your throat like
a labyrinth of isotopes
your forehead like
a backwards palindrome

your forehead like a cathode ray

your hair like hibernation
like unrecyclable plastic
like a flipbook
of vintage barcodes
like an unfinished game
of backgammon
your hair
like the power
of ALACAZAM                                                                                    

) your eyebrow like
an axiom of archery
))) like an assassin
in the form of a circumflex
))))) like Quetzalcoatl
))))))) your eyebrow like a
one-way boomerang

your ass like a
master class
in ventriloquism, like
an improbable zeugma
your ass like a time-machine

your pupil like Beta Centauri
like the dot of the final “i”
in the word
“infinity”

your wrists like a double helix
like habeas corpus
[like pandemonium writ large]

your moles like fragments
of an epic in dot matrix,
like irregular satellites
in Jupiter’s retinue of moons

……

your back like
an unfretted fingerboard
your brain like a
hyperbaric chamber,
like a dodecahedron
like a conglomerate
of renegade search engines
your thighs
like a sheet of fabric softener
your nose like
The Universal Fulcrum
your elbows
like Ankylosaurus
your ribs like a Venus flytrap
your tongue
like a stick of incense made
of pheromones
your tongue
like the Dead Sea Scrolls

your fingers like
intravenous needles, like
a pair of pince-nez
glasses
like Shakespeare’s
Sonnet 130
recited perfectly in Portuguese

—Thomas Wiloch on the work of Evan S. Connell

In Greece [985 AD] the hermit Barnabas moved into a cave at the turret-top
of a sandstone pinnacle, one man alone with God & thousands of finger-stone
formations in the untilled wilds of Metéora:  the soaring rocks.
Other hermits followed.  After fifty years of living in high caves, the monks began
building
precarious monasteries, twenty-three in all, until monastic compounds
perched everywhere, ornate thimbles on the weathered fingertips of Metéora.


Historical details catch in my spam filter.  My strings get all tangled up
imagining hermits who abandoned the surface world to dwell in fossilized
tree houses & pray among vultures — & how it took only fifty years of living aloft,
holy cavemen in high exile, before they begin reinventing civilization.
I have no statistics regarding the number of hermits returning to caves these days.
I’m sure it’s hard for statisticians to track that sort of trend.


*        *         *


Wouldn’t you prefer descent?  Last night, I dream-composed a goodbye letter
to the world:  Dear friends, I am going down to live in the Caving Grounds —
—— I found a tunnel mouth the mine company forgot to dynamite.  Habitable.
Adit.  Please, do not worry — as Rilke said, the soul descends, it prefers low places.
Caves.  Not sure how long I’ll be down. Please feed the cats til I come back.
I woke, heart on fire, & wrote it down exactly as I wrote it in the dream.


By daylight, of course, our dreams read like a joke, but the wind throws its powerful
shoulder against the cabin, at night, & the mind slips sideways without warning.
We suddenly remember God —— how long it’s been since we stopped at the old house
for a visit!  Though sipping coffee with our parents brings us down:  the home-place
needs so much work!  New shingles, new siding, an energy-efficient furnace,
silicone caulk around the kitchen sink, and special glue for the linoleum —






— there’s a floorboard loose under the table & whenever-we-find-the-time
some advice would be nice:  what computer should they buy, & does the wiring
need upgrading?  We open the screen door just wide enough to say I love you & leave
with long to-do lists, a month of work to add to our own.  The part you can’t
mention is how the old home place isn’t worth putting so much money into, anymore
—— or maybe it’s fine, Mom, but the whole neighborhood is falling down


bringing everybody’s asking price down.  A buyers’ market, they agreed, stubbornly
optimistic the last time you raised the subject — speaking of which, I keep trying to
shake the memory of that odd birdhouse I stumbled onto earlier this summer
— there I was, minding my own business, lurching down one of those endless
buckled sidewalks that give Negaunee her earthquakish charm, when I noticed the
FOR SALE sign, jutting at a 45° angle from the embankment — & I looked up.






I never reached for my wallet, really, but it had a certain fairy-tale charm, something the
Seven Dwarves would design if they mined iron in Negaunee:  cottage perched
like a stuffed songbird on a rocky ledge some thirty steps above Gold Street — charming,
even though a pine tree had sprouted from the mossy eaves-trough, quaint
even though the cracked foundation slab dropped in opposite directions from the porch,
giving the whole low-hipped roofline the look of a wishbone.


About to be wished into halves.  What I can’t forget is the lot:  a narrow acre
of unmowed grass, wormy apple trees & an old fence topped by a single strand
of barbed wire, running the northern lot-line, then turning & fleeing across the back.
No neighbors — Nothing.  Everything beyond the fence was razed to meadow,
groves of trees —  but wired along the fence in a half a dozen spots
was the familiar warning sign:  DANGER, CAVING GROUND.






