43 Violence poems

The bodies seemed so much like sleeping children that working with them felt “almost more like a kidnapping than archaeological work,” Dr. Miremont said. — New York Times , September 11, 2007 Thunder loves you, mumbles charms to warm you—folded cold body. Lightning’s pity picks you, licks a kiss, but what’s left to wick? Even direct hits miss— no amount of flash and hiss fires you. Inviolate virgin, inflammable channel to Gods long gone or gone underground, ghost-gray flecks left in the rock altar, your shelter for five centuries where you huddled, red-painted hair and wreathed with feathers. Weave threads of your shawl— not a shroud since you were live when left for dead—weave cover please, I beg your handlers. Pull stitches so that wound closes over your smoldered remains. They say you clutch your mother’s hair, strands in a bag sent up the mountain, an introduction to the Gods of Science, who read threaded DNA to determine who you were related to when human. Not the crushed boy near you, no brother he nor sister the girl, bound away to sacred silence, cased in plastic cased in glass. Visitors point and justify the past: See what they did—child sacrifice. Fattened ’em up, drugged ’em— Spanish violence, Christian influence, border fences, all deserved because of her wad of coca leaves and elaborate braids. Lightning’s mark spares you display. Singed cheek and blasted chest, blackened flesh looks less asleep, flashed back the fact you’re dead, a charred mummy, so far gone even Lightning’s longing couldn’t wake you. Thunder won’t forget you, hums a generator’s song in cooler vents to your coiled form in cold storage— song of your six years plus five centuries come to this: doom, doom, doom. Lightning still sighs:release, release, release.

Twenty-eight shotgun pellets crater my thighs, belly and groin. I gently thumb each burnt bead, fingering scabbed stubs with ointment. Could have neutered me, made extinct the volatile, romantic man I am. “He’s dead,” doctor at emergency room could’ve easily told my wife that night. Instead, “Soak him in a bath twice a day. Apply this ointment to the sores. Here’s a month’s supply of pain killers.” I remember the deep guttural groan I gave, when the doctor pressed my groin. Assured I could still make love, morphine drowsed me and in a dull stupor I don’t remember police visiting my bed, or laughing so hard, they scowled for a serious answer. I howled a U.F.O. shot me along the Río Grande, and they cursed and left. In the summer of ’88 I’d traded alfalfa for a bull calf. Still smelling of milk udders, I tied it to the truck rack and drove off. Its hooves teethed at pink roots ’til the whole lush field went bare dirt. A magnificent bull. Glowing wheel of heart breathed brimming stream of white flame at dawn. He wrangled his black brawn like a battleshield to challenge the sun, reared thick neck down and sideways, lunged at me with dart and snort, hoof-stamped and nostrilled dirt, ’til I growled him back whipping air with a limber willow branch, poured grain in trough and spread alfalfa. I respected his horns and he the whistling menace of willow. One afternoon my cousin Patricio helped me band the bull’s scrotum, usurp swollen sap in his testicle sack. It withered to a pink wattle and seeded the garden to drive cornstalks to bear hardy, golden horns. Thereafter, he grazed the fenceline, with the tempered lust and peaceful grace of a celibate priest. His bearing now arranged itself elegant as a wild flower sprung over night. ______________ Perfecto shot it. Rasping on a black rope of blood round its neck, it staggered, bouldering convulsions. Blood exploding in bright lash of earthquaked air, it stumble-butted stock trailer fender— second and third shots glowed its death. A quivering shadow of life-flame darkened the air and it sputtered a last drop of blood. I drank long swigs of whiskey and, thinking it was dead, turned to walk away, then it gave a tremendous groan, tremendous groan, a birth-letting groan . . . a moon groan . . . blood spurted out, thick, thick, thick alleys of dead star blood and I turned and said aloud to myself, “That’s the moon’s voice! That’s the moon’s voice!” And the white moon was in the sky, and I looked at the moon for a long time. ______________ I sat on the ground and gulped whiskey, drank the steer’s death still warm in my throat. A beautiful animal! I allowed to be butchered. When it trounced and galloped in the field, its body was a dark, windy cliff edge, and its eyes were doorways of a dream— now it bled a charred scroll of ancient chant in gravel, I would never know, and its blackened logs of blood smoldered dying vowels, I would never hear. My heart’s creak-n-tremble rage milled the steer’s death to red grist, I grieved, I wept drunkenly that no one cared, that humankind betrayed him, that we were all cowards. ______________ Perfecto, Valasquez and the butcher tried to stop me from driving, but now was the time to settle a bad feud with another friend. Redeem the bull’s blood with ours. I drove to Felipe’s house, anger knotted in me tight as the rope tied to the stock trailer steer strained against. I pulled, but could not free myself. (I had a dream night before— I crossed black-iron footbridge, partially collapsed by sea storm. Left-hand railing swept out to sea, I gripped bolt-studded right-hand railing, finger-clutched wire netting sides, carefully descended waist-high water. Waded through slowly and ascended other side— but had lost my sunglasses and wallet, went back, groped bottom, found them and ascended again.) Had to cross that bridge again. Full of significance . . . tonight, deepest part of flooded bridge was danger . . . drowning . . . represented years of my life collapsed and destroyed, water the cleansing element, my ascent from had healed, onto firm ground, but I went back, to re-live destruction… “Felipe!” I yelled, porch light flicked on, illuminating the yard. “Came to fight,” I said, “take off your glasses.” Bug-eyes glazed bewildered, then gray slits of lips snarled, “You motherless dog!” He withdrew in darkness a moment, reappeared on porch, serrated saw of his voice cut the chill dark, “¡Hijo de su pinche madre! ¡Mátalo!   ¡¡Mátalo!!” First shot framed darkness round me with a spillway of bright light, eruption of sound, and second shot roared a spray of brilliance and the third gave an expanded halo-flash. My legs woozed, and then I buckled to the ground. (I thought, holy shit, what ever happened to the old yard-style fight between estranged friends!) I groaned with the steer, and crawled my dead legs to the truck, lunged on elbows into the cab, hand lifting the dead stone beneath my waist to clutch and brake. Following morning calls came, “Tell us who did it Gato!” “Our rifles are loaded!” I said, “Leave it alone. What would you do if a drunk man came into your yard, threatened to beat you?” I wanted peace, wanted to diffuse the immovable core of vengeance in my heart, I had carried since a child, dismantle the bloody wheel of violence I had ridden since a child. During my week in bed, pellets pollinated me with a forgotten peace, and between waking thoughts of anger and vengeance, sleep was a small meadow of light, a clearing I walked into and rested. Fragrance of peace filled me as fragrance of flowers and dirt permeate hands that work in the garden all day. Curandero came to visit, and said, “The bull in ancient times was the symbol of females. Did you know that? Killing the bull, is killing the intuitive part of yourself, the feminine part. Did you realize, when Jesus was raising Lazarus, he groaned in his spirit and that bull groaned, and when you killed the bull, it was raising you. The dying bull gave birth to you and now you are either blessed or cursed. The flood of that bull’s blood, is either going to drown you or liberate you, but it will not be wasted.”

