Burn Lake

When you were building the I-10 bypass,
one of your dozers, moving earth
at the center of a great pit,
slipped its thick blade beneath
the water table, slicing into the earth's
wet palm, and the silt moistened
beneath the huge thing's tires, and the crew
was sent home for the day.
Next morning, water filled the pit.
Nothing anyone could do to stop it coming.
It was a revelation: kidney-shaped, deep
green, there between the interstate
and the sewage treatment plant.
When nothing else worked, you called it
a lake and opened it to the public.
And we were the public.

El Camino Real 2


In the dead summer
of 1598, midway through
the Jornada del Muerto,
where the river turned away
and went off into terrain
too rough for the horses,
after he and his column
had exhausted the last
of their supplies but before
they came to the place
they'd call Socorro, before
the pueblo there
sent runners with water
and sweet corn
to save them, Don Juan
de Oñate, sweating to death
in his chaps and iron chest plate,
thought, "After this
suffering, if we survive this
suffering, we'll be there;
we'll walk into the open hands
of the sea."
And in his mind
he began once again
to compose the letter
to the viceroy,
which, one had to assume,
would find its way
to the king: Dear Sirs,
We're here.
The coast is very much
as I'd imagined it:
water indefinitely, empty
and ours.

Father and Son at the Mesilla Valley Drive-thru Bank

It's a late Friday afternoon. The sky
is making that colossal pink gesture
that often precedes the dark.

The car in front of them finally pulls forward,
and the boy's father feeds the zipped bag of money
to the open mouth of the building.

From behind the glass, the woman speaks
into a long, thin microphone. She's so close,
if it weren't for the glass, she could lean over

and touch the roof of the car.
"This will only take a moment," she says,
smiling broadly.

Then, as if she'd disappeared entirely
from their view, she licks her thumb
and begins, without mercy, to count the bills.

The Flagellation



Soon they'll knock nails into him, but first there's this,
a lesson in perspective with two worlds coming together:
one gloomy and transgressive, let's call it super-real,
a world behind this world, in which a man is tied to
a column—his hair and beard unkempt, his body raw,
though not bleeding—muttering, "I am afraid to fall down,
but I will not be dominated"; the other world is surreally
calm, with saturated colors and costumes of the day,
a youth's head framed by a laurel tree, nothing
appearing larger than it is, so the eyes drift back
to the deviant, the melancholic, the real, emotion
punching through the rational—like mother cat with five
kittens in her tummy purring in my lap now—
as a man for his beliefs receives blow after blow.

The Death of the Frontier

It is during sleep that the distinction between
good men and bad is least apparent.
—Aristotle

In the dream, we wandered farther

into our thoughts,
toward the waters at their edge,
the overhanging cliffs—

we forded rivers, sometimes

snow fell on the squat cactuses,
the taut canvas covers;
it slipped through the steam

bursting from the horses' nostrils.

When our wheels broke,
we balanced on the thumbs
of our footprints,

dragged the children behind us

on palettes we'd gathered
from the City's back alleys.
We attended to our huddling

voices, dark around the fire,

we tipped our heads back
to examine the stars, though
at that remove our words failed

to describe them. Their whispers

floated over us,
behind us, wrapped the horizon
we kept pushing toward.

When the thread of the idea

we tugged on as a guide
led us through the emberlit camps
of strangers,

we stabbed them in their sleep;

and when we circled the wagons
in the night, we made
of ourselves a city—

like an animal bristling its fur.

Then, slowly, we awoke:
we were back in our beds,
the lights of the City

in the windows, the bridge—

an idea threading the bay.
At breakfast, we sat quietly
for a long time, the paper

open before us, its letters

winding down the page.
Now where would we go,
what should be next? The day

was crisp, the light, polleny—

and up the street, that film
we'd wanted to see for years
was still showing.

from Doppler Elegies

[I'm worried about a friend]

I'm worried about a friend
among panicles of spent
flowers. I'm on the phone
There's an argument here regarding
Cathedral windows thicker at the base
It does not concern you
flowing glass. Can we talk
about the drinking
They call them smoke trees

