Nouns & Verbs Read online

  thanks to our

  Schaefer customers

  for their loyalty

  and support.

  It is brewed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  It knows its place.

  It wears its heart on its sleeve

  like a poem,

  laid out like a poem

  with weak line endings and questionable

  closure. Its idiom

  would not be unfamiliar

  to a Soviet film director,

  its emblem a stylized stalk

  of bronzed wheat,

  circlets of flowering hops

  as sketched by a WPA draftsman

  for a post office mural in 1934.

  It conjures a forgotten social contract

  between consumers and producers,

  a world of feudal fealty—

  the corporation

  is your friend, your loyalty

  shall be rewarded—a vision

  of benign paternalism

  last seen in Father Knows Best

  and agitprop depictions of Mao

  sharing party wisdom with eager villagers,

  bestowing avuncular unction.

  It was, once, the one

  beer to have

  when you’re having more than one,

  slogan and message

  outdated as giant ground sloths roaming

  the forests of Nebraska,

  irrecoverable

  as the ex-cheerleader

  watching her toddler eat handfuls of sand

  at the playground

  considers that lost world of pompoms

  and rah-rah-let’s-go-team

  to be.

  It has earned no lasting portion of glory.

  It has eaten crow

  and humble pie. Long before it was faded

  by the sun it appeared

  faded by the sun, gathering dust

  in the corner

  of the bodega or the county store,

  cylindrical, handy, holsterable,

  its modesty honestly

  come by, possessing the courage

  of its simple convictions

  like the unsuspected gunfighter

  emerging from shadow

  to defend the weak from tyranny.

  And if we have moved forward,

  unmasking the designs of the regime

  upon our fertile valley,

  learning to litigate against the evil sheriff,

  such knowledge has left a bitter taste

  in our mouths,

  and if this can of beer

  deserves our attention

  it is as a reminder of what it meant

  to speak without hypocrisy,

  to live unironically,

  to be sincere.

  Thin, rice-sweet, tasting of metal

  and crisp water,

  it is no worse than many,

  and if it is not an elixir it might serve

  as an occasional draft

  of refreshment and self-knowledge.

  It was established in the United States in 1842.

  It contains 12 fl. oz.

  Store in a cool place

  and drink responsibly.

  Poetry and the World

  In the world of some poets

  there are no Cheerios or Pop-Tarts, no hot dogs

  tumbling purgatorially on greasy rollers,

  only chestnuts and pomegranates,

  the smell of freshly baked bread,

  summer vegetables in red wine, simmering.

  In the world of some poets

  lucid stars illumine lovers

  waltzing with long-necked swans in fields

  flush with wildflowers and waving grasses,

  there are no windowless classrooms,

  no bare, dangling bulbs,

  no anxious corridors of fluorescent tubes.

  In the world of some poets

  there is no money and no need

  to earn it, no health insurance,

  no green cards, no unceremonious toil.

  And how can we believe in that world

  when the man who must clean up after the reading

  waits impatiently outside the door

  in his putty-colored service uniform,

  and the cubes of cheese at the reception

  taste like ashes licked from a bicycle chain,

  when the desktops and mostly empty seats

  have been inscribed with gutter syllabics

  by ballpoint pens gripped tight as chisels,

  and the few remaining students are green

  as convalescents narcotized by apathy?

  But—that’s alright. Poetry

  can handle it.

  Poetry is a capacious vessel, with no limits

  to its plasticity, no end to the thoughts and feelings

  it can accommodate,

  no restrictions upon the imaginings

  it can bend through language into being.

  Poetry is not the world.

  We cannot breathe its atmosphere,

  we cannot live there, but we can visit,

  like sponge divers in bulbous copper helmets

  come to claim some small portion

  of the miraculous.

  And when we leave we must remember

  not to surface too rapidly,

  to turn off the lights in the auditorium

  and lock the office door—there have been thefts

  at the university in recent weeks.

  We must remember not to take the bridge

  still under construction, always under construction,

  to stop on the causeway for gas

  and pick up a pack of gum at the register,

  and a bottle of water,

  and a little sack of plantain chips,

  their salt a kind of poem, driving home.

  Girl with Blue Plastic Radio

  The first song I ever heard was “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”

  There was a girl at the playground with a portable radio,

  lying in the grass near the swing set, beyond the sun-lustred aluminum slide,

  kicking her bare feet in the air, her painted toenails—toes

  the color of blueberries, rug burns, yellow pencils, Grecian urns.

