by Jay Rogoff
for bouquet and everywhere
a gray
absence
minutely detailed an obsessively exact
disdain of color.
What prospect
for such a girl?
What imaginary
bridegroom? What invisible
candle to light her chamber
with mystery?
What dance
to possess the wrecked
and serene foreigner
raised among us our Barbara?
For Malcolm in Carolina
An only son
an only son
sent a thousand miles
from crack wars and street sales
to wander where the mockingbird whistles
and not the police,
where instead of a jaundiced streetlamp there’s
the moon,
south to paradise
with tractors and machinery,
hulks and explosions
too beautiful, too filthy and dangerous
to keep a seven-year-old away.
To say he’s
got a home
in heaven or this poem—
what comfort? He
belongs where he can tell
the mockingbird’s mood each minute
and stain
his hands with grass and cowshit
to wash off in the rain,
where he
can ask on the telephone
hard questions of his dad in a northern cell,
whom he will someday see.
Night Light
Oil lamp glows
in the dark lone house
reflected
in a mirror
and two windows:
four planets conjunct,
bred into a small gala
of light
spilling out
to where I stand, staining the perfected
night
whose stars
are no mirrors
but a struck conversation,
a centuries-
late invitation
from abroad, translation
impossible,
the tongue
inaudible
the host long
still.
Which way home?
The artificial
lamp and its three
shadows
signal
conjunction: walls, room
and bed where you, love, lie
sleeping, descending through household space.
Paradise
overhead is
beckoning
hourly, seductive with fire
and black hole. Standing
in desire
between stained and stainless worlds of fire
I feel welcome
in both and neither, home
in that I have no home.
The Porch
Before we built the porch
the woods hammered the door.
Coming home we’d plunge
from poplars into the parlor
where the hand-me-down albino
upright slipping its grip
in the bass confounds the tuner,
where houseplants droop
and the jumbled silverware
can’t find its way
home to the proper drawer
or, when put there, stay.
Pausing on the porch, our handmade
halfway house
from green rectitude
into homemade chaos,
we hear the cold trees mutter,
Those unpaid
bills… that unplumped sofa…
that warm, unmade bed.…
Loosening nail and splinter
off the strict porch boards, bless
these our wanderings into
bewildering wilderness.
Adirondack Scenic
The blue-hung clouds dangle, a wavering curtain
above the stage-flat lake, as though a show
were about to start—I have a good seat
on the cabin porch. Offstage a cardinal
rehearses, some birds tune up, and from the trees
a wood thrush flutes an air like Debussy.
Offstage the loon begins an aria—
a long note—carrying it out onto the water.
A long note, a long note—and then it laughs,
it can’t recall if this is tragedy
or opera buffa. Back and forth it shuttles,
deciding, and before I can call you out
to catch the ending of the second act,
asbestos clouds ring down, and I run
inside, battered with the applauding rain.
Butterfly Effect
FOR ANNE DIGGORY
Enchanted on the painting’s edge,
a butterfly punctuates the page
where marks of pigment aim to fasten
explosions of a world passing—
frozen faults, stalled waterfalls.
The painter fixes wilderness
securely as the clip’s black spring
preventing the image from taking wing.
Meanwhile the wings of the live insect
waggle darkly to deflect
an inch of air. Oceans away
an ostrich shakes its plumes in snow
and ice caps swell the polar seas
as your lips brush my eyelashes.
Fastening here, fluttering there,
which wings tune the darkening air?
Chrome skeleton? Black gossamer?
Translations
Starts somewhere in a subcutaneous
shudder, somewhere beneath the heart,
gut feelings parsing into syllables
about as easily as I can translate
the chocolate warble of the hermit thrush
fluting through a gauze of trees
like blood through a pinprick or tears through ducts;
its trill erupts—doutz brais e critz— You tussle
with German in the bedroom, courting the vampire’s
heart, while I ransack our nervous
system. The birdsong charms its listeners,
striking us dumb. What is the meaning of this?
