Nouns & Verbs Page 4
Part Two
Poems
The Human Heart
We construct it from tin and ambergris and clay,
ochre, graph paper, a funnel
of ghosts, whirlpool
in a downspout full of midsummer rain.
It is, for all its freedom and obstinance,
an artifact of human agency
in its maverick intricacy,
its chaos reflected in earthly circumstance,
its appetites mirrored by a hungry world
like the lights of the casino
in the coyote’s eye. Old
as the odor of almonds in the hills around Solano,
filigreed and chancelled with flavor of blood oranges,
fashioned from moonlight,
yarn, nacre, cordite,
shaped and assembled valve by valve, flange by flange,
and finished with the carnal fire of interstellar dust.
We build the human heart
and lock it in its chest
and hope that what we have made can save us.
The Golden Angel Pancake House
Or coming out of Bento on a wild midwinter
midnight, or later, closing time Ron says, the last
rack of pool balls ratcheted down until dawn,
bottles corked and watered, lights out, going out
the door beneath the El tracks over Clark and Sheffield,
always a train showing up just then, loud, sure
as hell showering sparks upon the snowfall,
shaking slightly the lights and trestles, us
in our fellowship shouting and scurrying
like the more sprightly selves we once inhabited
behind parked cars and street signs, thinking,
hey, should we toss some snowballs? Bull’s-eye,
the beauty of fresh snow in the hands, like rubbing
tree bark to catch that contact high direct
from the inexplicable source, unique however
often repeated, carried along on woolen thumbs
to the next absolutely necessary thing,
sloe gin fizzes to Green Mill jazz or the horror
of Jägermeister at the Ginger Man or
one of those German bars up around Irving Park
where a sup of the Weiss beer on tap is enough
to convince me to forswear my stake in any vision
of the afterlife you might care to construct, say
the one with the photo of the owner in his Nazi
uniform beside a pristine fjord, could be Norway,
1940? Whichever, we’re hungry now, cast out
into the false dawn of snow-coiffed streetlights
embowed like bowl-cut adolescents or
Roman emperors sated on frost, thumbs up
or down to hash & eggs at Manny’s
or the locally infamous Alps, then there’s one
at which I never ate though it looked absolutely
irreplaceable, the Golden Angel Pancake House,
which is a poem by Rilke I’ve never read
though I’ve used its restroom, seen its dim
celestial figures like alien life-forms
in a goldfish bowl, tasted its lonely nectar
in every stack of silver dollar buttermilk flapjacks,
though the food, for all I know, is unutterably
awful, the way it resonates is what carries me
down the swirled chords of memory
toward the bottom of the frosted glass
aquarium of dreams, whatever that means, it’s
what it meant to me coming home those nights
from the Lutheran College after teaching
the Duino Elegies to the daughters and sons
of Minnesota farmers, the footbridge over
the North Branch of the Chicago River, frozen
solid, eddies of whirling ionized powder
around my boots in the bone-cold subzero
that makes the lights in the windows of houses
so painfully beautiful—is it the longing
to get the hell inside or the tears the wind
inevitably summons forth? Homeward,
all the way down Lincoln Avenue’s amazing
arabesques and ethnic configurations
of Korean babushkas and Croatian karaoke
that feeling set upon me like the overture to god
knows what dread disease, that cathartic, lustral,
yes, idiot laughter, threat of tears in the gullet,
Adam’s apple stringing its yoyo to follow
the bouncing ball, as if boulevards of such purity
could countenance no science but eudaemonics,
hardly likely, as if this promethean eruption
were merely one of the more colorful dog-
and-pony acts of simple happiness, acrobatic
dromedaries or narcoleptic dancing bears,
but which I’ve come to see with perfect hindsight
was no less than the mighty strongman
joy himself bending bars of steel upon a tattooed
skull, so much nobler and more rapacious
than his country cousins, bliss, elation, glee,
a troupe of toothless, dipsomaniacal clowns,
multiform and variable as flurries from blizzards,
while joy is singular, present tense, predatory, priapic,
paradoxically composed of sorrow and terror
as ice is made of water, dense and pure,
darkly bejeweled, music rather than poetry,
preliterate, lapidary, dumb as an ox, cruel as youth,
magnificent and remorseless as Chicago in winter.
The Orange
Gone to swim after walking the boys to school.
Overcast morning, midweek, off-season,
few souls to brave the warm, storm-tossed waves,
not wild but rough for this tranquil coast.
Swimming now. In rhythm, arm over arm,
let the ocean buoy the body and the legs work little,
wave overhead, crash and roll with it, breathe,
stretch and build, windmill, climb the foam. Breathe,
breathe. Traveling downwind I make good time
and spot the marker by which I know to halt
and forge my way ashore. Who am I
to question the current? Surely this is peace abiding.
