Over a thousand years,
For a thousand different reasons,
And I’ve not learned
Anything,
And I’ve not forgotten
Anything,
And I’ve not forgiven
Anything.
I Gather
I gather
White porcelain pearls
Of mortal fatigue
As a child gathers spring violets
In bliss and vague
Unconscious destruction.
Hands that are innocent
Break the stems and tear off
Petals of creation
As if I myself
Could claim to be responsible for
My own invention
And not, like some wonder drug
Concocted by mistake
While searching for a cure,
For something else.
My cure has long since been found,
Was discovered with the world in fact,
Was discovered in the bees and fruit of Babylon,
Under the volcano of Chimborazo,
Beside the columns at Karnak,
Beneath the arches of Stonehenge,
Buried in the tombs of Yucatan,
Drowned in the waters of the Blue Nile,
Frozen in Kilimanjaro,
Fashioned in Phoenician gold,
Chased in Tibetan silver.
I have come to know it all
And to believe it
And will say it,
If there are any to listen,
Will even preach it although an atheist,
Would recite the litanies,
Say a year of rosaries
And a century of hail Krishnas,
Would fall upon my prayer rug,
Mend my tallith,
Kiss the leper,
If only death
Were not the root of life,
Amnesia,
Its bitter flower.
Dawn Is Cracked
Dawn is cracked
Like an inverted
White porcelain bowl,
Underglazed in
Ripe streaks of red which make
A marriage canopy
Over my head,
Except
I am
No bride.
Chilled by the cold saliva
Of low-cut grass on bare feet,
Very exclusive &
Sentimental meetings
Come back to me,
Resurrected in this
Word-less not-night,
Reincarnated in the posture
Of night animals
Now stilled,
Very exclusive &
Sentimental meetings
Come back to me,
Radar-guided
Through the astrological chart
Of my nodding bones
Like a romp of stars
Positioning themselves
For today’s horoscope: June 26.
Affairs of the heart
For Cancers
Will be rather tepid
Today.
Not so much
On your side
As on that of the
Other party
Concerned,
So it might be
Just as well
To sidestep
Sentimental meetings.
White Porcelain Ink Pot
White porcelain ink pot
Round, gleaming and smooth,
Like O’s history,
The Magic Circle
Resting like a miniature moon, frozen
On polished teak,
Split by a thin red line,
Opening like a pomegranate,
Revealing deadly red lead
(a nice touch that),
Passively waiting to receive
The imprint of carved phallic seals
Proclaiming the identity
Of someone not supposed to die
Unaccompanied,
Passively waiting to receive
Those compendious symbols
Of man’s idea of himself
(civilization),
Sculpted in delicate ivory,
Imperious marble,
Majestic jade,
Regal turquoise,
Imperial emerald,
Noble bronze,
Stately quartz,
Politicians, scholars,
Senators, poets, princes,
Generals, ministers, bankers,
Judges and priests,
Philosophers and scientists, all transfixed
Into the pages of History.
History’s idea of itself
Reversed
(a nice touch that),
Power reversed and perversed by that
Poisonous, thin, red line,
Each successive impress
Effaced by the one which follows,
Banker erasing Prince erasing Poet,
White porcelain ink pot
(History’s whore).
Curving Like a Colorless Vasarely
Curving like a colorless Vasarely,
Glistening white tiles
Shimmy down an endless tunnel of
White hallucinations,
Edged with shiny platinum pain.
At the end of this tunnel not light
But my own blackness,
Curling inwards like a slow
Cigarette burn in white paper,
Crackling and contracting with
My contractions,
Folding itself into flapping
White linen sails,
Making that peculiar sound
Of wet canvas in high winds,
Crashing in my ears
As the lead anchor
Scrapes across mahogany planks and
Plunges into what depths,
Sinking into white coral and
Holding.
Effervescent shapes
Reach round me like archangels
In the ozone landscape,
Bringing me back,
Brought back alive by
Gleaming figurines,
Fashioned in Pompadour’s
White porcelain.
Oh, the pomposity of it all—
A Louis XIV court accouchement.
I think of Rimbaud:
You are making a mistake.
I am not of your race.
I am of the race that
Sang under torture.
I am of the race that
Births alone
On river banks of
Deep green moss,
Staring wide-eyed
At the tilting
African sun.
