Come October

Come October

This is the month for change
as my grandmother always said
when we floated on our couch
through seas imaginary and real,
with pelicans and honey pots and flutes,
if you may believe what you do not hear
then she is still living somewhere, floating
alone on bed or chair among her recollections
of the imaginary and the real, with her debts
and threats and the man hanging from the tree.

What was left of my childhood was lived in stories
of her and in that way by her, her autumnal romance
with Bunny Soerg, who mom would point out riding his
three-wheeled, basketed senior citizen bicycle oblivious
down the asphalt road that cut back through the woods
to the bench factory we took to scout turkey vultures.
Bunny’s bike was forest green, reminiscent of a model T,
bell-shaped with a bell he rang deafly before intersections.

When I knew her she loved Lawrence Welk,
who was preserved thirty years as in vinegar.
She put him on Saturdays when we’d try to
make her eat but all she took was sweets and tea.
Her plan: to get her teeth fixed, come October, her eyes,
feet, like they were spark plugs or a few busted windows.
Her feet twisted like the pine roots in the back yard,
her eyes watery blue, like ponds reflecting a sky
that threatened rain, and vaguely blind,
her teeth were so many nuts growing from her gums.

Come October she would collect from Mayor McGeary
the cash reward for saving his cousin drowning forty years ago
and settle certain horse racing accounts too long let go
which would defray the costs of the teeth and feet and eyes.

She had her poems memorized like a cook who measures
flour out by sight, she turned her face up to the blossoms
of the dogwood in the front yard where we sat in lawn chairs
as though she needed to lengthen her throat, the lines came out
afloat, her tongue the percussionist’s hand poised then crashing
over each cranberry bog, singing the linen-suited ghosts
that leaned on canes to peer into the river searching for a face,
the tendril-haired ones who came upon young men in swamps
in white gossamer, breasts glowing through the maggot lace
against the green midnight light of the gases when
your uncle turns around—
Mrs. Dempsey with the pills sprinkled like oregano on her sub,
herself in the red bathtub losing,
Alice with a revolver in her mouth.

If you go senile or mad you can time travel
and I’ll not lie and say I don’t sometimes wish
I were not when I’m at, or nursing all these dead with gaping mouths.
My breasts are sore as lemons, it’s ages that nothing has come out.

October is a mirage that lasts almost a year,
the time when the floors of New Jersey woods
are rendered golden with the falling walnuts you might walk
of an afternoon kicking with your toes to air your legs
and think of words which rhyme and take your rhyming
at a natural pace, because no one you’ll miss is gone yet;
when you come upon this month it disappears.

But I’m not a drunk and mainly who I love’s alive,
I write my verses and my grandmother’s a dream.
The month is here and bright on every calendar,
so the ghosts are bored with everything and the swamps
and bogs that have survived the population boom
hid themselves in pockets of time you can’t even find
unless you were around before there were some roads,
when the papers came twice a day with no news
and the bomb factory, though abandoned,
could be found by following the proper path,
marked by poison berries you must know not to eat
and hid itself amid the phantom gravestones
with their improbable and shifting dates,
the lost soldier wandering looking for the war,
and the little stalls selling root beer floats
and maps to the Indian burial sites where
no dog bristling could be induced to go.

Love in Other Languages

Love in Other Languages

We send out longing the way invertebrates lay eggs
on hydrothermal vents, launching millions abroad,
directionless, they need from the ocean a miracle:
another vent, only the magmic heat will do to live,
one in a whole colony may make it or none
the jellyfish never knows the outcome or anything.

Do we fare better with knowing and our lot?
A spinal cord, a frontal lobe thicken the plot like
cornstarch in a stew, each tissue brings a clearer
articulation of despair, hair, each gland, the eyes.
We still have those thermal needs, our amino acids
spin helixes, we, too, jettison across the oceans.

Sometimes you put the message into words,
poems, Portuguese, this is purely hypothetical,
you could be anyone, a girl, a gaucho, a serf,
there could be a leather boot pinning your shoulder
to the ground when the song first escapes you,
splinter your instrument on any rock, you’ll go back.

