Metropolis Maria

She whispered my desire 

through a smoke-ring smile.

She said: You think you're in love, 

but it makes you kind of nervous 

to say so. She said:

My pistol is the Devil's right hand.

  

I touched you with my bronze epistemology, 

she said, but you never know what happens 

until the deal goes down. Nothing touched 

the trigger but the Devil's right hand.

I said: I think I’m in love. 

Think I’m in love. Think I'm in

the Devil's right hand.

When Yesterday Was Young

You saw the new moon last night, 

and it was holding the old moon in its arms.

Four-and-twenty stars fell,

twenty-four brief needles of light

that kept my deepest secrets.

You saw night lean on me, my lover.

Tom Waits was singing something

about moon-shadow mosquitoes and sour lemonade

and the forgotten lyrics of  “The Nut-Brown Maid.”

You saw night look back and wait for me,

and I didn't wait for you.

Desert Sand Blues

I was not intent on standing 

for the next elections,

said Hosni Mubarak.

I thought I

was in your sight,

your heart.

I sobbed and sighed.

Adieu, love,

adieu, love,

untrue love.

In Scarlet Town, Where I Was Born

If I thought I saw Bill Evans 

leaning like the smoky shadow of a crow 

over cracked piano keys, 

if I saw his narrow shoulders hunched, 

pale hands poised like two forgotten thoughts, 

his corduroy jacket wrinkled at the spine—

if I thought I saw all that,

I'd tell the horns to shut their goddamn mouths.

It only takes one smooth pull on a cigarette,

one long push—and the smoke smiles

dark thoughts of a room

you can't remember. 

That's what I said to the man at the door,

just before he tossed me and my military ID 

card onto the curb.

Mark Winkler was playing piano in a club across the street,

and the rain was falling on New Orleans

Strawberry Larry

Mon Frere Thierry

I live in Vicksburg, Mississippi, now,
but I remember snow
falling on the campus of Purdue and you
and I were thin as sin, 

drank gin and grinned at winter Indiana.

Sandy still plays her violin
and I still can't sing worth shit
or play an instrument,
not even spoons -- but you
were Pan's right hand, the man
who touched the keys of spring,
whose voice caressed
the robin's wing,
and a single feather
like a whispered secret
fell.

And summer is a-coming in,
you sang. Summer is a-coming in
someday.

Valentines for the Vampires

Your kiss tattooed my face 
with the thin calligraphy of love,
said the queen of vampires.
Every vein screams
how much I love you.

Sweetheart, said the king of vampires,
you caress my soul with a serrated knife.
I want to sing every song
the Flaming Lips recorded in 1989.

She said: Oh, my dear,
you grow old. You grow old.
You make me
want to slip on my white dress
and slice
the tips of all your fingers.

He sang: Come dance with me,
my lifeless queen, come dance
until tomorrow. I waged the moon
you'd rise a star
that fell a flower.

The queen of vampires moaned.

Oh, my black-eyed lover,
let your bloody fingers
jackson-pollock my white dress.

When Joe Pass Plays Guitar

I was thirteen 
when she laughed at my voice,
the choir teacher, that
sexy broad who gave me
my first hard-on.

I sang a scale
I wouldn't learn for seven years.

She laughed at me.

Fuck music
is what I learned from her.

I wanted to blast bass
for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
or bust drums for DNA.

I quoted Rimbaud for the goats
I milked every morning
before the school bus arrived.
When I squeezed those tits at night,
I quoted Walt Whitman.

The barn cats
moved like Miles Davis.

Oh, when Crockery Creek
topped its banks in April,
I ran naked through a third-
growth forest,
swum like Adam in that
muddy water.

I jacked-off on spring lilies
and slept on new moss.

No shit.

Herbie Hancock taught me to sing.

I purged my soul
on the clay banks of a little creek.

I tossed the ultimate question
to a suicidal Santa Claus,
spitting soliloquies at Mars
before I knew where the music ended.

I saw the fiberglass arteries of Orion,
the pinstripe suit of Ezekiel.

When I was nineteen,
I heard the horn of Miles Davis
before he took a chariot to the other side.
I saw him on the stage,
and he refused to look at me.

Where is Joe Pass on guitar,
my girlfriend said to me.
Where is black-angel music
when God says
make a joyful noise,
she said.

