14 Anxiety poems

So long I have been carrying myself Carefully, carefully, like a small child With too much water in a real glass Clasped in two hands, across a space as vast As living rooms, while gazes watch the waves That start to rile the little inland sea And slap against its cliffs' transparency, Revise and meet, double their amplitude, Harmonizing doubt from many ifs. Distant frowns like clouds begin to brood. Soon there is overbrimming. Soon the child Looks up to find a face to match the scolding, And just as he does, the vessel he was holding Is almost set down safely on the bookshelf.

is a woman burying bread beneath her lawn. praying for summer to make whole loaves break in their plastic shells through dirt like so many hands. worry is how i thumb a groove in the stolen jewel case in my back pocket at tower records, the man puts his hands on me & i’m cooked, i’m crooked, red handed, red thumbed. had enough money in my pocket for music & who really needs that bad? all my father’s overtime stocked in our pantry. all my mother’s edges worried smooth below the river of her boss’s hands. who am i who steals music who sells drugs because i love how it sounds. who sold my own good mouth for gold. a man puts his hands on me & i’m his & i’m paid. in the old country women buried what little we had in the dirt & hoped it would make more better on earth. in this country all food is unzipped from its plastic & passes clean through us. my grandmother’s panic is a relic, is bread unearthed from some forgotten dust bowl still dark & moldy & whole. why not eat the hand that feeds you, i think, why not eat the arm, the elbow, the shoulder? why not eat the whole damned body alive

So like the slow moss encroaching, this dark anxiety. In the bricks by now and all along the shaded left side of the house. And the statue, behind her knee. Her ankle, in the cool space between her breasts, spreading in the earliest hours of the morning. Between her fingers. Her parted lips. That black-green whispering.

If today and today I am calling aloud If I break into pieces of glitter on asphalt bits of sun, the din if tires whine on wet pavement everything humming If we find we are still in motion and have arrived in Zeno’s thought, like if sunshine hits marble and the sea lights up we might know we were loved, are loved if flames and harvest, the enchanted plain If our wishes are met with dirt and thyme, thistle, oil, heirloom, and basil or the end result is worry, chaos and if “I should know better” If our loves are anointed with missiles Apache fire, Tomahawks did we follow the tablets the pilgrims suggested If we ask that every song touch its origin just once and the years engulfed If problems of identity confound sages, derelict philosophers, administrators who can say I am found if this time you, all of it, this time now If nothing save Saturdays at the metro and if rain falls sidelong in the platz doorways, onto mansard roofs If enumerations of the fall and if falling, cities rocked with gas fires at dawn Can you rescind the ghost’s double nakedness hungry and waning if children, soldiers, children taken down in schools if burning fuel Who can’t say they have seen this and can we sing this if in the auroras’ reflecting the sea, gauze touching the breast Too bad for you, beautiful singer unadorned by laurel child of thunder and scapegoat alike If the crowd in the mind becoming crowded in street and villages, and trains run next to the freeway If exit is merely a sign

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building. It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America. People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee, sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone, I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word, a motion the brain requires for which there is no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped, when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause when we could have been perfectly American, could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact and more convincing for its precision, an expression of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt. We've lived in the sky again for some years and today on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know— switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory of the world, and just as the idea of embrace moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.

