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ENOUGH
Too many streets in this city, with their spines drawn white, their pWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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ENOUGH
Too many streets in this city, with their spines drawn white, their paving black as loss. As many as the branches of winterbare sycamores leading away from home. As many as the veins that trace their course through our bodies. Central Avenue, broad and straight, leads directly to the beating heart of downtown. Sunset Drive takes you to the aging painted ladies and their scrolls of gingerbread trim. There’s the avenue of cancer, the boulevard of diabetes, the irregular lane following fibrillation of the heart, the wandering way of dementia with its bridge broken over the river of self.
THE NOMENCLATURE OF DESIRE
The name of the lily is the name I had before I was born. Before white, before red, before the moon carved itself into one thin hair. The name of the sea is salt and spray and flat blue under pale. My lover’s name is written on my palm. The name of the grass is always.
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NECESSITY
She broods in her dark rambling house, and her brood takes its measWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
NECESSITY
She broods in her dark rambling house, and her brood takes its measure by her tone. Centuries may pass until they have sopped up every last drop of her bitterness, then she sends them out into the unready world, singly, like sin: the Pear of Anguish, the IQ test, books of divine whisperings, the cotton gin.
MENDEL: PORTRAIT, WITH PEAS
The long narrow garden: one side shaded by the white-washed abbey, the other facing
morning sun. Vines tall with white flowers; short with violet. The yellow seeds, the green.
Delicate glasses perched on a pudgy face. The pods green or yellow, smooth
or crumpled. Latent and recessive; dominant and loud. Father
of orange bread mold and the sea squirt, E. coli and the white-eyed fruit fly.
An oversized cross looped around his neck, resting on his cassock like a child’s house key.
The hairline receding, the expression wry, never quite blossoming into a smile....more
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From RE-EVALUATION
i. Nature Revises Its Business Plan
It’s summer. Q3. TimeWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
From RE-EVALUATION
i. Nature Revises Its Business Plan
It’s summer. Q3. Time for a midyear adjustment. Time to remark on my accomplishments. Some, like sunflowers, are too haughty for their own good, too proud of their core of seedsong. Some are spiders. Some are raindrops. I assign to each of my direct reports a developmental goal. This time of year I usually revise their milestones. I water my garden nine to five, color-code the marigolds. Bees profit from the nectar, its assets and liabilities. Thistles spike in the franchise. No one has to teach leaf buds to negotiate or roots to collaborate with topsoil or with rot.
From SHAKING OFF MY EXPECTATIONS
iv. Fired
They call it downsizing. They don’t give a reason. They don’t have to. Good riddance to my boss and my boss’s boss and his boss for whom I’m just another scrap of winter. So long Sandy, I say to the administrative assistant who stands, hands behind her back, watching me empty the wreckage of my desk drawer— safety pin, collar stay, the red thumbtack I used to post the photo of my team on a sun-struck Boston duckboat. I toss the handkerchief from Japan Airlines. I toss fourteen years of budget spreadsheets, the lithium battery whose life has been worn down. I put on my coat, decide to take the freight elevator down, sneak out the back, piss loudly on the new aluminum skin of the toolshed in the office park, leave long yellow-wet graffiti, making a statement, like migrating geese do when one flies out of compliance with the mutually agreed-upon “V.”...more
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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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THE ARTIST PREPARES FOR A TRIP
I leave to the past, the present or future,We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
THE ARTIST PREPARES FOR A TRIP
I leave to the past, the present or future, or to whenever will have it, the prophets’ ravings, the runners holding their kneecaps, the butchers bloodying their blocks. Goodbye to patched faces, to blisters of fists. I wave to sagacious critics, their tomes cold as tombs. So long to the tears of held hands, the nights of dying perfumes. Out from the owls of morality caught in their zippers of pain. Adieu to engraved invitations, their vacuous words sucking themselves. Adios to strangers and kindred clutching my throat, to computers of insults, the flatterers’ games. Saved from the chains of medals, the hospitality of whips. Released from the burden of inches, the ruse of memorable meters, the envelope of bones. No more the dirge of navels, the knuckles of breasts laughing like iron. Empty the sleeves of envy, the collar of vice, the pockets of pride. Goodbye to the straps of armies, the ballet of bullets and fire. Farewell electrodes of commerce; so long ankles of myth, religions of polished spoons. Sayonara my temple of folded hands, my sockets of eyes, my tunneled ears, my wormy tongue turned back from the slit of desire. Goodbye my empty mouth, my last word furled like a conch held to a lover’s ear.