Fuck music,
is what I said.

Love Poem # 46

~ For Miranda

We are like Méliès,

that artist of the silent film
who died poor --
the fate of all who pursue

something out of love.

Face it. 

We make a handsome, 
paranoid couple

sleepwalking backwards 
hand-in-hand in 

the midst of plots 
and sheer drops.

We back our way into tomorrow,

looking down but leaning
both shoulders against a filthy wind.

We back our way
into a flotsam of broken voices,

the detritus of arguments

we never saw coming.

The Girl Who Bought My Bibles

Since she was seventeen,
she wakes early to watch
the gray-frost morning
yield to the day landscape.

She adores the way night
fights a graceful retreat
from the penumbra
of every pine shadow.

She can play them, too,
these branches waving
a canopy of shade.

This is her song.

She shunned this dog
since she was seventeen and singing:
 I'll be damned if I dance
and I'll be damned if I don't.

She dreamed this scene
for the rest of her life.

Dancing with the last cold
breath of last night,

she was seventeen and singing:

The day is broke.
Be wary; look about.

Then, window, 
let day in
and let life out.

Camp Life

Before First Battle:
First thing in the morning
is drill, then drill, then drill again.
Between drills, we drill
and sometimes we stop
to eat a little and have a roll call.

Before Last Battle:
After breakfast there is little
for the well men to do in these
winter quarters. The forenoon
is spent in poke, poke, poking around
till the appetite says
it is dinner time.

When Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow Woke in Bienville Parish, May 23, 1934

Bonnie said:

We forswear salted horse

and the hard take

and the random thrill

kill. Our nature is raw.

We hate all law, 

stool pigeons,

spotters and rats. 

Clyde said: 

My lover, ignore the riotous 

affairs of this raffish, 

faith-based sunrise.

Such a dawn has only one 

remedy for all that ails us--

a thread-precious death. 

Bonnie said:

We forswear the first

and final word we heard

about the kidnap demand,

the Kansas City Depot job,

and clinically proven 

hair-loss solutions. 

Clyde said: 

Say goodbye, my darling, 

to the bald apostle 

who pawned his soul

for a pair of soiled wings. 

Bonnie said:

We forswear songs we forgot

we wrote in my mother's bible.

We forswear bus-station farewells

and a journey that takes us down

a gunpowder road

where day waits in the cane brake. 

Clyde said: 

Abandon, my heart,

the art of letting go.

Let's ride our horses

toward all the towns

we plan to name our children.

Waking Upside Down Under Water

He dreamed 
he was waiting in line
at the Department of Motor Vehicles,

standing in a row of cardboard eunuchs.

They were holding hands like a 
paper-chain of faceless children, 

and they were singing: 
Please cut us out

just as fast as you possibly can.

He was singing, too,

and thinking of the last time

he kissed his wife's hand.

She was looking 
out the passenger window. 
I'm lonesome as hell, she said,

whenever you're around.

They were driving somewhere 
through flashing shafts of sun and shade,
pillars of pine-shadow and green-dusty light.

He took her hand
and said:
I wasted life. 
Why wouldn't I
waste the afterlife?

The Lament of Yoko Ono

I was so happy

that last night with you.

Every time

I see the moon,

I think of you

every single day.
 

You looked

like a skeleton

with skin on.

Wasn't that night

so scary?
is what I want to say to you.

And you would say:

Yes.

It was.

The Love Song of Don Rigoberto

All cosmic activity
that does not contribute,
even indirectly,
to testicular and ovarian arousal,
to the meeting of sperm and egg,
is contemptible.

Take a falling star. I mean,
imagine a meteor plunging earthward,
a flaming rock
slamming the shell of the planet.

The spawn of this
galactic lust,
my love,
is us.

We are space-dust golems,
silt-sifted mannequins
posing for a brief
season behind dark glass. 

I could beg you to sing,
my darling.  I could 
plead until you dance.

So what if a fox
prances on your midnight lawn
beneath the winter magnolia.

So what if I do.

As If Anything In Language Could Make Language Tremble

Two things interested God about poetry, 
at least the stuff 
God cared to read -- 
                                     music and voices. 

The way sounds rub against sounds
and words brush words
thrilled God, 
as if language had a mind of its own, 
beyond the maker's intent
or the speaker's desires.

