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INFINITY: AN EPILOGUE
The slickest caper is to live in the world between safWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
INFINITY: AN EPILOGUE
The slickest caper is to live in the world between safety and danger.
Should thirst persist there, believe it to be only a trivial thirst which should not trouble love.
Just in case, there is a pillbox on the divan to indicate a glass of water may be near.
The children walked through the little gate and I ran to meet them in the garden, rose campion’s silver leafage graven by teardrops.
Remember how I poured milk before water, creamed and plenty of it till you little ones swooned?
The glass, the garden, the hour.
Remember how we loved to watch two waxwings safe in their twiggy bower, how they remained when we pursued, how they loved our company and, in the heart of morning, how we loved to watch them drinking from our basin?
If love will delay dying, love anything.
LIGHT LESSON
The Upper Side of the Sky, 1944 oil on canvas —Kay Sage, Surrealist
The shadow of my house falls on the lawn. It looks like the shadow of a barn but it is the shadow of my house falling on the lawn. There never was a barn and this can be proven by the shadow of a chimney on the roof of the house’s shadow.
Furthermore, the upper lode of sky has spun a shadow between the door and kitchen floor but it’s not my checkered floor, it’s not my kitchen from which a yellow curtain flutters, though the idea of a yellow curtain fluttering takes hold like a stark new city of implausibles serving to minimize the cozy shadow of my house.
It’s clear that light (so loud when near, ear stands in for eye) obliterates obscurity as light is meant to do; and clear (footfalls on the checkered floor, the curtain waving near) that though home is where the light is— intimacy with shadow makes one free to walk the world.
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THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
Took off on time, and over the Gold Coast saw Lake MWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
Took off on time, and over the Gold Coast saw Lake Michigan evaporating in veils of fog, and the fog similarly ascending into clouds. We’re in the clouds
now, United Flight 406, and a large man is consumed by reciprocal trade, —“Our soybeans, their labor!” Isn’t electricity running inside others, this animal fear
alternating with awe? We are flying inside mother-of-pearl clouds, and our iced drinks do not tremble. Big Jim is laughing open-mouthed, silent, to what we hope
are a comedian’s words inside his headphones. Somewhere someone must be spinning a prayer wheel, and we fly on into a cloud, a stately pleasure dome. “What keeps us here?” the Khan asks.
Lake Michigan flashes sunlight from its face, and a long ore boat pulls the widening V of its wake, floating on nothing but water, and all of the words for water.
LIGHT
It’s beyond me, the pinhole in Hubble’s eye tomorrow as predicted, (and lingo beyond me—some chicken scratching, a few noises standing up for red giants, string theory)
and Sol his own self making stuff take place, beyond me the melting ice fern on the window, these four lesions on my face, and yes a radish and maple syrup.
It’s beyond me, the streetlamp out front of 3236 Rex Avenue holding its sulfurous light over the street and the cripple Debbie inside the post-war Cape with her clenched hand.
Beyond me are light’s eleven tongues, the streetlamp talking her father’s parked dump truck safely through the night, and Debbie’s squealing laughs getting hit playing dodgeball.
Roger still tries to pry his sister’s locked fingers to show us the imperfection in Debbie’s palm, the reason for her crippled body, the meaning of life, to which the streetlamp as good as says, What is lit goes dark, what goes dark gets relit.
Debbie’s fist will not open, especially now after she’s squealing lo these several decades, even now after all this incandescence and fluorescence, but in her palm I believe a dot lives, like the still central point of a pinwheel nebula, of a radish, of a rubber ball, a dot beyond me, yes, beyond light. All it ever says is Open.
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THE LONG LIFE
There is no other that you are waiting for. Everything you neWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
THE LONG LIFE
There is no other that you are waiting for. Everything you need is within your reach. When the towhee sings his name in the maple tree outside your window, sing back your name. The wind will carry it downriver
to distant estuaries. Think of how hard you have had to work to get to this moment, how many soles you have discarded along the way, how many moons have waned
like shuttered lanterns. Now you are light inside. Now you have cast off parents, children, a house, expectations, demands, politics. You have earned the right to be self-ish.
Be like the heron who stands on the glistening shoreline tucked into her wings. Roam the countries in the two continents inside your head. Speak to the natives, all those people you have been and are.
