Poemunity — your poem community

7-Eleven’s a misnomer, like “mind- body” problem. They never close. The hyphen’s a dash of form. Sure,this mind-body’s a machine, if you want, plowing across town to the steak house. American Spirit. Give us the yellow pack. No matches? This dollar fifty-nine Santa lighter, too. Big Grab bag of Doritos. No, the “engine” is not separate — it’s part of the machine. Sure, paper’s good, container for recycling. Rain’s no problem. I eat the Doritos, smoke up — one for you? The chips are part of my machine — matter inside matter — smoke fires my lungs, gives me that slap of pleasure in my tailbone, maybe stimulates a thought. I’m prime matter informed by the soul. No, I didn’t just slip the word in there: that’s a spade — it digs through bullshit. Lean close, under the awning, cover up, you want a light. The mist can’t decide if it’s rain or fog. Streetlight moons, clouds around the neon signs. Pink as the steak we’re heading for. The comfort of a red leather banquette. No, your engine exists as part of and powers its machine; separated, both are just scrap, bunch of gears, rusty sprockets. An unlit oven. Unbaked potatoes. Sour cream inside a cow, chives growing mostly underground. “Engine” is a bad analogy. I’m one thing, not two, no intermediaries. I don’t have a body, I am one. A hollow one at the moment. What’ll it be? Filet mignon? Slab of prime rib, don’t trim the fat? Twelve oz. T-bone, two inches thick? No, I’ll wait until after I eat for another, but you go right ahead. Here’s a light.

We had to sleep in the streets. Not on the sidewalks, in the streets. Cause the sidewalks was full of urine and body waste, dead bodies. And we had to sleep out there, in the hell of waste and the dead bodies. I walked from water up to my neck to get to the Convention Center. There was dead dogs, dead rodents, you had to push all that kind of mess out of the way, hoping that it didn’t touch you. I was pushing them out the way, so many dead bodies coming from the Ninth Ward up our way and they had people that was drowned up my way. Now this Convention Center wasn’t nothing nice, I kid you not. People still crying and begging to go home. There’s nothing there. You have no running water. You have no lights. The place stinks. It’s contaminated. I’ve been there twice. I died there, I died. Me, my ten-year-old daughter, my sister and her thirty-two-year-old son, we lived out there seven days. Five days we had no food. No water. Every night and every day the military people was throwing down on us like we was a bunch of wild animals. They was on a hunt to kill. They killed one guy right there in front of us, run over him with a police car and then they shot the man and left him there. They didn’t cover him up or nothing and the next day, it was so hot out there, when they did come to pick him up, his body was stuck to the ground. So I can understand you want to keep control of the people, but why have those people draw guns on children? Women with babies in their stomachs. Every time you look around we breaking and running, trying to get into the Convention Center and they’re drawing guns on people like that. I mean, it don’t make no kinda sense. They wouldn’t let you leave. You had to stay there. Cause we smelled like — I’m serious — because everybody was smelling the same way — smelling like sewer, like shit, piss. That was the scariest time of my life. And we had to have that on us because we ain’t had no water, we ain’t had no sewer. There wasn’t no limit on it because you had to scrub yourself just to get the scent out of your skin Because, like I said, they knew they have a lot of poor people like myself don’t have no transportation, don’t have no money. Well I have a car but it got under the water. Me, my ten-year-old daughter, my sister and her thirty-two year-old son, we lived out there seven days. We looked for her for an hour and thirty minutes in the Convention Center. Five days we had no food. No water. I seen children die, I seen old people die, I seen murders, I seen rapes. I seen people murder people then cut their heads off. We already knew that the killer people were putting them in the icebox, killing little children and raping little children. The men, the looters, the people that was staying in there. I am telling you, that was the most horriblest experience I have ever seen in my life. I seen the troops shoot people. They ride around with guns almost like we was in a prison camp. No, the place wasn’t on fire. It was some children upstairs playing with the fire extinguisher. Like hell. And like I said, I never in my life grew up in a house with millions of people. You know, I’ve always had my own room, my own, you know, my own, I was always — just — In the Convention Center, the buses came in. Every night. Every day they was telling us “The buses is coming, the buses is coming.” The buses passed right there in front of us and kept going! The people was there to see the buses so everybody run, rushing the buses to get on the damn buses and get out of there. Every day they was moving us around, go here, go there, the buses is gonna meet you here, meet you there. They was lying. There was never no buses, they was lying. They was just making us tired. They had us in there to kill us. We used to look up at the bridge and see all the buses going that way to the Superdome, or to the hospital, or to the people in those condos, getting them all out of there and going back. Buses going back again, buses leaving out New Orleans again. That’s how it was. It was nopd police but it wasn’t our regular district police. These were special nopd policemen. We was running from place to place telling them, “Oh, this person dead, that person dead.” They said, “Well we can’t do nothing about no dead bodies. Y’all just don’t worry. Y’all just try to get the fuck out of here.” They say, “Y’all go to the bridge. The bus’s going to pick you up on the bridge.” I think it was they job to send the National Guards and the armored people in there to make sure everybody was evacuated. They left us out there for five, six, seven days. We stayed on the bridge nine hours. They didn’t care about us. The first thing they dropped into us was boxes of cigarettes. Not food. Not water. Boxes of cigarettes. Two hours later they drop us water. And half of it burst open cause they was so high up when they dropped it. Two hours after that they drop us some army food in a box we got to pour water in to heat up. We was hungry, we had no other choice. The news got us out. Not the National Guard, not the Mayor, not Blanco, the news people is the only ones who got us out. Channel 26 got me out. Channel 26. The rest of them was there to kill us. I got tired of Convention Centers. I wanted to come the hell up out of that damn Convention Center.