God was distracted 
by the rhythms of human speech, 
the singular sounds that defined 
singular identities. 

These two qualities of language, 
the music of words and the spoken voice, 
created any magic there was to find in poetry,
God said.

The thirst that compels poetic practice,
God said,
is quenched by a vast river
flowing from these two trickles.

God said, 
You don't have to play
jazz trumpet or have a tune
stuffed in your back pocket
to be a poet, 
but you must embrace
the long apprenticeship in the language. 

God said,
You must
humble yourself on the shore of the Word. 

You must dive naked in that milky river 
and swim against the current of language. 

Tugboats will push long barges upstream, 
and the waves will kick 
you always toward the muddy shore.

                                               Ha! Hallelujah!

Three-Penny Desire

That morning, he woke and said:

Like the long shadow of a spike
sunk in a waterlogged coffin,
my heart points always to the west,

beyond the Mississippi River,
beyond the desert
and the Continental Divide.

I've never heard your voice,
he said, but your words
wake my heart--

mixing memory and desire,
stirring dull roots with spring rain,
etcetera, etcetera,

in the midst of life
we are in death,
etcetera and so on.

She said:
Stay home,
hometown homespun.

Stay home,
provincial provocateur.

Remembering the Aria of November

The morning your parents conceived you,
clouds lay across the sky
like bodies all asleep in beautiful disarray.

Your father said:
The gray centuries of dawn
blow secret kisses to our bones,
and shadows coil along our spines.

Your mother said:
The harlequin moon
sinks behind the trees,
and leaf-lean branches
lift the palanquin of day.

When your parents embraced,
a mockingbird sang
like an ancient, exiled desire.

Your Mother's Roses

Your mother's roses
bowed in that heavy light.

I was thinking who
will save the bright culture
of this digital world
after we're all gone.

This light falls
the way a torn kimono falls
from the back of an old arm chair.

This light hurts
my right shoulder
like a day-old flu shot.

Someone Somewhere Will Always Whisper Narratives

This frosted morning along the Natchez Trace,
pines lay long shadows across a low field.

Six Brahman steers lounge in dawn sunlight,
pulling up damp grass that sighs
thin steam along the shadow's edge.

There Will Be Smoke in the Cookhouse Tonight

She said: My lover, I give you all
the wasted timber and abandoned cord-wood
you can harvest from the stump farm of my heart.

He said: Hand me down my double-bitted axe,
my darling.
Hand me down my mattock and my cant hook.

Mississippi

This morning, first light,
I saw rolled hay bales
in a field of knee-deep fog,
an archipelago of silence.

Oh, when dawn whispers
day-secrets to night,
even the doe and the mockingbird
pause to listen.

Maybe She Would Like Some Water, Kapuscinski

She rode a postwar Polish bus into the dark
neighborhood of my heart. Through the window,
untiring street lamps in the borough of silence
invited her to smoke her destiny in quiet puffs.

On this bus, she heard someone playing
an iPod so loud that Nirvana's Polly
bled from the ear-buds, and she thrummed
her fingers on her knee with the music.

Everything that is
our strength
is also our weakness, she said
to no one in particular.

She was quoting from I Wrote Stone.
I saw a tattered copy of the book
stuffed in her purse. I saw it
when I stole her wallet.

No one comes to my neighborhood uninvited
without paying for the ride
except dung beetles, ladybugs, and cockchafers.

Out In the Desert, We'll Have No Worries

Every night
she dropped her dreams across an uncut lawn,
dark feathers I gathered in my sleep. I knew her lips
would kick-start my heart,
such massive drains on unknown power grids.
She said there was a factory that
manufactured what I needed most.
She said we're going downtown.
And all the headstones climbed Cemetery Hill
just to watch her dance.

This morning, Mississippi huffed and steamed
and sweated like a fat woman who sang thin, sweet songs.
If I heard her on the radio,
I'd swear to God she was a Swainson's Hawk
wobbling in on a river of wind.

I'd wait ten minutes
before calling my daughters
outside on the limp lawn,
saying, Girls, look at that, will you.
I'd say, Here she comes, this young
thought, driving against all that wind
and a mouth full of surprises.
I'd say, There must be diamonds in her heart
and ice on her wings.