GUILT
For James Dickey, 1923-1997
We’ll never again meet as men, our words tumbling down like waterfalls turning the wheels of breath. You passed as through silver waters, through your own reflection staring into an emptying glass. With webs of your huge jock paws you swam below the waves of time, passed the luminous fish of fear into the black waters of nowhere. For us a belled buoy should sound to tell how lives are bound to run down, drop by drop, even as a fighter’s heart keeps pounding, even as a poet’s imperfect mouth peals the perfect poem. Now you’ve washed your burnished words, bursting through St. Peter’s defense with an affectionate bear hug or offering to whip his holy apse if he won’t throw open the gates. No fear. You will walk in upon the bright waters even of your failures. For you, no fierce night will ever descend. And you shall abide forever, holding the drink of guilt in your hand, charming the host of astonished angels. ...more
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IN THE HOME FOR ELDERLY VEHICULAR MANSLAUGHTERERS BY THE SEA
The guilt, likWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
IN THE HOME FOR ELDERLY VEHICULAR MANSLAUGHTERERS BY THE SEA
The guilt, like the sand, is in everything, being so near, as they are, to the ocean, being so close, as they were, to the end of their lives, before they took the lives they took. Someone should have taken the keys away. In many cases, they tried— but the old, mottled, gnarled knuckles clenched, closing reflexively around that silver promise, its heft, its glinting mountainous teeth. And they held on to it. Now the guilt, like the sand, is on their hands and on their lips. It’s the grit in the food they can’t eat. Lucky the demented ones, with no idea, no memory, blithely chewing.
STARING AT THE BLIND
My eyes are the flies, your eyes are the spilled milk. You are the cow whose tail the farmer cut off— defenseless now against the flies which keep returning to feed on the spilled white milk of your blind eyes. “Let us pray,” says the amazingly graceless born-again Christian sitting next to you on the train. “Let us ask God, together, to restore the sight to your eyes.” Your eyes are the guinea pigs, this guy is a pig farmer from hell, trying to cross-breed his faith with your life story. I want to cut his praying hands off. I want to open his eyes to your eyes. Your eyes are the bees, hovering, oscillating, making something perfectly rich and amazing on the inside, something heavy and thick with mystery, which some meddling hands would unburden the bees of. But the bees need no unburdening. ...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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HOSANNA
Nothing to hosanna, you will be buried cold. Only the living go on We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
HOSANNA
Nothing to hosanna, you will be buried cold. Only the living go on living.
Worship the wind-hover while it’s a-wing, let scything talons fret the meadow grass.
If you bear likeness to the rough face staring up from a lake, swallow grief, plunge
your hands through, grasp hematite lining soft silt which like a father’s eyes
beckons. Dredge. Repeat. A man thinking on his dead friend will cast his dry flies
only in shallow pools. A boy, thinking the same, casts his deep. The wind-soughed woods
and blue-hazed mountains are a bruised prism— symbols of harm, symbols of healing.
Do not, for a blessing, cross barbed wire into pastures where ponies graze.
No sugar can sweeten their wildness now. The question of loneliness comes to this:
whether you go on watching swan-shapes bow under dry pines to the encroaching dark
or start back down the untrafficked road.
WITNESS
I have seen an arrow pass through the heart of a deer, and the deer, with a flinch, continue nosing the moss that blackened the roots of an oak. But the deer knelt down, at last, in damp leaves, cocked his head to hear, then sagged, paling the earth with his white throat, his loosening skin.
And I have seen a carpenter, with his palm pierced in a jig-saw, put down the half-carved block—the wood sallow as flesh stripped bare— and so as not to snap the blade, pull it clean through the webbing of his hand, his eyes raised the way the murdered look to the sky, as vague as St. Sebastian’s stare.
The dark pines in winter I have seen, with branches full of snow, conceal the kerosene drunks gone to sleep in the shells of abandoned cars, and I have seen those men stumble in the woods at night: their hearts answer one another like ripples after a stone
with blood that wells from everlasting wounds....more
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Dead Wendy is written in three parts of 20 poems each. Written in the forWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
Dead Wendy is written in three parts of 20 poems each. Written in the form of Berryman's Dream Songs, the book is elegiac and allegorical. Each part represents the perspective of one member of a love triangle; through their intertwining voices, the larger story is told.
From Part One: The Boy’s Version
III
The lilacs bloomed that May in continuous rain. Limping under his black umbrella, the old man pried at us with his eyes. Time and age pried at us—but could not divide us as we strolled by the mere in the park, our magnificent smiles turned inward.
You had a plan, inexplicable Wendy. At the last moment you would fill up life with riches, mahogany and gold, yes, but also wild shrubs and unstoppable rain, and in blossoming fulfillment of the dream we traveled to England, your strange ancestral homeland, to face death—or cure it—with civility and tea.
