you feel your life starting over on Chuckanut Drive
(is what made Jane remember).
Our car crept like a grub on the country’s edge,
there on a cliff above Samish Bay:
mountains to the north, mountains to the south,
(& a life equaled)
the huge unbroken water in between.
The Garbo Cloth
Her daughter wrote back to say my friend had died
(my friend to whom I wrote a letter maybe twice a year).
From time to time I’d pictured her amid strange foliage
(and in a Mongol yurt, for she was fond of travel).
Why not a flock of something darkening the sky, so we would know
(ah, so-and-so is gone!)?
To a woman from the city, this might perhaps be pigeons
(blacking out the sun).
Or else a human messenger, as once when she was fabric-shopping
(bolt of green silk furled across her body)
Garbo passed, and nodded. At Macy’s years ago
(when I was not a creature in her world).
Of course she bought the cloth, but never sewed the dress
(“a massive stroke, and I take comfort in the fact she felt no pain”).
Logic says we should make omens of our Garbos and our birds
(but which one bears the message? which one just the mess?).
From the kayak, I’ve seen pigeons nesting underneath the pier
(a dim ammoniated stink)
where one flew into my face. I read this as a sign
(that rancid smash of feathers)
but couldn’t fathom what it meant, the bird trapped in the lag time
(of an oracle’s translation).
Foolish mind, wanting to obliterate the lag and why—
(let memory wait to catch up to its sorrow).
In addition to the rattling of cellophane
What I remember about the famous writer is how
he took the English muffin sleeve from a high shelf,
how he mumbled his apologies
on finding only one stale white puck. How
he blew the cornmeal off
before he forked the halves apart, twisting to loosen them
the way my mother did.
How therefore came a little intermission of memory—
a patch of time he filled by pacing
in front of the toaster-oven window,
lacquered and leaded with grease
like the stained glass of a church.
How I was looking for wisdom, how he was no talker.
How he devoted himself instead to buttering,
palming the muffin-half close to his eye
while the golden glob vanished
into the craters.
How slowly he heaved it with his knife.
A Pedantry
Many of the great men — Buddha, Saint Augustine,
Jefferson, Einstein — had a woman and child
they needed to ditch. A little prologue
before the great accomplishments could happen.
From nothing came this bloody turnip
umbilicaled to the once-beloved,
only now she’s transformed like a Hindu god
with an animal snout and too many limbs.
You’d rather board a steamer with chalk dust on your pants
or sit under a bo tree and be pelted by flaming rocks,
renounce the flesh
or ride off on a stallion—
there is no papoose designed for such purposes,
plus the baby would have to be sedated.
Sorry.
We don’t want the future to fall into the hands of the wrong — ists!
That’s how civilization came into being
for us who remained in the doorways of here,
our companions those kids who became chimney sweeps, car thieves,
and makers of lace.
By day we live in the shadows of theories; by night
the moon holds us in its regard
when it doesn’t have more important business
on the back side of the clouds.
Four Red Zodiacs
Because I’d drunk a lot of coffee on top of some antibiotics
strange ideas were already swimming in my brain
like sharks patrolling their aquarium walls
when I saw those strange rafts circling in the harbor.
Gatling was the word that came to mind
for the machine guns mounted on their turrets,
but Jim said I was wrong. And also:
Great, so now the war comes to Palookaville
while I stood too stymied for a superior thought.
Eventually we turned back from the window
to our task to prove ourselves
not easily deterred:
loading the truck with bags of garbage
so we could take them to the dump.
Styrofoam boxes from the Vietnamese restaurants
by which we are sustained.
We came back dirty, so we washed,
then lay down predictably.
And it seemed oddly synchronous
that I’d just been reading Baudelaire,
who couldn’t stand what sex did to the face. Meanwhile
a big ship slid into port
like a capsule sinking in the throat,
then some jeeps and earthmovers drove aboard.
And why not say we fucked right through it!—
an optimist might say that love prevailed.
But there is another way to look at it:
as greed, the body taking its cut first
(although I didn’t look, I never can stand to look).
Later I thought I saw a frogman in the bay,
but it could have been a seal.
I mean a real seal,
which is to say an animal.
Then, Infamous Reader, comes your turn to say: But we are all animals.
Martha
Nearly all the remaining quarter million passenger pigeons were killed in one day in 1896.
They named the last one Martha,
and she died September 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo,
she who was once one of so many billions
the sky went dark for days
when they flew past.
Makes me wonder what else could go,
some multitudinous widget like clouds or leaves
or the jellyfish ghosting the water in autumn
or the shore-shards of crushed clams?
Goodbye kisses:
once I had so many of you but now I note
your numbers growing slim—
yesterday a man stood me up in the sea
behind the big rock where the sand dollars live.
And when I said Now we should kiss
it seemed we’d grown too peculiar
and I thought: Oh-ho kisses, are you leaving too
like the man’s hair? Or like
the taut bellies we once had
or the menstrual period that was mine alone—
time flew its coop
our days did skid
and now see my commas going too—
art mimicking life’s mortal nature?
So I did no hem-haw with the man
I told him to grab hold of my ears
since daylight burned
the tide had begun to apply its suction then
the shotguns of our lips turned toward
what was perhaps the last of our wild flock.
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