And who is writing this awkward sentence?
A blackmailer, a girl in love,
And an applicant for a job.
Will they end with a period or a question mark?
They’ll end with an exclamation point and an ink spot.
Solitude
There now, where the first crumb
Falls from the table
You think no one hears it
As it hits the floor,
But somewhere already
The ants are putting on
Their Quaker hats
And setting out to visit you.
The Chicken Without a Head
1
When two times two was three,
The chicken without a head was hatched.
When the earth was still flat,
It fell off its edge, daydreaming.
When there were 13 signs in the zodiac,
It found a dead star for its gizzard.
When the first fox was getting married,
It taught itself to fly with one wing.
When all the eggs were still golden,
The clouds in the sky tasted like sweet corn.
When the rain flooded its coop,
Its wishbone was its ark.
Ah, when the chicken had only itself to roast,
The lightning was its skewer,
The thunder its baste and salt.
2
The chicken without a head made a sigh,
And then a hailstone out of that sigh,
And the window for the hailstone to strike.
Nine lives it made for itself,
And nine coats of solitude to dress them in.
It made its own shadow. Not true.
It only made a flea to bite holes in the dark.
Made it all out of nothing. Made a needle
To sew back its broken eggshell.
Made the lovers naked. Everybody else put clothes on them.
Its father made the knife, but it polished the blade,
Until it threw back its image like a funhouse mirror.
Made it all out of raglets of time.
Who’s to say it’d be happier if it didn’t?
3
Hear the song of a chicken without a head
As it goes scratching in grave dirt.
A song in which two parallel lines
Meet at infinity, in which God
Makes the last of the little apples,
In which golden fleece is heard growing
On a sad girl’s pubes. The song
Of swearwords dreaming of a pure mouth.
The song of a doornail raised from the dead.
The song in half whisper because accomplices
Have been found, because the egg’s safe
In the cuckoo’s nest. The song
You wade into until your own hat floats.
A song of contagious laughter.
A lethal song.
That’s right, the song of dark premonitions.
4
On a headless evening of a headless day
The chicken on fire and the words
Around it like a ring of fabulous beasts.
Each night it threw them a bite-size portion of its heart.
The words were hungry, the night held the fork.
Whatever the gallows bird made, its head unmade,
Its long-lost, axed-off head
Rose into the sky in a balloon of question marks.
Down below the great banquet went on:
The table that supplies itself with bread.
A saw that cuts a dream in half.
Wings so quick they don’t get wet in heavy rain.
The egg that mutters to the frying pan:
I swear it by the hair in my yolk,
There’s no such thing as a chicken without a head.
5
The chicken without a head ran a maze,
Ran half-plucked,
A serving fork stuck in its back,
Ran, backward, into the blue of the evening.
Ran upside down,
Someone huge and red-aproned rose in its wake.
Ran leaving its squinting head far behind,
Its head with a shock of red hair.
Ran up the church steeple,
And up the lightning rod on that steeple
For the wind to ruffle its feathers.
Ran, and is still running this Good Friday,
Between raindrops,
Hellfoxes on its trail.
White
Out of poverty
To begin again
With the taste of silence
On my tongue
Say a word,
Then listen to it fray
Thread by thread,
In the fading,
The already vanishing
Evening light.
•
So clear, it’s obscure
The sense of existing
In this very moment,
Cheek by jowl with
My shadow on the wall
With its long, gallowslike,
Contorted neck
Bloodied by the sunset,
Watching and listening
To my own heartbeat.
•
This is breath, only breath.
Think it over, friend.
A shit-house fly weighs
Twice as much.
But when I tell the world so,
I’m less by a breath.
The struck match flares up
And nods in agreement
Before the dark claps it
With its heavy hands.
•
As strange as a shepherd
In the Arctic Circle.
Someone like Bo-peep.
All her sheep are white
And she can’t get any sleep
Over lost sheep,
So she plays a flute
Which cries Bo-peep,
Which says, poor girl,
Take care of your sheep.
•
On a late afternoon of snow,
In a small unlit grocery store
Where a door has just opened
With a long, painful squeak,
A small boy carries a piece of paper
Between his thumb and forefinger
To the squint-eyed old woman
Bending low over the counter.
It’s that paper I’m remembering,
And the quiet and the shadows.
•
You’re not what you seem to be.
I’m not what I seem to be.
It’s as if we were the unknowing
Inmates of someone’s shadow box,
And its curtain was our breath
And so were the images it caught,
Which were like the world we know.
His gloves as gray as the sky
While he held us up by our feet
Swaying over the earth to and fro.
•
We need a marrying preacher.
Some crow, praise be,
By the side of the road
With a bloody beak
Studying a wind-leafed
Black book
All of whose pages are gold-edged
And blank,
While we wait, with frost thickening
On our eyelashes.
