41: coma in cantos, canto 2

June 30, 2011 – 12:15 pm

canto 2

as I sit at my father’s bedside
therefore
I wonder if he’s deepsleeping
a way up
the darkness
to the peak of the ladder
(and what then? out to what?)
or if he remembers
his image of heaven,
the respirator,
the other machines,
respiring him,
the gears making his
blood move,
the pressures,
the gravities the doctors
tell me for sanity, for love,
make the world whole

his concept of heaven
I remember from the pillow
as I sit at his beside,
breathing uninterrupted
and artificial air
I have little trust in, heaven
a thing I once asked a friend
about, asking:

its not the matter
of faith I worry about
it’s its object

and the sufficiency
of the object, I ask:
how can you believe
and expect me
to imagine you serious?

He smiles, my friend,
with his faith
and his coffee
and the countless
freckles on his hand
in which I read elephants
and wasps and the stones
that ring high places
where the wind
carries the words
of lost people,
carriers of disease,
pleaders who wake
every morning to ask
yet again for aid and comfort
and yet again in their
repetitive maddeningness
for unverifiable assistance

those people and my friend,
who I call the religious
of the maybe next time
or maybe tomorrow,
as after a thousand years,
of Bigfoot sightings,
in your trust,
still you would believe
in what you would paint
as faith
when the sky departs
in its billion miles of swells
knowable and just as lovely,
like the beauty
of everyday things,
slugs, ticks, spiders,
watermelon, the passing of things,
hands and tubing,
poetry where tooth picks appear

you who swallow
your coffee,
smile in your artificial simplicity

you may have your faith,
I say, you may have your heaven,
and leave me
alone, to return
to the voice of my father
echoing behind the voices
of the machines
and the mumblesome
trattle of the doctor
who shakes his head
and says,
time will tell.

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40: coma in cantos

June 29, 2011 – 5:04 pm

canto 1

my father, who was larger
than life (how many poems
have treated fathers bigger
than mountains–think
new testament?), told me
stories in bed
about coma patients

coma: which is Greek for deep sleep

my mother would say,
did you tell him the one
about the knight?
and my father
would smile and I would smile
and he would say, yes,
but it wasn’t about the knight,
rather the coma patients
he’d seen through
to somewhere
in their typical white
rooms and their families
and their tears
and their limp,
muscleless limbs
and their little bags
of candy they’d munch
on while they listened
to the sustenance machines
and their beeps, hisses,
and lamplight, which reminds
me of heaven, my father said,
which is the way he started
a story about one coma patient

the light reminded me of heaven,
the ventilator light, he said,
even when the overheads
are on, starting one of his stories,
while I listened at my pillow
and watched his face,
like heaven, he said,
though don’t get me started
on that, he said

no, he said, think of ladders
up. Think of a well and a ladder
up and far away, he said,
the sound of a ventilator,
very far away, so that the sound
is really small

all coma patients,
he said, will experience
in some way or impression
the ladder up
and distant sounds,
memories,
imagine, he said,
me watching him,
listening to his breathing,
imagining his ladder up
and the way he paused
to call up the image

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39: a Tuesday morning comic

June 28, 2011 – 9:33 am

Everyone knows the joke
(with the exception of cultures
who don’t know dogs):
it’s always the clever boy
who tells it. The others
gather and he asks
“Why does a dog lick its balls?”

First the boys suspect a serious lesson,
they smell the memory of school,
then the possibilities come,
answers they know aren’t the right ones,
(because they’re not funny)
then the clever boy gives
that punch line
and everyone laughs,
though just barely
because for the younger ones,
or for the ones who haven’t paid enough attention,
it takes time to make the connection
between what they have
and what the dog has
and the notion of desire.

Invariably, the boys
call up an impossible image,
and, invariably, one boy will say:
“I don’t get it.”

Maybe arguments will rise:
some of the boys will disagree
with the metaphor of balls.
“They’re not at all like balls.”
“More like sacks.”
“Why’re they called balls?”
And the least clever boy
persists: “Why are you laughing?”