All you have to do is listen.
THE DEATH OF THE POET LI PO
Some say it was the wine. Some say it was love, the moon smiling up at him from the river. He was drunk. The boat was tipsy. He stood, aching to embrace such loveliness forever.
The stars looked on. The lapping waves were dancing. Leaning out over the gunwale, he toasted his image which lay now beside the moon’s face and drank again. The sails
billowed and the little craft rocked him forward. He could not deny himself. He reached and reached until the river opened its mouth and drank him. The boat was lost in the blackness. The beach
was far away. This was Li Po’s last line. Some say it was love. Some say it was the wine.
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FISHING FOR WORDS
The fisherman fishes all day for words, words he knows arWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
FISHING FOR WORDS
The fisherman fishes all day for words, words he knows are there, words he’s seen lipping the surface, spangled and repetitive maybe, or words just below the light, darkened things watching.
Others had been there as the words surfaced but didn’t see them or couldn’t believe they were words or had no way to catch them.
He rises early and under the young sky begins angling for them, casting here, there, in obvious places and in the shallows where no word could swim.
He hooks one at 6, plays it till it rises to his eyes, nets it. Ten minutes later he hooks a second but just as he glimpses its first syllable it throws the hook and sinks away.
At mid-day, where the trees darken the water, another word bites. He has it. It is beginning to be a phrase. Around 7 he has the third.
The fisherman takes them home for supper and there, as he eats them, alone at his table, the phrase becomes a part of him. He says it once to himself but it makes no sound.
Then he says it to a photograph but it only sounds like wind. Then he says it to the cat but the cat has already eaten.
Finally he holds a clear canning jar to his lips and says it. When the words are in, they lie on the jar’s bottom, small and dry, but their eyes still open. They watch him as he seals the jar, puts it on a shelf in his cellar and leaves them to time.
MAKING PREDATORS
The world is rich with hamsters, rats and mice, the vegetarians whom Dr. Spock envisions as the future racial stock: industrious, bucolic, little, nice.
We see them nibbling barley, nuts and rice. But look where, coiled and mottled as a rock, one hopes to slip his body like a sock down over head and hips—a meal concise.
And you, my friend—with Beemer, houses, cash, no more ideal than you are small and cute— create the dragon on your gleaming stash.
This is no wish for harm. I pray the brute will starve and you get nothing worse than rash. But history’s a slut, and so is loot.
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MY DAUGHTER, TEN, DRESSES AS AN ALIEN
This Halloween she doesn’t want to sWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
MY DAUGHTER, TEN, DRESSES AS AN ALIEN
This Halloween she doesn’t want to see herself in Princess pink and gold, in Emerald Lady gleam of Oz, even last year’s sparkled onyx satin Woman Who Came From the Night Storm Sky. No—“nothing pretty this time,” she says, and so we search for weeks for just the right mask, a dream of bulging opalescence, huge eyes that make the planets small, the world a frail glass marble. Black pants, black silvered jacket, sleek black shoes set to step through space, and from her neck a braided ribbon of light holding a single perfect circle she’ll use to draw others to her power. Dusk comes, the pumpkins we’ve cut into demons and cats glowing against time’s grin. Before candy, before the doors that will open and close, I photograph her where she once stood pretty, this daughter, my creature, her strange new face turned upward towards the reachable moon.
EYES THROUGH THE WORLD
I took her traveling, my daughter, but she doesn’t need any country now except the one inside her: walls that shimmer white on white and pulse with warm sweet heat. She once was beautiful, my traveling daughter, her suitcase sewn with rainbow patches, her sure hands on doors and windows, strong feet on beaches and roads. What turned her to touch only locks and blinds? We shared a map, my beloved daughter, and talked of where new years would take us, writing stories and poems. Now she smoothly lies, forgets, sells off souvenirs to keep breath going with needles and pills. The heavy sultan holds her close in his harem without dance. She stares at me. I pack my bags. My love doesn’t stand a chance....more
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GLITTERATI
We are driven by our fascinations. Glossiness gliding down 5th AWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
GLITTERATI
We are driven by our fascinations. Glossiness gliding down 5th Avenue, the imagined life of adulation, model, saint, club killer.
