the writing machine

The Broken Heads of Saints

Jacob Rakovan

After Charles Perrault

I am weary with hunting young deer so swift to kick and crowned with barbs.
My ribs cut through my grey hide, the hollow pit of my belly grinds nothing

like a mortar stone roped to frothing horses. The day is hot. I lay panting

in the thick flowers. She comes skipping, a bottle of good red wine

in her basket. Here is my death, hooded like a cardinal, skinny and sweet

and giggling at an amenable old dog. Let us walk together for a while, she says.

I lift my grizzled head and follow. She stops , beheading flowers
in the afternoon glades. We tarry together.

She is thin legged, innocently wicked. I run ahead, eager to learn the final trick--

how every soft young girl has a woodsman's axe at the ready,

to free her from the tangle of your guts, how they step out smiling,
soaked in your cheerful gore. How they go off again,

skipping.

Jack

stole the black man's book.
When his mama taught him how
to ride a hayrake like a pony straight up

the chimney to the devil’s dance party,
fires lit up the holler like homecoming.
Everybody danced in rings
back to back in the dark.

The black man came walkin'
naked as a baby and faceless, dark as dark,
dark as a root cellar in a burned down house,
dark as a dead well with his book of names

Jack lifted that book just as fast as you please,
run down the hills, stumblin' through the bushes.

Two days later, he come runnin' into town,
hair white as a wedding dress
holdin' nothin' in his hands
but a headstone with his own name on it,

told all the fellas down at Hap's
he figgered he'd stole his death back
and couldn't nothin' touch him no more.

He could drink whiskey like it was water.
For a silver eagle dollar he'd hold his hand

in a candle flame as long as you please.

He went down to church an'
took up snakes, drank poison
but never got the spirit and laughed

till he was fit to bust at them that did,

told Wanda May, The only holy ghost

you got in you,woman, is Cal

what works up at the lumbermill
and that's only when his wife ain't home.

He called the widow Johnson

a murderer right to her face.
When they hanged him for thievin' horses
it was three days ‘fore they cut him down.
He kept the rope for luck.

That was when the dogs started barkin'

after him in the streets, howlin'

and yammerin' like they was

something just behind him all the time

couldn’t nobody see but them.

We was out fishin' at the dam one night
with nothin' but beer for bait and I swear

he whistled up the biggest catfish I ever seen,
the head on it big as a thresher.

It had barbs like fence posts
and when it opened its mouth
there was a horrible racket

like folks screamin' inside.
He told me:

That's the door

they got fixed for me
but I don't reckon to go. If a man

can hide his heart well enough
ain't nothing he cain't do.

Roosters would crow in the dead of night.
Ms. Cowley's guernsey had a calf with two heads.
We got drunk on bottled in bond
an' he took me up in the woods,

showed me a tree that the lightening split.

What he had hid inside,
there was no light but some foxfire
but I saw it well enough,
I still can't figger how it stayed wet

and bleeding on the outside
like the damnedest valentine you ever saw
and curse me, but when the fellow

come round askin,’ I sold it to him

for nothing but getting my farm out of hock
and my baby back what the fever took for the wife.

He must have thrown the haints in extry,
they bothersome most when I try to sleep
and here lately I notice the dogs

barkin' behind me wherever I go.

The Blessing

A white paper globe,

a thin skinned root, a pale

promise of flowers

sections in your hand

like an orange, like chocolates

cracks under the flat knife blade

like a beetle, juices stink

on your hands and the board,

minced, permeates the sizzling

fat in a scalding pan.

There is an art to this.

The husking of paper from the bulb,

the precise action of the knife,

the translucency of onions,

the spatter of oil and water.

It is better with fire,

with hot black iron

to sear the blood in,

to cauterize the bleeding muscle

its bath of fat, of boiling oil.

Run cold water over burnt knuckles

rub red pepper, kosher salt

directly into the raw,

burn the surface

but leave it bleeding

do not leave cut potatoes out

they will turn blue-black,

green beneath the skin is poisonous.

