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.