Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse

behind the heels and drags it

behind his chariot like the cans that trail

a bride and groom. Then he lays out

a banquet for his men, oxen and goats

and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat

until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—

in the morning more animals must be killed

for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds

no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;

not even heaving four stallions on the pyre

can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

And here I turn my back on the epic hero— the one who slits

the throats of his friend’s dogs,

killing what the loved one loved

to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent

by vanishing from my concern

after he throws the dogs onto the fire.

The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep

until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially

which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets

and tails like peacocks, covered in tar

weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows

at the rim of the marsh. But once

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals

my first lament. So now I guard

my inhumanity like the jackal

who appears behind the army base at dusk,

come there for scraps with his head lowered

in a posture that looks like appeasement

though it is not.

while the books lay open, scattered facedown

like turtles sunning, the jackets hunched, with a little

hump in the hunch from the trough of the spine,

bearing a white sticker with the typewriter’s Courier

font rendition of the decimal system

under the wrapper, hazy like fog

taped to the book, the tape’s yellow orange-almost

(depending on how old) reinforced with threads.

Meanwhile his eyes drifted back and forth

back and forth until the book slid to the floor.

The flag then. Then snow. Or the corporate logo

of the eye— all night the night would watch him,

plural, them. Just ask my friend whose father

was a drunk, a highball glass on the nightstand and a swizzle

stick to mark his place. Still, on Thursday nights

he stumbled down to the reading room

to leaf through the new arrivals.

Oh green republic where the pilgrims came to land!

If I’m going to choose my nostalgia it is a no-brainer

that I’m going to side with books, with the days

before the lithium-ion battery, but after

Philip Roth and John le Carré were born, books not too

highbrow or too low, but sometimes thick

and overdue. Books the fathers read to escape us

who were the shackles that the plodding days

latched on to them who’d started out their lives with war, so this

was perfect, courting danger in their underwear,

feeling the breast of the vixen stiffen,

slipping their hands into the thief’s black glove.

Though the twins were not identical, they both had skin

so thin & clear I could see their veins’ squiggling underneath.

One with red hair, one with white

& the veins made their combined colors patriotic

if a little terrifying

in the auditorium where we’d assembled,

their tears falling in a formal style of grief

reserved for civic purposes, I learned this

from mothers who’d stood by the mailbox, weeping

as we filed by them in the school bus

six years before, when bullets ruined the famous head

of the famous handsome man. Now

the girls’ red eye-rims similarly deliquesced,

their shrill notes ascending:

President Eisenhower! Has! Died!

news that made me scratch an old mosquito bite

& scrutinize the upturned faces of my shoes—

even in my girlish nerdfog

I must have understood that some will not withstand posterity,

that all the bodies on the beach at Normandy

still lead to the muse’s turning her cool marble shoulder.

Permissible to insert here the twins’ white lashes

& the curve of their hot foreheads. But

how tentatively one must ask the nouns & verbs

to step apart for Eisenhower, though he ransacked

more than his share of cities. Like the moon

his pale head hovers, yet he does not go around

like some transhistorical Fuller Brush man

sticking his foot in the door

the pale girl of my ode slams shut.

Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood

swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance

while a helicopter chewed the linings

of the clouds above the clear-cuts.

And I forgave the pollen count

while cabbage moths teased up my hair

before your flowers fell apart when they

turned into seeds. How resigned you were

to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli

as they swept past. And soon those gusts

will mill you, when the backhoe comes

to dredge your roots, but that is not

what most impends, as the chopper descends

to the hospital roof so that somebody’s heart

can be massaged back into its old habits.

Mine went a little haywire

at the crest of the road, on whose other side

you lay in blossom.

As if your purpose were to defibrillate me

with a thousand electrodes,

one volt each.

I had my precinct wrong and went to Garfield Elementary

where the hall monitors would not let me through

because I live on the wrong side of the boundary. I could hear

my neighbors, listening reasonably to one another,

listening even to the man who is my adversary

because he leaves his dog’s crap on the sidewalk’s grassy strip.

If he wants to fly, Peter Pan has to focus very hard on Tinker Bell.

If he is quiet and he concentrates, then he can fly.

The girl who spoke sat in the hallway,

so I asked if she was working on her reading. “No,

she’s autistic those are her socialization cards,” said her mother,

who asked if I would watch her girl (whose name was Terri)

so she (the mother)

could take part in the caucus.

He can fly only when he focuses on Tinker Bell.

He can focus only when he listens.

In the classrooms, my neighbors sat in chairs

that shrank their knee-chin distance pitifully. I heard my adversary

say he didn’t think the candidate looked authentic enough

and that’s how history gets made. Quick

write it down before it slips

too far downstream.

Peter Pan likes to sing and hear Tinker Bell sing.

When he hears Tinker Bell sing, Peter Pan is happy.

In the classroom, something was decided—

I heard the collective exhale of assent

before people filed out, looking giddy and grave. When she returned

I asked Terri’s mother what was up

with the singing, and she said that other children

tormented her girl with songs.

Go tell that to a poet.

It would explain a lot about the current state of the art.

Orpheus sang,

and, like the Beatles, his song made the girls scream

so loud they drowned the song. Then they yelled

See yonder our despiser and tore off his head.

Peter Pan and Tinker Bell like to sing together.

They are very happy when they sing.

You know one girl alone wouldn’t have done it,

and this is not just a matter of strength. There’s a fuse

running from one of us to the other— lucky thing

all that’s in my pocket is this old packet

of moist towelettes

I mistook for a matchbook.

She thanked me, the mother, even though Terri

had been reading her cards to my dog. Note

I carry a blue (biodegradable and perfumed)

plastic crap bag, though it hadn’t been used yet,

there at the school, and I was letting it flap

from the pocket of my red flannel shirt

like the American flag.

Come, my adversary—

let us discuss the warblers.

How sweetly they torment us from the budding trees.

Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,

feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store

where they sell food that comes in cans

yesterday expired. Picture it

perching on the dumpster, a corrugated

sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch

accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,

skittering on the cans. It has tried

to gnaw them open and broken all its teeth.

Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels

of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon-

chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells

from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,

with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light—”

we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.

Because we occupy the wrong animal— don’t you too feel it?

Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?

Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting

your robe into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped

fighting the urge to howl, and howled—

and did it bring relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?

I paddled many days to reach the totem poles

not barged off to Vancouver. Tilting in a clearing,

gray and cracked, upholding the clouds,

the grain for a hundred years having risen.

The ghosts of Cumshewa Inlet kept trying to evict me,

but I did not want to leave

because the Haida had left their dead here

and once you step over a human bone while following a deer-path

you want to step over another, unless you are not ruled

by curiosity as I was ruled. Or had already seen a skull

mossy in its entirety, with three holes (eye sockets

+ the nose) + the palate on the duff.

Into which the green teeth bit, the moss

covering it all like luminescent car upholstery,

what do you do if you are just a dumb American,

I can usually figure out how to behave, but require years

to come to my conclusions. Now

the fact the reparations have come due

is being made clear by the photo of the skull

I took when I was young and dumb, this anti-

luck charm emanating green recriminations,

though I notice that I do not take it from the wall.

of those who have drifted through thus far of their allotted

fifty or seventy or ninety years on Earth

with no disasters happening,

whatever had to be given up was given up—

the food at the rehab facility was better than you would expect

and the children turned out more or less okay;

sure there were some shaky years

but no one’s living in the basement anymore

with a divot in his head, that’s where the shrapnel landed/or

don’t look at her stump. It is easy

to feel possessed of a soul that’s better schooled

than the fluffy cloud inside of people who have never known suchlike

events by which our darlings

are unfavorably remade. And the self

is the darling’s darling

(I = darling²). Every day

I meditate against my envy

aimed at those who drift inside the bubble of no-trouble,

— what is the percentage? 20 % of us? 8 %? zero?

Maybe the ex-president with his nubile daughters,

vigorous old parents, and clean colonoscopy. Grrrr.

Remember to breathe. Breathe in suffering,

breathe out blessings say the ancient dharma texts.

Still I beg to file this one complaint

that some are mountain-biking through the scrublands

while she is here at Ralph’s Thriftway,

running her thumb over a peach’s bruise,

her leg a steel rod

in a miniskirt, to make sure I see.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

JOHN BERGER, The Sense of Sight

In 2006, in Ohio, Joseph Clark raised his head in the middle of his execution to say, “It’s not working.”

The salmon corpses clog the creek without sufficient room to spin:

see, even the fish want to kill themselves this time of year

the therapist jokes. Her remedy

is to record three gratitudes a day—

so let the fish count for one, make two the glaucous gulls

who pluck the eyes before they fill

with the cloudy juice of vanishing.

But don’t these monuments to there-ness

feel a little ostentatious? Not just the gratitudes,

but also what they used to call a hardware store

where you hike for hours underneath the ether

between the ceiling and the dropped-down lighting tubes,

muttering I need a lock-washer for my lawnmower shroud—

huh? You know

you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating

everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II

commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.

When even one giant marble Moses feels like a bit too much.

This year made it almost to December without a frost to deflate the dahlias

and though I stared for hours at the psychedelia of their petals,

trying to coax them to apply their shock-paddles to my heart,

it wasn’t working. Until one morning when

I found them black and staggering in their pails,

charred marionettes, twist-tied to their stakes, I apologize

for being less turned-on by the thing than by its going.

Not the sunset

but afterward when we stand dusted with the sunset’s silt,

and not the surgical theater, even with its handsome anesthesiologist

in blue dustcap and booties— no,

his after’s what I’m buzzed by, the black slide into nothing

(well, someone ought to speak for it).

Or it can come in white— not so much the swirling snow

as the fallen stuff that makes the mind continuous

with the meadow that it sees.

Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others.

PHILIP LARKIN

One day George Washington rides around Mount Vernon

for five hours on his horse, the next

he’s making his auspicious exodus

on the spectrum of possible deaths.

Rasputin was fed cyanide in little cakes

but did not slough his living husk,

and so Prince Felix sang to him, then mesmerized him

with a gaudy cross. And though he dropped when he was shot

he popped back up and ran outside: it was

Purishkevich who fired three times in the courtyard—

but even with his body bound

in the frozen Neva, one arm worked

its way free. Now, he must have howled

while his giblets leaked, though the cold

is reputed to be kind. Sliding his end

toward a numeral less horrible; it falls

say as a six on a scale of zero to ten?

Shakespeare went out drinking, caught a fever,

ding! Odds are we’ll be addled—

what kind of number can be put on that?

One with endless decimals,

unless you luck into some kind woman,

maker of the minimum wage, black or brown and brave enough

to face your final wreck? My friends horde pills

for their bad news, but I wonder if it’s cowardly

to be unequal to the future. Someone should write a book

for nursery school, with crucial facts like: how,

as the sun drops, shadows lengthen, including a sharp

or blurry one that is your own. And you scuttle from it

like a cockroach fleeing light— an anti-roach,

running from the dark. See my feelers, long and feathery:

I am more than well prepared.

Ulysses Grant lay in misery for half a year,

after eating a peach that pained his tongue.

Versus Ivan the Terrible, last heard singing in the bath,

who fainted dead while setting up the chessboard.

The boyish foreign tyrant wears faun-colored desert boots

hooked boyishly around the rungs of his chair

on this talk show where he speaks with the voice of a woman

who interprets from the ether. He’s smiling

like the naughty boy in school who picked his teeth

with a stiletto: mister, you may be despicable

but my boyfriend wore those same boots once,

and I loved him in them, despite the stolen tape deck

in his car. How small a blemish does your narco-trafficking

shrink to, what with that comely stubble on your cheeks,

your brocade cap and wool cape tossed

across your shoulder like a cavalier’s? Perhaps we need

to recalibrate the scale or set your crimes

in one pan of the balance, so when we set your beauty

in the other it will rise, as beauty does, instead of clunking down.

