1630 Nature poems

The deer racing across a field of the same clay and tallow color they are—if they are: or are they tricks of the light?— must feel themselves being poured and pouring through life. We’re not built but become: trembling columns of apprehension that ripple and pass those ripples to and fro with the world that shakes around us— it too is something poured and ceaselessly pouring itself. February shakes the fields and trembles in each yellow willow. • The violin’s back is not veneer— the strummed wood shudders together. Undivided by caution each note is its own first thought. My first thought’s a kind of prayer that I might resonate entire— sometimes it’s such a meager portion shaking a little, as if it ought... Every day, the same desire to push myself through the door that leads to some bright place, brighter than the concert platform, where the whole self echoes together— the outer to the inner pleasure. • Everything runs together— the light smells of spring, the unreasonable brightness of this peg, this sheet, this line tethering linen between sky and mud as if the garden marked a pause in that eternal return whose looping trace is the blood hissing through the ventricles. What gives you life’s the thing that kills.

A concrete table and chairs set back from the road at the edge of a playing field — vacant, wide with light — where I step into the background of my imagery, this place in which it is all still to happen, the table set — plates and side plates, ranked cutlery, napkins in their rings, long-stemmed glasses under a hanging lamp — the same vine wreathes around its shade as is enchased in the lion-foot salt cellars, turret pepper pots — Landscape with torsos sunk into mahogany — pictures by the window, half-drawn blinds, a centerpiece grapes of wire and jade-colored glass, their bloom of dust — soon I will sit and eat — Now strangers wake in their houses. One by one they have vanished into that blank behind their names, this place in which the room rebuilds itself furnished each time with more of my unreality — The stone heaps lie around me and nothing is mine — A concrete table and chairs and gray-green weeds persisting here and out of cracks in bitumen along the fence line where a warehouse backs onto the street, self-seeding at the verge of what the mind makes scenes as if to say what the future will keep of this place will be its innocence, a hunger as undeliberate as rain —

1 the weeds thick between sugar mill drums without batting an eye the moon strung through the smokestack’s pupil the connecting rod and piston shameless before the cane gone to seed rust scuffles with grease the toadstool atop the heap of  filings in the smoke box to be shielded from the abysmal ribbing infinite nuts to throw at the rustproof   head of the enemy Agabama spoon lunchless oxidation’s honor 2 you know by name every tool in the museum of wood within reach of the waves clamp brace brush set square boathouse in Coconut Grove withstood fourteen hurricanes like the soul transpires like the body transcends even the seagull recognizes you when you piss the sea three sheets to the wind rasp box of miter joints socket chisel the old cushionless rocking chairs rising up in pieces so you can spy on your childhood 3 they yell out but you don’t answer you’re in the yolk of a marabu patch no one looks for you where nothing can go not even the guinea hens running wild in secret you cleared a path one evening with your plaid shirt the only thing to get past the thorns is the voice of your mother meticulous like a hurricane you spread out over the dry corollas below a sky stripped of leaves by the clouds like a string of ants and you undress only for you to await the Indians 5 at the crossroads there’s a smell of mother crystallized sweat shadows in simple syrup an irrefutable knife between encrusted cans for coffee and lard there’s a taste of mother at the crossroads molasses in its light rice pudding soul a knife to cut everything but essence Peruvian guava ripened by flies the sharp destiny of a mother that can be wrapped in banana leaves 7 a dog facing a bookcase in the middle of see-through ruins the bookcase was the work of asthma there was a spot for the old oilcan the bunch of basil the goat tallow still the house curdled with books the dust’s bad temper the prompt unforeseeable water leak the dog was the work of no one a good swimmer did it all ’til its dying breath his ear bitten in the backwoods worms ate him alive now you do whatever you can to stop from howling Translated from the Spanish

