Burn Lake

Dearly

The still small voice cleaves
like thin smoke from a bed
deep in arcadia; there is
an arrow true and straight
to her, not to be spoken
as though the jaws gobbling
up my life have had their
fill at last; as though
my own fast is broken
upon this note, my mother's
song a falling scale of bone.

Sinking so far into herself
she's no one, yet I hear it borne
upon the wind, ancient voices
of the child she was, marking
time to save herself from moaning.

She chews grapes, spits them.
They have landed on my skin
and turn it green, it is
green fire speaking upon me
a burn too fierce to see.

That was the bed, the island;
hands stray like crabs
to find the shoreline; there is
an expedition in this visit
though the nurse won't catch it.

I hold the receiver tight
use a lover's words to
fold her loose and too-wide
wish her back unto its own,
take out my hard-won stone
and sharpen up love's knife;
late now for feeble gestures
send my heart hot down the line
for chewing on, knowing it lands
but no geography, nothing of that
boundless offering left to see.

Too far out she is for any
contemplation; there are laws
it seems, beyond cognition, too
vast and tremulous not to obey her
nor submit this moment's grace to
things undone.

Twin Tree

A tree divided. It grew like that—
Its slender trunk suddenly forking,

Lifting up from the crux in two Shiva arms—
As if it had come to a crossroads and split

The way twins unpeel from one another
In the womb. Two from one, it reached up

And flourished this way—it topped thirty feet
As its thick dark glossy leaves, half-folded like

Paper boats, kept the nubs of coming pears
Hidden then dangling. Avocado, avocado.

I held you in my hand as a big wrinkled pit,
Propped you (as I'd been taught once by a lover

Who was trouble) with four toothpicks over a glass
Filled with water—till the tiny white filament inside

Your worried seed slowly let itself down into the
Clear transparency, while sprouting above into a

Green feasible stem. I transplanted those floating roots,
The top-heavy shoot after weeks—then waited till it

Reached out at last—growing fast in both directions,
Down into dirt, up into the sky over the backyard. When

It twinned, climbing upward, I stopped my husband,
Standing hard by with shears, from pruning it back

Into one: The only way it would survive he said. But
It doubled skyward into the single tree at the top—

A hermaphrodite—as it had to be to make fruit. So
Many alligator pears, summer after L.A. summer! We

Filled baskets with the abundance of the you
And you: the fruit of two separate flowerings

From one quick hesitation. Till days after David died,
When clumsy workmen, digging a trench, severed your

Taproot. I saw the white exposed arteries they'd chopped clean
With their spades. I stood beside you weeping, trying to hold

Your heart together with my hands at the fork where you'd
Leaned apart, then towered. You were my love, conflict tree,—

Tough-skinned, the rich light-green flesh beneath. Avocado,
They killed you. When we sold the house, you were a cut stump.

Two in the Afternoon

The minister's gray spitz
at the sacristy door.
Sparrows' wings scuffle in the dirt
in front of his sightless eyes.

Like memories to him:
the twine tying the brace of pheasants
that appeared as a crack in the cemetery wall;
the shaking of the gravestones
when the crippled caterpillar wriggles;
the discoloration of the bricks
in the scream of the dying mole.

Calmly he acknowledges
the report from the woods
that the gates of paradise are to be thrown open.

(Text of the poem in the original German)

And

Fog fog fog,
hair
in my ears, a
noncommittal
friendliness
and
and
and Raissa's sweet laugh.

Experience tells
what belongs with what,
what belongs with and,
only with and,
no rationale.

It will last
so long as the and doesn't
slip my mind like the other words.
It's enough, thanks, it's plenty.

(Text of the poem in the original German)

Darts, 1965

Summer spent exploring
Yeats’s noble canon,
His heroes’ sprezzatura,
But now, an overnight
Stay en route to Shannon

In Bally-something-or-other
With its castle that beguiles
The traveler not to notice
The grimy factory
Where men are making tiles—

Tiles and tourists, these
The only two ways here
To turn a shilling.
My brimming mug of beer
Is drawn by a colleen,

Mere child, maybe thirteen.
Her Dad is publican.
I’m the only tourist,
Hard at their game of darts
The tile-workers, boy and man,

Play for sixpence a game.
They ask, Will I play with them?
I’ve been shooting all summer
But these lads—Darts
Is a way of life with them!

First, from eight and a half feet
You must hit the outer rim
Of the targe, only half an inch wide
Before your score begins to count.
Was I a drag on our side!

The others were well on their way
To a perfect 601
When my scoring had barely begun.
They played with confident grace
And concentration,

Keeping well out of mind
The dingy hovels they lived in,
Raw fires in the kilns of clay,
The long, long years of their bleak
Labor, their mingy pay.

