Random atoms
brought me here this morning
last night tumbled me into a phone call
with someone I never met
who was sobbing on the other end
and thanking me for making a phone call
about something that made them think
and feel their way past where they were at
into a space for holding others up
and there I was with random atoms
on my cheeks
humbled for I felt I’d done so little
yet somehow it was a huge thing
and I hung up and took a breath
then made another phone call
random atoms aligning
pulsing out
a maybe
a yes
a no
a no one’s home
I keep at it
thinking maybe
we’re going to be OK
Phone Bank
Ghost
Originally written circa 2005.
Ghost, you call me. Not a ghost, not the ghost, but
Ghost, making that my proper name, not (of course)
my Christian name, but the older kind:
the one that means something
and tells something about you
that remains true. There’s nothing new
about me being Ghost, only that I’m called
by that name now, and I’m finally
comfortable with it. Back when I was just a guy,
long before I leaped off that bridge to get here,
I used to daydream about flying
and walking through walls. I used to wish for the power
to blow through a window so everyone knows you’re there
and you don’t even have to show up.
I never had impact, and didn’t want risk,
so my fantasy became impact without risk:
that would be the life, I thought. A good joke:
I’ve got the life I wanted, now that I don’t have a life.
I used to cringe when they told scary stories at camp.
I remember that later
I laughed at horror films, pretending bravery.
But once you’re here, you find
it’s nothing like those. It’s all so – routine.
You show up at regular times, whistle a little in a dark hallway,
provide a moment of clarity
to someone who’s used to being safe and warm.
You become a lesson no one believes in until it’s learned.
It’s not all bad. It’s a beautiful world
when you can’t really feel it.
It takes your breath away sometimes to see the way it moves.
I spend years just standing
in front of odd, mundane things:
not sunsets, not rainbows,
but garbage trucks and fires and drive-by victims.
It’s all so beautiful, the way
disposal has become an art form. (It was my art, after all.)
Ghost is what you call me now,
and I’ll take it the way
I have always taken it: with a bowed head.
Before, I would always
come when called because I had no place to be
other than the place I was called to.
Nothing’s really changed:
I blow through, bother you, maybe I’ll be remembered
in your children’s stories. Maybe we’ll see each other
one night on the landing, where
you might call me Ghost, or you might
call me imaginary. No matter.
I’ve always answered to either one.
Strange Claims
I wash myself
in an infusion of lavender and rosemary.
I’ve read strange claims made for that.
I am a fool for strange claims.
I bite my tongue then spit the blood
into my palm and wipe it on the bark
of an oak tree while asking it to guide
my spirit to strength. I am a fool,
they tell me, to do such things,
for expecting magic to offer anything.
I am a fool, they sneer. There are times
when I think they are right, but there are times
when I rise after suffering in darkness
full of whispers whose source I cannot name,
and at once hold a knife in a candle flame
then step outside and plunge the blade
into the earth and bring it up free of soot,
and all my fears wiped clean as well.
Then I come inside and say, it’s going to be
a good day. I’ll deal with the dark
when it returns, but now I will bathe
in rosemary and lavender
and if later on today I bleed
I will offer blood to the oak in tribute.
I am a fool for strange claims.
I am a fool for thinking more of magic
than of psychology or philosophy,
yet no one can tell me
that this old coin my mother gave me
when first I left home did not keep me safe
as she promised it would, that I am not
here because of this token, this talisman
I have carried to wars foreign
and domestic and come out better
than when I left — yet I am a fool,
they sneer, a fool for believing
strange claims. No matter.
It’s a terrible world and to get through
I do as I do, have done, and will do.
One day, I know I will fall in the dark
and there I will stay, rolling the coin
in my fingers, saying just this: I kept the faith,
Mama. I never let go till I had nothing left.
It was not the magic that failed.
The Peonies
Originally written in 1999.
In the year I turned thirty nine
the peonies did not die
quite the same way
as the peonies always had before
In the year I was thirty-eight
the fragile man I was then
looked at the peonies
in the backyard
The progress of the year
seemed so fast
I thought about how quickly
those pink and white heads
would droop and drop their petals
fade and decay
I feared that if the year of thirty-eight
continued this pace into
my years of forty forty-one forty-two and beyond
every thing I had learned
by putting myself together
would come undone
But then in the year
I was thirty nine
I learned that in remembering
the scent of peony
the heat of their pink
the regal ice of their white
in all these memories
there was enough of youth to make
my mortality irrelevant
I learned that thirty nine was an opening and not
an end and I realized the sweetness
of the peony was the product of youth spent lavishly
secure in the knowledge that not only
would the dark strength of the leaves and roots last
the cool shade below the leaves would last and refresh
and their roots that hold so lightly to the earth
would leave their legacy anyway after the year’s efforts
were spent and dried and gone
In the year I was thirty-nine
the peonies died but did not die as they had before
and I rejoiced at how
once the blooms and the leaves were gone
and the grey strong winter had buried their bones
the actual plants in the fullness of their beings
always rose again
from the poor soil
along the garage
It was the year that I opened my eyes
my nose and my throat to the world
the year I passed through fear
to let my seams bulge and stretch
the year my senses saved me from falling apart
Vespers
Originally written 1999.
