THESE DAYS

Here at the local Starbucks you
sit in the college outskirts, wind
ruffling your papers, sky so deep
you're falling, all these ideas
chick-scratched in notebooks, ink-stained
napkins nested in your journal,
blue smoke from Russian dilettantes,
Polish lovers mooning over
the linguistic patterns of starlings
and coffee, Indian physicists
sipping caramel macchiatos,
arguing flights of particle theory
poetics and super colliders,
while scruff-feathered sparrows
beg for cake crumbs. The birds perch
beside a child standing on a
plastic chair, teetering, barely
able to speak, the wind blowing
hair in her lips, her Turkish mother
smoking, studying the season,
the girl picks up her mother's
flip phone and studies its black
odalesque screen as if it's some
talisman to another world:
she licks the screen with her tiny
pink tongue, giggles, puts it to
her ear, "Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!"
while her mother smokes in silence.
The phone clatters to the cement.
Birds scatter like the host.
The wind from their wings
pushes hair off her eyes.
Swaying in the tiger lilies
behind her, she's your wild aesthete,
your soul, your restlessness,
waiting to be loved.

MIDLIFE

Migod it's noisy this morning!
I can hear the ahhh of tires
on the tri-state, the dragonfly drone
of a Cessna scrawling overhead,
the high-pitched yips of chipmunks,
the scrabble of squirrel claws on ash bark,
morning trollops of cardinals
in the dirt and creeping charley,
the flagging moan of the diesel
drifting from the valley with the
steel clatter bouncing off houses.
How can one be so alone out here
among the overgrown lilacs,
the low-slung electric wires, the
leaning and chink-walled garages,
rusted ladders sprawling across
plastic lawn chairs, a misbegotten
apple tree stinking of ferment,
a tree so ugly even the wasps
shun its lurid juices, baskets
of bedraggled impatiens hanging
like twin iridescent squatters
condemned to life without parole,
monstrous swordleaf daisies
horning in on the neighbor's sundeck,
the slack clothesline, backyard jalopies,
rustbuckets, broken down wheelbarrows
invaded by trumpet vine, abandoned
charcoal grills upended, baring
their bent and skinny insect legs
to the sky, and, at long last,
as if to announce the end, a
single blue jay proclaims some
terrible household tragedy, as if
all tragedy were the same,
the bird bath's been tipped over,
the basset hounds are whelping in
the basement or someone finally
found the philosopher's wife dead
as a doornail dead on her lawn
in her robe and slippers, a
metaphysical mystery, she'd
been haunting the sidewalk for weeks
shouting "The darkness! The darkness!" ,
and it's not what she deserved but
it's certainly a sign of the times,
these are all auguries, predilections,
this world is an Old Richard's
almanac warning you it'll be
a hard winter, and this is what
you get for coming out here
in the first place, determined to
think of nothing in particular.

EMBARRASS RIVER

To live here you must absolve

     yourself of all pretense, 

all worldly signs of wealth

     or possession -- not that it's

hard, there's never been anything 

     here, really, save the damned 

river -- there's nothing to mortgage

     except what you do

to each each other, women and men,

     seeking redemption in

each other's wrinkled flesh,

     but it's the eyes that shame,

you can't escape, the deeper fear,

     like a furtive skunk behind 

the eyes, the mind embarrassed.

     There's no privacy here, no 

escape, the sensual and the 

     practical, the poverty of 

a river dock, you fish for

     trout and suckers, trap crayfish

in the claybanks, even pull

     wild rice from the oxbows.

Even on our death beds

     our friends and family

are too embarrassed 

     by the end to cry, to smile,

to hold our lifeless hands, 

     the skin sinking to bone,

oh the personal ownership of it!, 

     the selfishness!, the shame 

of causing such a fuss!

     And when we pass you wonder

What was all of this for?

     This economy of feeling,

this abstention from 

     all things carnal, all the

empty hours, that damned

     dying river?  What value 

remains from all this 

     fierce holding on?  

    

     

SUNDAYS

Sunday mornings, 4:30am,

walking past the last houses on the hill

painted in psychedelics, purple haze

and sunshine acid orange, redbud gold,

abandoned by the paper mills hippies and

left to squatters—those houses with the stark

and narrow windows, yellow shades, bloodshot

porch lights, one house filled with cubist nudes,

deconstructed whores languishing in

celluite and cigarettes, waiting all night

as the fuckfest continues in the great room

while the Rolling Stones bang out “Gimme Shelter”

and the Allman Brothers play “Ramblin’ Man.”  