But none of this will matter
because the image has been made.
The boys will all be imagining
themselves as dogs
doing what dogs do
but would die before admitting it.
Invariably, the boy
who said “I don’t get it”
will at once get it
(because the others
could never really explain it)
and this boy, invariably,
will imagine himself
home with his dog,
a golden retriever or a dachshund,
imaging what he will do
when no one’s looking.

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38: ode to a trimmer

June 27, 2011 – 5:30 pm

I’m not good with machines–
you’d know this by looking at me–
me, who owned once only old cars:
When I draw a machine up by a rope
after throwing it over a cliff–
see me draw it up,
that engine, hand under hand
from the cliff I threw you over, yes,

I draw you up and grin at your dented
form, like a dictator whose just boiled
a freedom lover’s skull, and holds
it against the sun, and says, speak, you

speak, you, with the face of Hamlet,
speak oh court jester you,
but in this case I still expect you to work,
to do your duty, rise to the task at hand,
belch your smoke and crank away
at the weeds, though I imagine you saying
(while I pull at the string, turn the key, whatever):

but you threw me onto the stones
you tossed me off
you poured oil where the gas should go
poured gas where the oil should go–
dumbass–
if I were a guitar you’d bash me ‘gainst
a plane landing and expect me to note–
if I were a freedom loving skull
you’d shoot me in the streets
and expect me to show at 5AM for burgermaking,
or whatever hoisting you want me to hoist,
armless, tanktrampled, pissed on–

but you, trimmer, you would never, no,
I throw you over a cliff,
I place you, morning time, under rush hour,
today I yanked at your string
with last year’s corngas in your tank bottle,
you, oh trimmer, ten years in age,
gunked by ten years of spilled oil,
throttled by who knows what grime,
grease and gravy, sparking still
with your boughtwith spark plug,
you, trimmer, dashed, dented,
neglected like some dictator’s lover,

you roar to life
you impossible and perfect
grass cutter, made for grass
but settling for my weeds,
oh trimmer of life and death
ugly, smoking,
beautiful
noting still impossible
(do you feel pain?)

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37: painting salt

June 26, 2011 – 10:08 am

in poetry the poet, or whomever has a stick and sand available,
may tell the story of a grain of salt, yes that grain of salt,
that escapee from bubbling water or Tecate beer, which is made for salt
and lemon, or from a bad experience with a chicken doomed
for the grill, the salt grain who days before had words, fightin’
words, with the chip of pepper, who insisted the sun would go
down sooner than the salt grain would admit to, or could admit
to, that grain of salt we’ve been following and that poses
against objects that reminded it of itself, as, in piles or containers
of salt, all salt crystals mirror themselves and, perhaps in poetry
or clattersome, bitter song, comment on the simplicity
of their packed, symmetrical chlorides, voids sodiumfilled
with blue light, and cadmium from the additive iodine, that grain,
that grain so unthought and often forgotten in its numbers
but, like the Aleph, reflects and refracts the infinity of a house,
its windows, it’s windows’ suns, reflects and refracts an infinity
above the ocean and its cool and deadly condensations,
an infinity of faces in that salt grain, the infinities
above us and before us, on that lattice of salt
the smearing cloud, the gray mountain shelf, the fear of falling.

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36: the day I learned roses talk

June 25, 2011 – 5:07 pm

the talking flowers were what threw me.
but first it’s important to know how the wind
traversed my friend’s community garden, who looked
at me like a sudden broken shoe lace
when I told him I would visit with his roses.
some beds faced high, dense hedge greens
and so the roses held still, like those in green
houses after a storm has brought the powerwires
down.  still, in other places of the garden,
where my friend had placed statuary
(I thought about asking after his relationship
to cemeteries but thought better of it),
here Aphrodite, there Apollo (or maybe
they were artistic renderings of his loved
ones made to look like Aphrodite and Apollo
in concrete), the breeze coiled, rose, or split
the air so that the roses bobbed
and swayed, and they looked like they
might be staring back at you, mocking you,
playing games of blink chicken with you,
or, perhaps, looking you up and down,
studying you, which, of course, is madness.

