Fallen Stars(Cleveland, Ohio, long ago)

They can’t imagine
here what it is like to watch


a river burn, the fire
spring to life as you


flicked the butt of your fag
into the Cuyahoga.


Lucky it didn’t light
the embankment where we stood


or the coal flats where we wrestled
in the back seat of your car,


we would joke later about that
Chariot of Fire.  Piece of us now


burnt into me — a Burning Man
on a desert floor already blackened,


naked with fear of having done
not enough to keep you,


wanting you to set me on fire,
but whetted with the sinews of the bent


river crooked against the skyline
from which we’d come.  Aliens


to an alien world.  No one
here can imagine what it is


to have lived through the moment,
the fire in us burnt out.


     

The Iron Horse has Wings

Satori Katsu in memory of Robert Allen Meyer




1.


The road ends in a circle. 
You feel its gravity, gain
speed over the arc.


Release, if you're lucky,
sends you home.  Through a field
of yellow flowers.
  

 

2.


Rape presses.  Seed
oil.  Lamps burning
long.  Engines of industry
sputter.


The next train will drive into the plain
like an embroiderer's needle.  Its design
can be seen off the tip of our wing.



 

3.


Why is it you defy gravity?
Can't you see it will pull you down
like a star?  Leaving a crater,


Earth will be forever 
smoothing over.



 

4.


Flight was the stupidest thing I've ever attempted.
I kept returning
like rain to the rivers of the Pacific Northwest


while you sewed the fields
with seed crops.  Pressed
to light my way.



 

5.


In the penultimate car, a passenger
throws down a window.  Waves.  Like
a wing.  Like a ripple.  As if 


he's soldiering the fields.  Repeating. 
Remember me.
I am one of your conquered cities.

 

Note:

"Lightning's blue glare fills Oklahoma plains, the train rolls east casting yellow shadow on grass. Twenty years ago approaching Texas, I saw sheet lightning cover Heaven's corners ...  An old man catching fireflies on the porch at night watched the Herd Boy cross the Milky Way to meet the Weaving Girl... How can we war against that?"

    ̶  Allen Ginsberg.  "Iron Horse"  (1972)

     

Sandman Takes a Room

It is
possible that I will be
nothing by the end of day,


that I will       
disintegrate in
the dry air of this room
where no breeze blows. 


And to
protect myself from these
inevitabilities,
curtains have been pulled
and drawn upon themselves


as a canvas where
the artist painted the scene
and his portrait eyes
the room in which oils still
supple mark the man


when he
turned keys against the latch
not to enter but to lock him-
self away. 


I have this
luxury: to scrawl out
my last will, my testament,
a cypher in grains of sand
on this firmament
where nothing holds.  Need


drives me to fire, white-
lightning and moonshine
and a match poised
to answer the only question,
What color shall I be?

    

Heaven's Gate

We hate cats!
read the sign
on the dog
park's gate.


Take them to
the cemetery
next door, it
droned to all
who would read.
Let them hunt
mice or die.


Why field mice
love the dead
we don't know:
burrows into
fresh dug soil
perhaps.  There
they breed like
with like, little
mice morsels.


And, should they
die, it read,
we let dogs
run the haunts
at night...


                Dogs
love to sweep
across streets
in the city
of the dead.


...to chase ghosts
"from this world
to the next"
was implied
though it read
from shadows
of their lives.






Dogs eat, of
course, from cats'
unburied
bodies and
bury clean bones
when done.


No cats go,
asserted
the rambling
sign, through
Heaven's gate
alone!


     

Singing Kaddish for Anna

(in memory of my mother, dedicated to my father)

    

All night long, my bedroom glowed
golden with the light of street lamps
through opened window blinds,
through the sash I’d cracked
to let the cool night air flow in
and the deep breathes of sorrow out.
All night long wasted on sleep
that wouldn’t come whilst listening
to thoughts that couldn’t stem
the stream of time into a river
greater than mine . . . A half-state
neither here nor there, beyond
the great windowed wall that once
sieved our lives into moments,
vignettes from the theatre of us,
that history only now defines.
All night confined to one such moment,
hearing the whimpers of the dog
whose fall into sleep has sent him
into a run across imagined fields;
no one else here to sing
the lullabies you once carried
like water: fluid even
within confines of a melody
I can’t quite remember
but don’t want to forget.


     

Vampires

They have put me in a room where
white curtains meet white walls,
where white lights glare down
from ceilings like irradiated flies.


They have strapped me to a bed
that I might take my rest
in waiting while the ventilation moans.
The cries!  It cries.


They have shown me pictures of my lovers
and my lovers as they died;
taken all my memories, twisted them,
and spoken just of lies.


They have caged a cricket
and placed it by my side,
that by it alone I'll know
when day is passing into night.


They feed me enough to keep me
healthy and alive, to prick me
and to bleed me dry through
tubes that wend into another room.


They pretend that they have left me
alone to hear the cricket singing,
but I can feel them sucking,
taking turns on the plastic tubes.




      

Werewolf

(for Paul)


Tonight, driving you home,
I think of the bogs beneath
a full moon.  The werwulf rising
above the mist on two legs,
the corps of a man not fully
human.
              Glancing at the wheel,
my hands, the bony fingers hard-
worked long past dark.   I
think   it could never happen
to me, but already ...


My hands are fur covered.  And,
I know this manhood
                                   will not be
long in coming.     You speak
of animals wiser than men:
You are a fox, a deer, and
you are hunted.  Tonight,
you find no rest, fearing,
I may turn out the lights
and go
              blindly,   able
to see in the dark.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In 1721, Bailey's Dictionary defined werwulf as being "so named because man should be ware of them."