Tomatoes are related to nightshade,

akin to digitalis, raw meat houses

salmonella, trichinosis, E. coli,

a host of deaths dancing.

A good sharp knife is essential.

There is poison in the corners

for the mice. Powder for the roaches,

a chemistry set beneath the sink.

clear cold water in a glass

thick whole milk, pure salted butter

ice and crisp vegetables

baptized quick, a charm

against insecticides,

a feast against dying.

Ireneo Funes Morning.

Opened my eyes again,

found the bed as I had left it,
drool on the pillow

the shape of a continent

I have never seen.

Reaching down, my pants lay

on the floor in the same place
they have fallen for thirty years

the belt splayed, the inside-out leg,
recalling, within a few millimeters,
the way the pants fell the first night
I shared this bed with you,

when your snore was more

soprano than reedy tenor ,
and I put the pants on,

bare feet on the cold floor

remembering each leg I have owned,
the infant's floppy puppetry,
the awkward teenage gangle
and the sodden stumps

I am headed towards,

remembering forwards
slid jeans over my soft fat legs,
walked into the fluorescent light,
shaved just my cheeks,
my mouth still holding the shape
of every word I have spoken or not,

I brushed one third of my teeth,
the blunt brush's bristles bent
and worn from each day's
half-hearted saw and drag
across the slowly dissolving

enamel of each tooth,

each a little smaller
like stones on this riverbed of days,
tumbling through words and sandwiches,
and a countable, finite

procession of breath.

I waited for the bus
and knew which one of the three
on the route it was,
the coffee stain on the third seat
from the November morning

when the fat woman

jostled against the child,
now doubtless out of high school,

the greasy linoleum flooring
like the kitchen of my first apartment,
the fake wood grain like the end paper

in a manual for insomniacs,
suggesting just a hint of a face.

Walked across the street,
the cobblestones weary
from the familiar scrape

of my step, thrice daily

for fifteen years
into the familiar air of an office,

the wilting plant and smell

of cheap coffee, the yellowing plastic

of a computer monitor,
the way the hand curves to the

precise shape of the phone,
the ever slightly diminished pencils.

The world is in ebb,
retreating from the moment

when I first saw you,
and everything clings

to its dull certainty.

The Man Who Made the Nightingale 

There are white berries in the ditch,

the thick husks of burrs hold stolen

hair in strands,

and a white birch

stands in night soil.

There is a fairytale bridge,

and apple blossoms in spring,

a broken-down house

with blue-green shingles

where a funny old man

makes the children laugh and laugh. 

He has an old black cat

and a sad brown dog,

a mushroom ring and old books

in black covers with pictures of machines.

He sings but the words are always wrong,

he has candy and new pocket-knives and string. 

He has old wood and nails for building forts

and his house is full of secret places

and you can crawl right under it into the wet black dark.

He has the parts to a million bicycles,

lost kites and kittens and radios.

He has big white hands that flap at the end

of his long skinny arms and a round

hairy belly like a barrel.

His owly eyes roll around behind thick

greasy spectacles. Sometimes if he hugs you

too close you can see his yellow funny teeth

or smell his funny old smell.

His red kitchen is full of soft grey mice

and in the firelight roasting hot dogs on sticks

you can see eyes in the dark like fireflies and

the gravel path from the door to the street

shines in the dark

and the moon seems bigger over the funny old house

like it would like to tell you something

but someone has cut out its tongue.

King David on Ocean Ave

A tagged star on a freeway overpass,

traffic pouring into the dead heart

of the country, mid-western faces

in sensible sedans, the pointless

locomotive hum. Beside this

we lay down and wept

a woman's soprano FM sorrow,

a drunk's songs, the whispered promise

of violence between boys,

the fear and awe of tourists

in the gingerbread city,

this baroque wedding cake

of brickwork.

Bottles in brown paper bags,

our harps in the trees,

scrawl of names on cement,

Babel-blare of signage

Arabic and Hebrew,

Russian and Chinese.

I am old, stripped of the wonder

of places, of the dream of mobility

and transformation. Here at the end

of roads in this final city

all the perspective lines end.

