Three Documentaries

Photograph #1, The Lying-in Hospital

Past the Emergency Pavilion's bordered brick, over
a roundabout, through the revolving door's glass
triangles that refuse to scatter into shadow,
turn at the Diagnostic Imaging Center beside the sign,
etched in stone: This Building Dedicated
To the Well-Being of Mothers and Babies,
Anno Domini, 1928,
to the room where a sonogram machine spins
its own story, where language
skims the surface of the image and fails,
where at this moment someone
watches herself, singularity erased.


Photograph #2, Queensboro Bridge

The sky salt white. The rails scrawl
across the water, a barge piled high with tires.
First the shock that there's a world
beyond my body. First this landscape
outside the magnetic field I can't step into,
tube of light where my child lies,
small fists tied down, fairy-tale oven.
I don't want to see it, so I watch
the green black water, remember
a butterfly clip pinching a vein
open, needle of wicker-colored fluid
spilling my body's secrets, promising
faith. The only promise is that the self
will be crowded out of the body.
That the bridge scripts the river.


Photograph #3, Interior; Mother & Child

The road back to myself will be lined
with gravel, stuttered with dirt, running
through the family plots beyond the house,
Mother, Beloved Mother; all unnamed.
The other body within mine at first
not yet solid, not vapor. Then,
all afternoon the child surfaces from sleep
on the white bed, fastens herself to me.
One grave in the family plot repeated.
One body that is its own vanishing point.
This self that now fits only in the edges
of my life, this body that keeps making and
unmaking, taking in darkness, giving back light.

My Father's Drums

His mad jazz slammed its way up basement stairs
through closed doors and double-glazed windows
all over the neighborhood. The one true
American art form, he called it, records turned up so loud
the floorboards buzzed. No rock and roll
allowed. No three-chord progressions in this house;
no rudimentary hook, no bridge, no lame refrain,
no silly haircuts please, we are musicians.
Bashing along with the hi-fi he banged through our days and nights
with a rat-a-tat rage, the fury fired down from his shoulders,
shot into his wrists. When he pounded his high-hats,
the pictures flew off their nails. Woodchopper's Ball;
The Big Crash from China; Sing, Sing, Sing;
Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. Never the whiz of his belt buckle,
never the sting of his open hand, only those long incredulous looks
whenever we smarted off, when his head came around
in slow motion, eyes narrowed, lips curling into a deep
underwater snarl: What did you say to me, Mister?
Young lady, what-did-you-just-say-to-me?
Sometimes we thought he beat them instead,
rattled their cymbals and snares to spare the dullard
child brains inside our skulls, wore down
their tight-stretched skins with his hammering sticks
to save our lackluster souls, our sorry hides.

What the Seed Knows

winter plods on like a Russian novel, spring
hints, haiku

tight blouses unbutton, jackets unzip,
skin is not just skin

rich soil proliferates
in the heart, in the hand
that can never let go

rivers flow unseen, underground, unfettered
unfathomable

some dig down, some rise up
some survive

sleep is not dreamless:
how else the orange, the dogwood?
the phalanx of asparagus?

coddled in the pod,
all the seed needs:

darkness, more snug
than light

grit splits the rock, raises
a tiny fist, screams
the world into profusion
of petaled racket

to uncurl and unfurl
to unhusk from the crust

to inhale, exhale
turn toward what's bright

Staff Sgt. Metz

Metz is alive for now, standing in line
at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear
and buzz cut, his beautiful new
camel-colored suede boots. His hands
are thick-veined. The good blood
still flows through, given an extra surge
when he slurps his latte, a fleck of foam
caught on his bottom lip.

I can see into the canal in his right ear,
a narrow darkness spiraling deep inside his head
toward the place of dreaming and fractions,
ponds of quiet thought.

In the sixties my brother left for Vietnam,
a war no one understood, and I hated him for it.
When my boyfriend was drafted I made a vow
to write a letter every day, and then broke it.
I was a girl torn between love and the idea of love.
I burned their letters in the metal trash bin
behind the broken fence. It was the summer of love
and I wore nothing under my cotton vest,
my Mexican skirt.

I see Metz later, outside baggage claim,
hunched over a cigarette, mumbling
into his cell phone. He's more real to me now
than my brother was to me then, his big eyes
darting from car to car as they pass.
I watch him breathe into his hands.

I don't believe in anything anymore:
god, country, money or love.
All that matters to me now
is his life, the body so perfectly made,
mysterious in its workings, its oiled
and moving parts, the whole of him
standing up and raising one arm
to hail a bus, his legs pulling him forward,
all muscle and sinew and living gristle,
the countless bones of his foot trapped in his boot,
stepping off the red curb.

