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such a sciencey word the sun crosses the sky in unison with the equator as if they were a trolley and a rail forming a perfect twelve hour day twice each year since pharoah bricked the pyramid before that even waay before that. Can you imagine anyone or anything so infinitely reliable?
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1. How much light urges from the sun? Most is lost to infinity. Still the trickle that falls to earth fires the aurora. 2. Sometimes you stare at the the sun. You stare too long and it aches. Your eyes force themselves shut. You see bluegreen echoes of the sun inside your closed eyes. You open your eyes and the tears come. The world haloes, flares. You look at the sun and you have to look away. It isn’t allowed. You can’t receive all that. There isn’t room. 3. A photo is a reflection of memory, a bounce off the surface of a moment. When you train your eye on the image you find your negative—deflected, polarized (as if Sol imagined that Terra were its mirror). Reflection is cold, insubstantial, on the verge, a mirage, a passing wave. 4. I sense you best with closed eyes. It is impossible to capture light in a photo or in the vault of memory-- sooner put a dancer in a bottle. So much light pours from the sun. I am trying to capture sunlight in this poem but all I have is a net, a poor container, like me.  We find ourselves here. Every person of any pigment gender or stripe discovers themselves here, now. It’s always a surprise. No one chooses the timing or circumstances of their arrival and by the time you meet them every person’s path is pockmarked with difficulties you can’t imagine and yes there’s love and music-- and loss. This is everybody. Please, remember we are all surprised. Please, remember this when your path crosses another’s. They didn’t get to pick any more than you did and chances are you are one of the lucky ones.  The considerable surprise of this great transmission Is the surge of kindness between strangers. Not all contagions are injurious. Fevers rise; so does our insistence on compassion. Overwhelmed caregivers in Asia and in my town Demonstrate we are not immune to each other’s suffering. I am not afraid to be infected by illness as much As I am afraid to succumb to the illusion of separation. We may be distant but we are not apart.  You can see this. Watch the mountain. Watch closely, for some time. Watch for ten million years. Stay as long as you like. The earth heaves up a mountain. Or the mountain heaves up itself. Watching will not tell us which. It emerges. The mountain crests from the earth into the sky then crashes down, or dissolves, melting back into the earth like a great stone wave, a wave breaking so slowly. It says, I am no more solid than rain. The world urges mountains in their season urges apples from branches, urges babies from their amnion. They are of a piece. An apple is a mountain. An apple self-complicates from blossom to flesh fills with juice, drops, urges back to soil to make more apples. No one demands this, not god, it happens. You might say solid things are verbs.  I think good things come from the south unimpeded by my demands about what is necessary or what will serve. The river delta is in the south. I feel its urge, impossibly ascending from subterranean origins. I place obstacles in the way but the river is a strong god. You will never coerce the river. In its brown water, something brushes against us, a branch, or was it living? It is gone. The river takes everything.  you just know it no one can tell you otherwise. I know I hit my little sister in the face with a rock and knocked her out when she was six. I was there threw the rock across the backyard watched her crumple like a ragdoll thrilled at the definition of a parabola nearly visible in midair against the backdrop of birch forest. I can't prove it. But I know it happened. Memory at best is an echo which repeated long enough becomes knowledge. Is my witness alone sufficient? You say you know Jesus. Just . . . you know. You can't prove that any more than I can prove I knocked my little sister the fuck out with a rock. I declare it on my authority. I am the proof of my witness.  down the stairs hoping to get your attention and you give me only broken ankles What are you saying says the man I have over fifty seven broken ankles my toes are not much better off and my femur reeks of gangrene Are you saying I push you down the stairs because I do not love you the way I love a hot cabbage says the man I am saying that I am killing myself for your love and all you do is sniff your fingers The stairs are draped in clothing says the man Did I mention my knees are shattered because you do not love me and I smashed my face at the bottom Please please I am trying to think says the man Oh now it is your problem says the wife I am tying this tourniquet and leaving you Must you make so much noise when you walk screams the man your insides rattle like a bag of broken glass When I am gone your mouth will open and no one will boil your oats Must you must you must you go on says the man can't you see I'm eating  or unconscious on the sidewalk while a kneeling fireman checks his—what? Breath, or pulse. His mechanisms. He has some moving parts. Lungs expand heart pumps and what is more mechanical than a pump? Still there are questions about brain function. These are vital signs-- maybe in the back of the ambulance is one of those contraptions-- metal disks with wires yellow green stick them on your head it makes a ticker tape of how your brain arcs little sparks between cells of the tissue packed in your skull. That’s how you make a fist or blow a kiss. Signals travel on pathways trafficking your impulses branching to your extremities. Someone told us that but it's pure horseshit. You have no idea how you make a fist or blow a kiss it's second nature, it's just obvious. Even the foremost neurologist can’t tell us how without resorting to a shrug.  