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the 1984 Apple Super Bowl commercial as intervention

Then I was found.
Because this is the future, there is a woman w/a hammer.
In the old days there would be a mountain & a path, there would be villagers, a
dais w/a great stone significantly positioned.
Now the world is all jetway & boulevard, burnished chrome, metonymy.
This is the future.
In the old days there would be a Spanish viceroy, his wig sugar-white, taking tea
at the long hour. Unaware.
What other beginning is possible? There is a woman gripping a hammer. She is
running, her stride smooth & polished as oil. Left, right. Something is being
challenged.
Left, right. How nights she dreams of vast plains of water, whole cities of trees.
Somewhere there is a screen, the projection of a man's face.
Once I was obsessed w/linearity. I was obsessed w/all things dark & stringed,
w/narratives that fell from the stratosphere.
The woman bursts into a hall, the hammer like a sacred text shining in her hands.
How the screen rants, the figure's face all pixilated light.
In the old days there would be a word for that.
The woman begins to twirl, her body is its own engine, the hammer like seed flying
from her fists.
Porte des Morts as Neutrino
Today the road is pure allegory-leaves down, the woods a city of bones, acres
twisting on acres.
I think of my own body, how each second the smallest of particles pass through me
at the speed of light. How we are regions of emptiness. How inside us there are
miles of woods just like this, autumnal & capillary.
I am walking the road on Death's Northern Door.
This is the year of Justification. These are its rudiments: faith & grace.
At the end of it all there will be water & a great cliff. In the summer one I love
will choose to go over & then climb back, the shale loose beneath her feet.
Who has never wanted to be fields of nothing?
Now in the shoals the salmon are massing. I watch them from the precipice, their
gray skins hanging in shreds.
What is it like to feel yourself die on the bone? To empty?
The Doctrine of Justification claims salvation lies only in grace, meaning He chose
to be voluminous for us.
A gunshot. Something dies, its velvet rack crashing to earth.
When you're gone, please pass through me at the speed of light.
the cabriolet as metempsychosis
& the moonlight said, "Die."
There are no horses. Only a field filled w/the cries of seabirds & a great disk
threshing up the darkness.
This is how it happens: the first snowflake. Something hanging in the trees,
stunned luminous, & you want the grace of it-the guitar's sorrow swelling like a
sprain, the vibrancy.
Then the story of your mother dying on the table, the small black seeds like a
contract germinating in her neck.
Now I know what a bridge is for, why the wind crosses the long water.
All night we drive the wrecks of our bodies over the earth. All night everything
unfurls before us.
Want to be water.
Want to be wheel.
One day you will feel yourself sprouting into something else. Like the summer I
found myself clinging to a stone in the rapids-the river seething & white- until
someone threw me a rope & hand over hand, I came back naked & shivering.
Which is to say we don't have a choice.
How the hydrogen in our bodies was created eons ago. Or the photograph of your
mother in a white linen dress standing by your door, her dark hair bright.
We are capacious.
The moonlight lies.
the seahorse as transubstantiation
A full moon & all along the reef's spine pairs of small monsters are dancing, their
fused jaws & stalked eyes argentine, refractory, the delicate pipettes of their
mouths heraldic.
Night & our clothes lie empty on the beach. We did not plan this-the salt's
impassive burn, or the way the moonlight thickens in the shoals.
I can see everything-these ridged creatures twined around each other, the whole
reef ablaze w/their agony.
In the distance there are fires burning on the water. All night men trawl the sea
floor. In the morning there will be nets heaped w/them, the bony plates of their
bodies crisping in the sun.
I imagine it was a creature like this at the annunciation, something mysterious &
derivative & spiked w/grace. Something extracted from the sea five thousand by five
thousand times. Something medicinal & tidal. A conveyance.
Who doesn't want to be altered?
When I take you into me, I become you, we are thirded & furious. The night spreads
like oil. When we rise salt-skinned from the water, everything is demonstrative.
All night under the Indian moon we sit & watch the seahorses mate, each year
millions pulled from the ocean, the hooks of their unleavened bodies ground into
remedies. Your arms hasped around me.
When such things are gone what do we celebrate?
Even then I was creating a memory of you.
Pernkopf's Atlas as Interregnum
After centuries of ignorance, we have finally won the right to dissect the human
body.
-Manual of Human Dissection
This is what we know of its origins: utter disregard for everything.
As if a prefix could convey that particular horror-how they went unfed for weeks to
make the inner structures readily conspicuous-skin sail-taut, the skeleton jutting
out in sharp relief.
Vienna in the early forties.
The gassed shipped in salt, glycerin & acetate, their arteries filled w/red lead &
glue to highlight the vascular system so that one day we might open this book &
say, "This part of us is named for a key."
On the radio I heard a Jewish doctor say he wouldn't know what to do if his own
son's brain swelled tumidly & only this terrible atlas could save him.
Consider the artist, his small-toothed saw, & the hours spent distracting the flesh
from the skull like a shellfish, the glistening meninges.
I am here in the library's medicinal light because I want to see the compressed
tables of the skull, the heart's four rooms, the lingual vein. How the body can be
both art & atrocity.
Enter the old disclaimers: what makes me think I can tell this story w/any hint of
beauty, say, the clavicle cut delicate as a key, or the Holocaust as my model, the
being I draw on the page, my small-toothed saw fascinated & glittering?
Perhaps in its molecular form, art should be the admission.
Here in my hands I hold what they did.
Arbeit macht frei.
Or should it be more than the admission? Should we be able to just walk away?