Piece it back together, sell your shoes for another,
you love the song you make the same primal way
the squid loves the eggs it sends out in the current,
the way it would die for the chance to lay,
you trade a lot of things, you pack everything into a car,
you get on another plane whose doors open on a desert.

•

Someone is reading your poems in his bed by lamplight
longing for you as you longed for anything writing them,
his first language is Spanish, as the message he sends you,
you once murmured together the lisped syllables, flailed
gorgeously in this language, glossed Quevedo and Quijote
with your tongues trapped between your teeth.

•

Love is a bit disgusting, what helps is to truss it with words
that don’t singe like those you were born with. To stand
eating oysters and drinking beer on a dock in summer,
making disinterested observations, if you manage to forget
the physical act, so much the better, go boating
and where possible, smash guitars into a thousand shards.

•

You wondered how it affected a tongue: the contortions
peculiar to each idiom, so you tasted as many as you could,
rolled each one like an r beneath your palate,
rubbed each taste bud, grown to its spices, dissolved
the medicine, heard the diphthong in each sigh, the urgent
exclamations which come in the language our mother spoke.

Lust is not what you think it is. The river we ford when
we reject a cadence, embrace a trochee, the stone we oil
and rub the knife in smooth circles of an afternoon.
It takes so much longer than you think, the reward
the clean incision into the meat, joints dissembled,
the organism rendered useful, even beautiful, which bled.

Love in other languages takes longer but lasts shorter,
you have to relinquish your name one day, it’s a
fundamental law, however you pronounce it
geraniums will bob their little grins indifferently
the pigeons will just keep pecking at the ground
in a metrical foot you exhaust your lackluster secret.

Deny if you want to, arroyos murmur (murmurar),
mud flats sigh (suspirar), the calden branches, widow-bare,
whisper (susurrar), the planets moan, you move because
someone said you ought to or you were terrified of
yourself, sensing that if you stop you may make out
the mussed cacophony, a cosmos ringing desire.

Winter Oranges

Winter Oranges

I was walking the lake waiting for the cross across shore to light up,
watching the afternoon’s color grow riper until it fell into darkness
like the oranges which fall from the neighbor’s tree into the yard
of the house I live in, the woman who owns it never picks them up,
her rottweiller can’t figure what to do with them, so they collect
by the fence and the weeds grow like a nest around them.

I’m glad it’s winter and the oranges don’t know it, me neither,
just a bit of chill I try to ignore, I love mulberries and the bites
that bracelet your ankles after picking them some morning in July,
I love that they are too sweet in your cereal, I love that they go bad
in mere hours, their purple blood a little eye at the bottom of
the dish and applying that useless stick to every red mark for days.

So it must be understood. If I knew the precise number of miles
between Santa Rosa and Slidell, the count of hours between June
and November, nothing, not even the outcome of the World Cup,
would change, and I would long no less to read Ulysses on my
purple folding chair on the beach in Ventnor on the off days,
on streets far enough from rentals to evade the shoobies.

Some dreams you never make happen, or when you drive the half-
hour, even pay the expressway fifty cents for an extra fifteen minutes
of good sun, the wind’s too strong, the shirt you took some morning
and was lovingly relinquished by some man you’ve long since left
doesn’t cut it, so you walk along the boardwalk choosing a house
you would buy if you had a job, savings, a Honda, if I had, say, you,

and which room you’d give your parents and your nephew and how
you and your brother would play golf at Blue Heron mornings.
Joyce stays in your bag nestled in the towel with the bottle
of water and suntan lotion, your cell phone. It’s only the middle
of the middle of three winters, and no snow to soften its color.
No rain to turn the dust into some grist more substantial.

