Poem: In the kitchen

*

As close to me
as my own breath
were the people I
expected to be with

forever -- she sat, she stood
in the kitchen so familiar
that I didn't even need
to look at her to see her.

In my memory a crumb falls
& the dog is there
brushing my ankles
with a sweet puff of air

& everything taken
beautifully for granted
as an eternal routine
until it ended.

*

Poem: Prayable space

*

He'd been unbalanced
as long as he'd been,
and too often leaned against
himself and fallen.

He was immune
to the scientific
worship of reason
because of the hairline crack

in his own.
Reality
was what you could not contain
or share -- privacy

was its being,
its burden,
its flame, though perilous to hang
from or lean on.

Community was
only where you went to assuage
reality's
intensity and damage.

The fellowship was a mercy
like the physical
law
that broke one's fall

inward
to where
the word
of God pulsed with fear.

"It's only a movie."
Was he insane?
Or was insanity
what made him ask that question?

There was a small
puncture
hole
that widened and tore

all the secular,
a place that if justice
flourished anywhere
was its only access.

This hole formed into a cell
with birdsong spattered
on the wall:
so blue and serene was the word.

It was a house of prayer
where a brokenness churned
the air
and one's eyeballs burned.

I can speak
with you here
but no not speak:
I am nothing but ear.

Through some canal the known
world lay spread
in a prayable condition
where fate was liquid

again,
something to shuck
like a skin
or unfold like

a story
whose meaning
lay
in the future waiting.

The secular
caked in doubt
while something in its interior
spat him out

into a place
beyond destitution
that was
surely big enough for everyone.

He heard piano
music behind a door
that he could open if he wanted to --
it wasn't blocked anymore.

The person
whose place this was remained
unspoken and unknown
as the puncture hole widened.

*

Poem: When I was sick

*

At 17 I had the flu
and couldn't go to school.
I boarded yet I barely knew
a single living soul.

My mother brought me nourishment.
I felt her come and go
but was too feverish and faint
to thank her. Did she know?

My sickness brought along this fear:
"your weakness is your fate".
But her strength saved me from despair
and she would sit up late.

And now I'm strong and she is dead
but it still seems more fitting
the other way: me sick in bed
her at my bed's edge sitting.

*

Poem: Wax

*

She was wax
in the sun --
existence had to fix
itself on someone.

Oh do not be
like the girl in the parking
lot leaning sullenly
on her thug's hip, enslaved so young.

Everywhere so many
frauds.
The only real authority
God's.

Can you go
blindly
and follow
someone you don't see,

slip the carapace
of pleasing
off, let the apparatus
of church fall with a clang,

let the inner
be exposed
though still too tender
to go outside?

She was not going anywhere.
Where she needed to be
was here
already.

If I could only
obey my own
feel for my
own intention,

nothing but wax
melting purpose-
fully in the flux
of that other one's purposes.

*

Poem: Disarray

*

A sense my disarray
brought me closer to God
on a pathway
almost never trod.

I can't judge I can't
and it's not
that I won't
but I can't do it.

God's own beauty
blew me up like a balloon
Without that air I was nobody
and nothing not even a man

So for me to be obsessed
was just to breathe
God was too close to be embraced
or even simply be with.

In the presence one said
no no give me space
I am buffeted --
but in absence distress

and the old disarray,
which was good
in its own way
because it told me what I wanted.

My craving for immediacy,
considered
okay in a sex criminal or junkie,
in a believer seemed weird,

like a lunge
into worship without
knowledge
to sustain it.

Probably whatever bad thing
anyone could say
about me would cling
as a truth and never flush away,

but my God! this poem
is not about me
but about him.
And he knows my disarray.

*

Poem fragment: The X in the heart

*

In that country it was as if
everyone
was forced to be alive
because deaths were none

deaths were not but only
people disappeared
as if they moved away
without a way to forward.

The deceased
there was not one example of
so it was hard not to exist.
Everyone was alive.

But there was a hole
in the flank of one house
& the people
inside were in distress

at the mess and unfixedness,
her bookshelves lined with gods,
her walls deep with celebrities
in defiant attitudes,

but where was she?
She didn't
even say
where she went.

In the hall
dogs howled --
nobody could console
the child.

But look: everyone
who is is alive & nothing
is gone by definition
no one is missing

there
is only
here
the rest is pathology,

useless tears
of spoiled
children kicking tires.
The world it has been sealed

& those removed
we do not approach
or speak of or to -- we avoid
even their touch

& O! this X at the center
of our hearts no one
will look into ever ever.
We do not look no no -- just fall in.