I'm pretty much dead
by any measure
already. When we were kids, the leaves
but that's a story, fallen or reflected
obscured the well. I cut this
In the dream, they are always
younger. Ari woke me
You were screaming
Everything is so

easy for you
You mean was
so easy, like walking slowly
Out of the photo, even those
They are blooming early. I mean that
literally. You can see it from space
he took. Can we talk
about the drinking
Sometime in May

[A flowering no one attends]

A flowering no one attends
The enterprise known
variously as waking, April, or
Bats are disappearing like
color into function. I wanted to open
In a new window
the eyes of a friend
by force if necessary. Amber light
is a useless phrase

but will have to do
what painting did
Dense smoke from the burning wells
for our parents. Ben
there is a man at the door who says
I've made small changes
he found your notebook
throughout in red. The recurring dream
contrived in places

Of waning significance
it resembles the hand
after a difficult passage
opening, a key word in the early
Blue of rippled glass
atonal circles. They phased us out
across the backward capitals
like paper money
Or is that two words

Movie

why have I spent so

much of my time witnessing

actors pretend things?


we are not actors

don't want to go down in flames

with people watching


the twin towers shown

as an establishing shot

saddens many films


the Empire State used

as an action location

gladdens many too


so why do I cry

when Kong turns to the sunrise

softly thumps his chest?

The Swifts

One August night, ten thousand.
Four thousand now, in this long, September dusk.
Some repeaters, staying over.

No first-growth stumps in sight—
no forests at all on this stretch of flyway—
and so they roost in a school's brick chimney,
ten thousand then, four thousand now,

turning in wide, counterclockwise gyres
above the chimney's rusted clockface, turning
their four-inch, half-ounce shapes, three heartbeats
per wingbeat, three heartbeats per clipped syllable
of each high-pitched cry, some repeaters,

staying over. Just to the west,
the sunset that stains their bellies
to the dusty gold of mine canaries

slips over the gray Pacific, while to the east, under
Kentucky and Illinois, the root-tips of fossil forests
reach down through the roofs of coalmine shafts.
Tropical then, the trees, three hundred million years ago,

rain-filled, before the planet quickly warmed
and the magma shifted and the world's first birds
cast their first neuronic blips
and the world's first flocks answered in unison.
What? the miners asked, brushed on the nape

by a weightlessness three hundred million years
whittled. Only the roots of absence, tepid
across the skin. And tangible in that darkness

as the sudden blip that any moment now
will draw this flock, like airborne ash, backward
through the chimney. The cell-phone camera eyes,
like miners' headlamps, tip up in unison

toward a micro-ounce of source too swift
for mystery. Wing dip? Cell click? Could the answer
be corporeal? Attention to the matter?
Their eyes are bigger than their beaks. Their sleep—
no opposable toes—is vertical. Just to the west,

a line of contrail draws us—
and down they drop, wings tucked, past
the chipped mortar and carbon dust, past the open flue,
the first birds overlapped by the next, and those

by the next, and next, climbing the chimney's shadow shape
in four-inch repetitions. Ten thousand then,
four thousand now, upright on the bricks.

On Aggression

My beautiful, bowlegged, jade-eyed tabby
was lounging on the patio
when a sparrow, swooping
down from the blue,

thumped against the screen door. And there
it thrashed, its claws
caught in the mesh.
How swiftly all of this happened

from where I sat on the living room couch
reading about the war—
the cat darted, leapt, his outstretched body
rising and rising

until the sparrow fluttered
in his jaws. No time to think—
the newspaper skated
across the wooden floor,

the door screeched along its track,
my hands clamped around the cat's throat
and squeezed, blood shuttling
quicker through my veins.

Drop it, I commanded,
and he obeyed. And I let go. And the sparrow
scuttled on the concrete
before ruffling a line in the lawn,

then sailed over the trellis
mobbed with lavender flowers,
over a rooftop, the black arrow
of its shadow sliding across the shingles.

The world slowed then, the blood cooled.
Far off, wind jostled wind chimes—
the sound of a broom
endlessly sweeping broken glass.