Arrested by surface attractors, the impulse is irresistible, it is what takes the debutante to the tattoo parlor,
obedience to the magic image; we are ruled by sparkling things, like Marilyn in silver lamé & Arthur with all his shining honors.
The moment of conception was born itself under the mirrored ball in the dance palace, replayed in chains of bubbles in countless flutes of champagne, luminous & effervescent.
The glitterati, hunched over a table, share the first glint of revolution, it is all about them. They toast—a sparkling future.
THE BLUE-EARED HOMUNCULUS OF EXPECTATION
cannot be tamed. It is wild always, bound to Exhaustion, each a keeper & slave to the other.
They cannot see the benefits of sitting alone in a vineyard, or being with Landscape until they are breathing it & so they dance with confusion, hold hands with the clatter that excess brings & invade every absence.
Excitement alone is purpose. Infants are taught this condition from the beginning by well-meaning adults who wish to entertain themselves & believe they are communicating joy.
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PROLOGUE: MEDITATIONS ON GRASS
And now, it’s beginning, the first shy tintWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
PROLOGUE: MEDITATIONS ON GRASS
And now, it’s beginning, the first shy tints of green on the trees, a leafy scrim overhead, and the grass, an improbable green for us who know how soon it fades to the darker tones of moss and jade, how it crisps in the August sun, bleaches to dun, to bone. All flesh is grass. And underneath this green air, cancer spreads its rhizomes, its tendrils sprouting in too many friends: breast, skin, lung, bone, ovary, brain, their green time running out. The yellow wands of the willow sway over the creek, tiny green buds beaded like tears. Soon they will flesh out in elliptical leaves: lancets, knives, blades. All grass is flesh.
MEDITATION IN MID-OCTOBER
Right now, just the tips of basil have been brushed with frost’s black kiss, but it’s coming soon, that clear still night when Orion rises over our house and the dew falls in an icy net of stars. On a small farm in Wisconsin, my friend’s cancer spreads. Piece by piece they’ve pruned her body. Now they want to harvest her marrow. They are promising her eternal life. Soon, every blazing leaf will fall to earth, stripping the trees to their black bones. Soon, the only flowers will be the ice roses wind etches on glass in diamonds and scrolls. And if she refuses the surgeons and their dazzling promises? The geese know when it is time to go, head south. We hear them pass overhead on starless nights, wedges of bells in the cold thin air. ...more
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UNDOCUMENTED LAND
Nothing but bones remain
where the desert floats toward thWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
UNDOCUMENTED LAND
Nothing but bones remain
where the desert floats toward the sun
of a man who lost his way between countries
and left a femur like a hyphen
from the punctuation that survived the text of his story
about stopping where directions
intersect to make his choice of which to take. A tibia
points toward a scapula
scraped clean by the light next to a mandible
biting into the ground
where a comma would be placed in a sentence
expecting it to be continued.
PREDICTIONS
There will be ice on the moonlight in the country of wolves when they rush from the cover of the trees. There will be dust
on the riverbed at summer’s end, just before the swallows disappear. There will be schedules left at bus stops and old shoes in the road. There will be blind men
asking directions and brides dressed in white selling confessions. There will be a time of plenty and another
of even more. There will be a time of need and nobody will know the difference. There will be deserts so beautiful
on the night the cereus bloom even the lost traveler will lie down among the thorns glad to be alive.
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SIDEREAL TIME
Why have I given him this watch? What appointments does he haWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
SIDEREAL TIME
Why have I given him this watch? What appointments does he have to keep in jail? Lifting its scratched bubble face, its little coolness to his cheek, he tells me about his first watch, a Bulova lifted off his stepfather’s bureau, the first thing he’d ever stolen. Not till he climbed the railroad bridge had he slipped it on. As he talks, the guards come closer as if they can tell from his head’s tilt, his hand’s trembling, he’s about to start something only they can finish. That’s the worst part of being in jail, he says, there’s no good place to hide. At home he could run away, scale a bridge, put hundreds of feet of air between him and everyone who could hurt him. Maybe he’d never go home. Maybe he’d stay up there, sleeping with the winds and the ghosts of trains. This watch I’ve given him isn’t so different from his old one. It’s luminescent too. He cups his palm over it. Together we peer into the darkness he’s made with his hands. There are tiny beams radiating out like those when you shut your eyes tight, the kind of light you imagine stars really make. He could strap it to his wrist and wear it past one iron gate and then another.