The fence was only twenty feet from the kitchen window.  I had to sink against the rusty
swing set until I could breathe again.  More & more, wherever you go,
it seems there are two Negaunees — one creating an annoying glow in the night sky, out
along the edge of the highway — the other, broken as a nest found underneath
the tree, dislodged by years of economic shaking.  For every SuperAmerica, Burger King
or
Wal-Mart springing up like fingers with their fingerprints carefully removed


there’s still an old garage on a sinking street, filled to the rafter beams by the debris
of somebody’s life — a tiny museum — a fire hazard — a time capsule just itching
to be buried somewhere, just in case there are archeologists a thousand years from now,
as
there were at Metéora, trying to piece together a picture of how we lived:
North America’s Rust Belt Culture — 1910–1999 AD.  It only took a few weeks
without internet or phone & already I’m tempted to stay.






The fantasy:  growing permanently hard to reach, perched on
a rocky finger, a road north — out of touch with the surface.  There are islands
out there, in Lake Superior, lighthouses where the light-keeper is gone
& only the light remains, a shooting star far out over the water, telling the ore boats
where to go.  Lately, I get this precarious, unbalanced look when I speak of islands
solitary as any iron mine, or monastery.  Imagine what a mind might accomplish,


alone out there!  Through caves of solitude & suffering, the monks of Metéora
believed they were atoning for their sins & the sins of others  — they believed
in a God with sharp talons — but hoped, as our ancestors hoped, boarding boats
for the unseen shores of North America, that a life of labor & loneliness
might open the door for us, the ones yet to come.  Some remained underground
so long we must use our fingers now, to count the generations of descent.






Five, six, seven.  Bent and twisted.  Brokebacked.  Working tin-mines in Cornwall, or:
back in Macedonia, like badgers, they followed meandering veins of silver.
How many spent their best years underground?  How many times a day & in how many
languages was the prayer uttered:  we work like this, that our sons
& daughters might live in God’s Country someday— & here we are!
500 channels on the satellite dish (Amen!), a 3-car garage, 2 phone lines — & debt.


*        *          *


If you only learn a few words of another language, I think it’s best to start by learning
how to
apologize:   “Με συγχωρειτε” (me syn-cho-ree the):  I’m sorry.
Με συγχωρειτε, you say to the monk whose solitude you disrupt by being a tourist
Με συγχωρειτε, you tell the mine museum curator whose lawn caved in
Με συγχωρειτε, for the Ishpeming man whose yard kept collapsing until a pipe was
installed, to equalize the mine’s air pressure — Με συγχωρειτε.






Prayers for the town, which sacrificed its only park for a pit mine — Με συγχωρειτε!
The mind leaps like this, pinnacle to peak, calmed only by the surface world’s hourglass,
where each grain of sand has been replaced by an oak leaf, releasing
its brilliant grip on the blackened fingertips of the trees, a falling meteor shower
while I reread the letter an Ishpeming woman sent me:  in the next few weeks,
(she’s keeping the precise moment a mystery),  I am going down into our location


(illegally) one last time.   I’d like pictures of the Jackson mine
and our old street. By street, she means Michigan St., which headed north,
once upon a time, into Cornishtown, an undermined section.  These days, it dies young:
two blocks amputated at a locked gate and a cluster of rusted warnings:
danger ——— it is a crime to damage this (illegible)  — no trespassing, no hunting
——— this property patrolled.  No dumping.  DANGER: CAVING GROUND.






Today, while thousands of leaves parachute (illegally) into the Caving Grounds,
I read the Eyewitness Guide to Greece, practicing a few words that might be handy
when exploring old ruins, such as “Ελενθερη” (e-lef-the-ree) —  is it vacant?
or “Δεν καταλαβαινω” (then ka-ta-la-ve-no) — I don’t understand.
Outside, the trees are simplifying their lives, forgetting one leaf at a time,
like Lila, the mine widow I met earlier this summer who remembered so little


of her husband’s life underground:   I’m sorry, she said, I never really asked him.
Με συγχωρειτε.  But she remembered another story:   how tramping men,
homeless in the Great Depression, inhabited a certain area on the edge of Ishpeming
— we forgot it was down there, she said, meaning respectable folk had no reason
to remember it, but the tramps found it.  Perhaps it was the remnant of a pit mine, she
thinks, or maybe a shallow level had collapsed there —






Ελενθερη? Lila can’t recall, precisely, but she remembers openings in the earth,
the homeless men who lived there undisturbed during the worst years.
They lived in the Caving Grounds? I asked, scribbling wildly, incredulous.
I mistrust my own memories.  According to something I heard on Public Radio,
we remember accurately only 5% of an experience as it actually occurred;  we fill
the enormous (95%) gaps with our own history, details borrowed from previous


experiences.  Yes, Lila nodded, Caving Grounds, that’s what we called it,
but those poor men called it home — that sinking place on the edge
of town.  Marginal.  Hobos developed a language of private symbols all their own
by which they marked their routes:  kind woman lives here, mean dogs,
safe bed to sleep, crude arrow.  Food.  Eggs.  Cops. Is it vacant? Eyes closed, Lila sees
smoke still curling skyward from fire barrels, their lean-to shanties.






