Demo Read online

  nobody showing up for months,

  mother drunk under the vines,

  redstart and bobolink, lover

  of hayfields and grasslands,

  oriole hardly ever away

  from the nest, mass migrations

  of blackbirds and other seed eaters,

  songbirds, all gone from here.

  The Casing

  For years I sat in bars lying about everything,

  concealing my limp, offering vinyl

  suitcases for sale and proposing to women

  who’d overlooked themselves. I gave away

  folding tables and threatened

  species like lopsided turtles and misused

  harness bulls. I wasn’t as speedy as I claimed to be

  or as galled by those without

  a purpose in life. I sold three-day

  vacations to resorts that existed

  only in my mind. I liked to watch the breeze

  take leafy boughs in hand.

  The limits to man’s ability

  to reach the stars were no problem for me.

  I sank my nose in foreign papers

  looking for tiny lots I might build

  my dream house on. I said I owned

  hotels and racks for smoking arctic char.

  I claimed to notice something burning

  in the kitchen. A leaf seemed at times to urge

  a change in plans. Probably the winds

  were coming from the other quadrant. I gave away

  my watch and told the time by the degradation

  of building materials. I spelled the stuporized.

  The sun, an old friend, eased

  onto the brickyard wall. I sensed an era

  drawing to a close. Something told me,

  so I said, to gather my things. Smoothed-

  over ideas, frets, a capacity for change

  unremarked by others, a boarding house

  menu I used for a text, my bindle, palpebral musings,

  a burial suit of lights

  and a jar of brandied apricots—all these

  I said I’d send a van back for and never did.

  No Nonsense

  split off for a sec

  I thought I might say something

  truthful

  but couldn’t come up with it

  and lingered in the rosy twilight

  unpacking an old suitcase

  I found under the stairs

  sometimes I stay as still

  as possible and tell myself

  a limitless vista’s

  opening up when it’s not

  the rain pounded madly on the roof

  afterwards we

  sat on the porch shelling

  peas and quoting scripture

  the birds in the melaleuca trees

  seemed tired

  the sky

  reopened like a grocery store

  on a desert road

  I came

  away from myself

  unstuck

  and a sort of translucent

  orderliness

  like a small herd of gazelles

  entered my mind

  RAW EARTH

  The Layout

  Morning, knocked off the blocks, de-amplified

  and clamped to daylight, the forests showing off their skinny bones

  and the winterized animals brisk and shoveling messy leavings

  down their gullets, the brandished bits in your mind like a vacation

  in the tropics where at the cathedral the inventor of equipoise

  loses his balance and falls flat. The damage is done. Carpenters

  and light-fingered apprentices on their way to the arena, the careful

  planning that’s supposed to make the lamps come on at the sound

  of eagles screaming, these placements detailing frostbite

  in the mountains might mean we’ll be back in the loggias

  and fruit stands of our youth, someday. The gimmies, the shucked

  superlatives like hosed-down relatives, the way she got on with it

  after the tragedy, these secernate jump starts—

  we get out early most days, wreathed in spumescence,

  the basic compilations of a destiny transformed as we speak

  into a vagueness of aspect like a murky rinderpest and invitation

  to a crab boil on the beach. We escaped easily

  the attitudinal ambiguities and hooted from the porch

  at the passing armies. Bravery is after all a known quantity.

  The getalong ways, conversationalists offering their cut rates

  and specialized phrasing, the details of the fire traced with a blackened

  finger on a placemat. It gets impractical you might say to go on.

  Ithika

  private disputes in the sweet apple

  trees and a certitude

  attested to by loquats and the hard-shell baptist

  spiders

  collecting rents

  the way you look at me after you knock me

  silly with kisses

  and what’s up with the elementals I say

  the dog

  lurks in the cabana like Ulysses

  shadowing his old lady

  the calculations

  fixing the tide

  and the inexpressible surrounding the fort

  these particulars

  left over

  when we boiled the affidavits

  add up

  to the spitting image

  of true north

  she says

  covering her left eye with the hand

  holding the deed

  to the trailer

  and a crushed floral tribute

  and suppose—she says—

  my typical effervescence was replaced

  by an obscurity

  heretofore unmentioned in the ranks

  and the mock

  voyage

  turnd out

  to be the voyage.