Dazzle
For such blue this dazzle
what sacrifice? None
too great, none.
Let liars in public trust go free?
All day.
Saints tear
singer and soothsayer?
Wives
and husbands strop knives
in the jealous sun?
Out of our power. Our power
lies in dazzle,
our responsibility
to such explosion
as eyes’ blue
through
my irising,
through
to the nerve,
a perpetual
losing
of all
but dazzle,
a flirtation
with
the perfumes of the palpable
an embrace cruel as the grave,
as strong as death,
the sky in desire open
upon
the slow dazzle
of this world, at once redeeming and reducing
us two
in consummate dazzle
to full
zero.
Intercourse
“You guys stayed up talking so late.
How come you talk so much?
Are you going to talk again tonight?”
My knee nudges
your knee; you tell your boy we’re sorry,
we’ll talk quieter.
He thinks a moment—that’s okay
with him—and goes. You stare
at me like a schoolgirl, and we count
the possibilities:
1. Like kids in Wordsworth, he meant
&nb
sp; it: talking. 2. He’s
speaking euphemistically
to (a) prevent his blushing
at knowing what he wants to know,
(b) pretend our thrashing
about comes as a trick of the chaste
night air so he need not
know, or (c) act unembarrassed
at our blushing that
we know he knows. Such ceremony.
Knowledge is quickening,
delivering grief or joy
talking or fucking.
Orienting
Cold facts can drive you nuts, what’s what, when’s when,
late spring snow subverting what calendar
we keep beneath the garden’s amorous trees,
collecting swiftly round our feet and—fragrant?
Oh! it’s blossoms—smell their delirious drift.
And isn’t our love like that? Isn’t it
urgent as fragrant petals, cool, skin-soft,
fluttering down to pile up in our palms
but disappearing at a touch, huge flakes
melting as the sea embraces them?
Mother and Child
1
Hell of a place to start a family:
an abandoned building, a reek like a stable,
glittering with broken glass, rich with animal
filth, where a teenaged girl nurses her baby.
His lips clutch; she snugs him like a stuffed toy;
the remote father hangs, invisible.
A family? I love her impossible
imagination, her holy naiveté
here in the darkness. Around them fires bloom
where folks cook up their desperate sustenance—
how solemn their night progress to the heavens,
entered through a needle in the arm.
They kneel crystal with offerings, their waters
distilled in the effulgence of her face.
2
Bringing forth glory on her own without
wise doctors or shepherding midwives—the rubble,
the shining shards, a frightened girl in trouble
with one star dancing in the firmament
haloing her through a shattered casement,
a pickle jar for Jordan pot—Godawful,
simply undivine, unbearable,
a watermelon bursting through her cunt.
Instead of screaming she felt the world shout
(she cried for her bible); instead of blood
she sniffed a lack of sanitation, a primal
lack of grace. Still, she’d done it with her body
and smiled: no need of anyone! as night
engulfed the ruins. The child began to squall.
3
My antennae sniffing out this young woman,
I hereby declare my desire to nurture
and… love? I’d even change his diaper
as long as I might advertise as mine
that glowing, otherworldly flesh. Alone!
I’d shadow her into a leafy arbor,
hoarding the secret liquids of my ardor
rising in me in an eternal groan
like Apollo in his fever. If she turned
into a tree spreading her limbs, I’d abide
forever in the odors of her shade
descending aurorally about my face
and savor fruit instead of fruitlessness,
plucking the fatherhood for which I’d burned.
4
It might be malnutrition, but she swears
she hears an orchestra of fiddling angels
whose music she inhales, although it jangles
like hip-hop, like the dying fall that pours
in from the street, from boys in stolen cars.
She hears him snaking through the bass viols,
his determined intonation, his sinuous
chord smelling of violent death. Through tears
(it might be malnutrition) she can spy
only rainbows. Wait: a leg, a gold arm
now crystallizing, see those platinum wings
whooping it up, having a heavenly time—
how can she step in time, eternally?
Rising, she whirls her baby as they dance.