Suddenly all smiles. I show you!  There’s a walnut knickknack shelf
subdivided into tiny squares, a dovecote built for miniature doves.
Each square housing an antique thimble, tiny metal helmets for an army of fingers,
vulnerable to puncture as they did their needlework by dim light, grew numb
with cold or weariness.  My father bought that shelf for me — made
by hand by tramps who lived in the Caving Grounds!


Lila crawls on her knees to the attic bedroom and lifts an afghan to reveal
the story quilt underneath, a dozen scenes embroidered by her own fingers:
that’s every house I’ve ever lived in — pointing out how she cheated, maybe:
by embroidering one garage. If you tell the story of your life, and someone only half-
believes, you might as well erase every other word, or rip out half of Lila’s stitches.
— I am sorry, friends, if I ever doubted. Με συγχωρειτε.






Cornishtown’s refrain:  All the houses gone (but) you can’t erase memories —
Let Lila reach what she’s seeking, once the leaves are fallen.
It is illegal, but let her see the fruit trees her father planted survived;
Let her touch, under decades of leaves, the outline of her own foundation,
her childhood home, the reason her father worked so damn hard.
(Basho’s barn burned down — now Lila can see the moon.)


While she can still crawl under fences, she wants to see Jackson Mine,
a pit where the road turned down the hill towards Iron, she wants to see
where she began.  I called her. I had just learned the Greek word for descent —
κατω (ka-to) — down.  I offered to accompany her, Virgil, into sinking
Cornishtown.  My friend declined, politely. Sorry.


*       *        *






(κατω…)  Wasn’t it cold last night? she asked, switching topics as if our line
was tapped.  Δεν καταλαβαινω.   I agreed, explained that I built a fire,
how constellations glittered like frost crystals in the darkness.  This far north,
the stars seem closer, as if we were all living on the top of a great mountain.
I want to tell her it’s okay, I want her to know about that galaxy of monasteries,
the buildings balanced high above the meadows of Metéora.


*        *        *






No one knows exactly how hermits and building materials reached the top
of these vertical rock-faces — historians suggest they built elaborate kites and pulley
systems, folklore claims miracoli! — they were lifted by the hand of God
— these days, we say, well, maybe they were really good rock climbers.
But we know this for certain:  of all the Metéora monasteries, only six remain.
By studying ruins, we know they caved in, fell into ruin, by the late 1700’s.


By studying bones, we’ve learned there used to be dogs as big as Ford Escorts,
freshwater
fish long as ore boats, N. American birds with the wingspan of two-bedroom bungalows.
After we’re gone, archeologists will be sifting through the Caving Grounds for our
rusty nails, thimbles, smashed mixing bowls, vinyl record shards.  I’d tell them:
we’re a hopeful species, but it happens.  We tremble.  The foundation shifts sideways
from
stone, and down we go — down, κατω, to the ordinary world below.

You discover them every day,

Leaning toward you, trying not to laugh. As guilty
Of the truth you never told
As of the truth you share, your face

Is huge with secrets
You pretend to avoid
On your way to your next class, next dinner, next

Amazingly mortifying sweater. Even your sweaters
Smell of secrets: fire
Stuffed in a drawer, music charred

By prayers you thought were yours, happiness
Burning in books
Hurled across the room, a hideous

Mix of emotions
That leaves burst marks on your kids.
You think you are passing

As a normal person,
Being silly, talking on the phone, giving
The gift of pain

To the family that needs you,
That makes you feel
Broken and elegant,

Like a cherry on a sword.
Your friends see you
As completely lost, a menorah of need and love

Laughing hysterically
At the top of the stairs.
You glance back. You want to pretend

To be a total person, a model
Of truth, an amazing parent,
But you are falling

Into the crack
In the charred foundation
You thought was happiness.

The secrets you chose
Never to reveal
Spill across the landscape

Of the love
You thought you would never give,
Laughing like dolphins

Stuffed in a drawer
Inviting you to swim.
 
 
 

brought round the mop, not even a wet but a dry one, to swab
down the snit-spot of infant three-four-year-olds whose only
entry duty was toilet training, no admittance to Junior
Kindergarten without the basic social skill this lad hadn’t quite
managed, and the evidence was now spreading through the
unknown fibers of the rug and the only thing to do was march

all tots out to the hall, call the parent and hope to get through to
a caretaker if one could be found in the hundred thousand square
feet of space they mopped daily in school, they’d informed her
earlier . . . perhaps to fend off exactly this summons. Later,
the father collecting his boy was most abject, but surly somehow
to be taken from real duties, forced back here to deal with this,

when even his own wife had to work, and surely this must be
Teacher’s responsibility, hmm? this handling of pupils’
needs? This is a public school he kept saying, as though he
personally paid her wage to dry his son’s butt, and indeed she
was mindful of this truly Canadian story, of hardships
in leaving home to immigrate, with infants yanked from their

