by Jay Rogoff
You’d laugh too. And such laughter! a music
ringing down centuries, preserved in books
like wedding roses, like a butterfly,
a dry, sly rustle snickering, a goy
in synagogue, the unbelieving smirk
of Ravenna churches, those shocked mosaics.
3
The angel gestures toward the ram. The son’s
bound body torques up from the pyre, his eyes
nudging the angel’s hand. The servants discuss
the happy ram, the donkey thoughtfully listens,
and a lizard, crawled from under the bronze
gleam of a stone, reflects. Even the father’s
old cloak, flinging a threadbare corner, swears
that on a nearby cliff the ram sits and suns,
an obvious solution, overlooked
only by the old man, his forearm cocked,
knife mindless as a compass needle, his bent
body scything away from the quadruped
and toward the bleating boy, two souls prepared
for the bleak relief of disappointment.
4
And now the boy’s become an animal.
Hear how he squeals! But you’d squeal too, arms bound
behind your back, your trussed joints swiftly browned
over the laughing flame heating the marble
altar to a shimmer. Your father’s arms cradle
your dark head—inhaling, you almost swooned
beneath the caress of his hardened hand,
slithering awake as from a tonsil-
lectomy. Damn his passion for instructions!—
rigid as a falling campanile,
his stern robe descending in tiers. Your shrieks
fly to his ear, buzzing their sweet corrections.
He’s deaf as bronze. Sometimes it takes an angel,
someone to grab an arm; whatever works.
5
Funny how it all happens in time’s nick,
ticked on a fallen watch. We should have guessed
the kid’s gizzard had to escape unsliced:
in a frieze on the altar hot as love’s nook,
our superpatriarch redeems the tyke.
My hero, cries mama. Hands unclutch her breast
to take the erect bouquet. We are blessed,
and our grapevines hang weary with good luck.
Bronze seduces us to believe permanent
say, those absurd shoes that carried our first
steps, bookends for mother’s family bible
through which our hero’s boy lugs his bronzed moment
when, like cider laughing from an apple,
the spirit from his body could have burst.
6
How much richer, my life before the angel.
One time we hiked, and he knelt on the mountain;
I hadn’t known a man might kill his son,
and I tried to laugh. Flames lapped like the spaniel
mother swore we couldn’t afford. The tickle
of his bronze blade, excited in the sun,
stropped on my neck! If only he’d not seen
the ram. Years later, that rank smell of rough wool
made me weep for that knife, those wings, the tears
of joy my father misinterpreted.
Blindly I blessed my son, my heel, who thought
he’d snookered me. Ha! Selling soup to Stupid!
Soup! So light, dark, it all boils down to bless,
curse. What angel ever dealt with that?
7
The story ends happily. All survive
save the ignorant ram, white as a Hindu’s
widow, scratching himself, oblivious.
The servants stop in midgossip. They knife
thorns from soles, and wonder if the stream’s safe
to drink. The lizard flicks his tongue and crawls
back under his rock. The angel hustles
home, bolting his door. How can people live?
The father brings the son home to the wife
and over mutton stew they share a laugh.
The old man, passing on his old belief,
dies leaving the son to confound his own
twin sons, hopelessly blessing the wrong one,
life bumbling on in comparative relief.
2)
Venera
How sholde any cherye
Be withoute stoon?
And how sholde any dove
Be withoute boon?
How sholde any brere
Be withoute rinde?
How sholde I love my lemman
Withoute longinge?
The Reader
So many distractions!—the angels crooning
next door, the organ throbbing down the hall,
out on the Sheep Meadow where she likes to stroll
crowds demonstrating at the fountain, chiming
like crystal. She’s tuned out the singing, the groaning
virginal, the shouting colors of the parade,
and the jeweled gravity of her brocade
hangs on her like air. What can she be reading?
She happens to turn, happens as she turns
the page an old hand chances to have written,
her index finger marking what must happen.
Lips parted—chanting or astonished—she
happens to read the one book whose one story
chances inevitably to be hers.
The Mother
Not my mother, certainly, not any-
body’s mother, yet despite the down-
cast glance, her face glows—that serene playground
look you see on young moms in the city:
engrossed in bestseller lust, but if some bully
tries to nail her lamb, her clear, alert skin
will hum brave as an apple, and struck blind
by love the little thug will slink away.
Such wide-set knees could magnetize a lover
marking beneath her gown a field of power.