Warriors, enemies on horses stampede with drawn swords torches and malice from the hills above the village. In a blinding moment they are on us, a furious storm of bloodlust with wild eyes. Our home's aflame children fall beneath hooves from distant towns with strange names, foreign kings we never-- Today the world ends. I chop off the head of the snake. Its reptile eyes refuse to darken its jaws stretch open, gaping in defiance, the long muscle of body stretches to rejoin the head urging toward resurrection. The world ends in the place where my father vanished where my mother baptized me where I carry the head of the snake in one fist and the body in the other. I wave the world into existence with a gesture, a prying open, a stretching of something spinal, a willing for what is emergent.  at least. One is bright as the sun with a voice like music tossing picked flowers into the wind runs laughing to the water’s edge and jumps in with glad splashing Sometimes he darkens over shadowed by the same old terror that seizes every perfect innocent who discovers this is a world of arbitrary death and no one can change that or stop it The other one of me is his father who cradles his head strokes his hair who has been defeated laid down his life so there is nothing more to do in the end but sit quietly and love  it does not hover frozen in future time it does not give chase. I do not feel it in my gut like my father does walking the dog early in the morning hours borrowed with a collateral of bypass surgery and low sodium. Death is the seabed accruing. We drift down, particulate, a gradual disintegration of layers like the crumbling of sandstone cliffs in a million tiny landslides, each dropping a handful of pebbles from the walls.  Standing in a big white room with a long white table and a tall white door that swings open BANG God storms in, nostrils flared. Gabriel trails with two chairs. God glares at me, snorts, settles into a fat white recliner with a big gilded G a built-in cup holder. He points at a three-legged stool with an unfinished seat, says You’re here to play poker. Sit down. Poker with God? I don’t like the odds: he has x-ray vision he bankrolls the joint. If I win he’ll be pissed-- I’ll be sold into slavery, fed to the fish. I fidget. Poker is a man’s game, says God forget Pinochle forget Mother-May-I you’re playing with me, mano a dios. I say, But-- God says, But what? God has a million chips in a silo— I start with fifty-three. He says One for every year of your life expectancy. Wait—fifty-three? Ante up says God. I draw one card, try to bluff him into thinking I’ve got a great hand. God draws two, says You’re trying to bluff me into thinking you’ve got a great hand You dummy I’m God I know when you’re bluffing. I say What kind of chance does that give me? God says Where were you when I created poker? God stacks the deck. I say Maybe I could deal for a change. God says I’m the dealer here chum we’ve been playing this game how long Gabriel?—never mind—since before time OK wise guy HA God shows another winning hand slaps Gabriel on the back lays down royal flushes inside straights—I’ll never win. I jump up and kick the table over Gabriel lunges I wrestle him til two seraphim fly in and pin back my arms. God punches me in the stomach chomps on the butt of his cigar. This is my place kid I got a full house no room at the inn know what I mean? The floor drops open I watch fog pour down into the abyss. God turns his back taps his ashes and they shove me in. On the way down I clutch my fist around one white chip I took without permission. Be fruitful I whisper and multiply. to get into the river I let go of the shore drift past fear and through to discover something new I let go of the familiar walk toward the unimagined to change my mind I let go of beliefs allowing stillness in their absence to change my life I let go of my self detached from the mask  that voice again pipes up, howls at the suggestion of a moment's silence why so vicious you might take softer approaches instead of the hammer, a knife, the furnace of contempt that burns away what might have been otherwise a flower or a song i control the tempo and temperature of my response i give it flavor gauge progress by shifts in volume and frequency it grows quiet for two or three days then i tend to violate any fragile truce ought to see it coming by now  they're big and they're decimal written in stone one's about an ox one demands, thou shalt love just who commands? surely not that smiling fat buddha, no-- a king a lord before whom you kneel begging for enough to build your own fortress you, princeling of this tyrant who commands love why? Can it not be pillaged? Must he insist? Any child knows: