Archival Works
The goodness of words
it all starts here
with the goodness of words
the feel of words
sound, taste of words
coming out of the mouth
the pen
coming out as new born babes
fighting breathing
all at once
release sliding out
sliding and sliding
laying still
gasping
goodness all around
eyes and more eyes
looking in, looking out
blinking
wet and finished
smothered in ink
blood tears
out at last
free,
no more aimless
floating in another's
sea, another's supply
no more silence
only words
coming out
fast and ripe
cry baby amen
cry allelujah
amen
hosannah in the highest
hey amen
this crib is a church
this cry is hunger
amen allelujah
this is for love
this for pain
cry all over
again
again
cry amen
try a little harder
make it a little broader
fill as much of this space
with cry amen.
Easter: Paul to the Corinthians
It used to be that forty days
was enough time
to tally everyone's sins
starting with burned palms,
Mardi Gras and Schmirnoff's,
all of it clamoured
to BE
in the words of Paul
to the Corinthians
-that was before I knew
what Ephesus looked like
under the clear blue Turkish sky
-before I saw the library
and the brothel ad
chiselled into the stones
of ancient avenues-
it was there and then
fact took precedent
over the great fictions
regarding very specific crimes
and indecencies-
when I saw the employment
of natural reason
in the cause of genocide
over there in the Promised Land
-indeed I determined the promise
to be nothing more
than a barbaric token
where nothing really existed
but the lack of ethics
and good politics-
Where has reason gone
that you would subject yourselves
to such meandering gossip
tailored to your hopes-
casual and unrelenting?
Advent and resurrection aside
your logic better add up
in the end
to righteousness, lest
you find yourself written
into the history
of the Angry God who studies
intent better than action
and waits your return...
the event horizon beckons
your better self without breath
or substance, gravity is not the issue
on the lawless ground, only an afterthought
to your stubborn network of subatomic
particles on their way through
obeying the higher commands
without handicap or false intention..
unstudied and wiser than the books
written over and over
in caves and bar-rooms
throughout time.
In Riyadh, God sends snakes
Right before the fourth inning,
and my third cigarette taken in the parking lot,
the home team and the away team
gather near what must be the naval of the earth,
to see a sand colored snake
laying on the mound-
as if it was blown into the halo of park lights
between strike three and batter up,
by a Riyadh summer storm or divine intervention.
James Joyce would have stood clapping in the bleachers
for this proof of one moral second
near the center of everything right here.
Hymm
A weeping man and his boy
at salvation's door
gunpoint.
The deadly gaze of a soldier
a photographer, the world.
Surely it will win the Pulitzer,
we all say
gasping on Friday afternoon
before another dinner
and the stretch of time
stolen from a mere
ten year old boy.
They so easily forget,
what they themselves
remind every slave of
in clips shedding crocodile tears.
They forget Goliath
in imagined largeness.
The great heaving machine
plunders and rapes
with the rapture of a criminal.
I once saw a baby
murdered at C'anaa,
his scalp peeled forward
from his pillaged cranial vault
as the peacekeeper wept.
A whole family shredded
like coconuts, opened wide
at their table.
You want me to paint sunflowers,
write hymms?
We drove through the South
past a village, marked
by the bones of houses
and a rusty sign.
Knowing full well, treason
galloped before us,
taking with her
their flesh and secrets.
I arrive at the border,
declare myself dangerous
armed with bloody stones,
praying for their destruction
like a Moses in Sinai.
Addendum to Hymm:
I will use my mouth
as a bomb,
my heart a plane.
Launch rockets from my womb
if that is what is left me.
Emily Dickenson is not my mother.
Do what you want with my clothes,
burn them bury them.
An Occupation in Three Acts
In this scene
we consider the actress
addressing the entire
Syrian armed forces.
During Act III
she is butchered on the third floor
of the abandoned building
the Syrians use for recreation.
When the climax
takes place
audience members
are asked to walk out.
Back to the opening scenes
in which Courtney or Faith
stumble onto the remains
of an occupied building.
In the farthest room
are wine bottles and a flak jacket,
twisted pieces of old rope
and pictures of half dressed women from magazines.
Other rooms have similar items,
old pieces of rotten bread,
discarded clothing
and cigarette butts.
In the closing scenes of Act II
Faith or Courtney find belief
in the creator and sustainer
of the entire universe.
When we return to Acts I and IV
we are reminded to applaud
at certain preordained times,
the moments of liberation.
The encore is performed
while Faith or Courtney
rise into the air
suspended by thin bungee cords.