Enthroned as on a birth chair, she delivers
us with one push into the universe,
rays of light loosed from her loose-shaken hair—
oh my, my children’s, everybody’s mother.
The Whore
Behold the painted woman on her throne,
my madonna of the patient thighs
whose book, transfiguring her loneliness,
tells tales of angels breathing on the phone,
falling to weightless knees with a heavenly groan.
If only they wore flesh for underclothes,
those off-key choirboy-toys. Sighing seductress,
bone-sick apotheosis of the bone,
if I could prime under your oily glazes
till your book smacked the floor, I’d wring a cry
from your high throat. Throw off your diadem.
Apprentice me beneath your jeweled hem
to labor in profound, unpainted places
I can’t get free. But I would pay, and pay.
The Light
The gold light’s created in the east trees,
abrupt against trunks, lovely in the limbs
looming like X-ray bones. In these rooms
new light makes everything antique—the brass
bed, oak dresser, last night’s whisky—suffuses
the rediscovered world like gilt combs
combing gold hair, winnowing from my dreams
streaks of sheer light whose falling mess of rays
eliminates the need for clothes. White light
at day’s height batters us from far above
the trees, wanting nothing to do with skin’s
effusions or healthy glow, but like night
indifferent to the colors of my love,
the gold light that dances around her bones.
The Window
On one side of the window lives t
he world,
on the other the word. Her articulate
heat permeates the gloom, kindling my sight
till it flames like a movie frame stalled
in the projector. Alas, my poor world, charred
past repair! Let it fall to her maidish fate,
yes, she does windows, millennia of soot
redeemed on long hair, just a smidge of nard;
then with her lips she’ll seal the brittle glass,
annealed by syllables that radiate
their glow through layers translucent as her skin.
If ink on paper glittered like her glazes,
I’d wrestle down opaque words to create
a stained world as transparent as our own.
The Daughter
I fall in love too easily with daughters
who’ve got this thing for Daddy. Subtle Barbara
sprawls meditative as a saint—her tower
in mid-erection, Papa’s hundred workers
grunting—reading her book. Astride the tractor’s
fender, my first wife chattered to her somber
father. The haying kept her happier
than wading at the Cape, quaint towns in Flanders,
the altar’s sworn embrace, the nuptial bed.
Cut out the squawking. Here’s one more beauty hung
up on Pop, hovering like a hawk over
his princess, talons out for any lover
who flashes like a falcon on her string,
homing to that heart kept chaste for Dad.
The Door
Either a door is swinging or it’s still;
it’s open or it’s shut. I can imbibe
aromas, I can hear an angel sob—
me, moaning in poor prayer as I kneel
holding my breath, beholding through the keyhole
no Degas glimpse of her astride the tub
but full-spread thighs beneath her velvet robe.
Haven’t I given you my naked soul?
Open to me my perfect one, my dove.
The ushers have removed the last drunk guest.
Feel your heart buck against mine as we clutch—
Hey! Open up! Clocks are striking, let’s thrust
the bolt aside, our fingers dripping flavor.
I stand ready, hand trembling on the latch.
The Vessel
It’s hard to conceive. I’m conducting research:
the leading candidates are cosmic rays,
some word raking hell through the universe,
a magic seed, or, in the joke a drunk French
priest once told me, “C’était le pigeon, Joseph.”
Picture it in a flask, like the old Pyrex
stomach where Rolaids used to neutralize
our belly’s sins. It’s not the clearest image,
this cockeyed gnostic gynecology.
Still, her carriage in that heavy crown and dress,
the oceanic patience in her face,
and the calm finger that holds off for later
her book’s climax, which she knows she’ll get to,
confide her love can bear the world and me.
The Virgin
Her back turned on his primal nakedness,
her downcast eyes defy the gaze of the naked
woman, a fallen version of herself naked.
She reads aloud to gilt her loneliness,
rose rising in her face, the syllables
clothed in her clear soprano as the body
with muscle, bone, and sphincter clothes a void,
in garments rich and pure as nakedness.
The midnight velvet of her gown redeems
her own untouchable, her own un-
imaginable nakedness—bare arms,
breasts, belly, maidenhood in a golden grove.
Forever in her cloth of honor’s weave
a gold horse kneels, bearing its golden horn.
The Sister
In the Park marching, voices ringing, at stake
all vulnerable virtue, “No more!” they shout,
“No more martyred sisters! Take back the night!”
