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1.

I walk in the streets of the city
and on the dunes by the sea
and write as the blind must:
without guidance
other than preternatural, reckless vision.

I feel no obligation to be objective, open-minded, or just.

People say I cross lines
and that one day in some great moral gaff
I will trip and fall on my face.
But I see no lines—only a web of declarations
torn apart as I pass.

I skip through the morning air, a little above the earth,
and to fall is only to fly faster.

2.

My sister copies down what I say,
confirms my visuals, complicates my imagery.

She embellishes with earrings
and tattoos which clarifying her meaning
if not mine.

Rash political discourse
she rinses out in the delicate cycle.

She musses my hair.

When I press my hand against a mirror, I see her, me,
the abyss of blindness between us.

She embellishes the abstraction between us
with ivy vines and little hearts.
I put in the dagger and drips of blood.

5.

I last remember seeing the shapes of trees
in a wet sunset, blobs behind fogged glass,
like ranks of gangly aliens lining the highway.

Today my electric car passes silently on that road.

My hopes lie in a biomechanical mastermind
whom I've persuaded to examine my tender eyes.
He researches painstakingly, while I ache for surgery
and new technology—electrodes, needles, anything.

I want cameras and light.

For now, I see only the broken actors of memory,
who slouch on the set, always slipping out of character,
and sometimes I prefer the furniture, the comfort,
the immovable props of my world.

16.

The hero is visionary
in his fantasies of wealth, sex, gun ownership,
but otherwise vacuous behind the sticky surface of his eyes.

He lives in a world of all pain all the time.

The lonely teenager studies his acne in the mirror.
Young women mimic dance moves well into their twenties.
Fathers and mothers grow old without explaining any mysteries.
I lord my power over him.

He checks the time on his cell phone and orders another beer.
A roofing contractor will call him in the evening.
Seven crews will shingle the roofs of a new subdivision.
These are the great accomplishments of men.
Our hero is sure of it.

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His Bartender

Fitzpatrick's belly was an iron tank
capable of containing anything—all the beer and whiskey
     in the bar,
wagonloads of potatoes and steak.

His wire glasses were like gauges on a steam engine,
needles hovering dangerously over incomprehensible numbers.
Interrupted, he'd blink hard,

and his real eyes would show through—blue of evening sky
with clouds rolling in.
Outwardly genial,

he ate like a machine.
Something in his hot core troubled him, some indigestion maybe,
but he was too large to be stopped.

The Bastard

We buttoned up our shirts and squared our shoulders,
laughed inwardly like talent agents
or priests
at the weaknesses of others.

Fitzpatrick lit my cigarette.
I raised my glass.
To good days
we drank, tossing the football of our good fortune.

And to bad days we drank,
slouched like bears.
With our great hairy arms we pounded the bar
to bring on the unseen enemy.

Like friends, we stood in salute, and admiration,
and drank,
and burst out laughing like talk-show hosts
at the misfortunes of others.

His Wife

I married Fitzpatrick for his mind:
brick and glass cosmopolitan,
boyish in meditation,
naked as a horse.

I understood the whip and leather of law,
the calculus of white-water rapids,
the economics of my adventures,
and approached him at the bar.

A statue of a horse,
he stood with his head thrown back.
My words circled him like pigeons,
and a few alit.

The Work

Boy with a Candle

His arm hangs limp at his side.
The black wick still glistens, minutely,
as though he's just blown it out, had done with it.

His other arm sweeps the air before him.
He's looking for something,
groping in a darkness of his own creation.

It's a black hallway, like he's seen in a dream.
Light enters the image from the front, from the viewer,
as though the light of my own body

lit the boy.
I push him ever so gently down the hall.
His gaze is forward, hidden.

We have no need of candles.
The eyes are not the gatherers of light.
His shoulders, in a soft robe, bear the light.

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Lost

Mother didn't want to raise a country boy. So:
A hundred miles in the blackness of headlights,
the whole family in tow, we drove a hundred winter miles
to eat dinner with wine and cloth napkins,
a hundred prairie miles with kids in suits
to see the Messiah in St. Paul, a hundred miles,
then turned around and drove a hundred miles home.

