one substance splattering into the next in the life undivided,
windows open, birds flying in and out.
They worked their conjurations by feeding chopped meat
through a dropper, and wiped their hands
onto their jeans so you could see their long black fingers
streaking up the whole length of their thighs.
Freak-Out
Mine have occurred in empty houses
down whose dark paneling I dragged my fingernails—
though big-box stores have also played their parts,
as well as entrances to indistinct commercial buildings,
cubes of space between glass yellowing like onion skin,
making my freak-out obscure.
Suddenly the head is being held between the hands
arranged in one of the conventional configurations:
hands on ears or hands on eyes
or both stacked on the forehead
as if to squeeze the wailing out,
as if the head were being juiced.
The freak-out wants wide open space,
though the rules call for containment—
there are the genuine police to be considered,
which is why I recommend the empty vestibule
though there is something to be said for freaking-out
if the meadow is willing to have you
facedown in it,
mouth open to the dry summer dirt.
When my friend was freaking-out inside my car, I said
she was sitting in the freak-out’s throne,
which is love’s throne, too, so many fluids
from within the body on display
outside the body until the chin gleams
like the extended shy head of a snail! Even
without streetlamps, even in the purplish
penumbra of the candelabra of the firs.
My friend was freaking-out about her freak-outs,
which happened in the produce aisle;
I said: oh yeah at night, it’s very
freak-inducing when the fluorescent lights
arrest you to make their interrogation! Asking
why you can’t be more like the cabbages,
stacked precariously
yet so cool and self-contained,
or like the peppers who go through life
untroubled by their freaky whorls.
What passes through the distillery of anguish
is the tear without the sting of salt— dripping
to fill the test tube of the body
not with monster potion but the H Two… oh, forget it…
that comes when the self is spent.
How many battles would remain
in the fetal pose if the men who rule would rip
their wool suits from their chests like girls
in olden Greece? If the bomberesses
stopped to lay their brows down on a melon.
If the torturer would only
beat the dashboard with his fists.
Maypole
Now the tanagers have returned to my dead plum tree—
they sip the pond through narrow beaks.
Orange and yellow, this recurrence
that comes with each year’s baby leaves.
And if the tree is a church and spring is Sunday,
then the birds are fancy hats of women breaking into song.
Or say the tree is an old car whose tank is full,
then the birds are the girls on a joyride
crammed in its seats. Or if the tree is the carnival
lighting the tarmac of the abandoned mall by the freeway,
then the birds are the men with pocketknives
who erect its Ferris wheel.
Or say the tree is the boat that chugs into port
to fill its hold and deck with logs,
then the birds are the Russian sailors who
rise in the morning in the streets where they’ve slept,
rubbing their heads and muttering
these words that no one understands.
Matins
Every morning I put on my father’s shirt
whose sleeves have come unraveled—
the tag inside the collar though
is strangely unabraded, it says
Traditionalist
one hundred per cent cotton
made in Mauritius
Which suddenly I see is a haiku
containing the requisite syllables and even
a seasonal image
if you consider balmy Mauritius
with its pineapples and sugarcane.
And this precision sends me off
down the dirt road of my fantasy
wherein my father searched
throughout the store to find this shirt
to send an arrow from before the grave
to exit on the other side of it,
the way Bashō wrote his death poem:
On a journey, ill
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields
It suits my father to have hunted down
a ready-made for his own poem,
not having much of an Eastern sensibility,
having been stationed in China during the war and hating it
despite the natural beauty of Kunming.
They say a man dies when the last person
with a memory of him dies off, or maybe
he dies when his last shirt falls to ruin. Now
its cuffs show the dirty facing all the way around
and a three-inch strip of checkered flannel dangles down
into my breakfast cereaclass="underline"
I have debated many days but
here it goes—
snip
and am overcome by an Asian wash of sadness.
Because the washer spins so violently, like time—
perhaps its agitations can be better withstood
with the last-memory theory, which means that a dead man
reposes longest in the toddlers that he knew,
which often are not many,
children being afraid of old men,
what with their sputum-clearing rasps
and their propensity for latching on to cheeks,
though my father was not much of a child-cheek-pincher,
not that he had anything against them;
he had a grandson he tolerated
crawling under the table at La Manda’s
where between forkfuls of scungilli
as his kidneys chugged with insufficient vim,
he composed his other death poem,
the one that came in his own words, it went
Soon I must cross
the icy sidewalk—
help. There goes my shoe
Black Transit
Trees bare. Days short. And at dusk
crows pour through the sky in strands.
From a point in the east too small
to feed your eye on, they pop
into being as sharp dark stars, and then
are large, and then are here, pouring west.
Something chilling about it,
though they are birds like any birds.
What’s fishy is the orchestration, all of them
with a portion of the one same mind: they fly
as if the path were laid, as if
there were runnels in the air, molding
their way to the roost. Whose location
no one seems to know— if they did,
you’d think there would be chitchat
in the market about the volume
of their screams, as if women were being
dragged by the hair through the woods
at night. But everybody keeps mum—
it seems we’re in cahoots with them
without knowing what’s the leverage
they possess (though we can feel it)