As beauty rises, even when it goes unseen. See

how many of the famous modern paintings

were made by men who have such vigor in old age?

And when I flip open the back covers of their books,

the famous lady poets all have shiny hair.

Isabelle Huppert in a peep show booth

with the wilted bloom of a used Kleenex,

and not her Kleenex, une mouchoir étrange—

this is not a promising get-go.

But can’t my hopes be phototropic

as I sit in the front row with my head cocked back

like a newly fractured dicotyledonous bean

uncurling on its sprout?

The popcorn here is not just bad—

for years the hopper has accrued its crud

so that sometimes you crunch down on what

tastes like a greasy tractor bolt

and are transported to a former Soviet republic

instead of some seedy part of Paris.

You have to swipe the burned nib off your lips

before scuffing it back, toward the lovers who’ve come

to make out in this habitat, upholstered

in the velvet mode of tongues. And when

I turn to see if they’ve noticed

their ankles’ being pinged by my scorched old maids

all the hardware bolted in their faces

glints like moonlight on the road after the crash is cleared away,

as the projector beam keeps on doggedly charging

through a googolplex of twitching motes.

Giving us Isabelle unclothed again,

Isabelle in the tones of the wood of a cello,

Isabelle if you’re trying to save us now

all your skin is not enough.

Monday

Wednesday

Friday,

I swim with the old ladies, hurry:

the synchronized swimming team arrives at three.

We ride the wacky noodles

through blue pastures

lit by chemicals—

I like to go under in my goggles

to watch their them-ness bleed

into my me

until we are evicted by the lifeguard, Danielle.

In the locker room, some retreat into the changing stalls

to sequester their mastectomies,

but your walker will not fit there, no;

you have to peel your swimsuit in the open

with the girls on the team. I’m staring

at one long strip of mostly leg,

daring her to

reciprocate:

but all this future-flesh has made her shy—

the way the belly sometimes flabs from having kids

and doubles down.

I thought this was a them-trait, not a me-trait,

but was mistaken about the boundary—

which turns out not to be a wall, but a net

in which we each hang like a sausage

in a shop window, liquefying in the sun.

Good luck synchro girl, trying to wriggle

into your spangly suit

without taking off your bra—

not wanting any of your you to bleed into your me

as you reach around yourself to pull out what you pull out

by the scruff of its neck:

your limp blue animal

of lace.

* Joe Wenderoth

War Emblem, the famous stallion,

will not mount a female rump

on the island of Hokkaido

in a pasture near the sea.

It is hard to imagine anyone not being overcome

by the sight of two dozen mares

surrounded by volcanoes (is the problem

that the metaphors are too direct?), and yet

War Emblem is still not in the mood.

A thousand years ago the courtesan Shikibu

wrote a thousand poems to her lover,

the references to sex made tasteful through concision

and the image of their kimonos intertwined.

Either her heart was broken or it was full,

either way required some terse phrases to the moon.

Was that all it was? Dumb animal hunger?

All those years when I thought I was making Art

out of The One Important Thing?

And how to apologize now for my lack of adequate concision?

Once I was so full of juice and certain of its unending.

The woman who wears dark glasses large as goggles

has her hand wrapped around the elbow of the young woman

who is beautiful. Where does it come from,

this compulsion not just to know their thinking

but to live inside her for a while, the one

whose eyes are hidden as she looks

down into the impoundment where the salmon who’ve swum upriver

end their travels? It must sound large to her, the clang

a loose piece of metal makes against the cement wall

whenever a fish leaps in its fury, I am claiming

the privilege to impute its fury as we listen to them

thrash. Dozens were killed an hour ago

because their future fate is better if the eggs are stripped

than if they’re left to their fandango

in the frothing of the creek. I have tried to live inside them too,

these fish who strain against the world, or into it, why

am I not so intent on battling my way into the young woman

who moves from one thing to another without hurry?

I would eavesdrop, but they talk in Spanish,

thwarting my attempt to learn if the blind woman can detect

the coolness radiating from the pile of slush, all that remains

of the ice in which the dead were packed

before being trucked off to the food bank: if she could see

she’d see the vapor rising, as from a fire not quite put out.

I feel the need for more humanity

because the winter wren is not enough,

even with its complicated music emanating

from the brambles. So I relent to my friend

who keeps bugging me to see her shaman,

tutored by the Indians who live at the base

of Monte Albán. Tutored also by the heavy bag

at Sonny’s Gym: Box like heaven / Fight like hell

his T-shirt says; the graphic shows an angel’s fist

buried to the wrist in Satan’s brisket, while the prince

of dark jabs the angel’s kisser. Victor

has sandpiper legs, his ponytail a mess of webs,

but he has eaten the ayahuasca vine

and chanted in the sweat lodge

and entered the fight-cage in a bar in Tucson,

Adam’s apple jiggling his Star of David

when he writes me out a prayer.

He says he flew here to visit his grandma,

only she died before the plane touched down—

the dead leave yard sales to the living,

who shoot staple guns at telephone poles

and soothe their eyes with slabs of meat.

No matter how many rounds you go in practice,

he says you always come out unprepared

om ah hum

vajra siddhi padma hum

for the mountain of junk inside the house: cedar canoe

in the rafters and the box of Kotex he found

from her last menstrual period in the 1950s.

I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake—

after crawling through the rotting milfoil on the shore.

At first

the materials offered me were not much—

just some cattails where a hidden bullfrog croaked

and a buckhouse made from corrugated tin—

at first I thought I’d have to write the poem of its vapors.

But wait

long enough and the world caves in,

sends you something like these damselflies

prickling your chest. And the great ventriloquist

insists

you better study them or else:

how the liquidmetal blue gleams like a motorcycle helmet,

how the markings on the thorax wend like a maze,

their abdomens ringed like polecat tails,

the tip of his latched

to the back of her neck

while his scrawny forelegs wipe his mandible

that drops and shuts like a berth on a train.

