In bed with the universal
I try to sleep, but it wheels
around my head
as it wheels around everyone’s head.
As if I am the pin in the center of
a garden pinwheel.
As if each of us is a pin,
each of us believing
we are at the center.
As if. Look at it spinning.
How could it be
that we each are the center?
Surrender that. You and I will never know
that answer. We see it spin the ceiling,
the floors, the ocean of sleep
waiting for us, and we worry
that if we slip free
it all falls apart. As if.
Look at it spinning around
so many centers. Impossible physics,
maddening science. Either that is wrong
or we are. As if the universal
could be wrong.
As if. As if there is anywhere
to which we could fall
where the spinning would stop.
Tag Archives: poems
Spinning
Bouquet
Originally written 2007.
1.
The brain
knows many things.
Some of them you know,
some you do not.
2.
If the brain
was a flower,
you would be
its scent.
3.
Perhaps the brain
is a flower, starving
for light, lunging out
through the eyes
for sustenance.
4.
If you plucked
your brain out
and held it to the light,
would you find a mind?
5.
The mind lives
in the brain and
hides in its petals.
The mind is the dark
among the riots of color.
6.
You sleep
and the brain corrals
the mind. They talk all night,
pretending they are
you. In the morning
you are nearly mad
from the echoes of their
conversation.
7.
Put your hands
around your mind
and know it’s not
part of the scheme
that you should understand
everything: there are things
shoring up the partners
that would terrify you
if you knew them.
8.
The brain blooms
long after you close your eyes.
The mind rises from its nooks and folds
to escape, moving past you,
playing in the meadows.
9.
The mind drifts back
in the hot late afternoon. Your head grows heavy
with pollen. You open your mouth
and bees fly in
to take their fill while the mind
avoids being stung
by the danger in the commerce.
10.
When you sleep
the mind and brain bear ideas.
You pretend they are your own fruit.
The brain laughs at you. The mind
strokes you softly, saying,
“There, there…”
11.
You are the scent.
Something plucks your brain
and you die slowly. Maybe
another brain and another mind
recall you for a while, but
you’ll certainly fade.
12.
Anything
fed long enough
on vision, scent, touch,
sound, taste will double back
on its own surety. The brain
makes you sleepy. The mind
makes you frightened. You
make yourself believe
there are reasons for everything.
13.
A night blooming flower
holds its beauty
until first light, collapsing
at the first touch of your hand,
staining your memory
with a scent you can never name.
In America
Originally written late 1996, early 1997.
In America there are drive through liquor stores
and cream corn wrestling pit strip joints
I am a child of the modern vacuum
and I am eager to be American
so I listen to television news
describing huge American pistol
throwing lead into a 14 year old
his ten year old companion screaming –
we didn’t know anyone lived here
we were getting wood for a fort
his ten year old companion screaming –
I don’t want to die
into 911
The dispatcher telling him –
Sweetie, you won’t
and him replying –
I might
and the whole time
the 76 year old killer saying
I gotta right they were stealing
they were on my property
In America there are Elvis churches
and spy shops full of surreptitious cigarettes
I am hearing our property come to life
I am hearing the country die
They say
that the Electric chair in America doesn’t work too well
They say the mask blew up into flame and
solid citizens got to see the head of Pedro Medina burn
I bet someone somewhere said it served him right
and someone else started a drive to switch from Old Sparky to
more humane and less confrontational lethal injection
so much easier on the witnesses
in America
In America there are head shops
peddling pseudo-Rastafarian hokum
and flea markets of Congressional loyalty
and it’s better to have the innocent die
or better that we become beasts to the beastly
than to let ourselves be fooled
by the modern ghosts of evil
(you can see evil in their eyes
but I’m confused: is it supposed to be all grey in there?
or should it look like Miami Beach
full of fun and pastel?
or does it look like the Everglades
full of gators and rare birds?
or does it look like me looking out?)
