Chapter One
SWEET JESUS

   Tea, tea, butter, the structure.
   We were discussing the death
   of iambic pentameter,
   though we didn't know it.
   She said with the notch
   above her lips
   I have a perfect ass
   and I thought the thing about asses
   is they're not perfect,
   they have a kind of fatal flaw,
   but I wasn't going to argue
   with such a proud collection
   of stumbling convergences.
   I wanted to say, can I stick
   my eyes down your throat?
   but what emerged
   was those eyebrows,
   are they for rent?
   How are they tragic?
   By announcing a mountainlessness
   that aches for its climbers,
   a brow that needs
   no announcing,
   lips that shift
   as mapped by insomnia,
   one hidden rippling
   bone that can never.
   A patio floated by.
   About us a Cambridge was revolving.
   Somewhere marriage was discussing
   a couple flattened
   by the new gravity of summer,
   but it wasn't us, we were refusing
   to cross that most glorious
   breed of slowness.
   I vow I will touch you
   always more distant stranger.


   THE ARTIST MUST INCLINE HIS HEAD JUST SO

   Often I have an idea and say it immediately.
   If people praise me I wear the world
   shyly on top of my head.
   At times I'm compelled
   like a fever to float
   without any distinctions,
   a sea of tin cans, love letters and greed.
   The world is good for my pleasure and consumption.
   I admire it totally, it stands
   like a mountain inside and outside me.
   Some art may be good, some dishonest.
   There's no pressing need for conscription or liberty,
   though a carful of people rides down the highway
   too fast, clouded in song.
   My lack of compassion astounds me,
   and must not come to know itself.
   It's true, I've never done anything
   quite like striking you across the face.
   There is of course the question of fate,
   and whether it can be angered.
   Example: when not overpowered by grief
   there are proper and improper ways to mourn.
   In such cases my gestures are shadows
   cast far from myself
   by one who crawls through the library,
   touching the books that she touched.
   I have dream after dream and forget each one.


   I GO OUT TO MEET THEM

   Terrible flowerbox
   on my shoulders
   unbuilt by the gold claws
   logic and lightning,
   speak the last word,
   rewrite me. Dead bird
   passing me like a friend,
   dead bird frozen
   in snow I was frozen
   in happiness you're so beautiful.
   With tiny golden claws you built
   the painted book
   of afternoon
   afternoon stared into.
   You said the world must have a border.
   You renounced the borderless world.
   You said the world
   must have two claws,
   one frozen in happiness,
   one lit with gold laughter
   past me gliding,
   a bicycle under a friend.
   A man coughs
   therefore
   the end of the world.
   Therefore down alleys
   that do not yet exist
   I resolve to greet
   each person more sadly.
   To put music
   back in a drawer.
   To remove it
   only when it needs me.
   What kind of music
   pins my sleep
   with gold thread among the elms?
   Blossoms die
   in my hand as I prune them,
   you can't win election,
   you can't prosecute night
   though we all heard it chuckling
   idea of love.
   Idea of love
   in a white dress bewildered,
   I'd prefer each friday
   not be so sundown.
   I'd prefer my memory
   dizzy from dancing
   for the memory
   of dancing for soldiers.
   Light and wind
   put me down in this room.
   Night has only one use for me.
   Branches come closer,
   bringing snow to my bedside.
   The chairlift
   how to remember mounts up
   to a lake
   nobody
   knew in the stars.


          WHOEVER YOU ARE

   As the wayward satellite believes its rescuers
   will come with white and weightless hands,
   and the rescuers turning and floating believe
   in their tethers and all those uninspected latches,
   as madness believes in the organizing principle,
   and allows it to strap her down on the gurney,
   and the tiny island believes the sound
   of a harp will arrive on the wings of a gull,
   as the olive believes it is filled with light,
   and its oil will someday grace a god's tongue,
   as my arms flail outwards and strike my forehead
   in belief of a vestigial prayer process,
   and I believe to allow them such historical pleasure
   is hardly harmless from time to time,
   as the transistor radio hears the woman
   muttering and believes she requests
   she be buried in the front yard with only her knitting
   far from her husband the master of stratagems,
   and weeping daughters once believed
   their father had coated each grassblade with poison
   and woke one morning to some twigs on the lawn
   to believe they were dead starlings,
   as the mountain believed it could stay hollow
   long enough to return the tunnellers home,
   and their wives believed in trying to believe
   that rumble through clear skies was thunder,
   I believe that is not what you wanted,
   for you are only a guardian
   geared to one particular moment
   conjectured in no saintly book of apocrypha
   when slowly at last the trucks will pull
   into a warehouse shot through with shadows
   and wherever I am I will see candles floating
   on the ritual arms of two dark canals
   and you will allow me to step I believe
   into the mechanism
   and tear off your wings


       SOMETIMES LEAVING

   Throughout the era of the tiny blemish
   to the left of her eyebrow
   I wandered clumsy
   as a high school in late afternoon,
   locked around glowing
   cylinders of dust,
   construction paper logic,
   echoes of correct answers suppressed.
   Sometimes leaving
   a room can snap
   your heart like a limb,
   and not because there's anything in it.
   For them, my seascape
   of dresses impervious
   and young careless hiding
   search for care under brims,
   I revealed behind my lecture on refusal,
   but never myself
   believed myself saying
   lips live best
   among the slow drape of hair,
   especially raven.
   Time of winter
   like correspondence delayed
   I did not yet remember
   how on the counter your hands would sleep
   unessential as summer,
   while overhead the churning
   silver impossible
   winged
   away and away from description
   surveying our impasse
   with one eye pretending
   the other's not glass,
   the car stolen and returned
   unnoticed except for the jangle
   of hey those aren't my glasses,
   the pleasure
   of the utterly faked confession,
   or the intimate public
   pleasure of glances
   down the eyes of young mothers.
   The eyes of young mothers
   sleepwalk
   clutching a hairbrush.
   So many times I hypothesized
   you actually standing
   before this painting
   of blue time choosing
   at last from wherever
   into my foot.
   And I'm glad to have it.
   It was probably lonelier than me.
   I swear I won't doctor you,
   or make you better, or even good.
   You can contact your friends
   if you have them
   in whatever manner,
   maybe radiating.


