View From The Kitchen

It is like looking down the trunk
of an old, hollow tree.

Morning will not come
for this cold night.

I stand there and listen to the

clock’s

hands, submerge my head in the icy
bath of new weather;

up there, the roof waits.
She waits with her flags. She waits for her view
to change.

The cat box does not clean itself—I am full of it.
Why do I not get tired?
The leaves

shiver
on the tree’s arms, there are
olives in the

fridge, fruit flies
that come under the hand
(what can I do about them? I can’t

obliterate them all, my dear), nights to paper the wall,
relatives to wish you happy birthday,
the elation of solitude to pass in the halls,
versions of ourselves

to butcher into shapes, and let their tastes
bewitch us, make us fall in

love with them,

dominate us, jettison our wits
with little square parachutes.

No one knows when our blood stopped
pushing through these clubs
called hands.

It stopped somewhere in the mountains,
somewhere in the battle objects of the forests,
somewhere in Oregon or the
knolls of
Big Sur’s bloated nose,
thinned by the
terse, thin

air of America.

And now this big body
has been put under the ground.
Big human,
big stitched up forehead,
big chest once filled with humor.

The Goat Head

Who lifted the goat head
off of the plank?

His body is art
hanging on the wall, hooves
down, tail twirled
like a spiral of Orcus, his
tongue opens all of our
locks.

I was saving that
in the kitchen, away from all you,
he wasn’t supposed to be your dinner.

Healing

This is what it always is,
healing,
and what it should be, really.
Still feeling the
long grass
as you sat in it, contemplating death
in October before an empty house.
Still awakening
sick, without that normal verve,
and kneeling
together with no one
to mime your mother on her saddest
days.
It’s when the healing ends, I think,
that everything wanes.
It sighs
and reclines into a chair,
like a widower who
did not love his wife.
And it comes
as the alcoholic burning
of years
down the throat.

Desert Night: A Love Poem

The The has died.

Someone slip it inside
its coffin.

Someone scoop its
gentle ashes into the air like snow.

The The
stands up

and pretends it is a
cactus.

Saguaro.

Its head is beside the moon
it is so tall,

its arms
out.

It mimes the
cactus as it downs its own fire

like a shadow,

and at the funeral
that fire lights you up.

Your legs are white
as apple flesh.

You’ll find me in the shape
of The The,

a shadow dark as a silhouetted hand,
stung as deep as the purple

flower,
our heads have gotten heavy.

Let’s go to sleep like this,
nude, cold,

blank and sluggish as cotton that has been
torn off and floats away.

We push one another across
the white rock,

rest together,
sing together, find
water together,

swim how
it
stays in its pool
together,

how it knows the song
of merging
waited
in the desert.

Your words are my words.
We speak them from the same mouth,
our languages move simultaneously

and so does The The,
the,
where is our
The?

Morning, Again

The fly dwells in the ivy
again,
his cocoon is no self,

it is a costume.

Fabric slips off of a woman’s
wet body
like an ice slab melting into the Arctic,

ad it is there on the floor again,
and
her body is all points, it sings like luminescent water.

Our jack-o-lanterns have
cried themselves
to sleep, shriveled into the sad old faces of mice
eating them,

and the leaves have crawled
into the oven of earth
to bake into tiny chips.

The Night

Night, the toad,
sits on my chest.

He is fat and heavy, sluggish
from slurping up blood and excrement--thank you--
beer, ham, cleaning out the shower drains,

sweeping the floors, running the
garbage disposal, clearing his
throat before delivering a lengthy speech;

during which, I fall asleep but

there were bodies
in there. There were small
bodies in his mouth. There was the
mud of music. He makes me sick.

The night
makes confetti
out of blades of light.

They sneeze white and golden,
I watch them
as they dance up there on the ceiling.

Sleep assembles itself.
It takes slow black steps
through the wires of hair
that have continued to grow
for years
over my torso.

