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canto 37

and so I told
her I would wait
and she said
wait for what:
for love,
for sex,
for companionship,
for the presence of me
among the Meadows
where I grew flowers
and made friendships with the ducks?

henry and Lucy
took me for drinks
for consolation,
something frothy
in a glass,
while Cruz and his girl friend,
Maricela, sat nearby
and told me stories
about Texas
they knew
differently than I,
consoling me
for my losses
and how they accumulate.
Consider, Cruz said:
the story of the painter child who
covered the whole sheet in one color
and as things accumulated
other marks emerged
on the canvas
of things,
how the names of things,
Maricela broke in signify
the deeps of memory,
as if every whale underneath
was given a name
and you must remember them
as signs for events
in the world,
such as the gray whale
with the image of a man
on its back
is significant
for its memory
of Imelda
and Cruz said,
the white whale,
the little one beside
its mother who
has a horn on its nose
for tearing through ice,
is significant for its
memory of this conversation
or a character named May,
who hates
eating apples
because they hurt
the hand she uses to hold it,
and so, Maricela broke in, the deep
whales, the whales under us,
become the translucence
of the memory of us,
who we are,
as you are or were with Imelda,
what might have been,
and what wasn’t
but was urged for anyway.

my father,
I said,
hasn’t a grand enough
net to secure
his memories
of what wasn’t
but was urged for anyway.
I think maybe
I should just disappear.

you can’t disappear
to him, Lucy said.

lord, not now, I said.
Ah ha, Henry said.
He does come in handy, then,
for your linguistic sporting.
but the thing is, I said,
there is no sport
and sometimes the wind
howls through us, Henry,
and the words we speak
are like fallen leaves
crisping the yard grass
and glutting the watergrates
on the road
and sometimes
what moves through us
is an underground train,
some dark speeding hulk
of smoke and metal grind,
manufactured tonnage
motioned by oils
and fires and glass
smeared by passing images,
and sure, sometimes, I wish
I could be the superspeaker
who convinces all of the reasoned path,
or leaps in with food for millions
of the starving
or bulletproof skin
to advance against the pirates,
with hands large enough
to cup the falling planes
and land them without violence,
and sometimes I wish
I could buffer
that town against wind
and flood or sand storm,
or use my mighty lungs
to suck the CO2 excesses
from our black skies,
or use my massive network
to work against the corrupt
and the insane,
or, like that Bones
with his futuristic helmet,
maneuver through the gray
matter and put those broken
neurons, like the tangle
of trees after storms I’ve known,
back to electronic rights,
but no, there is no sport
like that, but imagine
the power of doing it,
image the man of steel
scattering all the enemies
to everlasting fucking hell,
image the disweaver
of dreams and how
truly small we are standing
against the universe’s
evershifting center,
or image me this:
I, who lift this glass
of froth, can do little
else but drink to his friends
and to their health
and hope that tomorrow
he and she and you
will be there and that the sun
will rise and the moon will turn
and that we under them
will simply be under them
intact and sound, of right mind,
and not so miserable
with one another
that we can’t raise
another froth
to the sky
and say
goodnight.

canto 33

look at all the water
surrounding you,
lakedweller,
who would ask me for more?

look how your father
with the club of his hand
waves as the crowds
embark with that old fridge,
those book boxes,
crates of wine year-aged,
at the window you watch
with your mother,
who may or may not be weeping,
as a van departs with a mattress,
a truck with a couch,
several cars with his
downstairs electronics,
the hospital’s library van
with his store
of books on the history
of science, neurology,
and esoterica on subjects
phrenological, physiognomical, pathognomical,
for kicks,
and he will come
in when it’s all gone
and lay the bandaging
down on the counter
and it will push a coffee cup
a few inches until he remembers
to use his other hand
and he asks you the condition
of Imelda, Lucy, Henry, Cruz, Maricela
and you ask him
if he has in his intensions
deep for tomorrow to don
itchy Assisi robes, bound about the waist
by string, would he attend to the lepers
on the street corners,
would he divorce my mother
and remarry Lady Poverty,
and maybe the marring under those bandages
he considered another form
of stigmata, yes, that’s it,
mata mar, blood by god’s saw,
I can follow you over concrete
by the sandal prints you leave behind?

but he smiled.
The destroyer comes,
he said, the everskeptic.
My mistake, he said,
to have, I assume, overdrafted
you into the arcana of my science
and the stories which must, over time,
have come to sound absurd,
contradictory, the images,
the emotions,
my white room . . .

which interprets
something you disintend
to prove, I said . . .