            BLUEPRINT

   I fumble downstairs like some old early riser
   who has just dreamed of mowing the lawn with his cane.
   One glass, some water and a tea bag
   may be the forgotten alchemy of destruction.
   The sea has withdrawn from the kitchen,
   leaving one small whale which moans on the floor.
   Spiders congregate on the dark wall, whispering
   Have you heard about the insomniac dyslexic atheist?
   The children's book who went to the marriage counselor?
   The olive stuck on a desert island with a fan?
   Alas, what is forbidden?
   The sun rose while I was pouring.
   I must have hit the switch.
   Tomorrow, the dew will be a little colder,
   and a few more leaves will creep through the mail slot.
   The sun is a good conversationalist, if a little relentless,
   and inclined to peer into my desk drawer, but it knows
   the appropriate moment to go feed the morning glories.
   I've laid out a compass, the porcelain boxes,
   some colored chalk, a few photographs
   of diving birds, and an atlas of mineral behavior.
   Look, here's the future of Asia Major.
   There are several rivers in need of a washing.
   See what happens
   after forty years of moonlight?
   No eclipses until my thumb stops this talking.
   After zero and equal there were thoughts.
   All I had to do was create the world.
   How I wish I didn't know what endless preparations
   go on in that houseboat
   beached at the end of the cul-de-sac.
   For a long time I have felt a cloud in my pocket,
   where I keep a promise, but I don't know why.


            BEFORE THE POEM

   Morning plays a fine false tune in the crook of the tree.
   I get up to dance, I sit down.
   Each leaf is a possible ending.
   Great events are taking place in the house across the street.
   Four actors rehearse a play I have written and left on their threshold.
   Their shadows move from window to window, disappearing and reappearing.
   I could shrink the world into a clouded watchglass, this is proven.

   No matter which way I swivel my head,
   there is light on the edge of the teacup.

   I turn back
   from a great abyss.


           MIND THE GAP

   A little portrait of me lies in the flowerbed,
   making allusions, watching her comb her hair.
   She sings into the shattered mirror:
   "But you will last as long as the rose,
   as long as the glass, glass tulips ..."
   A can opener smiles on the night table.

   I remember she loved and feared the dark.
   Whenever the horses broke loose
   her heart trembled under my hand like a bat.
   We'd huddle all night in bed, counting.
   The horses filled us with the ineffable grandeur
   of their silent pounding, or something like that.
   Mostly I liked not knowing what to expect.

   The sun looms angrily, high above, stranded.
   She walks, or rather meanders towards my portrait chanting
   "Phillip, your green thumbs, the envy of All Wales."
   Each wisp of her hair grows larger, they wave and shine
   like snakes you can see through. How strange. She bends
   over me, blocking the sun.


        VIEW ONTO THE BALCONY

   The conductor shuffles his scores in the din
   as the orchestra conjures and tunes.

   A boatman stares down at the water. Reflected,
   a few gulls cry and draw the name of a place.

   Chin to her chest, she wears a slumped necklace of bone.
   The rest of space hangs a blue cape on her shoulders.

   She rocks, half in the boat and half in her chair.
   The orchestra clatters to one long roaring tone,

   dying out into the cavern which stands
   silent before the great action.

   We rise and applaud, madly, the musicians puzzled,
   ready to begin their obliteration.

   The auditorium is quiet again, except for wind
   opening a glass door onto the balcony.

   Two pigeons keep their eggs hidden in a pile of droppings and feathers.
   Dark hills in the background rise up over the black railing.

   Who will hear moss creep down the slope
   over the child's knucklebone lost in the grass?

   The music, as quiet as it was, could only begin to fill up the hall
   with the name we forget, already perfect beyond recognition.


         SUMMER CAMP

   The day is wearing a white lab coat.
   It is experimenting on us,
   which is funny until you stop thinking about it.
   Today I am going to drive my car
   up into the mountain of distraction
   where with my cat, Helix, I shall picnic.
   Towards him I feel only slightly parental.
   Only enough to feed him tiny
   slivers of moral instruction
   which he devours daintily without blinking.
   Helix doesn't have a twin.
   He is grey, and his left front paw
   hurts him, though he has never spoken of it.
   Past the blankness of his irises
   is a lake of sadness, from which he was torn
   many months ago, his mouth and tongue
   frozen in a repetition of searching.
   His mother was a sofa, a whole
   neighborhood of comfort, support,
   understanding, doors left unlocked,
   kick the can, let's leave the neighbors
   with the kids without even
   formally informing them and drive
   a car of distraction along the vanished town
   of Calico up into the mountains
   where we shall picnic. His father
   was a cloud, as are all the fathers
   of cats. Try to find one. The trail leads
   through wet grasses down
   to the culvert where I taught
   myself to smoke like a wet idea
   from which I have just withdrawn,
   leaving only the tenderness.
   There was a girl named Holly.
   We knew each other in the park.
   We were pineys.

(Continues...)