W. S. Di Piero

A high school mash note’s stammering lust. Father and me, shirts and ties, snapshot glare, and somehow graphed into that air a young man’s foolscap poem when a just, loose joinery of words was all that mattered. But then in last night’s dream, she (mother, wife, mash note’s love?) tells me a box holding secret life has been shipped, enclosing sounds I haven’t heard: a wind-harp’s warp, words yarding across staves, fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes. And things: a wishbone, ring, whatever I crave, the heart-hollows, the cannot-do-withouts, the whens and whos, the frayed veils between death and here... I packed this box myself. I packed it full of fear.

"NOW YAHWEH ORDERED THAT A GREAT FISH SHOULD SWALLOW HIM." Into my backyard’s six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline, Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens. From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block, neighbor women watched ours boil tub water; the barechested men, laying out knives and cleavers, fumbled the animals into daylight, in the middle of my world, my certain place, not stump roots on the cold Atlantic floor of mountains I’d imagined, one week every summer, from the hot Wildwood boardwalk. But just then Charlie lifted me above his head, saying “O Billy Boy you've never in your life seen this! Want it?” The ground gone, steep drag of thinned air, chicken squawk tingling in my ears with dim human voices. Charlie threw me in the sea. The underplace, swallowing my heart, opened like a horn of plenty, blood channels lit blue and red like pinball arteries, flesh-motes, mucus, sinew, pulsing viscera bits dripping from clothesline. Missile tracks horned across the ceiling. In the ribcage, stooped beggars crowded, kicking spongy gouts of something; deeper in the tunnel, toward the tail, in files winding out of sight, shaved heads, men and women in pajamas. Spear carriers paced the walls. Into my vaulted space came words not really words: shades, images with a worldly shape of meaning, but beyond me, aloof and hysterical. The silence wrapped me like a prickly woolen sleeve knit by my women’s voices, shouting, out there, unrecoverable, dense, while their horny hands plucked and the sweaty men teased, stuffing tacky down inside their headscarves. Inside, blood cells combed my walls, unfinished patterns seeped through as picturegrams that glided across the whale’s belly. A still life with ginger jar and pomegranates. A flayed, ripening Christ. An Ohio puddler stirring pigiron mash, whose back is the same one in Giotto’s Gethsemane that stays the hand slicing off a soldier’s ear. Mercury, my heart, the sickening beautiful shiftingness of things. Kettles steamed, tin basins quivered with guts, my dear hell’s bloodglyphs in things, in me. I’d not be whole in and of the world again. Quills cracked when Charlie put me down. In my backyard, in my head, women sang under a pier to the unformed sea, an unvoiced song I’d heard inside the monster, breezing now through clotheslines. Men scrubbed their hands at the spigot, the women sighing. Flies left charcoal scrawls on the air and grazed old stains; they lighted on my arms, not waiting, but constant, my familiars, until their manic newsiness went away. Then, in that twilight, slow, shadowless lightning bugs appeared, going on and off.

Miguel might, if he speaks English, call the colors of ukuleles stretching their necks from yards of canvas duffel yoked across his shoulders, auroral azul, cherry pop, or mojito green, under this Pac Heights sky where the awful rich snap their heels past shop windows, past goatskin bags and spiked heels that bring them closer to heaven, fibristic sheets of celadon paper from Zhejiang,

The View The plain’s hatching now after rainless months. A dust devil rips through a peach orchard down there, a seam snuffed by falling dust-fruit. Behind the vine rows’ shriveled abundance a low fire runs ragged by the ditch, flaying the pale sod. The voided skins wave. September, thirsting, sings our Hosannah, shrieks red poverties to old heaven’s eye. * * * 1944 You want February? Snow and sleet came down hard, heaven’s post-Christmas gift to freeze our eyelids shut. Walking the icy ground, our shoes all shot with holes, we did the Alexander’s Army Ragtime Dance, stomping snow off bones safely packed in newspapers. From down below, we must have looked crazy happy, dancing like Hollywood Indians, though who had anything to eat? We dreamed lard. So the wolves came, not straight into town, not into the piazza, but near the outcrop behind the church. God’s design, the best, the way they study the tired world makes them next to human, or more. They’re waiting while they move. I’d worship that expectancy. If I could talk to one, just a few minutes, he’d teach me hunger’s secrets. So one awful night I wrapped my legs and feet, stuffed more papers inside my pants and shirt, then danced my way behind the church. Faint gray writing on the snow. Skin and bones, sneezes, frost feathers, drifting away. Two of them walked back, canny bigshot archbishop warrior types. They said: The moon’s blue, we know you want secrets, help, advice, news from this side. Our truth is: Forget likenesses, live inside your carbon soul, the moon’s black and blue, in the soul’s time the world’s one winter together. * * * Renunciation The snowy poplar seeds are everywhere, balling against curbs and car wheels, sifting through gates, doorways, kitchen windows, snagged by white blossoms shaken loose from the nodding horse-chestnut leaves. We stand in their shadows—our springtime’s dark. The debris scrapes our cheeks, clings an instant to our lashes, chokes the soft breath before tumbling off the near precipice. We want divine uncertainty. O give us the Judas tree’s blood shadows, make us sick with rank pear blossoms, blind us with earth’s random pieces engorged with broom’s milky fallen-sun flesh.