habeas corpus as confession

"What was it like to taste death?" asked one reporter. Willie answered literally.
"It tasted like cold peanut butter." "What went wrong?" asked another reporter.
"God fool'd with the electric chair," answered Willie. -from Death by Installments:
The Ordeal of Willie Francis
First the argument: double jeopardy.
What happened: May & the electrical surge looked like shines in a rooster's tail.
Then all he said was: "I'm not dying" & it begins-the long year of adjudication,
the briefs thick as trees.
Louisiana in the mid-forties.
In the end he doesn't win, & naively wills his eyes to Rufus Allen of Dallas,
Texas.
Let my confession start here: I too am innocent & black but millennial, my fear
academic & secondhand. Like the yellowed photograph in the New Yorker of two men
hanging like pi atas above a crowd, the teenaged girls dressed for cotillion.
Images & stories. Strange fruit.
In my time: a man dragged headless behind a truck. Another shot on his own stoop.
Or the picture snapped near Government Center-the mob's animal rage
& the heavy stain bleeding down the protagonist's shirt, the flag literally
dripping.
My meager humiliations-a check refused here & there, the word penned where I live.
The W. E. B. DuBois Professor at Harvard tells his students the "blackest" thing
they can do is be successful. But I am a coward w/a penchant. I watch the old
documentaries, see the schoolchildren knocked down w/water, the dogs' instinctive
slashing.
This is my body: whole & black. In my dreamlife I see it otherwise: beaten, the
indignation an apotheosis as it was for them.
Who doesn't want to be tested?
At seventeen Willie Francis was electrocuted for the second time, the chair firing
like a kiln.
I want to believe I deserve what I have.
But I can't.

house fire as bildungsroman

The windows are the first things to break.
Cut to lightning. Cut to the cycles in the body. How Hajime took our picture in the
Forbidden City, the wall so red & pleasing Mie stopped & cried, "Here!"
After it's out, you come back w/friends, empty boxes. Your life is every ocean on
the moon-Mare, pocked & airless, dry.
When I woke up on the floor I saw the afterimage-the light smudged around the bulb,
the whole bed in agony.
What would you take w/you?
Cut to a blackboard filled w/conjugations. Amo, amas, amat. I wanted to raise my
hand & sing. Then I remembered the flames, my feet small & unprotected as brush.
There was nothing else to do.
Did I say pocked & airless? Did I say dry?
The man who can't talk. The girl who can't see the painting of the young bride. My
nephew, the aids deep in his ears. The ones who can't move, the snapped stems of
their spines.
O dark knowledge! O terrible glories!
Everything you are.
the oboe in Handel's largo from Xerxes as elegy
Put what will be your tongue in a glass of warm water. Let it soften, the reed's
clean wood smooth & expanding.
At that age I never believed I could make anything beautiful.
& then I did.
How w/practice I was able to pin paper to the wall using only my breath, vibrato
controlled as a hummingbird.
This is the fingers' work, the long notes like eggs on the page.
How in our second season both your parents died though I still looked for them
gaunt & ligneous on the stoop, their frail hands pianissimo & waving.
Through the oboe I came to know things: dolce & sorrow, why an aragonaise is like a
blue flame dancing, or how an adagio is sheened like moonrise.
Sweetness & affliction.
Then Mr. Harlick lifted his baton & we took our instruments up in our hands- the
largo's non-narrative suffering like an oak tree, something I could climb.
Who am I to have everything?
All I could do was take the reed from the water & push it into pitch. Purse my
lips.
Come in like light growing.
the short brutish life of Samantha Smith as control
That summer we went into the woods w/shovels, a few feet of twine. We picked the
spot mnemonically-a lichen-stained boulder, a surge of poison sumac, the two birch
saplings thin & ductile.
I said, "I could be the first person to ever stand right here." It was early
afternoon, the sun slipping through the canopy in long strips.
Then we began.
Like an archer you pulled one of the saplings toward the earth-the young wood
bowing smoothly, & I held it in my arms while you lashed it to the other. "This
will be my roof," I said.
We spent the afternoon leveling the ground, transplanting smaller things w/the
intention of training them to be walls, to grow up & over. "Next summer I will have
a house," I said, & we finally stepped back & looked.
That night on the TV news a girl my age met the Soviet premier. Three summers later
she was dead.
This is a story of childhood, of a girl & her mother playing in the forest. This is
a story of something they built & promptly forgot. This is a story of an instance.
Last winter I walked into the woods to look for that arch we strapped together. But
there was nothing, just the boulder capped w/snow.
& the moral?
Imagination? An appreciation for the earth? How I too could be dead, my small body
burned in that military plane filled w/babies? Or is it grafting? The accumulation
of instances? Or is it the memory of a single afternoon? Of not taking anything for
granted?
aboriginal cave painting as difficulty
Those who love you must suffer-
like the lightning man, his brother who gave everything.