first culture, from extended families who would if they could
help, support their efforts to earn, rise up and exist in two worlds,
give and gain with each, and he was young and she grieved for
him as she did for most of her son’s generation, the ones who
wanted all and couldn’t settle, nor could they pay. You know
I’m most surprised by all this he tolled, voice raised

against the din of fledglings who’d been rounded to the hall to
jangle loudly as doors slammed through the general wipe-down
and finally collected back and calmed and herded to
a new activity, a standing exercise even more grabbing than
sitting on plush and listening, and then Teacher had to be
distracted at the door, kept from them by this other blunder,

the man who’d not leave but linger saying My wife has no
problem with him, knowing he could neither expunge nor
deny the liquid evidence that he’d lied, covering fears
his boy would ever be excluded, a collective shame
their helplessness, and so he persisted, flashing search-light
smile and crinkly eyes on her face, while aside she

could see and sense the other kidlets escaping from her, the class
getting lost from where she was leading them now on the brainy
and pushy path of tutoring tiny tots, twenty-nine more
than the one abject little fellow firmly being pulled by the arm
as his father finally receded, calling over his shoulder, See, he
does know how to pee in the toilet . . . ? In Punjabi he can do it?
 
 
 

Cue fire-engine wails and flash
as Roman, hands spread and nose pressed flat
against his epic window, breathes
and leaves in dry finger-painted font
the melting image of a spear

(Roman sows flowers in the winter,
tender poinsettias at the edge of his lawn
just past first snow near the walk

he wraps up in hysterical layers,
then bundled in tight he waits—
rooted in his rocking-chair
he watches them die)

Roman hurdles his threshold’s black mat,
snagging with one hand his long, loose black coat
and absently straddling his front ditch-turned-moat
he slicks back his collar and
halts in his tracks

while he watches himself snarling up from the stream,
rude thick raindrops break his face and halo
out;
the smeared sky is a faucet,
Roman finds remote canals rising
quick as a sink unattended

Roman’s home lies on top of old earth
on past the gas station, a sunken corner, it
lurks, peering up, never blinking
its two skewed-wide eyes

as Roman boards his beaten brown Beetle
low to the ground around the corner he goes

toward the cinder-block blender,
the university and fire trucks, he follows the sound
as they start to wind down, then
after seconds of silence
they pick up the downpour outside
both his doors

The dormitory’s twenty stories all out on the lawn
boxed-in, bomb squad, blue-red brown;
the sky, his eyes, the gutters backed up
and the swarm keeping warm with umbrellas and
bright coats, they cram all together
at the brink of the road, standing back from the brick-bottomed
buildings; it rains

Roman watches oceans form faster by the minute,
parked down the way playing
Suffragette City

then the firetruck moves.
Roman throws forth his
transport and
strikes

Water pooled reaches half past his right tires
tickling the underbelly of his
automobile. Roman delves in a line along
the curb through the sea;
triggered tidal waves rise reaching
up for the skies like
the jaws of a great cocoa free-flowing creature

and envelop the ones in the front
and drench the ones back from that
and make obsolete nearly fifty feet of coats, umbrellas, and hats.
 
 
 

tight in the bud, more painful than the bloom
whose summertime lures us
with one common goal: to not be rolled over

by the weight of life. Fragile and delicate
as dough, your prospects stall you with excuses.
After training for years

to be buried in sand, packed in sawdust,
left in the ground
under a heavy layer of mulch,

you’ve learned to watch the pain
munching on your gender since childhood, harvesting
the meatier sections, legs and hips and knees,

while you retreat, just out of reach,
a balance not allowed to be,
a discreet oxygen tank maintained

for the benefit of other people.
Ready to leave that pose?
A large door

opens in one wall, a footbridge connecting
to a house with snow in the center,
a historically accurate reproduction

of your attempts to make male and female nourish
homes and normal-looking places.
So much is growing there: clematis

of varying shapes and sizes, bread and salad
and the fragility of others—
an excessively bountiful crop—

bittersweet, upside-down genders
striking bargains, cutting gardens,
appearing to level the world.

This is a part-time position. A difficult pregnancy.
Go in and chop down
who you meant to be, clearing land

for beautiful, invasive plants
that will change the ecological balance,
honoring the soul

and her need to be embodied
after 20 years of contraception
as a new wife

who suffers none of your inhibitions.
There’ll be no turning back. A hurricane is coming,
equal parts God and female,

shaking in celebration
behind rolling hills, winding rivers,
day-to-day existence, looking for a home

in the middle of your life. Remove your roadblocks
any time, day or night.
Chop and measure and stir yourself

into a delicious middle-aged body.
Woman—in terms of essence
reclaiming the world.

Can this woman rebuild a world
from the ruins of internal landscapes?
She thinks so, dear reader.

