from Orphan, Indiana (2010)

I WOULD SOMETIMES NOTICE THE WORLD OVER MY SHOULDER


The law of gravity

or the Rauschenberg-like penalty of law

like noticing her eyebrows

the symbol in an elevator for close door suddenly taken
     out of context

I saw Monogram

and that goat had eyes in the back of his head

He had these empty hands

A man-made spine where there was never any love

THE BONE SCULPTURES


You, you're undignified

like a logo

or high interest rates

Far from here, mint overpowers the must of leaf decay

Oxygen--

green as the inside of a glacier . . .

And the mist nets hang full in the understory, like Spanish moss

I like how you thought you knew everything

Ornithological

birds have no souls--we know that

they don't do much grieving

they can't write a check

or a detective novel

What the hell is this thing, and a wren pecks at a shiny table fork

It's almost 9:30

and I'm tired

I keep dreaming you and mother are trapped on a ship

surrounded by

a hundred other

burning ships

THIS IS HOW IT SOUNDS BEFORE REAL THINGS START HAPPENING

I was eight again

Losses--I'll get him

A monarch squeaks squeezing
out of its transparent chrysalis

The windows blew out of our house that summer

We have so many shadows

A car burning in the Parthenon

Barbie with her head on backwards

EVERYONE YOU SEE ISN'T EVERYONE

The kid who played cornet

the serious
problem
that developed in the late sixties

with saddle shoes

I mean the fascist blight as echo . . .

the neo-incorrigible
codification of your basic Epsom salts

blood running over the beach

Arthur Lee

people slapping their children

I mean rods and aluminum bolts

All you need is an Allen wrench

wind

and an abandoned one room school house

in northeastern Indiana

 

 

BETA CAROTENE

Yes, I say, to the spirit world

A non-electronic intrusion

A whirl of leaves begins
spinning on a lawn
and moves through the street

It disappears in front of my car

Philip Glass on piano

Green tea spilling across the walls of the aorta

A fish begins thrashing in the toilet like a blindness in one eye

THE WIND IN THE FURNACE


It's what you don't get to sacrifice

the worm writhing in the tequila

"imagination"

osteomyelitis

the way heat rises out of the flames in a furious rush

the X chromosomes blurring the face of the moon

detached retinas

glowing flowers growing backwards like a jar full of extracted teeth

and the sky that summer--nothing but bats

and the deck of cards left out on the screened-in porch

and the guttering candles

and the knife and the spoon with no fork

Christmas trees burning

cataracts

memory

THE INVENTION OF AMINO ACIDS

Criminal democratization

is not in the asparagus

But I know what you're thinking

re-charge golf cart

and

The indigo bunting doesn't even use a blow dryer

Spectator Sport or 

Dream of Privilege

the back light in your mirror shows

a frightening display of deep woods
                                                                       "woods"

The gardener whispers in the morning breeze

and that other wan meta-fiction

ectopic

THE NECK OF A HORSE
                                                

Little is said then, her new hands

pale as the sand in the river

Six weeks in
and the creature divides

No skiff

the smell of burnt oranges . . .

She wonders about the dream

a fountain lights up like a translation snapping into place

Vitamin B in syringes

the tiny flat cakes of his nipples

The little ball shoots up tight into place in the trembling tube

she's panting

the stunted vines struggling through
broken stone all along the cobbled lane

an ibis flies out of the world through a missing manhole cover

she remembers the lake house—

washes out the memory with a hose

 

BLACK DIAGRAM


My ten sisters lie face-up under their beds

To the sound of someone using a Water Pik

Cross your arms over your chest

And a giant red phone starts ringing on the other side of the glass

White doves flutter up where there used to be pillows

The jeweler takes his tweezers and plants a tiny Crucifix
inside each open window of the minuscule house

Now open your eyes

POEM WRITTEN IN MAY


You don't want to die

Everyone talks around the secret of knowing

You might want to kiss a church

Naked bodies churning in the sunshine

I schedule what's next according to impulse

The removal of hair

Such discipline

Year holds a month holds a week holds a day

I don’t want to think about 2021

Who I might be later on

Or was

That's my phobia

GARLIC MUSTARD


It's invasive,

it cycles quickly through your information.

I thought then of the north pole,

the sturgeon swimming in the underground stream,

the old freezer outside of Hastings hunkering in deep grass like a
     doorway to the underworld.

Sleep is a golden breeze all right

wheat still as the ocean under a geological moon.

And the weeds are absolutely choral, moving after the mind . . .