The cabbies
out there
read their newspapers and their heads
bend backwards
slowly
into the dark,

the cats cross the street, stronger
than any of the humans in it,
somehow wise,
somehow sharpened to a point,
abase me in my bed.


The fat toad
then
holds a cigar
between his fleshy lips. He wears his
hat. His belly drags over my yellow body.

This toad of night worships
me.

He worships my
head as his
emperor, and yet
he abuses me, hungers for me.

His hunger is immensely visible.
It is in a glass orb, it is so present, it is like
perfume.

And the light
across the way, high over
the stone and the ivy,
the twisted ferns, the iron stairs,
is still on
somehow.

It’s been on
now
for three days
and three nights
without going off.

Sometimes a figure
passes by

and sometimes
it stays,
it seems to go on between floors,
through the floor, flying between floors, this figure,

an imagined
creature
of the toad
of night’s fantasy.

What We Should Have Done In Big Sur

We should have stopped
at Miller’s Library.
I heard they’ve got
his skeleton
behind glass.
But certain parts of it
have kept growing.
No one knows why.
Now it looks like
John Merrick’s head
too big for a hat, hands
of uneven size, one foot
a brick.
His penis is contained
in an old beer can. It
resembles preserved fruit. His
testicles and anus
in a similar cavity—the
urn of a French waiter.
We should have modeled ourselves
after his collection of
toads and lizards who live in
shoebox coffins,
his tongue wrapped around a grape
that they couldn’t pry off, his jaw
like a goddamn stone hammer.
We should have built our own
library there, a cemetery, a library
of bones,
I said
as we looked over an honest-to-god
cliff.
It gets abrupt, you said and closed the door.
We were on our way
back
to San Francisco then.

Peanut Shells

A bowl of peanut shells
with my fingers in it, the
dead tattle on the living.
They are desperate for
attention, the blue
suds of their time on earth still sing
somewhere, along with the
choir of yet another coming Christmas,
It washes our hair and runs in our gutters.
Peanut shells, you stay up late
with me.
You gossip, influence my thoughts,
my love, you are
locusts who have slipped out of their
lives, you are the wings of
prehistoric flies, you are
headstones.
Your wheat
colored eyes twiddling with
naughty dreams, I turn off the light
and listen to traffic.

Perspectives On The Circle

The sun
is quiet up there.
Nothing comes out of it.
But you know what it’s doing--it’s raging.
Behind the crowns of our buildings
it’s burning beyond itself,
it does not know
it burns.
The plane rushes over us
with sounds like a giant silver funnel
and beside me, men from Chinatown
who seem like they must be
130 years old
eat sesame cookies, put their
canes and caps up on the bench,
we are all warmed like god feathers.

We have faces like numerals.
We look at each other
and recognize something.

Blue-pink feet are aired, a bicycle
can be ridden through
the rubbing of two hands, the opening and
closing of hands
like a door.

A fly haunts the cracks.
He is an unmitigated snob. Hairs like
fish’s chin hairs have grown from his back—they are
called legs.

The train looks heavy
as it sways
down the tunnel,
in the tunnel that goes
underneath the dome
the red leaf lies on its back
like a cadaver.
His arms are out. His legs, out.
No one has bothered to arrange him.
No one knows how to identify his face.

The grief of it
grows buds. Red buds and hair. Thick gray hair.
Like roots, like the tails of rats, like Birch trees.

A Day Has Ended

The wood in this apartment squeaks.
The cat has finally settled in
to the couch.
She’d been recently
preoccupied
with one
particular
section of wall. Staring at it. Pawing it.
I figured there was someone in there
talking to her.

I look out into the flat, smudged face of a tree,
a wall of leaves, I look up
into the Cassandra moon, and the
silly blue
fabric that
man has put over his windows.
We can see his kitchen anyway;
we can see his old hands holding knives.

This book had been rained on many times.
I left it on the balcony
to collect
dirty pools in its pages.
Now they are disfigured
and resemble old faces. I touch their lips.
Upon them, the saliva
dried up, the sheen of dead writers.