act 1 , scene 1 : do you know what it means for our survival? Fog spun into silk on the knee of the comptroller, propelled toward the crest of Ontario, the old, faded star, steambreath onto the windshield. To orient in the finest sense of cackles, mute chrysanthemums, funneling inordinate nakedness, absorbed, absorbed, immediately absorbed. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, we stay limber, each line choreographed from a tremendous mouthful of swamp, skunk cabbage brining at the jowls, acquiesced to pestilence, and exaggerated diffidence. Do you know what it is to clamp your shell an extra foot into the silt riverbank, kissing the soles of passersby, silky grains churning the earth over? Makeshift ceremonial dances, fine textiles culled from thrift store bins display brightly-colored throats who feed stacks of cash killed on recycled names. There is a golden tapestry on the berry-stained bottom of Wealth Woman’s basket of abalone. Beneath it are the exhausted faces of her babies grown old in the length of the inhale, and a facsimile remains from all the cycles spilled over, since nature cannot acid wash, since frizz canvassing the ozone always carries over. Geometry for days, countless days, spin-cycled through a craftsman’s circumpolar hands. There’s always another grotto or chamber where things dwell, they say. Wandering skitterers we are, the Northern Lights vacuum pried-open skulls. We cover ourselves with hides and entrails, overripe elderberries, looking to steal a moment of letup from the glare. The limbs of the Old Ones shunt aside bare toes, stripped solid and indifferent as a bear’s den or an ant’s apartment. Don’t be so much in charge, the frogs say, of coalescing wolverine trails huddled in 60-million-year pellet tracks when the wetlands dried out. The way soaked, green corpuscles rasp each other’s mouths and hands braiding the woof of God’s mind, that’s how it is, says the giant rat’s captive wife. Even if you can only faintly hear the eighth narrative told in the corner of the babbling wooden-slat house, that is enough leftover hooligan grease for the gods with killer whale ganglia. Knuckles rasp proscenium floorboards, splattering herring peck at scops owl’s waist, spruce branch lowered, scrapes conglomerate bedrock. Mother-in-law’s atonic hands lunge for stewed milt. One can conclude it’s a virus to plant burdensome layers of topographic crust on self-renewing limbs, like there was more to it than rustling fingers at the end of the line. All components must be in order, or it’s an ulcer here, a bladder infection there, a baked-out parking lot, fizzing in trampled-over, chastened hairlines. Hold, hold, hold, hold in your palms the Steller’s jay that beats its wings on glaciers lying high and straight over rivers slicing into cool nettles. Sea lions suck up a quick breath, dive and waft on the outskirts of ballerinas who gyrate in like-mind to classics bubbling up from Sedna’s citadels. I’m here to show you what you can do with this sandbar dialect, says the humpback whale and the goatsbeard moss, and the ore of iron oxide in the shoreline cliff. You must trust, she says, your swimming blood, joints lumbering in shadows, the dolphin clicking out to you, far above ground. And we should feed just as much as eat, says the heart your body formed around.