But when I tallied his legs, he already had six—

those wiper-legs belonged to a gnat

he was cramming in his mouth. Which took a long time

because the gnat struggled, and I tried to imagine

a gnat-size idea of the darkness

once the mandible closed.

Call me bad gnat: see how every other thing strives—

more life!

Even with just two neurons firing the urge.

Then the she-fly’s abdomen swung forward

to take the sperm packet from his thorax,

and he finished chewing

in this position that the field guide calls The Wheel.

Call me the empress of the unused bones,

my thighs fumigated by the rank detritus of the shore

while the meal

and The Wheel

interlocked in a chain

in the blue mouth of the sky

in the blacker mouth beyond

while I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake

where sixty thousand damselflies

were being made a half-inch from my heart.

The hungry ghosts are ghosts whose throats

stretch for miles, a pinprick wide,

so they can drink and drink and are never sated.

Every grain of sand is gargantuan

and water goes down thick as bile.

I don’t know how many births it takes to get

reborn as not the flower but the scent.

To be allowed to exist as air (a prayer

to whom?)— dear whom:

the weight of being is too much.

Victor Feguer, for his final meal,

asked for an olive with a pit

so that a tree might sprout from him.

It went down hard, but now the murderer is comfort.

He is a shady spot in the potter’s field.

But it must be painful to be a tree,

to stand so long with your arms up.

You might prefer to be a rock

(if you can wear that heavy cloak).

In Bamiyan, the limestone Buddhas stood

as tall as minor mountains, each one carved

in its own alcove. Their heads

eroded over time, and the swallows

built nests from their dust,

even after zealots blew them up.

Now the swallows wheel in empty alcoves,

their mouths full of ancient rubble.

Each hungry ghost hawks up his pebble

so he can breathe. And the dead

multiply under the olive tree.

There are blows in life, so powerful…

I don’t know!

CESAR VALLEJO, TRANS. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN

Driving past the Masonic graveyard, I see a boy

skateboarding down the new asphalt of the walk

that he veers off so he can jump

and slide along a tombstone.

He has such faith in the necklace of his bones

he will not let a helmet wreck his hair—

why does the brain have to be buried

in the prettiest place? You little shit, don’t you know

someone slaved at the brewery to pay for what was

supposed to stand as shiny as your hair

two centuries or three, when all your ollies

will no longer stir a moth or midge?

But what kind of grump would rather be eaten

by wind and rain than the glissando of a punk

riding off with a whump to the door of the oven

with a few bright flakes of someone else’s death?

Let’s not forget the Naked Woman is still out there, etched

into her aluminum plaque

affixed to her rocket

slicing through the silk of space.

In black and white, in Time, we blast her

off to planets made of gases and canals,

not daring to include, where her legs fork,

the little line to indicate she is an open vessel.

Which might lead to myths about her

being lined with teeth,

knives, snakes, bees— an armament

flying through the firmament. Beside the man

who stands correctly nonerect, his palm

upraised to show he comes in peace,

though you globulous yet advanced beings

have surely taken a gander of our sizzling planet

and can see us even through our garments.

So you know about the little line—

how a soft animal cleaves from her

and how we swaddle it in fluff,

yet within twenty years we send it forth

with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled-grenade launcher:

you have probably worked out a theory

to explain the transformation. And you

have noticed how she looks a bit uncertain

as she stands on her right leg, her left thrust out

as if she’s put her foot on top of something

to keep it hidden. Could be an equation

on a Post-it, or could be a booby trap—

now comes time to admit we do not know her very well, she

who has slipped the noose of our command. Be careful

when you meet her, riding on her shaft of solar wind:

you will have to break her like a wishbone

to get her open, she whom we filled with teeth

and knives and snakes and bees.

The TV knob was made of resin, its gold skirt

like a Kewpie doll’s, but it was gone.

So we changed the channel

with a pair of pliers (on the flat spot

on the spindle): chunk chunk

and then lo, Jerry Lewis. Chunk chunk and lo,

the marionettes with giant hands. The song went:

my heart would be a fireball. And in the chunking

and the singing and the watching, lo, my heart became one.

Less pageantry in the now. Say Sputnik: no other word

climbs my throat with such majestic flames.

Gone, the marionettes in flightsuits made of foil

gone grainy on the boob tube. The tremulous way

their bodies moved, my fear for their well-being.

The comic stupidity of the child,

which is forgiven. Unlike the stupidities to come.

The boy had a guinea pig named Fireball, so I taught him

the song by way of mourning

when it died. He still possessed his sweetness,

unlike older sons who think you are a moron without big

subwoofers in your car. To that son I say:

you may think you’re one of the alpha-carnivores

just because you’ve shot many avatars of whores

on a video screen that you will never have the Cuban missile crisis on;

you do not even really have the bomb, and how can anyone

command their cool without the bomb: Sam Cooke, James Dean,

those boys lived kitty-corner to their annihilation.

But my son glazes— what’s so special about the past

when everyone has one? And yours, he says,

is out of gas. Then vroom, he’s off—

you might think his car is breathing by the way the windows

bend. Welcome to the new world, Mom,

he says, if you hear singing, it ain’t a song.

After the physics final, Gina and I, in our mukluks

scuffed past the swanky shops on Sherbrooke

then climbed the mountain in the city. December 5,

1975: I tried to will myself to have a vision, though the stars

would not cooperate— instead of a sweat lodge

or a kiva, the warm-up hut at the top of Mount Royal

looked completely un-aboriginal, a replica in miniature

of the Château de Versailles. With night all around us

cold and thick as glass, I don’t know how the starlight

managed to pass through it to sting me, it was hard enough

to lift my hand to knock the door, a joke,

it was so late. And here past the midpoint of my life

I think I’ll die without a paranormal apparition

to which I could wholeheartedly attest. I am not sure

I even have a soul, a corny soul, a little puppet

made of cream and feathers. Yet the door

did open (turned out to be only six p.m.)

and the old man said, Ah jeunes filles, il paraît que vous

avez froid. Then he unstacked two chairs and set them

down before the fire, still chewing its meal of logs

in the giant hearth. Inside the château of our silence,

we sat and chewed our lips: wasn’t the sacred knowledge

supposed to involve telepathy with animals, and astral travel

to planets made of light? Kindness (b) seemed too corny

to be the answer (Restez ici pour le temps que vous

voudrez) though we were given no other choice

except (a) his sweeping, and (c) the mice inside the walls.