The mute
wind.

He does not act in expressive properties, the wind.
Music or autopsy.
And somehow the tree has been convinced by this wind,
and the cat bends into night.

I keep my ankles uncomfortably folded,
try not to disturb her
or the sleeping woman
next to me. I think of the stillness of caves.

I do not want to go to sleep—I don’t care
for the shape of that
mirror’s circle, a grape
in a god’s mouth
as it holds
open,
terribly open.

So I conjure up the old mothers.
They skid about the room in slippers,
they take
baths
in our bathtub, they forget to cover
their breasts as they drink milk
from children’s cups.

And the leaves, I think, are like doctors
who have put an IV in me,
administering an anesthesia, and are waiting for it
to take effect,
studying me as I go to sleep.

Then she emits a small sound in her sleep.
A little comma in some dream,
a half
owl hoot, the fragment
of a scream.

And it pushes me
into it. Not
at all
ready.

Time With Teeth Marks In It

A woman
wearing
a
wig

eats a
peach,

and looks around
at us
wondering,

it seems,

who’s next?

Some properties
within her,

like a banana
refrigerated,

have been arrested.

Meanwhile, I am
still
oozing into life,
haunting the
house

as much as you
haunt
the house.

We are
climbing the stairs
in
opposite
directions.

Somewhere else
the despot sings
in the bathtub, fingers his
blade, his pistol,
drinks his pear
brandy,

eats fruit salad,
sandwiches, sardines
from a can.

The fly,
who is big and
hairy as a dog in my dream,
leans on his cane
and waits for
death to jump out of the closet.

Surprise.
The skull has grown hair
and the fly’s
still around.

I admire his
bulky form

just
as the huge gray
slab
of a cloud
covers the sun
like a
hand
impervious and

takes
my light
away.

The Career

Someone is writing,
currently,
the previous books of
history, those which do not
involve us. They go forward,
ahead of us.
A blindfolded man kisses
the dark at a brown desk
while ironing his shirt.
He whistles and combs his hair,
prepares his speech. It is
his death speech, and the words
make such heaps of shapes
he cannot hear their sounds,
especially not
the little meows.
Someone
will be forced to take his place. So, he
wings it, follows through.
Says a number of very true
but very unbelievable things.
I remember that man
following me.
He was talking to himself,
nonsense over
Wall Street and how he
couldn’t find a fucking restroom.
Well, he swallowed my love
down his own dog’s mouth
like a ventriloquist; laughed his
owl laugh
through a glass of
water; plugged
his body
into an electrical outlet, three-
prongs; held the threats of
unimagined futures; looked in the
mirror and said hi to me.
Banquets of crying mothers
hired him, stupidly, to be their
photographer. He wrote their
biographies as my dying mother, told
the story of her dying to the dying earth.
A video of it was put to heavenly music,
and posted, and set when he retired
as he sat upon the toilet
smoking a cigarette
and wishing for
better times. Just then,
a wasp flew out from under his anus.
It glowed yellow and instead of
humming, rang like a siren, meaning
it was coming for him too.

Imprisoned Birds

There is a tree
that traps birds.

Every bird that flies in there and
sits down
cannot come out.

None of the other birds know this
so they keep flying in there
and sitting down.

When
they can’t leave
they squawk, screech,
whistle while turning their small heads.

Convene on how it's going
to end.

Now they’ve all collected in there,
hundreds of them. Hundreds of
different kinds, hundreds of
families, grandmothers, peepers.

A civilization in a tree.

They have grown old in there.
Measures are taken to dispose of the dead.

They crap and preen.
The last resort
is a sound they make, a sound they all make
together.

It's meant to draw attention to their plight.

But from the outside, it just sounds like
nonsense.

The Cruel, Restless Country

Who hungers for breakfast
after a cold sleep.

I prefer the colder
días myself,

these years are headed for an
Ice Age anyway.