By day the tower rises and the lock-
smith labors. Some of the best will starve stuck
in penthouse keeps, some stumble in the street
where a knife at the throat cuts off debate.
Don’t be oblivious. Put down that book.
And when the dance floor heats up, don’t react;
keep cool, a phoenix—no smiles, no eye contact:
that de la Renta suit conceals a slasher.
“Hey, sister,” whistles the construction worker.
“Is it a good book?” whispers the junk-bond broker.
How shall the world be saved, beloved sister?
The Field
But into what shall we beat our plowshares?
The grain strains skyward with the best of us,
but my love keeps its vigil in the furrows
where zygotes sprout in passion, where the source
suckles the jailbreaking seed, drunk with tears,
until, against the air, it joins the lace
lining the field’s lips, only to shoot like rice
back earthward, raining on us in the mire’s
embrace. So all aspiration recycles.
Love straitens us to drag us in the ditch,
one of the universe’s dirty jokes
you wouldn’t tell at the drunkenest party.
But it’s our joke, our love that’s rude and dirty,
and when my lady suffers an itch, I scratch.
The Ark
She’s so well-built, so trim, that any wind blows
her gently. Despite the warped world, she weathers
the wickedness of pimps and undertakers,
steering by her constellated virtues
her living cargo through the roughest seas
to port, where she must fend off smirks of sailors
and smart remarks of salesmen; and she batters
them back simply by averting her gaze.
In the warm hold, hidden, the animals
smolder, steam wafting from their hides and nostrils,
spring coiling round them, long cooped up, kept chaste,
a rumbling as in the guts of the earth—
can she keep these beasts clean, mad with their fast,
this keen desire desiring to give birth?
The Queen
Smell the lilies and the columbine,
intoxicating rose, seductive lily
of the valley, come smell! Can’t they die?
Must they suffer the hothouse of her crown,
the stars of her triumphant constellation,
these fresh-cut flowers trumpeting the sky,
woven into jewels, pearls, filigree,
the spoil of oysters and the bloodstained mine?
Well, she’s a queen, our lady must exploit
her naked subjects to keep lushly dressed—
fair tribute to the fair. I swear by the First
Amendment to stand erect. The cheapest
whore is as worthy of rank worship. Yet
smell those flowers, the perfume at her throat!
The Handmaid
After traveling all day you’ll arrive
half-dead, an inn where upstairs you’ll discover
a bed so made you’d choose to sleep forever
or immortalize the shredding ache of love
as though such verging on climax were life.
You’ll ask, “Who is the angel of this chamber?”
and hearing water poured into a laver
turn and be taken by her. How to save
her from these rooms, the dusty uniform
in which she curtsies now, how to transform
her—jewels! robes!—what words of veneration?
A kiss might lure her into bed, where you
might barter some cheap ring. S
uch dreams, my hero,
such velvet longings. Such imagination.
The Soul
Flesh creates language, launching empty air
through her svelte throat’s muscular double reed,
tongue and teeth drumming it to crescendo
up over her lips’ sensuous sculpture.
Her word shrinks my world to a sheer idea.
And flesh makes paint: bones and muscles grind
earth; a dollop of oil, some sweat, and I stand
in my round world with a flat paramour
wrecking my perspective, offering me
a book, a blessing, a piece of fruit, salvation,
as if the flesh I paint could make me spirit.
Clothes make men. The dance drives ecstasy.
No fire to her beauty without ignition,
no life without the bed, the people in it.
The House
The house is packed, stacked. Bodies assemble
to watch a ballerina in a hush
of music—make it Suzanne Farrell—push
sex skyward into an ethereal
realm. Here in the fourth balcony hearts tremble
at such elevation, her arabesque
rippling up through the dark while ushers blush
at the elongate angle of her ankle.
The Gothic architecture of her body
obliterates all sense of ours, its lame
excuses melting with its aches. My lady
is built like that, propped up by knees and elbows;
the shelter of her hair, her hearth call, “Dance.”
Enter, and be danced to another home.
The Earth
Deep in a black hole see my bluest lady,
blue luminosity fixed like a jewel,
tilt 23° from vertical
the axis of her head, her upper body
and mind bent like a divining rod toward me,
allowing me latitude from pole to pole.
I hope no more than to play her footstool;
the curtains of her robe descending round me
bring night lit by aromas of the sea,
the harbors of a sunken continent
of her desire rotating hourly by our
jeweled movement. Why turn to lighter day?
Stay to rain on this mutable planet
