Poor Species

I feel increasingly distant from you. Your weak attempts at birdsong. Your dominion, which was enjoyable, warm and cozy, while I was young. But more and more the frayed sweater of the DNA. We pick at it on the television news. The sound of gunfire in the streets. But still: Poor Species. I wonder if the search for expression will end. The search for expression will not end. It is the search for expression which is Guernica and that which Guernica depicts. And how long ago was Guernica painted? Do you feel that slippage? Today, nobody would attempt to paint it. Irony is lifeblood. But the secret is encoded in the art itself. That there is pleasure in the forms which quote pain. If they are imaginatively conceived, they are a distraction, an invitation to play. Guernica was such an invitation presented as a raw scream. Infantile and dark. Shelter of speaking or drawing. The people come out of the bombed theater speaking. The film still plays.The lovers are on the screen in black and white as the rafters fall. They are toying with each other. Their faces the size of the entire screen. It is only the childhood of the work of art. The work of art is eternally at play in a form of childhood. We feel like shadows, like shades, when faced. 

Gum

I wake up in the night, worried about how to get rid of gum. I fear nothing will vaporize gum but a white hot star. I worry about our ignorance. If you put it in a mere earthly incinerator, the wet gum of a mouth will just scream and writhe and turn and pop and then crawl away. Just as Daniel came with a spring in his step out of that Biblical oven. It will lie on the street, charred, and wait for a really low mouth, for little hands to pick it up and pop it in. It might be a child. Or an art dwarf like Lautrec. And if you bury it deep in the earth, it will hold all our cells and spit in those brain-like grooves, and with the weight of all the trash above, pockets will seal over that DNA like amber over 99 million year old ants caught in the act of inter-species fornication. There is no solution. We should have never started with gum. You might swallow it, but then it's going to follow the great Excremental Highway to the sea. Think of all the people who throw their gum into the ocean. Right off cruise ships and PVC rafts made to look like a box of Crayola Crayons.You just know sea cucumbers are mating with our gum at the bottom of the sea. How do you sleep at night?  You probably don't even believe gum has genes, but at the beginning of creation a bunch of water bubbles "got" genes. They had nothing at the beginning. Just a dark dream and a fiction about themselves they told themselves constantly until it became true. The way you can hear gum talking, even when you stop chewing it. So it begins.

The Voice Problem

A fly went to see a psychiatrist for a troubling mental complaint. Every time he spoke, it sounded to him as though a fly were speaking. This was whether he was speaking aloud or thinking to himself, inside his own head. "It comes out as sort of fly-like buzzing!" he lamented to the psychiatrist, who was himself just then perched upside down on the ceiling of the consultation room, vibrating his wings. "Very interesting," the shrink thrummed and rubbed his fore-legs together to savor the conundrum even better. The fly psychiatrist was actually fantasizing about horse excrement, how sensuous and inviting it was. Even more than a fly femme fatale on her best day. "It's like a long didgeridoo sound that never ends," the poor fly told the doc. "Well, are you hearing it  even now?" the doctor probed. The fly paused a moment to listen to his thoughts."Yes, even now," he confirmed. "And my voice, the voice of a doctor with many success stories, do you hear it as only the drone of a fly, a small hairy bag of being with a striking proboscis, the sonic output of eight limited chromosomes?" "Yes, I believe we are both buzzing," the patient sadly admitted. "How worthless patients are," the fly doctor thought. "Patient is a terrible misnomer. If patients were patient, most of their problems would be solved by time or death." But they had to show up and bother him. "I'm going to write you a prescription for absolute solitude," the doctor concluded. "If you follow my treatment regimen faithfully, I will never see you again. Also, never feed again from anything that even vaguely resembles a proboscis. And your identity problem should swiftly resolve. Please stop at the payment window before taking to the sky."  The fly did as he was told and was soon starving to death. But the doctor was correct. His voice began to change. The buzz disappeared. There was only a thin sound that issued from his body now. It was translucent like the voices of clouds. On his last day, the fly realized the wings had been his problem all along. How had the doctor missed that? What a quack!  He castrated himself of his wings and his voice by flying at a razor-sharp piece of broken glass in the window of an abandoned house. He fell to the dank wooden floor of an empty house and listened to his own blessed silence. There was nothing even remotely fly-like about him. When a child exploring the vacant house stepped on him moments later, his final cry of anguish, he noted with pride, had not one iota of buzz left in it. It sounded like the scream of the paragon of animals. The pride inside him separated itself off from its animal. He stared at it a millisecond as a proud parent does with its newborn. And then he was something like a niggling doubt that he forgot.