One, two, three,
five, seven, nine, eleven
dark brothers at sunset:
wet-suited surfers
off the beach at Del Mar,
while the bell for Vespers tolls
from the sea-cliff mission
and two
parallel acolytes
in F-14 Tomcats
arc south toward
San Diego.
What is it about
the brotherhoods
that men form
that makes me watch them
for hours and hours?
I pose that question
to Angela, houseless plain-talker
from the Encinitas streets,
while we sit in a booth
and mull over her fabulous life
in this bar called
“The Saloon”.
Two hours pass
and I’m no closer
to my answer
but I have heard
all of hers
about men and their missions.
She’s told me that once
she was a clerk typist
and then she was an engineer
but the boys at the Atlas-Titan plant
made it so hard for her
to hold a job
that she walked away
(it’s been a while
so she doubts the job is still there)
so now instead of gliding toward the stars with the boys
she lives with a man who’s a hundred years old
and tonight she’ll be damned if she’s going home again
because he is so
damned
angry
all the time.
In the booth across the aisle
two women are kissing.
Angela flashes a smile
full of surprisingly white
wild woman teeth
at the bartender, who is watching them
and squirming.
“It’s right,” she says.
“It’s right. Leave them alone.
Couples in love ought to kiss.
Everyone here is just fine.
Everyone ought to do just
what they like.”
I get up to leave and ask her if I
can take her somewhere.
She thanks me but says she never
gets into a car with a strange man.
Back in Rancho Santa Fe, in my
expense account movie star’s
hotel room, I open the window to let
the night breeze bring me
the scent of camellias.
Downstairs,
other businessmen are
drinking Scotch
and pounding veranda tables
for emphasis.
Somewhere
an angry old man
waits for dinner.
Pilots’ cheeks flatten
in the force of the turn
and monks fall off
to profane dreams
while engineers stew
before flatscreen blue fire —
as elsewhere,
ecstatic Angela
builds a new world
around our ears,
challenging nervous bartenders
and refusing to be with anyone.
In starry dark she walks the beach
just as she likes, learning to be free
of strange men.
Elegy (1996)
Originally written in 1996.
These days they build
new doors out of balsa,
nearly out of butter, hollowcored, empty;
we are losing the thrill of opening doors.
No longer do we wish or try to push hard.
The clunk of brass latches falling into place is fading from memory.
We are forgetting the comfort that bubbled within us
once resistance was overcome.
We have disembodied ourselves.
Already unable to remain entranced
with the sounds of our lovers for long,
the day may be coming when each of us
will fail to recognize a brother, a sister;
soon, we may no longer know
anything our senses tell us.
The question rings out:
how can we sleep knowing
in the soles of our feet,
in the ledges of our ears,
that we are feeling less each day?
How can we sleep knowing
that all what of we move through daily
without giving it attention
is becoming irrelevant?
How can we sleep knowing
that the ocean is rising,
that the waves at our feet
will take us regardless of
our ignorance of them? We will all find salt water inside us,
eventually; but how can we sleep knowing
that while it may not taste of bitter and blood,
it will still smother?
How can one sleep
without wanting to open
everything available
right up to that final moment?
Becoming A Man
Indeed, I am sorry
to have been
what I refuse to name,
but then again, without that name,
I can refuse to admit
what I am
and if what I am
can remain unnamed
long enough
it can disappear as if
it never existed;
if it never existed
I may be something
else again and I will take
that name and become
that man, so I refuse
the name I do not want
and it floats away
to land on another man,
one I can safely abhor
because he could not refuse it
when it was hung upon him.
Somehow
my refusal endured
and stood up
and was honored and
buttressed and coddled
and my preferred name
became my own. I became
a man who refused
his true name and
when they call it after me
in the streets or the courts
or the legislature, I can turn
and say again
that’s not me, I would never.
Secure in saying
whatever I want
to my accusers,
even to the point
of scolding myself
when I recall what I was
in dead night while staring
at the red movie behind
my eyes, scolding, saying
no,
I never, no,
I am not.
Two Video Channels
Two video channels
working on the cable box
this morning — old school
R&B, or rap
barely five minutes old?
I would tell you
it’s hard to choose
but I am not lying, not
this morning at least,
when I say
ten seconds into
one video and I am
on that remote as if it were
a life raft to reverse
course back to the
brand new mumble
I can’t understand, because
mouthing the words
and pretending I’ve got
every nuance, every hiccup
of timing, every inflection down
in the song I’ve known for forty years
feels too much
like accepting that I am
already long dead.
Haunt Song
You have refused to acknowledge
that you are the guitar,
and that the guitar is broken.
The missing pieces somehow
still right there in your body —
the dead end hand, the wilted neck,
the scrambled music within
that clots and clogs
when you attempt to let it flow.
Ghosts, but not ghosts.
Solid flesh that nevertheless has still
vanished. A haunt song playing
loud and obvious, yet no one
believes you when you
tell them what you can hear
or when you say: this is not
me, this broken guitar of
a man you’re seeing.
You’re wrong, of course.
You are as much your damage
as you are not.