Through the bedroom window a February sunrise, fog suspended between pines. Intricate crystals— hoarfrost lace on a cherry tree. My son calls out, awake. We sway, blanket-wrapped, his head nuzzling my neck. Hoarfrost, tree—I point, shaping each word. Favorable conditions: a toddler’s brain, hard data-mining, a system’s approach. Hoar, he hears. His hand reaches to the wallpaper lion. Phenomena converge: warmth, humidity, temperature’s sudden plunge; a child’s brain, objects, sound. Eyes widening, he opens his mouth and roars.

(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic") I In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. II Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres. III Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent. IV Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind. V Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ... VI Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything VII Prepared a sinister mate For her — so gaily great — A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate. VIII And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. IX Alien they seemed to be; No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, X Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, XI Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

At sixteen he dismisses his mother with contempt. She hears with dread the repulsive wave’s approach and her fifty-year-old body smothers under water. An old man loses half his weight, as if by stealth, but finds in his shed his great-grandfather’s knobbly cane, and hobbles toward youth beside the pond’s swart water. She listens to the dun-colored whippoorwill’s three-beat before dawn, and again when dusk enters the cornfield parched and wanting water. He imagines but cannot bring himself to believe that the dead woman enters his house disguised or that the young rabbi made

for Robert Lowell We smile at each other and I lean back against the wicker couch. How does it feel to be dead? I say. You touch my knees with your blue fingers. And when you open your mouth, a ball of yellow light falls to the floor and burns a hole through it. Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear. Did you ever, you start, wear a certain kind of silk dress and just by accident, so inconsequential you barely notice it, your fingers graze that dress and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper, you see it too and you realize how that image is simply the extension of another image, that your own life is a chain of words that one day will snap. Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands, and beginning to rise heavenward in their confirmation dresses, like white helium balloons, the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning, and above all that, that’s where I’m floating, and that’s what it’s like only ten times clearer, ten times more horrible. Could anyone alive survive it?

Champollion fainted, she says, once he had wrested their secret from the hieroglyphs and saw them turn transparent. The serpent no longer with power to strike, but biting its tail. I smell my salts, my packets of words, panicked. I’m no longer sure whether they shape my reality or have too little mass to interact with naked matter. Then they would pass right through the earth as I will in death. The lightest particles gather the energy, he says, and given their density, outweigh stars. Thought follows thought, the interval calibrated on the space between your legs. Your yes fire, your no the crack of a whip. Well, more a filament breaking in a lightbulb. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge can’t be undone. Only muddied, as by motivation. And the way you thrust out your belly as you walk, with almost shameless indifference, makes a void in the air, but no case for cosmic deceleration. So even if I despair of plane surfaces, she says, writing, even talking, becomes an act of faith that my bondage to grammar and lexicon is not in vain. That these symbols in their beautiful and hallucinatory nudity blind me only to make me see. There is fire under the smoke. The sun also rises and falls. We still read at risk, he says, but we don’t need to lard the crocodile with arrows. The picture won’t devour us. It is swallowed in the fluid agreements between gonads and frontal lobe at a rate relative to the dark closing in. Yet two speeds in paroxysm need not mesh. A burning heart, failing to strike while hot, may not save the burning feet.

