three poems
By the Light of my Lamp
We have begun fighting again; the scared light of my lamp, one bird
amongst a multitude of birds, starlings crashing up from the trees, one,
stillborn, watching. I’ve read that everything ends, but it’s mythos,
memory is vapor, hot, roiling over deer-timbred fields, details inked on the permanent
w ind . Nothing comes to nothing, ash is to ash as soul is to ash, as is
the sovereignty of timelessness, red poppies, fragrance over the mountain
rock. Frostbite, then, of your mortal hands – mortal my ass. We draw the map as we go,
the reality of perception, theatres of peace as of war. Pinch yourself, & what is
gone. My role, the optimist, you say, I cannot have “one of those
nights,” weeping for myself, trembling for the children of Darfur . Monsters mingle
amongst us, the contract extends well beyond my death. This is not the first
apocalypse. I made my first dollar pimping someone else’s hope,
placing myself amongst the single-celled plankton, not yet winged. O one gnat, now,
one gnat amongst a swarm, flight cutting at air like iron, I hear it: one
gnat, observing like Buddha. The word, the word of God,
you’ve found it in me for myself, found it in us both: remembrance, rebirth, dreams
perverted, filthy dreams. Tell me…the murmur of cocktail parties, sun
in scotch, the voices in the mirror are a separate truth. We are fighting
again. Having tea together atop an anthill, we will remake the ways of the world. To be
a part of something bigger, this is the hunger of jihad. But all good news
is not propaganda, truths are rooted in the sensual world,
rosebud, the river I was raised by: my God, to touch the ribs, your ribs, the bone
of which I sprang. Water. To realize the world.
Like Milk
I could disappear in this, the stucco frost turning the wheat stalks teal,
I could disappear in the fact that nothing much matters, not even the fact
that you cannot hear me – because laughter always arrives like milk,
like the fig trees of modern Gethsemane
gashed by randomness, by lightning, by the judaskiss-pitted barrels of wooden
muskets, yes, laughter arrives like the blossom of beginning to see…
I come to the soldier who has chosen to ride the backs of rockets instead of
sparrows, chosen to witness what even the soothsayer should not see,
I approach him
to cradle him & find him cradling me instead, his rough skin soaking up
my grief like a lit paper lantern, he is not no-man’s-land as my father was
space bound by barbed wire on his return
from the second World War, the noise of void hammered by winter sun…I want
to believe in mortality (Dad taught me this), that this is it, when the truth
of being human, all-too-human overwhelms my joy
at the grace of the human hand, & I am suddenly aware that I sleep so I again
can hang out & listen to Bob Dylan with the dead, I sleep
so I can recover from violent awakenings, how I have
waded again & again into the unfathomable moon-pull sea, a current
that carries smashed Halloween pumpkin shells & Eastern fans
of arsenic oranges opening…The ship heaves
like a houseboat, the compass needle settling into the groove as the shoreline
deepens like fright’s voice & majestic sculptures pepper the jagged
line, an artery drained of blood, the chasm that is
the cleft of my imaginings, where the soldier who is not dying (it is worse
than this), who is cursed to the amputee’s chronic ghost pain
of eternal life, cries out in Mozart’s staccato, & laughter runs
like milk, like a disembodied knock at mourning’s door.
Looking Forward to Old Age: for you
Taking for granted the oncoming luminosities of old age
of gnarled fingers grappling the octaves of Chopin / the white lotus opening
we found work in various underground cities
as exotic dancers, our faces hidden by our hair as eyes lurk within bark of trees
we sketched over again in the winter rain
our endings our beginnings blurred as treerings
knowing there is no gap between longing & desire there is no difference
between possession & identity, the elliptical stutters of all endings
like the body we leave behind in dream while it is battered
by time, only to inhabit it once more on waking
I remember you running to my door, or were you floating
across the university’s all-night library
wisdom piled around us, canned candy in a ghetto seven-eleven
where we got wasted in the bathroom writing coded notes to eachother
on filthy walls: promiscuous light, nefarious shadow
seeking the concentric luminosities of old age
I knew you could not see past the orb of yourself, could not see me
or the cancer that now takes you away like a child’s sailboat
or a silvery dolphin to swim with on your voyage
as the planet revolves & spinning
hesitates just once while you shave your long blonde hair
shave your head to the perfection of a freckled tulip bulb
knobbed & rounded & of this earth
because like a mass of energy Beauty never dies
Can I slip my tongue in your disembodied dreams & share with you the horror of
goodbyes said or left unsaid, I tell you now that only now I think of you
though once I left you a message in the all-night bathroom
in the code of the Rosetta’s invisible ink
(are you a fire-eater, are you a dancer)
a code meant to be left untamed
even as we were just then learning how to run away
