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BBR 1923–2008
JER 1923–2008
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Dedication
I. Bit Parts
Northwest Passage
In Shakespeare
Special Victims Unit
Subject, Verb, Object
Emergency Measures
Metallurgy for Dummies
Head-On
Iron Age
Classic Bar Scenes I. Apollo at Happy Hour
II. Ovidian Deposition
III. Pygmalion among the Young
IV. Twilight of a God
V. Orpheus at Last Call
VI. Apollo in Age
Zeus: A Press Conference
State-Sponsored
Echo
Bit Parts
The God Who
II. Vectors 3.0: Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
III. By the Numbers
By the Numbers
Birds in Rain
Are We Alone? or Physics You Can Do at Home
Prokaryotes
The Stars in Order Of
Origin of Language
Songs for Senility
Room Temperature
IV. Small Hours
Shore Town, Winter
Tableau
Postmortem Georgic
Night Lights (1977– )
Blackout
The Rich Man Sotto Voce
To a Tea
Slice of Life
Who Has Seen the Wind
Red, Green, Blue
Star
Reading Light
Roads Not Taken
Roads Taken
End of Summer
Notes
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
I. Bit Parts
Northwest Passage
That faint line in the dark
might be the shore
of some heretofore unknown
small hour.
This fir-scent on the wind
must be the forests
of the unheardof month
between July and August.
In Shakespeare
In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. Others confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
when they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, to die—yes, finally—in glad pain.
You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. O god, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.
Such a relief to burst from the theater
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with MetroCards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.
Special Victims Unit
Actually Persephone loved his loving her,
dark-browed, so serious: it proved something about her.
And for him, gloomy, overwhelmed with himself,
her brightness was more beautiful than beauty
and he basked in it. But when his turn came to shine back
it seemed her feelings were a storm of flowers
he could not gather, and the story gets ordinary:
he is angry at his heart and hurts her.
Demeter gets confused. Did a god steal her daughter,
or has she been living all this time in Manhattan
with her difficult husband, difficult job, difficult cat
and visiting once a year? Her love for what is lost
spreads so thinly over the planet
it’s not love anymore but weather. She goes to the police:
Benson and Stabler find her story dubious.
More so when they learn she never had a daughter,
though she was one, and that her vaunted power over harvests
apparently doesn’t extend to her wilting houseplants.
As for those Hellish threats on her machine?
Phone records show that dark voice was her own.
Actually she has bipolar Multiple Personality Disorder,
solution to all plot dilemmas. Fair enough,
since cop shows can’t say what we’d say: Life is a dream,
and we are everyone we dream.
When they come to get her,
her hands are clawed in the chainlink of the playground.
Hades, Demeter, Persephone form in her face of cloud.
She’s watching, of course, two girls on swings,
one going up while the other goes down.
Subject, Verb, Object
I is not ego, not the sum
of your unique experiences,
just, democratically,
whoever’s talking,
a kind of motel room,
yours till the end—
that is, of the sentence.
The language, actually,
doesn’t think I’s important,
stressing, even in
grandiose utterance—
e.g., I came
I saw I conquered—
the other syllables.
Oh, it’s a technical problem,
sure, the rhyme
on oh-so-open
lie, cry, I,
harder to stitch tight
than the ozone
hole in the sky.
But worst is its plodding insistence—
I, I, I—
somebody huffing uphill,
face red as a Stop sign,
scared by a doctor
or some He She It
surprised in the mirror.
Emergency Measures
I take Saturday’s unpopulated trains,
sitting at uncontagious distances,
change at junctions of low body count, in off-hours,
> and on national holidays especially, shun stadia
and other zones of efficient kill ratio,
since there is no safety anymore in numbers.
I wear the dull colors of nesting birds,
invest modestly in diverse futures,
views and moods undiscovered by tourists,
buy nothing I can’t carry or would need to sell,
and since I must rest, maintain at several addresses
hardened electronics and three months of water.
And it is thus I favor this unspecific café,
choose the bitterest roast, and only the first sip
of your story, sweet but so long, and poignantly limited
by appointments neither can be late for, and why now
I will swim through the crowd to the place it is flowing away from,
my concerned look and Excuse me excuse me suggesting
I am hurrying back for my umbrella or glasses
or some thrilling truth they have all completely missed.
Metallurgy for Dummies
Faint bronze of the air,
a bell I can’t quite hear.
The sky they call gunmetal
over gunmetal reservoir,
the launch, aluminum,
cutting to the center,
waters bittered with the whisk
of aluminum propellers
(your gold drink stirred
with a gold forefinger).
*
Faint tinnitus,
where is it?