When he was flush, we ate dinner

at Tung Sing on Central Avenue

where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic

bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet-

and-sour pork— what else

was there to care about, except his sleep

under the pup tent of the news? And the car,

which was a Cadillac until he saw how they

had become the fortresses of pimps—

our hair may look stylish now,

but in the photograph it always turns against us:

give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976

he went to see the enemy, the man

(with sideburns) who sold German cars

and said: take it easy, step at a time,

see how the diesel motor sounds

completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink

around the block in the old neighborhood

where he imagined people (mostly black: by now

his mouth had mastered the word’s exhale,

then cut) lifting their heads to look (-kuh).

And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung

back into the lot to make the deal, although

to mitigate the shift in his allegiances

(or was this forgiveness? — for the Germans

had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)

he kept the color constant. Champagne,

the color of a metal in a dream, no metal

you could name, although they tried

with a rich man’s drink. He could afford it now

though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump

of meat around the glass’s narrow, girlish stem.

Great-Uncle Stefan wears the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s sailor suit,

its cap flat and black, his long

dark hair pomaded in a stiff

blunt skirt behind his neck.

There’s something about the nose’s

bulb-and-nostril conglomeration that we share,

and though I’m not a man I like to think

I am a sailor, with a waxed moustache like his

whose curled-up ends provide

an occupation for our nervous hands,

twirling it so as not to betray

with a squint or smirk his sympathies,

which lie with the murderer Princip.

Who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo, where

it took me a long time in the assassination museum,

reading Cyrillic via the osmotic method

of translation, before I figured out

Princip was the hero of the place: a person

could match her feet with his imprinted

in the sidewalk and pull the trigger of her fingers.

And enter the fantasy of being The One Who Caused

The Greater Past, which I could not resist:

my knuckle crooked, and clicked.

However I did spare the Duchess Sophie.

It’s the Bronx, Barretto Point, so the sea

cannot be far away. But all we have to go on

is the lone pine in the distance— the rest

bleached by the chemistry of time. Also

there’s this young man in the foreground, squatting

with his forearms balanced on the fulcrum of his knees,

speaking to what’s disappeared. It is a blur

resembling a woman with her arm extended,

urging him to follow. Soon the Great Depression

will also call him, and for lack of other work

will send him downstairs to the boiler

where he’ll nurse the chromosome of sadness

while his words turn into coal. But he was not really

down there with the onions and potatoes—

in a moment, he will follow her

into the waters off Barretto Point, which will turn his good white shirt

translucent. Like the translucence he was led by,

but in this picture he hasn’t risen yet

to cross the muddy shoreline. He’s still crouched

in the upland, growing misty with the nebula who touches him,

misty at the prospect of his likewise turning into mist

as the camera makes this record of their betrothal.

Dusk takes dictation from the houses.

Sometimes sobs and sometimes screams—

laughter, too, though it doesn’t settle like the others

into the hollows of the Virgin Mary’s face.

In her concrete gown, she’s standing by

the satellite dish absorbing for the trailer on the corner,

wearing shoulder pads of Asian pears I stole some of

before the windfall fell. When the dog

lifts his leg to soil a withered rose I say Good boy.

Nightshade vines overtake the house of the widow,

their flowers turned into yellow berries

that there are no birds in nature idiot enough

to mistake for food.

after Dick Barnes

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper: I can barely pronounce your name

but have been thinking of you ever since your grease gun

erupted into space. Causing your tool bag to slip

beyond the reach of your white glove, when you were attempting

to repair the space station’s solar wing. Thanks

for that clump of language— solar wing! One of the clumps

of magic shat out by our errors. And thanks

to your helmet camera’s not getting smeared,

in the inch between your glove and bag— irrevocable inch—

we see the blue Earth, glowing so lit-up’dly despite the crap

that we’ve dumped in its oceans, a billion tons of plastic beads,

precursors to the action figures that come with our Happy Meals.

Precursors to the modern Christmas tree and handle of the modern ax.

Precursors to the belts and jackets of the vegans.

The cleanup crews call them mermaid’s tears, as if a woman

living in the water would need to weep in polymer

so that her effort would not be lost/so that there would be proof

of her lament, say for the great Trash Vortex

swirling in the current, for the bellies of the albatrosses

filling up with tears that can’t be broken down.

For the smell of mildew in the creases of ruptured beach balls,

for seabirds strangled by what makes the six-pack possible,

for flip-flops that wash up so consistently alone

they cause disturbing dreams about one-legged tribes

(described by Pliny before he sailed across the Bay of Naples,

into Mount Vesuvius’s toxic spume).

Dreams logical, Heidemarie, given the fearful data.

Dreams had by us who live 220 miles below.

Queasy from our spinning but still holding on,

with no idea we are so brightly shining.

Bad luck to enter the houses of old women, a commandment

broken when I entered their stone cottage, two streets over,

covered in vines that twirled around a rusted swing set

though they had no child. That they were witches: a conclusion

come to, given that they wore the clothes of men,

their wool caps covering their secret hair, their house

so laced in greenwork that it seemed continuous with the woods

and its nettles and the nickel in my pocket, which they paid

for bee balm I tore out of their yard and sold

back to them, the dirt-wads dangling.

“Don’t let the birds out,” muttered while I slipped

into the room with its stone walls, the backdrop

for a wounded jay who lived in a tin tub rattling with seeds.

Birdfeed, newspapers, feathers, guano— I saw

one substance splattering into the next in the life undivided,

windows open, birds flying in and out.

They worked their conjurations by feeding chopped meat

through a dropper, and wiped their hands

onto their jeans so you could see their long black fingers

streaking up the whole length of their thighs.