Blood is gushing everywhere From the lips of the bear’s face Out the elevators The children’s eyes When they are taken down by the ax The whole hotel is overtaken with blood You know I’ve started to think You really shouldn’t say Things you don’t mean The way you gushed into me And then that woman Who seems so much older, and isn’t Dear woman, I read your essay That fate could have been me Blood is gushing from between my legs I can’t feel a thing No really I can’t feel a thing When they propped me up They said, oh, she’s so strong But I am not I cry too I cried for you You left me, always, in the rain Dear love, you were so brave The blood exploded within you You were that whole hotel Could have been us I gushed Out came the blue-green cream

You look like a monster, one woman said to another. The woman was on fire. This is the first of two screws twisted into a wall. One bus is sent on its route minutes before the other. This is the first. Thousands of soldiers were lowering their faces to the grass, as though an exercise can will an effect. People made their way to the hospital: a doctor would look at them, and then they could die. You can dip a line of monofilament into a river. You can do it twice. The first becomes a second. The second becomes a third. Three girls stretched out their arms while the wind sheared their flesh. Sheared, not seared, what was left. I could have shown you a swimming pool lit with turquoise light. It was early. It was a mission. It wasn’t the first.

Maybe you’ve heard about this. Maybe not. A man came home and chucked his girlfriend’s cat In the wood chipper. This really happened. Dinner wasn’t ready on time. A lot Of other little things went wrong. He spat On her father, who came out when he learned About it. He also broke her pinky, Stole her checks, and got her sister pregnant. But she stood by him, stood strong, through it all, Because she loved him. She loved him, you see. She actually said that, and then she went And married him. She felt some unique call. Don’t try to understand what another Person means by love. Don’t even bother.

It was her first time coming home from college. She headed downtown for a drink or two. Her girlfriend went home early. That was Christmas. Now, under sapling pine trees in the clearing, snowdrops are coming back to their old places. They had been gone a lifetime. Now they stand, poised like a choir on the verge of singing: Nature is just. There’s nothing left to fear. The worst thing that can happen happened here.

