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For all the Roberts
No death for you. You are involved.
Weldon Kees
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
The Second Slaughter
Again, the Body
My Father Kept the TV On
After the Names Are Gone, the Damage Will Remain
To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall
The Caucus
Domestic
Skedans
I Could Name Some Names
Cold Snap, November
Auntie Roach
Another Treatise on Beauty
Bad French Movie
Proximity to Meaningful Spectacle
Hokkaido
At the Hatchery
Victor the Shaman
Wheel
After Reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead
The Black Rider
Pioneer
Fireball
To Carlos Castaneda
300D
Photograph: The Enemy
Photograph: Grandfather, 1915
Gleaner at the Equinox
Lubricating the Void
Not Housewives, Not Widows
Freak-Out
Maypole
Matins
Black Transit
Heronry
Les Dauphins
Rashomon
Stargazer
The Unturning
Wild Birds Unlimited
Bats
Autothalamium
Red Hat
This Red T-shirt
The Wolves of Illinois
Pharaoh
Samara
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Copyright, Credits and Feedback Link
Donor page
The Second Slaughter
Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
behind his chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom. Then he lays out
a banquet for his men, oxen and goats
and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat
until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.
The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—
in the morning more animals must be killed
for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds
no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;
not even heaving four stallions on the pyre
can lift the ballast of his sorrow.
And here I turn my back on the epic hero— the one who slits
the throats of his friend’s dogs,
killing what the loved one loved
to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent
by vanishing from my concern
after he throws the dogs onto the fire.
The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.
When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once
I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement
though it is not.
Again, the Body
I have become what I have always been and it has taken a lifetime, all of my own life, to reach this point where it is as if I know finally that I am alive and that I am here, right now.
TOBIAS SCHNEEBAUM, Keep the River on Your Right
When you spend many hours alone in a room
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—
this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal
but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us
do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,
from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit
a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,
who walked four days into the jungle
and stayed for the kindness of the tribe—
who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?
This could be any life: the vegetation is thick
and when there is an opening, you follow
down its tunnel until one night you find yourself
walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved
friends are using their stone blades
to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,
though the chunk I ate was bland;
it was only when I chewed too far and bled
that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.
How difficult to be in a body,
how easy to be repelled by it,
eating one-sixth of the human heart.
Afterward, the hunters rested
their heads on one another’s thighs
while the moon shined on the river
for the time it took to cross the narrow sky
making its gash through the trees…
My Father Kept the TV On
while the books lay open, scattered facedown
like turtles sunning, the jackets hunched, with a little
hump in the hunch from the trough of the spine,
bearing a white sticker with the typewriter’s Courier
font rendition of the decimal system
under the wrapper, hazy like fog
taped to the book, the tape’s yellow orange-almost
(depending on how old) reinforced with threads.
Meanwhile his eyes drifted back and forth
back and forth until the book slid to the floor.
The flag then. Then snow. Or the corporate logo
of the eye— all night the night would watch him,
plural, them. Just ask my friend whose father
was a drunk, a highball glass on the nightstand and a swizzle
stick to mark his place. Still, on Thursday nights
he stumbled down to the reading room
to leaf th
rough the new arrivals.
Oh green republic where the pilgrims came to land!
If I’m going to choose my nostalgia it is a no-brainer
that I’m going to side with books, with the days
before the lithium-ion battery, but after
Philip Roth and John le Carré were born, books not too
highbrow or too low, but sometimes thick
and overdue. Books the fathers read to escape us
who were the shackles that the plodding days
latched on to them who’d started out their lives with war, so this
was perfect, courting danger in their underwear,
feeling the breast of the vixen stiffen,
slipping their hands into the thief’s black glove.
After the Names Are Gone, the Damage Will Remain
Though the twins were not identical, they both had skin
so thin & clear I could see their veins’ squiggling underneath.
One with red hair, one with white
& the veins made their combined colors patriotic
if a little terrifying
in the auditorium where we’d assembled,
their tears falling in a formal style of grief
reserved for civic purposes, I learned this
from mothers who’d stood by the mailbox, weeping
as we filed by them in the school bus
six years before, when bullets ruined the famous head
of the famous handsome man. Now
the girls’ red eye-rims similarly deliquesced,
their shrill notes ascending:
President Eisenhower! Has! Died!
news that made me scratch an old mosquito bite
& scrutinize the upturned faces of my shoes—
even in my girlish nerdfog
I must have understood that some will not withstand posterity,
that all the bodies on the beach at Normandy
still lead to the muse’s turning her cool marble shoulder.
Permissible to insert here the twins’ white lashes
& the curve of their hot foreheads. But
how tentatively one must ask the nouns & verbs
to step apart for Eisenhower, though he ransacked
more than his share of cities. Like the moon
his pale head hovers, yet he does not go around
like some transhistorical Fuller Brush man
sticking his foot in the door
the pale girl of my ode slams shut.
To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall
Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood
swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance
while a helicopter chewed the linings
of the clouds above the clear-cuts.