i came close to his WET dog’s eye & a FAT tear shared animal PAIN sloshed & seeped in between us — “darling I’m sorry you were born a dog & people notice it” , 2 COME ON IN, WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU like a clue we found PEOPLE in the KITCHEN in the SUICIDE VEST with the KALASHNIKOV such beautiful, desperate weapons their faces had to be covered so we didn’t fall in love piteously with the self-same wretchedness we see in mirrors a worryingly familiar scene we’ve lived in will live in the carnage going on behind closed doors being told, regurgitatingly, “you only get one shot!” but is it true you only get one shot when you get a loaded magazine & plenty more where that came from in the MUNITIONS DEPOT which I picture in Arizona, right beside a render farm and to the left THE CLOUD that backs up and up and up up to where are there edges, Bobby? INTELLIGENCE tells us to test the power of names by naming things, for one thing to name is to guarantee the end like a starting pistol BANG you name it         it’s ! smithereens 4 I am so indifferent to the limits of feelings I can’t tell the difference every time someone lifts my flap the unwashed salad the unheated leftovers the sanitary products are standard but bear no relation to what I expected to feel overlaid with various forms of filth don’t you sometimes feel like getting wrapped in a dog towel and buried in the hardening ground under the Canadian maple? Do dogs need to approach death and back away from it like I did when the vet injected deep pentobarbital & his bowels ejected across the floor tiles I was there to inhale his fur and weep for my benefit I am not independent of my feelings this way of talking about feelings has fooled each one of us I’d rather be given CBT by a border collie when there are fewer words around my arms around his only adored and stinking neck dead up my nostrils throw me in there with him everything is in the cold awful and I’m not OK and without good reason still here and feelings 6 JUST A GENTLE REMINDER A LOT OF WORK goes into making sex alluring sex is just this and that but it seemed, for a moment, that a new climax had been won when even the sky fingered me with a slobbery insistence when we were retching with so much desire we created a whole new atmosphere grabbing at sex things / using the sick bag to be actually sick in now the shower curtain is transparent it’s a way of saying, “I want you too to have this experience so that we are more alike like a sign that life struck once in a slippy-bits marathon that began when our eyes were magnets yanked to each other’s fully-charged crotches at a picnic when it was essential to make every enhancement to our ‘connection’ by getting seriously indecent beside the Bluetooth wireless speaker system until even the trees had to dash inside to pour ice in their underpants” while I choked up playing the scene, as we lived it, united by our pursuit of arrhythmia or satisfying itches to that catchy bridge section in Chopin (I couldn’t wait to come with Chopin through his melancholic meadow (not that I approve of background music (I prefer to foreground the piano by massaging it loud and all over until the top layer comes off in my hand and the pedal squeaks for humanity (I like to FEEL a piano as an instrument of interruption and consciousness (though I also like to take light swims, to get away from what I FEEL (today I felt jelly beans resemble kidneys)))))) which throbs like everyone grieving 7 HERE, HAVE A NEW PUPPY said the Russians to the French to soften the dog-loss but mostly the dog’s image the image is the greater likeness except we never seem to run out of images sometimes something in an image runs through me and that is very common as is reading about something that’s happening to someone outside of me until I know someone outside of me without any knowledge it is a test for my knowledge to hang around until morning practically all mornings are news to me practically all knowledge is news to me practically all news is images going very fast around the world so we have to guzzle them like wrapped food — hot and on the run — in one end and squitted out the other [pics or it didn’t happen] until I’m fat with implications and containing not a sausage 9 I love a good weepy dog-meme as much as the next crybaby and nauseate irregularly when the gifs load automatically his hairy body into my hairy body unfairly the dog becomes the shape of 2:13 p.m. in me on a Tuesday if we accept the world as totally fucked there’s a lot worse coming than dog hairs in macaroni cheese dog hairs on pillows dog hairs in rented flats in bathtubs in my hair in my dog’s hair in your short & curlies between my teeth in coagulant soap bars some people are revolted by dogs and dogs are not up for revolting I am revolted when dogs are lacking what if he did lick my cheeks by which I mean “buttocks” which were coated in whipped shea butter and heavily comestible it’s obvious he’s related to a father he never knew because we found all his needs and perverted them into a kind of inter-species loyalty or the usual master-slave hierarchy before laying down the crisp breakfast bowl of the rest of his days which gave us carte blanche to rush in anytime and smother him with kisses without getting socked in the eye (unlike when I tried the same on Johnny (who spat my tongue out (& no one blamed him))) when maybe all he wants is just to go on being less and less subtle and alive the way life becomes very well known after its termination 12 If rigor mortis sets in it means there’s somebody who needs it. It means that somebody is drained and not awake and deems any speckles of life unusable and he is dead and dead all dead in the humus of trashed bodies shoved down there dressed in made-up relationships. What’s your favorite part? Mine’s every part with a maggot in it. Maggots mean that life’s still leaking. It’s like magic when his dead voice is nauseating and I can’t see him so he might as well be invisible. It’s like magic when he isn’t and doesn’t have anything to say and I can’t bear to listen anyway so I just recognize my fingers / all the injuries they’ve inflicted while my skin drops off. What’s worse than a maggot in the EAT ME GLOVE-BOX DATES? Does the 5-second rule apply to something that drops dead? Is it true he might come back and crack open a piñata blue alcopops, bombay mix, karaoke, and a pint of nostalgia which is like thinking in another language, I mean, how it feels, not what it means. Half a maggot, the memory of mange marching across his fur describes a lot of other feelings the feeling that someone else is taking up the whole room the feeling that no one could help me now or ever whether I was on several edges my hot core and noggin facing this hammering world of brainlessness and sweetbreads was always a favorite word. I don’t know what it tastes like but I know it’s terrible. a:ldskjfa:lkdgjsa meaning I’m so overcharged that all I can do is literally slam my hands / head / breasts against the keyboard. Wherever there are corpses there are maggots. If we dig him up will he be wearing a jacket? LOOK OUT for the milkier, gentler solaces which for all we know                   for all we know could be the wind or Chopin’s noise (still hammering the background) — who’s seen it? Only its aftermath is visible what’s not visible is the aftermath of my screaming 20 you can catch me on the FLOOR / DOG / SYRINGE periphery of the dying and dead scene FACE (FEMALE) maybe my whole life carting sensations to the center mopping shit up with towels SKULL / COFFIN (there are feelings for these things) while public petting CAR / PLANE / ROCKET bodies leak it’s no surprise what I give away ONE DROPLET you can have when the vet twirls off to deal with some bloody business in a kitchen KNIFE / GUN the hug-a-corpse scene gets deep in the hold of what I am PARTY POPPER / WASTEBIN is what I’ve not yet been 30 Who concocts the smell of dogs which smells like an extreme close-up of the world oozing in at the edges. Full as an ice cube is full of liquid. I mistook it for solidity. The world is too full of smells. Though it’s impossible to see the top of it they crawl between my legs in the shimmering fuzz on top of the plant stickers of evenings tongues held out pocket-friendly air fresheners strikes on our nostrils. They come at me streaming. Why the dog? Why not the dog? Was it only a dream of soil heating held and stimulated for his unique aroma. It’s not a way in but it places you somewhere that smells strong and looks strong leaving behind us. Hi.