  Stuff Your Cries into the Hamper and Hitch Up

  Where the grass touches me I tremble

  and phone Sister Mary Celeste

  who’s breaking the hearts of weeds in a garden

  like a battlefield, who says

  “This modification, these tremors, my cross-eyed soul—

  You get me, don’t you?”—and pretends

  trucks are carrying her victuals away

  and hangs up. This morning I woke to rain

  spattered on the screen and silence along the rooftops

  where on clear days you hear the starlings

  preparing themselves for the inevitable. In the park

  weeds writhe,

  bolting already, and women,

  clarified and promising themselves they’ll not be misled,

  plus hawks, cranks, the fretful men at the edges

  scared they’ll be picked off, the absolute courage

  of anyone who hangs on until the end,

  all add up, the point blank cavalcade you might say,

  and pick up

  where you left off last year, humming

  or cursing under your breath, the small time gangsters of rectification

  chipping away at their cells, the scars

  right under your feet that the dust pats back into place,

  proof of an ongoing perfection, and it’s been like this all day.

  ASSISTED LIVING

  September Flowers

  we grow slightly tired of the reconstructive

  lantana circles benday dots

  and raster of echinacea daisies crowding the scene

  dwarf maples

  waving their brown used

  tissues and the silver grasses that keep on fiddling

  with the wind and the crepe

  myrtles check their weapons at the door

  and goldenrod and mocking asters

  quiver slightly

  and the sof
t-hearted

  birches still climbing the mountain

  of their interest

  issue statements that so far

  mean little and the morning glories

  roll their soft blue

  hips and the telltale secretly

  crushed

  hearts of loosestrife lobelia and hosta

  dash off

  letters they’ll never send

  and gladioli speak frankly to the breeze

  about what it means to be

  alive and hushed up

  in the dark and in the september crowd

  get lost as fall sinks the last cuts

  in summer’s fancy

  life in cool water like a suicide

  going down for the count.

  Permission to Emigrate

  The light leans gracefully into oaks and whatever was about to stop: stops.

  But nothing does. The whole rheotropism pushes

  on as if that’s just fine, perfect, the explanatory

  events canceled probably . . .

  though this isn’t bad . . . and the little variances

  in which we stay a while in Yuma or Santa Fe . . . important to everyone, you notice,

  not us . . .

  the soft mornings

  when we wake from an old bony sleep and wander around thinking of the great odes—

  all this replicated in moments when the agony lets up

  temporarily and whoever that was at the door

  stops knocking and . . . you can tell . . .

  just stands there . . .

  maybe thinking of a girl in Omaha. How would we know? This the secret

  of course:

  the mind,

  if it’s the mind, refreshed by interception

  of the composed and quickening universe . . . possible yet:

  streets of Laredo, you say . . . and a feeling of plenty, like someone cornered . . .

  still kind.

  And so you go

  on, like Schopenhauer,

  temporarily free of indigestible self concern,

  ratty cravings and such. Though nothing’s being gathered . . . really . . .

  or put aside. We’re making it up: and using it as we go.

  On the Whole

  forced labor by now it seems for

  ratty flowers, the few

  wobbly

  bees still at it, birches,

  thinly dressed

  myrtles, a wiry plant

  tricked out in tiny

  blooms

  like red tear drops,

  the whole outfit

  stuck

  with it,

  every space shuttered,

  self

  untethered

  gasping,

  curdled yellow leaves

  on the lawn,

  each separation and elementary

  episode

  only a new version

  of the same

  ensemble, so

  they say, but what about

  these flowers, bristles, soft

  pinks of mimosa,

  gold crowns scattered in the lantana,

  time, etc.,

  not sleepy,

  but enflamed at the edge of the hill,

  glaring

  as the sun carries

  its red dog home.