Alarming and bizarre as the birth sounds,
the old life ends on the heels of awe.
The heart attack always telling us stories

of divorce and departure
is the first course in a meal that ends
with a sense of having reaped

a new person
fusing all directions: a parent
who finds it hard to let go; a little girl

giving birth to a tiger;
God’s presence, a confirmed wall-flower,
let loose with a reckless swing.
 
 
 

1.                                      A diagonal composition as a manifestation of the cliché
Infringe upon the viewer a singular reality.  This in the form of image.  When
discussing oppression, the content is secondary to the fact of its very nature.  The
image as the ultimate dictatorial source.  The very nature of the image allows for little
to no comment.  The image as reality.  The sense of self, false or true, is subsequently
abolished and handed over to the influence.  The audience is, in essence, held under
the tyranny of the original imagist.

2. Stories hang in strands
Tub, aftershock of time, after shock of snow or heat, one extreme or the other, I am
told, is the only way to live right on the bone.  The bone is where the meat hangs off
in thin hair like strands and according to a certain set of stipulations, tossed in the
barathrum.  The bone is where stories are told, and living this close is the only way to
live.

3.                                                      Hitler’s tub with someone in it who is not Hitler
Underneath the discordant pile of anti-war buttons and pictures of daughters in
Florida, there is a postcard of a straight faced and beautiful woman in a bathtub.  She
is wearing an ominous look and has her hair pinned.  There is a framed picture of
Hitler on the edge of the tub.  Everyone’s muse doesn’t usually find her own.

4.                                                                A photograph as promulgation of belief
I was reminded that the owner of the house is the daughter of a late Nazi.  A closet
Nazi.  One cannot help but think of the process of osmosis, the order of indoctrination,
and how many generations it truly takes.

5.                                                                                                           To do one
For the purpose of confession, the moment of capturing a crime may absolve the
punishment but not the shame.  When shame is omnipresent, it may not be felt, but
when it is periodic, yet daily, it mutates to guilt.  Shame being the umbrella, guilt
being the spokes.  The letter said two words.  Go Home.

6.            Actually, she preferred to deflect the attention from the fashion industry
Upon her departure from his arms, one of the leading Surrealists made an assemblage
to represent his longing.  It was a picture of her eye stuck to the end of a metronome.
The sculpture came with an elaborate list of directions, the last one being to plunder it
with a hammer.  In 1945 she went to Munich and found herself, it would seem, by
accident, in Hitler’s apartment.  When she saw the tub she removed her clothes,
started the water and climbed in.  She then turned off the water, climbed out, and
found a picture of Hitler in the living room.  She put the picture on the edge of the tub,
started the water, and climbed back in again.

7.                                                    Tile or ceramic is cold against something that is
The ceramic of the claw foot is cold against skin.  Need to pin up hair so ends won’t
get wet.  Sun is setting is making little crooked slants of light line up soldier like on
the wall.  Through the blinds they lengthen and shorten depending on the time of day.
Sharp in early morning, supple and gold in the evening.

8.                                                                             Her father was an unhappy man
The battle, the body, the wind, the torso, the neck, the eye, the best navel in Europe.

9.     At times I was unsure of their merit
In Germany for five months.  Missed it at home.  Forgot where that is.  Just
photographed the liberation of Dachua and sent the images to the magazine.  When I
got to the apartment I didn’t yet know it was Hitler’s.  It was as though I couldn’t
escape the hell, now in the arms of it, the pit of it, the belly of it, the box, the steamy
liquid.

10.                                                          It would be nice to see erotica for the sake of art
When it is so—art sake for the sake of erotica, when it can be so, it has not crossed that
line to or from pornography.  The definition is in the portrayal of submission.  Or the
level of submission.  One comes to me christened and wanting, the other, chaste and
unveiled.  Contrary to popular belief, it can’t be found in academia.  The level is high
to explode, permeates to wingless inertia.  There is an inertia that can be called
kinetic.  The ball that stops at the end of the table versus the one that sits under a pile
of clothes.

11.                                                          Art more often than not comes in stagnation
An art book on the montaged art coffee table in the art room with the art on the walls,
on the art walls.

12.                                                                              So much for the subconscious
There were many muses and always have been, but they say that this one was the
most ravishing.  Despite artistic merit, when she made it her project to push the
gender envelope, they were disgusted.  We don’t hold it against them.  The men.

13.                                                            I wasn’t the one who bathed in Hitler’s tub
The crack of it breaking “his tressed blonde thing.”  It is the noiselessness that
makes all that racket from under the bathed image.  Those who are enamored with
poverty and war crime would like to take hold of the ideal and pinch it to see what it
does.  Knees to chin, hair pulled back in a tight twist, stoic indulgence.

Note:
Lee Miller (1907-1977) recorded some of the most momentous events of the 20th century, including the fall of Hitler and the liberation of the concentration camps in the Second World War.
 
