When the suck
envelops the evening,
suck back your breath
and hold on.
If you fall
under the weight of suck,
suck in your gut
and hold still.
In the whistle
of the suck, listen
for the song
behind it. Suck
lasts a long time
but at some point,
it will end. Suck
is one end of a total breath.
1.
In common medical jargon, the combined bones of the thorax that enclose the heart and lungs are called a “ribcage.”
2.
The ribcage was first described as such in the writings of Henri de Vessallo, a learned butcher of the Middle Ages.
3.
Henri, I wish I was with you now:
we’d break ribcages together, create
new metaphors for the bars of bones
that enclose the freedom of breath and blood;
we’d speak together and maybe share a sandwich
if we could, and I would name that too, stealing thunder
from that yet-to-come insufferable Earl,
another dead white man stealing my thought
before I had the chance to be known for it; then again,
I’d call it a sandwich because that’s how learned it
at my mother’s knee, and here we are again, Henri —
in the prison of the Earl’s naming —
are you getting all this?
4.
Certain hallucinatory drugs, in the hands of an experienced shaman, may melt the ribcage altogether and leave the body so flexible that it can pass through its own third eye.
5.
Shaman, meet Henri
who is munching his sandwich as we speak,
eating the oppression of naming. Forget him,
he belongs to the stanza before last. You and I
will now go hungry, swallowing the ayahuasca’s fire
and traveling then into the mouth of the dragon,
plummeting like insult down his throat until we decide
to go into his blazing lungs — and what’s this,
up here, surrounding his coal-hot heart, his furnace
of agony, but the same old bones holding him safe —
is this a ribcage, dammit? I thought
we’d gotten away from this.
6.
The ribcage of a roasted chicken, when boiled for soup, will dissolve and free the space inside.
7.
So, back at Henri’s place,
we’re sitting around, the three of us
(the shaman having returned with me, demanding
a sandwich, calling it “the meat book of eating”)
and imagining new words for things. I say I shall call
the dragon’s skeleton “the twin bone ladder of the chest,”
but Henri thinks that’s ridiculous. “Call it a damn ribcage,
everyone else does, stop being such a damn poet,”
says Henri. The shaman says, “Is there any soup
to go with this meat book of eating?” “We call that
a sandwich,” I tell him. “Like the Earl of Sandwich?”
asks the shaman. “Yeah, just like that,” I respond.
“Ah, pity — he is going to be such an asshole
once he’s born and grows into it,” he sighs.
And Henri looks around for something else to label
with a perfectly good and logical name,
while I am impaled on the jealousy in my chest
that hides there, imprisoned in my —
dammit.
In front of him
there’s
a screen, always.
Sometimes,
a keyboard too.
He stares all day at Illusions of arrivals
and departures,
of everyone out there being somewhere close.
Calls the images friends.
Calls them by their false names.
Calls them Nazis when they’re disagreeable
and beloved when they’re not.
But above all,
from dark rooms,
from cafes, from stolen
work time, from deep
anonymity,
he calls them
through the screen
as if they could hear him.
The blank fields
on screen
encourage it.
The soothing,
empty responses
encourage it.
He screams, sometimes;
cries on the couch sometimes;
wonders why he feels so tired
and so afraid to get out
into the cold world
where touching someone else
in the flesh
requires more than the simple use
of your fingers.
There’s a legend
of a ghost that lived
in a pill bottle
found by a young child
under the leaves
at the edge of his driveway.
The name on the bottle
had leaked off in the rain
long ago, the pills
had crusted and fused
inside, a thick crumb cover
of white holding them in place;
the boy stuck a pencil in
and pried them loose,
shook them out onto the ground.
All he wanted was the bottle
to hold something else he’d found.
The ghost of the bottle
slipped into the air, moved
out into the world, barely rustling
a leaf as it rose through the thin
October trees to seek its original owner
who had died or gone missing
and left it behind.
It would have fastened on the boy,
but it chose to wait. At seven,
the boy could not have held the ghost;s interest
for long; he would need more age and pain
for the ghost to cling to.
But the ghost would remember
this boy, his poking at the leftover pills,
how he stripped the label off
and made the bottle his own.
Genies serve the masters who find them;
ghosts master the moments in which they’re found,
and this ghost had all the time in the world
to wait for the boy to grow into his moment.
You and your damn crows
and vultures, Time.
Always they’re out there:
in trees in threes for crows,
soaring solo or in posses
for buzzards. It’s like
you can’t not remind me
of your inevitable
last grin down upon me,
and don’t get me started
on how scared I become
in the moment after I’ve congratulated myself
for sweeping a worm off the front walk,
or each time I chase down and slay a fly.