  Slumberland

  down in slumberland the coldly available cattle bosses

  get together, like the staff in a cheap hotel

  for travelers blown in off the rainy desert says the old timer,

  the blast of wind pounding the backs of downbeat ladies

  and gents each with his own dead-bird smell,

  the drainage a little off, thin tubes taped to their sides,

  the bosses offering no explanation of why after living in this world without

  a single desire to leave the scene we are thrown one day

  into a box and shoveled into the swampy dark

  to lie with dirt in our mouths for eternity says the old timer,

  pulling a pistol-shaped lighter

  from his coat made of bulldog hair. it’s slumberland out in the sticks,

  the bill of cunning manufacture’s arrived, the astonishing

  complicity with almost everything to hold on he says,

  to the last breath, like small

  town waiters with greasy hands who never returned your change,

  even sadness faltering, the ring fingers of old women

  deeply gouged . . .

  TRAMWAY

  Genuine Risk

  Troubles like a set of webbed yellow duck feet

  in the Chinese butcher shop,

  emails printed out from my old lover

  speaking of life in the coalfields, heaps of char

  and chunks of substance everything useful’s extracted from—

  like what we were up to, she says,

  nothing left at the end but piles of gray pocked

  matter in brown rainwater puddles,

  this way I have about now, I say,

  of remembering the worn out flopped over

  daffodils in soaked mountain fields

  and the heavy bodies of old draft horses,

  the bunched uselessness of their muscles

  as they stand in the impound

  awaiting slaughter, in these circumstances you can bring up

  almost anything, she says, the badgering,

  the infirmities of your parents,

  the old man yelling

  with a panicked, penetrating feebleness

  as the sky darkened

  under the coming cyclone, I say, and the palm fronds

  clattering and shaking suddenly hard

  as a woman will shake her long wet hair, she says,

  disturbed and hating the argument,

  the cold quiet sureness

  after that when there’s a flatness in her eyes

  as she looks at you

  and you know nothing can be the same again, I say.

  Backseat in Kinshasa

  a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hills

  or someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a cold

  lobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrase

  that explains everything and then you’re revoking

  yesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattan

  or you’ve just changed the name of your dreamboat and it’s time

  for your pills or it’s time for a check-in with the vastness

  and the preacher is crying over the dappled gray running last

  in the fourth at pimlico and the bomb removal squad is just leaving

  your apartment or you are unable to drop the loose talk outside

  filene’s basement or spring is nowhere near this town

  and the operators all reach home at the same time and you understand

  everything means something else and weren’t told that cabbage roses

  went out of style or the proceeds from the caper long ago were lost

  No Claim

  A tense obligato, the light comes up out of a shallow grave.

  It was only resting. Sulphur butterflies, taking a holiday

  in the garden, one in shades of yellow and orange, the other

  the same plus chestnut spots, drift above

  white-faced mallows, giving a sense of softness, richness

  to the situation, paralleling the stinks and murder

  poking up everywhere, each an elaboration of presence, minus

  idea and will, the soul, we think, something like this,

  gliding through the somatological world, airy, when maybe it’s not,

  maybe just an overweight bumbler, clumsy sporting-goods salesman

  of the spirit, slumped by the road in a used Eldorado with

  the window down, sweating in the dog-day heat, one we pass

  irritably, exhumaceously by
, as we hurry to the rendezvous.

  FLEURETTE AMÉRICAINE

  Issues with a Right-Hand Turn

  Sometimes I’m issued a new head

  and the old one drops

  off and then I see the new one isn’t new

  it’s a used

  head, sometimes a bit moldy

  or flushed

  with rage, this head

  filled with notes on what is wrong with the world

  or carrying a list

  of expendables or groceries

  a head that remembers sunset casting

  a golden shine

  into the wheat

  or the painting of a pig on a dinner plate,

  or once I got

  a head filled with memories

  of snowy nights

  when she dared me to love her, but I couldn’t

  speak the part

  and had to set this head down

  beside the road

  and go on for the rest of that episode

  headless, heedless,

  one you couldn’t hang for his crimes

  if you wanted to.

  This Far’ll Do

  the coast along here smells

  like a rusty washing

  machine still in use. the sudsy

  clouds are in on this. the sharks and flounders

  know what’s going on.

  old plaques and busted dance floors

  teeter among brushy

  trash. discolored boilers filled with

  bullet holes rest