Too late for anything, too early for nothing

Unexpectedly we'll meet again years later,
quite on purpose we'll mix beer and wine
with vodka, to ride bicycles in the middle of the night
around the estate, unexpectedly bumping into the high

kerbstones, trampling flowerbeds, cutting our cheeks
on branches that have sprung up unexpectedly, then un-
expectedly to fall over, and pushing our
warped bicycles, come to my place, to dress

our wounds, and then lie down to sleep, in the morning
to copulate unexpectedly like animals, out
of fear that something will unexpectedly return

that we felt years ago, copulating like people.

[Untitled]

God has not retired—as Simone Weil
would have it—a huge distance away, but He's
right here, so close that I can feel His

caring non-presence. (Which is a word passed over
in silence, an aborted gesture, a suspended
gaze,
a breath held for a moment. That

not breathing, that's your life.)

I missed my moment

And how could I fail to miss it, reading tomorrow's papers
on the internet, hearing songs by the white dwarves
of rock pretending to be supernovas. Seeing

how a tsunami from years ago keeps on engulfing
the same old villages, and the World Trade Center towers
are hurriedly rebuilt by night in order languidly

to tumble by day. So tell me, how could I not miss
my moment in a world where the same newspaper
comes out in four versions: conservative,

progressive, moderate and without text. In times
when the unused minutes pass on to the next
month. I missed my moment. When, where?

Or maybe it missed me? Vanished
over the horizon, grew fat infinitely.

And is waiting.

Cutting Apples

My father always carried a penknife
to pare his green apples, raising their skins
in perfect spirals. He never drew blood
slicing his bananas for breakfast,
their dark-seeded cores like little faces
dropping into the milk, one more item
in a life of a thousand chores,
one more notch in a life advancing
by millimeters or inches, not seconds or days.
I watched him turn himself as carefully away
from violence as a lathe on a table leg,
cutting each curve and flourish
from the flat face of a block
clamped in his hand. His hand and its thumb
never shied from the blade; he knew
that what you do with any tool gives it its value,
like a life—not too eager or afraid.

Primer

1.

Extrude light from darkness.
When day breaks scoop up shards.

Ask time to make the pieces fit.
Who has more leisure than time?
Eternity is a very long
time, especially towards the end.
—Woody Allen

2.

Slice into a section of the waters.
Place heaven between the margins,
Give it a long arm and an index finger pointed
in your direction. Wonder
if you are being scolded
or invited to proceed.
The struggle
itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.
—Albert Camus

3.

Sow seeds for grass, herbs, trees, and greed.
It is not your obligation to complete the task,
but neither are you at liberty to desist from it entirely ...
—Rabbi Tarfon, Pirke Avot 2:16

4.

Invent signs and portents:
Monsters of the deep, for example.
Weapons of mass destruction.
Slip them into your pocket.

They're bound to come in handy one day.
E cosi desiro me mena—
and so desire carries me along.
—Petrarch

5.

Tat a poem with lacework that swims.
Compose an essay with heaving geometries of air and sea.
Encase three perfect blooms in an elegant vitrine.

Invention is the mother of intention.
All warfare is based on deception.
—Sun Tzu

6.

Subdue dust dervishing around you.
Gaze in the mirror as you shape
A few handfuls between moistened palms.

Model carefully with an additive of clay
You will produce all the companions you'll ever need.

When it is dark beware of your new friends.
The soul is here for its own joy
—Rumi

7.

Talk to stone. Tell it words
you want it to remember.

Have stone repeat these words
three times after you.

Do this one thousand times a day
for the rest of your life.

On the last day go to stone
and ask it what it knows.
For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing,
Because our days upon earth are a shadow ...
—Book of Job

Ajar in Tennessee

A conspicuous freedom came out of everywhere.
Slower traffic kept right, against the glare,
before we got to Exit 133 and Birdsong Rd,
on the edge of the first array of slovenly lumps
through which the river of rivers in Tennessee
bore islands into a ripply inland ocean.

We came to Cuba Landing and the Parkway Café,
sitting down to onions and buttered bread.
We spoke about how the fragrant air
would spill over our faces as we stepped
into a summer morning in Tuscany.

How different it was there than in Tennessee,
then or now. It's certainly nice to be here,
don't get me wrong, but Italy was sweeter,
you ventured. I looked over your shoulders
at the curtains covered with chickadees.