purdah as polemic
Do not speak in soft tones, for then, he in whose heart there is a disease will
lust.
Personally I will never go there again.
How we were made to rent dresses. You wore blue & I wore white, the cloth plentiful
as walls.
Or the man who followed me home from the market-the air sticky & dumb, to him my
loose hair significant as a red lantern.
& the others-the ones who broke in & the university student who stayed up all night
keeping watch.
Or the old woman who stopped me on the street, demanded to know why I was speaking
English &, as someone translated, "Naked."
Reader, I'm not beautiful.
It happened because I look like what they imagine their women do underneath-skin
rum-brown, hair sea-dark & thick.
Today on the news the government is killing adulteresses, burying them in waist-
deep pits, then commanding family members to stone them.
You are white-skin like a peeled apple, & so those men left you alone.
But here there was that night in October-how we'd gone dancing, your red dress
flashing significantly to someone.
Or
if the family members refuse, the offenders are positioned by a stone wall which in
turn is bulldozed down on them.
Call this poem what you want-an exercise in didacticism, a Western imposition of
morals, just remember it happens everywhere.
Only in some worlds this poem could earn me a sentence of death by beheading as
could your reading it.

the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 as allegory

The point is the material world is fluid & litigious.
Government of light.
I've never told you exactly what happens, what it feels like-the fear like a small
blue sun.
By all accounts there were bells ringing, the firemen unseasonably lounging in half
sleeves.
January. Boston. Commercial Street & the great tank of the U.S. Alcohol Company
bursts w/a "horrible sucking sound," the steel bolts ripping like machine-gun fire-
everything suddenly heavy & glazed.
Since the age of four I've never wanted to die. Nights I see my own death black &
stretching into the vanishing point & I jerk myself up out of the bloodpit & think
of couplets, of water, of the natural progression.
How the horses lay floundering in the sweetness.
Now I only sleep when the sky grows pink.
I am not afraid of the dark. I am not afraid to slip into that other world where we
can fly & no one calls me by my name. But listen: I am afraid of isolation. I am
afraid of the world's tangible silence. I am afraid of the boundlessness behind my
eyes. I am afraid of being held like that. I am afraid of believing.
Imagine you are Mrs. Clougherty. You are standing in your clapboard house, blankets
heaped before you for folding. What is your last thought as your body is lifted in
that rapturous thirty-foot wave?
Like something trapped in amber.
Do you open your mouth in surprise, the thick light filling your lungs?
O horrible vulturism of earth!
When it comes, what will I say?

the landmine as opiate

Here is your map: the women's mouths dark as flowers.
& Mie's shoes, her feet like two small holes.
The whole time I was thinking of home, the pictures unbelievably crisp-the
elephants w/the slow tonnage of their animal sadness & the evening sky arterial,
thickening.
I have told you the denouement before: the moon's small hare disappearing
unexpectedly, Ricardo & I struck pure. Or the way such knowledge permeates-the
esophagus hinged like a door, the black tar sweet as honey.
Yes, there was a river. I could hear it through the reeds.
Yes, there was always a thin file of men on the other side, in their hands their
guns furtive as animals.
Why shouldn't everything be whole?
Narratively there was a week we walked from village to village-the men shadowing us
along the border, the local children stumped & listing, their small bodies
unbalanced, monstrous.
Who put this line here? Who made this shard-filled thing winged like a butterfly?
All week I expected to see that light, to put my foot down on the earth & come away
changed w/what only the body knows:
emanation. The fallacy of closure.
Ridley Scott's Gladiator as Partitive Genitive
4/30/00
Such things should be spoken of in the locative: a field filled w/wheat & your hand
hovering allegorically..
Because this goes on in eternity: what we do in life-the black pitch burning & the
horses merciless in their separatrix, their hard cold line.
Give me a clean death & then give me a vision: of the sun stripping the paint from
a door, or of helicopters sinking through the endless ocean, or of my mother's face
before then unhurried as snow.
What is it about the fallen?
I too want to take the Penates in my hands & speak w/the dead, their words measured
& circumlocutional. Like a hawk flying over on one's left-its flight: fierce,
interpretive.
Sometimes you come home to nothing but two pairs of feet nailed in the air, the
fields black rubble. Sometimes you come home in triumph: Vercingetorix ruined & in
chains, sometimes you return & the people throw pigs blood on the very idea of you.
Imagine a city of such interest it must be destroyed.
Cause & effect: how Cato stood in the marketplace, the policy spilling from his
lips. Kartago delenda est.
How directives like this covertly expand-perimeters: inconsequential.
In the beginning there is a white horse cantering out of the mists, its rider
wrecked & headless, metaphorical.
Shadows & dust. How Hell simply becomes a command, a reserve we carry inside us.
What spectacle is: men made to fight, a roof filled w/people vying for one last
chance.