To stay it from your lungs would take love or a god, would take
expensive masks and changing cartridges every ten hours, work,
work you fancied you did willingly, like the rescue volunteers
who complain they’re sick from all the airborne krill they inhaled
when they were excavating New York for Americans.
Now they’re dying and complaining about it, as if we all aren’t,

as if they didn’t learn anything about death in all that rubble,
concrete and human, split violently into particles, absorbed
easily as a decade or the eight hours a man may sleep uninterrupted
when there is no one next to him to make his rest aware. Only
in that sleep shaken with dream or nightmare does your beak close,
does the train of your want slow to a grinding hum.

I’m not sympathetic. The world is turning and dimming, that’s
tragedy, getting cut short is the perpetual theme. Oranges
that go on ripening in the Argentine July, that’s worth paying
attention to, surpasses its entrance fee, unlike the casino concert
where you stood with old men watching you breathe and caught
only the last two songs in your cheap attempt at oblivion.

Poem for Omara Portuondo

Poem for Omara Portuondo

i

Are you Cuba or are you the night-blooming vine
climbing the lattice bars outside the quinceañera
where the bride-child kissed me and I blessed her?
Or were you the kiss and the blessing, the clouds
crowding the moon like family, the white scent
of jasmine, vertiginously sweet?

ii

I was in love with my professor for years
when I found myself alone with him drinking scotch
in the beautiful cedar parlor of his house,
paved with music, talking about Berryman
and the Cantos, like old friends, my body
wanted to throw itself against him, my mind

to dive off his mind like a bridge, the cold river,
Minnesota, one word and it would have been me
holding that hand, the risen veins, each tendon,
as he dropped off, instead he rose, crossed
the room, put on “Veinte Años,”
and watched me listen to it for the first time.

I mouthed the words, everything was blonde and sad,
I looked away but kept thinking of him,
your voice moved like two people dance
that dancing reminds what is between them,
the words were like branches that sway
when there seems to be no wind.

iii

My friend and I made the plan to live together
on the five-hour drive home after my graduation.
It was high-minded and predictable, but we jumped.
I went to Virginia to look at places but instead
we got drunk and watched fireworks from
another friend’s roof and all collapsed on the same futon.

He used to slide in his socks all over our
varnished floors playing track three over and over
singing, “Dónde, dónde estabas tú?” dancing angularly,
jutting his ribcage, the boomerang of his body
all outrage as though it were he and not you that
had been betrayed, although I knew he never had.

iv

As I sat there with him listening to “Veinte Años,”
I also felt as though your pang were mine, as if
it were he repeating the wisdom, “old loves
should not be spoken of, what do you care
that I used to love you?” As if my longing were
a chimera of memory, as if there were memory.

v

The details of the collapse: a can of cannelini beans,
bloated with poison, melon nail polish on the Greek
rug, calls to work, change of hands and seasons,
everything a seed for treason, and laundry stains
and coffee. October, November, December,
and no birthday gift, Borges or otherwise.

vi

Ilusión: in your voice the awareness of its duplicity,
hope and fiction. The perfect collapse of the imperfect tense,
and Spain would claim you if you’d have her, so regal
your Castellano, she’d give Sevilla for a preposition,
and the man you sing to, twenty years and a marriage
if he thought there were any going back.

vii

It is a long time since we parted ways, badly,
in the end I even considered whether he hadn’t
taken your album to unnerve me, but I found it
when I was unpacking, shaking out the tapestry
we used as a table cloth, I listened to the modulations
of your voice, now wounded, now betraying back.

viii

Alone, the music sings outside of time, like the night
the pain belongs to no one, you are unparticular,
and the man will never make it right.
You sing, “don’t cry to me,” as if there’s a choice,
or does it translate as “for me?” “Veinte Años”
announces itself, entering from the side, slow

as a negligee, smooth as thighs, your voice encircles
the question like a silk garter a knife fits into,
“What does it matter to you” you say as if it doesn’t
“that I loved you?” the past itself is a well-dressed man
you brought to torment the old love, you sing the whole song
atop his knee, your hand draped around his neck.