& O! there are no words
to say or unsay,
only these dissonant chords
we will never play.

*

Poem: Not by merit

*

It's not by merit
that I live.
By grace or by error -- not by right
I have what I have.

My worth
must be applied from outside --
rooted in the earth,
watered and fed

by one whose reflection
is what you see
when
you think you're seeing me --

the same one who shines
in you the same
way -- so we wear each other's reflections,
though we feel queasy inside them.

If we back away
from our being
kin -- if now we
seem bound by loathing,

that hatred
should in fact
be pointed
inward to the naked

self whose love
for you, that too
is of
the radiant one within you.

God's embodiment
is -- I don't know -- it is so humble,
so beautiful, so low -- I don't
know -- it is out of our control.

But how can people be
"hard to be with"
having the same being obscurely
underneath?

Such sickness in the news,
warmongers
so anxious
to break the mirrors

and deny that the God
who peers from an ugly face
might be their own God connected
to their own ugliness.

Suppose ugliness embraced
took on the semblance
of grace, suppose disgust
were self-directed violence,

suppose God not only was
but circulated
actively through the likes of us
unseen and unmerited,

would we change?
Would everything
become as strange
as our breathing?

If I woke would I give
you not my merit
but the real thing I have?
And would you accept it?

*

Poem: Proving God

*

When they challenged me to "prove"
my God I was struck by the oddness:
you prove something you don't have.
What you have you simply witness.

God seemed too basic to prove.
But if this was too clear to me
even to be labelled "if"
why did so many others disagree?

There had to be mediation.
We couldn't both be right.
Truth can only be one -- but the more one
it is, the more it feels remote.

My sense of truth was near
but confused, not that it was
but that I was, I suppose, there was a blur
pressed against my soul's moist glass,

something it was all too easy
to call my own desire
but what use could that be?
I longed not for myself but for another.

The world had only one will
that I could feel and it was not
my own but thrust like a staple through my soul
and was blunt yet I couldn't fathom it,

never quite managed to understand, couldn't
write it down as a to do and do it
because the need was so relentless and insistent
and all of me was fastened to it.

There was pain like a shovel
unearthing the old site
of our first warm bonding -- it still
held -- just barely -- but

could not be used
or redeemed in the day to day
bob and weave that passed
like a history in me.

My life was of little use
even to me but I held on-
to it "for dear life" and it was dear as it was
even to exist for not much reason,

praying
for change not
actually changing
so not doing it only wanting it,

as though what I want-
ed still
wasn't
attainable only thinkable.

But only thinkable? one thought
absorbed all my interest
because stakes so high were bound into it
there could be no other contest.

There was only one contest
and all else
lost its ambition to exist
if this one were false.

Goodness leaked
from our world at a rate
so unbraked
that even the measure had gone flat.

Most of my heroes were dead now
and my own soul seemed to hover
at this perilously low
caressing pressure.

I prayed for sheer prayer
craving an external
power
to erect my own will

and the sun shafted me
on a beam of hot fluff stronger
than the most sinewy
human architecture.

There I lay on a spear that was thrown
by but not decoupled
from intention.
And if it pushed it also pulled.

*

Poem: Law

*

it's just telepathy
embodied when
strangers obey
a law -- in their aggregation

the cars at 4 stops
move as one -- unless an outlaw
makes the design collapse
by moving when the law says no.

A good law is a quasi-nuclear
force drawing us
into harmonious measure
at best frictionless.

Hence the deeper meaning
in Auden's suave
phrasing --
"law is like love".

It's a thing that constrains
and annoys
its victims -- you don't have independence
if your acts synchronize.

But complaining is a token --
a symbol of time
at peace: we complain
like children bickering in a happy home

and there will never be a paradise
without bickering if
you conceive paradise as a place
where humans live.


What do I want
from the law?
Ideally I wouldn't
know or want to know

the law is there.
I would have the luxury
of our living without judging each other.
I would be free

"from" it "within" it.
It would never need to be
called upon but
in not being used would set us free

to float between gears
in grace... but this is hard
to imagine seeing how injustice powers
the forward plunge of our world,

and how compulsively
even good people cheat
each other as if by
nature, as if they can't help it.

Then I would have law
not be a human creation
at all but spread above and below
the human,

well beyond
anything a poet
can understand
or write about.

