Some mythology was made to order
for me, some was not. I won’t hold myself back
when I come to the border
between these; instead, I cross.
I’m an ignorant bastard mostly
so it’s not a graceful passage. I toss
my baggage over the wall
so I have everything, then drag
my privileged carcass over. At once, I feel small.
Short of that, though, I’m game to see
what’s what though I don’t yet know where this is
or how it gets along without me.
A friend of mine once said,
“All my experiences of Russia have been sad.”
I stare down the chainsaw-carved bear
in the courtyard of this Russian restaurant.
It actually looks like the little I pretend I imagine I know
about Russia.
I have but one experience of Russia,
but it’s a sad bear indeed: I was conceived in Russia.
I’ve done the math.
I was born in New Jersey
five months after my parents got back from the USSR
where my dad was a guard at a consulate,
and I don’t know what
my mother was. It feels sometimes as though
there was no womb between me and that country.
It was the Cold War back then, Eagle and Bear
engaged in frosty standoff. I could sense it then
in my preborn bones, and I still can, though I’m much harder.
Every time you see a political bear, it’s Russian.
Every time I see any bear, it’s Russian.
Even this bear-figure before me in this cheesy theme restaurant,
this pine log barely rendered as Bear with dead glass eyes
and splintered coat, makes me wish I’d been born
in Leningrad and not Fort Dix.
I have to turn away. I’ve lost my appetite
for thin borscht and frozen blintzes and such tourist fare.
Goddammit, before birth I should have pleaded with the angels of distribution,
the ones in charge of where the souls go:
I should have demanded a Soviet nuclear-fired hospital
that looked like hell
and not a warm suburban facade
of heaven on earth, asked for
a birthright that would have growled inside me
instead of one that keens and screeches. You can
keep the eagle, all sharp nose and ripper hands and
condescending, supererogatory flight.
Gimme that bear, called in Russia medved, honestly predatory,
reeking of fish, berries, looking to add me to the menu —
Medved. Predator, symbol, totem
of mine, stuck always stinking in the back of my mind.
Medved, predator, grizzly, brown, black,
that honey eater’s taken all the sweet out of me.
Here’s something
true and real, something I know about all bears:
they can outrun, outswim, outclimb
any human — unless you run downhill,
as their center of gravity screws them up.
Then you can barely get away.
So that’s it. That’s the story of how I came to be — this.
There was Mom, the Italian girl, fresh out of the Ivy League,
out in the big bad world.
And there was Dad, the dashing, hard drinking Apache, fresh out
of reservation, government school, frozen Chosen, POW camp,
Army brig, finally last stand diplomatic cage. They ended up in Russia
where a bear looking over their shoulders shoved them together,
the usual something happened, and I was sparked.
All my parents’ experience of Russia was sad.
I am my parents’ experience of Russia.
Behind me, since birth, a bear.
It’s been downhill ever since.
To step outside of my own
into others’ or no one’s —
to be in the great empty
of no possessions. To be
conscious only of that which
no one owns, or at the very least
is oblivious to our claims of possession:
lawn, garden, backyard. To be present
where that is meaningless. To look at it,
and be with it, and be of it until
what looks back is conscious in a way
we haven’t recognized, but which
is now obvious and familiar from a past
we did not remember at all till now.
To be present in the world that treats us
as another consciousness, not the only one,
is the one true honor we can afford to seek
on this planet of medals and titles.
These horns,
my God,
these horns.
Almost as if the air itself
was hooked up to a distortion pedal,
but that’s not possible. It’s
the players themselves
who must be bending the air itself
into such rough shapes, scraping it and
abrading it until there are surfaces
grit can stick to.
Warning: our ears
will fill with sand to the rims
if we listen. Our ears will get filthy
with that if we don’t move
from this spot where you appear to be rooted
under the fat leafed maple,
listening to this scabby racket
as if it were a gospel congregation.
My God, man, they’re bending the very air!
How you can still be breathing it
without warping, without changing,
I do not know.
Come away from here with me —
don’t just stand there
while music is being torn up like that.
I wouldn’t call it a sin,
but I wouldn’t call it harmless either.
It’s so hard to be
a surrealist these days.