Are those chickadees or thrush do you think? I asked you.
Maybe finch, you suggested. I think they could be finch.
Background music swept over us from the background.

We took to the road again, constantly eastward
as the afternoon sped toward us awfully.

I decided it was time I read Deuteronomy.
The part about the man with loosed shoes is enough
to reveal real weirdness and negligible wisdom
from the blessed curmudgeon so prominent in this old book.

It seemed all day we drove beside smallish trees
through all of Tennessee.
Brown water spread amongst the woods.

Fine old wackyjack balsams were the dominant boscage.
One had a board nailed to it and above that a platform
like the floor of a treehouse, probably a deer stand, you said.
Thousands of others showed no such sign of people.

Immaculate ideas played over us through the windows.
You lit another cigarette; we moved along, having become
an astonishment, a proverb, a byword among the nations.

Overweight

Cooking for someone can be loaded with danger.
He'll get here at six and I'm filled with a small fear
of conversation at the table.
I always toy with the edge across my throat,
between the cabbage, the duck and coffee we stare into.

There are many ways to scream.
I've chosen the silent one
because I'm afraid of being discovered as I am, not
who he remembers 20 years ago.

I want to say things have changed since then.
I've smoked my lungs black and eaten my heart out.
Lost each leaf of hair and seen friends to their graves.

So the real talk is never said.
After a polite time he leaves a bit early.
I want to re-run dinner again
with simpler food, the apartment a little messy.
I'd like to walk right over the edge and say,
'Who we were then is fable.'
But that takes believing we're someone right now.

Instead I sit down to a second meal.
I'm famished from things left unsaid,
go to bed too early, and wake totally
at the national anthem, before the TV hisses
into blue snow.

I get up. I eat again.

Holiday of a Lifetime

Your ex transferred
a photo
to a jigsaw. Years later,
underneath a shelf,
you find a centre piece.

Sit at the desk. It's mid-
November.
Your cigarette, neglected,
unthreads air
to ash. The study's walls are

strung with hoops of light
thrown by a glass
of water. The sash window
faces perfectly
north-west. You checked.

How close will you get?
Introduce it
as a mood composed of pauses,
water, glass and light,
the sound of distant

traffic passing and someone
burning leaves
somewhere, close by,
smoke shrugging
over fences, hedges,

as if to say that everything is
temporary,
as if you might have momentarily
forgotten,
you with ash on the sleeve

of your best blue jumper.
The jigsaw piece
is also blue, as an eye,
one of yours,
though what you will do

for the rest of your years
is to try,
repeatedly, to identify
that blue as sea,
maybe, or sky.

Estimates

Who knows what you mean by love?
Extrapolating from the facts
you want two hundred friends
to watch
you wear the white and walk the aisle.

We could pack the car and motor north
to waterfall and rock, a nightfall
lit by moonlight on the snowfall
patches
still intact among the sheep-tracks

and the turf-banks and the heather.
We could pull in somewhere there,
kill the engine, wait,
listen
to a late-night country music station,

split bars of dark and fruit-&-nut,
sip amaretto from the lid, skin up,
and wake,
unwashed and cramped
as man and wife

in a place unpeopled, dawn-calm,
cleared of its gestures, its features
by weather, to mountains,
and mountains of clouds.
We could.

Vertical Realities

Waking is an obligation:
three generations open their eyes every morning
inside me.

The first is an old child—my father;
he always chooses his luck and clothes one size too small for him.

Next comes grandfather ... In his day, the word "diagnosis" did not exist.
He simply died of misery six months after his wife.
No time was wasted. Above their corpses
rose a factory to make uniforms for dockworkers.

And great-grandfather, if he ever existed,
I don't even know his name. Here my memory goes on hiatus,
my peasant origins cut like the thick and yellow nails
of field-workers.

Three shadows loom like a forest over me
telling me what to do
and what not to do.

You listened to me say "good morning"
but it was either an elephant pounding on a piano
or the seams coming apart in my father's little jacket.

Indeed, my father, his father, and his father before that
are not trying to change anything
nor do they refuse to change anything; the soap of ephemerality
leaves them feeling fresh and clean.

They only wish to gently touch the world again
through me, the way latex gloves
lovingly touch the evidence
of a crime scene.