Waking Up

Waking Up

7:46 am, this is when the orange breaks in the sky,
I woke up to call in sick and sit for the first time in my chair
to watch the sun rise in Santa Rosa without hurrying out,
without resentment for the hour, I realize I don’t
really have to cheat the world into showing me
these moments, the birds sing suddenly, an alarm sounding,
I could wake up like this everyday secretly, complain
nevertheless about having to go to work,
I could buy something that makes coffee or drink tea
I could attack libraries privately like a ritual or read the news.

I am amazed at how the earth does not hurry through its cycles,
although it can seem to move as fast as it really does,
thousands of miles per hour, imagine how small we are to feel
still though we are riding it, I should give up night, work
when the sunrise is filling the watching with its patience.
I am trying to conceive of six months, what it means,
there were a few days when I moved here that I thought
I might be pregnant and I thought also how if it just happened
a month later, or any month thereafter, to infinity (although
it doesn’t really go that far) it would be ok, I could do it.

We sometimes bargain like this though there is no lender,
hawk the gold for what may already or no longer exist,
life and death make us wild, disturb natural order, I read
about Greek women who accompany people through births
and Americans who coach the dying and their families,
both called doulas, what do they do except cushion those falling
into and out of the world, and the ones who deliver them there,
is that why women are soft, and fleshier over time, why my stomach
will never be lean as the stomachs of so many men I’ve loved
or why my mother keeps swelling although her joints splinter?

You can’t really see the color changing, you only see that it has,
which is how a child grows, not that this excuses me or you,
just that there’s order. My brother’s emails
are staccato and sparse, but I see easily that he, too,
blames stasis, or its appearance. Maybe our expatriate
parents punctuated us, inculcated a greed for dirt,
the line extends, his wife tells him she wants another and he
writes me I want to get out of New Jersey, I think of love,
we are searching a pool in a cave of echoes, we remind me of
those twins reunited on Nightline with identical hand gestures.

Eight months in Argentina, nine months for a child to grow,
I’ve seen it, and a lifetime for suffering, which is neither lunar
nor solar. I remember my brother telling me about my nephew
before he had a name or a sex or anything else to make him
of this world, I remember it seeming like a stub on a branch,
which you did not realize was a bud, you passed it over as
an aphid, and some morning discover as a flower, the way you
may look over at your friend or glance randomly at his picture,
and see suddenly, like blood on a napkin, sun through the trees,
his eyes, a laugh, a possibility that was there all along.

Appalachia

Appalachia

When you were eighteen and just back from Appalachia
you couldn’t tell the stories enough,
the floors collapsed, the floods that never drained,
trees dying from root rot and children losing teeth.
Sitting in the supplies truck at five am
using the last of your pencil’s eraser to find a way
to purchase nails for which there was no money,
months of peanut butter, hot dogs, and dry spaghetti.
Each year you were less in your own stories
and when you disappeared from their telling
you resurfaced a poet.

But I remember when we drank Jameson’s in Madrid
in a crazy restaurant full of fake palm trees
long after the supercilious waiter wanted to go home,
and we were full of ideas and conclusions that we believed true.
And we made sense of none of the world’s problems
although we sang in the streets and got lost in a taxi.
Did you think, then, that the only heaven
is not a paycheck, or even knowing one will come,
is not a backward glance toward the family
whose ruined house you made a little better, or good verse?
Did you think heaven was the sound of one glass hitting another?

Poetry was always our caulk,
and we made poems that looked the same,
stanzas thick as Bratwurst, lines the length of a tenderloin,
salted but sauceless, with the occasional rhyme like a stray mushroom
that fell onto the plate from someone else’s dinner.
All of our poems were grilled rare, and never saw the inside of an oven.
I used more produce, tomatoes especially, and always
too many mangoes. You introduced horseradish or brown mustard.
I said, these are condiments, not food groups,
you said, fruit is not meat,
some semesters we barely spoke.