A Muted Parade

I went walking in the fog of morning before morning. A voice told me to look for living things or — finding no living things — look for pieces of living things, parts of their bodies and body loves. Of course, the trees were all alive. The children below the trees, ferns and weeds, they are alive. Green spurning things. I saw a dragonfly wing. Glinting on the asphalt. A desperate iridescence signaling. Everything was wet with dew as the inside of  a very old man’s wrist watch. One tall cold one. A black umbrella going  to a black car funeral somehow like an umbrella. The first birds called, then, to the space before time. It was black and weirdly swaying, dappled, blotched with holes like an old Super-8 film-leader. We were all on it.


A breeze through trees whispered it was only passing through and inhuman. The BLOCK PARENTS had died, but the yellow blocky sign was still in the window of their empty house. The photograph of this is of everything, that spirit of guardianship in photos taken for unknown reason. It floats like  a summer dirigible’s shadow on the nape. Time says things behind a photo’s back. That feel of father, wet beer kiss of yesteryear on a naked knee. Oh, it’s just the breeze again. You carry your father’s camera and inside the body the fog. The sense that hands are superfluous only leaves the body slowly, slowly as the morning, many hours and loops later.

On a Day So Cold

On a day so cold, the neighborhood hawk uncharacteristically cries out as he flies overhead, advertising his services to freezing birds who might have had enough. Surprisingly, no takers. Winter's game of freeze tag continues, with most of the players already in stoic tableau.

Two Gestures

                                                                 1.

Someone is burying a butterfly in the earth. Her small eyes and hands have found this lying on the ground, two windowpanes of orange and black-veined pollen which could have reached another continent. Except they didn't.

                                                                2.

Someone is performing open heart surgery. It is winter and the operating room is filled with warm bodies. The gift lies open before this gathering of distantly related beings. The sense of family might emerge in human crisis. This might happen between people who are all, every single body on earth, sixteenth cousins.The ribs have a sort of symmetry that might remind someone of butterfly wings.

                                                              3.

It's a child who buries the butterfly in cold earth. It's not a child whose gloved hand closes around the surfaced human heart. We are told that one gesture is science and the other is what, mythology? Religion? The child's hands digging a hole and placing the winged thing into what is believed to be a pocket of sleep. Restorative sleep. One covers. One opens. The human essentials of healing.

                                                             4.

Both these gestures have mysteries in their origins. We will never know who was the first to bury a butterfly in the earth. We will never know who was first to open the human body to remove the heart. These are both sacred gestures now, but in the beginning they were some sort of stumbling, strange instinct, a clumsiness of the heart. Ideas of salvation began in divine stumbling. One, we are told, is science. And the other is darker,  more hopeless.  But equally beautiful. A horror is discovered to protect us from a greater horror. It is called art or science. They both wing it like the butterfly.


                                                           5.

It is not a surgeon burying the butterfly in the earth, covering it up with comforting fragments of brown and black, granules with tiny sparks flashing through them. But the child may do this with the warm precision of a surgeon. It's not a child breaking the petals of human ribs to reach the red human flower that hides in its membrane from the unliving air. But the surgeon may feel like a child kneeling on the cold earth, digging with her mother's spoon in something that might as well be winter earth like frozen coffee crystals. The sense of the intractable is the divine sense. Some fix the broken thing with stents. Some do it with the hopeless glue of metaphor. The important thing is to touch the intractable. The impossible is the only thing worth our time and the one thing we all have in common. Divine stumbling gives us a sense that an accident might occur which will be salvation. That there is a word salvation. That it flies like a butterfly which can cross continents and, possibly, interstellar spaces. This is why the small child is a surgeon. This is why the best heart surgeon is a priest of hopeless butterflies.