And I forgave the pollen count
while cabbage moths teased up my hair
before your flowers fell apart when they
turned into seeds. How resigned you were
to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli
as they swept past. And soon those gusts
will mill you, when the backhoe comes
to dredge your roots, but that is not
what most impends, as the chopper descends
to the hospital roof so that somebody’s heart
can be massaged back into its old habits.
Mine went a little haywire
at the crest of the road, on whose other side
you lay in blossom.
As if your purpose were to defibrillate me
with a thousand electrodes,
one volt each.
The Caucus
I had my precinct wrong and went to Garfield Elementary
where the hall monitors would not let me through
because I live on the wrong side of the boundary. I could hear
my neighbors, listening reasonably to one another,
listening even to the man who is my adversary
because he leaves his dog’s crap on the sidewalk’s grassy strip.
If he wants to fly, Peter Pan has to focus very hard on Tinker Bell.
If he is quiet and he concentrates, then he can fly.
The girl who spoke sat in the hallway,
so I asked if she was working on her reading. “No,
she’s autistic those are her socialization cards,” said her mother,
who asked if I would watch her girl (whose name was Terri)
so she (the mother)
could take part in the caucus.
He can fly only when he focuses on Tinker Bell.
He can focus only when he listens.
In the classrooms, my neighbors sat in chairs
that shrank their knee-chin distance pitifully. I heard my adversary
say he didn’t think the candidate looked authentic enough
and that’s how history gets made. Quick
write it down before it slips
too far downstream.
Peter Pan likes to sing and hear Tinker Bell sing.
When he hears Tinker Bell sing, Peter Pan is happy.
In the classroom, something was decided—
I heard the collective exhale of assent
before people filed out, looking giddy and grave. When she returned
I asked Terri’s mother what was up
with the singing, and she said that other children
tormented her girl with songs.
Go tell that to a poet.
It would explain a lot about the current state of the art.
Orpheus sang,
and, like the Beatles, his song made the girls scream
so loud they drowned the song. Then they yelled
See yonder our despiser and tore off his head.
Peter Pan and Tinker Bell like to sing together.
They are very happy when they sing.
You know one girl alone wouldn’t have done it,
and this is not just a matter of strength. There’s a fuse
running from one of us to the other— lucky thing
all that’s in my pocket is this old packet
of moist towelettes
I mistook for a matchbook.
She thanked me, the mother, even though Terri
had been reading her cards to my dog. Note
I carry a blue (biodegradable and perfumed)
plastic crap bag, though it hadn’t been used yet,
there at the school, and I was letting it flap
from the pocket of my red flannel shirt
like the American flag.
Come, my adversary—
let us discuss the warblers.
How sweetly they torment us from the budding trees.
Domestic
Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,
feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store
where they sell food that comes in cans
yesterday expired. Picture it
perching on the dumpster, a corrugated
sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch
accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,
skittering on the cans. It has tried
to gnaw them open and broken all its teeth.
Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels
of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon—
chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells
from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,
with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light—”
we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.
Because we occupy the wrong animal— don’t you too feel it?
Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?
Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting
your robe into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped
fighting the urge to howl, and howled—
and did it bring relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?
Skedans
I paddled many days to reach the totem poles
not barged off to Vancouver. Tilting in a clearing,
gray and cracked, upholding the clouds,
the grain for a hundred years having risen.
The ghosts of Cumshewa Inlet kept trying to evict me,
but I did not want to leave
because the Haida had left their dead here
and once you step over a human bone while following a deer-path
you want to step over another, unless you are not ruled
by curiosity as I was ruled. Or had already seen a skull
mossy in its entirety, with three holes (eye sockets
+ the nose) + the palate on the duff.
Into which the green teeth bit, the moss
covering it all like luminescent car upholstery,
what do you do if you are just a dumb American,
I can usually figure out how to behave, but require years
to come to my conclusions. Now
the fact the reparations have come due
is being made clear by the photo of the skull
I took when I was young and dumb, this anti—
luck charm emanating green recriminations,
though I notice that I do not take it from the wall.
I Could Name Some Names
of those who have drifted through thus far of their allotted
fifty or seventy or ninety years on Earth
with no disasters happening,
whatever had to be given up was given up—
the food at the rehab facility was better than you would expect
and the children turned out more or less okay;
sure there were some shaky years
but no one’s living in the basement anymore
with a divot in his head, that’s where the shrapnel landed/or
don’t look at her stump. It is easy
to feel possessed of a soul that’s better schooled
than the fluffy cloud inside of people who have never known suchlike
events by which our darlings
are unfavorably remade. And the self
is the darling’s darling
(I = darling2). Every day
I meditate against my envy
aimed at those who drift inside the bubble of no-trouble,
— what is the percentage? 20% of us? 8%? zero?
Maybe the ex-president with his nubile daughters,
vigorous old parents, and clean colonoscopy. Grrrr.
Remember to breathe. Breathe in suffering,
breathe out blessings say the ancient dharma texts.
Still I beg to file this one complaint
that some are mountain-biking through the scrublands
while she is here at Ralph’s Thriftway,
running her thumb over a peach’s bruise,
her leg a steel rod
On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths Page 1