It would encompass
the dead and gone
not just those few of us
who hold life's microphone.

Law would be love
when those most broken
of all have
their tiny portion

of I want to say existence
but it must be
some form of transcendence
we can align with, not see,

an alignment so incomplete
that we
die by law, yet pray for it
to come in its way: that is, completely.

*

Poem: The voice

*

Where did he hear
God's voice or did
he hear it indeed, did he ever
hear a voice not his but so closely related

to his own
most intimately
hidden -- his own unable-to-be-spoken
hopes of what his own life might be

that the voice lay in his tongue
and not on his ear -- was not imposed
by circumstances commanding
but simply said what needed to be said?

It was no second you inside you
telling you what
to do
and what not,

no no, not so split.
The voice was full of a consent --
his own -- but it
was really consent, it was not constraint.

He would hear the voice then lose it
but the swing of the loss
kept him chasing the part not lost:
its rightness -- looseness --

the seam of confidence
embedded in the darkness
as if mere chance
had slipped and become conscious.

Was it possible? You could really know
what to do and lean
within this feel of assurance that held you
close and guided you in?

Suppose silence were like little wells
where God stored messaging
in virtual particles
through which our day to day swung?

How could one hear this?
Surely the body
acting would catch this voice --
or mask it more likely.

The trick would be not to cover it
with chatter but to listen
to the X squeezing the heart
for a terrible beat then gone.

The trick would be to stay open
for the can't-measure
length of endurance even
to begin to hear.

So... the poet's ear was open like
a bird's
hungry beak.
And God fed it with mysterious words.

*

Poem: Soft strips of chance

*

In school he'd liked epigrams
and the way they could heave the most
unruly experiences into sums
that however simplified were not reduced.

A problem -- his own
work had never hooked the heart
of a distant person
caught up in shared hurt.

No poem was ever meant
to stand closed, intact
and pointlessly eloquent
but his did in fact.

But no. There was a cloud
of consciousness, like a chamois
cloth filled with wettest graphite, that stood
above the poem pulsing freely:

the ex-
ternal force of readership
that would flex
itself loose from an author's grip.

Around any willed object the abyss
of chance bit into that will -- but beyond
that abyss, in an almost mirrored place
a new consciousness took its stand.

So if he wrote well
(an "if" never proven)
that wellness might not be sterile,
if the reading were yet to happen,

and the randomness in
which writing lay
were a sort of moat beyond which recognition
slowly moved its eye.

In chance if there is chance there is no "unlikely"
or "impossible" -- there is no reasonable bet
you can just place over the sway
of its indifference to your plans for it.

And if this thing is wielded
by intention, why pretend you conceive
so awesome a Godhead
that just permits you to believe?

What surrounds us feels like destruction
but what surrounds
destruction feels more like creation
in its black and stylish bends,

this movement of time like a shiver that recurs
in a patterned way and seems as willed
in its careless spinning as a dancer's
pirouette through reality's perilous fluid,

a locus
of order, or of a world's slow
coming to order -- both perilous and conscious --
that seems suitable also

to be the stream down which poetry might flow
in fear of being devoured
but also -- or as though also
in a longing simply to be read.

For if he had traveled too far from
epigrams to return to their closure
still the Lord -- of epic and epigram --
stood nearer than ever -- in his fear.

*

Poem: Poor relation

*

You you you -- that person
bobbing in the mirror's
current, up then inexorably drawn
down, your own self moister than the water's.

Well they said to me: you own
nothing not even you
and even this particular introspection
will be taken away and rather soon too.

I said then I will give to God
the intention through me intended,
which I wish I'd not distorted
but know that I did.

I will give what's not mine
but that the giving
of my own intention
to give at least is not nothing

if it resonates with what more deeply
exists than I ever could
and if it makes me
a poor relation but still related.

What I have no choice but to give
to God I will give anyway
I will give what I don't have
I will give my nothingness away

I will give that I'm glad
about it. No. What I give
can't even be stated.
It's a nothing there's a lot of.

I am nothing nothing nothing.
In my own what seems this weary demise
I feel myself somehow also expanding
as God fills the room. Or his breath does.

*

Poem: "Punctured"

*

In church a human sound
came from
behind
him -- but there was no one behind him.

At the dance concert
the curtain never rose
but the entire stage was punctured
by a colored gas.

He held onto his chair
edge
out of fear
that he would fall onto the stage.

The dance circled
even behind his heart.
It swelled
and was rhythmically punctured --

like a something between
our death and us --
the dance lay not out front but in
the body breathed and was.

