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.
The Black Rider
There are blows in life, so powerful…
I don’t know!
CESAR VALLEJO, TRANS. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN
Driving past the Masonic graveyard, I see a boy
skateboarding down the new asphalt of the walk
that he veers off so he can jump
and slide along a tombstone.
He has such faith in the necklace of his bones
he will not let a helmet wreck his hair—
why does the brain have to be buried
in the prettiest place? You little shit, don’t you know
someone slaved at the brewery to pay for what was
supposed to stand as shiny as your hair
two centuries or three, when all your ollies
will no longer stir a moth or midge?
But what kind of grump would rather be eaten
by wind and rain than the glissando of a punk
riding off with a whump to the door of the oven
with a few bright flakes of someone else’s death?
Pioneer
Let’s not forget the Naked Woman is still out there, etched
into her aluminum plaque
affixed to her rocket
slicing through the silk of space.
In black and white, in Time, we blast her
off to planets made of gases and canals,
not daring to include, where her legs fork,
the little line to indicate she is an open vessel.
Which might lead to myths about her
being lined with teeth,
knives, snakes, bees— an armament
flying through the firmament. Beside the man
who stands correctly nonerect, his palm
upraised to show he comes in peace,
though you globulous yet advanced beings
have surely taken a gander of our sizzling planet
and can see us even through our garments.
So you know about the little line—
how a soft animal cleaves from her
and how we swaddle it in fluff,
yet within twenty years we send it forth
with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled-grenade launcher:
you have probably worked out a theory
to explain the transformation. And you
have noticed how she looks a bit uncertain
as she stands on her right leg, her left thrust out
as if she’s put her foot on top of something
to keep it hidden. Could be an equation
on a Post-it, or could be a booby trap—
now comes time to admit we do not know her very well, she
who has slipped the noose of our command. Be careful
when you meet her, riding on her shaft of solar wind:
you will have to break her like a wishbone
to get her open, she whom we filled with teeth
and knives and snakes and bees.
Fireball
The TV knob was made of resin, its gold skirt
like a Kewpie doll’s, but it was gone.
So we changed the channel
with a pair of pliers (on the flat spot
on the spindle): chunk chunk
and then lo, Jerry Lewis. Chunk chunk and lo,
the marionettes with giant hands. The song went:
my heart would be a fireball. And in the chunking
and the singing and the watching, lo, my heart became one.
Less pageantry in the now. Say Sputnik: no other word
climbs my throat with such majestic flames.
Gone, the marionettes in flightsuits made of foil
gone grainy on the boob tube. The tremulous way
their bodies moved, my fear for their well-being.
The comic stupidity of the child,
which is forgiven. Unlike the stupidities to come.
The boy had a guinea pig named Fireball, so I taught him
the song by way of mourning
when it died. He still possessed his sweetness,
unlike older sons who think you are a moron without big
subwoofers in your car. To that son I say:
you may think you’re one of the alpha-carnivores
just because you’ve shot many avatars of whores
on a video screen that you will never have the Cuban missile crisis on;
you do not even really have the bomb, and how can anyone
command their cool without the bomb: Sam Cooke, James Dean,
those boys lived kitty-corner to their annihilation.
But my son glazes— what’s so special about the past
when everyone has one? And yours, he says,
is out of gas. Then vroom, he’s off—
you might think his car is breathing by the way the windows
bend. Welcome to the new world, Mom,
he says, if you hear singing, it ain’t a song.
To Carlos Castaneda
After the physics final, Gina and I, in our mukluks
scuffed past the swanky shops on Sherbrooke
then climbed the mountain in the city. December 5,
1975: I tried to will myself to have a vision, though the stars
would not cooperate— instead of a sweat lodge
or a kiva, the warm-up hut at the top of Mount Royal
looked completely un-aboriginal, a replica in miniature
of the Château de Versailles. With night all around us
cold and thick as glass, I don’t know how the starlight
managed to pass through it to sting me, it was hard enough
to lift my hand to knock the door, a joke,
it was so late. And here past the midpoint of my life
I think I’ll die without a paranormal apparition
to which I could wholeheartedly attest. I am not sure
I even have a soul, a corny soul, a little puppet
made of cream and feathers. Yet the door
did open (turned out to be only six p.m.)
and the old man said, Ah jeunes filles, il paraît que vous
avez froid. Then he unstacked two chairs and set them
down before the fire, still chewing its meal of logs
in the giant hearth. Inside the château of our silence,
we sat and chewed our lips: wasn’t the sacred knowledge
supposed to involve telepathy with animals, and astral travel
to planets made of light? Kindness (b) seemed too corny
to be the answer (Restez ici pour le temps que vous
voudrez) though we were given no other choice
except (a) his sweeping, and (c) the mice inside the walls.
300D
When he was flush, we ate dinner
at Tung Sing on Central Avenue
where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic
bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet-