In that world the children of demigods
were doomed, and if I survived,
who would be left to love?
No one knows anything until he dies.
The stones I dropped into the well
rest on the bottom, and the water
over them hasn't spoken, and so—
stone- and water-silent—and so, and so.
LOST HORIZON
They would come, blown off course, in their wheeling,
spiraling, then hovering, trash-like flocks,
and settle on the weekend seas of irrigated fields and parks,
like ducks on ponds too shallow for paddling—
or from a distance they might seem to float, though
in another sense held up by mirage and meniscus,
which meant you had to blink, refocus, to see what was
or wasn't there. Occasionally, in their midst
something bold, big-billed, and broad towered above them,
whose wings cast shadows large enough
to make its own weather, a foreigner among so many strangers.
And this was my first taste of the floods and plagues,
the rain that would not end over the unprepared lands.
And yet the birds, lifting one by one, retraced what they had
been,
while filling up the emptiness they had made, returning
to wherever they had come, if such a place existed for so many.
AUBADE
Quietly the mornings used to start
as if the breath escaping from our mouths
was meant to fill the room
and that would be the day's requirement:
a volume equal to its space, arriving
as the sun arrived. Then we could hear
the sparrows fussing in the pyracantha,
the river of traffic from the freeway.
Then the wonder of the moment was that
the day made room for us at all.
But now we know the place, the numbered
hairs, and have seen the figures of ourselves
along the road, searching for the street
that leads into the avenues, then through
the intersections with their crossing guards.
Look how far into the day we've moved
and yet we're still in bed, awake, silent.
Escape or stay I used to tell myself,
waiting for you to shift and touch my leg
so I might turn to kiss your lips.
BOAT RENTAL
From the shore we could see the work it took to keep
the bow straight—constant adjudications
of wind and current. The boat, a kind of shuttle
threading elemental warp and woof. Each rower
faced the direction of his going, away from where he'd stood.
When the storm blew up they struggled to return.
Earlier, when it had been our turn and the water smooth
with intermittent scuds that slapped a beaver's tail
against the skiff, I thought, "Who doesn't love
the middle of his life?" My voice whispering
crucial adjustments, not anticipations
but greetings of air and water, mediums of resistance.
And then a man's voice, as if along a wire, traveled
from his mouth, in the middle of the lake, to my ear:
"Put your butt down, now!"Advice offered too late
to the tipping-over canoeist? Or from the shore,
more threatening, more resigned: "Why did we ever have
these children?"
A teenager soaked from a water fight screams
for the other teenager to stop his splashing.
He doesn't stop, and she wouldn't want him to, really.
Amid their laughter and commotion a flock of mallards
rises from stockades of bamboo on Duck Island,
circles eucalyptus and palms, and then returns.
What was once over the horizon is all around us.
The instruction in J-stroke not so much remembered
as imprinted—the saving gestures—and, of course,
the world divided between paddlers and rowers.
("There's room for a thermos and small ice chest.")
Few make a journey of diversion; most want a moment,
not a story. It felt good, then, to be afraid for others—
to see the storm approaching and the boats racing
for the dock. Finally, we all stood under the boathouse
and watched the vessels fill with rain. Those of us who were dry
were quiet, and those who were wet laughed,
uncertain if all the others had returned. Nevertheless,
we took pleasure in the cushions lifting off thwarts,
oars and paddles drifting away, the thermos bobbing,
while a plastic sack caught by its handles sang above us in a tree.
COMMON FLICKER
Old nail pounding your way
into bark or creosote,
intermittent tripod
of legs and beak,
derrick, larvae driller,
when I look up from
my mind I see what
you are: feather-hooded,
mustached, gripped
to the steady perch;
an idea of the lower
altitudes sparged
with color, a tuber
of claws and wings
and an eye unmarred.
Wing-handled hammer
packing the framer's blow,
face stropping the hardness,
drumming and drumming,
your song is your name.
This will cure me,
you declare. This will
heal the fractured jaw,
soothe the vibrating helve
so I can eat, so I can sing.
INVOCATION TO THE HEART
Speak to me now,
alive, outside the body,
massaged,
lifted from this package—
rigged, hybridized,
a chunk of sulfide
breeding worms—
scorched, glittering,
unburnable.
The severed veins are eyes,
ears the pericardium.
No longer
an abacus of click and slide,
no longer the engine
of this or that fist
but a machine of foreclosure,
aurora of occluded sky,
veil over the fetish.
Fill my mouth
with imperfect speech.
Remind me how you are
part pig, part parachute.
Root in me, slow
my fall.
Remember that each of us
lay dead awhile
waiting for the other.
A NIGHT AT THE WINDOW
The moth detaches from a leaf
and swims up through the dark
to flutter at the screen
through which the desk lamp shines.
You could almost say its wings
are oars, the legs like walking
rudders, except it doesn't float,
it skitters upward, out of sight,
and then returns, while the night
from which it's made withdraws,
and the light, a star so far above,
yet hot enough to burn, unwheels
its arms. Nothing stays, though
in a while the day comes on
and you can leave the window.
But who remains to watch
the navigating legs, the unfolded
sculling wings? What holds the place
until the night returns—the bang
and flutter—as if across the day
a face is formed, sun-drenched,
searching, wise with what it sees
and then unwise, caught
> in its own light and then released.
THE LIFT
Birdsong in the morning air
and the whir of my neighbor's lift
as it raises him in his wheelchair
onto the bed of his truck.
