want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep
I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces
of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.
I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike
on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.
Little Voice
I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice
saying this life, it was good while it lasted, but I just
can’t take it any longer. I’m going to stop shaving
my teeth and chew my face. I’m going to finish inventing
that way to turn my blood into thread and knit
a sweater the shape of a giant machete and chop
my head right off. The leaves had a green
aspect, all their faces turned down towards the earth.
This is exactly how I wanted to act, but I didn’t
know where the little voice had hidden, and anyway
who talks like that? What a loss, another tiny
brilliant mind switched off by that same big boring finger.
Clearly life is a drag, by which I mean a net that keeps
pulling the most unsavory and useful boots we
either put on lamenting, or eat with the hooks of some
big idea gripping the sides of our mouths and yanking them
upward in a conceptual grimace. Said the little voice,
that is. I was just half listening, one quarter wondering
what the little park the window looked onto was named,
and one quarter thanking the war I knew was somewhere
busy returning all those limbs to their phantoms.
Never Before
My neighbors, my remnants, in what have you chosen
to bury your heads? Shadow, said one mote
in an auditorium after a lecture. Some
archive explorer had just finished discussing
a group of islands. Inside me for a while
a tribe had theorized purely and wrongly
its location merely on the basis of tides. I was
feeling extinct, and wishing for a sudden
totally silent sliding out from the wall of twenty
or so very excellent beds so we the audience
could together engage in further collective
dreaming. I would describe that lecturer’s voice
as twilight shadow smeared origami cloudlet
but the historical ceiling gilded by the names
of agreed-upon great thinkers is a beautiful dowager
making her sleepy wishes into dimness
soon to retire gracefully known. I hear soft
seventies cell phone songs. Come home
those who love a librarian aspect. I am one,
for give her time and she will answer any question
no matter how spiral, no matter how glass,
so slow to judgment you can sit among her
like a reading room and read and think
until the docents come, they move as trained,
as trained they place a careful hand on our shoulder.
The door locks automatically but not before
wind slips in to do its research on blackness
which gets even blacker, on the fabulous black
dust intercom orchard of what happens
when people fall asleep in their dreams and dream
what they are. Have I mentioned lately
I have been reading a book about a steam powered
carriage we are actually in moving slowly
through the countryside towards the kingdom
and its ruined citizens? Have I mentioned tonight
we shall both stand before the enormous spiral
of wrecking balls in a dress made of laughing glass?
Yellowtail
The wind made a little movement
as if it were trying to reassemble.
I looked up from my affidavit. Sometimes
my life feels taped, and quiet evenings
I listen back. I hear the humming of the car
and through the windshield see the road
twisting down a series of cliffs to a very small
blue ocean that like the placid eye
of a beast that regarded our lives without
any desire to eat them grew larger
and stared a little past us, absently
flecked with gold. I would like now to believe
I felt like a leaf. Each night I told
my brother and sister ever more fabulous
stories about far away humanoid beings
with ordinary loves and concerns
swept up into galactic battles for peace
in which the dark forces
with their superior weapons and numbers
were always defeated by a ragtag company
led by slightly better versions of us. No one
ever asked where we were going.
It was all very clear without anyone
saying the dunes and the sea
would never hurt us. Every morning
I opened my eyes so gently I hardly
noticed the difference. Before I was even
awake I would already be flying
a Japanese kite, or sitting underneath
my favorite tree, biting my nails. Perhaps
I am still not supposed to say
advanced translucent beings with the spirits
of animals walked among us. Light
brushed their human hair and cast
their shadows across the tree trunks
or our faces among our games. Someone
was always strumming a guitar with a bird
made of pearl inlaid at the edge of the sound hole
and singing a tune about how helpful
most people are, especially strangers.
You Have Astounding Cosmic News
Dear sociologists, I have been asked to explain poetry to you. Thus
in the offices of dazed lute press the clicking begins. Lately
we’ve been conducting field experiments into our private thoughts. One
faction next to the soul shaped watercooler wonders whether
there’s any reason at all to remember the feeling of being a child. Is
it best to imagine oneself again beneath the desk as the rusted
air raid siren explodes with its bi-monthly ritual Wednesday afternoon
fear distribution? Like you I was always holding particular crayons
in the dimness of certain morning assemblies. I have been told
some of you think the only constant is constant observation. I know
city planners designed the city and still there are diffusionists who pace
the deep blue edge of do you know you can never try to discover
why why flowers in the cubicles. Between you and me the buildings
also have a space for the sparrow named never who does not sing
yes the cities die when you leave them, yes no one cares what you do.
The glass covered in dust windows of the thrift store display
a mirror from the 1920s. If you take it it will no longer regard young
lovers with important thoughts pushed towards the mighty river. I
will fall in love exactly about a million times and then I will die. Clouds
playing dominos agree. At Everest on Grand someone eats yak discussing
the endless undeclared war among the neutral provinces. Long
metallic articulated girders cast thin shadows over thousands of windows.
A photograph of a pacifist smiles. He wore a white suit, was a friend
to the poor and worked for the union of unemployed telegraph workers
who listen for signals pulsing as Joni Mitchell never said from the heart of
a distant star. He
was like my grandfather, after he died the city fathers
did not know what they were building when they built a museum
to encase a window in a wall brought from a far away country where
it once overlooked the sea. Evenings through giant speakers people listen
to troubled sounds whales bounce off continental shelves. Go tell
everyone everything is related, the rich own the clouds, and you can
always locate yourself with so many shadows to instruct you.
Poem for Tony
Sometime around 11 p.m. the you I was thinking of
left my head. I was in bed, among my white ten billion
thread count cotton sheets. The pillowcases cradled
my head like the earth a very young carrot.