  This would be when—1966? No, later, ’67 or ’68. And no,

  it was not the very first song I ever heard,

  but the first that invaded my consciousness in that elastically joyous

  way music does, the first whose lyrics I tried to learn,

  my first communication from the gigawatt voice

  of the culture—popular culture, mass culture, our culture—kaboom!—

  raw voltage embraced for the sheer thrill of getting juiced.

  Who wrote that song? When was it recorded, and by whom?

  Melody lost in the database of the decades

  but still playing somewhere in the mainframe cerebellums

  of its dandelion-chained, banana-bike-riding, Kool-Aid-

  addled listeners, still echoing within the flesh and blood mausoleums

  of us, me, we, them, the selfsame blades

  of wind-sown crabgrass spoken of and to by Whitman,

  and who could believe it would still matter

  decades or centuries later, in a new millennium,

  matter what we listened to, what we ate and watched, matter

  that it was “rock ’n’ roll,” for so we knew to call it,

  matter that there were hit songs, girls, TVs, fallout shelters.

  Who was she, her with the embroidered blue jeans and bare feet,

  toenails gilded with cryptic bursts of color?

  She is archetypal, pure form, but no less believable for that.

  Her chords still resonate, her artifacts have endured

  so little changed as to need no archeological translation.

  She was older than me, worldly and self-assured.

  She was, al
ready, a figure of erotic fascination.

  She knew the words and sang the choruses

  and I ran over from the sandbox to listen

  to a world she cradled in one hand, transistorized oracle,

  blue plastic embodiment of our neo–Space Age ethos.

  The hulls of our Apollonian rocket ships were as yet unbarnacled

  and we still found box turtles in the tall weeds and mossy grass

  by the little creek not yet become what it was all becoming

  in the wake of the yellow earthmovers, that is:

  suburbia. Alive, vibrant, unself-consciously evolving,

  something new beneath the nuclear sun, something new in the acorn-scented dark.

  Lived there until I was seven in a cinder-block garden

  apartment. My prefab haven, my little duplex ark.

  And the name of our subdivision was

  Americana Park.

  Wheel of Fire, the Mojave

  What is this white intensity

  swallowing me as the night swallows and now disgorges

  only Jonah was rocked and the night

  is sorrowful music

  but this is something else? What is this absence,

  immersion as faith is a kind of immersion,

  a thirst for light in the true air?

  Look at the sun’s jailbreak over the violent

  walls. I’ve driven all night

  to find myself here. Look at the gypsum desert,

  elements scattered like 7-Elevens all the way to Death Valley,

  the way L.A. reaches into it, one hundred miles or more.

  I’m talking about America, the thing itself,

  white line unreeling, pure distance, pure speed.

  I’ve driven all night

  from fear of the darkness that would seize me if I stopped,

  even coffee at a truck stop, even water. Look

  at the wraiths of stars,

  Buick Electras rusting in the freight meadow.

  It is the ghost of the light that moves me.

  I’m talking about the half-seen,

  dawn and evening, desert orchids,

  coyotes coming down to the river to drink.

  I’m talking about the thing itself,

  what rises in the night like anger or grief,

  language-less, blistering and overbrimming

  as a river coming down from the mountains

  to die in the sinks of rushes and alkali,

  the absolute purity of light or intention,

  memory of grace, seagulls canting windward

  above the Great Salt Lake—

  the sun, the desert,

  the weight of the light is staggering—

  until even the flesh of our days falls away,

  ash from a cone, fruit from a stone. Even now

  when the whirling miraculous

  wheel in the sky has risen and vanished at first light,

  gears of a huge engine, starlings

  drunk on oxygen—

  when the wheel

  is gone and I am alone with the willows

  at the edge of the utterly desolate

  Mojave River.

  I’ve driven all night toward the basin

  of angels. I’ve driven all night without understanding

  anything, need or desire, this desert, neon

  signs remorseless as beacons.

  I’m talking about America.

  I’m talking about loneliness, the thing itself.

  I’ve driven all night to find myself

  here. Look around you,

  even now look around you.

  Dawn breaking open the days like jeweled eggs,

  Joshua trees crippled by this freakish rain of light.

  Consciousness

  An obsessive compulsion, a ring of keys,

  a sequence of numerals to roll the tumblers

  and open the golden vault, a web, a blizzard,

  a stochastic equation to generate song.

  It goes on. There is no satiety mechanism

  in the market system, in the agora of thought.

  We cannot bloom, cannot flower,

  cannot crystallize into coal or diamond

  or disassemble ourselves into pure melody.