love is spontaneous as laughter and cannot be commanded even for the amusement of the god who demands love in exchange for protection from what he made  love drops by with a jarful of ladybugs and a bigbag of Fritos has to have hotsauce on everythingeven Fritos love is unexpected tells us she originated from a roster of diagnoses as long as the unitedstatesconstitution and the lovers who came some heavyhanded all a disappointment some of them now are the ladybugspots tells us all this while we are enrapt we would follow her anywhere into the jar, down the hole she wears a sunlit halo askew when she wants to and it makes music and just like that she's out glancing at the rearview the ceiling is painted with ladybugs and it’s morning It isn't a question of if: We take it for granted the world will soon end. We've known this since ancient time. Any day now they will play the credits: the dramatis personae all left for dead in a . . . firestorm? A frozen wasteland? An irradiated plague-infested drought-stricken country lorded over by merciless cow-eyed scavengers? What is the so-called ended world? It stopped spinning? Is gravity suspended, all green things withered, all animals corpsed and rotting and earth become barren as the moon but for roaches? I believe the world will not end. I am certain the earth will outlive our scourge. Cheerless reassurance perhaps against the promise of extinction; all I know is: the green fuses of flowers still urge from cracks in the stone.  I rode the original surprise down into existence. From the first instant, the primal surprise, part shock, part question: What am I now? And here's Time. I know it because things move around, things made of matter constantly change their position. I wonder if it ever stops, time, if it ever does what's the difference? Somehow it seems there is goodness behind everything once we settle in the original compulsive act is generosity. We care but still can ask how minerals contain feeling? I rode the original surprise down into existence. And after the surprise, my annihilation? Am I a candle going out, or a bomb going off, a light switch or say a placental birth, messy and irrevocable? And in the end, despite my urge to compel the objects of my desire to align, the surprise will be allowed.  Pecker. I envy writers skilled enough to compose formal poems who toss off sonnets or forms I scarcely can pronounce much less execute. So I set myself to writing a formal poem (and have yet to manage it seems). No matter the form I fail often by the first line to concoct anything presentable. I find my success hinges at this point on creating my own form, which I have done: a baganellestina, consisting of three stanzas, each of which must begin with the word pecker. The poem must contain the name of the form, baganellestina, at least twice. Each stanza must be composed of a different number of lines, in no case less than seven nor more than twenty-six. The first stanza should serve as an introduction to both the form and the poem itself. The second stanza should in some way indicate the structure and formal requirements of the poem, and the third stanza—which, like the two preceding it, should begin with the word pecker—ought to digress tangentially from the subject of the poem thus far, and while prolonged technical explorations of Indo-Syraic archaeology may inexplicably be juxtaposed with casual mention of data acquisition and the seven deadly sins, these latter may at no time be enumerated, nor shall revelatory details from the personal life of the poet be divulged. The poem must once and only once violate its own form and should in every case with a verb conclude.  A man is inside a camera. He squinches one eye and peepholes at the green world. Outside outside the dream a man in the dining car of a train spills cola on his camera. Inside the camera it is raining cola. My dream is dissolving in soda cries the man. I can see green, and I will not get there, no not ever.  When he was a boy, his mother fit glasses over his eyes to help him see God. The lenses focused very far away, and went dark when he looked in the mirror. Every melty bite of this cheeseburger triggers a billion biochemical reactions-- That's called nature. It breathes my breath-- we share that job, nature and I. I can breathe just fine if i will it though I forget for days at a time while nature breathes me. Does nature make my decisions? Nature pumps my heart I think and precipitates my emotions but I do the math. Wait—is that me flexing my diaphragm, gathering hemoglobin from the atmosphere? Does nature think my thoughts? This is the seed of madness for which the lotus is the salve.  of the dollmaker who built the world and you a doll made of peoplestuff. The dollmaker stuffed you full to bursting with longing and urges. So you set yourself to filling the dollhole (the funeral march of the dolls!) I was a doll for a time but now, well, I'm a whole dollfull or you grow weary or injuries add up or you lose your love of dolldom (dolling around is all we've ever known!) Awake! you suspect another way—outside the playroom still dollish but . . . lighter? the door to the playroom is: secret? heavy? What is outside the playroom you ask the other dolls. One beams you a dollsmile.  |
Poems from Other Days
September 2021
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