The tusks of woolly mammoths
frozen in the blank tundra are shaking,

their molars
smiling like stones the size of
fists, pointing us toward the poles, the word,

the direction we’re supposed to march
slowly as a humanness, I draw a map in the
hemisphere

with my snoring. My bare
feet are useful as blood upon
a cave wall, thinking or unthinking,
seeing without seeing.

We will have 1,000 days.
We will burn 1,000 times,
you will somehow shut in 1,000 tubes
and shout into 1,000 tunnels,

and your rodent faces
will mourn.

Watching Hawks Hunt In The Park

He looked like an airplane coming toward me.

When he perched
up in that tree
the whole branch shook, he was
that heavy.

All I could really see was his head.
It occurred to me that he was basically invisible
up there, so I could have walked by
a hundred times
if I hadn’t seen him fly.

After a few minutes,
I watched
as he disconnected from the branch,
swooped down
over my head, his chest like a white diamond,

and flew a hundred yards or so
over the grass, passed one squirrel,
then went for another one.

The talons came out like two hands, the squirrel
turned and shot up a tree.
He missed.

I looked around. Did anyone else see that?
I thought.

No one seemed to
have seen it.

Love, With Anne Sexton

It is her
when I look in the mirror.

It is her too
when I reach out in the dark room.

The mirror
encompasses the surface, the silver face,

the tea knees, the ashen
gray weavings of her eyes.

Who were these
neighborhoods you haunted? Where

was that street you wrote about?
I imagine it through the opaque light of a glass of milk.

Who, what dwarf hobbled next to you
that no one else could see? I see him. I see him as myself.

I feel you in my sleep
picking at my toes, my

genitals--
free from the honey of the mountain,

washed
with cold water directly from your lake.

Anne makes a painting of herself.
Anne is the painting, doubled in the moon,

her little armless selves
fly in the night.

The white fingernailed
hands and wrists of lovers

are pressed against the screen,
oh no, half of your face is the sun.

Maybe this time
you will exercise using a mallet on your skull,

maybe you will sing again like a body—
I conjure you

sitting on the wicker chair,
made out of pillows and the black form of a cat.

We will eat, again,
at the cheapest Italian restaurant in Beacon Hill.

Out there, the wind.
It doesn’t have writing, the mirror is on sale.

From this she introduces me,
her waxy melodies of sleep are nodding here in the room

resembling a shark
skimming the bottom, barely breathing.

No breasts, no familiar scents, no gills, no red
blood or cherry pits.

Her pasture is the bottom of its mouth, its tongue,
the sounds in the room, its black eye.

Now the cats around her
are burning in great piles. Ours is there. Gas lingers.

Her corpse is still warm and
damn, it happened again as we reflected on her face,

plus the sounds of the wind
and a bit of this other woman’s snore, faces in leaves.

What if I did not put stamps upon
the letters to your houses, Anne,

to tell your sisters, your babies, your brothers
that you are dead?

Why do the dead come around with so much
vague regret? Do

none of you really know
what’s happened?

You don’t have children anymore.
You don’t have dogs.

The Sound of the Hairdryer in the Bathroom

With that sound
I remember she is in there
like the sound of an airplane somewhere
over the trees.

I’m confused by the squawk of some
bird that repeats like the pieces of a
puzzle, nearing completion.

Frank O’Hara’s death haunts me. He
sleeps like I slept, and as others
are still sleeping. In the barn, on the beachfront with no shirt.

Death is in the sunflower, the bored
cat, the sound of electricity
pulsing through the wall. She comes

out, naked from the waist up, and
again, oh yes, she is in there now and she’s
come out, and it all snaps together, I have occurred like a yawn or like the years.

Music replies in the morning, the telephone
is still busted as is the washing machine
and door buzzer. So, perhaps, I won’t be

reached. Still, I think, something will happen while I
wait here, the ringing phone will not be behind a
locked door, the hairdryer will blast away the quietnesses of myself.

The Post Office

Where did the sun go? the
teller says, as she weighs out my envelopes.

I look out there
but do not answer.

