WHERE THOUGHTS COME FROM
A murder of crows wing black vectors across
my window—called Double-Hung, a touch
suggestively—& alight nowhere I see.
Back to coffee in a chipped cup, then out
of a borough in my brain comes ashes, ashes,
the playground singalong some believe
invokes the Black Death. We all fall down. Years ago,
I’d have begun my boneyard of butts by now—
the next one stubbed next to the last one
next to the next-to-last, then one last stump—
a waste-heap late Guston got so right, or so
I thought. Revisiting A Life Spent Painting
turns up half a dozen smoldering insomniac
self-portraits, Klansmen with black cigarettes,
studded shoe soles & horseshoes,
& what looks too much like an entrail sandwich.
But no mass graves of ashtrays. Memory
misremembers: that we know by heart.
Tougher to hold in mind that Self itself is pure
fiction, the first person not to trust. Your brain
without your body would get nowhere rings
true enough; but give it thought: since when
did Brain & Body get divorced? While I was
unearthing the memento mori of my smokes?
My butt-pile played the part of the skull,
& someone with more than my math skills
might calculate any given poem’s risk-
benefit by timesing nine eternal lines to time
by nine Marlboroughs in ninety minutes,
factoring in two packs a day. The benefit’s
the poem, of course, for what that’s worth.
Why all those nines? Think: the lives of a cat;
think Yeats’s bean rows; think baseball
players & the innings played; think planets before
Pluto got traded for a dwarf; think how many
stitches a timely stitch saves; think #9, #9, #9. . .
Thinking of time, for a sweet spot of it, why not start
with touch?—how a hammer-haft befits the hand;
our first fingerings; rummagings of all kinds;
ivory-laid paper riffled, thumbed (like a thigh, I feel);
braille & how, hand-in-pocket, even the blind
from birth can tell a penny from a dime;
& the sex—my sister told me—when she first felt
the tumor. So much for touch, & stirring up
the dead I thought at rest. In today’s Times—
a 40-foot-wide ring made of skulls, ribs, & tusks
from 60 mammoths. No one knows for what.
The mammoth, though—there’s a mammal
worth a sidebar. Even its idiocies appeal: gulped
by sinkholes; washed away in mudflows; drowned
after falling through thin ice—the male
beats out the female, more than three-to-one,
for getting himself killed in stupid ways.
Man, can’t we identify with that?
& you, my audience of one, my true-penny—
Hamlet’s nickname for the Ghost—remember
what Sis said: I’m dying young but not
before my time. To you, then, the guy I can’t look
in the eye unless mirrored or snapped, don’t quit
stirring up artifice; be me on the sly, in & out
of frames—like my crows, or Hitchcock’s cameos.
He loathed location, directed outdoor scenes
before rear projections on a soundstage,
giving the façades of Lombard St., Bodega Bay’s dunes,
& the headstones behind Mission Dolores
their auras of beautiful fakery.
AT THE GREEN FERN TAVERN
after Rimbaud
After eight slow days along a rutted road
shredding my boot-soles to strips of skin,
I entered the Green Fern Tavern, ordered
some bread and butter with a side of ham,
and felt fine, my aching legs stretched out
under a fern-green table, while my gaze
toured the rural tableau on my placemat,
until the server—fantastic ass, sage eyes,
not one to shrink from a kiss, I suspect!—
brightly delivered my bread and butter
on a fern-green plate, the ham lukewarm,
whitish-pink, with its tart scent of garlic;
then filled my stein to the brim with lager,
its head foaming gold in the sun at 5 pm.
THE INVISIBLE GORILLA
Fresh from its marsh, the terrapin I crushed,
shell marked with runes, surfaced last night
in a dream but left no fable. I retracted it,
even while its pud-blunt head would not,
and if I figure death adds up to nothing,
maybe I’ll accept that, one night, smashed,
I climbed Mount Auburn Cemetery’s tower
and swilled a toast to the dead I don’t believe
nap tight inside their marble chambers.
I’d lay most any ghost back then, all loves
desperate loves. Wrong one after wrong one.
How many close calls in a single lifetime
whisper past, unnoticed as the gorilla
suit’s high-five amid the dribbling t-shirts?
Amazing, how that redwing blackbird banks. . .
Now that nothing’s glowing darker, I’m not
scared of death, much; a lot more of dying;
but about your leaving me alive, the most.
BLOOD WORK
Which arm do you prefer? the phlebotomist asks.
I’m puzzling over this riddle—do I favor
one limb over the other? Since toddlerhood,
my right’s been far more expert than my left,
though every bush-league pitch it threw went wild,
and each football pass it meant to cradle slipped
loose. I earned my slur, The Fumbler. I won’t retell
how lame my jump-shots looked; or, hell, I will:
like the capering, hoof-hearted, jerking Pan
critics dubbed Nijinsky’s hijinks in Debussy’s Faun.
I love that he defied gravity and the ban against
dancing in tights without pants—the word abashed
not a move in his repertoire. What put him under
house-arrest in Budapest, having dumped Diaghilev
and married Romola de Pulszky—perfect name
for a Slavic noble if there ever was one: that’s a fact
I can’t yet smuggle into this poem. How bolshie
(look it up) words are! But choreographed adroitly,
they tour with the 20th-Century’s greatest male
dancer and his bride through an Argentine wedding
to their daughter Kyra’s Austro-Hungarian birth.
Tamara, daughter number two, doesn’t even rate
a hyperlink on Wikipedia. Sorry, airbrushed Tamara.
Too bad, teeming world no poem can jam enough
into; not here, nor back in the lab, my bloodwork’s
rubber tourniquet undone, my vein man meaning fist,
not me, when he says open up. Don’t get me started . . .
Then The War, along with its utter nuttiness
of branding their infant Enemy Alien—her beyond-
belief fleet Dad being Russian-born. There it is!—
I rustled in the cause of his confinement! Words
prance at their own pace. Take couvade syndrome—
his sympathetic pregnancy—a measly disorder
next to three decades filling diaries with eye
after coal-sketched eye. Then The Next War. . .
When the Red Army came, he fled his cave
and found some soldiers around a fire singing
folk tunes from home; they knew on the spot
who that dancing old man was. Look it up.