That sinking feeling of knowing
it’s all a holding action.
That moment of wondering
when you, Time, will throw me
to your pets.
I’m sick of you and your insistence.
Friends say it’s just coincidence,
that there’s no definite presage of death
in these things…
but I know what they all eat.
I know their hunger. I know
I’m fat, soft,
and an easy pick with this head of mine
that won’t shut up about making it easier
for them…
ah, Time, I get it now:
it’s just your way to tease me
with the death-eaters
in the midst of my living.
It’s what you are best at:
using the little things,
the obvious things,
to reveal yourself as an arrow
pointing inexorably
one way.
We were the wolves
and the forest they ran through
and the prey they were chasing,
we were all one.
We ate what we killed
and killed all we ate, we were
the carcasses ripped by need,
we were all the same.
Wind in the trees, the cold globe
of the moon, the fiery cross,
the villages burning, the hangings,
we are all this.
Both of the ends of the gun
are ours. Both the sidewalk
and the mansion are our beds,
we are not different.
Cities, country, dark sky
and wash of neon — we see
in all the shades of night,
and so we are one.
In what we have amassed,
in this heap full of contradiction,
is the germ of how we are,
and here we are all buried.
Break out of the hell mound
and look each other in the eyes,
savor and cower at the night we’ve emerged into,
and admit it: we are all one.
It’s easy to look back
and say life was rough,
and everything that happened
was like being dragged over
sandpaper.
If I could
do it again,
I’d like to dive down
under the grit
and get to the backside
that’s always smooth.
Smooth —
that would have been
good enough.
Don’t tell me
it was better this way —
I’d gladly have settled
for less.
They say
every PT Cruiser’s
haunted by the ghost
of a car designer
who didn’t get credit for it
and died alone and drunk,
mangled in the wreckage of a Sebring.
They say
if you stare into the neck
of a bottle of Coke long enough,
you’ll see the spirits of glass makers
driven from their jobs by the advent of plastic
(they’re in the bubbles, silly).
They say if you spin a quarter
and can say the name “Alexander Hamilton”
ten times before it stops and falls,
the federal deficit will right itself.
It’s been said that the wind
off the east end of Long Island
carries the voices of waitstaff
who died longing to be swept off their feet
by Papa Legba or the shade
of Jay Gatsby’s doppelganger.
Electronic drums bear the weight of stars
who died in gas stations,
who failed to make hits, who cried foul
in trashed dressing rooms full of roaches.
They say things about you
and your family too: how you were
the offspring of fabulous wealth
and were deposited with those cretins
after a coup in your home country.
If you sleep long enough
in the shadow of the flag,
you’ll be lost to your fortune forever
and left with only a vague longing
to read the signs of your squandered past
and discern the truth from little things:
the sneakers on phone lines, the symbols
on a shampoo bottle, the lyrics
of a hideous pop hit.
They say the world’s a scary place
and every interaction’s got a whiff
of the Hoax of Hoaxes in it.
They say a lot of things,
and all of them don’t need to be true
to fill you with a lust
for conspiracy.
Maze in the center.
No entrance visible
but the journey requires me
to seek it,
so I seek it.
I am circling,
looking for the gate,
listening for a creak,
feeling for chinks and seams.
Push hard, whisper
old spells, light fires,
burn herbs; nothing
is revealed.
Turn and look behind me
and there is the open gate
that has been outside of me
this whole time.
I walk through and there I am
now, inside the center, having no clue
as to the physics or geometry
involved. But there is the first turn,
and I move deep into the labyrinth,
turn upon turn.
A book on the ground
now: I turn to a passage:
“There is a road that is not
visible. You walk it here on earth
not knowing all the dimensions
you pass through, and once at the end,
you will not have a way back.”
How familiar it is, this puzzle
now, the walls that hold my old photographs
and scribblings, my struggle
laid out before I arrived this time.
At the center of the maze,
a stone. A mouth in the stone
and a rose in the mouth in the stone.
A hawk above that will not light,
a wind blowing up out of the earth.
I have been inside and outside myself
and found past embedded in present and future,
and how will I get back now
that there is no difference?
