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When I
raised my hands in the air
two yellow
leaves fell from the tree
I was facing
my whole life
in those day
slavery had already
been
civilized into Edwardian
consumerism
and Neo-Platonism
but one
still died under the lash
now of the
fear of death itself
I just
didn’t want to accept it
that human
beings would let
this happen
over and over
that the
older ones who knew
and could
say are silenced
with dementia
and money
while the
young forgivably
are too
close up to see
I hope you
enjoy it
Try a
different brand
To you I’m
just another taco stand
Don’t be pathetic
Mr. Platonic
Now that we
can see subdermally
I’ll sit in
your lap but no touching
Sex is just
an excuse for touching
The world is
a womb or a bomb
It’s still
making up its mind
suddenly the cat was in me
and I was in the cat
that’s how I know what it sees
when it looks at me not me but
the world just before this one
Huidobro
Parra Bolano
it sounds
like a Latin motto
‘Don’t let
your banana down’
or some such
endearment
or maybe a
stern warning
‘I told you
no baloney’
an injunction
that forms
a family of
little injunctions
‘Find your
opposite and beg
him to come
back’
from my
patio I can see
Bolano
eating ice cream
at the beach
where
it’s not
cold anymore
An animal’s
eyes are not built
for beauty
its nose discloses
choices not
chances its ears
movement not
music though one
admires the
integrity
of the
concept the intensity
of the
delivery almost
every single
one a keeper
whereas man
is all muddied
with bits
and pieces of
everything thrown
together
and woman
muddier
not through
any fault
of her own
but because
some man has
muddied her
Of the 24
who sprouted
only 6
remain but
what is that
to Bach’s
and Magdalena’s
loss
of 8
children out of
13
unimaginable or
the loss of almost
100
of the
cantatas
of the over 300
he made
to my 18
zinnias gone
things alive
on different
fronts that
disappear
nostalgia is
death asking
what you
will miss
if you only
fall down
and adore me
After sixty
years
it’s plain
the true
purpose of
the world
is pain actually
of one kind
or another
from the
first sixty
seconds on
admit it
pain and
suffering
only made
endurable
by loving
something
someone
somehow that
love which pain
alone
births into
the world
and the
respite this brings
or not for
those who drop
out to be
refreshed
but not
deleted
nothing is
deleted
but it takes
that long
to learn to
be tender
to the world
you watch
dying in
your arms
German may
be a further
development of
coughing
French of
humming and grunting
Italian of
touching and groaning
English of
fooling around
but you can
still use
the other
end of your pen
to rescue
the gnat from your coffee
the only
question remaining
will you
drink it now
the poison
of the world
which is its
promise
to mistake
its pleasure
for its
greatest treasure
To be safe
and be respected
was all we
ever wanted
as creatures
of the earth
not to be influenced
by death
if life
could not be truly lived
‘I can’t
take it anymore’ scrawled
in ruby
lipstick on the mirror
how go on in
blindness illness
depending
your whole life
on a certain
sense of self-control
no longer to
be counted on to show up
at the
corner of thought and feeling
at midnight
in the village
of
conscience and couth
If you give
yourself up
easier said
than done
you will
receive everything else
this can be
a gradual process
or happen
overnight
but still hardly
anyone
is willing
to take the deal
it feels
like buying a bridge
for a few
colored beads
above all no
one wants
to be taken
for a fool
to be
laughed at and made
to feel
small enough to be
in him as he
is in us all
To survive
in this world
I was
telling myself
you have to
act like someone
or something
is out to kill you
as I jerked
the old mower
around my
postage stamp lawn
but suddenly
I remembered
a God would
have had to think
through
every one of these kinds
of thoughts
before even qualifying
he would
have had to fail
every human
being in existence
just to get
into the finals
he would
have imagined all the details
of his
arrival and his departure
and then he
would just have to do it
Wasn’t
Frankenstein’s glittering
condominium
on 5th Street
in the 70’s
before he
moved back
to Pennsylvania
and became
that assemblyman
who wrote a
book called
‘The Book of
the Dead’
which was
simply an endless
list of
numbers of the dead
in different
categories
in small
print for thousands
of pages the
numbers alone
were
astonishing and tiring
the only
book everyone had read
but no one
seems to have finished
The
Christmas after the house
got broken
into I went looking
for that
clay nativity scene
I bought in
Mexico years ago
and realized
it was one of the things
they took
among several
odd things
to steal some early
color
polaroids of us one of
our toilet
seats and three
cheap and useless
watches
maybe they
were aliens
seeking
souvenirs of things
one only
finds on earth
At 8:32 a
brilliant
trapezoid of
sunlight
enters the
dining-room
sits down at
the head
of the table
a fork
in one hand
a knife
in the other
waiting
to be served of course
our bodies will do
fever-warmed
and
topped with
a dollop
of unsalted
sleep
our master
our slave
our teacher
we save
What you don’t
think about enough
the 45
million people in the air above you
or the 90
million under your feet
that could
be a question of blood flow
at any given
hour
everyone
blames the ocean
but it was
the fault-line’s fault
my car has
lost its stealth
I was home
for Christmas
but Christmas
was not home for me
my home is
in the stars
to each one
his own star
what was
true once
preserved in
relevant texts
is true
again for one night only
even otters
hold hands
rowing against the
dark
A
hole appears
where there
was once
an
attachment
it’s called
a belly-
button
untethered
window to a former
wall a
massive gap
in the demolition
of the
future
cables in
the concrete
how will we
support
the doors
left open
to the stars
how plant
here
a new plan
As we well
know no one
is in anyone
else’s exact same
position in
space and time
this is how
he would talk to me
mild-tempered
as a summer annual
and we would
sit through centuries
how can you
live with just
an
afternoon as your friend
I would lob
that back at him
I say him
but I mean layers
and layers
of identical faces
like skulls
or ranks of angels
each glowing
like a son of a gun
and coming
straight at me
The secrets
are all washed and dried now
some need
pressing the rest are
ready-to-wear
I had no idea
they could
be cleaned up so well
I remember
wringer washing machines
hanging the
heavy secrets out on the line
in winter
stiff as boards freeze-dried
I can’t
believe I’m telling you this
it must be
the power of secrets
to
camouflage themselves as memories
when the
only real secret is that
there are no
secrets at all
everything
is right out there in the open
but most of
it passes for crisp white linens
or underwear
hanging on a line
The one star
visible
above the
city tonight
thinks it’s
the only one
who doesn’t go
far enough
like Samuel
Beckett
who stood
with one foot
in the Old
Testament the Torah
and the
other in warmed-over
Protestantism
‘harshing
his mellow’ as
the smokers
put it to us
what’s wrong
with
pleasure is that we take it
at others’
expense and think
we can get
into heaven without
ever getting
stoned ourselves
Like the
first line of a poem
he rushed
into the restaurant
still in his
pajamas dreaming
look the sun
has come out
from a dark
mountainous sky
to warm my
back for a moment
I knew you
loved me
the things
of the world
insert here
in the waist
of the poem
we’ll need them later
when we have
finally
grasped the
gleam on the roof
another
scrap of the Logos
but also my
lover
as he came
to the end
of the cross
of the poem
and said to
me smiling
the risk
itself
outshines
the lines
What does
the hummingbird see
when it
pulls back the blur to observe
how the
world is built up
life by life
and leaf by leaf
which even
if only in decaying
adds
something to the earth
the presence
of time clocks in
usually
involving a weapon
or at least
a triggering descent
abandoned by
its leaves
the flowers
of the desert rose
bloom tall
pink-flamed
candles in
the cold yard
naked as a
newborn