  Alone in the ruined observatory we stand

  surrounded by astral bodies, glittering

  milk-folds of star creation we stutter to name

  but still we cannot burn our fingerprints

  into the void. Into. The. Saints of it, myths of it,

  cloister, waterwheel, winged lion, myrrh.

  Knots of olive wood in a beached rowboat

  over which to roast the tiny silver fish

  delicious with salt and lemon. Marooned, then,

  but well fed on the substance of this world.

  And still forsaken. And still hungry.

  Smokestacks, Chicago

  To burn, to smolder with the jeweled incendiary coal

  of wanting, to move and never

  stop, to seize, to use,

  to shape, grasp, glut, these united

  states of transition, that’s

  it, that is it,

  our greatness, right

  there. Dig down the ranges, carve out

  rivers and handguns and dumps, trash it,

  raze it, torch

  the whole stuck-pig of it. Why

  the fuck not? Immediately I am flying

  past some probably

  pickup truck with undeniable motor

  boat in tow, a caravan

  of fishermen no less, bass and bronze eucalyptus scars,

  red teeth of erosion click-clacking

  their bitterness. And

  the sports fans

  coming home through a rain

  of tattered pompoms. And the restless

  guns of suburban hunters shooting

  skeet along the lake. Desire is

  the name of every vessel out there, but

  I think the wind that drives them

  is darker. I think I see

  the tiny sails are full of hate

  and I am

  strangely glad. Don’t stop,

  hate and learn to love your hatred,

  learn to kill and love the killing of what you hate,

  keep moving,

  rage, burn, immolate. Let the one

  great hunger flower

  among the honeysuckle skulls

  and spent shells

  of the city. Let longing

  fuel the avenues of bowling alleys and flamingo

  tattoos. Let sorrow glean the shards

  of the soul’s bright jars

  and abandoned

  congregations. Harvest moon

  above the petrified

  forest of smokestacks.

  The Burning Ship

  No room for regret or self-doubt in art,

  doubt but not self-doubt. The ship hauls anchor,

  the kerosene lantern flickers and goes out,

  voices in the pitch black swell with anger

  as shipmates mistake each other for enemies.

  The lantern spills, the pilot drops a lit cigar.

  Tragedy ensues and engenders more tragedy.

  If only the moon could see, if only the stars

  had been granted the power of speech.

  But the blind remain blind, the voiceless mute.

  The burning ship threads its way between reefs

  in the darkness. Doubt, but not self-doubt.

  The Future

  I would speak to it as to a stream in the forest

  where infant ferns grow shapely as serpents or violins.

  I would surrender to it if I could drift among the stars

  as among a cloud of milkweed spores, or jellyfish.

  Years turn, like autumn leaves; they pass,

  and we number them, like galaxies or symphonies,

  when we should honor them with names,

&nbs
p; like hurricanes, or the craters of the moon.

  What will Arcturus ever mean to me

  compared to these years—1962, 1986, 2005?

  They march beside me like siblings,

  they are more intimate than lovers,

  they do not turn back when I fall behind.

  The future watches us and marvels

  at our inability to comprehend it.

  Even Einstein only glimpsed its shores,

  like Magellan, planting small vineyards

  at the edge of the ice, like Erik the Red.

  To view it plainly we would need to evict

  the self from its rough settlement,

  to strip the bark from our limbs and branches,

  to reside in a place where atoms and stars

  resemble shy animals learning to eat from our hand.

  Only then would the future, like a lonely hermit,

  find its way to that clearing by the stream in the forest,

  and sit beside us on a mossy stone, and listen.

  The Zebra Longwing

  Forty years I’ve waited,

  uncomprehending,

  for these winter nights

  when the butterflies

  fold themselves like paper cranes

  to sleep in the dangling

  roots of the orchids

  boxed and hung

  from the live oak tree.

  How many there are.

  Six. Eight. Eleven.

  When I mist the spikes

  and blossoms by moonlight

  they stir but do not wake,

  antennaed and dreaming

  of passionflower

  nectar. Never before

  have they gifted us

  in like manner, never before

  have they stilled their flight

  in our garden. Wings

  have borne them away

  from the silk

  of the past as surely

  as some merciful wind

  has delivered us

  to an anchorage of such

  abundant grace,

  Elizabeth. All my life

  I have searched, without knowing it,

  for this moment.

  Nights on Planet Earth

  Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally “night,” like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian Fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian “Field of Rushes,” the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/Diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).