This very white moment of being alone without
any loneliness I ruled and was ruled by like a benevolent
dictator full of human feelings he manages each day
to actualize for the benefit of his people. He feels
very protective about their souls. To him they seem
to be either tiny milagros in the form of boots
or horses made of pounded flat silver, like the pieces
in the homemade board game that glowed
the way they did just a little when it was his turn
as a child to choose which would represent him,
or small blue aspersions cast like the outside
part of an innocent candle flame that does not burn
your finger if you move it very quickly across.
This moment will never return. You were gone,
for a while I heard crickets and some kind of bird
doing something there is probably a word for between
hooting and whistling. Then the train, which despite
all those songs is not very mysterious at all.
Poem for John McCain
Today I read about the factory
where they make the custom rolling ladders
everyone has probably seen
rising through silent rooms
full of boxes or shelves
crossed by motes in the sun
#5 is my favorite
made of black walnut
with its hinge that folds a small surface out
for reading or placing
books on as you shelve them
it’s easy to imagine working in a library
for me at least there is something shameful
about how clearly I can see it
like I am thinking something important is not
I say tomorrow waits for me
but I don’t know
if I knew anything about the wars
besides what I have been safely told
I might understand
why they call him a maverick
when he is really just a horse
a horse like me except with dark eyes
terrible from his useless suffering
When It’s Sunny They Push the Button
and the sky
through the oval aperture
above your head in the form
of light that bounces
a little then rests on the walls
and also in the form of whatever colors
you can see and maybe
if you’re lucky clouds
pours through
maybe it’s obvious
and peacefully alien like a young nun
walking past the local establishments
in a university town in summer
where it’s always despite the superficial changes
the same time
even the rain
feels like rain after the evacuation
and even happiness
feels like having survived something
I can’t remember
Work
This morning I rode my gray metal bike
through the city throwing its trucks at me,
sometimes along the narrow designated
lanes with white painted symbolic bicyclists
so close to the cars too close to my shoulders,
and sometimes down alleys where people
on piles of clothes lie sleeping or smoking
or talking in the shade. Cars parked there
have signs in their windows that the doors
are unlocked and there is no radio.
It is remarkable to me that downtown
is always so remarkable to me. Every single
time I feel so shiny mixing my intention
with all the other lives, each so much
more interesting and easy for me to imagine
than the tourists muttering to each other
over their maps in some garbled
by traffic or wind foreign language I never
quite hear. From my window the old
brick factory building with its large white
graceful letters seems to be actually
proudly saying WILLIAM HENRY STEEL
to the sky, the building floats, up and to
the right but it’s the clouds of course
that move. Or is it? The earth moves,
farther off a squat little tower with three
huge metal cylinders that must be
for sending some invisible electric
particles out into the city. I only feel
free when I am working, that is writing
this book about a pair of zombie detectives
who painstakingly follow clues they think
are hidden in an authentic tuscan cookbook.
It is really more a sort of transcribing,
every day I close my eyes and see
them in an ancient yet modern high ceilinged
earth-toned kitchen, laughing as they
blunder through the recipes, each day
a little closer towards the name of their killer
whose face will soon to all of us be clear.
They have a little zombie dog, I name him
William Henry Steel, and this will be
my great work time has brought me here to do.
Lesser Heights Are Bathed in Blue
I’m staring out the window at an aluminum shed.
Periodically late March sun against its roof
flashes just randomly enough not to be a message.
A dog has wandered into the yard. He
keeps crouching until his balls I presume
touch the ice and he jumps and yelps.
What I find hilarious shames me. I am
house sitting. I am sitting in the house
watching ESPN. Daisuke pronounced
Dice K Matsuzaka throws a gyroball, very
slowly it seems to but does not spin
like a green dress on a mannequin in the sun.
I grow hungry awaiting instructions.
On television the cherry blossom festival
has begun. Already the trees have started
to bloom, along the edges their white
leaves turn a slightly deathly darker red.
Every spring amid the day we light
a giant paper lantern the Japanese presented
to us in 1951. Here I am hanging
a black light bulb in an enormous desert for you.
From what? People, I grew up a wonderful
sullen boy close enough to the capitol
building to dream of hitting it with a stick,
but did not. Inside there’s an arch
the exact color of the sky, under it anyone
can stand and barely speak and all the way
across the rotunda someone else can hear.
Now it is known as the Millard Fillmore
spot, but only to me. The world’s last
remaining Whig, I lie on my back thinking
we must defeat them, but later, after
this final highlight. A giant foam finger
> the color of a fabulous foreign lime appears.
I put it on. Wildly I am cheering for nothing. So much
for someone who doesn’t remember his dreams.
Minnesota
This blue vinyl couch
you bought is winter sky color,
blue but also a little white
with cracks like the robin’s egg
that fell onto the balcony.
The railing is painted
that green generally intended
by the authorities to make you feel
you are not even intentionally
being punished. For weeks
I did nothing but dream
I was writing a letter
to my younger self full
of useless benevolent warnings.
I wasn’t lonely, I was 22
and knew lots of things
I’ve now forgotten like how
they made the great rivers in Siberia
run backward, there’s a city
called Ólafsfjörður where every
winter hulls are left locked
in ice so they do not rust,
and what all of that had
to do with me. Now on my back
in Minnesota I am reading
about phlox. The blue
phlox is blue and can grow
to such great heights it will
no longer fit in any more poems.
Unlike in the Young Drift Plains
or southern tip of the Canadian Shield
glaciers here did not as they
melted deposit fertile soil,
only boulders and stones. I see
a squirrel I recognize. It’s so
silent I can hear his onyx nails
click on the frozen snow.
He watches a tree until it moves.
He has one main and an alternate nest,
and lives with other squirrels
in a temporary winter community
called an aggregation. I hope
Come on All You Ghosts Page 3