American soldiers advance
dressed as dancers in full regalia
lifting her spirit
from the refuse of her occupation.
Ode to Wolf O'Meara
Arriving dressed as the Canterbury Tales
no small effort, I placed my keys
in the wife swapping tray of American Beauty,
decided to keep my Ice Storm legs crossed,
mind all a-whirl, dancing in the mizzling rains
which could be seen through a window
made of polar bear skin and whale fat,
a real Iroquois squaw-maiden in the Long House.
What could be done about the matter
anyway? I was there, riding in the Range Rover
man-made comfort interior with the radio
playing What's that flower you have on/
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
O vey! Miss Ellen Steiner might agree
that I'd learnt the paux du chat in a room
occupied the next year by Sister Miserable Josepha
but in my mind, it was here, in Yellow Knife
where the snow blowed cold, the will stiffened.
My human body trembled, it danced, it weakened
the snow blowed some more, a desert freeze
if you will, the shag carpet near the bookshelf
contained particles of food from the maiden voyage,
the bookshelf held Ecce Homo, My Book House
and several dozen anthologies of trout poems,
mostly. Some editions of Wordsworth, unabridged,
one by Alice Notley born in a river entered once,
and only once, by two poets. She wasn't there,
no need to be available to the press at press time.
You miss your friends in these times,
alone and looking through the whale blubber.
You also miss Wolf O'Meara in times like these.
Nothing like the town drunk to make things a bit lighter.
Listen to him tell the story of the town Vet
stitching up another bar-room fiesta will you?
"Walk in Beauty" Wolf often said and I gave him
a photograph of a Mexican girl in a party dress
walking towards her front door (if-you-could-call-it-that),
walking through a sea breadth of reflective monsoon mud.
A parting gift and his wife Patty long gone at the time-
cancer, alcoholism, the etiology of broken hearts.
How they loved one another, how young they were
when they entered our-ville, still sexy.
Still with that Hollywood glow that they entertained
as the clause for all the impropriety they wreaked
on the city council.
Yes, you miss Wolf in times like these,
alone at Yellow Knife and it's so cold in there.
San Pantaleone Sees Anne Sexton on the Corniche, Beirut
"Becoming a parody of oneself is not so bad when you figure
everything is a bit fetish, the tickling tease of the ego."
-Dr. Soandso, 1990, Commencement address given at Bryn Mawr, "The
history of stereographic photos revealing ladies' bloomers and the moral
controversies of our time."
Oh that divine itch!
The fuel of the fire, man
-the fractional distillation
-the rising to the top
-the sparkling rumination.
Oh that jet fuel!
How it makes us fly!
A system of clockwork,
spins its spine,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
ferris wheel and gypsy
in our hokey hoboken
on the boardwalk
lit up in the dark,
the sea is waiting
to see under her skirt
her frantic nipples
and her eyes so alert!
Our Hurly Gurly of Lunatic Park.
Published Wicked Alice
Oriental Storms
I
What would be good here is to sleep through the hierarchy
let it rip open by itself and all alone in itself
without me to introduce it to my voice, the sleep one
which chatters into the nonsense of nonwaking, the miracle
of losing touch next to the boulder breathing, cat purring
the whizz of appliances at night, snap of the clocks each
per room divided into the drops of faucets and drains,
each passing unnoticed falls into the curvature of a steady building
on this precipice near the sea of hidden color.
II
buzz drip drop whizz galore
a symphonic clause of night
the cat bats around a piece of plastic
the wind rattles the big metal door
occasionally a jet removes itself
the anxious boarded people sit strapped
if only one could see them there
praying good lord praying
don't fall into the sea, don't drop
the wind rattles entire shackled tenements
runs in a river through the shafts
chimneys full of air until the glass
shakes like a fun house mirror
lightning over in the west
part of it from Istanbul some of it
having touched the Hagia Sofia
where the cistern serves water
to the dead, the big door arched
over one thousand kings and consorts
and the small side doors for the poor.
Cisterns and drains, the same.
III
Just back from Turkey eh?
Food was great. We spent Saturday waiting in the car
for the business men. Against the law she said
for covered women to enter the government buildings!
Yes I said, that was Kemal Ataturk's business.
We sat up in the hotel bar, we could see everything
but not the Bosphorus, stood near the double bridge
Asia and Europe, you did? Couldn't enter the mosque
because we'd just had sex at the hotel and a drink
but that is a tourist attraction anymore I said
she didn't know nor did she know
to buy a ticket to see St John's arm encased
in a golden jacket, absconded with by the Turks.
