Tom Sleigh

I / omen What was going on in the New York American Black/red/green helmeted neon night? The elevator door was closing behind us, we were the ones Plunging floor after floor after floor after floor To the abyss—but it was someone else’s face Staring from the screen out at us, someone else’s face Saying something flashing from the teleprompter: Though what the face said was meant to reassure, Down in the abyss the footage kept playing, All of it looping back like children chanting The answers to nonsensical riddles, taunting A classmate who doesn’t know the question: “Because it’s too far to walk” “Time to get a new fence” “A big red rock eater.” And as the images rewound And the face kept talking, the clear night sky Filled up with smoke and the smoke kept puring Itself out into the air like a voice saying something It can’t stop saying, some murky omen Like schoolkids asking: “Why do birds fly south?” “What time is it when an elephant sits on the fence?” “What’s big, red and eats rocks?” 2 / in front of st. vincent’s A woman hugging another woman Who was weeping blocked the sidewalk. Nobody moved for a moment. They were an island caught at the tide turning: Such misery in two human bodies. Then the wearing away of the crowd Moving flowed over them and they Were pulled swiftly along down the sidewalk. 3 / joke Faces powdered with dust and ash, there they were In the fast food place, raucous and wild, splitting The seams of their work clothes, weary to hysteria As they hunched in their booth next to the buffet Under heat lamps reflecting incarnadine Off pastas and vegetable slag. Then the joke Ignited, they quivered on the launch pad, Laughter closed around them, they couldn’t Breathe, it was as if they were staring out From a space capsule porthole and were asking The void an imponderable riddle While orbiting so high up in space That the earth was less than the least hint Of light piercing the smoke-filled, cloudless night. (What was the joke about? Nobody knew.) And then they stopped laughing and stared into their plates, Ash smearing down their faces as they chewed. 4 / spell spoken by suppliant to helios for knowledge from the Greek Magical Papyri Under my tongue is the mud of the Nile, I wear the baboon hide of sacred Keph. Dressed in the god’s power, I am the god, I am Thouth, discoverer of healing drugs, Founder of letters. As god calls on god I summon you to come to me, you Under the earth; arouse yourself for me, Great daimon, you the subterranean, You of the primordial abyss. Unless you tell me what I want to know, What is in the minds of everyone, Egyptians, Greeks, Syrians, Ethiopians, of every race And people, unless I know what has been And what shall be, unless I know their skills And practices and works and lives and names Of them and their fathers and mothers And brothers and friends, even of those now dead, I will pour the blood of the black-faced jackal As an offering in a new-made jar and put it In the fire and burn beneath it what’s left Of the bones of all-praised Osiris, And I will shout in the port of Busiris The secrets of his mysteries, that his body, Drowned, remained in the river three days And three nights, that he, the praised one, Was carried by the river into the sea And surrounded by wave on wave on wave And by mist rising off water through the air. To keep your belly from being eaten by fish, To keep the fish from chewing your flesh with their mouths, To make the fish close their hungry jaws, to keep The fatherless child from being taken From his mother, to keep the pole of the sky From being brought down and the twin towering Mountains from toppling into one, to keep Anoixis From running amok and doing just what she wants, Not god or goddess will give oracles Until I know through and through Just what is in the minds of all human beings, Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Ethyopians, of every race And people, so that those who come to me. Their eyes and mine can meet in a level gaze, Neither one or the other higher or lower, And whether they speak or keep silent, I can tell them whatever has happened And is happening and is going to happen To them, and I can tell them their skills And their works and their names and those of their dead, And of every human being who comes to me I will read them as I read a sealed letter And tell them everything truthfully. 