Poetry
If you were a random house
on a random street
in any given town,
somewhere in the world,
I would want to be a postcard
sent from the San Diego Zoo
delivered accidentally,
anonymously,
to your front door
Pulling your naked body out
of the Vegas rubble, I learned
something about radiation:
fickle death doesn’t always
blister or glow. Sometimes it
preserves things exactly as
I remember them: pale-lipped,
black hair streaming across my
shoulder, your body curled in
my arms, only sleeping.
I want to tear this mask off
and breathe one last gasp
of you, I want to press my
face against your poisonous
flesh, I want to touch you
like I touched you before the
horizon forgot how to go dark.
Verdun, France, April 1916
We sit in silence,
armored in shadows:
light reveals us,
spurs God to guide
bullets into us,
wretched targets,
so we scurry from it.
I am safe
so long as I lurk
in the shadow of
Etienne’s corpse above me,
gloom rat, ghost,
half-drowned in trench-muck:
French blood, French mud,
yellow courage trickling away
down the leg of a messenger boy
from Avignon, and I’m amazed
he has so much left – I pissed
all my courage out when Etienne
splattered across my face.
The merciless sun is rising
through Verdun’s blasted dust
and with it, the distant boom of
clear-day thunder.
We French invented guillotines.
Now they whistle down upon us.
Egyptian Rem: “to weep;”
Fish god, Nile god
I could gut you.
Cast your chalk spine
Into the reeds,
Barbed hook through your eye
To lure shachihoko from
The shores of gold Nihon.
Yes, your tears
Feed cotton on the Nile,
But shachihoko’s tiger howl
Stings the sky itself to weeping,
And what could depose
The ecstasy of ablution?
I would bathe with tears
plucked from the face of God.
Some day soon
I’m going to drive out of this city.
Out to where the roads
shrug off their asphalt
and go back to gravel and dirt.
Out where street lamps
haven’t yet outnumbered
oak trees, and the only
moving lights are fireflies
instead of high-beams.
Once I’m there,
I’m going to pull over
to the side of the road,
look up at the sea of stars
and scoop up a bucketful
to bring home to you
and show you what you’ve
been missing all these years.
September 2008, Vancouver
In a single fluid motion,
the officer steps within
the panicked mother’s reach,
taps the stun gun
against her ribs,
and scoops her sick
infant into the crook
of his arm.
How do you justify
mating lightning
with motherhood?
You ask why
I love you.
For this:
You are
a minute
of quiet
in a loud
shouting
world.
A survey of conquered lands:
fifteen telephone poles, three
valleys, and the wire skeleton
of a fence line an acre back
from the curve of the porch.
Seven feet a week, when the
weather’s right: humid enough
for the vines to suckle water
right out the August air. Drought
can’t kill it, just makes it sleep,
twisted, drying in the Alabama sun,
until the clouds give back the rain,
and its endless gnawing march
resumes. Burn it if you like:
set fire to the vines and watch
flames curl up hillsides like
shedding leg hair with a match,
but all that does it make it
a little more eager to sprout.
Here’s a secret to keep your head
afloat under the encroaching tide:
kudzu’s worst nightmare – a pair of
small white goats.
I want to kiss her after kissing her,
and before, and while kissing her,
I thirst to kiss her again:
I fear all this kissing will crack my lips open
and I will spill words onto her tongue:
You are the water and jug
and I thirst and I thirst.
but first I will kiss her
and shepherd sweet words
over the hills of our mouths,
You are the smoke and the salt,
preserve me, preserve me
so she will kiss me and kiss me,
and this poetry isn’t free,
it’s bartered from me
with the moist of her lips,
the clip of her tongue as it slips
into me, an offer of moisture
for the roots of my poetry,
for the tangling roots entangling me.
I want to kiss her after kissing her,
and before, and while kissing her,
I thirst to kiss her again.
The daydreaming archaeology intern
doesn’t really wish a giant stone ball
would chase him back to the leaking
trailer-laboratory, but a noir beauty to
kiss his bruises (just a few scrapes
on the knuckles from careless brush-
stroking, really) might be nice.
Brown felt fedora, tumbled scruff,
obligatory Nazi goons…
On second thought,
rusty antebellum nails in the Alabama clay
aren’t likely to melt your face in
a flashy show of divine wrath,
so maybe this gig ain’t so bad.