But the time contained by an absence is collapsible,
the duffle bag stuffed in your suitcase that you believe
you will bring back from Argentina full of treasures
for the people you once loved.
Can you really love them here, in another world, where smoke
enters your window in the morning from a bonfire
connected to the teacher strike at the university
where you do nothing for humanity,
are not even really qualified, you wait
until it is sunny to leave your apartment
and write whole days away on your laptop which could
explode at any moment from the one peso transformer
you have put your electrical trust in from the hardware store
on Calle Uruguay.

Imagine the bag I could prepare even on my salary:
turquoise maté gourds capped in silver
etched with Incan patterns, silver straws, blue silk flags,
calfskin tango shoes and a sequined dress in everyone’s size,
a man or two at least, one from each province, a sturdy gaucho
of few words, a lover from Buenos Aires, versed in opera,
professor from Salta, vintner from Mendoza, a pair
of brothers from Tierra del Fuego with black eyes.
I could scatter them across my country like Japanese cherry trees.

I wish you were here to stop me,
take a red pen to my bullshit,
scatter my skin with underlines, arrows and question marks.
And before you hand me back to myself, write, in your scrawl
across my forehead, “what’s the point you’re trying to make?”
I would be years getting over the outrage.

But aren’t years easy?
We already have a handful, and so many good conversations,
at least a book or two there, and more poems
than this lousy one, and better,
and contained somewhere in all the drinks and smokes,
the evenings that grew cold so quickly in upstate New York,
the bleary nights wandering through Spain,
a little sapling or something to indicate a handful more.
And if we’re lucky, a surprise, you running away to another country,
and me sifting muck out of the corroded drainpipes of America’s poor.
And you, scattering mangoes throughout your verses, and me,
slathering mayonnaise over each line,
lacking proportion, as always,
or maybe we meet in Tokyo, or Poland, or Namibia,
by accident, and fall into the only mess we’ve always avoided,
which will have been so long in coming,
and the sky in Africa so low on the horizon, that we will be as likely to die from it
as to rise simply, unavoidably, away from the earth.

The Window in Hotel Victoria

The Window in Hotel Victoria

When she turned the latch to open it you breathed in
a moderate air and felt something like warmth
which you wanted to believe was sun
and these were to speak against mildew
and ill-flushing toilets you had endured,
the yeast infection, the rotten food,
and all the damage that moisture can create.
And then the first afternoon there the storm hit,
and it sounded like chairs were rattling
in spirals in the center of the building
and the courtyard swished with rain.
And because it sounded so startling,
and because a storm you did not expect
is beautiful, I did not think of these things,
but pulled you down to me and kissed you
and we choreographed the cacophony, by which
I do not wish to imply a lack of beauty, but rather
that our love was as discordant as all love must be
that is not conducted between a violin and a cello,
moans unscored like the howling of the wind,
which strives and gusts and grabs haphazardly
as with fingers, towards something, and always
finishes, dropping branches and limbs suddenly
to the ground below, beautifully empty, as air.