Walking back along the beach I mark the signs of erosion,
bide the usual flotsam of sea grass and fan coral,
a float from somebody’s fishing boat,
crusted with sponge and barnacles, and then I find
the orange. Single irradiant sphere on the sand,
tide-washed, glistening as if new born,
golden orb, miraculous ur-fruit,
in all that sweep of horizon the only point of color.
Cross-legged on my towel I let the juice course
and mingle with the film of salt on my lips
and the sand in my beard as I steadily peel and eat it.
Considering the ancient lineage of this fruit,
the long history of its dispersal around the globe
on currents of animal and human migration,
and in light of the importance of the citrus industry
to the state of Florida, I will not claim
it was the best and sweetest orange in the world,
though it was, o great salt water
of eternity,
o strange and bountiful orchard.
Sugar or Blood
In the kitchen Elizabeth has been making marmalade
with the luxurious crop of our lemon tree,
and from my desk I can almost taste the caramelizing essence
of citrus rind and vanilla beans and burnt sugar,
and I can hear the piano concerto by Mozart she is listening to,
which sounds like a pavilion constructed from lemon-tinted panes of
sugar-glass,
and the Zairean music I’m listening to is like a tessellated and betasseled tapestry
thrown upon the floor of a nomad’s tent, and the sands of the Sahara
continue their migration into the timeworn grasslands of the Sahel,
and the Virunga volcanoes comprise a fog-shouldered heaven
to the last families of mountain gorillas awaking before dawn,
shy, Herculean versions of ourselves, brothers
from a simpler dream, luminous and transient as meteors.
There will come no more into this world
when we have killed the last of them. So many
spools of golden sorrow to unwind,
so much pathos to weave upon a loom of human agency.
As if we were not ourselves baboons on the savannah,
not jackals, not giraffes in our ungainliness.
As if to desire the coat of a jaguar, the fur of a snow leopard,
was not a form of worship, as raw ore minted and coined
resembles the child’s flattering imitation of a mastery it will never equal.
Who would not be a great cat in the Amazon or the Hindu Kush?
Even the greenish pelt of a river monkey, its iridescent aura,
even our too-human bodies shimmer with the weird, atomic eclipse-light of life.
Talking to myself like this, in a blazon and an emblem,
I realize I have never said plainly most of what I truly believe,
I have shied from difficulty and misstated my deepest fears,
I have not born full witness to the suffering in the streets of the cities I love,
I have not walked a picket line against the tyranny of greed,
I have been wily and evasive even on behalf of art,
I have not praised the movies in tones equal to the rapture
I have known there,
I cannot remember King Lear,
I did not finish Ulysses or even start on Proust,
even now I seek diversion in the candy necklace of delight,
even now I refuse to commit,
even now I would walk among jaguars
wearing the skin of a jaguar
as if it were not necessary to declare my allegiance,
as if I did not have to choose.
Which will it be, sugar or blood?
Capitalist Poem #5
I was at the 7-Eleven.
I ate a burrito.
I drank a Slurpee.
It was late, after work, washing dishes.
The burrito was good.
I had another.
I did it every day for a week.
I did it every day for a month.
To cook a burrito you tear off the plastic wrapper.
You push button #3 on the microwave.
Burritos are large, small, or medium.
Red or green chili peppers.
Beef or bean or both.
There are 7-Elevens all across the nation.
On the way out I bought a quart of beer for $1.39.
I was aware of social injustice
in only the vaguest possible way.
Sunrise and Moonfall, Rosarito Beach
What I remember of Mexico
is how the glass apple of mescal glowed
and exploded like a globe of seeds
or something we couldn’t pronounce
or know the secret name of, never,
and even when the federales shook us down for twenty bucks,
as they must, to save face,
I couldn’t lose the curve and rupture
of that sphere—half-full, hand-blown, imperfect
as our planet. Sure, everything is blowing open
now, all the freeways and skinheads, the music
invisibly blasting, radio waves invading the spines and craniums
of all this. San Diego, Tijuana, the Beach of Dead Dogs
where we slept in the cold, local kids incredulous
of Ed up early for no reason
driving golf balls out into the restlessly pounding surf.
Jesus, we’re always hitting golf balls. It seems to be
some irreducible trait. There’s Rob smashing the plaster icons,
all the bleeding martyrs and aqua pigs
and pink squinting Virgins the radiant chapel of candles
induced us to need. Jesus, let me ask, please,
before he decapitates you also with a wicked six-iron slice,
why are we always the ones on the beach
as dawn sucks the last drops from mescaline shards,
the ones who beat the sacred iguanas to death
as the sun comes right up
and the shadow-globe finally dances off stage,
the moon, I mean,
that other white world of men
driving golf balls to seas of dust and oblivion—
chrome-headed, flag-waving, violently American.
