cooling lava pits of their eyes
their giant gingko ears
their bellows of desert pain
how elephants became elephantry
how the woman who fevered with pox
became after death a weapon
a contagion to catapault over fortified walls
and finally I knew
why in this theater
the missiles are named
Savage Sinner Scapegoat
Peacekeeper and Goblet
Herren er en stridsmann
my descent is of the Vikings so
man is a Lord of war.
[Here is the board, here the water.
Baptism is as bad as they say:
you must renounce the devil
you never met.]
Far Desert Region
Comes August, comes December,
then April thinned of its birds.
Again August, ten times.
Fathers forage the bombed chemical plant
for barrels to carry water
from the lime-bright pools to houses
leaning inside hot wind.
To think a war might give a gift:
a pool, a clean bucket.
Remedies for Sorrow
The soldierly ready
of human sadness: it must, by nature, hover.
I water the date palm at dawn in the desert acre. I can see
it’s not alive; the landscape doesn’t need me. This is May,
May should riffle pollen toward another,
women should weave fans of stiff reeds
to sweep air palm to palm, but my friend says he just tries
to keep his body busy. Sunday a horror movie,
Tuesday the opera, Thursday tea with the reclusive poet
who comes out just for him. He is an audience to the arts
of extremity in the apartment that gilds itself
a mean irony of light.
Time passes, is the early summer squash.
He asks the farmer how he cooks it —
I scoop the seeds and cut butter and nutmeg
into its little boat —
but at the end of each living task
there is a fringe of loss.
The heart works hard at the apprenticeship
of a diligent hand learning to pull
wet porcelain into a thinness of wall
just prior to what’s brittle. We talked of remedies
last week on the phone — can you swim the bay,
I ask, take in the cats, put up the Japanese shades,
trace your life in pins? The loss of love will
try it all.
Dear merchant of a twice-stolen boat,
when surgeons cut deeply
into the dark matter, you said, I believe
we can be made whole again.
What did you mean, again?
November Philosophers
Nothing is nothing, although
he would call me that, she was nothing.
Those were his words, but his hand was lifting
cigarettes in chains and bridges
of ash-light. He said he didn’t want his body to last.
It wasn’t a year I could argue
against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl
killed on the farm a mile out — brown and silvery, wild —
and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime.
I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses
slowly through the cold, slow as I’d seen
a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor
of my beaten house.
She seemed to see my whole life
by ordinance of some god
who wanted me alive again.
Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken
into the corners of violent sadness.
She wrote my address
across her chest
to let everything listening know
where my life was made.
We waited, either forgetting what we were
or becoming more brightly human in that pine,
in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills,
not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting
from the yard part of what she required.
Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would
when the molasses warmed over the pot enough
to come into the brandy,
to come into the night
begun by small confessions —
that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor,
that the woman he loved was with another man,
his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space.
Then I told of the assault at daybreak between
the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward
the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script
and song. There must have been chanting,
as it was on the hour.
What we said was liturgy meant only for us
and for that night. Not for anyone else
to repeat, live by, believe. Never that.
Our only theories were
their giant gingko ears
their bellows of desert pain
how elephants became elephantry
how the woman who fevered with pox
became after death a weapon
a contagion to catapault over fortified walls
and finally I knew
why in this theater
the missiles are named
Savage Sinner Scapegoat
Peacekeeper and Goblet
Herren er en stridsmann
my descent is of the Vikings so
man is a Lord of war.
[Here is the board, here the water.
Baptism is as bad as they say:
you must renounce the devil
you never met.]
Far Desert Region
Comes August, comes December,
then April thinned of its birds.
Again August, ten times.
Fathers forage the bombed chemical plant
for barrels to carry water
from the lime-bright pools to houses
leaning inside hot wind.
To think a war might give a gift:
a pool, a clean bucket.
Remedies for Sorrow
The soldierly ready
of human sadness: it must, by nature, hover.
I water the date palm at dawn in the desert acre. I can see
it’s not alive; the landscape doesn’t need me. This is May,
May should riffle pollen toward another,
women should weave fans of stiff reeds
to sweep air palm to palm, but my friend says he just tries
to keep his body busy. Sunday a horror movie,
Tuesday the opera, Thursday tea with the reclusive poet
who comes out just for him. He is an audience to the arts
of extremity in the apartment that gilds itself
a mean irony of light.
Time passes, is the early summer squash.
He asks the farmer how he cooks it —
I scoop the seeds and cut butter and nutmeg
into its little boat —
but at the end of each living task
there is a fringe of loss.
The heart works hard at the apprenticeship
of a diligent hand learning to pull
wet porcelain into a thinness of wall
just prior to what’s brittle. We talked of remedies
last week on the phone — can you swim the bay,
I ask, take in the cats, put up the Japanese shades,
trace your life in pins? The loss of love will
try it all.
Dear merchant of a twice-stolen boat,
when surgeons cut deeply
into the dark matter, you said, I believe
we can be made whole again.
What did you mean, again?
November Philosophers
Nothing is nothing, although
he would call me that, she was nothing.
Those were his words, but his hand was lifting
cigarettes in chains and bridges
of ash-light. He said he didn’t want his body to last.
It wasn’t a year I could argue
against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl
killed on the farm a mile out — brown and silvery, wild —
and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime.
I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses
slowly through the cold, slow as I’d seen
a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor
of my beaten house.
She seemed to see my whole life
by ordinance of some god
who wanted me alive again.
Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken
into the corners of violent sadness.
She wrote my address
across her chest
to let everything listening know
where my life was made.
We waited, either forgetting what we were
or becoming more brightly human in that pine,
in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills,
not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting
from the yard part of what she required.
Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would
when the molasses warmed over the pot enough
to come into the brandy,
to come into the night
begun by small confessions —
that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor,
that the woman he loved was with another man,
his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space.
Then I told of the assault at daybreak between
the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward
the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script
and song. There must have been chanting,
as it was on the hour.
What we said was liturgy meant only for us
and for that night. Not for anyone else
to repeat, live by, believe. Never that.
Our only theories were
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