Storm in Santa Rosa

Storm in Santa Rosa

The Egyptian cypress, tall and slender as Isis,
staggers and the leafy trees, whirling madly
as Italian women thronging a new young widow
who the dead boy loved, ripping off her clothes
and flattening the black mantilla over her face
tossing white undergarments all over the place
and throwing their faces up to God to see how he is liking it,
who may be looking now upon this city, the brown church,
the tiled houses, the flat silver roof that is my neighbor
and the children’s soccer fields the water kicks down on.
Quick and decisive as a matador the storm moved in
where everything is accomplished slow, time
there always is for one maté and then another, tomorrow
being equivalent to today, holidays announced
a day or two before they’ll happen, a general spurn
of calendars and banks. And banks should be hated,
but in an offhand way, fuck you, someday, for the collapse
and all the troubles in the old world that brought us here
to the port at La Boca especially where men loved men,
a long time before frittatas and Chihuahuas or the color pink,
and while the one girl, a slave, serviced sixty men each night,
what an artist would think of as real love in the salon,
man and man coordinating, arcing, stepping in patterns
as intricate and complicated as a sign language
it was necessary not to voice. Is passion a stocking
hanging limply from a doorknob, or a lantern
suspended forever above a helix of pinstripes and slick hair?
Sitting by their windows, poets everywhere are
asking these questions, glad for the storm that assures them
that their window is no painting, glad for the lurid story of tango,
glad, secretly, for bloody foreign policies, glad for the rat
a German immigrant awoke to find suckling her breast
opposite her child so that she had to let him finish, imagine,
every poet is thinking, a world in which a women could find herself
feeling the slow drawing on her nipple by a rat, imprisoned
in her tenement on a mattress of fleas, and let him go on!
As they watch girls with dripping hair catching helmets
and slinging their legs over Vespas, clutching their boyfriends
by the waists, and disappearing amidst a double wake of spray
that resembles a pair of wings as long as the entire street.
Imagine, all the poets by the windows are thinking,
writing the poem that, even on a Friday afternoon,
could move whole villages to evacuate their lives.

The Pampas

The Pampas

In twenty years when I am living with my olives in Mendoza,
I will remember how I came alive like a caldén in the Pampas.

I will remember how all my dreams like syrup crystallized
in a rented Citroën, that I drove across the country
in every direction like a spattering of sutures
which created seams where I had been rent apart and sold off
more times than a tern spans the gap of the continents.
We will use maté and wine to paste each piece together
until we’ve made a woman with a heart like a valise
so mutable we will use it to light fires with the gauchos
and revive fallen hikers throughout the peaks of Patagonia.

No one will wonder where I went, but will ask, how long
before the new moon, and where are all the trees?

The mail will look forward to its strange pregnancies,
a pressed flower from Foz de Iguaçu, a vial of water,
sand from Mar del Plata shaken from a young man’s hair,
the olive branch from the cathedral in Santa Rosa, Palm Sunday,
the discarded signs born by the runners in the marathon
praising Jesus, and gourds and straws and gourds and straws.
So much of it smuggled in so insidiously, like lead pipes
and chalices, the empire will asphyxiate on sweetness
where there had only been spreadsheets and traffic.

Someday, there will be a child with black hair
who will find her legs in the Plaza of San Martin.

When I am treeless and bare as Easter Island, with my icons
on my cliffs, and the last flowers wreathing my hair,
there will still be a sea surrounding every peninsula I
have loved, and fossils washing onto the shores, friendly
sea snakes who flirt with you when you swim, I am by nature
unafraid of the mirage, the angels that may descend when you
have come towards the end, the dunes which preserve no shape,
the air which carries no smell. I am a lover of the falcons
that swing in great arcs, the stiff camel milk, and the final thirst.

Rain in Buenos Aires

Rain in Buenos Aires

These are not the first clouds you’ve seen,
or the first time you’ve smelled the rain,
which you can never be certain of,
like the scent of sex, which sometimes you intuit
rather than perceive, since you’ve been here,
but now, as you stand in front of your plane
waiting to mount its folding staircase to somewhere else,
this plane that was two hours late,
that you would not have chosen,
a trip of someone else’s invention,
it rains in Buenos Aires, where the air is so good.

For you there is peace but no happiness in the loft apartment
speckled with borrowed kitchen things, a thick pot,
two plastic teacups, flatware in a purple pitcher,
the mismatched beds with the single roseate blanket.
The view of the schoolyard, the good light and wood
ceilings you know are charming, go nowhere like
your uncle wandering back and forth from the racetracks
to Florida for forty years and as many more as it takes
to die or get better. Each win furnishing a hamburger,
a quart of beer, a trifecta or two more chances. Each loss
falling into time like losing tickets between the bleachers.

