Directional Artifacts

South, at Tenochitlan is blue
As water, indigo or azure as chalchihuites
Thrown into the temple mortar,
Is the season of rain, and life,
And wet sky.

East is the red son of the flowery wars,
The moon-sister of Huitzilopochtli, slain
And dismembered on the hill of Coatepec,
And her thin, red-nailed hands.

North is black as the volcanic disks
Of his stone eyes, black as the abyss
Of the executioner's block.

The west is white as the sickness
Of her death, white as the bones
Of her children, fishbones,
The bones of frogs and the skulls
Of feathered serpents.

Their colors shine with an
Extraordinary luster,
The holiness of direction
Excavated two meters below
Street level at the corner of Guatemala
And Argentina.


(From: A Book of Fours)

THOR AND THE JOTUN UTGARDSLOKI: ALLEGORY 1

See, once there was this fellow
called Thor, bigger than Mr. Jaws himself
and as good at butchering goats
as Father Abraham
skinning them without so much
as breaking a bone.
Well, it happened that he was also good
at eating
and fast, too
but not as fast as Loki, who ate so
it seemed the meal was consumed
by fire,
ate the bones and trough as well,
so it was plain who won that contest
heads down. Kept poor Thor
so weak he couldn't lift a cat.
Found himself outwitted
by somebody's grandma as well,
crooked old crone that she was.
Hoodwinked by Old Age herself, indeed
consumed by that self-same Wildfire
he chose to better.
Never had a chance,
knowing too late the cards
were stacked from the beginning
and the games were fixed.


Loki (nomadsunited.com)

NERIAD TO NEPTUNE:

Our footsteps cross the shifting wind
where sandipers dance down the shore.
You buy bananas-on-a-stick
that taste of salt, or tears, before
we lie upon that glimmering bed
below the cliffs where tides have left
shells like wet, white bones, and sleep
christcrossed, where sky and earth are cleft
by sea and froth.

Your lips taste salt, like creatures born
of green sea-water. If you bleed,
pale drops the color of the sea
will fall into the ebbing sand.
We please ourselves deliciously,
we're satisfied, and glad of life.
The world will end this way, won't it?
It will, without a doubt, and at
the speed of light.

AUGUST AFTERNOON: WAITING FOR THE BUS

Waiting at Main Street
and 50 South
for the bus that
never comes
and all the people
coming and going
past Continental Bank
and the FOR LEASE sign
CALL HENRY 359-8776
and the hunchback at the
pay telephone
and the woman weeping
outside the Delmar Lounge
as if it matters

Sometime I wrote:
'There is a black hole in me
that swallows light.
I am only afraid at night.'
This is not true.
At my left
another woman walks her dogs
two black poodles.
She carries a red bag
and walks slowly while
her dogs sniff at corners
and squat in the gutter.
Behind her
a window is broken.
The glass is shaped
like a W
or perhaps more like
a vampire's fangs.
Someone has shut up the hole
with paper and tape
as if holes
could be so cleverly
contained.

I see more clearly
things I cannot write
for all their clarity
before the world slips.
A thousand afternoons
the sky weeps drops
like small teeth.
If I had a throat
I would swallow them.
I have no mouth
only this pencil
and granite fingers.
The tears of the woman weeping
outside the Delmar Lounge
are fevers.
There is no hunchback
and no phone booth.
Henry is no one.
If I call up the numbers
no one will answer.

Great Salt Lake, 1984

In our moonboots
we sway against the wind,
step carefully across
the picked clean bodies
of two gulls
drowned in the floods,
feathers worn away,
washed out.
Even the sand flies
are gone.
Our little boys
kick at the wet rocks,
skip small stones far out
from the jetty.
The lake, as high
as an ocean
is the color of mercury.
It swallows rocks,
saltgrass, asphalt,
train tracks.
This morning
the moon hangs bone-white
in a blue sky,
horns upward
like the milk-glass skull
of a dead buffalo.
There is no signature
across these horns telling
who passed by, or when.


(image: Passport Journal, Lewis C. Prince)

daddy's hard earned dimes

by chiminetty
my daddy grows lean
waiting at the scrubbed table
waiting at the scrubbed table
he reads the comic section
of the new york american
where der gink mit der viskers
is pursued by dose two liddle sissages
dose smarties
it iss vunderful

early evening
and he rests at last
in the twilight
of someone else's labor
all hard muscles
his sweat warm and random
in the loose weave of his shirt
waiting for the oven to bloom
with biscuits

my mother
superimposed on the edge
of his evening's rest
watches the bright horns
of the moon prick the horizon
and one by one the stars
write what they have seen
one by one they drop their
wide circles into her apron pocket
like daddy's hard earned dimes
spit-shined
turning the night silver

the biscuits are hot
the butter unwrinkles its
gold tongues down their brown skins
he reads
if I didn't belief it
I couldn't see it
let's go out for a row on der lake
liebchen

chass
und let us go qvickly

it iss vunderful

THE CATS OF CORONA DEL MAR

There are cats in those sandstone cliffs,
tiger-striped, black, calico, white as sea-spume,
all wild, and common, with eyes
like split yellow marbles. Beautiful:
the beach, rocky and shell-covered, the palms,
sailboats on the water, surfers, the salt wind
cool in the tangled, beached seaweed.