For example,
I found myself hanging
upside down outdoors above
a vat of clear liquid.
There was no clue
as to who
might have been
responsible.
Said to myself, “Gee,
it doesn’t look dangerous,
smells fine, no fire below it,
I don’t see any cooking utensils,
kinda spooky that I’m
hanging here alone
trussed up like a rug
but all in all, I’ve certainly felt
more threatened
in my life,”
and then to me of course there came
all the obvious references
of failed love and broken threads
among family born and found
and how I have hanged myself
through neglect and anger and how
I must now reach out to save myself.
The branch holding me
started breaking a little. I was suddenly
a little nervous as
I was running out of metaphors
I might use to keep from drowning
when it failed at last. Poetry
has its benefits but
when you’re going to drown,
you’re going to drown. So,
looking down at the vat,
wondering why no one was around,
I prepared my last words
though none would hear them,
it still seemed a good idea to scream,
“HEY, HELP! HELP!!!
I’M FALLING HERE,
GONNA DROWN,
HELP, HELP!!! THE SILVER
CHALICE BELOW SHALL TAKE ME!
THERE MAY BE LOBSTERS!
HELP, HELP HELP!!!!”
There were no lobsters, dammit.
(Or, alternately, thank God.)
When I fell at last, the pool was so shallow
I flailed about until I was out of it
and managed to loose myself from bondage
and got away and came here, to this bar.
You ask me, who tied me up?
Let me tell you this: it’s so hard to be
a surrealist these days,
I decided not to pursue the mystery.
Chances are it was nothing poetic
and probably had to do with unpaid debts
or a gang thing. It’s always a gang thing,
right? Unless maybe
I was suspended there for no more reason
than to prompt a poem. That would be
cool. It’s so hard to be a surrealist these days
that every little bit
helps. This bar helps. You’re helping
just by listening.
We are in this world together
and I’m tired of it trying to make sense.
If the lobsters can’t derange us,
random acts of meaningless violence
will have to do.
Good morning, unsettled awesome —
my whole body just cracked like a knuckle
and I rose above the bed
to the cobwebbed dirty ceiling.
There has to be a big reason for this: magic
wasn’t necessary to reveal the extent of my sloppiness
and casual approach to housecleaning.
Maybe the spiders want to thank me for their habitat?
Am hearing voices. Am beginning to shiver.
Am wondering who died and made me delusional
or divine, and will there be a sign to tell me
upon which interpretation to rely?
By the time you are old enough
to know what to do,
there’s no one left to do it with.
Take this last funeral
for an example: you were driving home alone from burying
a murdered friend,
someone who had just been in the wrong place
at the wrong time. You stopped by the roadside
above a creek choked with deadfall,
and in spite of your suit
and good shoes and your blinding tears
you climbed down and cleared it
so it ran free and clear again.
You went back to the car,
scrambling through gravel,
climbing over the guard rail carefully,
sitting there, chest aching, knees aching,
muddy and scratched and is that a tear
in the sleeve of the shirt? There is
a tear. You tell yourself
“right place, right time, wrong clothes.”
You laugh, you cry,
the friend you just buried
would have done the same
but there’s no one left in your life
to give a damn
about this well-set gem of a moment.
It’s time to go home, change, read the paper,
eat, change, clean the gun, do some writing,
change one last time, and get ready for bed.
No shaman for me.
Unlike you, rich seeker,
I can’t afford pay-for-view visions.
No dream catcher for me.
Unlike you, pow-wow tourist,
I am clumsy with my elusive dreaming.
No bow, no arrow, not even a kinfe.
Unlike you, Injun great-grandchild,
I know what a good investment a gun can be.
No long hair, no leather, no…
no. Stop, friend, and I will too. I’m dying
from ensuring that I am not your fantasy.
Ay, roomful of columns of eyes
and mouths in Fibonacci
swirl, and then I spy
a half-chewed apple.
The apple is breathing,
or it was until just now.
The mouths were after the apple.
The apple was some being
that only looked like an apple.
I cannot speak of the eyes
in the nautilus cloud
above us all. What they are,
what they saw before I came upon all this.