Where is Kate Smith when you need her,
is what I'd tell them.
Where's Philip K. Dick, for that matter?

Ever since I came home from Iraq,
I can't find my memory.
I know it's there, biting its cud
and chewing its tongue. I can hear the old cow,
pulling the grass of my future
up in fresh, green fists,
ripping tender blades from a field
I dreamed
every night for eleven months.

But this song is for the sleek rat
who got fat on the flax seed
I left for the songbirds
that never came.
This song's for the river birch
and the white-nosed fox squirrel
and the fallen box elder.

I knew a girl, Holly Anne, who taught me to sing.
She taught me to dance. I worked for her old man,
hauling hay in summer and milking cows.
When I walked through the barn,
she wanted to run, she told me. When I came,
she sent all her shadows to tempt me, dark
feathers lighting all around my sleep.
She twisted, double-fisted all the foot-
bruising gravel of my dirt road youth.

Now, I am a mole. I'm a mole,
sticking his head above the surface of the earth,
and I'm only waiting for the fever to break.



.

How to Kill a Tree

When you decide to fell
the dogwood behind the house,
do it quickly. Saw it at the roots
and watch it fall.

Don't limb the tree -- dropping
first the dead branches, then
the less dead -- and let it stand
alone on that hill, a bare trunk
with two raised arms
cut off at the elbows.

Don't leave it there
naked in the Mississippi heat,
saying one cool morning
you'll finish the job.

Ha!

I'm a tame cat,
a domesticated feline --
shampooed and combed fur
subdued by a chartreuse collar and a pink bell.

I leave the mouse's head
at the foot of your mother's bedstead.

I continue to keep fighting the good fight
against my own bourgeois self.

Seeing and Believing

We are born with a mandate. We must strive to live in a perpetual state of surprise, experiencing the sensual world with wonderment. We achieve this variously. One way is to seek new places and experiences, which becomes a kind of drug for some people, a restless desire to abandon what is familiar.

I am less adventurous, perhaps, and more compelled by commitments to people and places -- so I tend to stay in one place for long periods. Therefore, another way to achieve constant awe is to look or listen or feel the familiar from unexpected positions -- as if it were possible to be born anew each morning, each moment.

Seeking out the unfamiliar experience in familiar surroundings requires a subtle discipline, rigorous in its way. Until this way of living becomes habitual, one must practice it. Do the unexpected, and see what happens. Make outrageous claims that even God could not support. Put your fingers in your ears and listen to your heart beat. Stand beneath a white pine while eating molasses-soaked grain and thinking of the first cigarette you ever smoked, the first dog you ever shot. Stop and observe the smallest details.

Once when I was up at Oxbow Lake, near Ludington, Michigan, where my extended family has owned property for generations, I watched a dragonfly free itself from its cocoon attached to the roots of a tall oak.

The creature was translucent at first, the color of milky tea, and its four, shriveled wings looked as if a child's hand had wrinkled them. It crawled up a blade of grass in a dapple of sunlight. I'm not sure how long I watched, but I witnessed its soft, pale skin harden and darken, and its wings unfurl into transparent iridescence.

Still, the dragonfly clung to the grass blade, and still I waited to see it take flight for the first time, which it did, finally and gloriously, launching toward the lake, its wings buzzing, and I was wondering how it viewed the world, and then a swallow swooped low and snatched it away.

What a miracle. What a gift to have witnessed such a small and perfect spectacle of creation and destruction -- and to have the honor of remembering it in words.

Love Poem

I danced for my lover under the Japanese magnolia --
slender tree whose every leaf is a tongue,
each one singing with a single breath this simple song:

If I am not with you, where will you set your heart?
If I am not with you, against whose thigh
will you warm your hands? My lover, bury me
and my words in the river
your father turned to water your mother's garden,
if I am not with you when I end this song.

What She Said

In the chamber of destinies,
she donned the first of her seven splendors.
I prowled the night forest,
sniffing and pissing to mark my passing.
I saw her putting on her splendors.

I spoke and broke the silence.

When my lips gripped her name,
constellations died. My words
toppled the hall of designs,
and she flew into the ancient forest,
dropping her splendors like glorious feathers.

Enkidu, you stupid, stupid man,
she said.