1 A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed- fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger as they inch up stems. Through the bulkhead door I can hear their spirals plunk into the sluggish south- bound current and dissolve therein with such brutal regularity their dying has given rise to the custom of measuring time here in a unit known as the snailsdeath. The snailsdeath refers to the average length of time, about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human throat, while the adverb here refers to my person and all its outskirts, beginning on the so-called cellular level extending more of less undaunted all the way down to the vale at the foot of the bed. I often fear I’ll wake to find you waiting there and won’t know how to speak on the subject of my production, or rather my woeful lack thereof, but in your absence, once again, I will begin drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves. 2 Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched, trudges through the froth. I take its photograph from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch day’s delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche has proven spirited enough to produce such a range of material effects upon what we’ll call the closed system of its custodial body, indeed if it’s expected to, and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand- new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera, and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale, then might it not also prove possible for the psyche by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress its thumbprint on some other system, a production in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway, dragging your long chains behind you most morosely if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak. 3 After the memory of the trucks withdrawing heavy with their cargo fans out and fades into late-morning hunger, I relocate in time to the lit bank of vending machines still humming in the staff-room corner for a light meal of cheese curls, orange soda, and what history will come to mourn as the last two cream-filled cakes. Eating in silence, a breeze in the half-light, absently thinking of trying not to think, I imagine the Bethlehem steel smokestacks above me piping nonstop, the sky wide open without any question, steam and dioxides of carbon and sulfur, hands pressed to the wall as I walk down the corridor to stop myself from falling awake again on the floor in embarrassment. If there’s any use of imagination more productive or time less painful it hasn’t tried hard enough to push through to find me wandering the wings of a ghost-run factory as Earth approaches the dark vale cut in the heart of the galaxy. Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples, or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it. 4 (Plunk) Up from the floor with the sun to the sound of dawn’s first sacrifice to the residues of commerce. On autofog, on disbelief: rejuvenation in a boxer brief crashed three miles wide in the waves off Madagascar, cause of great flooding in the Bible and in Gilgamesh. Massive sphere of rock and ice, of all events in history (Plunk) thought to be the lethalmost. A snailsdeath semiquavers from pang to ghost where the habit of ghosts of inhabiting timepieces, of conniving their phantom tendrils through parlor air and into the escapements of some inoperative heirloom clock on a mantel shows not the dead’s ongoing interest in their old adversary (Plunk) time so much as an urge to return to the hard mechanical kind of being. An erotic lounging to reanimate the long-inert pendulum. As I have felt you banging nights in my machine, jostling the salt from a pretzel. This passion for the material realm after death however refuses to be reconciled with a willingness to destroy (Plunk) it while alive. When the last of the human voices told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats. That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern, yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless. 5 Graffiti on the stonework around the service entrance makes the doorway at night look like the mystagogic mouth of a big beast, amphibious, outfitted with fangs, snout, the suggestion of a tongue, throat, and alimentary canal leading to a complex of caves, tunnels, temples . . . There are rooms I won’t enter, at whose threshold I say this is as far as I go, no farther, almost as if I can sense there’s something in there I don’t want to see, or for which to see means having wanted already to forget, unless stepping into the mouth at last, pressed into its damp, the advantage of not knowing is swapped out for the loss of apartness from what you’d held unknown, meaning you don’t come to know it so much as become it, wholly warping into its absorbent fold. I can’t let that happen if it hasn’t already. What draws me on might be thought canine, keen-sighted, but it’s still incapable of divining why the constant hum around or inside me has to choose among being a nocturne of toxic manufacture, the call of what remains of the jungle, or else just another prank on my gullible anatomy. Am I not beset in the utmost basement of industry? Is that basement itself not beset by the broad, black-green, waxy leaves of Mesoamerica? And haven’t I parted those selfsame leaves, discovering me asleep on my own weapon, threat to no one but myself? 6 Asked again what I miss the most about my former life, I remember to pause this time, look left, a little off-camera an entire snailsdeath, an air of sifting the possibilities, I eliminate certain objects and events from the running right off the bat, such as when their great displeasure brought the gods to turn to darkness all that had been light, submerging mountaintops in stormwater, the gods shocked by their own power, and heartsick to watch their once dear people stippling the surf like little fishes. Or when the flaming peccary of a comet struck the earth with much the same effect, waves as high as ziggurats crashing mathematically against our coastlines, scalding plumes of vapor and aerosols tossed into the atmosphere spawning storms to pummel the far side of the earth, approximately 80 percent of all life vanished in a week. Or when we squandered that very earth and shat on it with much the same effect, and more or less on purpose, emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production, shoveling it in as ancient icecaps melted, what difference could another make now. And so I clear my throat, look directly into the camera, and even though it will make me come off bovine in their eyes, I say that what I miss the most has to be those cream-filled cakes I used to like, but then they prod me with their volts and lead me back to the barn. 7 After the panic grew more of less customary, the pity dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography will come to show: field after field of untouched white. After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare, too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather over time might deaden one all over again, unless being changed with death means not only changing past change but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change. That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it. In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph. The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave-goods. When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay. I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour, even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world. 8 The noises from the basement were not auspicious noises. I wanted to live forever. I wanted to live forever and die right then and there. I had heard the tight, distinctive shriek. Here again and now. I no longer have legs. I am sleeping. Long tendrils of tobacco smoke, composed of carbon dioxide, water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen cyanide, and 4,000 other chemical compounds, penetrate the room through the gap beneath the door and through heating vents with confidence. They are the spectral forms of anaconda. The ruler of the underworld smokes cigars. A certain brand. Hand-rolled. He smiles as if there is much to smile about. And there is. He is hollow-eyed, toothless. His hat, infamous: broad-brimmed, embellished with feathers, a live macaw. His cape is depicted, often, as a length of fabric in distinctive black and white chevrons. Otherwise, as here, the full pelt of a jaguar. On a barge of plywood and empty milk cartons he trudges through the froth. He is the lord of black sorcery and lord of percussion. He is patron of commerce. He parts the leaves of Mesoamerica, traveling with a retinue of drunken ax wielders, collection agents. His scribe is a white rabbit. Daughter of moon and of night. Elsewhere, you are having your teeth taken out. There is no music left, but I still feel held captive by the cinema, and in its custom, I believe myself capable of protecting myself by hiding my face in my hands.

I maaku You told me ba ko tangirai I maaku I maaku My arms were awkward so ko taua baiu I maaku I maaku The dancer trembles because te ruoia is a kind of sorcery I maaku I maaku The frigate birds fly high above us and I’m afraid of falling I maaku

Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had: As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight, Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through, Though someone always said I’d be all right— Just don’t look down or See,it’s not so bad (The nothing rising underfoot). Then later The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch, Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view, The merest thought of airplanes. You can call It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep; But it isn’t the unfathomable fall That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch, It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.

Whose bread, buttered on the side of the angels, falls from a great height? So you wait to take the temperature of your enslavement: is it slow-growing, like a virus, or magnanimous and complete? Your interlocutors are generous, the little stretching rack is cute, and all grown over, like an English cottage, with tiny, exhibitionistic roses. Will they open wide enough for you? This is a song about paralysis, despite your sweet mouth running all that rivulet of chatter, despite the fan dance with the missing lampshade bobbing on your head, the children and their panic-stricken laughter.

We'd  like  to  talk  with  you  about  fear they  said  so many  people  live  in  fear  these  days  they  drove  up all  four  of  them  in  a  small  car nice   boy  they  said beautiful  dogs they  said  so  friendly  the  man  ahead of  the  woman  the other  two  waiting  in  the  drive  I was  outside digging up the garden no one home I said what   are  you  selling   anyway  I'm   not  interested  I said  well  you  have  a  nice  day  they  said  here's  our card  there's   a  phone  number  you  can  call  anytime any  other   houses  down  this  road  anyone  else   live here  we'd  like  to  talk  to  them  about  living  in  fear