5 / from brooklyn bridge Sun shines on the third bridge tower: A garbage scow ploughs the water, Maternal hull pushing is all out beyond The city, pushing it all out so patiently— All you could hear out there this flawless afternoon Is the sound of sand pulverizing newsprint To tatters, paper-pulp ripping crosswise Or lengthwise, shearing off some photo Of maybe a head or maybe an arm. Ridiculous flimsy noble newspaper, Leaping in wind, fluttering, collapsing, Its columns sway and topple into babble: All you’d see if you were out there Is air vanishing into clearer air. 6 / from the plane Pressed against our seats, them released to air, From the little plane windows we peered four thousand feet Down to the ground desert-gray and still, Nothing seeming to be moving on that perfect afternoon, No reminder of why it was we were all looking, Remembering maybe the oh so flimsy Wooden sawhorse police barricades, as the woman In front of me twisted her head back to see It all again, but up there there was nothing to see, Only the reef water feel of transparency Deepening down to a depth where everything Goes dark and nothing moves unless it belongs To that dark, darting in and out or undulating Slowly or cruising unblinking, jaws open or closed. 7 / spell broken by suppliant to helios for protection from the Greek Magical Papyri This is the charm that will protect you, the charm That you must wear: Onto lime wood write With vermilion the secret name, name of The fifty magic letters. Then say the words: “Guard me from every daimon of the air, On the earth and under the earth, guard me From every angel and phantom, every Ghostly visitation and enchantment, Me, your suppliant.” Enclose it in a skin Dyed purple, hang it round your neck and wear it. 8 / roll of film: photographer missing Vines of smoke through latticework of steel Weave the air into a garden of smoke. And in the garden people came and went, People of smoke and people of flesh, the air dressed In ash. What the pictures couldn’t say Was spoken by the smoke: A common language In a tongue of smoke that murmured in every ear Something about what it was they’d been forced To endure: Words spoken in duress, Inconsolable words, words spoken under the earth That rooted in smoke and breathed in the smoke And put forth shoots that twined through the steel, Words plunged through the roof of the garages’ Voids, I-beams twisted; the eye that saw all this Tells and tells again one part of the story Of that day of wandering through the fatal garden, The camera’s eye open and acutely Recording in the foul-smelling air. 9 / lamentation on ur from a Sumerian spell, 2000 B.C. Like molten bronze and iron shed blood pools. Our country’s dead melt into the earth as grease melts in the sun, men whose helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond help, they lie still as a gazelle exhausted in a trap, muzzle in the dust. In home after home, empty doorways frame the absence of mothers and fathers who vanished in the flames remorselessly spreading claiming even frightened children who lay quiet in their mother’s arms, now borne into oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea by the surging current. May the great barred gate of blackest night again swing shut on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn, may this disaster too be torn out of mind.

Back in those days, when he told me about his adventures in sex clubs it wasn't the whys and wherefores but technical details, like going rafting down the Colorado River; and when he wrote about a gay male friend whose first sexual experience was with his stepfather, the friend told him it wasn't weird, but the best possible thing that could have happened . . . I saw then that God, who I never believed in, was dwelling in my heart as a negative: that the negative had been developed into a picture of a man who stares up at the sky on a day so clear he sees through the mountain's shadows to the divinely human-seeming form that climbs it— a neighbor in running shoes and sunglasses jogging up the slope with his dog, tongue panting and slavering, an acute look of happiness in its eyes that could turn at any moment into exhaustion or pain as in a maze of cubicles called Asshole Alley, little pyramids of canvas called Lust of the Pharaohs, different pricing for what you want, depending on the equipment, the air thick with a sour, acidic, head-fogging reek of come. . . . And my pal the poet, who believed in infernal chemistry, in the spirit as a kind of "spooky action at a distance," he communed with this God, this eternally dying father of all matter who made out of our bodies his own maze of cubicles where he hides himself away—his sanctuary Asshole Alley where God's own unholy loves bubble all around him like a cauldron in his ears— and my poet pal heard the bubbling, he stirred the pot, he showed me the holy city, the sexual New Jerusalem that came prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . . —That was how it was in those days, back when my friend hadn't yet met the coroner who wrote down his cause of death as "polysubstance abuse" that brought on his heart attack while fucking . . . And regardless if I believed, whenever we were together God shone clearer— those were the days when every morning God woke up in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night in divine rage. Whoever loved him, he loved. Whoever hated him, he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality of hate or the volatility of love.

