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Playground
Safety
Easy to enter but difficult to leave
(when is Daddy coming
home?), the rules of playground
safety – take turns on the jungle
gym of transported logs, hollowed and
painted yellow;
know this contraption of circle on
circle
is no amusement
park merry-go-round, but
the earth waiting to crash
into a meteor, waiting for its hubris to
end. Massacred
ideals, no way out.
The therapist turned priest enters a
realm of thin words,
thin tears – talking about
not being able to talk about
it. At this point of
the mess, the beginning act is moot
abstraction – the
assassin of what Arch Duke caused
what carnage?
How we grope the Braille of the
unexpected, it’s all
about surprise, about the golden cloak
that
made Frodo invisible.
“My Precious…” The ventriloquist dummy
is booed
off the stage, his master’s lips moved
visibly, somehow
grotesque. The ransom
note is lettered in Sunday newsprint, my
daughter is
seeking a snow day in summer, the day
the world
as we know it will end, at
least, we will enter
the tunnel of the third world war,
and class will be cancelled tomorrow.
Corners
Transgressions of
the boundary
Genet repeats: Corners
There is no use for human bone
Stroking femurs that whistle
From the windowsill
Hold a rose
toward the eyes of your own murderer
(They will say you caused it
Through your own powers)
Abandon all sentiments of
fear
The matches are wet
There is the inevitable sandbar
The ferryman far
beyond reach
And the priest playing with
tortoise
Shells in the ash
Genet
repeats: Corners
Hold a rose toward the
eyes of the murderer
Who
is your father
A single lightbulb, interrogating
The initiates
Transgressions of the boundary
Carried through arteries
around the river’s bend
The middle C of
abandonment, your hair loose
And
loveless
Facing the other way
From the
monkey between yourself
And origin
There are ways to learn about power / pleasure / desire
With no sense of
the weather or history
Genet repeats: Corners
The single
lightbulb alters the square
Planets, names, released from rotations
A setting of winter transposed
A doubling, redoubling
So
subjectivities become possible
The full
moon gone
Unslept mastery of mourning doves
Incidental Kin
On a road with no guardrails she swerves
up and around
the hill, trees spreadeagle collisions
of red, swerves
up and around and sees the doe. The torn
lots of the body shiver slow as wind on
lakewater, a gold
liquid karat: she pulls the car over,
traffic behind it
does not stop but brackets her and the
doe and a bit
of dry brush. She pulls the car over,
gets out, hair
in her face as if she’s been making
love, hand steady
as when she unfolded her father from the
evening
table, then folded his hands and shut
his eyes.
The lower half of the doe quits moving
but
like light from a just-quit star the
full belly moves
now autonomous, the belly shivers and
jumps
and she knows, the doe too is pregnant.
Someone
calls from a stopped jeep, she asks for
a hunting
knife, “though I don’t know how one
cuts-out
a living thing…” He lifts the hem of his
autumn
plaid, the ulterior sun sucks last light
from the doe
belly and flank, sucks it in, then, its
ulterior own.
Deertracks
* I bite my lip, tell him
to always recall his heritage: a juxtaposition
With voluptuous intent.
* Before the Flood, there
were no distinctions, I professed love to either
Gender. Pilfered senses, the
marvelous.
* I thrive within the
hurricane. Wicker baskets hang upside down from
The kitchen ceiling, grief’s
providence.
* Broken pencil lead and
old prints of guitar-strewn roads. The dream
Work is a critique of
reality.
* Hypnotisms and their
emergence: past lives, children left along highways
At night. (Three police cars
did not arrive.)
* The visionary is ripe for
a sideshow. As instructed, he planted warts
On his soul.
* Who will detonate the
proverbs with me. From this exile, doubling,
I know the use of the
skeptic.
* Madness is a political
value, from slaveships or elsewhere.
* Once, in a garden, I was
dead for a whole morning. Enchantments,
Above which is written: the
gazelles.
* Of course, who is holding
my hand?
* There are keyrings and
the prison’s resistance. Streetvendors hold
Toward me the choicest
strawberry, say – here, the witness to your
New road. –
* On this asteroid, which
is the superior rose.
* I have enough space,
enough pause. I have access to the isosceles
Triangle, mother-of-pearl,
wherein lies the Philosopher’s Stone.
* Revolution alters the
import of folklore and song. Let me see
As from Lenin’s eyes.
* Tavern drunks turn and
stare as the door opens. It is the hour
Of adult men crying.
* I try to emancipate my
own mind. Through alleys I chant fairies
And gnomes of redemption.
Unlearning
Everything
Make of your life a river – he says –
ignoring time, held gently
By rocky
sediments of the earth
By silt
By the
reflections of the sky.
Unlearn everything
you’ve learned thus far, replace it
With the mechanism of four
wings
Stroking a dragonfly through
Dense smoke
To the other side.
Watch birds. Make a feeder of wet clay.
See them nibble with their spectral beaks.
When you ask: what am I to do with these
baskets of grief – know, it will all remain
This terrifying.
Being. Choices. The sounds
Milling the
quarry of blue granite
Where multiple
children have drowned
Where we used to
swing on a rope and drop
Into the water.
Never thinking past
The feel of
water. Sun.
Luck might stay steadfast or give out.
Like floorboards of a
house on stilts
Beneath which there is
simply air. Beneath air
Swamp. Where nothing but
insects
Can live in living
breathe.
There are rarest moments, commencing
from the place you stand:
She wore red
shoes. A car passed by. You ripped
A paper dollar
and each took half.
(Thirty years
past you still have yours.)
Or simply
holding calm, so still, regarding
The notched blue
of a Creek arrowhead.
Know this: you are
regarding
History as
it unfolds. It unfolds
As it must.
Yourself
Whistling,
numb
With having
fun, a river
Cradled
gently
By the rocks
of earth,
The
reflections of the sky.
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