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter. The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded —I hadn't noticed — and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil. Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do. A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine, and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted ware- house down the block and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me, their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other. I know where they're going—to the "Legion": once, when I was putting something out, they stopped, both drunk that time, too, both reeking—it wasn't ten o'clock—and we chatted for a bit. I don't know how they stay alive—on benefits most likely. I wonder if they're lovers? They don't look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening hap- hazardly along, contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters, tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat, his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down, to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb. In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the show. Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they're not, at least, thank god, laughing. Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting. Now he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun. He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair, but a dangling foot catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down, set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him. No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of belly blubber, the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair, then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be, and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he'd known, all along, that I was watching and I can't help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too, I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours. It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold, and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then real- ized made a figure eight, what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent, and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out. Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he'd blazed, but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them now and I looked away, up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some, though it was midnight, with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons signal- ing erratically against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky. In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white, its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relent- less, unadorned.

a perfect world a trail widens out the code of indents channels serving both prey and interpreters arms back, re- laxed nerves as in a vat a perfect world placed hand on the breathing field the choices are circled until so dark they must be chosen over someone in estranged weather passed past “these doors don’t”

The clock-cricket singing, that’s the fever rustling. The dry stove hissing, that’s the fire in red silk. The teeth of mice milling the thin supports of life, that’s the swallow my daughter who unmoored my boat. Rain-mumble on the roof— that’s the fire in black silk. But even at the bottom of the sea the bird-cherry will hear ‘good-bye’. For death is innocent, and the heart, all through the nightingale-fever, however it turns, is still warm.

Leaves scarcely breathing in the black breeze; the flickering swallow draws circles in the dusk. In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching. And over the evening forest the bronze moon climbs to its place. Why has the music stopped? Why is there such silence?

Rushing rushing water's rumbling old hypnosis. The river's flooding the car-graveyard, glittering behind the masks. I grab hold of the bridge railing. The bridge: a large iron bird sailing past death.