I know it was supposed to storm
all day, and it had for a bit—that morning—against my windows
but beyond that, I’m baffled.

We all stand there looking outside,
me and the teller and then the second teller,
contemplating what to say about the weather,
about where the sun went.

Then in comes this guy
with messy hair and a lot of crap
stuffed into his pockets.

Excuse me, he says,
have you seen two unmarked packages
filled with angels?

Yes, says the second teller,

and he goes to get these
boxes filled with
angels.

The Old Woman

She comes on and I get up.
Thank you, she says
and that’s the last of it.

Her eyes look at her master, studying the
master.
enchanted, threatened,
hypnotized by that master.

She is a day of the dead doll, the shell of a cicada
on a workbench
under the ax
in all its splendor—wrinkled and pink warm.

Across the way, a girl eats a green apple
and writes with a pen.
does a crossword puzzle.
It all seems to blast this
old woman
away
as she sits there, holding onto the bar.

The apple eating, the writing,
the crossword,
the face that looks like
washed laughter.

And over there, a man with
immense feet grumbles in his
fat brown throat and
spits hell
into a napkin.

The old woman watches,
peaceful as the
stuffed egret

Girl

there is a clam
with a sea inside of it.

she shines and laughs like
thousands of teeth, her brine

the memory of her
mother.

Damn, sad

two heads close together
one going down like a shadow,
and in the house the master comes and says hello
and the
short
life
is over.

we watched it from the branches of a tree, the windows of a bedroom.

dead little thing
dead flower dead bird,
you take a blunt weapon, ram it into the jelly of
night and of
pain…the wool of fear, the rough sack put on over our heads--
laugh now at the viper’s shot. the boa’s mouth
the wolf throat.

Cry short, then stop. Scratch my asshole in its light wisdom.
It’s a small ending for something
small again

Can't Sleep

My mind tends to act
aggressively
toward itself
early in the morning.
When I’ve come
for some reason
awake, and look out
the window
at the cold light
of some unresolved
hour—a few birds, much
cloud cover, one
smoke alarm dinging
somewhere
in the building…

I start the processes of paranoia, terror, go
about thought
the wrong way, the way
cancer goes about
reaming
your internal organs without saying anything. A perversion
of magic,
shit--it’s a systematic
unwinding
of my authority.

The water up there spills from
organized, peaceful cups
to buckets
and then
overflows
to the floor, and eventually, a
steep canyon with no
plant life
where it bakes to
dry death in the
sun.

Small problems
become emergencies.

I am the wild
murderer of Sigmund Freud.

Time is resisted by the earth
and all
except
me.

I am the bearer of the
greatest fears and
stresses
and unwanted inheretences of man--
those
which are mine.

So there I am, worried,
and I listen to her snore.
This is what sometimes
returns me
to a more humane form of things,

where
watching it go by is the same as
sleeping,
watching trees
blur into windowless houses and the
rank slough of man is like sleep itself,
and it sleeping is the same as
watching it sleep and
finally,
resisting the passage of
1 hr. some 15 minutes, sleeping,
I sleep,
which is, of course,
what they call it.

The Pages Are Rickety As Matchbooks

Relationships with people
are the same old jokes.
The same old bath
moving around in the same gray tub,
the same laughter
sinking to the bottom.

The same bowl, washed again and again,

stupid like a circle,

the asshole of a seashell that
goes round and round
into itself
and so do you and I--

that’s what it is:
boueyed, beaten, ping-
ponged by waves
in houses, apartments, bathrooms, jobs
earths, oceans.

I am here, I say,
and so are all of you.

So what if the ocean’s stopped moving?
It’s just like a fish or a frog

it died.
There are no fish, there are no fish or
frogs, there is no rain.

So what if we’ve lost track of time?

I am here
and so are all of you.

We’re eating food, celebrating holidays, making
phone calls.
Drinking that wine,
watching that purple flame
Ok

Chinatown expands like a love note
and so do the universes,
the universities, corporations
commerce and cancer.

Roads cover most of it
like time.