And I must be a part of this
forever he thought.
The soft gas caressed his face
and caught

his will up in its substance.
We make a community or a complete
world not just an audience.
When it ended he couldn't back out,

but followed
the dancer who looked most like
him down a still stage-feeling road
into a dream-cafe picturesque and frantic

with the need for art,
the abiding need
to speak it touch it enter it
be part of it and in that way abide,

despite Fashion that malevolent
god of fear strutting the aisle
trying to make us feel insignificant
drab and small.

Immune the dancer pulsed as if
awkwardly
with an almost corny declarative
right-now vibrancy.

I want to be
you, the spectator
said -- I mean completely
to be your

image witness lover
participant
closer than the mirror
image is to the person in it.

There is a gold tattoo
of grace carved across our multiverse,
with little characters in Hebrew
that cover our suicide scars.

If I could only get
closer to you
than that tattoo or than the inner side of that
tattoo.

Around them the cafe
throbbed with the displacement
of those who moved away
and those who stood their ground

coming back night after night --
menus slapped on
tables -- diners who when they sat
down could barely get up again --

liaisons that somehow ended
before dessert -- there were
marriages that lived and died
quickly or tried for forever.

Life was like an ode
to transience
embedded
in dance.

Lover and lover
stood on each side
of the mirror
distinct and united

inside the bright vitality
of other pass-
ersby
etched in glass.

Sometimes bodies contain such
a strangeness that when 2
of them touch
that touch dissolves and passes through --

an interaction occurs
but is so abstract
that the loneliness mirrors
itself and remains intact.

Goodbye goodbye
to our intense
reciprocity --
what we felt inside our dance.

Outside our protected
space a still unnamed disease
stood
waiting for us

to pause and it said honey
whether
quickly
or not -- wherever you are

I will find you and eat
you and afterwards take
Africa the whole of it
into my mouth as a snack.

People paused when they heard that voice
and they grew self-
conscious
held their breath and marched into the wall of

shadow at the back
of "company B"
that nostalgic and deathlike
ballet.

The survivor? He'd wake or half wake
at midnight to the sight
of soldiers marching into black
and not coming out --

then he'd suddenly wake --
to the same sight --
boys in black
night after night.

In the pit of reason's stomach lay
an abyss of contradiction
that reasoners groped to deny
without reason.

He slept through it, woke in it,
lived it -- a blackness laid
on top and under, a bottomless night
with him stretched across the lid.

In church not a mention of this.
But if he sat far back
then behind his ear the place
in its darkness seemed to speak.

Now he had become one of those adults
who do
nothing on impulse
nor do they know this nor wish to know --

but no that was not
exact not
precise not quite
it.

Fixity of place
was what he had to have,
every day the same office,
the same drab protective

home,
and in the morning the same road
wrapping him
in repetition like a shroud

for one year then twenty
and not even
gone away
because they were never there enough to be gone.

His dreams were of routine
the days and nights in denatured rows
along a boulevard of destitution,
endless personless days

and all of that just how
one lived, the repetition
meant to help you
both arrive at and be your own annihilation.

It didn't hurt.
It had the feel of
a late night news report
whose numbness was redemptive

for if time was a thing -- then a chunk
of what
exactly? each piece unique-
ly carved, bottomless and intricate,

born as if boneless, to be babied
and cooed till its unknown substance
overnight solidified
and took its place in the dance.

He found himself one night
outside then inside the old hall
of a genteel palace that
stood waiting for the wrecking ball to fall.

It was wounded like sacred space
and the troupe he'd seen long before
mysteriously was
also there.

He saw a troupe of kids expressing
what they had not
even felt yet -- things they would be feeling
in the future but not yet.

The curtain didn't rise but vanish.
The dancers pulled the room
into their gaseous swoosh.
It swept in front of and behind him.

His heart was a churn
with no place to churn against.
The dancers had not been born
when what they danced was danced,

as though what survived
death was not what stood
still but only what moved
and thus paradoxically died

and so only transient
things could become
permanently resident
in the perishing sensorium.

Something "between our death and us"
lay
in this gas
too exposed even to see precisely.

But I will take your presence
in any form that I can
whether in permanence or in transience
who knows? but in either case "in".