Still charged with city power, lights and action,
I couldn't sleep. I couldn't tell if farmyard lights
were little towns, if little towns were farms,
nor which light might be ours. My father used a captain's wits
to steer among the lights, to navigate the frozen sea.
I know the way, was all he said. As if to prove it,
he let me hold the wheel: Steady as she goes.

The heater ran full blast to keep my sisters warm in back.
They slept like a pile of kittens. Wide eyed, I dreamed
the distant lights could move as they pleased,
men with lanterns, the eyes of whales. I dozed, held erect
by my little boy vest and jacket that fit the year before,
until I crossed the center line. Dad jerked us back.
The kittens mewed, went back to sleep.

Put your head on my lap. My mother's dream had ended
when we left the city. I'll tell you the Adventure of Ulysses.
She could spot those glinting eyes, those dreams flitting
bat-like in the dark, snatch one with cat accuracy, and give it,
still leaping, to her young. Ulysses was a king, a warrior,
     a great sea captain...
A hundred miles home, a hundred sailors, a hundred dazzling
     men-at-arms...
One dreaming farm boy lost forever, a hundred far-flung watchmen
     lit the night.

Breakfast Storm

Suddenly wind seething in the elms wakes the boy.
He drifts, swaying side to side, downstairs.
Outside the kitchen window, wet leaves break free
and slam against the cold October glass.
The boy stops by the sink, official.
A zodiac of crumbs on the cutting board,
sliced potatoes blackening on the stove,
the butter knife floats down
in his father's hand. The newspaper,
for one to read, the other to watch,
rises lazily, a drapery dividing the room.
Toast pops up. The boy sits.
The father’s grey hair and blue eyes are like clouds
filled with the first thin light of day. He draws air—
and the boy hears the god of his wintry ancestors,
the god of winds and storm, and the leaves whirl
upward into the trees. Now
everything could change, for when the god speaks,
big limbs break free and fly against the house.

The Deer Would Speak

From the living room window
I can see deer
browsing in the stubble,
crow territory,
clear against the snow.
They're too close to town,
smoking chimneys farther off,
quiet for now.
But when a car starts
or a door slams
or an old man coughs
or if I blink,
the deer will disappear,
three leaps, one breath,
into the woods, blackened by mist.
Here the deer shed
their documentary personae
and speak. They shake off
the language of fear
and nestle down in bare briers.
They speak the language of shy contemplation,
a song of nuzzling, snorting
and brief wailings of exclamation,
or comfort, brother and sister
far-flung among the trees.
But solitude, hostile
to the slow and tired
yet praised among the trees,
conceals that one word
the deer would speak.
They seek it with their tongues
beneath the snow.
The word clatters in the upper branches,
draws breath when the deer look,
and scrapes, clicks again
when the deer doze.
The fireplace exhales.
I look, but no one is there.
I look again, and beyond the stubble field
the woods sweep down snow,
sweep down darkness, crows' wings
where the deer had browsed.

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dead dead

witness the doctor's banal finesse
when he pronounces the dead dead
his hand slides into his white pocket
saying what he cannot express

a redwing blackbird perches in his eye
his black Mercedes vandalized with red paint
a garbage truck ran over his dog
the dog did not die

Vermeer's blue reflections lit her face
then fell to goose gray
the doctor's carbon silence erased the rest
except some lilacs in a vase

last address

her suitcase slashed open
she walked in tall grass
I cried pinecones for her
for me – she wept sea glass

comfort of white buildings
made the sky seem clearer
I cried for her in private
darkly in my blue mirror

the umbrella her last address
her white blouse all undone
she fed on grass and leaves
for me – wept apples and sun

fang

her hands flopped like two toads
through the knife drawer
I sniffed at her suicidal whims
wrestled her to the floor

saved her from the fang of a scissor
clenched in her fist
better a shard of champagne flute
to suit her delicate wrist

once I struck her hand against the sink
to knock the razor down the drain
she pushed the fractured bone against my chest
as though to make me feel her pain

ice-skating

ice-skating together for a date
surrounded by champions and damned
Prokofiev – we felt like children who don't know
how to love yet – or how to let go

I pulled her closer and we fell
pushed her away and we drifted apart
we locked hands and felt like children who
want to love – don't know what to do

champions lifted each other high above the ice
under loudspeakers playing the mournful
wolf march – and we felt like children who skate
in simple circles – in love and out late

stars

the stars she loved are muddled now
luminous jellyfish sunk in black tar
I wince to see them as they were
one star plucked from its constellation
rolls in my palm like a glassy cloud
I remember well the wish we made
the star – lights a memory of her face
struggles with itself – and flickers out

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I.