Organdy Curtains Shifting
Organdy curtains shifting
In a rosy June breath,
Muzzling a shepherdess, a Cheshire cat,
My cherished figurines of white porcelain
Sitting in halcyon solitude
In the dappled, unfocused light
Of my fifteenth summer,
City heat rushing through
The narrow Victorian house
With the neat red-brick alley,
As I lay dreaming beneath my organdy baldaquin,
My grandmother
Entered the room without knocking,
A freshly painted Renoir,
A universe of firm voluptuous flesh.
“I’m dying”
Was the only thing she said
And she wept.
For the first time
My mind’s eye
Recalled her Christian name:
Elizabeth,
Known to me, until that moment, as
Mouf-mummy.
“I’m dying”
Was the only thing she said
And she wept.
And Death, like a slow blush, stalked
The high-canopied bed where we sat,
And I, my unused womb,
Free from Death’s dealings,
Held the trembling
Flesh of my flesh in my arms
And rocked the rock of my life,
Burned away in desperate,
Demented radiology.
I was a virgin no more,
My organdy maiden’s bed
Forever stained as
I gazed into the eyes
Of a dying woman I loved and saw myself
An Almost-Full Moon
An almost-full moon
Missing a tiny sliver,
Coquettishly, like a
Plucked eyebrow,
Tongues still water.
I walk the shores of my own blight,
A hopeless dependence,
The splinter off the moon
Resting on my naval like
The moon of your thumb.
I circle this forlorn lake,
Reflecting the enmitic landscape
Of another planet.
The words, the music, as incomprehensible
As of aborigines,
The mauve swish of bat wings and
The cries of wild geese,
The whistles of sleepwalking nightingales
And masturbating crickets,
Stir not Pity but Terror.
A Greek chorus laments
My blithe miscalculation:
A perfectly respectable, mathematical formula
That doesn’t come out right at all,
Filling a white, chilly planetarium
With desperate, frantic equations, erased,
Rewritten, repeated, reversed, tabulated,
Added, multiplied, divided, subtracted,
Scribbled over, revised, calculated,
Checked, canceled, double-checked,
Squared and rooted to the nth degree,
While a howling computer
Crouches laughing in the corner as
My hand trembles in defeat,
My heart squeezed in the horror
Of some fundamental step ignored in the beginning,
Some primary rule forgotten in the haste
To get on with it,
Now searching back in panic,
Trying to find the irremediable error,
As the dry, hot chalk of murder
Screeches across night’s blackboard.
White Porcelain Ribbon
White porcelain ribbon
Frosted over gleaming biotite,
Laid like a dining table
With verglass and crystal,
Slim trees strewn elegantly
With diamond froth,
Only the veiled Norwegian pines remain
Untouched in black,
A landscape made for magical beasts,
Studies in crystallography under a sad eye.
A unicorn rushes from the birches,
A snow leopard and his wife sit
Like stone centurions along our royal road.
A startled tree grouse scatters from her perch.
The glazed forest holds
The lynx and the manticore,
The mimic and the Gulon at bay,
The cell and bacteria of life suspended
Into an iced reincarnation of bestiary,
As the manticore darts behind the car,
And the ounce and armadillo crowd the road,
Flexing their crystalloid heads.
Out of the corner of my eye,
I spy the llama,
Lovely and lost in slow motion,
Black eyes two nuggets of jet
Set in superb superciliousness,
Long, hard swaying and rippling as it shakes
Snow droplets from undulating fur,
Clad in silver and icicle necklaces,
Its phantom-white frightens like
The color of mourning,
Nature’s tomb,
Hiding chaos in chill.
I close my eyes until I see
The black of spring earth,
The black of clamorous life.
I turn and smile at you
As we travel this country road,
Winding between wine and water,
Between Cheroubis and the Rhone.
The Carrellian
Peacock,
A white porcelain figure
In the tempered green landscape of
My sister-in-law’s private zoo,
Fenced in with five
Peahens
That bore you so
You don’t even stop to
Preen,
Dragging thirty pink eyes
After you like multiple sins
Too heavy to lift,
Too common to all
To bother about other than
Confessing weekly to the lonely
Catholic priest in Macon,
His stone Roman abbey harboring
A crumbling confessional,
Startled by the white of you as
You enter his black closet
Smelling of armpits and guilt,
Compressed feathers
Lapping phosphorescent through
The iron grid like a Mother Superior’s headdress.