Night Travelers
Rising from Newark I see the cars of the homebound commuters assembled like migrating caravans.
Lush as glowworms, gregarious as electric eels in their dusty blue Hondas and plush Monte Carlos,
they jam the tollways and access roads, flood the exits and passing lanes, circle the sinuous clover leaves
until they are nothing but rivers of dun and aluminum and butter-colored light,
arterial channels of ivory and gold, pythons transmuting the freeway web to luminous honeycomb.
Now I see the Trojan horses of industry, refineries and loading docks at Elizabeth.
Now the magic kingdom itself, Manhattan, pathologically lucid on Midsummer’s eve,
which according to the book I’m trying to lose myself in as we shudder to scale the oxygen stairwell
was the optimal hour for witches’ transport by broomstick and airborne bread paddle,
the dancing of mad hags under Venus Mountain, the Wild Hunt’s enchanted stampede,
covenants and covens, auguries and invocations, henbane, belladonna, elderberry, hemlock,
as the travelers to Hackensack and Scotch Plains must suffer the runes and rituals of unemancipated flight,
hubbed enumerations and the tokens of interchange, the ghosts of evening loosed from backyard barbeques
as from the window I hear the song of baseball cards in bicycle spokes and crickets in the neighbors’ lawn,
lost summers of crabgrass, resin of oak leaves, taste of chalk from the window screen
as I wait for the sound of my father’s car in the driveway, Ford Falcon, 1963,
as even now I imagine the children are sent to bed with patio voices and urn-light of fireflies in jelly-jar sarcophagi,
all the children in all the suburbs, tens of thousands, millions of them rising into the air in striped pajamas,
hovering like midget astronauts, tiny inmates in coonskin caps, convict stars above a nation of lawn chairs and tinkling ice cubes
and sprinklers whirling like tireless apostles, the beautiful sprinklers casting their nets, whispering silver apologies to the dust.
Now the air-nurse is passing out thimbles of whiskey, the pilot has spoken of vectors and altitude,
trajectory, velocity, how distance reduces to speed over time, the ways our lives reduce
to intervals of burnished light on the freeway, a ritual semaphore of stop-and-go traffic, sleepy kisses, radio static,
the invisible jet stream propelling us forward as the past recedes like farmland beneath our wings.
There are no spells against this grief, no incantations to bridge the longings of memory,
days and nights I cherish far better than projected wind speed or nomenclature of root salves.
I don’t really know when midsummer falls or sign of nightshade or if the moon has risen at all beyond the acetylene clouds,
but I am rising to 31,000 feet and as far as I can see there is nothing but darkness
and nothing on this craft but bourbon
and water and light the color of bourbon and water to ease the fire of our passage.
Sleep
Falling asleep you do not traffic in abstractions:
you fashion images in the mind and count them.
You step back from the brink of thought,
from cognitive manipulation, to pure envisioning.
The sheep jump the wall, the skier parses new trails
on the mountain, swooping between spruce trees.
Elizabeth walks through homes she has known:
an old apartment in Chicago, our beloved hovel
on Jane Street, her childhood house in Baltimore.
What’s down this hall, which door is the closet?
Turn on the light, examine the faded wallpaper,
move through the space, feel it, inhabit it.
What’s been subtracted is a kind of pictorial syntax,
the filmic and interpretive operations of the mind
driving the images forward. Or, is that wrong?
You must remember to count the leaping sheep,
to engage the algebraic half of the mind,
which is the left or the right? Does it matter?
Two hemispheres, globe and brain,
night and day, the mad serendipity of it all.
What is the evolutionary purpose of sleep?
What is knowledge? Why are we alive?
Where is this world we find ourselves in?
How can we understand it? Who are we?
Where the Water Runs Down
1
High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise
In Ansel Adams’s photograph the moon disintegrates
like sandstone. The inverted V of cliff in shadow
and the chevron of dark sky nearly meet
to consume the crest
of carefully delineated sunlight along the ridge.
This clarity signals a vision
without mitigation. It is a pure, chromatic world,
a landscape where ideas dominate facts
as light determines exposure.
Dry pines along her flanks. Douglas fir and juniper
remain hidden in the deeper arroyos.
In the next frame, Aspens,
Dawn, Dolores River Canyon
become wardens of an Emersonian ideal,
light thrown scintillant off edges and spires like needles
or a wave towing zones of sure and distinct tonality
down a slope of boulders and loose scree,
a tragic quality to the shadows of the transcendent grove,