the long jump as teleportation

Mexico City, 1968
It only allows itself to be glimpsed.
Though there are prerequisites: the night like a bell jar, the air rarefied & thin.
Because the shortest distance between two points is both memory & forgetting- how
we remember the moon of the green corn lurching over the sea, sky gone the color of
absence
& we are there again-the catamaran's ambient listing. Or
the story of one epileptic's diagnosis-art history, how the professor seemed "to
blip" about the hall, the lecture like an old film w/frames missing.
Point A. Point B. The hang time in the air. The becoming.
Though it only allows itself to be glimpsed, there is a runway of indeterminate
length.
You must think of yourself as both there & gone, arms like a wheel.
If the atmospherics are right, there will be a moment like a broken mirror:
you will see yourself in a thousand rooms at once, legs airborne & desperately
pedaling.
Call this consciousness. Call this pure awareness-the being focused like a beam.
Because sometimes you can want something too much, there is always a threshold & a
place to fall.
How many feet to tranquility? How far must we leap until we never look back?
I don't need to know anymore.
Once I was there & then I wasn't.

mal amour as disciple

What I want to say cannot be said.
The sorrow stretches like a neck, the earth unmoving, silent.
Even w/o a body I will still feel it-the heavy lashes, the serrated coins piled on
the night table.
How long will you be lost to me?
I did what I did.

Dosso Dossi's Saint George as Controvertible

& for what?
Because the dragon is small & shoulder-able? Something each of us can carry?
Though it took you all winter to die, would you have me believe in that? Your body
whittled to nothing?
Afterward who noticed the rigid grip-the hand bloodless as a fish, & the lance
shattered & blunted?
Where are the putti? The strong bronze light?
Before the myth, whose presence was in the fields-the earth pungent w/blood & the
villagers' sulfurous belief-the metensomatosis, the wildflowers thick as bodies
which go on & on?
What is the worst thing I have ever seen? What agency?
How can something headless be kept alive? Under what conditions will the human
heart not incinerate?
On the plains the horses rearing between worlds, expectant-& the sky contused & the
water castigating against the glass.
What if there is no end? What if there is no punishment?
& the lightning cinematic w/movement. & the unseen rumbling. & the road leading to
all things.
& the agony? When is it right to want that?
crossing the South China Sea as analgesia
One day we will all be like this-the boat's sickening pitch, & the delicateness
needless, consumable.
How everything here naturally passes into night, a room w/o walls.
Could mindlessness keep us alive? Could bright colors?
Tonight I am thinking of the young woman who dreams of her father being shot in the
head. Imagine needing to believe the one you love has been destroyed.
Now it is after midnight-the spindrift lunar & diaphanous. Here alone on deck could
I make peace w/it all in thirty seconds-the water's inherent rising, the gasping
for air?
I have never seen such omnipresence, such vast dreamlessness- but I too am such
things.
What does it mean to be eroded? What would be the significance of slipping one leg
over the rail & straddling the indifference?
Yes. Once upon a time we spent three days on a boat out of Kob , Japan.
All night the waves. All night the somnambulistic urges.
Or how as children we would swim in a hard rain-the lake's surface ragged & torn,
but underneath
the roots of the water lilies like ladders trailing down into the marvelous.
figurative poem as psychostasia
Or do we each draw a particular death-the spiderweb trembling in the window.
How my cartouche will read: small yellow boat; bird; bird.
When I die what part of me will become light as truth, a single ostrich plume?
& the spiderweb trembling in the window: each spun cell a portal- something to live
through.
Let me believe in it all-infinity, pain & the things we see in mirrors in dark
rooms at night, the moon hermetic & shifting.
Will there be a reconfiguration? Will there be a papering over of names?
At the weighing of the soul, the heart is placed on a balance & everything is
gleaned in profile, our stories painted on reeds.
So much wrong.
Small yellow boat; bird; bird.
& behind the ibis-headed recorder, the Devourer.
Scribe, what did I mean to me?
the last elephant in Burundi as vessel
Imagine the whole savannah teeming w/this-the vultures so engorged they break
trees.
East & central. The Rusuzi turbid w/tsetse, bullet casings.
How an elephant has twenty-eight gestures for sorrow. Or how in times of drought
the lead female will remember where there was water generations before she existed.
As w/everything, there is always an end.
& the nearest towns: Big Skull, White Man's Grave.
Leisurely it hones its trumpet of bone on a baobab, the last elephant in Burundi
spared by poachers due to animism-transmigration & the soul's need to rest.
All these years two hundred, a thousand elephants at a time left w/o faces.
Where do we go when we die? What are our lives w/o the possibility of a heaven?
& the chainsaw's masticating power-the tip of the trunk hacked off, thrown into the
bush for luck, & the tusks like something numinous swaddled in wet blankets.
Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" as Infatuation
What is it about movement?
On the horizon, the growing wheel like something forged.
I want that feeling-the water's eagerness to respond, to be touched as if stroked
by feathers.
Because such a moment is a living death-borderless, the light its own season, &
because such things can only happen once.
What power is: the palm of a grasping hand, & the way I secretly want you to name
me.
Or how once far away I woke up under it & wrapped myself in a sheet, the dirt floor
bright & skittering, the night riddled w/satellites, w/things that can't escape.
& at the same time my amazement-that I too could be lulled into dying, that this
obsession could be written on my body in such dark script.
The way I feel you in my sleep-face textured, cleft.
I saw it written & I saw it say:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hanging Rock as Intervention
There is no ladder.
The sunlight holds us in its palms.
This is what we stumbled on: our cis-human souls, metamorphosis.
Is there a myth that applies? Will their mourning scorch the earth?
& is it right, leaving them only our afterimage-the refrain of us, the crushing
wonder & awful light?

