to sequester their mastectomies,
but your walker will not fit there, no;
you have to peel your swimsuit in the open
with the girls on the team. I’m staring
at one long strip of mostly leg,
daring her to
reciprocate:
but all this future-flesh has made her shy—
the way the belly sometimes flabs from having kids
and doubles down.
I thought this was a them-trait, not a me-trait,
but was mistaken about the boundary—
which turns out not to be a wall, but a net
in which we each hang like a sausage
in a shop window, liquefying in the sun.
Good luck synchro girl, trying to wriggle
into your spangly suit
without taking off your bra—
not wanting any of your you to bleed into your me
as you reach around yourself to pull out what you pull out
by the scruff of its neck:
your limp blue animal
of lace.
* Joe Wenderoth
Hokkaido
War Emblem, the famous stallion,
will not mount a female rump
on the island of Hokkaido
in a pasture near the sea.
It is hard to imagine anyone not being overcome
by the sight of two dozen mares
surrounded by volcanoes (is the problem
that the metaphors are too direct?), and yet
War Emblem is still not in the mood.
A thousand years ago the courtesan Shikibu
wrote a thousand poems to her lover,
the references to sex made tasteful through concision
and the image of their kimonos intertwined.
Either her heart was broken or it was full,
either way required some terse phrases to the moon.
Was that all it was? Dumb animal hunger?
All those years when I thought I was making Art
out of The One Important Thing?
And how to apologize now for my lack of adequate concision?
Once I was so full of juice and certain of its unending.
At the Hatchery
The woman who wears dark glasses large as goggles
has her hand wrapped around the elbow of the young woman
who is beautiful. Where does it come from,
this compulsion not just to know their thinking
but to live inside her for a while, the one
whose eyes are hidden as she looks
down into the impoundment where the salmon who’ve swum upriver
end their travels? It must sound large to her, the clang
a loose piece of metal makes against the cement wall
whenever a fish leaps in its fury, I am claiming
the privilege to impute its fury as we listen to them
thrash. Dozens were killed an hour ago
because their future fate is better if the eggs are stripped
than if they’re left to their fandango
in the frothing of the creek. I have tried to live inside them too,
these fish who strain against the world, or into it, why
am I not so intent on battling my way into the young woman
who moves from one thing to another without hurry?
I would eavesdrop, but they talk in Spanish,
thwarting my attempt to learn if the blind woman can detect
the coolness radiating from the pile of slush, all that remains
of the ice in which the dead were packed
before being trucked off to the food bank: if she could see
she’d see the vapor rising, as from a fire not quite put out.
Victor the Shaman
I feel the need for more humanity
because the winter wren is not enough,
even with its complicated music emanating
from the brambles. So I relent to my friend
who keeps bugging me to see her shaman,
tutored by the Indians who live at the base
of Monte Albán. Tutored also by the heavy bag
at Sonny’s Gym: Box like heaven / Fight like hell
his T-shirt says; the graphic shows an angel’s fist
buried to the wrist in Satan’s brisket, while the prince
of dark jabs the angel’s kisser. Victor
has sandpiper legs, his ponytail a mess of webs,
but he has eaten the ayahuasca vine
and chanted in the sweat lodge
and entered the fight-cage in a bar in Tucson,
Adam’s apple jiggling his Star of David
when he writes me out a prayer.
He says he flew here to visit his grandma,
only she died before the plane touched down—
the dead leave yard sales to the living,
who shoot staple guns at telephone poles
and soothe their eyes with slabs of meat.
No matter how many rounds you go in practice,
he says you always come out unprepared
om ah hum
vajra siddhi padma hum
for the mountain of junk inside the house: cedar canoe
in the rafters and the box of Kotex he found
from her last menstrual period in the 1950s.
Wheel
I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake—
after crawling through the rotting milfoil on the shore.
At first
the materials offered me were not much—
just some cattails where a hidden bullfrog croaked
and a buckhouse made from corrugated tin—
at first I thought I’d have to write the poem of its vapors.
But wait
long enough and the world caves in,
sends you something like these damselflies
prickling your chest. And the great ventriloquist
insists
you better study them or else:
how the liquidmetal blue gleams like a motorcycle helmet,
how the markings on the thorax wend like a maze,
their abdomens ringed like polecat tails,
the tip of his latched
to the back of her neck
while his scrawny forelegs wipe his mandible
that drops and shuts like a berth on a train.
But when I tallied his legs, he already had six—
those wiper-legs belonged to a gnat
he was cramming in his mouth. Which took a long time
because the gnat struggled, and I tried to imagine
a gnat-size idea of the darkness
once the mandible closed.
Call me bad gnat: see how every other thing strives—
more life!
Even with just two neurons firing the urge.
Then the she-fly’s abdomen swung forward
to take the sperm packet from his thorax,
and he finished chewing
in this position that the field guide calls The Wheel.
Call me the empress of the unused bones,
my thighs fumigated by the rank detritus of the shore
while the meal
and The Wheel
interlocked in a chain
in the blue mouth of the sky
in the blacker mouth beyond
while I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake
where sixty thousand damselflies
were being made a half-inch from my heart.
After Reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead
The hungry ghosts are ghosts whose throats
stretch for miles, a pinprick wide,
so they can drink and drink and are never sated.
Every grain of sand is gargantuan
and water goes down thick as bile.
I don’t know how many births it takes to get
reborn as not the flower but the scent.
To be allowed to exist as air (a prayer
to whom?)— dear whom:
the weight of being is too much.
Victor Feguer, for his final meal,
asked for an olive with a pit
so that a tree might sprout from him.
It went down hard, but now the murderer is comfort.
He is a shady spot in the potter’s field.
But it must be painful to be a tree,
to stand so long with your arms up.
You might prefer to be a rock
(if you can wear that heavy cloak).
In Bamiyan, the limestone Buddhas stood
as tall as minor mountains, each one carved
in its own alcove. Their heads
eroded over time, and the swallows
built nests from their dust,
even after zealots blew them up.
Now the swallows wheel in empty alcoves,
their mouths full of ancient rubble.
Each hungry ghost hawks up his pebble
so he can breathe. And the dead
multiply under the olive tree.