Mine have occurred in empty houses

down whose dark paneling I dragged my fingernails—

though big-box stores have also played their parts,

as well as entrances to indistinct commercial buildings,

cubes of space between glass yellowing like onion skin,

making my freak-out obscure.

Suddenly the head is being held between the hands

arranged in one of the conventional configurations:

hands on ears or hands on eyes

or both stacked on the forehead

as if to squeeze the wailing out,

as if the head were being juiced.

The freak-out wants wide open space,

though the rules call for containment—

there are the genuine police to be considered,

which is why I recommend the empty vestibule

though there is something to be said for freaking-out

if the meadow is willing to have you

facedown in it,

mouth open to the dry summer dirt.

When my friend was freaking-out inside my car, I said

she was sitting in the freak-out’s throne,

which is love’s throne, too, so many fluids

from within the body on display

outside the body until the chin gleams

like the extended shy head of a snail! Even

without streetlamps, even in the purplish

penumbra of the candelabra of the firs.

My friend was freaking-out about her freak-outs,

which happened in the produce aisle;

I said: oh yeah at night, it’s very

freak-inducing when the fluorescent lights

arrest you to make their interrogation! Asking

why you can’t be more like the cabbages,

stacked precariously

yet so cool and self-contained,

or like the peppers who go through life

untroubled by their freaky whorls.

What passes through the distillery of anguish

is the tear without the sting of salt— dripping

to fill the test tube of the body

not with monster potion but the H Two… oh, forget it…

that comes when the self is spent.

How many battles would remain

in the fetal pose if the men who rule would rip

their wool suits from their chests like girls

in olden Greece? If the bomberesses

stopped to lay their brows down on a melon.

If the torturer would only

beat the dashboard with his fists.

Now the tanagers have returned to my dead plum tree—

they sip the pond through narrow beaks.

Orange and yellow, this recurrence

that comes with each year’s baby leaves.

And if the tree is a church and spring is Sunday,

then the birds are fancy hats of women breaking into song.

Or say the tree is an old car whose tank is full,

then the birds are the girls on a joyride

crammed in its seats. Or if the tree is the carnival

lighting the tarmac of the abandoned mall by the freeway,

then the birds are the men with pocketknives

who erect its Ferris wheel.

Or say the tree is the boat that chugs into port

to fill its hold and deck with logs,

then the birds are the Russian sailors who

rise in the morning in the streets where they’ve slept,

rubbing their heads and muttering

these words that no one understands.

Every morning I put on my father’s shirt

whose sleeves have come unraveled—

the tag inside the collar though

is strangely unabraded, it says

Traditionalist

one hundred per cent cotton

made in Mauritius

Which suddenly I see is a haiku

containing the requisite syllables and even

a seasonal image

if you consider balmy Mauritius

with its pineapples and sugarcane.

And this precision sends me off

down the dirt road of my fantasy

wherein my father searched

throughout the store to find this shirt

to send an arrow from before the grave

to exit on the other side of it,

the way Bashō wrote his death poem:

On a journey, ill

my dream goes wandering

over withered fields

It suits my father to have hunted down

a ready-made for his own poem,

not having much of an Eastern sensibility,

having been stationed in China during the war and hating it

despite the natural beauty of Kunming.

They say a man dies when the last person

with a memory of him dies off, or maybe

he dies when his last shirt falls to ruin. Now

its cuffs show the dirty facing all the way around

and a three-inch strip of checkered flannel dangles down

into my breakfast cereal:

I have debated many days but

here it goes—

snip

and am overcome by an Asian wash of sadness.

Because the washer spins so violently, like time—

perhaps its agitations can be better withstood

with the last-memory theory, which means that a dead man

reposes longest in the toddlers that he knew,

which often are not many,

children being afraid of old men,

what with their sputum-clearing rasps

and their propensity for latching on to cheeks,

though my father was not much of a child-cheek-pincher,

not that he had anything against them;

he had a grandson he tolerated

crawling under the table at La Manda’s

where between forkfuls of scungilli

as his kidneys chugged with insufficient vim,

he composed his other death poem,

the one that came in his own words, it went

Soon I must cross

the icy sidewalk—

help. There goes my shoe

Trees bare. Days short. And at dusk

crows pour through the sky in strands.

From a point in the east too small

to feed your eye on, they pop

into being as sharp dark stars, and then

are large, and then are here, pouring west.

Something chilling about it,

though they are birds like any birds.

What’s fishy is the orchestration, all of them

with a portion of the one same mind: they fly

as if the path were laid, as if

there were runnels in the air, molding

their way to the roost. Whose location

no one seems to know— if they did,

you’d think there would be chitchat

in the market about the volume

of their screams, as if women were being

dragged by the hair through the woods

at night. But everybody keeps mum—

it seems we’re in cahoots with them

without knowing what’s the leverage

they possess (though we can feel it)

to extract from us this pact, this vow.

Now my body has become so stylish in the ancient way — didn’t Oedipus

also have a bloated foot? Yes,

I remember him tied by the ankle in a tree, after his father heard the terrible

prophecy and left him hanging

for the animals to peck and lap, same way the dog likes to lap my bloated foot

when I take off the special socks

meant to squeeze it down. He likes to eat my epidermal cells before they fly

off on the air that moves on through

the tallest trees one valley south, where great blue herons build their nests

and ride on small twigs up — then gently

do their legs glide down my binoculars’ field of view. The twigs they ride on

never crack; how do they calculate

the tensile strength of cellulose versus their hollow bones? I thought of this

at the hospital cafeteria

as I stared down an oldish woman’s half-cubit of shanklebone, exposed

between her sock and slack: it was

oldish skin I lapped until scowled at by her companion, who reached to the hem

of her pant-leg and for the sake of what

rule of decorum gently pulled it down?

The dogs of the childless are barely dogs.

From tufted pillows, they rule the kingdom.

They’d stand for their portraits

in velvet suits, if they had suits—

holding hats with giant feathers.

And ousting the question: who loves the dog more?

the question becomes: who does the dog love?

The woman says: you are the one who plays him

a drum, you tap the anthem on his head.