Not someone to pity, he locks the wheels
in place and like a gymnast
on parallel bars manages himself
from his seat and then, in a move
too quick to see, disappears, though
because I've been there beside him
I know he's on all fours crawling
to the tailgate where he swings
over the edge and continues
in the dirt of the drive. Sometimes
when I'm weeding the garden
or admiring sunlight through leaves
the electric whir of the lift, followed
by its silence, breaks through and then
the hoof-slap of palms on the ground,
the scrape of shoes pulled along
by his strength, and I see him
as I did the first time, hoisting
a chainsaw, by block and tackle,
and then himself, into the blighted tree
towering between our yards
and which, limb by limb,
branch and trunk,
he cut down and stacked.
TO A CHAMELEON
After moving the clothes dryer to unclog the vent
I find your bracelet length of bone,
curve of vertebrae, spine
that is also tail, saurian claws
like clasps unclasped, and your skull
fallen away from its sharp neck.
It's harder now for you to understand,
harder for you to listen.
I once tried calling you back
with a pill cap of water, dead flies,
and something more absurd, a reptilian
whisper—all for my son's benefit,
who stood as still as you had stood,
leashed to his shoulder. And then
when unleashed you disappeared,
but left behind a writhing tail.
You were a lesson, at first, of love
that never repays itself and then
of absence and grief's forgetting,
but now what benefit is there
having found you, a fossil
unencumbered except by memory
and the sound of my son's breathing
and the chain and collar that still hangs
from your patient skeleton—the coppery
blue links and rusted white ash.
NIGHT STORY
There was an understanding of how the pages
of the book unfolded, like owl wings,
when my mother read to us, and how the words
of the familiar story, laid out in furrows,
skirted the farmyard—chickens, pigs, a tethered goat—
and lay like clouds over a billowing land,
or shadowed the white house with black lightning rods
while parked near the shed stood a truck as old as a grandfather.
Night, dark earth, brought darker clouds.
Lightning flashed. A red tractor, all but its nose
in the barn. Calm and clear and plain,
my mother urged the boy out into the thunder
and rain to drive the animals back to their coops
and stalls. Hair stood on end. My sister squirmed.
The great chestnut tree split, caught fire. Half
fell in the pond where the flames soon died
and half fell on the barn. All of this so long ago
a boy could reach the blackened tractor
without anyone saying,"It's only a story,
life doesn't happen this way."
But how else did hair rise on my arms the first
and last time the story was read? And what woke
my sister from her dream where she stood
in a forest, burning, among an alphabet of flames?
TURKEY VULTURES
The red drill of their faces, pink-tipped,
grubbed in gore, cyclopean in their hunger
for the dead but not the dying, lugubrious
on their perches from towers, in trees, where they
convene like ushers on church steps.
Heads sculpted to fit cane handles, claws
to dibble seed, to sort out the warp of the snow
from the woof, unwind the gray bobbins of brain.
assiduous as cats as they clean, wing scouring
wing, until the head polished like a gem
gleams, and the ears no more than lacy holes
are sieves for passing air or molecules of gas.
These birds, who wear the face of what will last,
congregating but not crowding, incurious
and almost patient with their dead.
IN MAY
In May the paths into the dunes
are roped off from foot traffic
because the birds amass to breed.
You can watch them through binoculars
from the edge of a parking lot,
white invisible deltas that drop
and glint, cataractous floaters
against the sun, rising from the sea
or fluttering midday from nests
spiked inside the broken clumps
of compass grass. Or on a plaque
read about a lighthouse stretched
like bones beneath the waves.
When Heraclitus observed,
"You can't step into the same river twice,"
did he mean you couldn't trust
experience or thought to illustrate
how "nature loves to hide" beneath
its own swift surface? Did he mean
there's pleasure in deception,
not despair, delight when we recognize
a tern's or plover's flash and glitter,
silhouettes that navigate thermal rivers,
declare themselves like scraps of paper,
then disappear?
SHELLEY'S GUITAR
How much more beautiful it is
because it's Shelley's guitar—
a coffin of trapped song
in a body like a grave.
Because it's Shelley's guitar
it's been put on display,
a case within a case,
a wooden hand inside a velvet glove,
and nearby, the torn copy of Adonais
that held his heart for thirty years.
Next to it, other incomparable relics:
his baby rattle, a watch, the plate
off which he ate the beautiful
raisins of his diet. Everything
encased, preserved, though
the heart now is only a stain, a watermark
on pages his widow used to save it.
Never mind the guitar was given to his friend
Jane, as if it were the heart
unauctioned, a neck
with tuning pegs, gut strings, arabesque
filigree. And never mind the guitar
was meant to be a pedal harp
he couldn't afford. "Take this slave
of music," the poem says,"for the sake
of him who is the slave of thee."
Whose heart is it but Shelley's?
Whose grave, whose book, whose glove and raisins?
All those things that have been given
either by "action or by suffering,"
left behind, collected, to prove
the dead have substance.
BARDO
Dangerously frail is what his hand was like
when he showed up at our house,
three or four days after his death,
and stood at the foot of our bed.
Though we had expected him to appear
in some form, it was odd, the clarity
and precise decrep
itude of his condition,
and how his hand, frail as it was,
lifted me from behind my head, up from the pillow,
so that no longer could I claim it was a dream,
nor deny that what your father wanted,
even with you sleeping next to me,
Dark Wild Realm Page 3