I step into my mother’s room, she says, and though a woman’s body is a calendar of births and injunctions to death, time disappears. Only dead enough to bury could prove sound to silence or the anxiety I know by heart and lung. In my mother’s room. The tie between us anticipates any move to sever it. Terror and lack of perspective. The river runs clear without imparting its clarity, whether we step into it or not. Deep in the bones, he says. If a butterfly fluttering its wings in China can cause a storm in Rhode Island, how much more the residues of radiation, family resemblance and past rituals. The stove glows red. Thin apple trees line the road. You think you are taking a clean sheet of paper, and it’s already covered with signs, illegible, as by child’s hand. The heart has its rhythm of exchange, she says, without surplus or deficit. Mine murmurs your name while conjugating precise explosions with valves onto the infinite. I take it down with me, in the body, to develop in a darkroom of my own. They way the current elongates our reflection in the river and seems to carry it off. A death without corruption is the promise of photography, he says. Focus and light meter translating a cut of flesh into a tense past laughing its red off. But the film’s too clear. Even if smudged with fingerprints. Even if the light falls into the arms of love.

I sit in my own shadow, she says, the way my mother gave birth to it. In artificial light, blinds drawn against the darkness of power.  I think of you as if you were that shadow, a natural enclosure, a world, not a slight, so I can wander through your darkness. Has our contract inverted time, made our universe contract, a cramped bed for two? And when I say your name, do I draw water, a portrait, curtain, bridge, or conclusion? Place there is none, he quotes. Not even to hang up our archetypes. Let alone Star-Spangled Banners. We go forward and backward, and there is no place. Therefore it is a name for God. My eye, steadfast on traffic lights, abolishes the larger part of the round world. I should look at my feet. Space sweeps through us, a hell of distances bathed in the feeble glow of emptiness. Outward mobility, unimpeded. Suddenly we’re nobody home, without any need of inattention, imposture, or talent for deceit. The wind whips my skin as if it were water, she says. My skin is water. For wind read wind, news, sky falling. Is it a mental disturbance or the higher math of love if I hear you talking under my breath and from the torn fragments assume the sun is far away and small, and a look can cause a burn? Superstition, too, is a kind of understanding, and to forgo it may have consequences. Clusters of possibilities whiz through our head, he says. Electric charges, clogged highway, screeching brakes, a house too full of guests. With grounds for disagreement and miscarriage. The light rushes in dry, screaming. But the opaque parts of the nerve oppose the noise and void the options. Then the project must be prolonged in terms of lack.

After bitter resistance the river unravels into the night, he says. Washes our daily fare of war out into a dark so deaf, so almost without dimension there is no word to dive from. Body weight displaced by dreams whose own lack promises lucidity so powerful it could shoot a long take to mindlessness. Fish smell travels the regions of sleep, westward like young men and the dawn. Then I return, too early to bring anything back, unsure of what I want, terrified I’ll fail, by a hair, to seize it. We talk because we can forget, she says. Our bodies open to the dark, and sand runs out. Oblivion takes it all with equal tenderness. As the sea does. As the past. Already it suffuses the present with more inclusive tonalities. Not orchestrating a melodic sequence, but rounding the memory of a rooster on top a hanging silence. Or injured flesh. Impersonal. Only an animal could be so. An avatar of the holy ghost, he chuckles. Or the angel of the annunciation beating his wings against a door slammed shut. Behind it, love already plays the organ. Without the angel. He is invisible because we have rejected his message. On the old photos, she says, I see a stranger staking out my skin. As if an apple could fall too far from the tree. Yet I call her “me,” “my” years of furtively expanding flesh, with almost-certainty. It’s a belief that seems exempt from doubt, as if it were the hinge on which my doubts and questions turn. Still, I may seem the same “I” to you while I’ve already rolled it through the next door. From left to right.