. The yellow squeak of rubber on oak wakes rivers of grain — what does it matter that this matter jumps back or breaks for open court — sometimes you only stand and scream, wave both arms, put it on the floor and drive, lay it up, put it down, take it home.
6
Let me find the keys says Candace let’s go says William the water nibbles at the bank sunlight shafts the fog wait says Candace clouds back off the water what else the boat suspended glint gray along the gunnels here they are I’ve found them the washing machine idles in its cycle sun shattered in water slaps let’s go says William the legs follow the surface tension the door closes the car starts the green wave slides under the boat a day begins.
7
Slow it down, bring it down, bring it on home, tympanum of the trumpet- flower, raised hood, swollen yellow face, pathological woe standing in rank grass against the Hurricane fence, half a brick bewildered, half carried through slatted shadows, cracked bell shrouded by buildings, doorways listening, patiently waiting for someone to open a paper bag and bring out the horn and this one time it sounds exactly like laughter, wind blows in your face, from a high window in metallic light long green trumpets beat back rain.
8
When the instruments linger in the band room, snare leaning into itself, tuba beached against green cinderblock, do they riff where a fault opens, make a crazy line in space, does brass lie in bronze alloy, does longing breathe in acoustic energy? Notes hang to the skirt of the bell like a city of light for a moment. A tire spooks the gravel, you hear talk about the weather, the leaning toward and then away. Pierce the blind to better hear the music, the fall of each sound and pause between.
9
It damages people when they do not understand the healing power of friendship. I am damaged. The left front light of my transport is out. A day doesn’t pass. An hour does not go by. There are minutes that glow in human flesh. A trumpet has a voice. A place lives in music of people and time. These are not things I know. Things of the air are also not thought of in time of need. That is why the passive voice is so active in distortion, and well to note that a slur is more expressive than a sharp note timed to surface admiration, though the fool in me shines to perfection.
10
Soft percussive no-look pass of summer, flexion of bell, white seed of longing and forgetfulness — I remember stopping on the way home from school at a car showroom, perching on vinyl I could smell thinking I don’t belong here and the place about to close. I hold the page of music so you can see it, William, your face reddens, your foot taps eight times to push breath past unbelievable seconds, a dandelion head floats out of sight senseless and alive, full of feather and plume, empty to itself wherever it flies, drifting from its own heart.
11
The dog growls, a low unearthed intent stands up on back of the neck — I am here and somewhere else — back in time maybe, fingers tap the valves. Make two trumpets of silver Yahweh said to Moses — and make them play flat and sharp notes at the same time said Ornette Coleman, no loose lipping. Wake the memory. Wake the present tense. The tongue wicks the mouthpiece. Horripilates the cause. Lights up the argument. A column of air moving through an empty place, three stops, an opening outward toward no purpose or proof beyond the time when people will not hear it.
12
My father’s there. Like fugitive dust seeping through cracks and keyholes in Oklahoma in the early 30’s. What happens when I try to hold him is my arms pass through air. Goodbye goodbye to the river and to green metallic leaves. I leave the darkness which sat on my shoulders for love talk and grace of music. Still, there are strains of darkness dear to light. I found a photograph under the couch. My father barbecuing chicken with his shirt off, skin brown as a berry. Grinning from the other side. Into the lens. Of light and song.
II. Shout Trumpet
1
When passing the Trumpet in Zion Church, red brick soaked with morning rain, four cars parked on slickened blacktop, marked yellow lines, redbud clusters, heart-shaped lavender pods, I keep hearing my own minor key. Even so, a person puts a thumb out, an awning cantilevers, traffic comes to a rolling stop. Through an open window high bright notes clarify the air back to March wind, locked doors, to those who have lost their love, decided to go and not come back: the high C of incalculable motion.
2
At the Trumpet in Zion they do the laying on of hands — your long hair passes over me, the purpose of the body hidden in the word. Thinking nothing. Resembling an eighth note. If the rapture taketh then where does the body go when hands lie down on air? A flag dragged through the iris upside down. Desire runs through its stops — the dance rises to water level. What happens inside music to make it run over arms and legs like a squirrel? Toot toot go to the water to the river of folded wings,
3
where catalpa shade holds a body of gnats just the shape of smoke and water saturates yellow air and a water moccasin displaces the imagination — not away from but toward where the world reaches and a song carries across water, one they’ve been singing all along, the same notes and fears, the sound of pure tones. I wouldn’t know it if I heard it. I might not know if it were only mine. I would like to think I could clearly hear the music as it calls across so I could know what you know.
4
Bats are back. Looping the Mulberry. Concentric gravitational waves. I think I notice my own radar. I loll in a yellow chair with two ear plugs connected to Art Porter. Art Porter Junior in background on clarinet. Little Rock’s own. Follow the ogive turns past Maybelline to Telegraph Road, past Jimmy Doyle’s and the white birches, signs for Alltel and Jesus, SunCom, and Ruby Lube. Are you a holy roller William asks his grandmother. No but I’m spirit-filled. Her sisters’ faces ghost across her own face as it is — Jean, Billie in her garden, pious Lucille.