*

Poem: "Glove"

*

It was as though the prime
of one's life were a glove
that one put on for a time
and took off

without anything
about the hand inside
changing
except that it was now outside

that is, it was still a hand
and did what a hand did
nothing had happened
to it yet it had been abandoned

or driven between gears if time were gears
or if time was just a mechanism
for maneuvring between months and years
like a dead machine that moved but was always the same,

then something was as wrong
as the glove pulled in reverse
whose fingers would now be fitting
a different universe,

with the life spilled
out of a container
first young then old
really neither.

The body was not a vehicle
or furnishing or mode, not a disguise
device or brace, nor some metaphysical
obstacle either -- there was no well known thing it was --

not sliced matter -- not in fact separate
from one's own awkward
attempts to fit it
within this or a different word.

So if he lived it was not because I
remembered him (because
even my poor memory
was less than what I once knew him as),

but could I say intrinsically?
There was a dancer's picture on my wall.
He filled his body ecstatically
but was flat as a stepped on snail.

He lived not
because I remembered him, no, the other way,
it was the life that was at the root
of what memory occurred today.

Life flexes
fingers in the glove
and seems more than it is
possible for anything to be made of.

It was not just life but his
life, not representative
just the single thing it was
and in that smallness alive

at least not otherwise,
because what
twisted in my gut was
him: the hook of him shifting in the gut.

Life covered the darkness with hair
and gave off the rude spring-green
ever-helpless odor
not of skin but of what has come to wear skin.

And one's own realization -- while it passed through
the place that aged and never aged,
would it too be able to
remain in the passing where it was wedged?

Poem: Watery substance

*

He grew old without noticing --
was mental absence
a part of ageing?
Or did his caution make the difference?

Think. Think. Cast memory
back upon the sweet ones
gone suddenly or quietly but early,
because there is true absence.

The veteran's hands shake
too much to work --
he wheels his chair or leans back
on the worst bench in the park.

His buddies are dead.
Would that have been better?
He once saw a teenager explode
on a battlefield, a teenager,

and he thought
to himself wait
his life isn't done yet:
this kid's not even complete.

But complete? Where
was that now? Then the veteran
stopped thinking -- needed liquor
to wet his brain.

The poem's narrator
never went
to war nor
could he know what going meant.

He was naîve about a cost
not his to pay
at least
not overtly.

Time could be a purge of all one's
crudities and false hopes
but in the end experience
only emptied people out -- perhaps.

All roads led down into
wisdom he was sure -- life travelled down
into itself, but also into knowledge of itself as its term grew
long enough to curve back into recognition.

One's own slow death was worth having
because only from having first lost
this sense of being young
could the full sense of youth have been noticed.

"In school our teachers told us
to shape our future consciously
make the future conscious
or else it would turn to shape us its own way...

With us or without
us it would still occur
and our choice was to climb on top of it
or be dragged under.

I heard but didn't heed
their warning, not exactly, because
I couldn't decide
first of all who I in any fixed sense was

and then, much less, secondly who I wanted to
be -- no. No. I never never
knew who, but only how,
I knew only how to go after

the thing by continual questioning,
and I knew that I never wanted
to take such an awesome thing
as existence for granted."

It was of a mucousy consistency
the ground that kept humans
from plunging recklessly
into transcendence.

There was an athlete who had dipped one little bud
into Coke-white bone-
like dust and fell inside for good
and never played ball again

and shot himself -- by the sea.
One can still feel the water
sleepily
rocking his soft cadaver.

The salt water sinks and pulls itself back out
like the tears a survivor's lips will suck
up and sideways into the throat
where they will thicken and get stuck.

The parents who grieved are dead now too,
they themselves like children, faces
filled with transient woe
only in that everything now was,

transient I mean --
like the face a child would make
when its ice cream cone
fell onto the dirty brick.

"I have been one to survive
without deserving to,
I haven't earned life, I simply live.
Others did more. But that one thing, no.

Unmerited, precious,
it must be probed,
saved, understood, if only because
I must know, were they honored or robbed?

I was never Orfeo
not to look at the one I rescued,
no. Impossible not to
see then caress that sweet head,

wondering at life not death,
since life barely remains
to me as well, and we both
skirt nonexistence and both retain existence,

mysterious substance, of which
there cannot be
too much
too long too far or -- my love -- too many."

*

Poem: "There is a space"

*

There is a space
around your heart, a once rigid
space where judgment was
uncomfortably wedged,

now just air,
filled with a breath
that previously you were
scared to breathe with,

now as it were
the lodging of prayer
too full to censure
itself or any other

creature.
Mere prayer.

*