 
 

Mother conjured us into prophets & saints out of her simmering
Sunday dinner pot, an alchemy of lamb,

breads & wines, garlic, tomatoes, Romano, until the air dizzied,
until the table rose to the ceiling

with grace: Destined by The Lord God Almighty for the greatness
in the blood pounding through your veins, ever lifting us,

or crushing us where we sat, mouths hanging
open with the weight we had to shoulder

after Christ pulled his big finale— How to follow a suicide? To prove
willing to be called? So much stirring under our skin,

and if we failed to believe, there was always the bottle, as if hell
wasn’t enough, the price we set for a lack of faith.

2.

Most mornings I could be counted among the saved, ready
to bare my soul to the parish priest in hopes that somewhere
there lived miracles in daily slices of bread, in saying grace,
in a glass of wine at evening meal, blood red, intoxicating.
I spent years believing in the pious smiles on their faces,

my neighbors who sat in the pews at mass, the incantations,
frankincense & myrrh working upon my mind, preparing
the way for the spirit with the holy word. Though, at times
I felt like Christ finding the temple turned into a market,
and always wanted to tip the altar over, pointing my finger:

Hypocrites! Every one of you, & if I see your blemish, think
of His eyes, think what He sees—

3.

Other mornings, I trace the veins in my wrist
with the point of a utility razor, imagine flesh
opens like an unsealed envelope, a flap.
How easy I should find letting all of this go,

the breathing aching bones of every day
waking to find I’m still here, still on my back
in the early morning gray— The terrible
memory weight rushes in, a troubling sack

of thoughts. I rise to write before dawn diffuses
gravity’s curtain, more my bones these days, a farce
played out between myself & the eye watching
from inside, who takes this so very seriously.

4.

I remember the priest’s eyes glaring, burning for me to believe so he could believe,

stale wafers, Christ’s body sticking to roof & tongue, the wine turned blood,

my altar boy robe covering everything but sneakers, hands & head,

being shown the proper way to carry the icon before the procession,

a brass chain, swinging the censer, tracing the Stations of the Cross in smoke,

the virgin’s powder blue robes, the sadness in her skyward eyes,

a crucifix suspended above the tabernacle, spikes through ankles & wrists,

the gash under His ribs, the image of the Roman Centurion with his spear,

the word love, a pronouncement we all must suffer with Him, through Him,

His thorn crown, the heady thoughts, the urge to cry aloud: Father, save us,

believing there was no way out, that I was bound for hell before I was born,

kneeling & asking forgiveness for being me, for being so weak.

5.

Tell the truth, my best times were stolen Sundays
I lied to my parents & walked the woods to smoke,
listen to crows & November wind in the trees.

Low clouds crawling across the pond’s surface,
sweet decay of leaves, I skipped flat stones
smooth across the sky until each rock

turned ether before reaching the water’s other edge.
I listened to the distance between the world
where I stood & the far off highway

carried to my ear like the voice of mother calling me
home before my eyes could adjust to the darkness
quickening where night also called my name.
 
 
 

Every summer, we’ll chop our wood
and in the winter watch it burn.
In the coming years, we’ll re-elect
Don Young to another term.
Who knows, we might end up in some
Robert Service saloon
when we take the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere.
We’ll get to nowhere soon.

We’ll can tomatoes after lunch
and darn our socks at night.
When we drive out to the boonies under
the wispy Northern Lights,
the moon will be almost hidden
like a shiny, lost doubloon
and we’ll take the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere
so we’ll get to nowhere soon.

We’ll have to wash the cuts we get
hiking through the kettles
out by the airport runway where
an airplane sometimes settles.
It’s still hard to see a spouting whale
and not reach for a harpoon.
When we take the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere,
we’ll get to nowhere soon.

We have to import paper towels
and our canned goods come by freight.
There’s many things they don’t know about us
down in the lower forty-eight.
When the Savannah Sparrow tsip-tsips
its endangered tattoo,
we’ll take the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere
and we’ll get to nowhere soon.

Our troops may need more Kevlar vests
and more Abrams tanks,
yet we got 300 million dollars
and we have Don Young to thank.
Even though New Orleans drowned
that August afternoon,
we’ll take the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere
and we’ll get to nowhere soon.
We’ll take the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere
and we’ll get to nowhere soon.

Author’s Note
“Dubbed the ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ the bridge in Alaska would connect the town of Ketchikan (population 8,900) with its airport on the Island of Gravina (population 50) at a cost to federal taxpayers of $320 million, by way of three separate earmarks in the recent highway bill. At present, a ferry service runs to the island, but some in the town complain about its wait (15 to 30 minutes) and fee ($6 per car).”

—Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D. “The Bridge to Nowhere: A National Embarrassment,” The Heritage Foundation

Dusty multitudes wander the grassless fields
along I-40 nine-hundred miles from here.
Dazed in the heat, on radioactive feed,
they go from birth to enormous in a few months time.
As far as the eye can see, heads
dip and rise, dip and rise, dip and rise.
You will not make the cow a metaphor.
The impassive anvil is enough.
Cows bawling and pushed into metal stalls
by burly men at their hindquarters is enough:
the hammer slammed, her flat head,
the whites of her eyes, then red.