This is the vanishing point

where train tracks meet,

the nighttime home

of the sun's boat,

the mortuary city.

Here is the promised glow

over the horizon realized,

the final square on the pasteboard

labyrinth of my life,

here all the snakes

and ladders lead, dissolving

into the tail swallowing

arabesque of the drawn line.

I am unused to happiness,

to realized desire. I am unsure

of what songs to sing--

there is so much speech,

so many spray painted palimpsests.

Here it is hard to find an unused word,

the streets are lined with books,

carelessly displayed

on folding tables or blankets,

left unread on doorstops,

abandoned in subway cars,

how then to speak?

I left behind the boxes

that held a life, letters

written to a dead man,

to a false face,

having here

taken away

all faces and flesh.

Our bones commingle

to build new life,

to add our joy to this confusion.

It is no small thing.

I have seen a drowned city,

the enameled sepulchers

of refrigerators

standing sentinel on corners,

I am from a city reborn from fire

know the way, unknowing,

the living walk over the bones

of the dead. I have seen the dead

museum of Rome,

the ossuaries of Budapest,

every place has been a place

like other places.

Outside my house

the scattered people of Jerusalem

in black hats and plumage

like funerary birds are content

with Brooklyn if there is no temple.

How shall I sing the Lord's song

in a strange land?

Mariner

My shipworm riddled heart
is bound in hammered copper,
to keep the parasite

from the rigging of my bones.

When I lie still to rest I hear them,
boring through the woody ventricles,
the blood rusting the hammered skin,
the tinny sound of the surge
the hollow thump of softly rotting

timbers against the # copper case,

a seashell held to my ear echoes
only their wet knotting.
I cannot sleep.

They tangle through the dumb wood.
My father, the sharpener of knives,
carved this for me
from a wharf piling,

bound it with rotten rope
and gave it, like a gift,
a judas-kiss sharp with whiskers
and the words “keep it safe.”

I hammered the housing

that holds it in shining copper

now from the sea salt splatter

and acid of my blood,

tapped the tattoo

with a tinsmith's hammer,
stitched myself lungs

from coral and sailcloth.

Now the long nights drawn on

and compassless,
I walk the muddy sea bottom
with # for eyes.

My mouth held silent by a sailor’s knot,
my creaking shipwrecked heart,
a bellows in the dark,
your name scratched on it
the only thing shining.

In the House that Jack Built

He comes in from the war

because there is always a war

for soldiers to wander home from,

with ragged boots and scars.

The devil walks the fields

at night, tries to bargain a soul,

for a sack that is always filled with food

because the war has taken all the food

and only women are at home to

wait for cowards and cripples

hobbling back.

The war is a fire on the horizon

that never goes out. At night

the dusty beets and turnip tops

drink in a second sun.

Where the city burns outside

the young men lie, discarded toys.

In the rusting engines of their

undoing, the black-eyed birds

rest in their yellow hair,

fight for the dull gems

of their eyes, pulling teeth and

shining buttons from gallow birds.

Young boys off to seek their fortune

in the wide wide world walk

towards the blaze, a fire

in the belly of a giant puffing steam.

In the broken columns of the city

the rivers are filled with bodies, swelling

and the girl has watched

her brothers go west

like bundles of faggots fed into the fire

and she cries at her milking, so the pail

holds tears and blood and milk

because the cow is too sick for slaughter

kept lying on it side, so the dogs

who have remembered they are wolves

come to test her, falling on her knees

till the great broken horn like a moon

tosses one a limp red rag outside

the ruin of the house.

The doors hang on hinges.

The unexploded artillery

shell in the straw like an egg.

The fat and happy rats crawling

amongst the dead and the unbroken china,

un-looted piles of fur and books

treasures too heavy to carry.

The forgotten cats, like infants crying,

are afraid of the dogs circling

the house in the moonlight.

The cow dying, the city burning

the men home from war and hungry

with new hungers learned in the dying city .

Unable to face the homeowners'

final eyeless repast

she hides in the barn

where last years crop, unused,

feeds rats

and the cow who cries

with her broken leg, half sick

lowing, her bloody udders

hides in the barn

and he finds her there.