5
We’re damned, exiled to kingdoms of earth,
given time to live in, given place,
given phlegm, bile, blood, sexual disease,
given air that won’t sustain a breath.
He can expect an early, tragic death,
given gang wars, the greasy-palmed police,
beatitudes of crack: compared with these
the pains of birth erupted like a laugh.
Around her ignorant finger his fist has curled.
She’s seized by joy. Death is impossible.
Nursing, nectar at her erect nipple
thrilling her, she trembles with the heavens,
and like all teenaged mothers she believes
the baby at her breast will save the world.
Life Sentence
At the bouquet of daffodils
from the prison greenhouse
nurtured and gathered
lovingly
by the hands of a killer
with Harley
tattoos,
hands that caress
the stems—as the guard
marveling over his shoulder
at his work has never
dared
even in dream touch his own wife—
and then quickly coolly cut
their green life
out like a light
like a lover
her look—
sun burst from cloud,
liquid
fire you couldn’t get
even if you put
all those blossoms in a blender—
somehow her look
took
its light
from the cut
flowers, a look
that under-
stood
only the body
in its volatile
cells can create the nerve-
shimmering wave
we love to lie about and call
soul,
love
giving no reprieve
no escape save
the daily
dalli-
ance, the descent
into the bouquet of fire where we give
off
all heat
all light.
Dirty Linen
In your absence everything
inhabits your scent:
empty coffee cup, sandwich, paper and ink,
all redolent
as the nylon, rayon, cotton
scattered when you unsheathe,
the pattern
of their fall
a deciduous riot,
rhythms of smell
rank as air sculpted by Sappho or Wyatt—
there’s a man I really believe’s in heaven,
when her loose gown from her shoulders did fall—
head spins to breathe.
Nerves flirt with overload
till to inhale
one more charged
molecule,
one part more per mil-
lion could kill—
Yet good is the life ending faithfully:
to have all matter knock
with your olfactory
hallucination, and public
moments veiled with the pungent shock
of privacy.
Only Child
A small child is standing at the bed.
That’s what you said,
that’s what you’re saying as I shake
off the shock
of your voice
rocking me awake;
then your eyes
open
and you chant this text:
Can you remember what I said?
C
an you remember— —You said
A small child is standing at the bed.
—Before that, before I woke. I think I asked
Who are you? What’s your name? Who are you? —And then?
—I can’t remember what will happen
next.
Something
awful, something
terrible.
That’s why I wake. —Something to the child?
—I can’t remember.
Hold
me.
You breathe deep, talk of your daughter
off at school, your boy
off with his father.
Imagine:
the only child to get you up at night for water
is the small child of this visitation—
voice jingling
like smashed glass, hand dangling
an eyeless bear—
our child. I cradle you, your back
and bottom sweating in the dark.
We breathe together,
and the dark at my back
cradles me.
Laughter
They resolved to invite to Florence the best craftsmen in Italy
to make in competition, as a trial specimen of their work, a
scene in bronze.… For the subject, they chose Abraham sac-
rificing Isaac, considering that this would test the competitors
in all the problems of their craft.…
—GIORGIO VASARI, Lives of the Artists
1
Anyone can model men from mud.
Make them better! Cast in bronze relief
to make us gasp and cast out disbelief—
in what? Is it incredible, a God
demanding child abuse? infanticide?
suffusing his concoction—flesh—with love
so faulty it flees at the drop of a knife,
its bronze clattering down the mountainside?
Well, can you do it? Entries must include
one ass, one fat ram anxious to dissolve
into a thicket, two slaves goofing off,
and popping like a rocket from a cloud
one punctual angel with a timeless shout,
zeroing on that bright glint at the throat.
2
Maybe any birth’s miraculous
but if your husband wined and dined a stranger
billing himself as heaven’s messenger
annunciating your new fruitfulness—
yes, you, enduring second menopause!—
so what if he ate with unearthly hunger,
turning your cakes and venison to ether,
your wine to air, your kid to sacrifice?