Spider

To the poet with goddamn webbing in her eyelashes,
arm-hair, and teeth, because she was smiling
to herself opening the iron gate—a secret
in the boxwoods—onto the pond, marbled green
with algae, to look for goldfish:

Your bulldozers haul the sun up every morning.
Your touch, the baptism of concrete.
You fill the spaces between what you build
with speed and bodies. Leave us
some air to work with.

Cow

“We were something slow happening inside the cold brain of a cow …. the remote, massive unvindictive indifference of God all-mighty or fate or me.”           

You will not write about the cow.
You will not write: Her thick-slippery
tongue, whitish pink, slaps at her buggy
sides and sticky udder. You won’t put the cow
on a pedestal, an inconvenience in her bowing
to sweet clover, up and down, up and down.

In her solid gaze, best called bovine,
blackflies swim in the liquid periphery,
and there you are, barely in focus, there
you go again—a soft shifty blur.
She says, here it’s all the same.
She says, our many stomachs are unperturbed.

She must, like us, haul herself
through space and time, one field
to another, but you’ve never seen it.
A low cloud passes over onion,
goldenrod, fool’s corn, carrot grass:
her shadow through nighttime

to the next morning’s tableau:
constant hunger, patient fulfillment,
milling about with the others, chewing.

Pigeon

Description is not the point.
After dinner we watched the pigeons fly.
Too top-heavy and round to surf the licks of wind
brought in by another hurricane nine-hundred miles away,
they dive, weave, dip, weave, dive.
A banner unloosed, the flock
circles closer and closer in to the silo;
a few artful passes and they settle
for the night on its ledges and broken shingles.
As if that weren’t enough to bring on darkness,
a single bird rises out of the coda:
dive, weave, dip, weave, dive, an homage.
Description is not the point.
Alone in broad arcs over pasture and dairy barn,
this fowl among fowl draws the radiance of his circling out
as far as intuition allows
and with slow steady flapping
reels it back in. The wind
is more unruly than he remembered.
He misses warm shadows in his periphery:
without them the sky is huge, like new happiness—
already faltering in a few dizzy seconds.
So he, a rock dove of the Columbidae family,
an easy mark, folds himself,
seems to float, and, like a fan
in the hands of a pastor’s wife, opens
his wings, paddles the air,
and lowers himself
into the silo to roost.

Gravity

Your spidery fingers look for a wrinkle, a wound, a wraith
of gravity in the barest indentation.

Hawk-high, the coolness off the rock
comes in waves, a mineral taste.

Stack your strength like vertebrae
and balance your flight to the pull of the highway.

Be still for the rock
but for gravity, fluctuate your selves

like mercury into and out of
contiguous peninsulas of the body

to meet rock and earth sufficiently.
Read slowly with hands, fingers, toes,

hipbones, knees, shoulders, chin
the lapidary phrasing of antagonist and helpmeet.

To the sky, Eleanor,
say, belay, belay, belay.

Dewlap

Guess how old I am.
Eyes, teeth, holes, shadow and luster,
skin pulled across small bones and muscle,
her face hurts her feelings. Loosening,
lined, spotted with mold,
the skin goes wild. Nature is time:
the Big Bang, the Do-DododoBirdbird, and her.
How do you stay so young?
One lady says, Cuban women use egg whites
and alum to pull up drooping eyelids.
Marlene Dietrich pinned back her scalp
before each scene. Three women died
this summer on Dr. Baker’s table. Quietly
another says, I don’t recognize myself anymore.
Mother’s dead giveaways
you’ve reached a certain age: the walk,
the neck, the crepey skin between the breasts,
and talking about face lifts at dinner.

Cow

A tarp and poles pushing out at the hips,
a tent saddled with rain, she’s not so much
cow anymore; what’s left hangs low
off her spine like a purse, pulls her toward
the soft ground. Leaving her behind, her skin
can’t help but shine like leather in the sun.

Groundhog

Eleanor said Astonish,
and the wind-slapped trees
brought their many hands to the sky,
then corrected themselves,
(nothing had happened)
fidgeting with the air, patting it down
into stillness again.

One spruce tossed
and roiled and popped and knew
what was coming but not when.
The tree was a conductor’s hand
drawing out the storm’s first tentative notes.
The air like steam from tea.
And still it did not come.

Second earth or second sky,
the fog stretched out in the pasture.
Thousands of funnel webs
as far as the eye could see
spun overnight and gemmed with dew.
Rolls of hay rotted in high wide grass.
Ayda-Lie, Ayda-Lie, Ayda-Lie.

A tendril of kudzu processes to Amherst
across the railroad bridge.
Are those bee houses or tombstones
between the hills?
She said Astonish. I wished
she were mine.
A groundhog on the railroad tracks.

Could it be the same groundhog
at the same juncture of rail and tie
I’d seen the day before as I
hurtled across the bridge
through curtains of warm rain?
It’s the same posture of concern:
upright in the blue midday,

spiky head held in its paws.
The moment had folded over on itself.
We were meant to meet
in this manner and then
we were reminded of it.
Despite all the fuss.
Despite all the fuss.