domestic violence as Noh play

Because I was audience.
Flute & gesture. The open fan is lifted up before the face, then lowered toward the
right.
In the personal place, she sits gazing into the distance, mask pale & iridescent as
a fish scale.
By the mark of the third pine, the bed wide & hard as a table, & through the open
window the moonlight silver, mimetic.
Don't let the stylization confuse you-the koken cloaked in black, how each
stagehand materializes in the scene, deals the protagonist his weapon, & vanishes.
That night the only music was the phone's ringing.
Afterward I remember looking at her face-the carved wood's deepening azure-
& the moonlight slashing through the window like a sword.
Enter second flute & simple drum. How the open fan is raised & lowered at the level
of the heart.
Where is the fool's spot? Who is lurking on the flower path?
Because I was made to watch something I still don't understand-for his part only
the histrionics apparent.
Pharaoh's Daughter's Motivation as New Criticism
What we're told: that she had compassion on him, & said, "This is one of the
Hebrews' children."
The narrative mentions water, a small ark of bulrushes daubed w/slime & pitch.
Because she remains faceless, we can not infer anything about the weather, how the
sunlight glittered in the reeds, or the harvest song her maidens sang as they
washed the dark sweep of her hair.
Because I drew him out of the water.
The way the text is everything: disclosure & mystery-what did it feel like when she
first held the small loaf of his body in her arms?
Now it is late. A moth flutters at the bare bulb, outside the night like a
presence, & I am halfway to understanding what the text means:
the way we come to you over the long water, & the way you simply take pity.
the excavated foundations of the Salem Village parsonage as resipiscence
Like a mouth set in the frozen ground.
& how our childhoods were informed by it-this innate sense of something missing.
Even now I imagine the girls were both pale & dark like a flock of moons reflected
in water-something seismic, languishing.
What I would have done they did-the night clear as broth, the fire pure volition.
Who isn't desperate to see into the mechanism any way they can?
I would have seen a house burning. I would have seen a man coming to me over water.
I would have seen this place, its hold on me- the primacy of the deep image & the
supplanting of narration.
Where do we learn the art of explication? What can our origins teach us about who
we should be?
Then was the winter of small yellow birds, of visions.
What this place suspended in the world beneath the world denotes- truth, & its
transmitting.
Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee as Semiotics
stolen March 18, 1991
& the sky stained like a shroud, the discoloration organic, spreading.
Or the broken cordage whipping through the air-the sound of it like a hive, like
something interior bilious & thrumming.
How the spindrift is as clean as a beard, or how the boat's laths groan & crack
like ribs.
Death.
Temptation.
Revelation.
Duty.
& the sick one in red-the one doubled over & nauseous w/his back to them.
I remember the water-its pounding blue heart,
& the tattered flag w/its crude cross resolute, exacting.
How in its own way darkness can stand for faith, as in the uninterpretable.
We are intermediaries.
Even in the now-empty frame, when He awakens in the heaving stomach of Galilee,
there is nothing to do but look.
Arctic Summer as Analogy
But under the ice, the krill massing like a forest- untoward, oblivious.