You could try playing
what you hear: that haunt song.
See what comes from that
that might be the melody you were
once again or might be
some song nearly brand new, or some
admixture — one ingredient
dominating, then the other;
harmony and melody swapping
primacy. Whatever: you
are the broken guitar trying
to play. Still making music
while you can, whether
haunt song or anthem. There is surely
at least one note left.
Translating
Morning.
I’m terrified
of myself.
Last night
I dreamed again
of lead and steel
speaking truth to power,
speaking directly to its faces
and those visions
won’t leave my head
now that I’m awake.
I thought I’d forgotten
that language.
It’s so ancient, so
differently civilized.
It hurts my tongue
a little (although a little
less each
subsequent time I test
it against the edge
of the moment, even when
I can taste blood after).
I am remembering
how to use it
to call up those
ancestors long gone,
those once
so fluent in it
that while there must have been mornings
when they must have risen
to similar terror,
they still raised their voices
of lead and steel
and spoke
deadly truth to their
enemies
because to hold it back
was to die.
Morning.
I’m awake.
Afraid but compensating,
getting used to
forming thoughts
from dreams,
translating.
The Path Without
I have learned to walk
the Path Without.
For years now
my body has scolded, “Student,
do what you are told.”
I’ve resisted for a long time and
my stubborn frame
has backed me up
but no more. Now I walk
the Path Without.
A path without
a place to rest. Without
peace, without
freedom from pain.
My body scolded.
I whimpered and yes, surrendered,
but not without a struggle.
Now I walk the Path Without.
Without the chops I once had
that made my living sing. Without
the skills I once had
that led me through love and art.
My body tells me this is
a lesson I must learn,
but I feel dumbed down, numbed
and muted, unenlightened
by being made to walk
the Path Without. What,
I ask my body, is it
that I am here to learn
in this stunting class you offer now?
My body says, you are learning
how to be diminished in one place
as you grow in others. Learning
that wholeness is not
a flawless circle but sometime
is a process of living through
a twinge of pain, a bad footing,
over and over until you begin
walking again as you first did
long ago – a step followed by a fall
following a long slide down an incline
This is the Path Without. Slow down,
my body says. Do what you are told.
They Did It
They did it to the sky —
look up at the jail-bars
from their planes and
factory stacks, cross bars
from bomb craters and
piles of smoking Brown bodies.
They did it to the earth —
look out upon the jail-bars
of roads and pipelines,
cross bars of damaged towns,
ghost landfills, sick-making farms,
trails of brown Brown blood.
They did it to the sea —
look to the horizon over jail-bars
of diesel spew, acres of death and corpse-fish,
cross bar drift nets
and garbage in patches as thick
as the brown oil sucked from Brown lands.
Don’t ask me
who they are.
You know.
You nod. You agree.
You consume
and enable. You
look
into the sky
marveling
at the color
smoke brings out
of the sunset. You
look
across the land
and thrill to
the ease
with which you can
cross it. You
look
at the ocean
and imagine
yourself a pirate
adrift beyond law
and rules. You
don’t understand
how they could ruin
a world
that seems like it was made
just to be captured
on a white page.
Civil Society
In order to examine
all sides of a foul debate
I turned myself inside out
When I was done
I reversed the reversal
but little went back into place
I look the same
except for some weariness
and caution in my eye
but my heart is banging
(perhaps against
some maladjusted rib)
It hurts like a bell
close to cracking
while my gut isn’t easy at all
keeps twisting and poking
in anticipation of danger
that may be real
or may be a product of
all my contortions to try and be
civil and respectful of despicable men
their crusted ideals
their crooked deity
their tumbling glory dreams
I bothered to listen
and try to talk
and now I’m withered
and all my innards
are slipping around
trying to keep me
alive long enough
to do something
to make me forget
that I once deluded myself
into thinking that inverting myself
for them
was a courtesy
when in fact it was
a slow suicide
begun in the name of
a civil society
that has never existed
Stone
I was careful with the care
of my gigantic aspirations
once upon a time,
based on their size,
irregular borders, and
fragility.
No more. I’ve made them
smaller and harder. No more
are they built upon
some improbable dream of
fame; not focused upon legacy.
They’ve lost the glassy
shine and brittle
enormity of grandeur.
What I’ve settled on instead
is a longing for invisibility.
To become a stone underfoot
in Evil’s path, kicked aside
after breaking its stride;
better still, to be tossed through
a mansion window
in the Last Battle; best of all,
to be one small piece buried
in the foundation of the Next World.
I aspire to be forgotten
but sturdy. Absent,
indispensable. Insignificant, solid.
Hearing Problem
It has taken me
nearly sixty years
four thousand glasses of whisky
uncounted pounds of herb
pills upon pills
a taste for killer thrills
bodies held close whose souls
I kept at arm’s length
and bent decades of lost hours spent
chasing words into caverns
and trash heaps
to realize
I might have a hearing problem
I might have misheard my mother
when she said
don’t have kids they will ruin your life
What she must have really said was
don’t have kids
you will ruin
their lives
but thank God I followed her advice
for surely
surely
surely
either way
she was right
Dark Matter 