Lucifer clings to my ear like a tick,
drawing a little blood, which I should hide,
except he says never mind.

This is my condition.
I ride my bicycle home in the rain
on a summer day as hot as a factory.

In the apartment, bright, even in the rain,
I open a dresser drawer like a priest,
pulling slowly with both arms.

Lucifer quivers on my earlobe,
and I slide a hand under the jumbled shirts,
swift, like groping under a blouse,

and grab my stash.
I smoke in the afternoon, making no secret of this
my monstrous, beguiling, beautiful face.

II.

Lucifer brings the sea mist
and milky light in the morning.
Breakfast with Juliet is cold cereal.
She slices bananas, back turned.

Last night we made dark love
when we should have argued,
slept as calmly as staring corpses
writhing with maggots inside.

Today I will look for work.
Juliet will kiss me deeply before I go.
This must end.
Daylight is hell for me and she knows it.

III.

We drink, listen to the band, think about
finishing college but who has the money.

Lucifer shows me how to love music
by loving the musicians.

Mick the Bastard does not play or sing
but dresses the part,

and I love his hilarious intelligence.
He mocks and cuts, but it's funny.

Then he holds up his beer, and looks at it—
like it's the only thing he cares about.

IV.

Lucifer creeps into my private consciousness,
bringing a small amount of light.
The green glowing numbers on my bedside clock

swirl like a little zodiac when I am half awake
and night pumps through the room.
Committed to irreversible drunkenness,

I promise solemnly to sleep until noon,
or until time has healed the outside world.
How happy then.

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The Boy's Version

There are no nurses here—no pills, no machines.
The sickbed is all the comfort you will get,
useless as kind words:  sleep well…  sweet dreams…
For like the goldfish in the dark pond outside,
a thought moves clearly in your mind:
I must not sleep. I must remain cold.

You watch the faces of tongueless visitors
swim past each other among floating coffee cups.
One might surprise you—it's been so long—
if our old friend can climb the stairs.
You look toward him
as you look toward death.

But love, you start to say, is just as helpful as...
or unreal as... These cold nights. No one visits
at midnight, or three, or at liquid dawn. Unreal...
You close your eyes to think, always thinking,
and fall asleep. You smile in your sleep, and ask for water.
And I know you, Wendy—I know you are drowning.

Dead Wendy Responds

You have been a poor student of death.
But learn:
Death is not like sleep. It is not forgetfulness, oblivion,
or nothingness.
Death is not decomposing flesh and skeletal remains,
not dirt.

Death is a long warehouse full of daisies
and kicked buckets.
Death is swimming with the fishes,
which you'd enjoy.
Death is a pale horse waiting for me in the meadow,
his neck bending exquisitely.

A rabbit in the claws of the cat—
that is life.
The brick wall spray-painted with the riots of our hearts—
that is life.
The silence that you bring to my grave
is life.

The Old Man Steps Forward

Wendy is afraid.
I must find a better way of burying her,
a blouse and plain business skirt
too vulnerable, too cold.
She holds a tiny lily of the valley between two fingers—
a very small prayer.

The boy is never afraid.
He raises his head out of the foxhole,
snaps three pictures of incoming fire,
and sinks down.
He jots notes. Wendy crosses his mind,
but he concentrates on the wide-open faces of soldiers.

Wendy is waiting for him.
Their thoughts are alike.
They will walk in a monochrome garden,
admiring its stillness.
There can be no promises made concerning death,
yet all swear love forever.