On the Proposal of a Bill to Allow the Blind to Hunt in Texas

The stars are buckshot holes

in a tent roof, the sun

a piñata filled

with who-knows-what stale

and ancient sweets.

We spin below it, are released,
we have yet to knock it loose.
You have never seen its yellow streamers,

the way the woman with her hands

on the rope jerks it out of reach

each time you come close,

each morning, coming out of darkness for the first time
how it bleeds, then rises on unsteady legs
have never seen the party streamers of
contrails draped across the sky,
the way a deer or a man opens up,
that slow blossoming stain
will be denied you

but when your prize is hung by its ankles
you can warm your hands
in a rush of blood
you can feel your prize stiffen
and grow cold.

The way the warmth of the sun
comes leaking out

of every living thing
is something even

the blind can see

Pietro della Vigna

“'tis not just to have what one casts off.”
--Inferno canto XIII

The hill is crowned with the accusatory spike
of a dead radio tower enclosed in razor-wire,

concrete slabs criss-crossed with logging roads,

the oaks covered in carved names grown into chancres.
Littered with beer cans crumpled in one-handed bravado,
abandoned amid paper bags, old lumber,

half-burned pornography like memory
is the foundation of a house unlived in.

I have seen this burn. A stolen picnic table parasol
surviving the blaze, absurdly domestic amid
the trees glowing with charred embers,
undergrowth turned to fine white ash,
the cans blackening in the heat.

Here my brothers and I buried our youth
in a shallow pit scratched out of the clay,

rough-covered with leaves.

Here we drank, stood vigil over the housing project
waiting for dealers to come home, brought girls
to ply with cheap wine and beer. Here we drank
and wept and shouted, smoked bad weed
stale cigarettes and waited and drank.
Here built a church of stones and bottles,
here candlelit processions snaked down to a holy elm

here we stood in the storm,
a clearing in the clouds like a perfect O,
pried open a space between the stars to fall into,

erased a city of empty houses

here howled at a fat yellow moon above a lean grey town
a train yard, a highway, a river of poison in concentric rings,
here leapt through fire and bled
here lived, and left for years, here rubber banded home

the stake for a dog’s chain.

I returned, climbed the road in an ice storm
dead-fall trees blocked the way, glass clattered in branches
snapping power lines sang in sleet and rain
stood alone in the silence of the snow's shrouding,
I was there to hear the heavy final fall of a tree

covered in names.

After the Shelling

The past is a city in flames,
we refugees on the road
drag the inexplicable flotsam
that people carry out of catastrophes.
When the city fell, the animals

left the comfort of laps and grew thin,
crying on the knives' edges of rooftops,
then fattened on the rats that fattened on the dead,
now empty streets crawl with them
bright eyed and sleek.

Demodocus to the Phaecians

The thin thread of days extends onward,
unraveling back to some forgotten anchor point
where we tied our hearts a hundred years ago,

it unravels as we walk.

The devil trades us for the bright

red rubies of our terror.
We bleed stones, weep ice,
stand listless in the grey morning.

I would wash my eyes bone-white,
I would make them opaque pearls
where there is no entrance or exit

the ocean at night,

limestone caves and the sound

of dripping water
locked boxes

buried

in chains.

I am Half-wedded to the Death in Things

the January crocus, the false spring,
the thawed black mud, the ringing steps of couriers,
a black edged letter and a widow's face.

I am slow poison in a bone china cup,

the numbering of breaths,

the fool's dawn of a filling station's lights,

the coal tattoo, the black ice,
the siren-singing lumber mill saw blade,
the nail-pulling edge of a hammer.

I am water on a daily ferry commute
briefcase in hand, the cold light of offices
waiting in the pre-dawn murk.

Bleach and ammonia side-by-side beneath the sink

like a promise. Three boxes of sleep,
perfect cold of a closed window's surface.

Who else if not you to love me,
my valentine knife, my Saint Sebastian heart,
my lady of sorrows, my lover's fist?