Five days of eating at restaurants.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
IV
buzz drip drop whizz galore
the whizz of appliances at night
the cistern talks to the bottom
of the catacomb
each eye closed for a time to the miracle
of losing touch
another jet to Istanbul on takeoff
the wind whips the big metal door
the heater off and cold
and out there, the sea without a color
under lightning, under the oriental storms.
Goat's Rosary
Derrida's metaphysical framework displaces the facts of mimeticism -
Peter Goldman
Say: I sacrifice myself to the martyrdom of dawn,
in all that is secret within the secret itself,
this goat whose basic inner desire is unknown,
wears this rosary, in every awakening there is all knowledge,
all reason yet on momentary reflection it evaporates
with the cool mists of early morning fog, the whow-wee
calls to the mule, Man is Dead!
All over again, each day the secret is maintained
or related as the stranger in the copse,
the evil tongued whisperer filled with contempt
for all that the Dreaming Eye sees and obscures
with the regularity of the Opening Eye.
On the cross it is said our Jesus doubted
the final cue to his incumbency and ever since
that final propitious moment all things ensue.
Baptisms, bloody engagements, adulteries..
nothing really changes from one of the other moments,
Abraham abrogates Isaac for Ismael, the displacement begins
and is repeated as casually as fratracide does.
The clap of thunder recites itself in the Universal Whimper.
Floods and earthquakes, beasts with three heads, insolent,
scantily clad women take over, chaos produces the kind of order
which was clarified in the twinkling of an Eye,
this Universal Eye with no stake in the prize
for all is already in possession for he who creates,
who intends only to destroy and rebuild,
for that is the Game of Time imprisoned in the special wrath,
of moments, hours, deaths and births,
the shower of our blinking and these tears,
within the glitter of some laughter.
September in Riyadh
These are the days
when silence fills
spaces where no
words would do
eyes meet eyes
wondering which assailant
will lose,
which will proceed
into the final chapters
the author of a new history.
These are the days
when flight is more
than wings or sailing
when the notion
that all is not at rest, is
and so many more hours to come.
These are the days
when coins are thrown
like so much schrapnel
through the skies
paying the price
that must be paid
for carnage, for success.
These are the days
our children will remember
like bracelets of molten steel
lacking charms, relentless
the days when they will ask
if it hurts to die
and when will it happen
and to whom
These are the days
when work stops still
in the gaze of a stranger
walking blindly in
a barrage of alien scenery,
when nothing seems to have moved
for endless hours, billows
of towering smoke
odorless on the screen
These are the days
when I let them
watch cartoons -
all day long.
Flight
The exact moment
you disappeared
from the radar screen
a night sky stripped
from stars
when reflections stop
the talk between themselves.
I, just awake
one world still
open to the next.
Were you coming or going?
Just another day.
She and I get along better than most,
I do the talking and run when we near the dumptsters.
She does the smelling.
The brindle's carcass is rotting up by the corner store,
wet and hollow like the rats she used to leave in bits and pieces.
We've made plenty of friends, the masons on the corner,
the old man that died last month, his widow,
school children waving in the rain and our good friend Jacko.
Jacko waits for us, rain or shine to take him along, pull him over
his fence, tears in his eyes.
We've got a pack.
Some of us have given birth and starve in down pours,
others have gone on, look at us from above, Boots.
Oh Boots. She was something. Waited for us down at the garbage,
nipping at my heels occasionally in gratefulness.
Don't know what happened to Boots but we still call her,
every day on the hill strewn with waste, perhaps hers as well.
There's Broken Kitty. We scooped up his boy one day,
eyes gouged out, blind. Fed him and let him go to his creator,
watched the Vet insert the needle deep into his tiny heart and it
stopped.
Buried him the same day as another, one of eight pups,
mangled by a person and a car contemptuous of life.
The Vet told me his father wasn't at ease with this,
this taking of life. I had to laugh.
It must have been a strange occurrence...two animals in one day.
Nevermind I said. Nevermind.
I've taken human lives. Three exactly. One accident and two on
purpose.
The inoperable baby suffered along on a trickle of air until I undid
it. He breathed his last breath in relief.
Another, eleven years on this planet and the last two leukemic
coded seven times before we agreed, the others and I,
to stop informing the intern on procedure. Knowing the intern would
forget.
Knowing the vet needed absolution.
But the other, oh. Ninety three years old and a lesson for me.
Pains in the neck should never be confused with heart attacks.