He was hit back of the head for a haul of $15, a Diner’s Club Card and picture of his daughter in a helmet on a horse tethered to a pole that centered its revolving universe. Pacing the halls, he’d ask for a blow job he didn’t want. The ward’s new visitors didn’t know this request was all the injury had left him to say, and would be shamed or pissed, a few hitting him as he stood with his mouth slightly open and large frame leaning in. His wife divorced him for good and blameless reasons. He would not be coming home to share his thoughts on film and weather, or remembering her any longer than it took to leave a room. He liked ham. Kept newspapers in drawers and under his bed, each unread page hand-pressed flat. And when it snowed he leaned into one of the sealed, unbreakable windows, a cheek to the cool glass as he held his fingers over his mouth and moaned low and constant like the sound of a boat on the far side of a lake. When he died they cut him open to see how his habits had been rewired and so tightly looped. Having known him they were afraid of what can happen when you cross the lot to the office or pull up to a light and thump the wheel as you might any hour. If you stare at the dyed and beautiful cross sections of a brain, it’s natural to wonder how we extract the taste of coffee or sense of a note accurately found and held on an oboe from this bramble. On Duke’s slides they circled the regions of blight which explain why almost all behavior we recognize as human was lost, but not why a man who’d curl into a ball like a caterpillar when barely touched, could only ask for sex, for intimacy, for the very thing he could least accept and lived twelve years without, no embrace or caress, no kiss on the lips before sleep, until he died in the lounge looking out on winter sky that seemed eager to snow all day but didn’t.

Decoy Gang War Victim, 1974, by Asco (photographer: Harry Gamboa, Jr.) For Harry Gamboa,   Jr. Just a tick ago, the actor was a Roman candle shot to the sky, smudged by rain’s helter- skelter. His motivation was: he’s a stooge on L.A.’s sodden turnpike, so we have “to make” art. Got to rezone and react. The world the bare wall to his bullet. Got to rile up the populace, to fortify the arsenal. Once in a while, repopulate and penetrate, paint a list of incitement onto the walls. An elder told him that to overturn the city, one must surrender body/belongings to the one explosive spectacle of truth, making it ongoing. Pay attention. To overturn the city, not just the scraps but fervor itself. Not just the wan broadcast of indignation but IRL incursions into the workhouses and poorhouses to inflame the thousand points of  light. A lean surge, departure pinks both ends of  him. He’s the n th layer folded into the stand’s nerve.

Newspaper says the boy killed by someone, don’t say who. I know the mother, waking, gets up as usual, washes her face in cold water, and starts the coffee pot. She stands by the window up there on floor sixteen wondering why the street’s so calm with no cars going or coming, and then she looks at the wall clock and sees the time. Now she’s too awake to go back to bed, she’s too awake not to remember him, her one son, or to forget exactly how long yesterday was, each moment dragged into the next by the force of her will until she thought this simply cannot be. She sits at the scarred, white kitchen table, the two black windows staring back at her, wondering how she’ll go back to work today. The windows don’t see anything: they’re black, eyeless, they give back only what’s given; sometimes, like now, even less than what’s given, yet she stares into their two black faces moving her head from side to side, like this, just like I’m doing now. Try it awhile, go ahead, it’s not going to kill you. Now say something, it doesn’t matter what you say because all the words are useless: “I’m sorry for your loss.” “This too will pass.” “He was who he was.” She won’t hear you out because she can only hear the torn words she uses to pray to die. This afternoon you and I will see her just before four alight nimbly from the bus, her lunch box of one sandwich, a thermos of coffee, a navel orange secured under her arm, and we’ll look away. Under your breath make her one promise and keep it forever: in the little store-front church down the block, the one with the front windows newspapered, you won’t come on Saturday or Sunday to kneel down and pray for life eternal.

While the tennis ball went back and forth in time A girl was burning. While the tonic took its greeny Acid lime, a girl was burning. While the ruby sun fell From a cloud’s bent claws and Wimbledon was won And lost, we sprawled along the shore in chairs, We breathed the azure airs alongside A girl with the thinnest arms all scarred and scored With marks she’d made herself — She sat with us in flames That not all saw or saw but couldn’t say at risk Of seeming impolite. And later we’d all think Of the monk who’d doused himself with gas, Lit a match, then sat unmoving and alert amid Devouring light. She didn’t speak. She touched No aspect of our silly selves. I was the awkward guest everybody hardly knew. She was an almost ghost her mother saw Erasing the edges of herself each day Smudging the lines like charcoal while her parents Redrew her secretly into being over and Again each night and dawn and sleepless All years long. Having seen that mother’s love, I testify: It was ocean endless. One drop could’ve Brought to life the deadest Christ, and she Emptied herself into that blazing child with all her might And stared a hundred million miles into The girl’s slender, dwindling shape. Her father was the devoted king of helicopter pad And putting green. His baby burned as we All watched in disbelief. I was the facile friend of friends insisting on a hug Who hadn’t been along for years of doctors, wards, And protocols. I forced her sadness close. I said C’mon let’s hug it out. Her arms were white Birch twigs that scissored stiffly at my neck till she Slid on. That night we watched Some fireworks on the dewy lawn for it was Independence Day. Soon after, she was gone. She was the flaming tower we all dared To jump from. So she burned.