The cats stalk gulls, but do not catch them--
this time. Our footprints are soon washed
back into seawater, the patterned trail
we walked along the water's edge covered
with the incoming tide. We carry shells
in Pepsi cups, whorled sundials,
fanned cockles, speckled scallops
and rainbowed periwinkles, snails, abalone.

One long line of almost imperceptable horizon
separates water and sky. The cats
disappear into their caves, the sun
into irregular ancestral waves, the gulls
into the wide and graying sky.
There is no moon. And far away,
the low, receding voice of buoys vibrates
the vast and salty darkness.

And it is as if the frail sandcliffs
purr to the beach, and the palms,
and the heavy sea: Blessed, blessed.
Beautiful, the thin and marble-eyed cats,
the wild and honest cats
that dance and make striped and calico music
and comprehend a disinterested and flea-worn
nobility.

EARLY FROST

From a jet's cabin
in strong sunlight
at thirty thousand feet,
I cannot see where mule deer
nubs of antlers-in the velvet
doeskin, buckskin, fawnskin
stroll across fallen barbed wire fences,
smelling the cow's saltlick
in the greensward.

But they are there:
rumps, undersides and neck patches white,
tails white beneath, blacktipped,
browsing undisturbed.

I cannot hear their muted footfalls
in the grass,
but they are there,
like dim, ancient pictographs
scratched on citrine canyon walls
in rude attempt
to hold motion still.

The Fasten Your Seatbelt sign
is off. I am free.
Ascending in some transfigured
fourth-dimension,
leaving behind a white contrail
like a slip-knot lariat,
I think of those deer
leaving hoof prints
in an early frost,
foraging unfenced orchards,
fat with ruddy windfall apples.

Razzle

Dazzle
All these male
Bodies grown out of
My own female
However
It is done
One running in a field
Throwing a football
One whose brain
Is his joystick
Transcribing Bach
Into Atari
Another blows music
Into his grandfather's sax
Two are half-grown
Still bone of my bone
All of them too big
For their Adidas
All of them
Strange as baboons
Sometimes I touch
Their grace
Their weight and fists
Their unwashed hair
Their faces in their
Loud savage joy
And I claim
Their sprouting bodies
As my own
This moving rush
Of feet and hands
Doing all my undone
Cartwheels

BIRD WATCHER

Sextant and chronometer
under her fibrillating wings,
the ruby-throated hummingbird thrashes
the air over the Gulf of Mexico,
pectoral muscles anchored
on the keel of her breastbone.

The saltwater underneath heaves up
its blowing waves
toward an overcast sky, but the bird
is drawn by magnetic cues, by inner sun,
by occult moon, by pulling
shearwater tides.

The stars plead,
You remember us, don't you,
and our mysterious markers:

Polestar to the north where
the Little Bear roves in the tight arc
of the Big Bear.
The Crab and Bull, Waterbearer,
Dragon and whitehorned Goat
roll on all night, luminous
circles inside circles.

Her vision is acute. She continues.
She comes.

MY SON, 1966

Because you hold the circle of earth
in your hands, a world within a world
where it is always safe
with its wreaths of pansies blooming,
a line of red-roofed houses
is preserved under orderly clouds
like ropes of pearls.
You keep them safe. By day
you light the sun,
and you know there are rabbits hiding
in those round hills, small beasts
with silken fur and great dark eyes, like yours,
and snails curled in grass. By night
you call the moon up over the rooftops
and count your folded sheep among the stars.
You do not dare to breathe
lest breath burst the bubble of existence,
the lights explode and darken,
and all the rabbits die in their warrens,
the fierce faces of the pansies
burn and blow away, and you yourself
grow old, and older yet grow blind,
and forget which of those window-lit red-roofed houses
was your own.


(painting by Ivan Rabuzin)

BEAR SONGS

The hunter's moon
rolls like an orange marble
around the vast ringer
of sky,
clipping stars,
gathering light as it goes,
shedding a red October gloss
on the leafless aspens.

Down below
in the dark leaf pile
the black bear rambles,
his black silk belly full,
his throat prickly
with bear songs
magnified within the flat plate
of his skull,
his delicate nostrils
wetly curled
to catch the first delirious scent
of warning.

Wire Walkers

The mountain leans
toward equinox.

The pond is silver-rich.
The water sparkles
with spindlelegged wirewalkers.

The fisher spider
wades out
without breaking the polished surface.
Inch by inch she skims,
carrying her eggs gently
in a silken sac,
waiting for her spiderlings
to emerge.