Across the road from where we nap under a dead elm dazzles the meadow where the partisans strung the traitors up, the meadow which their dangling shadows stain. Belly up in vines a blasted tank rusts flake by flake to lichened scrap iron while horseflies harangue the rippling green, July a limbo of quavering yellow... We wake to cattle lowing at dawn, grass overgrowing summer—so like us in love each hour with the noonday sun that neither toils nor spins, its brightness hovering, blinding us... What would the dead say if they could see us, lounging, talking, peering through brambles at cemetery photographs sunk beneath the undertow of milkweed shadows, death dates smoothing back into the stone? I think of Goya’s demon, old man flesh hanging from his bones, long teeth bared in an ass’s grin as he scrawls on a schoolboy’s slate, What more can be done? Nothing... while behind him a noose etched clean as the moon rises through the inkblot spiraling back into the hanged man’s mouth as if blackness poured from his throat: “When will you tire of us bogeymen, caricatures of your father’s war, our crimes half-forgotten, unforgiven? All future blotted out when they hauled us from our beds, our minds went dead to everything but fear: Nightshirts soaked in snowlight’s pall, we hunched in mud, each step loud, too loud beside the farmhouse wall, the seconds teetering till we drop... What our betrayals were we know with a knowledge intimate beyond revenge, history the needle’s eye you can’t squeeze through. The partisans cut us down, heaped us in a mass grave our relatives dug up: Yes, there were tears—even for us... Now, like aliens from space on your TV shows, we ravel into mist, surrounding you the moment your eyes close... Our pupils search out yours from behind the mirror with your father’s stares, fathers and sons melding in one mind— but who are you to call us traitors, an outsider judging through the smoke-haze of home: Each blow exact, our own neighbors beat us till the blood ran, beat us black and blue...Even now, would they dare take us back, older, wiser, necks broken by the yoke? Moving in time as to a dance we buzz and swarm across the meadow, dissolving and glinting like fireflies in the hedge, blown like milkweed in the moon’s wall eye. But under your lids, you see us locked in cold, shattered wheatstraw flecked in ice: Chill as the night air on your sunburned neck our eyes like X rays pierce the frost, stalking every step the living take.”

for Lem As if your half-witted tongue Spoke with an eloquence Death bestows, I heard your voice Muffled through the dark Layers of cemetery loam: “They found me black-suited In the shuttered half-dark, my eyes Dug like claws into the clouds’ Soft feather-turnings. What kept me Separate the broiling sun Of intellect now shone on fiercely: In the sheep-pens stinking Of dung and lanolin, I buried my face in the ewe’s Swollen side and listened For the lamb the way The night sky listens To the synapse-fire Of meteors, the fibrillating Heartbeat of the stars. I heard the cells crackle Into being, the embryonic Brain begin to burn: Hunger. Thirst. Beneath my ear My own disastrous birthing, The umbilicus strangling Like a whip around my neck, Shoved through the momentary Breach memory tore open— Dying revealed to me my birth, How half my brain went dark, One side of a universe Pinched out like a candle: Just smart enough to sense My difference, yet not know why— Even my death was the thrust Of a bewildering punchline: On Thanksgiving Morning mouthwatering Pain shoved like a spit From my bowels to my brain.”