THE MEDICAL CENTER FOR THE AGING
Today I teach the class about metaphor. Imagine you have wings, I tell them, feathers. Lift, I whisper to Dr. Fernald, to the retired headmistress Eve Briscoe, to the frail pianist Eleanor Conwyn, to Idwell Robinson, who, in 1913, was champion of all the British Isles. Where is the wind carrying you? What do you see below? I stand behind Mr. Paxton, rub his shoulders. Imagine wings there, you are soaring. How does it feel? Scared, Isabel Pfeiffer says, who once raised millions for a young ladies’ academy. Embarrassed, Professor Railsback adds. Why swimming? I’ve always loved swimming, replies Mrs. Behn, because she answers that to everything. Nervous, insecure, apprehensive, lonely, come other shy responses. No, no exhilarated! insists Mrs. Carduso. I’m rising. This is how wide my wingspan is, she laughs, spreading out her arms. I’m casting shadows on everyone, little children are scared at first, they think I’m some sort of prehistoric bird escaped from a museum. We fly over mountains, rivers, veer off to each person’s home. I make each name the town. We go by Santa Fe, Topeka, Sioux City, Springfield, Des Moines, then float back over Doylestown and circle the Medical Center where the doctors and nurses rush out, gazing up, pointing their shaking fingers. Be reasonable. Come down. Come down this very instant. But Mrs. Carduso wants to fly on, straight into the sun, to get so close to the source of light it singes her feathers, and then to plummet. She catches my arm tightly and I almost cry out, her fingernails pressing through the sleeves into my skin, but I make myself not flinch. I hold onto the pain. She’s got me dangling over the earth. I can see how far I’d fall if she were to loosen her grip....more
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MEDIOCRITY WEEPS TO BEHOLD GREATNESS
My new dentist is admiring the great wWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
MEDIOCRITY WEEPS TO BEHOLD GREATNESS
My new dentist is admiring the great works of my old dentist in my mouth and it makes me feel like a museum of fine arts of sorts with twenty years of gilded masterpieces filling my walls. He has never seen such beautiful margins, he says more to himself than to me, incredulous and impressed and more than a little jealous as he examines each one with our mouths open, tapping with his tiny round mirror as if to wake us from this dream of impossible beauty and perfection. Thank you doesn’t seem the right thing to say somehow, and yet I say it anyway, with so many amazed fingers camped out on my tongue that it comes out sounding like “hankie.” That’s when he abruptly turns off the light and wheels his stool away somewhere behind me where I can’t see him wiping the tears from his eyes.
A WOMAN TAKING OFF HER SHIRT
does so with arms crossed over her belly like she’s hugging herself and each hand takes hold above the opposite hip and off it comes in a fluid motion like a fountain shooting up and falling down in a great arc the shirt rising up and the breasts rising and falling and the hair falling and finally the hands falling to her sides with the shirt in one hand inside-out
while the man taking off his shirt wrestles it off grabs his own collar first like he’s going to beat himself up then dips his chin down like a fighter into the dark well of the shirt and climbs down in it reaching back and grabbing ahold and pulling it up over himself and pulleying himself down through it and out. ...more
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THE NIGHT BEFORE I LEFT
Scared, my suitcase locked on the bed, I walked dowWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
THE NIGHT BEFORE I LEFT
Scared, my suitcase locked on the bed, I walked downstairs to tell him. Down all three levels I moved through all the things he’d earned to find him in the den alone, the lights off, drinking a diet cola and bourbon, watching the late movie.
My lips trembling, I sat down near him and started to speak, when he leaned up and touched my arm, saying, This is the good part coming up, where these natives in New Guinea think... the first time they saw an airplane, they thought it was God. They think an airplane is God.
I still see him, bending to the screen, hair white, his glasses silver globes crossed by black clouds, watching natives once again dig a tiny runway of dirt, build a tower of sticks, then sit down on their heels in the dust to watch the sky and wait the way their fathers did and their fathers before them.