Every time you put on your shoes you step into loneliness,
to be alone is a relief, drink a coffee on the corner,
try to make out the graffiti angel across from Teatro Colon
or go to the tall standing cemetery in Recoleta
where the dead go to gossip forever, you can imagine
their soirees, everyone wearing marble or granite,
with hairdos that never collapse, sneering at tourists.
And do the cats slumbering on the tombs, and weaving
through the iron gates like small priests die too?
Where can you lay them to rest, who slept through life
carelessly over a thousand tombs, and would death
improve the impeccable rest a cat feels each time it shuts its eyes?

Borges, who thought so much about immortality, was comforted
to think that we all die. He looked forward to the great release,
like Jesus, awaiting the fulfillment of God’s only promise.
He ran his fingers over the husks of the old German volumes
in the depths of the National Library, where he negotiated
the currents of concepts like a squid, formless and infinitely
deft, buying books long after his eyesight was gone
because there is a pleasure in buying books, he said, a sensation
in their proximity, a vibration you can feel
in the most private quarters of the shelves,
the variable shapeliness of water, the cool distortion
of your own hand and wrist, the gentle manipulation of time.

When I was in the city I sometimes saw Borges
going to work on a bus, wearing a pink shirt,
or passing me on the street, his right hand extended
such a small degree ahead of him, avoiding children,
or I would pass a café where he was seated, drinking agua con gas,
I was never surprised, and I would say aloud, look at the shirt Borges’ wife
has chosen for him this morning! Who does he hope will win
the football game this Sunday? Does he love Palermo?

When people like us come to the Pampas to confront
the other versions of ourselves, to grow disoriented on meat
and get into fights, there can be no peace in the village.
We are always polluting the air currents with our dreams
of the city’s gray walls, the women walking to the opera,
the dogs curled around tree trunks, the loud man singing Milonga
by the café where we sat to write, alone with the universe,
naturally, deeply alone, among thirteen thousand people,
the common presentiments, the car horns, and the trees,
which, as long as your poem can last, are drunk on blooms.

Dick Clark Poems

A Poem for Dick Clark

The verdict is in for 2005: this year will be better
for us, the cataclysm of blood vessels in your brain,
set to come back again before too long, or not,
the show goes on with or without us, look: your face
is still on that big building that sticks out into Times Square.
2004 has done its worst, and we are none the worse.
All I can say for myself is that I no longer believe
in American foreign policy or the diet revolution.

Once, before our chosen occupations, caterpillars
grew in gauze nests in the wild cherry tree
we took torches to them every year so they fell
in millions of little crisps, like something out of Exodus.
I had read little poetry, never tasted choyote, or mango,
and swimming in cedar water took gulps while I was below,
believing it was iced tea. I listened evenings to retirees
laughing on the docks, drinking cocktails on their yachts,
and never, rooting through the grass for frogs took note
of the fact of being on the Mullica river in July, and young.

Surviving texts tell us that no one lives forever.
Plastic surgery can only do so much, the dermis goes;
words are meant for the long haul, Sunday’s repose
forever, reading the coupon section and the fliers
of the sales you’ve no intent to shop. Stop a moment,
and for a moment imagine that ideal morning,
the one you’ve sometimes pondered: the smell of
baking bread has filled your house, the sun is out,
your lover’s at your side, filling your glass of tea,
and the newspapers that you read are dateless and blank.
The lanky mailman who startles you at your door is one
of many friends that you will not outlive.




A Second Poem for Dick Clark

Amazing! You are still alive, or are you? I don’t recall,
Regis did the New Years show again, he got the call
earlier I imagine than the year before, but let’s put that away,
it’s May says the bamboo calendar hanging on the wall,
the lucky carp swim tectonically deciding
the earthquake season for the millennium, their whiskers
eeling through the water, and everything is intelligent.

I could have been your lover in my former life
when you were newer still at this one,
dancing in a poodle skirt and getting ideas as you spit
into your microphone Travolta’s name, I grew faint
watching your lips unfurl the rosaries of my worship,
I wore a cardigan and a locket and my thighs were firm
from roller skating when you parted the crinoline like Moses.