Rage Against the Machine as Plate Tectonics

The first time I didn't know what it was-the ground tremulous as water.
& the afternoon we thought we were going to die-the overhead lights thrashing
insensibly, even the trains shuddering on the tracks.
Since then I've learned to recognize such energies-the way the sea floor spreads
itself like a giant conveyor belt, the lithosphere cold & brittle, shifting.
Tonight I am watching the faults move through this crowd-the arena floor like the
asthenosphere heated, convecting.
Don't turn away-get in front of it.
& they do, thousands of people like a continental shelf, like something collapsing.
What is it about anger or a seismic moment that reads now?
Because I had only seen such fury in nature-the earth buckling under a car, or what
one man did to another w/his fists.
Compressional. Extensional. Transformational & always spreading.
Afterward there is a young boy crying in the parking lot, the full moon like a
mandate.
How pressure builds up in the earth, & the way it gets released.
Go home.
The thing lives in us.

Vietnamese Dictionary Definition as Self-Portrait

See strings of coins, the body's three doors.
To coffin. To grave. To be concerned. To observe.
See idiom & air. See widower & judge. See an inn. See huts. See printing shops.
See consulate & native place.
To water. To excel. To mind. To temporarily shelter a corpse.
See top adjutant in the army.
See flute. See tubes. See ducts. See tracheae. See authority.
See heavenly compassion. See posthumous & touch.
See a pass. See distant places.
the final scene in Akira Kurosawa's Ran as condition
What if we start w/everything?
& how the character for disorder is self-contained-the left radical like a man on
wheels, & then the hook insistent, grappling.
Imagine your whole life consists of things you can't experience-the cherry blossoms
bloodless as snow, & the being you love most lost to circumstance.
What would you do for music? Where would you go to maintain what you believe?
Now there is a man tottering on the lip of a wall, the ground sockets of his eyes
like mortars.
How long can we hold onto the old ways? When something falls from such a height,
what does it become?
Because chaos is a hooked tongue- contagious, interior.
& because contextually we never know the difference.
Lazarus as Ambiguity
How much has passed?
Only yesterday I cut my finger on a piece of glass-how it's still bleeding,
& the way the latest theory claims time is fabricated, non-existing.
Or think of the miracle of the once-dead man, how when Jesus heard the news He
abode two days still in the same place before coming.
In this story time is nothing, just a stone rolled out of the way.
I can live w/the idea of this: that time is like a roll of film, each moment
present simultaneously, & that there has always been a frame of yesterday, the
glass breaking in my hand.
But tonally the story of Lazarus is horrific to me: the idea that Jesus called him
back not because He should have but because He could.
& he that was dead came forth, bound hand & foot w/graveclothes; & his face was
bound about w/a veil.
Was He saying: this is the miracle-that nothing is absolute?
& fundamentally is creation an act of power or grief-the soul consoling itself?
Think of Lazarus staggering forth in the rags of his body again wondering what it
means.
"Loose him, & let him go."
the Blue Grotto as gestation
There is no relativism here.
When conditions are right, the ceiling rains pure water-the sound of it resounding,
cleansing.
How a second underwater opening filters things out- red light, uncertainty.
It's like floating on stained glass-semiotic, the blue vastness a tablet, something
to write on.
This should be a place of visitations, messages.
I submerge my hand & my hand is transformed.
What did the ancients know? Why did they believe the gods created such a space?
Or speleologically, why did the ocean first start lapping at the weak spot in this
particular rock? Why do we exist at all?
That we come here over water is significant, but how I can't exactly say.
Darkness. Vibrancy. Reflection, then the cavern's ragged mouth.
Eventually we duck our heads & are ferried out.
Someone is singing.
Stravinsky's as Approximation
Something rigid & tight. Say a door closing, or if an emotion resignation,
foreboding.
& the tone of it-how the rivers lead nowhere & even the wolf moon was never a
living thing.
Before it was a boat, but modernistically it's the horrible iron body of a train-
mechanization, agnosticism.
Or what was in the heart of the twelfth man in the red hour-his footsteps
disappearing off the earth.
Do you see music? Do you hear free will in the very struts of it?
O physical impulse! O first rune knobbed & stuttering on the page!
"By its very nature, it is powerless to express anything at all-" the moon simply a