No, the man says, you debone him the hen,

you tie the bow of his cravat.

The dogs of the childless sleep crosswise in bed,

from human hip to human hip — a canine wire

completes the circuit. The man says: I wonder

what runs through his head

when he squeaks and snorls all through his dream?

And the woman says: out

of the dream, I’m in his dream,

riding the hunt in my lovely saddle.

When the masters are gone, the dogs of the childless

stand in the mirror with swords on their hips.

They’d stand for their portraits with dogs of their own

if we were kings, if they weren’t dogs.

Light passing through the leaves obliterates the subtitles

when the thief overtakes the swordsman

and forces his bride to submit. This is why

I need a new 42-inch flat-screen TV—

so I can read the dialogue of foreign films

that will improve me, though frankly it is horrible

to see the swordsman tied up and to watch him watch

the change in his wife’s fingers

on the thief’s (somewhat doughy) back. First

it looks as if she’s fighting him, but then

she seems to pull him close,

saying Now I am stained and must be killed or

How do whales strain such tiny krill—these problems

of interpretation can be solved by money:

we need larger words. I have not abandoned words

even if with trepidation I now enter

the kind of store where they sell plastic polygons

that hum and blink. As the swordsman’s wife

enters the forest on her pony, her trepidation draped

with a veil that renders even the biggest tv powerless

to show much of her face. But she shows the thief her foot

in its fancy flip-flop: that’s what rouses him

to rape her in the leafy grove, I’ll say what I saw

in the plainest words. I am not asking to be forgiven

for desiring 1080p, though I am asking

whether or not she asked for it: you’d think

we would have laid that one to rest (it seems

so strident, air-lifted from the 1970s

when I did not watch tv and also called myself a womyn—

a word it’s hard to dress in a kimono) but apparently

we will never. At his trial, the thief (Toshiro Mifune)

sits wigwam-style in tethers and laughs maniacally

as he tells his version, though in somebody else’s version

she’s the maniac who laughs. We ask, but the new machines

refuse to say much more than this: that everyone

will get their chance to laugh and everyone

their chance to wield the knife—

be careful, it is sharp and growing

sharper, the more I spend.

When first I was given the one lily

chaperoned by two green pods,

I strapped myself in like a cosmonaut

to absorb the whoosh of seeing

its pods open one by one.

Because what mind cooked up such extravagance,

spot speckle pinkstripe smudge—

someone call a fire truck

somebody call a bomb squad

somebody call a pharmacist

for a Valium prescription.

Because the beauty of the world is soon to perish;

everything is burning up too fast—

lily number two goes off like a bottle rocket, leaving

the bloom and withering on the same stiff stalk

and the heart torn between them as the petals drop.

Oh, I might have asked for a simple daisy, something

to inflict a subtler vanishing…

without all this ocular pyromania

and the long-bones-dressed-up-in-a-coffin

scent. Plus there’s one pod yet to detonate,

which the yellow pollen grains are trying to defuse

by lying scattered on the table,

precisely scattered on the wooden table

in a manner calibrated to this trapezoid of winter light.

for Ben S., 1936–2010

My friend said: write about the dog in The Odyssey—

four hundred pages in. I found him lying on a dungheap

where ticks sipped his blood, though in his youth

he’d taken down wild animals, eager to kill

for a man the gods favored! Who comes back

in disguise; you expect the dog to give him away

with a lick or a yip, but this is not what happens.

Instead we’re told that “death closed down his eyes,”

the instant he saw his master after twenty years away.

And I wondered if my friend had played a trick—

setting me up with this dog who does not do much

but die. When the gods turn away, what can we do

but await their unturning? That means: don’t think

that after so many years of having such a hard pillow,

the dog wasn’t grateful. But I wonder

if, for the sake of the shape of the plot,

the author ought to have let him remain

for another line or two, if only to thump again his tail.

Because the old feeder feeds nothing

but squirrels, who are crafty and have learned

how to hang so it swings sideways until

gravity takes the seed — I bumble down

to this store of bird knickknacks and

lensware for the geeks, and while

the clerk is ringing up my Mini

Bandit Buster ($29.95), spring-loaded

to close the seed-holes when a heavy animal alights,

I read a pamphlet about bird-feeding, which I had not thought

was complicated, but turns out

is. Yes I bought the costly mixture

— not the cheap stuff full of milo—

which the birds kick to the ground, where it becomes

an aggregate of shit and chaff.

But I’d not known you must sweep it up

so as not to spread the pathogens, and space

your feeders far apart and dump

the seed each week and clean the feeder tube with bleach.

And you should whitewash the windows of your home

so the birds won’t crash — you’ll live in twilight

but your conscience will be clear. Otherwise

it’s best not to feed the birds

at all: your help will only kill them, has killed them,

I killed them says Wild Birds Unlimited — thanks,

now let me tell you that your wind chimes

turn this place into a gong-tormented sea.

Outside, it’s just another shop in the strip mall;

used to be that this place was a grove

of cedars where I knelt in the purplebrown duff

while something holy landed like a lunar rover

on my shoulder. But listen

to what sings in the grove’s bright stead—

computer chips provide what you would hear here

if they weren’t — mechanical birds

on plastic boughs, always flowering.

Light leaves the air like silty water

through a filterpaper sieve:

there is a draft created by its exodus

that you might think that if you rode

you too could slip away quite easily.

Is this why they call to mind the thought of death?

Squeak squeak, their song: I want to go

but I am stuck here, it is a mistake

being incarnate; I should be made

of the same substance as the dark.

If they must stay, like us they will be governed

by their hungers, pursuit

without rest. What you see in their whirling

is not purity of spirit. Only appetite,

infernal appetite — driving them, too, on.

On my wedding night I drove the white boat,

its steering wheel a full yard wide. The dress

bellied out behind me like a sail

as I gripped the lacquered wood

and circuited the bay. The poem

by Akhmatova having already

been read, the calamari and cake

already eaten, I stood alone

in the wheelhouse while my friends

danced to the balalaikas outside

on the deck. I could not speak

for the groom, who left me

to the old motor’s growl

and the old boards’ groan; I also

couldn’t speak for the moon

because I feared diverging

from my task to look. Instead I stuck

my eyes to the water, whose toxins shined

with a phosphor that I plowed and plundered.