but this day, on this visit, with the memory
of my friend’s strange expression in my stomach,
I entered the garden and found the flowers in conversation,
or I entered a space that was fairly common
and I simply had never noticed, this garden
I’d visited often in summer but had never made
time for, for the voices of the flowers, and on this day
the sounds threw me, because they were bold
sounds, unheard of expressions suddenly
made fluent in my ears.  Both the typically still
roses and the roses who played in the breeze
were all conversing, chattering to one another,
moving in the wind or not moving in the wind.
I could, if I listened, make out what they said:
something about the flowers that visited
and their astounding colors and shapes, shoeforms,
their gaits, and those hats, oh those hats,
how they speak so when we come to observe
their differences, when we come and study
their petal textures, observe the slower
movements of the ones with wrinkled skins
and the ones who grow sudden lights
in boxes they raise or the ones who have other boxes
they make noise into, oh, how we love
to visit them
–and that their favorites
were the buds, the little ones with sad faces,
the little ones that cried when they spilled
the cold fluffs they carry in their stems,
oh, how they wished they could see more
of the buds, not like the one they we’re looking
at now with that wide-open pollen face,
the look he has as if he’s seen or heard
some amazing or frightening thing,
oh, how we would like to scratch him
with our thorns and make him run away
and bring other flowers, the buds, the little
ones who cry and try to touch us
as we reach out to touch them.

yes, how strange I felt then,
entering the space of the talking flowers
and then the breeze rose up, the roses
swarmed, and I ran.

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35: the poetry teacher, the mildewed porch, and the leaf

June 24, 2011 – 11:26 am

Has there ever been a poem
about sanding mold and mildew
from an old white, screened porch?

asked the poetry teacher.

And why would there be?
a student of poetry asked
the poetry teacher, who,
the student thought,
should be able to answer
such a question, a question
that tore to the heart of the history
of this ancient form, and so he
was proud of himself for asking.

Why would there be what?

asked the poetry teacher,
who at the same time that he
asked this question, a leaf
fell from a tree and appeared in the window,
but only briefly, a yellowing leaf,
probably with some holes
made by caterpillars, leafcutters,
maybe, and the moment it took
for the leaf to fall into view,
tip up and down on the air
very much like a shovelblade
(and so the poetry teacher thought:
the leaf shovelbladed and passed
out of view or fell from view
with the slow motions
of a shovel blade, which reminded
him of the slow sink and rise
of oil field reciprocating pumps)
he went back to his rigging days.

The student reminded,
even as the poetry
teacher turned back to him.

What equals a poem, a poem
about a moldy porches, mildew,
fungal hyphae,
and sanding, I imagine for painting,
staining, or something else.  Tools
for such a job, face masks,
said the poetry student.
Why would there be a poem like that?

I don’t know, the poetry teacher said,
and he said: why are you asking?

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34: the day I turned into a snake with hair

June 23, 2011 – 8:54 am

Today I became a snake with hair,
in a such a state we must wonder
about sleep and figures, hair, for example,
as I rise from a hole and confront the day.

Sure, when they saw me there was wonder,
but I had to wonder also, speaking of appearances,
about their own hair, their own eyes,
their own methods of eating and evacuation.  Still–

Birds and birds there are (as not all birds
are birds), when she saw me
her eyes turned sepia and the whales
and the fishes flew the coast, just to even
out the metaphor of birds and sea creatures.

And consider the land animals, when they saw me.
The hyena and the bear took a few bluish berries
of discombobulation down from the trees
(the hyena fished them from a rotting chest cavity)
and screwed those berries into their eyes holes
when they saw me swish up from the hole
with my hair and those nuts of vanity I
had secured firmly and with confidence
between my new scaled lids. Yes,

I wonder at this innovation, this hair, this speed
with which I rush through the grass and the others’
eyes following me, how the goat’s ears, when she saw me
turned into dove wings, maybe a frightened dove,
maybe a dove who had just moments before
knew itself for years as a crow or a marmoset–

So things went, with my hair and my scales,
and vanity lubricating the cavities behind my eyes,
that is until I found my guitar and my shoes–
and it struck me, stupefaction in the form
of a whale’s hand–how would I play them,
how would I put them on as I had no hands,
no fingers, no feet or nails?

Which is maybe what the whale had been thinking all along.

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33: variations on form, part 3

June 22, 2011 – 1:39 pm

Steve (approaching): You?

Matt (relieved at the interruption): I’m departing for . . .

Mdala: Another coffee, thank you.