•
The sky of the desert,
The heavens of the crucified.
The great white sky
Of the visionaries.
Its one lone, ghostlike
Buzzard still hovering,
Writing the long century’s
Obituary column
Over the white city,
The city of our white nights.
•
Mother gives me to the morning
On the threshold.
I have the steam of my breath
For a bride.
The snow on my
shoes
The hems of her wedding dress,
My love always a step ahead,
Always a blur,
A whiteout
In the raging, dreamlike storm.
•
As if I shut my eyes
In order to peek
At the world unobserved,
And saw
The nameless
In its glory.
And knew no way
To speak of it,
And did, nevertheless,
And then said something else.
•
What are you up to, smart-ass?
I turn on my tongue’s skewer.
What do you baste yourself with?
I cough bile laced with blood.
Do you use pepper and salt?
I bite words as they come into my mouth.
And how will you know you’re done?
My eyes will burn till I see clear.
What will you carve yourself with?
I’ll let my tongue be the knife.
•
In the inky forest,
In its maziest,
Murkiest scribble
Of words
And wordless cries,
I went for a glimpse
Of the blossomlike
White erasure
Over a huge,
Furiously crossed-out something.
•
I can’t say I’m much of a cook,
If my heart is in the fire with the onions.
I can’t say I’m much of a hero,
If the weight of my head has me pinned down.
I can’t say I’m in charge here,
If the flies hang their hats in my mouth.
I can’t say I am the smart one,
If I wait for a star to answer me.
Nor can I call myself good-for-nothing.
Thanks to me the worms will have their dinner.
•
One has to make do.
Make ends meet,
Odds and ends.
Make no bones about it.
Make a stab in the dark.
Make the hair curl.
Make a door-to-nowhere.
Make a megaphone with one’s hands,
And call and make do
With the silence answering.
•
Then all’s well and white
All day and all night.
The highways are snowbound.
The forest paths are hushed.
The power lines have fallen.
The windows are dark.
Nothing but starlight
And the snow’s dim light
And the wind wildly
Preaching in the pine tree.
•
In an unknown year
Of an evil-eyed century,
On a day of biting wind,
A tiny old woman,
One foot in the grave,
Met a boy playing hooky.
She offered him a sugar cube
In a hand so wizened
His tongue leapt back in fear
Saying thanks.
•
Do you take this line
Stretching to infinity?
I take this white paper
Lying still before me.
Do you take this ring
Of unknown circumference?
I take this breath
Slipping in and out of it.
Then you may kiss the place
Where your pencil went faint.
•
Had to get through me
On its long, long trek
To and from nowhere.
Woe to every heartbeat
That stood in its way,
Woe to every thought . . .
Time’s white ants hurrying,
The rustle of their feet.
Gravedigger ants.
Village idiot ants.
•
I haven’t budged from the start.
Five fingers crumpled up
Over the blank page
As if composing a love letter,
Do you hear the white night
Touching down?
I hear its ear trumpets,
The holy escutcheons
Turning golden
In the dying light.
•
Psst. The white hair
Fallen from my head
On the writing paper
Momentarily anonymous.
I had to bend down low
And put my eye next to it
To make sure,
Then nudge it, ever so slowly
With the long tip of my pencil
Over the edge of the table.
What the White Had to Say
Because I’m nothing you can name,
I knew you long before you knew me.
Some days you keep your hand closed
As if you’ve caught me,
But it’s only a fly you’ve got there.
No use calling on angels and devils
In the middle of the night.
Go ahead, squint into the dregs on the bottom
Of your coffee cup, for all I care.
I do not answer to your hocus-pocus,
For I’m nearer to you than your own breath.
One sun shines on us both
Through the slit in your eyelids.
Your empty hand shows me off
To the four white walls of your room,
While with my horse’s tail I wave the fly away,
But there’s no tail, and the fly
Is a white thought buzzing in your head.
Because I’m nothing you’ll ever name,
You sharpen your tongue hoping to skewer me.
The ear that rose in the night
To hear the truth inside the word love.
Listen to this, my beloved,
I’m the great nothing that tucked you in,
The finger placed softly on your lips
That made you sit up in bed wide awake.
Still, this riddle comes with no answer.
The same mother left us on your doorstep.
The same high ceiling made us insomniac.
Late-night piano picking out blue notes
In the empty ballroom down the hall,
We’ve fallen in the gaps between the notes.
And still you want me to say more?
Time has stopped. Your shadow,
With its gallowslike head and neck,
Has not stirred on the wall.
The Partial Explanation
Seems like a long time
Since the waiter took my order.
Grimy little luncheonette,
The snow falling outside.
Seems like it has grown darker
Since I last heard the kitchen door
Behind my back
Since I last noticed
Anyone pass on the street.
A glass of ice water
Keeps me company
At this table I chose myself
New and Selected Poems Page 3