Everything is capable of being watched.

I am here
and so are all of you,
so how do we like
the big kill?

Cool as plaid foxes, we are, pond water
single-celled organisms
moving their cilia.

Goons a-rockin’ the ground,

I hear sounds.
The screaming in the nights
of
their dogs at the ends of chains,
their refrigerators full of food,
TVs on.

Guns loaded with shot.

I am here

and so are all of you:

the young man there with half his jaw gone,
the cheerleader, the fake, the producer,
the virgin masturbator, the homeless
atheist,
the boiled chef, the theater
goer,

masters of race, creativity, economy, media:

clients are our main criteria,
and music…

Populations emerge
every day
like invertebrates from the water

and I do not hear them
and I do not want to.

I rest in the wilderness of myself.
Lose them in my own sort of matrimony.

It is the only kind of love I worship.

I am here
and so are all of you
and still, I do not tell a joke.

The Feet People

The curtains move still
and they move in some math,
I know that now. They move in some
extension of the leaves, some reaction
to the bleatings of hermits.

It becomes the ghostly white
sum of her mind, this aura,
the aura of her face of numbers,
and
it adds up to an area; an area like a foot.

Who are these heads of feet?
These bodies of beautiful
feet becoming body
areas?

Belly-button, eye, hair
hole, her mind is simply
moved in a different scale, a rotation like the
rotation of the sun, and more numerous attributes emerge,
calling itself constantly
to hear echoes, and see that it’s still there.

These echoes are the movements of cantos,
the curtains of closing and stopping this movement,
in and out, the ghost breath
of the house.

The Waiting Man

The man who waited--
waiting was his ambulance.
It turned into
birds upon some lurid sky
he lost while he sat there
waiting, it turned into
moss.

Waiting was the sound of
corn husks
rustling in between rocks and
autumn dirt,
the crows moving through them
like medics finding
bodies in wreckages.

This afternoon
his waiting takes the form
of purple toes dipped in purple water, the purple
dogs bark a melody
emitted in the empty firehouse.

Whose waiting
has he seen, in Vegas
paying animals to dance or in Venice
pushing angels down stairs,
talking on the telephone with his mother
who has throat cancer and an
overweight boyfriend,

voices reaching him throughout the day,
these are the voices of the waiting minds
circling the bald arches of his head.

Loony blurbs surround him,
find their ways to newspapers, folly
in rags dressed up like
cowboy rip-offs and Dracula
pushovers, comb the floor of the dance hall
for bones in the confetti, hair in the wilted balloons.

Laughter joins him and waits too,
the white head of a goat in a yoke,
chainmail masked hostages
called tourists reach for him and want a cigarette.
He asks for one back
as they flicker away, tadpoles in ruin,
whistlers
of what they think
is godly music.

A Sense of the World as an Entity

Babies are born
and one after the other
crawl through the internet.
Their laughter
in huge in halls is
made out of names, their
bodies experiments of chance.
We farm them in hydraulic
busses non-stop
one way,
terrible one way to the Midwest,
the nothing land of rust,
egos scooped out from some giant marrow ball
and plunged into them,
and flattened out.
Planes are inserted into their hearts, their
sounds are numbers made by tongues
that are just
fleshy wedges of time.

Amongst The Sleepy Pigeons

There is a death in there
and it’s gone to bed—took off its
stale socks and aired its feet
in the sheets, just the bald top of his head
sticking out of there now, his brain.

Beside him, on the bedside table,
a carnival of flies upon a dead rat,
the crazy remains of a man’s mind
as he curses loudly, punches the air,
then goes to sleep on the ground.

This is all because this death is in there
sleeping,
sucking his thumb, getting drunk.

Some family of pigeons
picks at a piece of brown bread.
Four or five of them, maybe,
all standing around poking at this
bread.
The bread is getting pulled back and forth between them
as they poke and pick at it,
the bread looks like a body.

When he wakes up and stretches,
the loosening of his back muscles,
the tendons in his legs, arms and neck,
releases this whole new
swarm of flies, who emerge
like a full-sized man.