Anne (enters): Matt. Mdala. You?

Mdala: Thank you.

And two white butterflies break or mangle
the heavier air beneath the trees, above the grass,
soundless, rising, now falling,
slapping with their wings

Steve brings coffee.

Anne: Leaving?

Matt: I thought I’d glance at Mdala.

and at the butterflies tearing at the air
under the trees with their fairywings,
two white and spinning helices there above the grass

Steve: Coffee?

Anne: Crème et sucre.

Steve: d’accord, and you?

Matt: A menu, I think.

and butterflies at war, closing on the river
where dragonflies watch

Steve, Matt, Anne, Mdala watching the butterflies
and the trees and the grass and the river, where
there must be dragonflies

Jeanette (enters, waves to everyone): Bon jour.

Matt: Bon Jour . . . comment allez vous?

Jeanette: et vous?

Matt: Butterflies and dragonflies, because their must be?

Anne: You seem bright and early . . .

and the butterflies, two white butterflies
make refusals of rest, tearing at the air
above the river, two now distant helices
dimming under the trees

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32: variations on form, part 2

June 21, 2011 – 9:12 am

That sun on the carpet is like
a tortoise composed of light, like
something the poet forgot and can only
recall as a creeping vapor, gravity-flattened,
soon to withdraw or crawl under a shelf, like
a low white sound sustained,
and the luminous dust motes are like
little planes on maneuver, like gnats,
flaming atoms, the nuclei of irritated
notes that have yet to find frequency,
pattern, ear, or synthesis.

That sun on the carpet is like a boy’s
otherworld, an opening, something
to look into and step inside with care and a wish,
where there’s warmth and maybe a spring to follow,
follow to a river to a sea where everything,
even the sky opens, and then the sun goes down
into some other distance, a jagged
black horizon, and now he’s lost,
pathless, noteless, pattern poor:

but he can reach down and feel
for the slow cool current and suddenly
the round and rough of a tortoise shell
and the click of crocodile teeth in the dark.

Or it’s only sun on the floor
above which there just happens to be a window
and the sun
and a poet to write them.

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31: variations on form

June 20, 2011 – 1:33 pm

In that same quiet of the sky
the mood changed with crows passing
blacking toward evening.

At that same place in the sky
I watch the sun, I watch
the children reach for the trees.

Clouds from ash, clouds
from cracking stone, clouds
from skin and the eye.  Crows and Rain coming.

That same place in the sky,
now brown, now gray, cloud-shaped, now the sun,
soon I know rain will come.

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30: fathers day

June 19, 2011 – 10:06 am

yesterday I came into the house smelling
of gas and memory; the smell of grass cuttings,
of course, recalls older days, days with little
form to them; they’re filled with objects:
poems, turntables, shoes, the sound of doors
opening, bandages, stomping horses, gift boxes.
I’m not good with machines, though they
are hard to break; and then there’s the water hose
whose outer surface grows black with some black
unknown life.  Nor do I do well with lawns:
mine has grass but the grass would seem to prefer
the gardens to the proper places, flowers love the lawn, too;
my logic says: so pretend the lawn is a garden, but grass
doesn’t seem to know.  I have a fear of electrocution;
I have a fear of plumbing parts; how they must fit
with precision or flood you out; and so maybe that fear is a fear
of precision (or drowning); I hold a fear of fire in my stomach
so when I fill the mower with gas I imagine explosions,
head hair aflame, painful paper-thin skin.  I remember
my father growling at the plumbing, yelling at us
to start the roofing paper at the eave; now with projects
I feel the thrill of starting but wonder what other project
I should be doing instead, and so have a hard time starting.
I should indeed fear fire.  I didn’t invent plumbing
but it does make some amount of sense.
My daughter asked me recently: “How do you know
how to do that?” I should’ve told her that I’m really
just making it up as I go; I’m reading the directions
and the signs, putting two and two together,
remembering the last dead light switch.
The gas goes in, you pull the string (thank reason
someone decided to tie a handle to it for yanking),
and the engine roars to life. Until it doesn’t and the questions
come: is it broken, is the corn gas bad, is it the spark plug?
Complexity can be defined as a measure of difficulty
and consequence in understanding if something is indeed broken.
You stare at it for a minute or two.  On the inside,
you shout a few cuss words, and then you say:
that thing will be running soon even if I have to burn
myself trying, even if it kills me, and it could
if you misread the signs.