straight white hole.
Or the way ritual supplants memory-blood & wood & the hurtling into light.
What pure listening looks like.
It's the helix. It's the one unutterable.
"Jisas Yu Holem Hand Blong Mi" as Dream of Reunification
In it, I'm w/you-
the leaves broad as faces, the water devotional, contented.
There isn't a word for this yet, just a color the shade of the sky's reflection.
The way it lets us hold the flame in our palms-each soft petal an annunciation, a
certainty.
I remember the first time I saw the possibility of myself in you-my soul corporeal
& floating in the weeds.
Or the afternoon I sat wracked & sobbing in my car-the first snow fluttering like
thousands of messages.
I think of you asking for me over & over-the birds bright as jewels, or how I'll
know you by the way you look at me- your innate suffering.
What is it about being called in a forgotten language?
What are we if not smatterings?
the knight's soliloquy as vespers
"To believe is to suffer.
It is like loving someone in the dark who never answers.
It means nothing to me now.
I will remember this hour of peace-the strawberries, the bowl of cream- your faces
in the dusk.
Michael asleep, Joseph w/his lute.
I will remember our words & will bear this memory between my hands
as carefully as a bowl of fresh milk."
the Shroud of Turin as admonition
Think of it this way: how an entire story can be captured on a single bolt of
cloth.
Or the subsequent diagnosis of the body: beard torn, the limb hanging bloodless
from the socket.
Or the sheets of bruises on His shoulders, nose broken & the nails pragmatically
driven through the wrists.
What could a man do to deserve this-the droplets like petals crowning His head?
Or does it matter who this is? Could the fact that this figure suffered & died be
enough?
How when I look at it-the humility, the stark composure- I want to be a better
person.
What is faith if you can prove it?
&: why do we do this to us?
Emmett Till's Open Casket as La Piet
Today on the radio, news of the great lady's death.
I think of her breaking the coroner's seals, prying her way in to him.
How a thousand miles away she heard him crying in the Mississippi night, calling
her name & when the second black man ever stood up in court, he said as much.
This is the litany of injuries: the body waterlogged, monstrous, one eye gouged
out, hanging halfway down his cheek, the nose broken & mostly missing, a hole in
the side of his crushed head where the light came through,
& the marks where they tied the fan w/barbed wire to his neck.
Because the child wouldn't beg for his life.
Let them see what I saw.
& we came. For three straight days we came & looked at her only son.
They are beating him in the barn.
When Mary holds the dead Christ in her arms she has seen everything but the
Resurrection.
self-immolation as self-immolation
Inland the river plugged w/hundreds of wintering ducks, the webs of their feet
furious & churning & the ice like chunks of glass.
Already I can feel the dull ache in the small of my back-the snow water-heavy &
heaping.
What would it be to cast off the body & go on, the river sub-zero & solidifying? Or
to simply lie down in a drift & let yourself slowly burn off?
This inlet is teeming w/their suffering-wings ice-logged & stunned.
Or is it my own suffering I project on them-my fear of the incomprehensible?
How do you tell the body to go beyond the body? To disregard what will happen?
I think of the stories of the ones who go up w/o even twitching, who in the dark
can read by their own light.
Let me come back blank & unneeding.
In the river, the planks of ice illusive & shimmering.
snow angels as Michael Furey
How long will it last?
In the woods there was a statue of the Virgin on an old stump, the snow laced
w/tracks.
& all along the half-frozen shore, the fish w/their rungs of bones, their deadness.
Specifically what was that afternoon symbolic of-the sun tidal & low, or how we
went walking on Death's Northern Door, all weekend the deer stripped & lashed.
The way we put our fluttering bodies down on the earth & were changed, reminded.
Or how I wanted to know there was another me out there- icy & watching.
What makes the short-lived beautiful?
Why does everyone need to believe that someone would die for them?
In the woods there was a statue of the Virgin, her arms outstretched yet grieving.
& the beings we made? Where did they go?
untitled as apologia
As if you could take the winter light & transform it in your very hands.
Yes, I am still thinking of you-in particular, your face of sand, your eyes like
dark corners.
Tonight the snow grows like a penance.
How I am sick w/the idea that this is all there is-outside my window something
watery & collecting.
Because it doesn't matter either way: come to me w/reticence or come to me
w/judgment- the dawn like a white robe.