Dictionarium Britannicum: or a more compleat universal etymological English dictionary than any extant ... Explaining hard and technical Words, or Terms of Art, in all the ARTS, SCIENCES, and MYSTERIES following. 

Bailey's Dictionary rivaled Samuel Johnson's Dictionary in terms of its popularity in England.

     

Mud Man

you say     i won’t
make you


and so     i go to bed
unmade     slept in
unlike a shore
ravished
by flood, retreating


and acceding
to your will     i break
a sweat that will burn


only after
you are gone
in the morning


   

River's Edge

soft: mud fingered
by roots, holding
a treasure of bones
and the flints used
to pare them of their flesh
beside a campfire burned
long into the night, its red
embers to white
ashes: fired up, then
covered stones
with a powder      like snow
no one long remembers –
not even wrenched up
and prodded into shapes
made for tasting water

Reformation of the Cut Makers

Block.     A block.     One
Beside another.     Distracted.
Distracting.     A block.
A block.     One atop
Another.      Oppressing.
Imprinted.     One,
A Monet squinting
At the other.     The Other,
A dot.     Arranged
As a puzzle.     A  photo
Of the mountains
From which another
Descended.     In multiples
Chipped from altars,
Holy men ascended
Whole.     Again,
A block.
A block.     Blocking out
The sun behind
A pyramid.     Always,
A scion to the light.
A render of lime.
A block.    Built
On the back
Of bones.     Encased
In them.     Refined
And reformed.     Else,
Then, is
Nothing but stone.

Disowned

Severed -
not cleanly but
by the stroke
of a pen:


piss and carbon,
the gall of it
culled from candles  


burnt on the roof
of my mouth      like devotion.


Heretic,    you, my maker,
my religion, …   And, the word


followed by words
scrawled out:
I am your father
       no more.

Crusoe & Friday

Somewhere among the deep
blue oceans and blushing skies,
among the countless U.S.O. halls
full of men tanked up
on rum cut with bitters


lay the perfect dive.
I show it to you
in its simplicity: quiet,
reserved for the night —
a stag party certain


to get out of hand.
They always do.  The shot-gun
of it seemly, almost empty
as a church before Sunday.
It echoes a song we learnt


as children; nothing of music
loud enough to make banal
conversations made small
in the dim light tripping out
of a jukebox, this charnel house


for the writhing dead.  Tomorrow
we will be arisen, each of us
a nave built on the memories
of our fathers.  My lips will
drink from you, decanting


ancient words, meaning
do this in honour
of and tasting of wine
that remembered a crushing
of feet bared by those


who would pick our bones
clean.  And, crisp as a banker,
count them back
as days here ever
after.

The False Villanelle of Miss Rubie Thang

for Miss Southern Decadence 2009

 

Will they see me like this?

Head tilted and eyes, lost

as I look for the red lipstick

I placed in my leather purse

beside house keys and change.

Will they see me like this?

... with thin lips drawn out

in a pallid frown, scowling,

as I look for the red lipstick

that keeps me from being

like them.     These men.

Will they see me like this,

and say, Oh, girl!

You're just     fine.

as I look for the red lipstick?

How could I be so remiss,

so blind, so ... so sick

as I look for the red lipstick?

Will they see me like this?

KS

“I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

     — Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

We grow wise only

too late to save ourselves

from death – a river

coursing quickly over

stones – the runner jumping

at the gun – a gazelle

whose flight is the breeze

in the tall grass.  We grow

wise only too late

to grow new spots the wile

those we have will kill.

       
     
     
The increasingly archaic word "wile", meaning an enticement or skillful deceit, is intentionally used in the place of a more common English, "while".

Days and Nights in the National Archives

     

“Ikh vel aykh opshrayen fun toyt!”

(I will scream you back from death!)

          - Ruth R. Wisse*

      

All of your men

shall be photographed

and fingerprinted. 

Their data: birthdates,

eye colour, proclivities,

stored in protocols

with their names and

the names and number

of their lovers

never spoken again.

* http://www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/publications/detail/the-poet-from-vilna

The Long-distance Swimmer

I placed an earthen jar on the Kentish coast,
not far from our marital home.  I waited whilst
its breath escaped, and, watched
as the sea and the sand rushed in.
It aped such human sounds as moaning
cries as over washed the wind.
Then I laid me down beside my love, beneath
the sun as the surf in eddied alcoves swirled
and after swam alone, toward the dark, distant shore.
    

Hyginus’ Library of Dreams

I dreamed,  I dreamt
that I grew wings and flew away
to a city on the sea.     I dreamt
of feathers, rooted in arms: cupped
palms, curled; fingers, withered
[away] like a river
toward a desert lake:
drawn down, sharpened,
saline.  I dreamt of night
folded upon night after night alone,
thirsting.     I dreamt
of sky and of rainfall,
of its broken and restless lines
streaming down upon my face.
I dreamed.  I wanted it,
I dreamt.

Incantum Dei

a final memory:     the boy
on the black sand beach
thin     lean and long     climbing
naked over a black boulder
washed in white foam
that day my desire facing
the sea      not at an end
though it might have been
spoiled with the rush of tides

lambent pentameter

love      whisper
a language sordid
yet sweet
let your tongue
fluff my breasts
read from my skin
the tell of a knife
then sleep     take
dreams to our bed
fall     arms     legs