Here is a hothouse orchid that grew
behind glass, beneath the snow.
Here is an unanswerable question,
the bed you cannot get comfortable in,
here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit,
here I embrace you, a potbellied Moloch,
pass through the fire in my guts.

Here is a life, my grasping hands,

my liar's tongue, my love.

Here is the needle

in the candy apple,
the barbed hook

of an answered prayer.

Black Donald Goes Walking

wandering up and down the earth,

bartering bridges for the souls

of cats and turnip tops.

He is ever mobile, the traveling salesman

from every farmer's daughter joke
the cuckold's horns on his head--

who could love him truly?

It is hard to say where he dwells,
in what well-furnished ventricle
he makes his home, what shattered country
where trees grow through ringer washers
and houses are filled with what is left
after everything is gone

what box of poisonous letters
he curls himself around,
what flashing eyes or smile are his embrace,
which is the precise bottle he sleeps in like a djinn?

Whose wings overshadow the earth
whose vainglory and whispered promises
are songs for dancing, our new red shoes

what is clear is that where he is
is ruin and where we are, he is
and that of all the angels, he is mine.

The First Time I Tried Dying

I was eleven, the December ocean

rising to my chest, hands and lips numb.

I stood shaking on the grey

of Mission Beach unobserved,

a coward after.

In slick pages, plasticene women

parted cunts symmetrical as fruit.

Plastic vodka bottles emptied

the lie of water into me, filled my head

with stones long enough to keep it under.

My dreams are reefs, the writhing of soft life,

something rich and strange.

You are not the rising water or birds,

or the dark where the horizon is not

or the tanker’s light. You are no land

to lay a claim to, the islands of glass that drift,

the great slow creature, a living country

tree roots carving into your back,

scalded once by fire,

stained continents

on yellow bedsheets.

1L Southbound

There is a security guard,
her hair in a tight bun, homebound on the bus,
a backwards flag on her arm, a tattooed tear.
I love her a little, for that blue tear on her cheek

that makes me think of you,
how she wears it every place that faces go

I wonder if she ever forgets it is there,
startled at her reflection's costume jewelry,
that of all faces to wear she chose this face,

it doubtless has a cipher
stands for murder, or prison
or every year he's away
or for her warm brown eyes filled
with real, not painted sorrow
her just-a-little red nose

that with the tear make

her a harlequin in black,

a woman masking as a policewoman
who has lost her lover in Carnival,
a painted effigy of suffering,
sad as a hobo clown.

Her fingernails are painted like small pearls,
tears made solid. They rest uneasily on her lap
against the black polyester slacks,
something strangely delicate

about them at the end of her arms
makes me think that they will fly away.

I want to put them in my mouth,
taste each pearl for the salt of the ocean
where you are, that final repository of tears
and look for a trace of you.

There is a red bow around her finger
where a wedding ring would be,
something she is trying to remember,
there is something I am trying to forget.

She is gone.

In her place sits down a young mother,
her baby on her lap, the child in white, crying.
with heavy gold earrings in her ears
and a bright green ponytail holder in her hair.
The word Angel in bold letters on her chest
as if she comes from a generic heaven,
where everything is precisely its name.

Her mother soothes her in Spanish
too fast for me to follow. The child

looks at me curiously as I write this and stops
mid-wail, tears pooled in her eyes
like water in your mouth.
She laughs a the absurdity of this poem,
of me and you,
that I would make a song
of the way we wear our painted sorrows proudly.

She laughs as all the angels do at us,
she is covered, somehow in improbable glitter
and probable dirt streaked from crying
smiles with no trace of pain more tears won't wash away.
She holds blue dice in her fist--

snake eyes and double sixes
that she shakes and shakes and shakes.

A Girl, a Bear, a Box of Chocolates

Your private winter

is a home of ice

behind your eyes, a room

six floors

above the street.

My prison is a heart-shaped box,
a casket with plastic roses

and ribbons, a blood-stained

mattress, ticking.

I am the bitten half-moon

chocolate awaiting the return

of your mouth. Your hand

passes over,

your eyes elsewhere.