The Anesthesiologist

The anesthesiologist is perhaps the seminal problem of our time. Are we able to note the presence of the anesthesiologist? The answer, obviously, is no. Because the anesthesiologist has been among us for so long now, an era. It is the Era of the Anesthesiologist. Many of you are holding the anesthesiologist's hand, counting backwards from ten, not making it very far at all. The anesthesiologist is an expert at self-erasure. It's like seeing a lens flare and thinking it is the fingerprint of light. For a millisecond you remember that you are a lens. And then you are only the flare of the lens, a fingerprint of light, and you are out. Gone, here. Language must be something made in the anesthesiologist's image. The anesthesiologist enters the room and there is no longer a room.

Okay

It is okay to be the night. It is okay to be a shopping cart stolen and ridden by teenagers miles from its strip mall of residence. Left in a small rural tunnel cars drive through one at a time. It's always cooler under there and there's a dripping from the highway above that grows algae on the walls. A lovely, pale Matisse green. It smells like the wet of ancient mosaic. Algae skin that gets so little light, you are pretty. Wall, I like that sound you make with your mouth. Little shopping cart, come with me. I will take you to your mother. She is probably frantic.

Westron

Winter winds go forcibly through a landscape. The palette changes as you watch. Going through a field of this and the forest at the edge. Do you only imagine this lavendar light? It is like a dry washing machine, a washing machine of air. And you are in the middle of its violence, like a garment trying to escape but following the rhythms of the machine. Trying to think less while walking in heavy winds won't work. Winds, especially these winter winds, have mastered reverse psychology. They know you will try to retreat to silence. They are like the pressers of old. They put the stones of winds on your mind and force all your silence out.

It may be their unfairness you come to love.

Drawing

The distance is in the wings. We say, no, the wings are in the distance. But we know we have reversed it. The way we have with ink. It is the same stubborn idea, the same stubborn wing.

The Pingers

A father is pinging his daughter because he fears his death. A teenager is pinging the cell tower above her naked body, which shares a wild, untilled field with another naked, pinging body which shares itself with her slightly older lover who is also pinging. Something is pinging on the floor of the Arctic Ocean right now, a mystery ping, and nobody on earth knows what it is. Arctic animals are scattering from this sea zone of pinging mystery. I feel the dead pinging me when I read poems. Phone calls are being thinned out, attenuated to mere texts. Screaming is texting now. The universe is sliding towards less and less human words. There is much less blood in our language. Something is being quietly strangled to death. I want to escape the pinging, so I run out the back door of my house at evening and race towards the dark woods. It may still be legal to scream there. The trees might be protecting screams. They have for thousands of years. On my way there, some contemporary bats fly over my head, scoffing at my retrograde screams, pinging every solid object in their blind sights.

Sun Drain

Every day, the old man sits high in a dour, tall building. He sits at a window. He watches a train that contains all the loved and loveless dead ones whizz down the oldest railroad tracks in the world. Always there are more and darker commuters. From his side, they look like the ghosts of jazz singers, with their dark hands and faces pressed to the morning-frosted glass of the train. From their side, he is a slight imperfection in the ice.