Richard Nixon's 1972 Christmas Bombing Campaign as Gospel

How the Word came hammering to earth.
Or the story we tell ourselves this time of year-that some of us were foundlings, &
that some of us were given up freely.
Imagine scouring the countryside for even the smallest hamlet, a clean place to
rest & begin.
Or the forests scorched & utterly wrecked. Or the full rabbit moon like a grenade.
What was rising in the east? What is it about this season & the innocent?
Today on the news, the government has finally agreed to go back
& find what it can-the ordnance dormant, biding.
What does it mean that it ever happened at all-the planes an annunciation,
& the people desperate to remain uncounted.
Then I was a small hole in the darkness.
& they were terrified.
ultrasound as palinode
& the initial premise?
I am holding a picture of my sister's unborn child, its face seemingly reflective.
Does this change anything, this window into the soul when the soul is forming,
heart like a closed rose?
Or similarly what of the call to criticism? That we should take up the pen &
critique?
In the photo, my Ur-niece is a small moon, the wrought spoons of her hands art.
Because something is fundamentally changed by this kind of seeing-to think that I
knew you before you were.
Or the dilemma of having a critical language before the poem physically exists-
i.e., theory superseding the line.
Yes, there is a beauty in transparency, in explanation, in rendering.
But I want the difficulty, the first there was nothing & the then there was light.
In my hands the image of her body like the prow of something wriggling into being.
Because poetry should inform theory & not the other way around.
Sophie.
the finite as infinite
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it
seems limitless.
-The Sheltering Sky
Once in the Rockies when we were descending-the road liminal, like the beginning or
ending of perception, & the way the snow spun blurringly in the night air.
Who wasn't afraid? Who didn't feel it climbing the body's lattice, the gathering
sensation of bloodlessness, irrationality?
Yet a part of us knew it had to end-the map's stiff peaks flattening out, the road
lucid again.
I remember looking out beyond the headlights & thinking of the animal world w/its
surefootedness, its ability to suffer & go on.
Then it came up over the mountain pass-perfect & blood orange, like a personal god
& I knew I would never see it like this again-in the growing light the snow almost
fleshy, blessed, both of this world & the next.
imitative fallacy as jeremiad
after Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Why can we never have the life we want-the pale bare room among the trees?

the long jump as bullet-time

Conversely what about the moment like a broken mirror-the seeing into a thousand
rooms at once?
Or the time I thought I was going to die-the music stretched thin & ribbony, the
whole night like a piece of clay.
Imagine a world where everything holds its shape, where the instant can be viewed
from all sides.
What if this kind of thing happened naturally-the light corporeal & knifing down
the beach.
Or the poet sitting in the dark w/her mother, the fire banked & radiating.
We never left the room.
What would you see right now-my heart grown soft in its sheath, each raindrop
suspended, prismatic, the very idea of you hovering over me?
Doug Flutie's 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary as Water into Fire
Listen w/o distraction.
Even before its incarnation we were transported, which is to say we were there, the
Miami night larval, charged.
Read this to me when I'm dying, when I'm in the intermediate state- my
consciousness dissipating through the elements.
Did the child-me know it would be all right, that the next six seconds would
represent human existence?
This is the way it always begins: in huddled confusion, then the object churning
toward a predetermined end.
There is a plan. There is hope. Then something happens.
Love comes & goes. Anger. Happiness. Decay. A man stands on the other side & holds
out his hands.
Something is sailing through the new year.
Teacher, call me by my other name. Tell me to breathe through my eyes, see the path
through the luminosity.
We are the ball. We are the arc through the air. We are the no time left on the
clock & the disbeliever.
Read this to me when I'm dying, when I'm neither here nor there.
Say, "Grab onto nothing & it will come to you."
winter tragedy as fire into air
Listen w/o distraction.
Saturday late afternoon four young boys fell through the ice, the Merrimack
seemingly motionless.
If you're reading this it's the second day, my consciousness dissipating through
the elements.
Was I a good person? Did I understand the implications of my actions?
Somewhere the first one goes under, the one who thought he could fly, his small
friends desperate to save him, arms linked as they too step out.
Because this is the end of lying, the end of half-truths, the end of whole seasons
spent wishing everything were different, I will tell you what I see:
an eight-year-old unconditionally holding out his hand over the brokenness.
What did I do to justify this life?
Rutger Hauer's Final Lines in Blade Runner as Air into Space
Listen w/o distraction.
When he lets go of the dove, it's done-there is no more need to spike the flesh.
I meant for this to be instructional-the goddess's robe torn in half, the mast
crashing to earth.
I am the last one to love them like that, remember how she stood protectively
beside me, the fierce dog ripping her arm, or the way he built me a ring box out of
pine, hid each of its sixteen nails.
Now the pus comes out through the nose, now the body reads zero.
"Attack ships burning off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the
dark near Tannha ser gate."
A long dirt road off the Pacific, the robbers bearing down on us.
A man in a thatch house holding a tattered magazine, crying because I tell him yes,
the world knows of Pol Pot.
& the improvisation: "All those moments lost in time like tears in the rain."
The night you carried me home after literally pulling the thorn from my hand.
Sophie dancing, her feet small as roses.
banh chung as aesthetic
Finally the young prince went to sleep, the gibbous moon like green rice.
& if you were charged w/this-sent forth to bring back an unknown delicacy, where
would you look?
How I spent an entire afternoon diving in the sun, the lake vast as a field, & the
way I brought them up one by one, each ridged shell autonomous, beautiful.
How w/each lunar year the earth is renewed, shaped.
Or how it simply came to him in his sleep-this square cake wrapped in banana
leaves, bamboo.

That statement of the Lord

Is not a controvertible-
He told me, Death was dead-
-Emily Dickinson