PIT PONY
There are only a few left, he says, kept by old Welsh miners, souvenirs, like gallstones or gold teeth, torn from this “pit,” so cold and wet my breath comes out a soul up into my helmet’s lantern beam, anthracite walls running, gleaming, and the floors iron-rutted with tram tracks, the almost pure rust that grows and waves like orange moss in the gutters of water that used to rise and drown. He makes us turn all lights off, almost a mile down. While children scream, I try to see anything, my hand touching my nose, my wife beside me—darkness palpable, like a velvet sack over our heads, even the glow of watches left behind. This is where they were born, into this nothing, felt first with their cold noses for the shaggy side and warm bag of black milk, pulled their trams for twenty years through pitch, past birds that didn’t sing, through doors opened by five-year-olds who sat in the cheap, complete blackness listening for steps, a knock. And they died down here, generation after generation. The last one, when it dies in the hills, not quite blind, the mines closed forever, will it die strangely? Will it wonder dimly why it was exiled from the rest of its race, from the dark flanks of the soft mother, what these timbers are that hold up nothing but blue? If this is the beginning of death, this wind, these stars?...more
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From THE BOUNDARY WATERS (Damascus Road, 1982)
SALT
Carry salt in your handWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
From THE BOUNDARY WATERS (Damascus Road, 1982)
SALT
Carry salt in your hand when passing from room to room in the dark. The wife of your friend holds out her arms. The salt of your tongue anoints her.
She looks back stiffening at the destroyed city of fidelity, sighing in your embrace. Now you’ve betrayed everyone.
Bless yourself with Holy Water. These elements were consecrated separately, then combined, just as your bodies became one body briefly in declining waves.
Once salt was money, friendship, kept evil from the house. To spill it signified a great misfortune.
You spill yourself in her gasping as luck twists its noose about you. A hundred birds startle from your pupils. To capture them, you must salt their tail feathers. You must offer salt to the angels of your right hand.
This woman, now, curls against you, brackish. You want to flow back to the seas of origin, leaving the salt-flats of her body, those white acres burning beneath the moon.
From THE ATROCITY BOOK (Lynx House Press, 1986)
PIONEERING THE HEARTLAND
For years we slept on the staked plain where only the scavenging wind endures. It still shrieks in my ears like the banshees in the abandoned shacks where we stayed until the floorboards disappeared like dust devils.
Then we’d load our gear onto the buckboard and head for someplace we’d already been.
Recognize the cabin where porcupines were scouring the shelves for salt. Find the burial place overgrown with weeds where we held hands and wept until our eyes dried up, until the sun turned the land to chalk and the water wasn’t fit to drink.
It was some time after that you flogged the roan mare to death and I broke my looking glass.
In bed your whiskey breath sours on my mouth. My body is the hollow you root for like a bear when winter comes.
At sunrise there are buzzards circling in the air and we’ve eaten all our seed corn.
From DEAD HORSES* (FutureCycle Press, 2012)
DEAD HORSES
Now that they are dead or gone, the dream Is always of a field where running horses Flash past, hooves catching and echoing light, The grass lush, milkweed or Queen Anne’s lace Along the fencerows. Then suddenly it’s winter, Snow is falling, shapes are haloed, the sky is bleak.
You might awaken, amazed the sound of horses Has passed, diminished just as a streak of daylight Pours through the curtains, fills bastions of lace As your eyes fill with sorrow recalling a winter Where nothing ever thawed, each vista bleak. You knew the vault of loss, the end of dreams,
But would not acknowledge it, that blight of light Unraveling the seams of some grandmother’s lace Concoction that formed a history, that overwintered In every house you slept in, every bleak Ceiling that you woke to, emptying dreams Into a landscape now bereft of horses.
Those horses: the dappled one like old lace Fading into the slushy nouns of winter, Its whites and blacks and greys as bleak As a deserted park, no childhood dreams Anchored by swingsets or gymnastic horses On which you vaulted, slim and young and light
As any snowflake in any kind of winter, The brilliant sled-filled one, even the bleak Fog-frosted dawns, the ones that hid all dreams Until they burst from the icy mists like horses Racing to the barns in that first light Presaging hunger, muzzles coated with the lace
Of their breathing, how they stormed the bleak Hollows where your final splintered dreams Corroded. You want them now, those horses Crashing the earth with sound as if light Had been surpassed by speed, as if the laces That bind you to your bones gave way to winter’s
Blast, unreining every dream, freeing the horses Of your past, lightening that blanket of heavy lace Until you open your arms to winter and everything holy or bleak....more
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