Skin

I found a young man's jacket / deep in the woods / on duvet of duff under pines / a type of pretend blue satin / its arms thrown back / as if in ecstasy / as if to channel this surge / some burrs / proudly attached at collar and cuffs / he was on his back / everything had been given up / and I believe he wanted me to see / his shed skin / in a holy place / you, weird blue skin / want weirdly / whether man or boy / lives or not / to play it forward

Hate

That thing is blue / and up early in the morning / before the morning / nodding as Lucifer's bored star descends / as the moon too sets at this hour / going to an old station just to miss the train / and miss it all day

but

I tell you that station is closed / all these iron years / lockstep behind me/ I go to the station to see the wildflowers win / to see the scrub take over / they are not hate they are not even spite / they are the ocean / what people mow and sit and spit on / what nobody gathers up into bouquets / the real gist of years / the pretty brothers you have forgotten

The Sound of a Cat Getting Shot

The sound of a cat getting shot before morning. Let me give you a paragraph on that. I will need thousands of baths and it won't be enough. See, it cried out. As if the death was not instantaneous, no, not as if, the death was not instantaneous. Somehow (the bullet must have entered the hindquarters) the body could be a vortex of consciousness, so the pain was allowed to enter the universe. The pain beat the annihilation, the void, not only to the nerves but the neurons. And I hear all these things as living textures, as if this were my own skin grown in a Petri dish, somehow still a phantom limbness in a little glass vessel. The space tumbles over and over itself. The horror. Though I know he had a gun, I ran out into the night of the morning. I stood there in my pajama bottoms and accused in my blindness. I wanted the fucker to know there had been a witness. The witness was an ear. I wished him dead so bad. The cat lived out there and was harmless. But the cat also belonged to some kids. He hid, the fucker. Somewhere in the green that sheltered in darkness, he pulled back. I couldn't find the animal. The horror if it lived. This is all paper, see, everything alive becomes paper. I went back in and murdered him. Over and over I murder him. Then I heard the car start up. The awful sounds of that engine that's nearly dead. It sounds like a car engine made out of tin foil. He drove off way too fast. He shot the cat because of the sound his car engine makes. Also, he's white and they're black, the kids, the cat is black. I will do drawing after drawing, the sound of the cat getting shot.  As I draw, I will relish the murder, his scrawny neck crushed between my two hands like melting tangerines.

Confess

The egomaniacs in art are as the salt in the sea. But we are the waves. As the waves. That strikes me now as an egomaniacal thing to say. For the sun is shining.  But we must speak as the ocean. We do as the waves, putting salt in touch with other salt. Such friction. It is funny work. I was walking along the ocean one morning this October and a rose had washed up in the night. It was bedraggled from the waves, all that travel. Her terrible, lovely hair. Entwined in a white grosgrain bit of string. There must have been a wedding party at sea. I visualized them barefoot. I visualize you barefoot. Always. This tells you more than I wish to confess.

If

If the shadows of trees are upon me, if the shadows of the leaves of trees and the shadows of the needles of conifers are dappling my face, the shadows of humans are probably not upon my face. If this condition is true, there is probably less, possibly nothing, to explain. But the thought occurs to me that there is nothing to explain. And I have just put this thought down in words like green leaves in shadow. Why does the thought occur to me? To exonerate myself?  It is a parasite like a caterpillar. The trees themselves do not care for solitude. After all, they are all together. But we believe it is solitude. Probably they are communicating, possibly they even comment on my passing through their shadows. They look down on me in the literal sense. Possibly they do in the other sense too. But I don't worry about it, since they are sworn to their green silence. They talk when the wind picks up, they sound disturbed, but possibly this is an erotic moment for them. Though they lose the most leaves then, in wind, you always lose something in erotic moments, don't you? That's largely the point. Now I feel I have intruded into their secret lives, even if only at the level of speculation. Speculation is an intrusion. I look up and shadows pour down on my face. It is the money shot of darkness. It is cool and smells like nothing. Shadows are the money of the forest. Shadows are the money of trees. I come here to steal and pretend I do not steal.