Engagement

The young man knows he's going to die today, but he's wrong.
The other young man figures the army is the best way to improve his life,
but he's wrong.
They both think their weapons will protect them, but they're wrong.
They both believe their prayers will help.

Their commanders have intentions and intelligence, but they're wrong.
We've heard the story before. It's wrong.
The news will document it, but it will be wrong.
The war on terror, the war on Islam, the clash of civilizations.

The explosion will exceed the necessity of the occasion.
The exchange of fire will be unbalanced.
The response will be disproportionate.
The reporter is factually incorrect, theoretically misinformed, morally
reprehensible.

The clear typeface and perfect binding are misleading.
The reader is uncomfortably and inappropriately implicated.
The tranquil mind is insufficient to the task.
The young men, necks dirty and damp, advance.

Another Fable

The old man, in his day, well let’s just say
He took a lot of meat without a license.
That he was arrogant, well that just goes
Without saying, so we don’t, but see,
He had a reason. He thought that a man
Who owned his land shouldn’t have to pay to
Hunt. Not the Government, especially.
So though he never, as some poachers do,
Hunted in the spring or summer, killing
Does with fawns out of sheer depravity
Or desperation or both (sometimes it’s hard
To tell the difference, though There Are Roughly
Zones). He never—it was a point of honor—
Hunted legally—not antelope
Nor deer nor elk. He never had a fishing
License either, for that matter, never.
No harm, really, except his son, before
He was old enough, himself, to learn to poach,
Was terrified each time the old man brought
A gutted carcass home and strung it up
In the tool shed with a pulley hooked to a stave
That cross-pierced slits behind Achilles tendons,
And put a Master padlock on the door,
And told his son the word was mum in case
The game warden came to snoop around. Remember,
The son was very young and he still thought
That those who broke the law were put in jail,
That the whole family could go to jail
Since they knew, and would not tell, what hung
In the tool shed, behind the padlocked door.
It isn’t imagery, the painterly,
I’m after here, but stale fear in a boy
Each time he opens the tool shed door, even
In spring or summer when there’s no meat hung,
The smell of blood and the prey’s adrenaline,
Which triggers in the boy a predatory
Inability to turn and run.

Two Poems

Restoration Ode

What tends toward orbit and return,
comets and melodies, robins and trash trucks
restore us. What would be an arrow, a dove
to pierce our hearts restore us. Restore us

minutes clustered like nursing baby bats
and minutes that are shards of glass. Mountains
that are vapor, mice living in cathedrals,
and the heft and lightness of snow restore us.

One hope inside dread, "Oh what the hell"
inside "I can't" like a pearl inside a cake
of soap, love in lust in loss, and the tub
filled with dirt in the backyard restore us.

Sunflowers, let me wait, let me please
see the bridge again from my smacked-up
desk on Euclid, jog by the Black Angel
without begging, dream without thrashing.

Let us be quick and accurate with the knife
and everything that dashes restore us,
salmon, shadows buzzing in the wind,
wren trapped in the atrium, and all

that stills at last, my friend's cat,
a pile of leaves after much practice,
and ash beneath the grate, last ember
winked shut restore us. And the one who comes

out from the back wiping his hands on a rag,
saying, "Who knows, there might be a chance."
And one more undestroyed, knocked-down nest
stitched with cellophane and dental floss,

one more gift to gently shake
and one more guess and one more chance.


Scavenger Hunt

Three young foxes spilling down the culvert.
A red shirt in the closet. Stick jammed
in the undercarriage. Steaming plates
presented by a weeping waiter. Some days
the sea is calm, others it would rip apart
the world. You always wake in another room.
It makes you want to be buried in the air
but not yet. Some things separate themselves
effortlessly from the abyss, the undifferentiated
primordial clot that owns us. Others
not. A hole remains in the argument.
The strain remains in the ballet, the stain
on the gown. When you lose something,
it's so you can learn how to search.
You will lose almost everything,
which makes for a good, long search.

In Honor of Xipe

Xipe Totec, Aztec god of Spring

I

Slicked
with a birther's goo, it

gleams up green from the ground—

Little blade.

How much toil, to split the sealed doors
of the mother—

And scrape up
through rock and clay; the hard sharp March

of the ground—

our little god, our flayed lord.

—

Xipe Totec (shee-pay toh-tek) appears in Aztec art as a human
figure wearing a tunic of human skin.

The hand-skins flop prominently below his elbows, and his
human face, usually grinning, peers out through the eye-slits
and mouth-hole of a skinned-face mask.