Soon she will be
a thousand times richer.


(Photo by Steve Warrick, Single Moments Photography)

The Dreamers

The Great Bear slumbers
In a cave of stars,
The Little Bear, Aries the Ram.

The wind is a still sea.
The horned owl hangs
In chill air, feathers scarcely stirring.
He floats like a swimmer
Above the white bones of jackrabbits,
Over the winter burrows of field mice.

The mountains breathe
In the dark, a sleeping breath
Of hawk and fox,
Of wildcat and beaver.
The pond is bleak, the shallows are ice.

Under the hill,
In a cave of granite and quartz-crystal
The black bear sleeps,
Keeps sleeping,
Patiently entombed in his deep
Burial vault.

Let him sleep. Let them all sleep.
Let them savor the brown earth-smell
Of their dreams.
Let them cling to the dim runes
Of dreams.
Let them range far, light-years distant.
Let them dream of spring,
Of moving water, of light,
Of the beautiful sons and daughters
Of air-splitters and tree-dwellers
And cave-slumberers.
Let them dream.

ALL QUIET ON BOSPHORUS

Things are different this April day
in 1909, when Albanian soldiers
at Yildiz Kiosk refuse
to surrender, when the last burials
of the men who fell for Schefket Pasha
took place eighty years ago; this day
a boy can drown in a swill barrel
with no help near,

and while the walls of Yildiz Palace
are being razed, burnt, blown to bits,
on the other side of the world
firemen in a junk-shop blaze
are attacked by rats, hundreds of rats,
rats used to the comfortable disorder
and piling rot of old gingham, old wallpaper, old oxfords,

all of them bargains before the blaze,
and the rats.
And fearing she is losing her mind,
the young wife of the manager
of the Rock Island Hotel
throws herself under the wheels
of a passenger train
bound for Denver and points west,

falling with the grace of the six hundred
Albanian soldiers also falling
in Constantinople, with the terrible grace
of the child falling in a swill barrel,
and no one near.

What difference does it make
now, that theirs are only a few more
lovely faces incised with pain,
and that the next morning
the city under seige will be quiet?

MALLEUS MALEFICARUM

I wear breath in a bag
around my neck
like Russian garlic cloves
to ward off the Black Goat:
a perennial charm to keep
lungs pink and budding,
the diffuse root hairs of alveoli
and taproot of the heart,
the Witch's Hammer,
anchored against erosion.
The secret of eternal life: breathe
or the medicine wears off.

But breath has portents
of the poison in it,
like dust upon the lips.
Whoever gave takes back,
and the charm returns home
to its mother, the lily.


photo: Enthroned Black Goat
Ritual Live In Thy Flesh)

'BY GIS AND BY SAINT CHARITY"

In this book
there was a picture
of fair mad Ophelia,
floating face up, trailing daisies:
on another page
The Rape of Lucretia,
startled hand to throat,
round breasts fallen over her bodice
like white May pears.
Somewhere, dark Othello
and that poor Jew Shylock
protested in blacker pentametered despair.

The pictures drew me.
The words were only partly
understood, underscored by my
splayed young fingers across the page.

Now I trail ink-stained daisies
of my own, sing mad songs,
demand my pound of flesh,
stare blindly across the spaces
between years, and wait
for whirling obsidian waters
to have me,
to carry this ash-black body
coughing blood
and cut it into stars.


Painting: Echo of Ophelia by Im Elbenwald

A Human Presence

"Even so
I kept right on going on
a sort of human statement..."
--Anne Sexton


What presence here
as in utero dictates?
Decide, it says, to be something!
But I am a fish
in terrible waters,
blind in the dark,
milky eyes like white oysters.
Water breaks over forceps
grasping at my crowning head
where the skin bursts
bruise-red and wrinkled.
I would decide, I say,
if I could see a light somewhere.
Here, where I am
there is never enough.
I would forgive my eyes,
for one ray
bright as a furnace.
Come, my blind sister, my other birth.
In our black hunger
we eat hope
drink expectations
like sacraments. In our mouth
they become something
unmistakably human.

backache

backache
flattens me

gin in the veins
might help

tonight I fly on brittle bones
out of this skin

this old pain
disconnects

my top and bottom
halves

sleep waivers like mirages
in a white fossil sea of aspirin

that dulls the saw
between deeper jacknifed vertebrae

this great grey sleep of bone
sucks me dry

NAQUAMUYSEE'S LULLABY

Soft summer thunder
drums distant and brings
a wild velvet rush
to the red hawk's wings,
and the black pony Night
rides a dark warm wind
where the new moon skates
at the shadow's end.

Sleep warm, sleep dry
in a buffalo skin
on the Black Pony's back,
on a dark warm wind,
and the corn stalks ripple
and the squash blooms fold,
and sleep runs easy
like a swift dark colt,

and sleep runs easy
like a swift dark colt.