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One Sleeve Goes to the Park to Think

One Sleeve goes to the park to think.
Sitting on a green bench

or standing like a tree,
he is always thinking,

like a watch that never stops,
a TV never turned off.

He thinks of himself in the third person
except sometimes when he talks.

I talk between people.
I aim for the space between passersby.

If they look and say What?
One Sleeve puts his head down.

One Sleeve Is Not Afraid of Death

One Sleeve is not afraid of death.
It's the state of nonbeing after death

that troubles him.
One Sleeve will miss having himself around.

I'm going to miss having Beethoven around,
LP records, old piano scores,

the clok clok of the metronome,
my hand twitching like a dead insect.

My room too small for a piano, too quiet for music,
I no longer play.

And so the heart quits beating.
The blood stops flowing.

The brain ceases to compute and command.
Without stimulus or impulse,

the light of the mind scatters.
The sparks of the evening's last firework fall.

In darkness lie memories in motionless pools,
unremembered.

The fingers stop twitching.
One Sleeve is afraid of this.

I Look Down the Subway Stair in the Rain

I look down the subway stair in the rain.
The underworld fills with people

escaping the rain.
One Sleeve mocks the symbolism,

as though there were two realities,
one the shadow of the other.

When the sun breaks through,
I go down the stairs,

my shadow stepping daintily beside me,
its long arm reaching for the handrail.

There is only one way to avoid the symbolism
and the mockery.

Go down under ground where only shadows go.
One Sleeve's fingers slide along the handrail

unable to grip it.
He is sorry to go this way.

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Auto Parts

I started my search for him in the salvage yard
in and around the junked cars and vans
somehow all the same color and sprouting the same
        yellow weed
imagining him already grown into a boy
and playing where I played
climbing the stacked wrecks keenly
for the view across the rail yard and down to the river
though I was not so sentimental
that I would go to a playground looking for my daughter on
        the swings
for of course I knew the girl and knew she was old enough
        to be in a bar
drinking working whatever
whereas I had never met her son
and so thought of him in a state of joy
a grandson among the auto parts.

A Suitable Calling

I would call the boy Ace
after myself
a name I picked up for being awkward as a kid
sideswiping parked cars
twisting up my bicycle in crashes
a sarcasm
a jeer
hey Ace nice flying
but a title I later polished clean
running errands for the local dealers
never failing to deliver find or find out
so that it became my logo
my business card
though maybe not a suitable calling for the boy.

Groupie Freaky

My old lady was cherry
straight blond short shorts groupie freaky
who called me across the river for some wild dancing
her act
and kept me coming back until we got married
for about nine hours
after which she had our kid Miss Princess
and graduated to bartending
which is when I lost interest in her career
though I kept tabs on her for a long time from a distance
until recently when I heard she died
Carol her name was Carol died
of cancer AIDS suicide bones breasts killers killers
OD probably.

Vagabonding

Miss Princess learned vagabonding from her mother
and ran away without graduating from school
as we all did in various states of combustion
the girl in particular setting fire to bridges
her mother's apartment
her boyfriend's hair
someone's car
in order to make her pregnancy pure
all her own
and all alone she would have her baby and raise him better
        than whoever
never pausing to wonder who would help her in all this anyway
maybe no one
and therefore I wanted to see the boy who as a consequence
        of his hardship
would be magnificent.

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Eagle

His hair is like an eagle's nest,
huge and messy. The rest of him
is thin, though still hard-knuckled.

Spiders in the cracks of the pavement
mock him. He speaks in short bursts
as though commanding a dog,

except there is no voice. Then the mouth
stops moving, and his eyes turn upward, green
tarnished black around the edges. His field jacket

is buttoned all the way up, the left pocket
torn down. I do not salute him.
He cups his hands to receive my charity.

Frankie's Kiss

She photographs the homeless joyfully.
Like a butterfly collector gathering specimens,
she captures their upturned faces.

The images are beautiful in their stillness,
the eyes—just the orbs of the eyes—
gone blurry in the chloroform of halted time.

At the appointed hour I meet her by the opening of an alley.
She emerges victorious,
and I become suddenly thirsty looking at her smile,

an empty brown bag:
coffee and nicotine color
her large, square teeth.