He was a god of transitions, oppositions.

After which the rotting skin was removed, and a "new"
human being appeared.

—

—in the shimmer,
their hummingbird cloaks, their

plumed heads
as they ran toward slaughter—flowers

in riot on a field—

They flayed the slain captives' skins and wore them, dyed
"golden clothes"—to impersonate Spring's

Skinless Lord—

conjure a power I wanted. You know,

to make the corn stand up. Piercing the hardpan
inside my head, new self

—

green and scored—

Died. My sister died. In the fourth year
of parentless night.

Aztec blood-drinking, why should I oppose it? Or put down
my proper

—

terror of the earth—


2

They each of them lived in an eating world. Members
of the Wheel of Mouths—

Owned implements of autosacrifice: a thorn, a carved
bone,

it was a sacred gift,
to pierce the soft tissue, feed the earth

as the earth fed you—

And so gain power
over the killing-wheel: not you, not you, the gods

in chorus—

When my sister died, after my parents died;

when my sister died; "—stalking your family like a serial killer,"
someone said;

"Death is a serial killer," I had said, when my sister died—

—

It was called Tlacaxipehualiztli, which means "Skinning of
Men," and was the first feast of the year within the number
of their calendar, celebrated every twenty days...

...and the festival of Tlacaxipehualiztli, before the time of
sowing...

...who have studied this divinity and his strange ceremonial
and concluded...

... an agricultural rite in which the skin of the victim
represented the husk of an ear of corn about to ripen...

...like Prosperpine [sic]...

—

Plants change with the conditions.

For the sun their lifting
cotyledons.

Light being
at home in their bodies—and the way they

turn from the dark

when brought in to winter. Half dying, half spreading
their green hands:

DAY, DAY, DAY—

And when the priest thrust up the still-steaming heart,
the crowd lifted ears of corn.

Saying, Thy precious water hath come down from Coapan.
It hath made the cypress a quetzal.

Plants
converting light by a windowsill.

—

I was tending them. Those Xipes, Spring's
excruciates—

Easing the blinds
to bend the sun into their green city

Onto transcripts of birdsong,
gods of rain and war.

To loved/was loved, an alien power, under which
(decreed)

all would thrive—

Shocked
into green.

Two Poems

Manifesto
after Breton
When I dream, I vote.

Exercise my rights
as citizen of the dream state
to terra-form the future.

Work to abolish
the most abject poverty of all—

that of knowing
only one world.

Activists, lovers—
don't just entwine your bodies,
but also dreams.

When you sleep together,
go all the way!


Progress Report

By trade, a waster
of paper, food,
product, time.

By nature: wasted.

Each month I can hardly wait
to throw my check away.

Technology, we've learned,
should be balanced with human folly
in order to malfunction
in the optimal way.

I try my best to deplete
our planet's resources,
but even so, can't gain the attention
of higher-ups who spectacularly
and regularly waste whole cities,
countries, civilizations
in a morning's work.

My boss remains optimistic,
recognizing an innate talent,
still he chides me for my small-town ways.

Two Poems

Neanderthought

Knuckle-pure & forehead-finished, spear-perfect & canine-wise, it wrestles with mammoth-peculiarities & flint-feelings. Unnumbered, its days amble stag-free across the cave-plains of Lascaux-like visions & Altamira-like ambiguities. She-wife tolerates & transposes & transcends he-husband's mud-mutterings & dirt-ditherings & finds love buried like the first & fragile shoots of ungathered & unlooked-for affections.


Bildungsromangst

Two cups of squalor & three heaping teaspoons of overcast/oppressive village, add several cases of undiagnosed childhood consumption with a dash of petty larceny, stir over a low heat of human indifference, cool with a blast of bitter accusations & serve thick/black wedges to starving artists on the eve of the only war they will ever regret.

What Should We Do?
Gratefully, I acknowledged that my doubts had kept me from going all aswim in
contentment over such givenness as prevailed everywhere one turned.
MARCEL TOULET

Since everything had gotten so much worse,
I tried to take in at least some one thing
to make out how we came to where we were,
with the result that, on my walk that morning,
which I take solemnly every day, over toward the creek
that rises beyond the highway then disappears
into the forest behind us, to reemerge
two or three blocks away in tiny cataracts
beside a yellow house with a gazebo,
I resourcefully recollected that the French
for garbage can sounds like a word for a tiny
blue iris a couple might name their daughter after,
so that when I tried to articulate that moment
in my semiyearly letter to my friend Marcel,
who lives near Montbourbier in the Dordogne,
with its otherworldly river and black cliffside,
I could not imagine how I would convey
with any force in his own vivacious tongue
that we had tumbled into the garbage can of history—
nous sommes tombés dans la poubelle de l'histoire
simply would not do—so I wrote instead
how my wife and I welcomed the news that our plan
to come over to search for leases with options to buy
would coincide with the birth of a new grandchild
who might look back on these as times of triumph,
with or without tumbrels rumbling in order to have it.