It is too sophisticated,

this dance. For your hands

I would do anything,
I am an amiable bear,

treading time to the music

clumsy but eager.

Your earliest memory--

sharp toothed, held by the throat,
stolen candy in your panties,
gnawed lace and finery.

We waltz, the sad eyed circus child,
the half-trained bear

chained to the radiator
in a comical hat.

Your kiss is forgiveness

and paper cuts. You bite

rusty typewriter keys into my neck.
They spell your name.

I am learning the slow shuffle of this.
I make you laugh. Taste you,

like the first kiss outside the gates,

when the beasts became dumb,

& forgot their names

when the angel with the flaming sword

took his weary turnkey's post,

when bears first learned

to dance like men.

For G.C.

It is not enough you are dead,
ride a gleaming stolen bicycle,

leave burning dumpsters,
stolen cigarettes, perfect cubes of safety glass
a spray of copper bbs in your wake.

The canvas on the pop- up trailer, rotted.
The house burned down.
The oaks were scored with lightning.

we ran between cheap headstones.

Once, with our shared girl

between us, naked while the fog

rolled out of the lake
from the gun that held guard over
the flag post to the lake filled with

duckweed and mosquito larvae.

I have a photo somewhere of the two of you
with absurd mohawks, entangled in a kiss
on a gravestone sprayed with swastikas.

You do not have a stone.
Like your father, you are dissolved

into everything. Like mine,
I am alive and unwell.

The train tracks smell recalls you,
hot sun on tar and the whir of cranks,
Liquor in tiny bottles. Do you remember

smoking your fathers funeral arrangement,

a seventh grade science project

for photographing souls?

Do you remember anything?

You came to my window once,
drunk, your lung was punctured,

there was blood on your lips.

You threw gravel at my window
and called like a dove.

I answered, but could not go
the stolen car was shattered,

you did not have your bicycle

Being gone into where I always knew

you would go, the vanishing point

where the tracks meet,

a kirlian negative in black and white.

The Uncorrupted Body

White plaster crowned with plastic flowers
queen of the may
misses Mary Margaret's dusting hand
the murmured hailmaryfullofgrace
thelordiswiththee
blessedartthouamongstwomen
andblessedisthefruitofthywombjesus

She misses the smell of Pledge
Mary Margaret's smell
of rosewater, spearmint gum
the undertone of milk.

Her dainty toe listlessly
taps on the lace doily,
her blind eyes staring
at immaculate carpet,
at the turned down guest beds
for grandchildren who do not come
at the radium dial

of the alarm clock

that is never set.

She hears outside the door
the soap opera drone, envies
the plaster cats, their loved position
atop the television, even the decoy duck

his affectionate weekly dust off

with the Reader's Digest condensed books

Her arms are held out, endlessly patient
Mary Margaret breathes bottled air
stays downstairs most days
the stairs ascend up to
a gold tone light fixture

There is a framed picture of Jim,
gone ahead when his heart gave out
he waits for her like
the never driven Oldsmobile
in the garage, the seat upholstery

still smelling of the factory.

The zinnias bloom like fireworks
carefully dusted against Japanese beetles
the chemical lawn is dandelion free
and the nice boy from next door

mows it once a week.

Little Mary clambers up the sill and sits
running white fingers through her white hair
turning white eyes on the perfect green grass,
the shirtless neighbor boy.

Mary Margaret dusts the unused ashtrays,
arranges Newsweek and the paper
next to his unused chair out of habit.
She never sleeps on his side of the bed.

Brooklyn is the World

The Atlantic Ave Prophet
screams at Borough Hall
drawn from the tunnels

by the warmth of day

sandwiched between

a street meat vendor
advertising Halal hot dogs
and a table of trashy romance
and dream interpretation books,
a dream of fish means money

will come your way.

Five-dollar watches. One dollar jewelry
direct from China, displayed on Kente cloth
a half dollar, a half dollar, a penny, and two bits.

Rich white mothers push their
Chinese babies up the street.
The Prophet is screaming
something about Roman emperors
and circumcision.