But where, then, did I go to leave you breasting the tide alone,
or with a wife and millions of fans, but still, somehow, alone,
singular, like Gilgamesh, against the enemy of your throne,
to find the rose that fell impossibly down into the water.
I must have, I pause. Don’t think of that! Your ears
are not accustomed to the language, the doctors who have
grown older over the years do not abuse you with what
no one can be certain will ever happen. Have you wondered,
if you might not just be the one to do it? You would swagger
if you could and say, just cause Adam cocked it up, and light
a match and put it out between your fingers with a little spit.

Once I tried to live my life, but I got it wrong, so I went south;
the carp swam on, and forty thousand Chinese school children
note the details in their government-issued ledgers. Do you realize
a man masterminded that, and three hundred thousand
won a year or two before the one the carp did not get right,
and no one blamed the carp. And who could deny the price was right?



A Third Poem for Dick Clark

There’s been too much fuss about your brain,
and all your tissues, the doctors alliterate,
neurons, nephrons, they dish them out like tapas,
the passageways that carry memories and piss,
I am beginning to feel as if I know you well,
as though we got high together and spoke
of Joan Miró: oiseau étoile, the Prado crucifixes
and the clear elevators at the Reina Sofia
you go up through like heaven to see Guernica.

You suffocated when there was no art so
you became like art, an edifice, a canvas
for a million suits and silk pinstripe ties,
no wrinkle challenged your decision, you
gazed hours at the mirror contemplating themes,
the interplay of colors, the durability of bronze.
Nor did anyone grow bored as the ball was falling,
so slowly, I thought the first time I saw it,
like geology, like the arc Miró painted
which we both agreed we loved, beginning
at the star and going maybe forever, sometimes
straight, sometimes in spirals, towards the bird.


A Fourth Poem for Dick Clark

Do you think it was eggs or top-feeder fish
that put a skip in the record? The one you
did not enjoy less after playing it for seventy years,
the cover art and melodies providing something fresh
in the mornings or tragic by the reading light when wife
was already between the sheets, slumbering or strategizing.
We have to look out for certain things, the billboard charts,
and the latest body types we all should strive to have,
which provide a guarantee until the next great cure.

Do you have a story about buying the white album,
like my father does, and so many people, you wonder
how they paid for it, who couldn’t buy a car battery
and lived on food stamps, there is a reassurance there
that there will be money for the things you really need,
though not a ride or a table with legs on which to spread
your baloney and mayonnaise, but music, yes, sometimes,
a hand steers you towards the one you’ll still be listening to
after the musicians, younger than you, have gone vegetarian,
or just gone, you drink wine on the floor with your young wife
and friends, you are drunk believing it will always be like this.

Title Poem

The road is ending here, the pope's head has received the silver hammer.
You, my friend, are Jewish, tall, beautiful, and I am a European schnitzel.
If there were more time, we say, lamenting, drunk, if there were more days
and ways of hand, you and I waltzing across a marble floor would notice
each other in the other's arms and be pleased that the war was over in our hearts.

And then there would be a kiss better than acid, better than twelve-year aged scotch
and better than loving each other under a meteor shower with all its burgeois
sentimental pretexts. This is when the kiss would occur, the kiss that would not destroy
poems or fevers, whose unity of lips was as pure as hydrochloric acid that ate through the syrofoam plate of your sophomore year in high school. This is a song

that we have waited to perform, a ceremony of falcons circling, a carriage coursing
through the newly snowed-over Japanese roads, whose dream of a flowering garden
your mother carried through the longest desert in the world. Many have come and gone.
God has grown weary and wants something beyond devotions or the usual meal
of bread and wine, God wants Hoisin duck.

Let's defenestrate the flamenco dress and shoes, the tango we embark upon has its hair
severely twisted into a bun and the silver hammer has smashed the papal ring to pieces.
The red-sashed cardinals have filed for the conclave, and an albatross has gotten stuck
in the doldrums. Let's revisit the argument over Ursa Minor and the dipper,
the wet grass, where, swinging in the abandoned playground, we fell.