The solitary Father asks you about
The cardinal sin of pride,
And you snort in his face,
Stalking out,
Opening your
Magnificence and
Showing your stained-glass posterior.
Gleaming, you walk straight through town
Nostalging over the perfect
Blue divinity of Krishna’s
Multitudinous loves,
Dreaming of perfumed gardens
Described in miniatures,
Returning to your private zoo,
Which surrounds the La Carell chateau
With thirty rooms
And enough clean linen
To last a year.
Don’t Move Your Arm
Don’t
Move your arm
Yet.
Let me bear the weight of it
As I bear the weight
Of hard visions in your eyes,
Bright as Middle-Eastern sun on stone
Flecked with yellow,
Sand, scattered like a split-screen
Of splendid images
That crack my heart like
White porcelain funeral figures
Sent to accompany the dead,
Shatter in the air and glare
Of an anthropologist’s
Stumbling cough,
A flashlight tracing
the sweet dry dark
Of a Han tomb,
Bomb-sheltered up till now
Against the rape of
Recorded History:
That bitch you serve so well.
Those cool gray eyes,
Marked like temple touchstones
With what has passed before them,
Filtered through a Leica lens,
Transforming,
Like a deranged spiritualist,
Misery and murder,
War and famine,
Lunacy and genocide,
Into a glossy two-dimensional
Black and white dream.
Is this why,
Having looked
(How many times?)
On flesh and blood
Parted,
You can’t look
(How many times?)
On me?
Without A Ripple Or A Crease
Without a ripple or a crease
Love passes through white porcelain tubes.
Babbling alchemist’s fluids converge
While I consult the astrologers,
My sun is in your moon,
Astrological fixed forever
In the universe of your flesh,
My spirit distilled in your flame,
To pure sapphire-veined gold,
The frantic is gone,
The formula, acid-engraved on my
soul,
My only guide as I make my way
Amongst your stars,
Without a ripple or a crease
Love passes through white porcelain tubes,
My heart a glowing coal,
Liver and spleen, pure rock crystal,
My body a transmitter of rare and charged
Signals from distant planets,
Our milky ways curse and rumble on the edge of space,
Violent configurations of a fate we never chose.
My sun is in your moon,
Our spirits morally obligated to conjunct,
Our bodies predestined to elope,
Shrieking through the celestial equator
Like tail-less comets,
Leaving traces
To be discovered later by our progeny
For that too is obligatory:
Like demi-gods we must mate on earth
To form a new race,
A new generation destined to be loved
More than we ever loved,
A race of pure bloods
Predicted by oracles and written
In tongues now lost to translation.
My sun is in your moon,
A prodigy of gravitational force
Traveling itinerant,
And without navigation,
Attracted by the irresistible
And refractory breath of great love.
Breaking Out
Breaking out
Of white porcelain skull,
Droplets of brain
Splatter against Memory’s transparent skin,
And the first lightning
Divides the instant before the roaring
Disintegration of a personality.
I hurl new pain not yet discovered,
Sucked through a jagged black hole
Into the frozen space of a new galaxy
As slimy, bloody and blind
As my original entrance
And with as much knowledge;
I swim toward distant stars,
Flesh pulled back in accelerated distress,
Hair wrenched from my head
As if shaven in collaboration.
I am not beautiful.
All my pretensions of normal womanhood
I’ve shed with gravity.
Fragments of myself
Hang in the vast airlessness as,
With the feeble determination of the dying,
I grope my Past.
Fresh portraits of myself
I do not recognize and cannot reproduce
Turn in slow-motion,
A prisoner in a glass box,
Doomed to listen forever
To the recital of her murders,
Relive every criminality of her life.
A break-out is not a break-in.
Flight is not force nor
Travel suicide, and this is better—
Flung where there is no light nor air nor time
Means there is no flesh, no feeling, no fate.
I’ve sealed mine in one blinding crash of crockery,
A hallelujah of crescendoing chandelier,
The tiny slivers of which
Enter skin and bone, lung and cell,
Microscopic new chromosomes
That change the woman
Translucent Crater of the World
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 10