I think of roadways, patterns of migration
circulatory systems and subway maps
of livers and the flight
of Coney Island seagulls

There is a placard around her neck,
a crayon drawing of
the dream of Nebuchadnezzar
the idol with the feet of clay,
it is a map of the body

as empire.

A Name Scratched

on a mailbox with a knife

leaning fence posts and a line

of maples, a sickly pine, a tangle

of overgrown roses

grass and dandelions and clover,

onions, snowdrops, death angels,

brownie caps and chicken-of-the-woods,

king size beds of untended daffodils

and tiger lilies, mullberries

and the rich purple stains of bird shit,

possum grapes, elderberries, thistles,

blackberry brambles and lilacs

redbud trees and a hive of yellow

jackets in an air conditioner,

a wringer washer filled with gasoline,

half of a Volkswagen, a pile of bicycle parts,

bent rims and frames rusting together

under a willow tree,

a yellow and black garden spider

and garter snakes, catfish in the ditch

when it rained enough to make

the neighbor's pond flood,

tree frogs and toads and bullfrogs,

a washing machine full of tadpoles,

old rotting plywood with carpenter ants

and centipedes, sow bugs and slugs

robins, cardinals, blue jays, sparrows

a black crow sitting next to me

in a tree branch,

the black cat that came back

across three states that taught

my father how to breathe

and leave his body.

Foxfire.

Ruined houses, old wells

and foundations, animal bones

in the dead leaves,

and up the road,

the culvert where the drowned boy

was found, the grown over

headstone cutting operation

with tombstones never delivered

and a great fallen handless angel

lying in the mud, moss on her blank eyes,

a buck deer, the broken heads of saints

and fir trees, the abandoned school

and acres of swamp

overgrown orchards,fields of dead corn,

a tree with a plow in the middle of it

and duckweed covered water,

this has been my country.

She Has a Golden Throat

“...metaphor is a myth in brief"

--Giambattista Vico

Think treacle, golden syrup, still

you see a wedding ring,
heavy, her head resting atop it
a pink entree on a gleaming tray.

Gold is soft as lead
malleable, see her hammered

throat, its marks from careless

handling, her scuffed, dented throat
a predictable story of origin--
a father's strangling grasp.

Mercury, winged sandals

fluttering trampled pigeons
bandy-legged Vulcan hammering it out.

See her splashed with a cup of water
from hell's river, Achilles in reverse
impervious to blows
this hard fragility
this permanent jewelry
this flesh become an ornate collar

touch it, find it cold
inhuman, a saxophone,

a trombone slide,
a Victrola's amplifying bell.
 

Allegory in Three Parts 

I.

Rain fell and fell
drowned the fields
he came walking

with the storm at his back

I had heard tales of him
striding the hilltops like a giant,
a bag of houses spilling out
old stone farms like seed,

how he built the city's bridge
and the walls of Rome,
had to content himself with
a lone black cat in payment

and yet he seemed

somehow smaller
and incapable of wonders
when he condescended to call

I did not, in truth, recognize him.
I, the very genius of famine
with horse and scales

crying prices

in the marketplace
a plague corpse, a skeleton

behind my starving oxen.
A fine pair we made.

We shall make a deal, he said,

the crops above the earth

are to be mine
and those below it yours.

He promised me

a gem of great price.
I signed in blood

I sowed the seeds he gave me.
How dead mens' bones
should bear fruit seemed

mystery to me, yet

the trenches were dug

and I waited.

The briars grew thick,
entangled with martyred men
the trenches filled

with water and blood

with cholera and dying boys
with rats and gallow-birds and fire
with all the things nations are built of
a gem of great price

II.

Winter came upon my fields
a great blotting whiteness

of forgetting and he

walked up, taller seeming,
breath steaming in the brittle air,
buttons gleaming on a fine coat,
my bones showed through

my tattered cloak

I will build for you a fire

that will never go out,
he said. How quickly,

how foolishly I pledged

to him my allegiance.
He pulled from his pocket
a bag of human hearts--

See how they smolder, he said,
breathing promises upon them.

I could not hear
they leapt to flame.