1/ THE MOUTH Not English Somali Italian French the mouth blown open in the Toyota battle wagon at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Not the Absolute Speaker of the News, not crisis chatter's famine/flame, the mouth blown open at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Speaks back to the dead at KM4, old men in macawis, beards dyed with henna, the women wearing blue jeans under black chadors. Nothing solved or resolved, exactly as they were, the old wars still flickering in the auras round their faces, the mouth of smoke at KM4 mouths syllables of smoke never heard before. 2/ THE CONCERT Lake water in smooth still sun moves in and out of synch with the violin playing at the villa— the bow attacking the strings looks like a hand making some frantic motion to come closer, go away— it's hard to say what's being said, who's being summoned from the dead, from red sand drifting across the sheen of the shining floor. The pianist's hands taking wing to hover above a chord become the flight path of a marabou stork crashing down on carrion, the piano levitating up and up above red sand that it starts to float across the way a camel's humps far off in the mirage rise and fall fall and rise until mirage overbrims itself and everything into its shimmering disappears. And the ones who died the day before, blown up at the crossroads at KM4, scanning the notice board for scholarship results, put their fingers to their names as the onlookers applaud. 3/ ORACLE The little man carved out of bone shouts something to the world the world can't hear. All around him the roads, lost in drifted, deep red sand, die out in sun just clearing the plain. Dried out, faded, he makes an invocation at an altar: an AK-47 stood up on its butt end in a pile of rock. The AK talks the talk of what guns talk— not rage or death or clichés of killing, but specs of what it means to be fired off in the air. No fear when it jams, no enemy running away, no feeling like a river overflowing in a cloudburst— forget all that: the little man of bone is not the streaming head of the rivergod roaring at Achilles; nor dead Patroclos complaining in a dream how Achilles has forgotten him. The AK wants to tell a different truth— a truth ungarbled that is so obvious no one could possibly mistake its meaning. If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrel what you'll see is a boy with trousers rolled above his ankles. You'll see a mouth of bone moving in syllables that have the rapid-fire clarity of a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute. 4/ "BEFORE HE BLEW HIMSELF UP, HE LIKED TO PLAY AT GAMES WITH OTHER YOUTHS." And there, among the dead, appearing beside your tent flap, at your elbow in the mess hall, waiting to use, or just leaving, the showers and latrine, the boy with his trousers rolled appears like an afterimage burned into an antique computer screen, haunting whatever the cursor tries to track. So he liked to play at games with other youths? The English has the slightly too-formal sound of someone being poured through the sieve of another language. Syllable after syllable piling up and up until the boy, buried to the neck, slowly vanishes into overtones that are and are not his. As if he were a solid melting to liquid turning to gas feeding a flame. 5/ TIME TO FORGET There's a camel a goat a sandal left in red sand. Over there's a water tower, under that's the bore hole and here the body asks and asks about the role it's asked to play: no matter how it's dressed. Like a nomad like a journalist like the hyena who eats even the bones and shits bone-white scat from the calcium. No matter if it sleeps under a dome of UNHCR plastic, baby blue in the sun, or hides in a spider hole or walks around in uniform behind plate glass, the body makes itself known before it becomes unknown. On the television the blade runner is facing down the skinjob, and of the two, who is the more human? On the table there isn't a glass of whiskey but the ghost of whiskey that keeps whispering,It's OK to be this way, nobody will know. And then the boy who rolls his pantlegs up above his ankles because to let them drag along the ground is to be unclean turns right before your eyes into a skeleton. 6/ THE COMING At KM4 a wall of leaves spits green into the air and hangs there beautiful and repulsive. Between the leaves, in the interstices where birds don't stir in sun and heat, the smell of raw camel meat wakes you to the vision of what keeps going on in the wound— the wound inside your head that you more or less shut out as you go round and round the roundabout at KM4 where your friends the soldiers in the Casspir are all pretending to be dead. The TV Ken doll anchor keeps complaining to their corpses, Hey, can't you get my flak jacket adjusted so it doesn't crush my collar?