Next door a roach squalor booze fest, bottles

of Wild Turkey and Cactus Jack and shattered

Mad Dog, it’s all Merle Haggard and Dean Martin

and “Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me.”  Now it’s

a philosopher’s den, epistemologists

and phenomenologists, goggle-eyed

anarchists and neo-Platonists holding court,

rolling Bugler cigarettes and drinking

Carling Black Label and chomping cold

french fried pickles, it’s Chopin’s etudes,

Ravi Shankar ragas, and of course The Doors,

“The Peace Frog” and “WASP (Texas Radio and

the Big Beat)”.  Then the graveyard.  The long

descent into the darkness and the city’s

stillness, the cold wrought iron fence,

the hill busting through the iron spikes as if

the dead, burgeoning underground, seek

redemption. The stones and mausoleums

of the city’s great fathers and sinners

are not haunted, they’re just buried in

bottle rockets and spent rubbers and

Michigan dirt. Comatose, like the city,

like the bums in the rail yard seeking

their hovels, the psychotics released from

the State Hospital for the Insane

scurrying in sumac like opossums

from the hill’s pre-dawn corona.  Cross

the tracks and spill into the main drag,

furniture stores and failed banks, and finally

the News Agency, where bundles of papers

wait among bleeding-eye men squatting in

Greyhound diesel fumes, news from Chicago,

Detroit, Cleveland, LA, New York, everywhere

that matters but here.  Switch on the neon

sign and the first drunks and scholars and

stoners stumble in from the pureness of Sunday,

sanctimonious, baptized and redeemed.

The headlines confess that the day’s begun,

like every other, interminable, precious

and smeared across flesh and cheap newsprint,

desperate for the future.

TURCOTT'S LANDING

After the coke bust the owners 

absconded to Patagonia, so 

the house was up for grabs until Turk 

and Posthumus parked their Econolines

on Sugarloaf bluff.  There were parties 

every night, skinny dipping in the pool, 

fucking in the hot tub,  shagging 

on the carpet to the Moody Blues 

because the Turk loved the Moody Blues

and when someone dropped an M-80 

in the pool and fired roman candles 

from the diving board like a stoned 

statue of liberty my new girlfriend 

and I snuck down to the lake drinking 

Annie Green Springs peach wine and shivering 

in the shallows, slick minnows on our skin.

We waded through cattails all muddy 

and naked in darkness.

Later it was girls in halters smoking 

Virginia Slims and snorting lines 

and guys drinking flaming shots of wild turkey  

and getting all philosophical, tits and 

death and weed, and the Turk, the visionary, 

was going to hitchhike to Mexico

to find the real shit, something to smooth 

the wrinkles in your brain, blind-your-inner-eye 

stuff, divinity.

This is how we ushered in our new era, 

making way for the new millennium, 

a new paradigm, the new order, the 

revolution: the gypsies were no longer 

gypsies but an orgy of lotus eaters.

We astonished ourselves not so much at 

our ecstasy or our excess but our 

clumsiness, our awkwardness, the algae scum 

in our hair, the claymuck  on our feet, 

our cold wrinkled fingertips and groins.  

We were suddenly the drug of each other's 

flesh, and that terrible craving 

afterwards.

Death and Early Cinematography

Every film maker's first 

film explores death, naturally.

Morpheus, Terminal, 

Expiry, or just The End,

the sweet kiss of poison 

on curiosity's lips, probing 

the world for mortality 

with their lens to capture

the mystery of our 

enchantment with the

loss of being.  You see it

in the shadows, the ghosts, 

as if  their art breathes life

into some lifeless scene --

a blade flashing in the

blazing sun, a blind frigate

bird soaring to the sun

and then falling like some 

dumb boomerang into the sea,

Dirk Bogarde, stumbling 

and pathetic, sweating 

in the plague-heat of the

Venice beach, puckering

on the sand like some 

old carp.  In my brother's film

I'm caught in slow motion,

a stupor, climbing a dune,

grasping the weeds to 

pull myself up, then the 

obligatory montage, cut 

to the westbound  Amtrak

effacing me, cut to 

staring at the mirror

and seeing nothing but 

the silvery darkness, the

liquid memory pool of 

nothingness, the old

existentialist trappings,

cut to a graveyard, 

lichen-spotted stones and

the camera swings skyward

to the November cold,

but once the production

is splashed on the screen

the great mystery is 

reduced to a scrim of 

slippery images sliding

before our eyes--there's no

transcendence, no epiphany,

no elegy, the sweet cello

fades, it's a film, after all,

about nothing, the other side

of a story, a sequence 

of dead flowers left beside

the road, a field of chopped

corn stalks in the snow,

a redemption, a benediction,

a way of being that can't

be sensed or repeated,

and that failure, grandiose

or felt, cannot be captured

or known by image, it

can only be known by

surrender, whether 

by the eros of music or

first person narrative, 

limited.

GODLESSNESS

The first

     sunny day 

            after Easter

the neighbor boy

     rakes through

          the brambles 

with all the patience

     of a Catholic,

          steady strokes

cleansing their yard

     of stubborn oak leaves

          and winter trash,

the trumpet vine

     and lopped roses --

          dead wood 

and snow-burnt

     grass, all gathered

          in a circle

triumphantly set

     ablaze and smoldering

          toward heaven, 

the  yard now redeemed

     by this ceremony,

          by this sacrament

of smoke and ash.