The embers are lit, he said,
now quickly feed them.

I ran and carried as fast as I could
a mountain of the dead and dying,
so quickly did they burn to ash,
babes were laid upon the fire
which grew and grew.

In the light, I saw his fine coat

was made of hair and teeth,

there was a flash in the end,

that eclipsed the sun,
and strange snow fell.

I split the fire

between my neighbors.
It burns on all our hearths.


III.

The sun so burnt the earth
no green shoot could rise
and again I saw him walking
he seemed a giant in the wavering heat
I will make you no promises, I said
and he laughed, saying
We are old friends, you and I
what need have we of promises.

There is a spring

on your neighbor's farm,
its roots in my domain.
I come only to offer you a taste.

He pulled a great flask

held for me to drink.
I drank all he had.
He smiled and left,
we said no more that day.

First I offered all I had
to buy my neighbor's wells
but he refused me, found reasons

to tarry in his fields.

To help you bring the harvest in, I said,
to protect your fine wells

from thieves and robbers.

Your coat is made of hair

and teeth, he said,
you seem a giant

in the wavering heat
my fields are mine to tend,

now off with you.

I took the devil's fire

from my hearth,
kindled it

as he had taught me.

Earth so dry,
thirsty as I,
the world is burning still.

Saint Anthony’s Chapel, Pittsburgh, PA

Gold-rimmed bones, a crowned skull
the walls a mass of cabinetry,
gilt monstrances with fragments
of the cross, bones and fingernails

and hair on velvet

pinned butterfly saints' names on

handwritten labels, glass boxed Mary,
Anthony, Joseph, stations of the cross.

I am writing my request on an envelope
dropping it down a brass tube,

like a bank deposit
with $2.50,

a coin-operated prayer,
candles like hearts in jars.

I pray to be restored.
I pray for my children,
for mercy and not justice.

There is an eye in a triangle
on the ceiling, a host, a hovering cup
the names of monastic saints,
Francis, Benedict, Anthony

I mouth the creed, awkwardly
I say my hail marys like a bribe to god
like a magic formula

lord, I am not worthy to receive you
but only say the word
and I shall be healed

I think of my father, 
his hair still wet, brushed down

strange, his button-up shirts,
his blinking eyes, weak chin
his relish at this phrase
how he sat through every Eucharist

I think of the mysteries,

Marlichen under juniper,
the scourging at the pillar,

the crowning with thorns
of lambs and incense

and mummery.

I add my request to the others
I say my paternoster

as my grandmother taught me
I kneel and cross myself

with water and oil.
The confessional is empty
I could not rid myself

of this millstone
if I wished.

Soon comes the feast

of the Pentecost,
the descent of the tongues

of flame. The priests are praying

for vocations
and ask us to pray

that others receive them

I am not called. I wait for fire
I leave the bread untasted,

the cup untouched.

If Everything is Black and White

then I am a monster.

These hardware store bolts

barely hold my head on anymore,
dead parts held together

by a road map of stitches
wear and burst at the seams,

a discarded stuffed animal.

My insides show.

Still I do it, lurch to life

when the electricity

climbs Jacob's ladder.

The lightning strikes, the doctor laughs.

I jump up in my bed, predictable

and safe as houses,
popping my head out

of the grave like a prairie dog.

The first time, I know I scared them.
You should have seen the villagers
so excited, like a carnival,

something transgressive

and festive like Easter

or a magic trick.

In the end, it is never enough.
You lose your top billing, wind up

shilling cereal, chasing Abbot and

Costello around a theme park,

a rubber mask with no

face behind it,
a lifelike diorama, sold

with the joy buzzers
and the x-ray specs

in the back of the magazine.

They built me a bride

but she was never mine.
The arms-out-zombie walk
is just like sleepwalking after a while.

Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten

what I was grasping for.
It is hard to keep pretending,

to keep putting one heavy boot

in front of the other,
to flee the fire when you

know it burns you clean,

means the movie is over
and you can rest
until they dig you up,
jump you like a dead battery
send you shambling off again, a joke.

A pretty girl is throwing flowers in the river...