Incarnations

My name is Church,
my name is Hombre Church
and I reside in the residues of dust.
My houses are numerous
because I am numerous,
and I am the sun shutter blinking
Hello.

My name is Furlong,
the killer Furlong,
who sharpens knives on his
teeth and laughs in
bathtubs full of lady’s
dresses. I tie my wolves to
cacti, I squeeze out
pomegranate juice like
blood from bars of soap
and wash myself while
whistling…

Hello like a prickly pear,
Hello jet fuel burned across the sky,
Hello continuing orange embers.

My name is Speed McCoozy.
I was born in the Mexican city of
Mancuso. El Mancuso. Ok, not
Mexico, but Iowa, and I killed myself
in the corn. Ok, not the corn, in the
tree house my father built and
painted green, I hanged myself with
chickadee wire.

Take a while and look through my
photographs, my sing songs and whistle
out my sentences.

This is the only way I’ll know my
own name.

Half-life

Death does its job for what?
A number of years?
A decade?
Well however long it lasts
it is your slave and your
friend, your rival, your twin, your
master;
someone to kiss, something to
work against.
A plow. A wave. A
shotgun.
But now it’s wearing off.
I tell you it’s wearing off now
so I will prowl the streets
like a Burmese dog.
Delirious and sniffing the dirt for grass,
poking for tastes of fire,
the sounds of some awful siren
or yellow stench of gasoline.

And when I find them
in their perfection

they will
kill me
again.

Early

Only painters in white
Painter’s pants
Were out in the
Inner corners of
Unpainted doorways,
Draped in white sheets,
Smoking,
Their brown, creased foreheads
Loosened in love of the morning,
Happy that it was what time
It was
And the work was yet to be done.
I did not nod to them,
And I did not say hello.

Death

There was snow
inside my father’s house.
All along the walls it
piled two feet high.
It’s on the stairs, it’s
underneath the refrigerator,
it’s in the bathroom sink, in the
beds.
It’s in the fireplace now too. Snow.
And gallons
and gallons of snow’s milk.

His face is white with it
as he asks, “do you believe
in the years?” He coughs and clears snow
from the ears, mouth and from within
the clothes he’s got on. His eyes gurgle and
blink in the snow milk and the eyes
are like dark little holes
in it.

“This is what it is,” he says. “Oh…” he says,
“oh no…Look. I’ve come all clogged with snow
and milk.”

The Horse In The Wall

I look at the wall
and hear her guff,
her rump mashed
in between the drywall
in an entirely new language,
though I recognize it now as
the language of my mother’s
ghost. The pictures move,
the candles tremble as she
turns around in that stall, that
horrible little cell in the wall.
She shifts, trapped,
standing in there so still
she’s growing white
flowers on her back, moss
upon her jaws. There is
fungus puffing from her pointed ears,
her nostrils, her genitals. So when we
open up the wall,
tear into it with an ax or a sledgehammer,
we’ll just find a standing garden there,
an upright beast of foliage, scents,
fruit, roots, her organs turned to
tubers, hair turned into grass, insect
larvae crawling from beneath her skin, and her eyes
the moon.

Sod

There is sod where his vegetables used to grow.
A square of sod next to the shed.

It’s got a different color
than the rest of the yard.
It’s an imposter.

The white shed
with a padlock
on the wood door,
he died after his cucumbers
came up.

First, he died
then he died more as the cucumbers
pushed through as well as the
cabbage and the sprouts. It was a purple earth
display as he died good that day
with tomatoes shivering
alone on the vine.

One year later, his daughter pulled up
the vegetables and planted sod
next to the shed, the padlocked
shed behind the house
rising over the white shadow,
bright green.

The Café Car

Here we are. There is something sad about it,
how we’ve all lined up in here, in the café car.

Fathers by themselves ordering coffee,
sandwiches and beer. Candy bars, sweets,
with their hands
in their pockets
and their
feelings
on the floor.