I greet you
in the doorway
of the plain house
of your ancestors,
where you are standing
even though you’re not
yet born: you pass through
the door and do not look back,
walk the yard ignoring the feel
of grass below your bare and tender feet,
you will not remember this later, you will be
surprised by it, the folding of it underfoot,
the soft staining of your heels and soles,
you will forget it and the house so warm
and comfortable, sparely furnished with only
necessities, you will clutter your own homes
with toys and gadgets and huge furniture, beds
the size of entire rooms, closets larger than the kitchen
and its smells, its deep banquets and crowded feasts,
you will forget this pyramid of family crowned with living
as well as possible in a hard world, you will forget it all
until a day comes when you seek out the source of the longing
you suddenly feel as you look around at the clogged rooms
of your own monster homes, your interconnected empty relations
with those a thousand miles away with whom you share
only one common interest, you will recall this when you can’t stand
the rage you feel at the empty lawn out front, the gray cars, the roads
lined with similar homes as full of inchoate anger and sadness and
unfamiliar faces, the ones you pass in the morning and at night
and do not acknowledge; that day you will begin to claim
a true life of your own. I greet you coming out into the forgetting
that is the world. Welcome: I greet you knowing that you will not remember me ever,
for I am the forgettable man who knows what will happen to you,
to whom it has already happened and who will watch
as you flail through, living toward a thing called contentment, a thing
I wasn’t made for because someone has to stand aside from it, greet you,
turn away shaking my head and thinking hard about how I was never able
to forget a thing and thus rediscover it. I greet you knowing
how separate we always will be from one another. Welcome to a world
denied to me, such an enviable place, such a good place to lose and recapture, to be in exile from.
I grew up
and lived for many years
on an island of bread:
bread mountains, bread roads,
bread coastlines.
I was never hungry,
wanted for nothing,
but I longed to leave
and see flowers
and scars and stones,
and all the rest.
Left eventually
and found everything
I’d dreamed of,
but today, I would offer you
these roses, these diamonds,
for bread. For home,
even if it’s just a grave
scooped out of bread,
heaped with bread,
surmounted with a bread marker
over me and the scars
I would bring with me
and carry into that white ground.
Take all I’ve found
and let me die
there, no longer hungry
for the smell of home,
living in a simple knowledge
of bread,
coveting its warmth
like that which pours
from an old family oven.
Tags: poems, poetry, meditations, death, happiness
Close your frightened eyes
if you’re on fire;
you’ll still burn
but you’ll be able to pretend
you’re not damaged
for a little while.
Close your burned eyes
if you are blind;
you’ll have
a moment of hope
that a miracle may happen
once you open them again.
Close your lying eyes
before you dig them out
with your bare hands
and imagine that they are gems
you did not expect to ever hold
in your ruined hands in this life;
then put them in your pockets
and pray they’ll be able to see
in that darkness you carry around
in there all the time,
in the emptiness once meant to hold
valuable things.
Stalled
motionless
in sudden awareness
of the dirty rug
and cat-furred blankets,
I turn down the music
and think: what should I do
next?
A chore’s a way of arresting
entropy toward
an inescapable fate:
things will get dirty
with our traces and fragments.
What shall I do next?
Sit down and return to the work
of poetry?
Isn’t that just creating
more dirt, or at least
pushing the dirt that’s already there
into pleasing patterns?
What shall I do next?
Sit and think some more,
let the dirt pile up,
plan to mold it later
as if I were the successor
to Picasso, only to see the work
covered in another layer
of remains and leftovers?
What shall I do next?
The vacuum in the next room
is defense against the vacuum
in this one,
and that one
marvelously
turns on and off
with a switch.
Consider the killer’s last words
when strapped to his execution table:
“Boomer Sooner.”
Consider his last meal:
steak, fried okra, strawberry ice cream, Dr. Pepper.
Consider his capital crime:
strangling someone
during a common robbery.
Consider the stature
of each of these epic decisions
when viewed from a distance,
then consider yourself, your grand
and grandiose notions,
what scripture
you reach for in extremis,
how and what you would choose
in such circumstances.
The jazz organ
makes a face — rather,
a lot of faces. A twisted smile
followed by an upraised chin,
closed eyes with movement
under the lids,
and then the saxophone, the poking finger
demanding entrance into the reverie —
time to break one stride, find a new one.
Eveyone sprinting together down a road,
perhaps in North Carolina late at night,
toward a dilapidated church that hides
a still. Party in the sacred space —
bass and drums,
sidekicks, strong and soft-spoken,
peek out from beyond
the circle of light from the fire.
Drift over there, see what their take is
on the goings-on.
This music has a face.
Eyes open, calm intelligence.
A darkness that resists
the incursion of obvious message —
says,
it is what it is. Sit down
and listen, don’t speak to it
unless it speaks to you.
— for William Parker and Cooper-Moore