going on everywhere in summer’s cold wind winging through hollies. Banana plants flap like canvas sails above a dugout cellar where Latino boys shoulder cans of dirt, rocks. Three doors down more or less

The Santa Fe Depot's Moorish architecture of displacement— squeaky kids trawl satchels through the shed, happy voices mystically far from home, the waiting room's fizzled, tiled light of life lived imperfectly between one where and another. Everybody's here. Cowboys, Mennonites, Tijuana illegals, Muslim cabbies at prayer on loading docks as dark clouds fuss above the southerly sun past its prime. Killing time, a life mostly miscues and hesitance, I want something to take me over so looked for you near the baggage claim's glide, who could have been anybody from everywhere, like Ellis Island's ghosts, their dump of cardboard valises, bindles, baby-fat sacks strangled by hemp, and around me here long-haul lovers who in sleepers last night loved to exhaustion. Scorched roughnecks, perfumed girls in heels grabbing Samsonites and golf bags schooling the carousel's louvered U-turns and straightaways. It must be why I'm here, to wait and see who claims what looks too much like your brown suede duffel, no "Antigua" or "Cancun" decaled in its hide, nasal music threading the scene while tonight you weave through songs somewhere else. That floppy bag and us— the Garment District, two Venices, South End, South Philly, scraped nap, brass clips, gaunt warmed handle. . . A teenage girl two-hands it off the belt and waddles into the runny sun, your bag five years late thumping freshened thighs and dimpled knees. Where are you now that you're here again for me? Hear these thrilled voices, the engine horn howling? Smell these acid residues?

Its small celestial reach stops where the counterweight, the first tough green fruit, pulls earthward and returns the brazen, almost rank perfume of blossoms now six months gone. The slurred odor of its leaves calls back that long evening’s end: we shivered in the cool light a northerly sun bent against the world into the hands of friends who helped clear the outdoor supper’s sharp debris—forks, tin plates, balled napkins and bone nests. The lemon blossoms throbbed. The air slowed with so much young life, the fragrance quickened in our veins the common, too surprising wish to hold, just then, another, whoever stood nearest, whatever charm would bind us to the lowering light. Then someone said, “Let’s eat the tree”— Tear apart the bole, raid the green heart, devour remembrance with one moment’s hunger and eat the nature of things. Scraped plates, laughter, glasses refilled . . . Our sweet anger urged and gathered us around the young tree’s tub, made us tamp the wet soil and drink fast the clear smell of unseen yellow fruit in time we ourselves might never know.

There’s no description in the braided stone, the pear, the stone in the pear, the birchbark, bread hills on the snowfall tablecloth. The dog of work gnaws the day’s short bone, snarls a mountainside into lavender and green. In the mind where objects vanish, almost is all. Element of pitcher, sky, rockface, blank canvas plastic and vast in one off-center patch. To copy what’s invisible, to improvise a soul of things and remake solid life into fresh anxious unlifelike form.

Where are you now, my poems, my sleepwalkers? No mumbles tonight? Where are you, thirst, fever, humming tedium? The sodium streetlights burr outside my window, steadfast, unreachable, little astonishments lighting the way uphill. Where are you now, when I need you most? It’s late. I’m old. Come soon, you feral cats among the dahlias.

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost knowing she’s close, me not getting younger or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes. I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists vaporing nooses around my head and feet and genitals, conjuring my drab hair into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks. She makes me nervous, but what would I do without her? So long as I can’t have her, I want her and this alarming manic frequency. Then again, who wants to wake to change, its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies? My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom, let me get just one night’s sleep without regret, released from your foxy ticklish fondlings, your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.