But I love her kiss—her stiff, gritty lips, the way
her tongue reaches in, trying to drink from my mouth,
guzzling nothing. She laughs and of course

I am like one of her subjects,
a stuttering old man
exposing himself to her.

Monochrome

The borders of the photograph harden,
and from within a sharp, brittle microcosm,
the stopped streetwalker calls out to me
forever. In the dark stasis of the shot

I have grease-penciled her small handbag red.
No one hits her in the face tonight.
She does not call her father.
Her child is never born and has no birthday party

with one candle on a Twinkie.
And yet her thin, musical voice
still chimes in my head
and breaks the glass lock of stillness

and all the monochrome denizens of the photograph
flood into the neon honking steaming street.

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VI

I am in search of the Hapax Legomenon—
the single utterance.
I thought my friend the Bearded Lady
was the solitary instance of her kind,

a shooting star written in the sky only once,
never elsewhere or again,
but she cried and said she was not alone.
I was cruel to forget—

some days she looks like an ordinary woman.

XL

The Boy went out in a butane shirt
with sleeves of blue flame
spent the hot night
sniffing crotches at the strip joint

and on his back tasting delicious feet
a cinnamon odor tingling
in one nostril
thickening on the tongue—fell asleep

under a blanket of floorboards
woke in wreckage.

LIII

The Bearded Lady displays herself on a sofa
stuffed with hairbrushes.
A rawhide mirror reflects the odor
of her nakedness.

Slow eyelids strumming the air,
she eats and calmly vomits my white-cake friendship,
eats and calmly vomits
the eggshells and blisters of my resistance.

LVIII

We are strange to the bees,
prismatic
and myriad, like droplets of sun and rain
colliding in the misty blue vistas of their heaven,

though profusion means everything to the sapient hive,
and they love the musical hairstyles of flowers,
minuet, gavotte,
even poorly imitated in our droning art.

LXII

I met the Boy on a hot tar roofscape
openly among the exhaust vents and broken bottles.
He gave me a lucky bracelet
made of needles.

Humidity spilled over us.
His lips tasted like double-A batteries,
tangy and electric,
and I was a tenement of blown lightbulbs and rattling window glass

shaking in his arms.

LXIX

I find the Hapax in the bathroom
nibbling pills.
My polite, antique cough does not disturb her.
I snap away her towel.

A pretty pink dragon tattooed on her translucent shoulder
glistens with fresh pinpricks of blood.
Her boiled hair
smells of lemon biscuits and chocolate.

My steel fingernails grind
against her mask.

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Inventor

My father was an inventor of martinis.
He acquired archaic languages,
collected Renaissance textiles.
But mostly he made martinis.

He worked at night in a closed room.

      §

Martini chilled among purple crocuses,
served with two drops of spring snow
gathered from the petals.

Atoms

We were like atoms smashed together
creating dazzling light and destruction.

      §

Martini made of tears
squeezed from the eyes of pimps.

Gods

I worshipped the gods of our city
in my father's place,
bearing to their altars
offerings of crusty bread and marbled cheese.

Although he believed in the deities—
the God of Mercy and Humiliation,
the Oracle of Horsemanship and Enterprise,
the Golden Idol of Cancer, Tongues, and Weeping—

he despised them all as competitors and louts.

      §

Martini observing the city from a great height
as the lights come on in the apartment towers
and darkness fills the lamp-dotted park,

squinting at the old marquees
that glitter and wink in the long street-canyons,
whorish,

turning to its son and saying:
You are a martini admired only
by the ruined and the thirsty,

a clear, pure libation,
garnished insipidly
with a chrome-plated bullet.

Organ

He wanted his eyes cryogenically preserved
in separate tanks,
his friends among the organ farmers
untrustworthy and powerful.

      §

Martini displayed in a bell jar,
the hollow-pupiled olive
whitening with age.

Lounge

In the darkest velvet lounge of my heart
I knew I would become him,
reject him, kill him,
and so exceed him. But not in that order.

      §

Martini sipped by Socrates
surrounded by his friends.

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