It had no interpretation before I saw it
with my own eyes. So, call it murder
or bad dream or
something I ate.
No matter. I blink.
If you wake tomorrow
to a song with a violin and a steady drum,
do not step into the day
and away from the music
too quickly, occupying yourself
with the business of living
instead of the joy of it.
Really, how often does it happen
that you wake up early for work
with a sweet fiddle in your ear
and a lover next to you?
Don’t the soft drum
and the sidling of the wicked bow
suggest something other than
getting up for work?
Assume it’s all been a hoax.
Assume everything you know
was cooked up to control you
and stuff you with blindness.
Assume Dad and the teacher
and Mom and the boss
were all indifferent about spreading
well-funded lies as long as they
got their share of the funds.
Assume this is the way it works.
Once you get this
there will be a sudden urge
to uncover the Real,
so you will stick your hand
into the nearest pond,
pull out some
of the black rot at the bottom,
and wolf it down.
You’ll get sick enough to think you’re dying.
You probably won’t die. Instead
you’ll come back thin.
You’ll come back grim.
You’ll come back cynical
and pleased as a leech
with a fat vein to suck,
and you will fall in line,
unless
you are one of the few who simply
can’t.
You’ll know if you are because
there will be a taste
forever in your mouth
called freedom.
You will be
sick with it
as long as you live,
and sometimes you will wish
you had died,
but now and then you’ll pass that pond
and note how pretty the sunrise is
across its water
and be glad you’re still alive.
wet sandals
mean of course wet feet
it’s been raining a while now and
stepping back into my house
after the morning walk
feels very briefly
like settling into a lie
to be able to be
on the earth
in this place
at this time
and be dry
almost as soon as I decide
that the novelty of wetness
has worn off
feels briefly wrong
but in the next second
gratitude takes over
I take off my sandals
I dry my feet
I pour a hot coffee and
sit by my window
watching the rain
from a dry seat
of my choosing
that fellow over there
walking
appears to be miserable
do not forget that
to have the choice
to be a spectator
to your local weather
is to be privileged
I announce my next task:
improvement of The Circle.
I shall strive to make The Circle better
so that after my redefinition,
all circles drawn prior to it
will look weak.
Upon hearing of this
a man approaches me
with a pill, two pills,
more pills. “Here,
these will render your task
trivial.”
They flatten me a while but then
with the realization that they also
are circles, I am illuminated
from within.
So the man approaches me
with a straitjacket. “Here, put this on,
these arms will encircle you, be
calm and cease the Work.”
It holds me for a while but then
with the realization that I
embody the Circle, I shake
free and stand naked.
The man returns with a gun.
“I give up, as should you.
Here are rounds, barrel,
chamber, all of which hold
the Circle you seek.
Take this, and go
with whatever God you choose.”
I stare at the gun and the bullets
for a while, turn away,
come back to them
again and again.
It is insanity,
the man has said,
to attempt such a thing
as redefining the Circle
which has been so right
for so long.
But such perfection, such complacency
leaves me wanting.
To have to leave something alone
just because it is perfect as is,
because others have made it so,
is not my calling.
No matter. There are sun
and moon and gun and pill
and my arms to answer to,
and a huge work to be done.
I am no crafter,
I am an artist,
I think. They’ll all
be rounder someday
when I succeed.
Impossibly well-sculpted heads
shoved deep into
equally pretty asses!
Yogic twist in the morning light!
But, no matter!
They know all of what is needed
these days to get by!
There is no need to entertain
alternative views of reality!
It is very exciting! Very complete!
And above all,
there’s no way extraneous sound
may enter as their ears are
so well plugged with themselves!
They are irresistible, the wave of the future,
the only opinions that matter,
don’t try to fight
what is so right right right!
In fact,
bend now to the same task —
either shove your own inadequate head in there
or take the position that it’s time
to kiss your ass goodbye!
While cutting the weeds I see
a small bit of fur flash
along the fence.
A new species to me, I think,
something unexplored,
unknown.
The great question:
shall I chase it
or let it be, hoping
for it to be revealed
another time?
I let it go,
remembering the cautionary tale
of Columbus, recalling
that Audubon
killed what he documented.