. . . my white room,
he repeated, with his coffee,
with his wound,
my mother outside now
working to clean things,
examining some little destruction
to her beds,
the white room god gave me,
he said, and, no, he said,
if I have to answer you,
I don’t intend to follow the ways
of Assisi; I intend, rather,
to wander these rooms
and count, to deincrement,
to encounter the emptier spaces
and ask of him, What else,
in the way of the hard and physical?
And to perhaps wonder why
it is that you find me dishonest;
why you can’t take me seriously;
what that horror in you means:
jealousy, regret, maybe even a dose
of envy, that I have comfort,
that I have some amount of courage
little known to you, to let this world go?

I reminded him of his manic
disposition, that what I regretted
was the loss of his fingers,
that I regretted the loss
of his reason, point blank, I said it:
do you not recall that you
said you saw nothing,
that you woke with the severest
memory loss from deepsleep
and denied us,
that we learned to live
with your reckless quotation,
that we must learn to live
with whatever unanticipateable permutation
of you. What will it be tomorrow?
What will you cut off tomorrow?
What will you do tomorrow
that for humanity’s sake,
for filial sake, we’ll be forced
to live with, at your irresponsible
whimsy. You, I said, didn’t decide
to give everything away
just weeks ago for some devotion
that I can see as real: this,
father dear, is your brain
working some strange magic,
and you would’ve mastered
it in others, called it what it was,
prognosticated by method,
deduction, fingered the lists
of possibilities other.
Do you think I believe anything
you say or do?

and there was that odd
smile of the amputee again,
the smile of the believer
relieved of calculation or premises,
a gently swallow of the coffee,
the sun playing behind him
in the leaves like yellow
cloth wisps playing in wind.
He said, Back at you kiddo.
But I sense him close,
sense him calling, driving,
with your dead brother
there, too. Oh how the strength
of it is like a taste on my whole
tongue, young sir,
my tongue fat with his sauce,
with his herb and with his tang.

he stuck his old man’s
tongue at me and sucked
it back inside his mouth,
clamped it shut,
stood, and left the kitchen.

I walk outside on legs of fragile reeds.

canto 31

Henry had a bird on his hand,
that fluttered when he moved
his fingers through Lucy’s
hair now dyed red,
the color of the small bird
made by the discolor
on Henry’s hands,
while my father
wondered on his new bed
at the strange itch
in his knuckles
and my mother,
said to herself:
if I had just let him
give the thing away
goddamn you.

Thor taps on the glass.
He says: when I get out
I’m gonna cut off your
fucking fingers, too.
For fucking my Lucy,
for taking her;
I’ll hunt to whatever
lake you try to hide
in, wherever you go,
and I turned back to him,
where he sat
behind the glass,
his body lesser,
the hair cut to stubbing,
his big knuckle rapping
the glass again,
he said:
sorry about him, anyway,
he didn’t do nothing to me.

and I wonder
if I should’ve said:
it’s not me who’s touching
Lucy, fool, thief,
counterchristian,
that in the koran
the hands, it is said,
may bear witness
against the user,
for what the hands make
will become evidence
of the maker’s making.

but I refused
to change the image
in him of Lucy and me,
me and Lucy because
I sensed a mission in him,
a mission to destroy me,
this murderer and thief
behind the glass,
perhaps not eating as well
as he was used.

I ask him how he’d been.
He says: should be obvious
in this place.
I told him
he’d probably
never see the sun
in the park,
the sun from the mountain,
the sun from a car,
the sun on the rise
or the sun on the fall
and that my father’s
hand was like a club now,
with just two fingers
remaining but somewhat
chewed up, healing though.

he said: taking your stuff
brought me bad luck;
because you’re cursed.
And now I’m here
and the trial won’t go well,
I reckon, he said.

no, I said:
the sun from your little
window is all you’ll know of it
maybe till you die.
He crashed the window, then,
hammering at the glass
with the meat parts
of his palm,
which is what the guards
had been waiting for, I assume,
for they tackled him,
subdued him,
and dragged him
and as they dragged
him he called:
I’ll hunt you
or hire someone
to hunt. Yes, hire.
Look for peace if you can.

days horribly wet
to come. In the showers,
persistent and loud out the windows,
my mother gave away, sold,
and hid all the sharp things,
the sheers and the knives,
the saws and the axes,
for fear of their chaos
and when she brought
my father home
she put him to bed
where he lay for sleeping
and closed the curtains
to mute the rain and thunder
crash, closed the door
slowly, and made soup.