Wiretaps and tapes, concealed bugs and mikes, intercepted letters full of passionate declarations, contradictory intelligence— how attached he’d grown to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging the influx of intelligence with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost like love: he felt the cool gray eyes of his superiors trained on him, rebuking him for swerving, for letting himself go—such tender obsession occasioned by the file! Not quite the professional style he or the Agency expected… But such official loyalties seemed mere protocol to this!— what was wrong with him, he wondered, that he construed the documents to make the subject seem a hero, a bastard whose sole patrimony was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword left by an unknown father beneath a stone? And yet his exploits in the tabloids, the headlines screaming, SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN! HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC were these heroic different in kind from the rumors, unverified, of a rape, a murder? —But to have met undisguised the devouring monster! To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze… On balance, for such a life, the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad: think of the opportunities for evil a man of such qualities must have had! How well he knew him—an essential innocence that followed impulse, blind to protocol, not noticeably more kind than he was cruel. But to stamp Case Closed and cease gathering intelligence, to give the hero up, almost, he admitted, like a lover…: such limits the hero unknowingly transgressed! And the Agency, cold-blooded where limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?— more like a second backbone!), committed to keeping order, could not afford such sentiments—the Chief of Security felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence should lead to this… He leaned back in his chair and sighed: a forged genealogy certifying that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual assistance pact to aid in taking back the usurped crown: he could see them now, the wind blowing lightly, the two of them sweating as they climbed the cliff, discussing the terms, exchanging information, intelligence— how would his own face look staring down across the sea as he gestured earnestly toward some island, saying, “According to our sources, the tax revenues…” And then, edging the hero closer to the cliff, pointing out the harbor, he’d push.

In memoriam Liam Rector The little boy crying out Weenie Weenie in self-panicking delight, waving his little cock under the banner of the sun, seemed pure Blake, all anarchy and energy, an innocence unfrightened of itself that shook the lake's waters and unsettled the strained composures and appointed certainties of whatever Absolute Speaker had been ranting in my brain: Peace Through Strength Justice Must Be Ours— so many demon faces in the glass city. Each pubic triangle seemed, under the bathing suits, to grow electrical and crackle with a sexual shock that made me turn my face away: and who should be there but you, my dear Lord of Misrule, blowing smoke in all our faces, the clean bullet hole in your forehead above your self-ironic smile: Don't let the monkeys stop typing

A little village in Texas has lost its idiot. -Caption on a protest sign Let us deal justly. -Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, from Shakespeare's King Lear; act 3, scene 6 But where, oh where is the holy idiot, truth teller and soothsayer, familiar of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer whose garble and babble fill rich and poor, homeless and housed, with awe and fear? Is he hiding in the pit of the walkie-talkie, its grid of holes insatiably hungry, almost like a baby, sucking in the police sergeant's quiet voice as he calls in reinforcements? Oh holy idiot, is that you sniffing the wind for the warm turd smell on the mounted policemen backing their horses' quivering, skittish haunches into the demonstrators' faces? Oh little village among the villages, the wild man, the holy Bedlamite is gone, and nobody, now, knows where to find him... Lying in mud? lying caked in mud, hair elfed into knots? Some poor mad Tom roving the heath for a warm soft place to lie his body down, his speech obsessed with oaths, demons, his tongue calling forth the Foul Fiend, Flibbertigibbet as the horses back slowly, slowly into the crowd and he eats filth, he crams his ravenous mouth with filth— and then he sits on his stool in the trampled hay and deep-rutted mud, he anoints himself with ashes and clay, he puts on his crown of fumiter weed and holds his scepter of a smouldering poker and calls the court to order.