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29: on the logic of fear in triplets

June 18, 2011 – 9:20 am

yesterday I strung my first guitar with the help
of a friend who had his own to string, an instrument
for advanced artists and looked it

he said he hated stringing guitars and I told him
it had to do with the fear of those things
that might garrote us, the human fear

of sharp things and something deeper,
I thought, about the vulnerability of fingers
which was in my mind as on my right-hand

pointing finger I had sustained a thin
cut, the knowing-about-which slowly mattered
over the morning with a thinner sting

a sting I noticed only after opening the cat food
or when I brushed my teeth or when I slowly
passed that same finger over the touch pad

or when I washed my hands and definitely
when I ate a salty chip with hummus and definitely
when I strummed the guitar, and thought:

what if my finger nail was on the underside
of the tip of my finger? Then I would be passing
that thin cut, with its sharp but subtle flavor

over six killing strings and this would result
in the sound of the potency of blood rushing
against the air, where it turns red

where it’s not supposed to be; it’s supposed
to be on the inside of the body, contained by our
perimeters of touch and sensitive hairs

which detect the wind and the invisible webs we walk
into at night and the approach of armored
weaponry on the streets where we protest

the dictator’s freedom to draw it and spill it
at very little cost often, and to raise those
suspected of harboring dreams of something else

onto platforms, where, above the dreamers,
nooses hang, soon to ligature their breathing,
make music, string their own guitars

and so, the fear of stringing guitars is really
the fear of a constricted neck and swinging
under a platform or, in traditional fashion

seated in a chair with a band over one’s strange
neck apple soon to feel the pressure of the garrote screw
all against one’s will

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28: Jimmy’s image

June 17, 2011 – 10:30 am

when they took our
pictures and printed them
the artists would come
(we never saw them, so I can only imagine)
and put the images into bracings of flowers,
cut paper and foil frames, very much like
glitter or leaf-like aluminum, painted
arrangements of color and shine

they’d cut as closely
to the edges of our photoforms
as they could with scissors or artist razors
or whatever they had for cutting us out
then pasting us onto backgrounds
of painted paper and then arrange us
inside the ornament
finishing the process
of the portraits when we
grew by a year or moved from one
school to another or joined
whatever service or married

these were black and white
photographs so the artists
would paint them
(I think because artists can’t help themselves)
before the process of framing
pinking up our cheeks
providing creamy depth of field
smooth surface texture
and red lips with a dap of white
for the illusion of studio glow

it wasn’t the image or the lacework
framing or even the procedure of making
but all these together, the image,
the meticulous centering,
the paint and shading and leafy frames
and more so where the images
would be placed in the house
or even outside on trees
so that when the neighbors
would come on holidays
or just for a visit some noontime,
they would ask about Jimmy.
Jimmy’s mother would point to Jimmy’s
image and the frame.  She would tell
the neighbors
there’s Jimmy, look at him,
isn’t he beautiful

the visitors would nod, admire
Jimmy, go back to their
tea and talk about the weather
and who’d be turning
another year older soon

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27: my old dog’s face

June 16, 2011 – 9:28 am

my dog’s old face
follows me to the place
he’s buried under
the white pine
in the back of the house
and I kneel and wonder
who has visited
other than the squirrels,
slugs, and deer
here where everything
important happens

I imagine what that old dog’s
face must be thinking
will I have to answer
to him when I go,
eaten by something
like epilepsy,
to stand for his reckoning
and should I have used
him better to judge my actions,
the threats I made, those things
I put off, the hatreds I cultivated
with the love of gardeners?

my old dog’s face who hated
nothing, never threatened,
who as a puppy ate a copy
of the New Revised Standard bible
one afternoon and preferred
the table legs to chew toys
and who had no skill at all
for gardening but had mastered
the art of shitting on the rug
when the hardwood
was more than available . . .

he was yet more ancient
than I, something more masterful
in his quite, in his position of sitting
and watching the birds,
my old dog’s face following me
as if my passing has happened
without my knowing it,
as if all I need is the memory
of that old face to live well.

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