5
I ask myself riddles in sleep and part of me thinks it knows the answers. My body leaks, my ignorance, my desire. I keep a gold tooth which is not the trumpet, wood landing over water knock, photon locked in early light wrapped around a cove, people in a boat, not much talking but it echoes, love is there, when will I ever believe, fill the body up and sing. A wireless chip with beams of light carries itself in your eye. Who sleeps upside down on a ledge with toes turned in, dreams of making love mid-air, only you and me in water? Bats are back. I feel a scarf of air rush past.
6
Some mean ass little red bug just bit the shit out of me! So why does it grease the room with soulless nasal noise, no antennae for opposites, alighting on the trumpet case? Seven years of mending, leaving and coming back through you, I think I can hear syncopation in the last half of the beat, cancellation too, but I only want to touch the button on your blouse. The hi-hat clears the moment. Out of nowhere you came to me. Where is memory with its leaning sideways solo under a stone weight? Out of nowhere you came back. Today and today an old wind blows, music flares above the grasstips.
7
When the moon stares from its forehead and sound waves and particles knock on tiny hairs in the inner ear, information travels — how can one not know the only pressure occurs at a molecular level? A channel forms in the flow of ions. When one whacks at a cloud of flies, one clarifies that insects don’t know where the hell they are — they can’t hear right so spend their remaining days complaining that music by itself is trivial. Their bristles get bent, ions flow in to trumpet the brain, but still no hard high note, no upward rip.
8
Plumbline of the asters, music caught inside the throat, the implacability, the fluted crescent of the body, the temple, the infarcted heart, the age of reason, the tap tap tap of the baton: one time one steps off the porch two stories high, next the song sings itself: the air, the ambient glue, the tongue in mid-salute, the coup de langue, the nation at war, the wormhole connecting nothing to nothing, the creak of heaven over the creek, the flat speckled rock, the event horizon, the accretion disk, the no which means no, the wide swing under stars, the water, the verb, the hidden grammar.
9
Not long ago a fly landed in the butter. The buzz stumbled, the the stared out from the portable computer, the astral light combined with the high speed line to toot back an unheard, unseen opinion so popular here in the South. I reach for you and nothing, not anything from all the days of walking, breathing in and out, waking to change and resemblance, quickened to the task of words, time and timing unsung — belly to belly, keyboard to hyperthought, one wing gleaming on a salt sweet brick like a face in the screen, increased singularity.
10
I hear the neighbors talking over the fence — “He came driving up in that turd-colored convertible and didn’t even open the door when he saw his stuff all flayed out in the bushes and grass, his shirt with the sleeve drooping over the hostas . . .” The glass doors screech, the monarch glisses over standing water, the ego in its drifting boat interminably waits. We have no ideas but why should we say goodbye? The signature and sign don’t mean the end of it. White azalea blossom stuck to mud. That is the end of winter, this a preoccupation with weather which has nothing more than last night on its mind.
11
Thunder and rain all day like the drumming of Zutty Singleton. Ivy gropes the fern, a sprig of oak pollen navigates over two bar breaks. One or two octaves over, like a ghost flattened out, down the basement, up one flight to the dirty silver door with Judas hole, to a few tables and wicker chairs, late afternoon — that’s where to hear a phrase turn. The upright shakes the floor, and when however fast the falling torrent flows — stop that please thinks management if people stand too long and listen — the whole world knows in wind when self assured, the roses blow.
12
You know that silo in Oklahoma, the one with chipped tooth on the way to Grandma’s house where apple blossoms lit the way to certain hell? Well, it’s gone now. The leaping light and silence. Through channels of urgent voluntary sing-song, passing tones in the hallway mirror, tension through the saunter of water cooled air, all is gone. You don’t have to remember. Only that violation in the upper registers which sounded and does sound in houses just a few blocks over, and in fact, in this house which is hot at night and cunning, waits for a future. Slap-tongue’s gone. The mouth meets and notches the music.
We don't belong to each other.
We belong together.
Some poems
belong together to prove the intentionality of subatomic particles.
Some poems eat with scissors.
Some poems are like kissing a
porcupine.
God, by the way, is disappointed in some of your recent
choices.
Some poems swoop.
When she said my eyes were
definitely blue, I said, How can you see that in the dark? How can you not? she said, and that was like some poems.
Some poems are
blinded three times.
Some poems go like death before dishonor.
Some poems go like the time she brought cherries to the movies;
later a heedless picnic in her bed.
Never revered I crumbs so
highly.
Some poems have perfect posture, as if hanging by
filaments from the sky.
Those poems walk like dancers,
noiselessly.
All poems are love poems.
Some poems are better off
dead.
Right now I want something I don't believe in.
