SLEEPING WITH UNCLE LESTER
We walked from town to her land
through clotted darkness
and frozen pastures, heads brushing
bottles hung on low branches. The old
kitchen, cut by a line of ragged shirts
and socks, smelled like wet bark. Jars
of fruit salts and redcurrants, tins
of dried onions and parsnips rattled
when we walked. We went to bed,
that’s all. I woke with her uncle Lester
beside me, slack-chinned and thin, face
and neck a wash of white stubble
and the high turpentine of fetid sweat.
Lester’s wife died when their Chrysler
broke down as she hemorrhaged
from miscarriage. I got up
on my elbows; out the window
was the background of an otherwise dull
family photo: blue skies and egg shells
blown across a bald yard, rain pattering
the stinking fine dust, and steam billowing
up from somewhere — a tree
of backlit breath, and Lester’s grindy voice
like the cold of close metal, “Hey, dunghill.
Lookit — you’re blockin’ the view.”
THE LEAVING
There is the rain on the copper
roofs, there is the click-shuff
of red heels on concrete, the voice
of a ruddy-faced neighbor
above, calling after her husband.
In their apartment, the pillows
still sleep-dented and sour
with breath. The headless straws
of aster stalks hang above
the credenza, beside the battered
front door. There are the bridge’s
rust-water icicles, its bands
of moss seaming a forgotten
cobblestone sidewalk. There is
the river in thistle-gray cowlicks,
and the husband above it, deciding.
WINTER INVENTORY
I look out at the river in cakes of ice
sliding violently over one another,
speaking a language remembered
from another of earth’s ages, and almost
understand that speech as human, some
body of absence struggling with itself
under bridge lights. And remember
a winter spent driving a heatless car
with a patchwork quilt thrown over my legs
until more than a ghost of warmth existed
and I was alone on a country road under
a nothing sky with stubbled fields
and telephone poles flashing past
and the sense that if I closed my eyes
I might remain sitting, speeding along,
no car, and soon no road, and perhaps
the trees evaporate and the telephone polls
sink deep into hard earth and nothing
then but myself, and a river far off, and the name
of someone, and still no better understanding.
WATER FROM THE SAME SOURCE
Knuckles stripped
to a skinned goat’s head—
the nearly vacant fingers
of barge workers; when you left
I was wire-jawed
and shut-in from surgery.
Going back out, sinking
into subway tunnels, I was reminded
how easy it is to forget the world
is inhabited mostly by others.
I’ve got three joints
in my shirt pocket, and we’re kicking ash
from our shoes in the pointless
heat, smashing a ditch’s discarded bottles
in the night, so that their wreck
spreads in cinders over the blacktop
like silage spilled into moonlight, like
something you might want.
ELEBADE
When I woke
I felt fine for a minute.
Set the table, saw myself
rise and go. First rise
and stand, holding
the table. Then sit
again. Then go. Start
to go.
Motionless pines
we’d built, stirred.
Blind October
inching up. No wife
raising hell
when she came. Empty
or almost empty beast.
Bull down. Bad heart.
BLIND ATTIS
Her lover was a black bear
whose empty eye-sockets rattled
with pebbles. And though
he should not have existed, she believed
as she believed in stones that fell
from high places. She knew
when he had been with others
because he loped through the pines
and lindens smelling like a mudbound
whale. One night under
the stars strung out behind a haze
of brushfire, he slept clutching
a claw-scratched rosary.
And she climbed, brushing
her stark nakedness along his coarse
length, to the soil-rimmed holes
in his head and found no manic
bestial glow, but the dark
behind cracked lantern slides. And he rose
and like a husband he cut her—
“I will love you more when I am older…
if I let you live,” she breathed
into his pricked ears. Each night
she took a bit more blood
from him, until he woke
under a crooked moon
and reached to maul her crouching
black figure. But she had taken
his paws, and biting, she whispered
into the folds and long darkness
of his ear, “If you return again it will be
through the eyeholes of birds,” for whom
she left the pink jigsaw of his hatcheted
remains steaming in the morning.
SMOKE
I dreamt your childhood wound, softened
in bathwater, had reappeared,
an ochre-blue puncture at the heel—
dimpled star spreading to uneven
points. It held in its shadow
a leaf stem, beetle-brown. I pulled it
from your foot and it brought more leaves
littering the bath. Soon you were
a tub of dogwoods and blackthorns
I gathered and carried out
to the grass between the crocuses
where I stood over you, bit of earth fleeing
into smoke, spelling nothing above the yard.