and-sour pork— what else
was there to care about, except his sleep
under the pup tent of the news? And the car,
which was a Cadillac until he saw how they
had become the fortresses of pimps—
our hair may look stylish now,
but in the photograph it always turns against us:
give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976
he went to see the enemy, the man
(with sideburns) who sold German cars
and said: take it easy, step at a time,
see how the diesel motor sounds
completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink
around the block in the old neighborhood
where he imagined people (mostly black: by now
his mouth had mastered the word’s exhale,
then cut) lifting their heads to look (-kuh).
And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung
back into the lot to make the deal, although
to mitigate the shift in his allegiances
(or was this forgiveness? — for the Germans
had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)
he kept the color constant. Champagne,
the color of a metal in a dream, no metal
you could name, although they tried
with a rich man’s drink. He could afford it now
though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump
of meat around the glass’s narrow, girlish stem.
Photograph: The Enemy
Great-Uncle Stefan wears the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s sailor suit,
its cap flat and black, his long
dark hair pomaded in a stiff
blunt skirt behind his neck.
There’s something about the nose’s
bulb-and-nostril conglomeration that we share,
and though I’m not a man I like to think
I am a sailor, with a waxed moustache like his
whose curled-up ends provide
an occupation for our nervous hands,
twirling it so as not to betray
with a squint or smirk his sympathies,
which lie with the murderer Princip.
Who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo, where
it took me a long time in the assassination museum,
reading Cyrillic via the osmotic method
of translation, before I figured out
Princip was the hero of the place: a person
could match her feet with his imprinted
in the sidewalk and pull the trigger of her fingers.
And enter the fantasy of being The One Who Caused
The Greater Past, which I could not resist:
my knuckle crooked, and clicked.
However I did spare the Duchess Sophie.
Photograph: Grandfather, 1915
It’s the Bronx, Barretto Point, so the sea
cannot be far away. But all we have to go on
is the lone pine in the distance— the rest
bleached by the chemistry of time. Also
there’s this young man in the foreground, squatting
with his forearms balanced on the fulcrum of his knees,
speaking to what’s disappeared. It is a blur
resembling a woman with her arm extended,
urging him to follow. Soon the Great Depression
will also call him, and for lack of other work
will send him downstairs to the boiler
where he’ll nurse the chromosome of sadness
while his words turn into coal. But he was not really
down there with the onions and potatoes—
in a moment, he will follow her
into the waters off Barretto Point, which will turn his good white shirt
translucent. Like the translucence he was led by,
but in this picture he hasn’t risen yet
to cross the muddy shoreline. He’s still crouched
in the upland, growing misty with the nebula who touches him,
misty at the prospect of his likewise turning into mist
as the camera makes this record of their betrothal.
Gleaner at the Equinox
Dusk takes dictation from the houses.
Sometimes sobs and sometimes screams—
laughter, too, though it doesn’t settle like the others
into the hollows of the Virgin Mary’s face.
In her concrete gown, she’s standing by
the satellite dish absorbing for the trailer on the corner,
wearing shoulder pads of Asian pears I stole some of
before the windfall fell. When the dog
lifts his leg to soil a withered rose I say Good boy.
Nightshade vines overtake the house of the widow,
their flowers turned into yellow berries
that there are no birds in nature idiot enough
to mistake for food.
after Dick Barnes
Lubricating the Void
Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper: I can barely pronounce your name
but have been thinking of you ever since your grease gun
erupted into space. Causing your tool bag to slip
beyond the reach of your white glove, when you were attempting
to repair the space station’s solar wing. Thanks
for that clump of language— solar wing! One of the clumps
of magic shat out by our errors. And thanks
to your helmet camera’s not getting smeared,
in the inch between your glove and bag— irrevocable inch—
we see the blue Earth, glowing so lit-up’dly despite the crap
that we’ve dumped in its oceans, a billion tons of plastic beads,
precursors to the action figures that come with our Happy Meals.
Precursors to the modern Christmas tree and handle of the modern ax.
Precursors to the belts and jackets of the vegans.
The cleanup crews call them mermaid’s tears, as if a woman
living in the water would need to weep in polymer
so that her effort would not be lost/so that there would be proof
of her lament, say for the great Trash Vortex
swirling in the current, for the bellies of the albatrosses
filling up with tears that can’t be broken down.
For the smell of mildew in the creases of ruptured beach balls,
for seabirds strangled by what makes the six-pack possible,
for flip-flops that wash up so consistently alone
they cause disturbing dreams about one-legged tribes
(described by Pliny before he sailed across the Bay of Naples,
into Mount Vesuvius’s toxic spume).
Dreams logical, Heidemarie, given the fearful data.
Dreams had by us who live 220 miles below.
Queasy from our spinning but still holding on,
with no idea we are so brightly shining.
Not Housewives, Not Widows
Bad luck to enter the houses of old women, a commandment
broken when I entered their stone cottage, two streets over,
covered in vines that twirled around a rusted swing set
though they had no child. That they were witches: a conclusion
come to, given that they wore the clothes of men,
their wool caps covering their secret hair, their house
so laced in greenwork that it seemed continuous with the woods
and its nettles and the nickel in my pocket, which they paid
for bee balm I tore out of their yard and sold
back to them, the dirt-wads dangling.
“Don’t let the birds out,” muttered while I slipped
into the room with its stone walls, the backdrop
for a wounded jay who lived in a tin tub rattling with seeds.
Birdfeed, newspapers, feathers, guano— I saw