The estate was grand. But the palace was odious. The drugs were killers, the clinic a front for a hospice infested with foregone conclusions. We woke behind heavy curtains, and as we drew them open, time rolled forward like thunder, and we knew you had to die.
From Part Two: Dead Wendy Responds
I
I thought the underworld was a silent one until your shouting shook the trees and the black raindrops rolled off the black leaves, splashed on the lawn of long night, and seeping down through the dark soil trickled across my flesh like acid.
So much trembling and commotion I have not seen since life. There I was oak, but you were fire and saw through to the molecules of me. Even now I am afraid of your voice, you sleepless monster, you storm whirling at my bedside. The sickbed, the grave-bed—the terror never ends.
Yet there were safe moments, quiet minutes folded cat-snug against your chest. That embrace, recalled through all the minutes of the years intervening, has remained to me, in my little bunk, a comfort. Then you—storm-fire, lily fool—you kissed the dead. And my lips opened for you.
From Part Three: The Old Man Steps Forward
IV
Wendy was never old but always a terrible blue flower unfolding. Patient as a fed cat, quiet as a book, she waited for my visit. Always late, I came to her sickbed and found her floating above it, just a sliver of moon, crying sweetly to herself.
I looked away. And at that moment the boy returned. The invader marched across the lawn, trampled the twig and bark shrine of my grief, broke the locks on the house, blustered into Wendy’s bedroom, and took her for his own—lifting her, kissing her tears.
That hurt. I felt old. I looked in the mirror, and the shaved head of death looked back, rotting slightly. It sang a mad song! I backed away. I would start over, in the forest, and grow again— a seed in the mulch, a sapling, an oak of many limbs —and build a ship to sail beneath the moon.
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GENESIS
It all began with an amoeba singing
against the fear of separation
oneWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
GENESIS
It all began with an amoeba singing
against the fear of separation
one throatless note static
then the fluid soul torn apart.
MAGIC
When a bird dies, if you place the empty purse of its body under the green velvet of a catalpa leaf, nestle it among berry canes and nettle, the leaf will curl brittle, catch on a thorn, scrape wind, earth-low, overlooked, and where the bird was will be bent grass.
Once, when my mother bent to kiss her three small girls, leaned into their breathings, letting her lips tap theirs, the sound reminded her of water dripping into other water, but later, when the house stood scorched, every window a black, gaping mouth, where that sound had been, now, one child.
These things could be magic or physics or god. No one really knows....more
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SHIPWRECK SURVIVORS MARCH ALONG THE COASTLINE
Three days, twelve days, a lWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
SHIPWRECK SURVIVORS MARCH ALONG THE COASTLINE
Three days, twelve days, a lifetime. To starboard, the sea that didn’t bury us. To port, a land that won’t let us pierce it. Sand beats our shoes with microscopic hammers until the leather flies in strips. The sun doesn’t search hard enough for clouds to hide it. We take turns carrying the child on our backs.
For food, cousins of plums that hang on bushes like the crooked scarecrows of beetles. Cook samples one and expires on the spot. Meanwhile, crimson figs stand in trees whose trunks grow an assortment of cutlery. The birds that seem to have no song eat these and stare.
For water, inland springs...only half a day’s march. One of us throws his face down into them, does not rise. Perhaps he is trying to catch a gudgeon with his teeth. Perhaps he will; we leave him to his luck.
At night, we make fires to keep back the animals that snarl or laugh from the brush, or both. We throw on buttons, fallen teeth, the ship’s log, sextant, stewpot. To atone for the lack of wood, the carpenter throws himself on.
Day sixteen: a sail on the horizon. We hoist the child to our shoulders, who tries to do a dance. The sail immediately slips away, as if it’s seen better. That afternoon, mollusks are exposed by the tide. When we lunge, they burrow into the sand like the tongues of repentant gossips. We strike at the beach, whose enormous face cannot feel it.
We march. No crossroads, no reckoning, no end. The child is dead, but we have forgotten how not to carry him. The captain walks into the water until he can float his hat. The second mate dashes himself on the rocks. Soon it’s just the bosun and I. He climbs invisible rigging to the sky, reaches a hand for me to follow him.
STEALING HYMNALS FROM THE CHOIR
These are the famished in spirit. They steal tomatoes from where the armless man made his garden, sharpen their knives on the gravestones of martyrs.
Be slow to invite them to your table. They will scrape salt into their pockets, hide the soup tureens in their laps, use tweezers to serve your grandfather his salad.
They steal hymnals from the choir, blood from blood banks. Last week at midnight, one dug a sapling from the schoolyard, where now the children vanish as they run.
These are the famished in spirit. They sweep the world of its joy, using your broom and mine. You will not know them by their fruits, for they will have eaten them out of rancor and fear....more
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