The next morning I turn aside
From the movie on TWA.
I close my eyes, am with friends
At the dartboard again as we play,
Keeping well out of mind

As they did, that they
Would be toiling at tiles again
While I’m flying home.
For their ale, for the fun of our game,
They’d not let me pay.

On Pouring a Good Stout

Time is the main ingredient. A thirst cannot truly be quenched without it. For stout, the measure is in the pour. There's no rush, but slowness is by and large misunderstood, and so rushing remains the norm. For instance, right now I'm at one of those blood drives which constitute the extent of my service impulse these days. I am watching my blood seep into a sterilized plastic bag while my daughter—our daughter—reads King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry (illustrated by Wesley Dennis, Rand McNally & Co., Chicago, ©1948) with such intensity she can't hear me call out to her to stop twirling her hair. Your own blood in quantity is darker than you think it should be, and the color and stealth with which it accumulates remind me of pouring a stout, which ends up dark, but which foams from the tap into the glass a rich, wild tan, like "a clear bay—whose coat is touched with gold. When he flees under the sun he is the wind" (p. 53). That's the first color: steed-tan. And active, with tiny bubbles parading up and down in columns, particles swirling and tossing their manes, hooves tearing at silky hide. I fill the pint glass a third of the way and let it sit for a good five minutes, until all the animals have settled down, the bay has floated to the top and thickened, leaving the blood brooding below. And I pour another third, and the horses start and whinny. And I wait, patient, wise, silent, wiry, like my brewmaster love ("The only 'uman bein' what can 'andle 'im is a spindlin' boy," p. 107) until all is calm again. And I pour the last third, and the thick head rises up, up past the rim of the pint, but it doesn't spill because I have been patient and slow and wise. It stays put, my prayer, my possession, not quite broken, reading in her chair.

Absinthe

O sacré bleu
Those were some crazy temps
Poets walking pet lobsters on leashes
and everybody drinking away
les heures bleues as if
there would always be more of them
Always another trickle of gaslight
to spill

Here is a thread
of spun lightning and here
a grass green cloud abloom
in a glass Yes they had elements
then Trams aglide beneath
their cables and absinthe
tipple so bitter it was délicieux
like dark memory or gnarled
heart

And now of course
almost none of it remains
Mesdames Monsieurs Don't
need a poet to tell you that
When was the last time you heard
the merry click of claws
on a city sidewalk? I stumbled
on an arc of old track embedded
in the street, a forgotten
rib

As for absinthe,
they outlawed it years ago.
Seems after two, or four, or twelve,
a man would lose his head.
Only l'heure bleue, that hour
dusk leaks over the rooftops, the sole
survivor

Love Song (Lame)

This is a little like high school
he said, when I wouldn't take off my clothes.
It was true, although in high school
I would've come over to torture him deliberately
and now the torture was an unfortunate side effect
of my sadness, and had nothing to do with him at all.
Sleeping with you would be like
a drowning woman grabbing an anvil,
I explained. A burning man guzzling gasoline.
Lame analogies, but I was trying to make a point.
When he got up for a drink, I missed him
but that feeling disappeared once he came back.
I sat there and tried to feel sad,
tracking my blue mute form
as it sank to a furrowed ocean floor.

Poussin

clouds solid
as columns
the satyrs lounge
among lunge
for the feel
of the seventeenth
century tufts
of historical lust

Anthropology

why am I not preserving
the yanomami language
or speakers of same
or learning a lusty romance tongue
the smell of the sea
mediterraneanizing open vocables
split down the middle
by dirt?
o the language game uh huh. I played
the lion, saw that I won, sd
hello. He like unto himself
yawned/roared
as the case required.
a daggered paw ripped off my face
the savanna no longer so peaceful—

all this was caught by the cameras
the intrepid documentarian brought
in the jeep.

bleep bleep went the machine
begging for love
thought the anthropomorphizers.

and right they were: desire slimed
everything.
how stupid to forget the objects
would one day rise up

I See the Sea...

I see the sea shrink
then shrink again
until it fits in the palm of my hand.

And I
hear the sound of flying fish,
the dead sailors' cough, the burning whales,
the shivering mermaids, the horses and the wind,
the sea's white curls,
and the drowned strangers who have forgotten their human voice.

I see
the sea
shrink
then shrink even more
the oars' hopeless beats,
the foam-circled boats,
the frozen shadows,
the salt-encrusted stores,
the disheveled hopeless left on the shore....
Oh what strange mystery,
the sea!

I see your purple fingers
in the beakers of the dead,
and the shoulders of the wind
drenched with your mouth's sweat,
and I see your bitter joy.

I see
the sea
shrink,
then shrink again,
and I
float farther
from the invisible shore.

To where is this familiar boat,
whose oars' solemn sound mingles
with the rain, carrying us?