Air silver with a trillion
wireless calls,
stop-quick stop-quick
of sweep hands,
crickets and downed lines,
their sing of tension,
that out-of-earshot
too-bright CD sun,
the heads of presidents
sleet sleet in your jacket.
*
They were right,
those alchemists.
Anything—
tin-cold
eye of salamander,
a fly’s
green shield and styli
on your wrist,
distinctly six—
anything might—
mutterings in the wet,
two-packs-a-day
brass of sax, bright
tears pestled,
or your hair’s backlit
(same as the rain’s)
slender metals—
anything might flash out…
*
Surely one sip,
mused Midas,
gin and silver,
surely her fine engine tuned
to a dial tone,
surely her famous sway,
gone Gold, gone Double Platinum,
Rare Earth, gone Transuranic…
*
Anything slow,
slash-black and copper
monarch settling,
the shy key’s glint and turn,
sunny-cloudy
brass-and-tarnish fruit
paused at your lips, reflecting.
Any velocity,
water under the bridge
my leap
like dropped change rings on,
or seen from a train
chicory’s blue
extrusion to a wire of blur,
the train itself
(of thought)
on its track and track and track,
your soft, incredible metals.
*
…surely these vast reserves
(Midas, that treasurer, surmised)
I must address
with a safecracker’s
listening touch.
I’ll be the anti-thief
slipping certificates of silver,
the slim faux-platinum
yen of credit,
palms flat,
over and over into her skintight pockets.
*
Eyes, blank or deep,
a lake
gone bright dark bright
(on thin ice giving way—
one: roll up the window
two: when the car fills…)
the fatal-in-seconds
keen cold of a mirror,
the blank bright blank
that any word might,
any word might not.
*
No one my touch
(that treasurer says)
can bear and tell
(apparently did not touch himself).
*
Wine so cold it’s nails,
rings in the glass, poured,
your ring and its click
two-three, and click,
the bar awash
in digital and silver
whispers of the disc,
yes-no, yes
yes,
and This
Just In:
incredible metals
the shifting of your silks
imagines, unimagines,
the thought-blue
alloy of your lids,
the pistol
chill of your lips
my lips might freeze to.
Head-On
Flashing vehicles, unurgent lounging
tell you what it’s too late for.
Don’t rubberneck.
Don’t look down the front of death’s dress.
Don’t say that white oblong on a gurney
looks like a bobsled, looks like room service.
Don’t say it looks like a man,
all bright days jarred from his brain
like droplets from a branch.
Iron Age
Lest he could not make out my name tag,
I signed that I was a god, and would eat.
He brought me, as was meet, utensils,
but served, Lycaon, pans of scorn: sauté
of which of the human muscles I won’t say.
No problem. Nothing I had not imagined
as vividly as its happening. Whereas a man
concocts strange sauces for his cruelty
that he may forget what meat he feasts on:
thinner and thinner his wife, his pale subjects,
his guests, ghost-thin, and at last,
in anesthetic dark, painlessly he tooths
the sweet flesh from the bones of his own hand.
All this I knew, without what you call horror,
but since he meant to horrify, I chose anger,
and thereafter, it is true, he was a wolf.
All one to me were his turns and swervings,
confession, lies, indifference, remorse.
Say that I showed him heavily how I saw him
from above: no wanderer but a map, unmoving.
Though a man thinks he can hide in changes.
Classic Bar Scenes
I. Apollo at Happy Hour
Shoulders and faint sheen
of lotion, torsion,
loose dress sliding
over flanks of glass,
silks so utterly watery
splashing, as you click along the shine,
on left shin right shin, but alas
the chase is a tired
and tiring metaphor:
let’s sit. It is
your Beauty that is omnipotent,
and I the god its constant
victim, automatic
as the keyboard you reach over
accidentally typing with a breast
aaaaiiiiyyyyesssss,
as the copier you press
with a page and another page
that lights again and again your face.
Hear my song:
I will walk out of the 14th floor
and into your ear like a wireless call.
II. Ovidian Deposition
The bull or swan,
face rippling as it changes,
speaks, and for a long, long moment,
you can’t tell luck fro
m disaster.
He recited his exploits and cutting-edge features,
all the arts and countries he was lord of.
He was wasted, I think. He walked on the table.
He said his voltage was so out of control.
He said, Relax, what you’re feeling is
the great experiences are generic:
when they happen to you they do not happen to you.
To take the god was to lose the man.
To take the man was to die of the god.
Either might turn me into stone.
I got up For a refill
from the Heliconian well,
and texted from the parking structure
Hadda go…
III. Pygmalion among the Young
By the Numbers Page 1