     His sister brings

          a fistful of wieners

they impale 

     on barbecue forks

          and snack on, 

burst and

     sizzled flesh.

          My penance?

To observe this 

     carnal worship, 

          this Spring sweetness,

and beg forgiveness

     for my sons and I, 

          how we raked 

our hard scrabble 

     in haste, in haughty 

          anger, shouting 

at the wind, 

     cursing our lot, 

          the very life 

          

we were borne

     into, the punishment 

          of raking.

AFTER SEEING MATISSE

 

(the curvilinear steel bridge

 

             a reclining nude

 

      Matisse’s line)

 

 

 

the first two drawings

simple graphite on ivory     allure

 

a woman standing, nude

flesh captured not by marks

but by what is not marked

 

            her calves

            her arms

 

            lines

                        slightly bent

           

     but mass,

  volume, not

       desire, but

     woman

 

 

 

just        seeing that

 

 

       the buses on Monroe

                        on Michigan Avenue

                        everywhere!

                        emblazoned

                        MATISSE

 

 

two silver-haired women

stand before Matisse

a woman in a shawl

”I don’t believe that sentence!”

she declares, “there’s no

intuition at all!  I wonder

how she felt about this picture!”

 

 

                        in a film Matisse

                        draws a school boy

                        with one hand

                        while with his left

                        he touches the boy

                        as if he were divine,

                        as if he were reading Braille,

as if to guard himself

from the boy’s innocent fire

 

 

the woman reclining

in the studio

voluptuous line

among so many others,

that line is eros

 

            two gold fish!

            swimming

            in a blue room!

 

                        floating in consciousness

 

            they have been

            swimming in your mind

            behind your eyes

 

 

a lilac branch

like a peacock’s tail

 

                        some wonderful

                                    language

                                    spilling

                             from your lips. Chirps,

                        whistles, clicks, something

                                    beyond the mind

 

            all these people

            so self-conscious, cold

            reading words

            and walls

            ghosts          waiting

            for

            something

            something real

            the words

            the fish

            the lilacs

            to shimmer or speak

            or blare out some Saint-Saens Marche Militaire Franchaise!

 

in Millennium Park

two copper mockingbirds

perch on a bench

            and yelp out

            their hillbilly calls

while skinny Russian girls

in pink slippers!

Slurp frappacinos

 

            Oh Matisse!

            everyone’s

            snapping photographs

            at the cloud gate,

            the mercury-skinned bean

            reflecting the cosmos,

            a pulsar!

            circumscribed by

            the magnificent line!

             

Matisse’s nude bathers

inspect themselves

sure in their being

sure in their eros

 

           

            after the show

            people can no longer see

            exhausted,

            faces washed

 

            they were          somewhere

            for a moment          (open)

            THAT

            is radical invention

            before they returned

 

 

the fish?

the line?

the blue?

 

            and then

            the words

MATISSE

MATISSE

MATISSE

from every

light pole

 

            You see him

            In those apples in a bowl!

            those gold fish!

            that lilac!

            that woman’s leg

 

the words

you scribble

a line

before breakfast

in Tangier

consciousness

radical invention

unguarded / breathe

PRODIGAL HOMECOMING

I was driving to the prison

to see him, the underground lair 

of fluorescent oxbows and switchbacks, lost 

tributaries and dead-ends, Sanitation, 

Electrical, Emergency Exit,  

Death Row, Psychiatric Wing, Holding Cell, 

all monitored by cameras and controlled 

steel doors that open and close as I drive 

deeper into the complex.  Execution 

by Lethal Injection on the left, 

Murderers, Sex Crimes on the left, 

Arsonists, Drug Traffickers, Scam Artists, 

Tax Evaders,  Meth Freaks, Petty Freaks all

on the left, and then, when it seems I will 

never surface, Drunkards, Na'er-do-wells, 

Pan Handlers, Misbegotten, Those Who 

Lack Grace.  I park the car and push through 

the steel door and follow the corridors, 

the same pattern, Derelicts to the left, 

the Deranged, the Mindless, the Impulsive, 

the Compulsive Confessors of Dark Secrets, 

until the hall narrows to men and women 

splayed naked by their own choice -- women sleek 

as harbor seals, tumescent men sprinkled 

with glittery stars, fussing at their self-imposed 

scars like chimpanzees scouring their flesh.  

The last door opens to a room of tattooed 

men and women bound by chains scraping the floor.  

Black and white slides projected on the far wall 

show a splay-toed boy in a potato field, 

then talking to a mynah bird, then 

fishing in a rowboat.   A one-eyed Brutus 

shouts "Hey Don, there's someone here to see you" 

and then a man shuffles forward, the same 

silent man, the same oval name patch stitched 

to his green shirt, the same pencil planted 

behind his ear.  "I see you made it," he says, 

by which we both know we can go no farther.