And no matter what has happened since,

the years and the dead,

the sadness of the bound-to-happen,

the ecstasy of the fragile moment,

I know one night I narrowed my gaze

and attended to my captaining, while the sea

gave me more serious work than either love or speech.

I followed your red stocking hat

down the river of summer snow

until you carved the turn that stopped us both

with a spray of crystals. A prosthetic leg

lay on the ground, wearing a red

running shoe; we almost took it

to the Lost and Found, but skiing on,

we found more legs

perplexed the mountain. Leg

with thermos, leg with scarf, tableaux

with legs like bowling pins

struck down, though some were propped

erect, against a rock. Art installation

or object lesson? — first the body loses,

then it loses what it puts in place

of what it loses? — I thought

Mount Hood had come to life

to hammer this in. But I kept on

after your red hat and soon was overtaken

by one-legged men, a human wind

I whirled among for just a human minute.

Below, I saw them swallow you, then leave

you with the mountain shadowed on your back,

your red hat wagging, happily, it seemed,

despite the tons of rock you wore.

was a gift from Angus, came with his new Harley

which no ladies deigned to perch their buttocks on

and was therefore sold minus the shirt—

net cost: three thousand dollars, I wear the money

in my sleep. The black braid flowing from the man

herding dice at the Squaxins’ Little Creek Casino

cost me two hundred thirty-five, well worth it

for the word croupier. Work seven months on a poem,

then you tear it up, this does not pencil out

especially for my mother who ate potatoes

every day from 1935–41. Who went to the famous

Jackson Pollock show after the war — sure, she was a rube

from across the Harlem River, snickering

at the swindle of those dribbles until death squelched the supply

and drove the prices up. I’ve known men

who gave up houses worth half a million just to see

the back of someone whom they once bought diamonds.

And I’ve known women to swallow diamonds

just to amplify the spectacle of their being flushed.

The Gutenberg Bible — okay, I get that:

five-point-four million dollars for a book of poems

written by God on the skin of a calf. A hundred years ago

the Squaxins could tell you easily

who the rich man was. He’d be dressed in a red robe

made of epaulets from redwing blackbird wings.

When I stopped along the road and climbed the platform that the wildlife people built, I saw the dead grass moving. A darker gold that broke free from the pale gold of the field.

“Wolves,” said the man who stood beside me on the platform. On his other side stood his wife and children, I assumed, dressed as if they’d come from church,

a boy and girl, her scalp crosshatched with partings from her braids. Note that this is my way of announcing they were black

or African American, I am shy not only of the terminology but of the subject altogether

compounded by the matter of words, black being strong

if not so precise a descriptor—

and my being torn about the language makes me nervous from the start. “Look at the wolves,” he told his children

before dropping a quarter in the scope, which I didn’t need because I had my own binoculars

and know the names and field marks of the birds

(like the white rump of the marsh hawk),

so I include “the white rump of the marsh hawk” as it flies over the field.

“Those are coyotes,” I said

with pity for the man’s foolishness? is there a correlation between my knowledge and my pity?

(an inside joke: the marsh hawk’s having been renamed the northern harrier,

though marsh hawk is stronger).

Plus what about the man’s pity for the white girl with coyote in her mouth

— coyote in two syllables, the rancher’s pronunciation,

when wolf is stronger. I wondered whether he was saving face before his family when he said, “No, those are wolves,”

or did he only want his kids to feel the dangerous elation of the word?

I could not tell because they did not look at me, they who had come from praying to a God in whom I don’t believe, though I am less smug about that not-belief

(could be wrong, I oftentimes suspect)

than I am about the wolves. Because I know the wolves were coyotes;

the wolves were coyotes

and so I said, “There are no wolves in Illinois.”

“No, those are wolves,” the man said, turning toward his wife who offered me her twisted smile, freighted with pity or not I couldn’t tell, the pity directed toward me another thing I couldn’t tell, or toward her husband

the believer in wolves

(at least he was sticking by them, having staked his claim).

In the autumn withering, the eyes of the children were noticeably shining, but I saw only the sidelong long-lashed white part of their eyes as they stepped up to the scope.

“Check out the wolves,” he said (the minutes ticking)

(the minutes nuzzling one another’s flanks)

(the minutes shining in the farthest portion of the field

as whatever emerged from it entered it again).

In the saltwater aquarium at the pain clinic

lives a yellow tang

who chews the minutes in its cheeks

while we await our unguents and anesthesias.

The big gods offer us this little god

before the turning of the locks

in their Formica cabinets

in the rooms of our interrogation.

We have otherwise been offered magazines

with movie stars whose shininess

diminishes as the pages lose

their crispness as they turn.

But the fish is undiminishing, its face

like the death mask of a pharaoh,

which remains while the mortal face

gets disassembled by the microbes of the tomb.

And because our pain is ancient,

we too will formalize our rituals with blood

leaking out around the needle

when the big gods try but fail

to find the bandit vein. It shrivels when pricked,

and they’ll say I’ve lost it

and prick and prick until the trouble’s brought

to the pale side of the other elbow

from which I turn my head away—

but Pharaoh you do not turn away.

You watch us hump past with our walkers

with the tennis balls on their hind legs,

your sideways black eye on our going

down the corridor to be caressed

by the hand with the knife and the hand with the balm

when we are called out by our names.

Lucia Perillo’s fifth book of poems, Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon, 2009), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Washington State Book Award and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress. Her book of stories, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, will be published by Norton in 2012, and a book of her essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, is out in paperback from Trinity University Press.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, in which these poems first appeared:

The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Barrow Street, Kenyon Review Online, The Los Angeles Review, New England Review, The New Yorker, Orion, Ploughshares, Poetry, Rio Grande Review, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, Southern California Review, Subtropics, Tin House, and Voices in Italian Americana.