But now you're sequestered—

box inside a room inside a frame

(with that stink on your hands)

your wings breaking silver.

The carpet moth dreams in a pontoon zone.

He taps out a message . . .

The light hits all these icons that look like crabs, you see,

trojans or antibodies

croutons

and white flowers

drying, then crumbling . . .

And all you can do is grin through the bloodletting.

 

 WRITING

Are you really going to just sit there complaining?

This means everything you might think it means

I know

I see it, too

out there prancing on the grand promenade

but what gives with the self-deprecation?

Draconian Death Organ

(and are you cool enough to pull it off)

Splenda then

a little injection

your poem, it really isn't so synthetic, or bad . . .

let's all put bar-codes on our book covers

Vicky Cristina I Can't Pay to Get to Barcelona

I was in New York City in the rain with Herbert Scott

when a guy in one of those horse-drawn carriages yelled

"Make room for the little guy under that umbrella"

just rip off that normal face

Are you perfect enough for God?

Herb just laughed

 

 

MOBILE HOME


I saw one with a chandelier crashed in the middle of the back yard

You might walk across the desert

Rooms opening and dividing before you

And never quite feel safe enough

I saw an abandoned one in Teegarden with a shotgun
   in the closet

I got lost in the forest there in the narrowest of hallways

Fire in all the trees for seven miles

In the seventies we were warned

The table was Formica and was tilted for effective removal of seeds

The snow fell for weeks without stopping

Whenever I strip a bed down to bare mattress

Graduation pictures and paneling

I don't know what's more cliché--shoes dangling from

An electrical wire or the wind blowing a Wal-Mart bag against a fence

I saw a mobile home burning in a thunderstorm one time

Flames shot out of the small broken windows

The Romantics were singing "A Night Like This" on the radio

And the deer grazed casually in the field next door

I went home to my ground floor apartment a mile away and sat
   looking out the window at the rain and lightning until
   the sirens began

THE BLISS-TREE PHOTOGRAPHS II


We want it now—a room

Everywhere

Put Nature in a room, and be in it

Let your heart gush in a bowl

Roses

Blood pulsing out of the center of the chopped-up bed

Pull the axe right out of the wall

Start breaking windows

So the wind can get out

Sleep

Sleep as though you are completely willing

Until the idea of living just is

 

 

NIGHT LIGHT

There's a crime scene near The Saint Joseph River

My point is, why are we still
so obsessed with these penultimate leavings

Three empty nights on the beach

Something Catholic
sitting in a cracked clam shell

I'm not saying my night-terrors are better than yours

You with that dental work

A cup of light you hold in your hands stolen right out of Follain

I just can't stop falling in bed

It's like sitting at a red light crying

The hospital room looked so peaceful with the sheets pulled back up

Decorated with a light switch

Someone left a dog tied to a post outside the Dairy Queen again

 

 

 SNARGE

Answer yes or no to the following questions

What if you were on the plane you are currently watching

Yes

I am a cedar waxwing

Camouflaged as an arbor vitae

There's a lot of fermentation going on this year

No

The goose enters this roaring cave

He doesn't have the appropriate documents

And for a second he's a monk in a hood

Smelling the rain on the dirt road

And in this manner we feel our lives are not so precious

We're tucked so safely inside

And it's really true

They do look like toys or little ants

Besides, everyone calmed right down after they piped in the Chuck Mangione

I am a pileated bushtit

 

 

 

 

FORTY YEARS AGO LAST WEEK


Four of them maybe, thin little reeds with the appropriate fingers

We’d stand invisibly

Bangs touching the eyebrows, like Egyptians or terriers I said to someone later on

The mandolin player entered the front door
And there were teeth embedded in the lead singer’s shoulder . . .

A rather toad-like child appeared beside them and he was responsible for
vocal harmonics, like Art Garfunkel

This was on Castle Avenue actually, home of the wounded killdeer

Before my face became dwarfed with my father’s endless exasperations

He would very much have liked to destroy a Jackson Pollock I think

I played the piano, then watched the record player for a while

The arm for the stylus moved on its own

“Now the man from La Mancha drinks too much,” sang the mandolin player

That’s why I left that theater and began collecting other beings

Like Rolly Polly bugs

I found a Polyphemus moth dead on the grass one day like it was waiting
   to be towed into a hangar

The creature both scared me and turned me on

But I don’t mean it made me horny

I would sit in the grass holding my breath while a praying mantis slowly
   turned to look at me

I had no reason to believe in anything else