His head rose like a torch in a tomb. Banquet-style, as at a second Symposium, The others lounged on couches or lay knocked out. A net of shadows dangled from wire-meshed windows. Buffeted there, there, some swam against currents Or were swept off into underwater canyons. Visitors, confusion streaming over them, speech Foaming into eddies, words lolling like jetsam On the lightless bottom, listened to the news Of minds crammed in bodies: Here, all was stoic Or hectic or unspeaking disconnection. Moving shadows on the TV screen implied A world out there, though a world more couth, More uncouth? in four o’clock’s slushy freezing dark: Plato’s cave loomed in semblance of the walls, Only wasn’t it the cave as All, no outside Not inside, nothing more real to go out into? He peered far down to where dark swam up From the depthless screen and hovered poised Above dark-in-light: Sergeant Schultz kept repeating, “I know nothing, nothing,” his funny-Nazi German accent As he recoils from his ever sauve tormentor, the American POW Colonel Hogan who threatens Schultz With good-humored ruthlessness as bad as a mother In a supermarket aisle cajoling her greedy-eyed child, “Ah ah ah—remember the Russian front!” —Poor Schultz’s accent making him more human in his terror, Though only an actor acting his lines through The canned laughter’s bacchic furor sweeping down The corridor to die in murmurs of slippers shushing. Cast yourself in it, imagine having to say those lines, Not just now, but always, eternity a chaos Of laugh-track frenzy more demonic than funny, Reruns of Hogan haunted by the actor Who acts Hogan’s lines, his real-life orgies Before a secret camera ending in his Glogotha, His infamy to be bludgeoned and found wrapped Naked in a shower curtain that hangs In the mind like the cave’s walls turning outside Inside outside inside no end or difference inside out —The almost see-through membrane of a world gone flat: He hunches forward to change the channel. Muttering something to Schultz’s “I know nothing, nothing,” A grim joke maybe, “Ain’t that the truth...” though really, Who could know what words he was or wasn’t Answering, who can hear above the roar of Earth moving under him, trying to throw him off As he clings to the sofa hurtling through space! And as he clings, the screen slowly opens and fans out wide Around the National Broadcasting Corporation peacock Waving its plumes, flaming blues, greens, radiant vermilions, Brilliance of the seasons, late-morning pastels Easy and restful for the brain and eye, Sempiternal hues Atlantis rose up and sank back into. And these feather off into grays, solid wintry Grays that give off nothing and reflect nothing back.

Staring up into the tank's belly lit by a bare bulb hanging down off the exhaust, a mechanic's hands are up inside the dark metallic innards doing something that looks personal, private. This tank is nothing like the ones the Americans deploy. Those have uranium piercing shells that could melt right through this tank's armor and set off the ammo box: nothing can withstand the American tanks. The barrel's called a cannon. The machine guns they call deterrents. The tank is old, small, about the size of a horse and cart. The armor plate shines green under the streetlight. The sprockets, almost rusted out. Somebody forgot to grease the nipples. The timing belt is nicked and worn. The spare parts from France don't fit. This wire crossed with this wire makes a catastrophic fire. Be careful how you route it. .20 caliber ammo goes in the hatch behind the armor plate. The mechanic on his back in the dirt, cursing in Arabic, sounds like he's cursing in a good-natured way: who was the fucking moron who did the maintenance on this thing? This tank, this tank, he should push it off a cliff into the sea so that it could bob for half an hour before sinking under the Pigeon Rocks where all the lovers gather in the shadows near that little bar, lit by a generator, that serves arak and warm beer to soldiers hanging out on the Corniche: mainly conscripts from down south, whose orange groves rot because nobody can pick the oranges: try to pick an orange and a cluster bomb lodged in leaves comes tumbling into your basket. What weight oil did this cocksucker use, anyway? And this engine, it's gonna blow. Beat up tanks and sandbags, that's all this army is, old sparkplugs that get fouled so that you have to file the gaps over and over. He stares up in that live, minute, completely concentrated way of scrutinizing something or someone you thought you understood: the tank's underbody completely covers his body so they look like they're embracing when he reaches up inside it, his needle nose pliers crimping, twisting, pulling down hard. There, you see that, it's all corroded. The cannon jutting out looks both threatening and vulnerable as if the tank's firepower were dependent on that wire. He runs two fingers up and down it, then feels where rust, mixed into an oily paste, shines like bloody flux that he gently dips his finger in, sniffs and tastes. Clanging back his tapping on the armor plate, as he listens to her talking on his back in the dirt, screwing in the spare parts, the tank says what tanks always say, Fix me, oil me, grease me, make it fit, confirming what he knows about the French.