Eleanor

The petite bull has gotten out of the pasture.
He scrapes the ground
and dust puffs out of his nostrils.

All day goldfinches fall up and down,
thistle to hemlock to thistle,
their sides turn green in later light.

The formidable bullfrog has sides like a bellows.
Spiders drag around sacs of eggs while they work.
The big-eared cat kills black crickets who can’t keep quiet.

Momma, momma?
Eleanor, it’s time to go.

Sometimes my body is my better self.
Year after year it patiently ministers.
Half the time I’m not even trying

not to take this body for granted,
not to take this body down with me.
I wish I could offer it up, let it be taken over

by more than it can contain. Eleanor,
I might be gone when you come back.
You might come back when I am gone.

There are too many ways to miss a life.
Eleanor, where are you,
it’s time to go.

Notes
Third section, Cow: Epigraph from Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men.
 
 
 

I.
In Vermeer’s paintings, light is always falling
just like here, in sweet Virginia, where spring’s
already come, lilacs and phlox, soft air
on bare arms, descending. Peepers are calling
from the trees, there are dogwoods, white
and pink, everywhere, as if a cloud
of butterflies has come to ground. Haloed
in hazy green, the woods are coming back to life.
At twilight, the scent of lilacs drifts
through the open screen, the sky turns lavender,
and this first day’s work is put away.
Nothing but false starts today,
first lines begun that simply go nowhere;
filling yellow paper with my erratic script.

II.
Filling yellow paper, my erratic script
wanders over the blue ridges and green fields
where cows munch green grass, that yields
rich milk, like Vermeer’s maid, whose hips,
wrapped in a thick blue apron, are rolling hills
themselves. The earthen jug, the crusty bread, the buttery
light glazes her face and arms, spills
onto the table and floor. The thing about memory’s
that it’s a thief, stealing what it should
preserve, the past, stop all the clocks.
I’m trying to remember what it felt like to be five,
first days of school, the smell of library paste, arriving
late, the stomach butterflied, new crayons in their box.
I’m trying to be good.

III.
I’m trying to be good, write 500 words a day
even though outside the sun is streaming
like a thousand dandelions gleaming,
and the sky’s the blue of washed chambray.
The purple prose of redbud trees is
scribbled and scrawled outside the lines.
Hidden in the grass, violets, buttercups shine,
but gosh, how hard this writing business
is—it’s easy enough to just repeat, a slick
lyric, a villanelle or two—
What challenges are there that I’ve not tried,
that also call to something from inside,
blend head and heart as Vermeer drew
the light? A crown of sonnets just might do the trick.

IV.
A crown of sonnets sure would do the trick,
could capture this experience—away
from home, nine days to see if I could pay
attention to myself for just a bit.
And so, today, I took a break and drove
to town, a thrift shop, bought a raw silk
blouse of Chinese blue, a t-shirt swirled in gilt
and glitter, earrings of gears and sequins that I love.
Came back, wrote for hours, went for a massage,
felt all the knots along my shoulder blades untie,
walked down the winding road, the mustard
blooming, thick as butter
spread on bread. All I
know is: a day like this is nothing but a blessing.

V.
What a blessing it is, to be in this space,
no cleaning off the desk when the school bus comes.
The only sounds, the birds and bees that hum
and dither—which flower should we light on next?
In the woods, light falls, reflects off dogwoods,
rafts of phosphorescence,
illuminations, decrescendos
of lace. Each morning, I do yoga, get the blood
moving, then back inside to dig in memory’s mine.
Each sonnet’s getting harder now to write,
but the challenge has been thrown down like a glove
or crumpled petals littering the ground. I’d like to prove
that I can meet this task, and take delight
as one word, then another, falls in line.

VI.
One word, and then another, falls in line
like geese wedging their way down the sky,
a vast scroll of paper yet unwritten. I
roll a sheet in the typewriter, and begin
again, to try and pin down what’s elusive,
some insistent bird that whistles from a bush,
“Here, here, here I am,” then vanishes,
while I am left to struggle with the narrative.
Like Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window,
I wish the light would flood in from the left,
paint me slickly gold, tell me what comes next.
But I am in the dark, no map, no text,
just following my heart as night falls soft,
covers us with her obsidian wing.

VII.
Night covered us with her blueblack wing,
but now it is the morning, the last day—
here, the closest thing to paradise on earth. May
I be truly grateful for this stay, though squeezing
these last lines is getting tougher.
Last night, we had a concert, Brahms
and Currier on grand piano, wine on the lawn,
Caesar salad, grilled tuna, and strawberries for supper.
The lilt of southern vowels, drawling—
But this last sonnet’s waiting to be woven,
threading the radiance of spring, memory’s snapshots,
pictures at an exhibition, bird song snippets,
into the poem’s loom, the descant of love.
In Vermeer’s paintings, light is always falling.