---after a photograph by Marta Bevacqua

Never Explain Your Poem

I am telling you never to explain your poem while I am preparing to explain mine. In the poem below, the quaint image of the mail process used by poets in the pre--internet Stone Age to submit poems via snail mail (and still practiced by a few voodoo doctors or superannuated atavists) focuses upon the importance of the placement of the poem in the faith of the envelope, which vessel is then placed in the faith of the mail ("dark water") to reach an "editor of loneliness" (I, too, cringe) who then pounds a nail into the hull of the (poem? envelope? both?) before returning the poem/boat sinking to the ship maker poet. Maybe the important thing for the ship maker is not the return of the boat but the congress with the sea. It is a perverse thought, but sailors and ship makers usually are perverse. You can find them in the most unusual beds. The faith of putting the poem in an envelope is a physical faith. The tongue participates, licks the body of the envelope in a poor man's Eucharist (moistening with a sponge is for the insincere) and this is like the faith present in every moment in which one licks one's beloved (or near-beloved). Like a cat. I can remember the intimacy of these moments in my youth, the church of this boring rite. I mean the licking of envelopes, not the licking of lovers, which wasn't so boring. I think why the words emerged thusly in that poem is this idea that the boat is not complete without the envelope, the social envelope of the poem. The social envelope is meant to be torn to bits whether the poem's "ship-setting ritual" is successful or not. Its protective body will be torn like Bacchus in an act of violence which will turn out to be, nevertheless, very disappointing should this act be too carefully or closely compared with that revelry of ancient, mythological destruction. But the metaphor suggests a kernel of divinity. Bacchus's body may be torn to bits. But Bacchus may not be torn to bits. Maybe the Bacchantes got off on this fact. The ship is torn to pieces and either the poem sails back or the laurel leaves of an acceptance (is there not secretly then a grieving by the poet for the child stolen as if by fairies and, possibly, actually by fairies?) The returning (rejected) poem is like the prodigal son. It might be hated and spurned by its maker. It might by stomped in front of its more comely and promising siblings. It might be embraced for itself, the spiritual fact of itself, or for its growth potential. It depends on the degree of enlightenment of its maker. Perhaps the returned poems should be our great loves. They stayed loyal to their maker. Only he or she could love them. The poem that was published would rather lose its maker. It dances on the sea with its show-off sails. But those are copies, reflections, fame ghosts. The real poem, published or not, languishes in a drawer or on an electronic device somewhere. The one the maker's hands touched. It will doubtless be destroyed and no one will be there to console it. It seems a lonely business all the way around. The only solution, apparently, illogically, is for the ship maker to be buried with his or her ship. Or burned with it.  Probably Vikings did this, sincerely. Authentically. But we are traitors when compared to the Vikings. We might not drive as many spikes into as many heads as they did, but we know something is missing. All those little shining beads of character woven into that long, gnarly hair. We smolder with envy. But we have attempted to recapture this with the resurgence in Viking beards lately, a fad which I note is now nearly over. We have no sticking power for the feral things we desire most. We are pagans manqués. We know inside that Vikings were never slumming it, and one glance at the contemporary scene lets us know that we are only too happen to fall into that modus vivendi.  Let us for once be glaringly truthful and admit that most forms of social media are couches and that most occupants of those social media couches are couch louts. 

Tomato

All the person wants to know is "Does this person leak?" Is there glorious leakage from this person, like eating a tomato with your mouth only. Can you bite into this person and the juices will all come out? Can you infiltrate the soul of this person and is it runny enough that you may take nourishment and then do something with the nourishment involving translation into more nourishment for you? The person, no the tomato, is sitting at a safe distance. You are eyeing the tomato (no, the person). Doesn't the person look round and fat even if they are skinny? That is because of the Tomato Phenomenon. People who are tomatoes possess a certain rotundity of spirit. The person's DNA must be information as the tomato's juices are filled with seeds all DNA information. Runny on your chin. It is like after oral sex except it is talking and desire and desire for more DNA. Little seeds float everywhere in the vaguely sexual juices. Did you know that people and tomatoes share as much as sixty percent of the same genes? What is the tomato's acidity, what is its alkalinity? If it is too alkaline, run. You need the edge of the acidity in the juice to make the tomato really worthwhile, really worth your scheming time. Worth your tongue's probing. Record your experiences with tomatoes in a journal. Sound mostly like a nun.