In America there are bridges
that flake until they fall
and rhyming monsters beneath them
waiting to invade the nurseries
I am a child of the modern vacuum
eager to become American
Ponce de Leon came ashore in Florida
hundreds of years ago
looking for
a Fountain of Youth
but what he really wanted was
Hooters
manatee blood
bison hide
passenger pigeon extinction
bales of weed wasted on the shore
drunken gropings resolving into violence
rootless numbers adrift on crazed ozone wind
immigrant massacres in the dark
flames leaping from the head of Pedro Medina
old man gunfiring into childhood forts
cream corn wrestling pit strip joints
drive through liquor stores
and a horizon as flat as a mouth
The center was empty
when Ponce got there
the Fountain of Youth was a booby prize
and today the center is still empty
but the vacuum is filling rapidly
with mystery boxes
full of cheap ripoffs of
Voudoun
Santeria
Wicca
Krishna Consciousness
Holy Rolling
Lutheran
Catholic
Buddhism
all swarming in ecumenical floods
around our true faith
Evangelical Consumerism
all molded by Television
into a spectacle of death
through satiation
I am a child of the vacuum
I am an eager American
In the absence of anything solid
I will believe whatever you tell me
Cobbler
Originally posted 2001. Revised.
words do not come independently
to me
looking for equations to solve
or causes to exalt
instead words
work for me
like ants
in service
to something underground and distant
whose existence
is inferred
from the way the words
draw attention away from themselves
and in tandem
draw attention
toward a common end
so that
only upon reflection upon the many
do first the pattern and then the path
become clear
my trade:
make
language
over
so that to speak is
to stitch words together
and shoe meaning
with them
so that meaning and I
may walk in steady pace
across
rough ground
so when I get to where
I am bound
I can set language
aside
and set meaning free
to dip itself in cool spring water
wriggle in the grass
and be itself
this is the nature
of the way I work with words
it is not the job of a poet
it is cobbler’s work
I’ve been apprenticed to a hard master
seated at the bench each day
I must be simple before the need
and sing as I work
at each day’s end I can feel the welts raised
on my callused hands
from building these verses
I make my bed at night
knowing I have come far
knowing that
tomorrow
I will rise and set to work again
to make
language
over is
to work
as if meaning
is enough
as if work
is enough
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday to you
who I will not see today,
or tomorrow. Happy Birthday
to those whose birthdays will come
tomorrow, or the day after,
who I will not see on those days.
Happy Birthday to all whose birthdays
came and went and I did not
see, have not seen since, will not see
again soon. Happy Birthday is how
I say to you that I am sorry and yet
I still feel joy in knowing that you
made your circuit and are here still.
Happy Birthday to those
I should have known but did not,
whose birthdays passed unnoticed
by me as there was no tie between us
except for the Unknown that ties us all,
that we are born and pass
and never touch one another, or
may have touched without knowing
and it is much the same as if we lived
in different eras, on different lands.
Happy Birthday is how I say to you
that there is something in the world —
a pulse, a beat humming under all
that contains you, that I feel, that is
joy I am not familiar with but love anyway.
Happy Birthday to those
whose birthdays I will miss because
I will not be here to see them. Happy Birthday
to those unborn, waiting in the wings for me
to pass, or to come into a better world
than this one I am part of. Happy Birthday
to those of you I will not see again
due to the vagaries of life and distance
and death. Happy Birthday to those
I will fail with bitterness and anger,
who will slip from or flee me, who will be
set aside or dismissed. Happy Birthday
is how I say to them that I know
I failed you. You did not fail me.
Happy Birthday is how I say
that I hope you are well
and that the world keeps you, holds you
as it spins. How I say that you are missed
and that wherever I end, it will be incomplete
and emptier for not having seen you.
Dagger Of Light
I did not ask for this fight.
I did not ask to be born to this war.
Would rather have been born
on a far mountain, living life
with my loved ones in quiet
and peace from my start to my finish.
But it seems that I am a dagger of light.
It seems that I am a dagger of light.
The night we saw the darkness start
was the night I felt my edge.
Saw that thin line of glow and knew
it was more than fire and steel.
The night the darkness closed upon us
was the night I first raised my self and said:
it seems I am a dagger of light,
I have become a dagger of light.
I did not ask for the war, the fight, the fear.
I did not ask to be born now, born here.
You find yourself
in the places you did not ask to be
and here I am shining, scarlet ivory,
one small blinding blade among many
who may live or may die, who are terrified
but cannot turn away —
we burning, we trembling, we daggers of light;
we doomed but splendid, we daggers of light.
Phone Bank
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
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.
Dark Matter 