Two Poems

The Moss Garden

Somewhere outside Kyoto's line, she said,
they stumbled across the famous garden of moss,
the smallish sign so plain it could have been
overlooked. No temple, only moss.
So they entered the walkway with little expectation,
the silence creeping in, much like expectation.

Instead of leading them to the garden directly,
two monks had led them to a different task,
requested they copy three hundred characters,
the ink and paper set down for the task.
And this, too, was a practiced form of prayer,
left behind for those who had forgotten prayer.

The monks left brushes, ink, and bowls of water.
They asked the seekers to write, to pray. But prayer,
any prayer, wasn't easy. The brush and ink,
the doubting hand, made not for simple prayer.
And even as I write this, I do not want to pray.
This story changes nothing; I do not want to pray.


Wind

But I was afraid then. I remember still
the way my feet skittered up the bamboo,
the way the air held me as the stalks bent
one way and then the other. I remember
the first steps across the tops of trees,
and then the all-consuming speed.

Unlike you, I was lit by anger then,
the least of all warriors. You were there
when the old man first found me, taught me
how to become water. And so much has passed.
River, air, everything passes. They say
the first time you give yourself up to the wind,

there shall be no fear. But I was afraid.
Yesterday, I watched one of my students
scale the bamboo for the first time.
His hands shook only when he returned
to the ground. Now, he wants to know
how to change the wind, this boy

who has only just learned to be carried by it.
Do not laugh. I remember you in the field
so long ago, your fear, your stillness,
the supreme weapon. And I remember you
stripped of your clothes washing the blood
from your feet—you, who keep my heart

in your rooms. Now, the old man says
I cannot move forward until I learn to forget,
that to become wind is to forget even this body.
I have been water propelled across the fields
from the edge of the riverbank. I have been fire
licking back the scrub outside the sad-faced grove.

But this, this final step ... Do not laugh.
Mornings, after you study the indentation
I have left beside you on the mat, when you
walk the bamboo line between field and grove,
do not be angry with me for leaving. Look up.
The wind in the trees betrays more than the wind.

The Soul Bone

Once I said I didn't have a spiritual bone
in my body and meant by that
I didn't want to think of death,
as though any bone in us
could escape it. Maybe
I was afraid of what I couldn't know
for certain, a thud like the slamming
of a coffin lid, as final and inexplicable
as that. What was the soul anyway,
I wondered, but a homonym for loneliness?
Now, in late middle age, or more, I like to imagine it,
the spirit, the soul bone, as though it were hidden
somewhere inside my body, white as a tooth
that falls from a child's mouth, a dove,
the cloud it can fly through. Like bones,
it persists. Little knot of self, stubborn
as wildflowers in a Chilmark field in autumn,
the white ones they call boneset, for healing,
or the others, pearly everlasting.
The rabbis of the Midrash believed in the bone
and called it the luz, just like the Spanish word
for light, the size of a chickpea or an almond,
depending on which rabbi was telling the story,
found, they said, at the top of the spine or the base,
depending. No one's ever seen it, of course,
but sometimes at night I imagine I can feel it,
shining its light through my body, the bone
luminous, glowing in the dark. Sometimes,
if you listen, you might even hear that light
deep inside me, humming its brave little song.

The human palimpsest's prayer

I want to stop being so human,
low to the ground, dragging this
bag of bones around, udder with nothing
left to give, no memory of grip pull twist squeeze,
how it lets the inside out. I want to stop
making my way through the day
like I'm a shim. Want to forget about the mallet
driving the shim, climb the highest tree in town,
settle on a branch that can barely hold me,
encouraging the slenderer branches
higher up: Prick the firmament,
bleed down a sample of beyond.
I want to leave the cellar I've packed full
behind me, squinting as I would to see someone
coming toward me from faraway, blurring
the orange and yellow leaves, the few trees still green,
softening the world, merging the seldom merged,
valley and city and river reclining
like paint-spackled nudes.
I want to channel the Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt always wanted to be,
to turn osprey, owl, or crow, marveling
at the surprising ease of flight, joints
cracking in places where I never imagined
I could bend.