Funny in a way...he'd have gone on to reach a hundred if it weren't
for me and I'm sorry, I suppose, to that old man.
But she and I get along alright. Monitoring all this.
Monitoring the births and the poisonings. The litters
and the availability of food at the dumpsters. Smelling.
Monitoring the Syrian soldiers and the skidding traffic.
Monitoring the ill at ease people, going to work each day.
Our pack grows and shrinks irrevocably.
A Note About Paul
They thought I was a tire burning.
They thought I was a Marine Barracks--Sister Cities
This is a piece of obsidian,
a crocodile tear from Apache land,
this is the way a squaw makes amends,
it is, natural glass.
Like lemmings on their suicide march,
over a ravine-scraped into a pouch
this is where you point
through the superstition chain.
Double back to this year,
that proletariat under various
types of calm and unrest,
all the same, natural glass, not a tear.
How many weird sisters to make
a necklace like that! How many
obsidian tears must we hear,
weird weird sister?
Diabolical graces, evil lies
in the trust of the trance, this is
the superstition chain, this is
what you call, several necessary goodbyes.
This is the zahir given
in a lapsed remedy,
old men, old ties, old sameness
this is a cochise tear, not a bolshevik revolution.
This is the way it is, this is the return
to the superstition chain, the code
no one dares to understand the zahir
as what was split, what has landed.
Not iron or phosphate, not fractional
distillation, this is natural glass,
a tear and a reunion, a proletariat
on the notorious ground sought after, sought into.
The Lazarus
Abu Riyad found me again, down on the lower road-
must have seen me pass by his house,
checking to see if his dog came back.
We go through this all the time,
he is still looking and so am I,
so's my dog, still looking...
JACKO JACKO, come 'ere boy
is what the thunder said.
Last time I saw Jacko, Abu Riyad
was beating him, no, he'd shaved him for the summer
and cut him down to his scalp, exposed his spine,
Abu Riyad was miserable and sulking, so was the dog.
Jacko had a mercurochrome tatoo, monkey's blood -
Abu Riyad's answer to everything.
Then Jacko ran off again and stayed gone.
Somewhere in the rain and starving,
or on a front porch, he's there
we both know he's somewhere, just not here,
but we keep looking:
past the skinny lame dogs
past the giant Russian on the corner
past the abandoned sheep dog
past the beauty parlor next to the bridal shop
near the dry cleaner down from the pharmacy,
we keep looking.
Abu Riyad hobbles down the hill pretty fast
to catch me on the lower road
near the place where I found Lady giving birth once,
used to bring her food once in a while,
her dogsbody is somewhere in the rubbish,
almost a year now -
she watches with eyes from a photograph -
I recall her long miserable teets
and shrunken thighs, the way her pups
grew up with her and she never left them,
even for the next litter -
three generations under the same rotted couch.
She and Jacko passed the languid coital hours of dogs
there, across from the dehkena where every old man waves,
I am memory scooting by.
Abu Riyad catches up, and my pointer sniffs his boots.
He says something in Arabic I don't understand,
The dog and I wander home, a bit sadder each time.
Abu Riyad is getting too old for this.
The Pelvis
As women we must
protect ourselves
and daughters:
from green card seekers
and noise makers,
from insufficient funds
and defects in plumbing,
from hosts of maurauding males
and temptation get thee behind me,
from wrinkles
and cysts the size of a golf ball,
from eating disorders
and too much salt,
from underwear stains
and chalk dust,
from history written by victors
and Victor's history,
from having children too close together
and infertility,
from drinking in the closet
and DUI's,
from rapists
and adulterers,
from monsters under the bed
and ones under the sheets,
from slashed wrists
and overdosed best friends,
from memories of love
and reading Lolita,
from talking too much
and talking too little.
We women must protect,
virginity in all of it's guises,
the way it follows us to the grave,
held in our pelvis
in some part of the bone.
II
He is the kind of man
who gives back
what he took
so long ago it doesn't seem to matter
anymore,
a boy who pilfers an apple
attached to a string
in the corner market stall.
III
Getting caught...
The UN Sounds Blue
There are jackels out there in the fields,
guarding a hundred ghosts,
dead Roman soldiers
disintegrating near Saladdin's castle-
-a bat skirts through the early morning air
swallowing and swallowing-
The UN makes another patrol
down the thistle lined roads of South Lebanon
the sun will climb over the horizon
one more time
to make a small history
as if Christ walked here
sweeping for land mines
in the frost cracked hills.
The jackal out back is innocent if we let her be
leave her to her pups.
Their cry sounds like a herd of goats,
or a hundred frogs,
or dying birds,
a plague of locusts.
We could catch one and give it a name
create a race of stray dogs
sought after by collectors of uncommon things.
but a god damned hunter shoots her anyway-
As bats witness to Rome and Geneva,
the weary eyes of the UN
hide in jeeps and tanks,
big white tanks
their blue flag courses in the wind
flappity flap flap flap,
it sounds blue, like blue flappity flap
in the cold southern wind
full of jackal.
WARNING: you won't know where to turn next but it is such that you are in a welkin of some definite plausibilities. Not for the faint of heart or the archaic. It isn't that type of place. There are so many brothers in the world, blood brothers, half brothers, dead brothers and Jacks. There are always the Jacks. You have the doogs and the Lanny's and the brothers of the elk which is a rhyme to the starry blisses. It is a long story of beginnings, endings, tragic and blistering comeuppances. There are no politics in this world. It might be said that Carmen is a fine place to be when one trades one's soul with sisters and mothers, darling kittens. You've got so many Mira Labs but it is only the current one that matters her eyes full of shame and contagion. You help up that dog in the rain: Pip on down through to the bassett hound with three legs moving through a steady course to the most Noble Imposters and Just Buddies. The tricks are all there but you don't know where to turn next. Is it the sea calling? What is it that is ringing? It must be the lilacs again, always ringing and the peaches falling. A rhubarb tale disguised as a hallowed pie. A baptist pie, a cherished fruit. This is the last one of its kind. The machine ex post facto of the Anchorites with the tiny windows, peeking out into freshly fallen snow....freshly fallen snow. A silent kind of reverence towards the ancients of Mogollon where in the deep hollows of summer, fresh from the fears of gypsies up near the creaks, a lonely man sells his Russian memorabilia declaring he is being chased by the wealthy landowners who know for certain Rasputin. Hunted. He is wanted. He believes this with his almighty heart. His windows are boarded up. Butterfly mimics in the flowers have utensils that listen and pray to whatever is going on up there in the lava bombs, a sister walks by because she is in on it. She is totally in on it but we've got to go. The man mentions a place called Hafr Al Batn and we agree to never meet again but only silently. Only in the perfect sun.
The Ninth Inning
Poets and bugle players
employed by wars,
clasping hands
with death and it's gathered mourners.
Breathing a line
whose phrase escapes
and must be repeated over
and up and over and down
embroider and careen
with a soulful exertion
that lays the crusade
to waste.
A tangled play of
soldiers forgotten,
chaste and dying so very slowly,
drumming, agonal rhythm,
fingers dance heart fingers and heart
dance dance dance fingers and heart.
what everyone of us must run from
what every soldier has seen
the truth of cancer,
of the pitcher's father
the mother the pastor the daughter
your uncle my dad someone's dog
a girl you dated before me,
young and leaving
all too soon.
The pitcher's father arrives
before the last play
as his boy shows his worth
in solidly delivered strikes,
mortar shells
driven with an unnatural force.
His mother hard and clear
in the bleachers, managing well I'd say,
thins bravely,
her strength nothing more
than the vacuum suck
of the surgeon's mighty will,
a lieutenant with soldiers on the line,
the surgical oncologist.
Words on his face
holding the end of the season
between forefinger and thumb
orders to march.
When the Music Comes In, It Comes
In the beginning, it was written over water
written across a broad staring canvas
stretched as taut and meaningless, without a mountain.
Clouds ascended the steam of creation heavenward where God sighed,
and apathy reigned over the lack of distinguishing features
on the earth, the Great Plains never suffered
but the land waited and it waited. Some of it,
waits still, open, level, the grasses.
Water came down, oh how it came down, a deluge
of which it is written there is punishment
defined by groups and pairs, a boat full of collage.
It came down, it carved the great Canyons,
the Bryce, the Grand, Everest, the Andes,
carving, sculpting, resulting
rivers and rivulets, mammoths drinking
shark teeth even still in the Sand of the Arab,
the dry dwelling sand mongering Arab, feet cracking.
The divide between the ocean and the mouth of mighty rivers,
rivers that held still the voice in rushing waters.
It was then written, the sound of it. Carried
down through the ages, repeated by sacred apathetic warriors
called the Angels. Calling out in the canyons,
This is how it sounds! It sounds still.
But then, how it was! Empty and floating
over the flat land and sea without an ear,
without the appreciation of an echo, the canyons.
So playing is the piano, the concerto, the crescendo,
for this is what the thunder said. It said, itself.