They bend over and pick them up,
couples prod one another for love,

nuts, Coca-Cola
classic,

our little pleasures.

There’s something sad about being human like this.
About standing in line in the café car just waiting for
something to eat.

Meloncholia

Mount
Saint Helens
will drop her slough
upon
our shoulders.

Old men’s hands
will shake
covered in
crumbs.

I will eat raisins.
It will rain.

It is an
accumu-
-lation;

Abe Lincoln
will
cry
and write letters
in the dark
forever.

The Steps I Hear Are My Own

The floor
makes sounds
like clouds—
the clouds are
old.
What if they lasted like that
and did not
die?
What if they did not
break down,
and collected there
in the sky, one on top of
the other forever.
A medieval cloud,
a Hitler cloud, a cloud
that was watched by
Marie Antoinette, and laughed
at by Marie Antoinette?

What I Angels Were Giants?

And you saw one slouching in the yard there,
Her shoulders towering like the massive bush
of a wet tree holding

feathers in her mouth,
weeping at the dynasty of her busted family,
and how they’d gone back into their
holes in Arizona.

Their pets, huge Gila monsters
and saguaro cacti aching for
balance in the white wind
had run away.

What if the giant angel
became pregnant? And her belly grew
grass and we used it as an exquisite playground?

And her birth canal was the
tunnel to our houses?

Bukowski's Last

Bukowski stopped
because he died.

At least it wasn’t the other way around.

His last book,
it felt like someone looked into the
refrigerator,
saw one box,
opened it up
and
looked upon two eggs left in there or maybe even
one
and said
ok—let’s eat.

Gone

I must admit I thought you’d left.
Your name was gone from the news-
papers and the television
was blank and anxious and the many
screens had turned away; there was no activity in their brains.
The signs that came across
from the twitching of your eyelids
were no longer affecting mine. This is a terrible moment
of fear, you see.
When the things like this mean
the worst has happened,
and you think of things beyond: the
bats circling and you’re down there at the
door to the barn alone, a leaf in the grave,
the horses moving on their hooves
purple in the paddock, cold death rubbing
up against their rumps, locks grinning, police
sirens in the dark…
gold bones
under their feet got
verve and aggregate courage
I just can’t manage.

I Am Both

Something in the sun sounds like music,
something in myself is the sun.
The music deletes the sun yet comes
from inside of it.
I ache like the sad music of her sounds,
her sons are a tribe of impotent warriors,
I ask the movements to emerge
like from within a tomb.
Who’s come to start this sun, my
music? And when I arrived who
blew it in the opposite direction
creating a whirlwind?

A tornado hums over the landscape,
a funnel cloud barks in green,
comes over the sun.
There is the blue barn
crouched in its cave of stones,
holding its small visions, its small
encryptions.
The whiney mind moans,
her wood planks shudder and the light
of the diaphragm opens totally up
upon these angels of stuffed horses in their stalls,
eating apples in the frozen darkness,
their eyelashes are words I think of then,
their heads, the mountains of
computers mainframes.

The Glacier Moves

Sometimes
I lay there on my back
in the dark
and I wait.

The fan whirls
overhead like an anarchist’s
voice
while a woman sleeps,
makes her sleeping sounds.

They are the sounds of words
and their meanings are hidden
in the folds of a mountain’s
snow.

Furthermore, the mountain
is swept along,
it sweeps along, and cries, and her feet are touching
the cold sea.

Her acting is in the leaves at the base,
the leaves have
turned black this year,
and are now dead and
dirt as well as their
original forms,

and these ideas are farmed
like salmon in cages,
their eggs
withheld
to buy more cages,
and the cages repaired
to buy more milk.
Who are you?

I say to the face of the fan,
as the shadows return to their proper orders, the leaves
crossing over themselves
in quiet hymnal prayer,
though then it occurs to me that this idea
is wrong;

There is no prayer where there is no idea.

There is no prayer where there is no love.

I wait to hear the sound
of a waterfall, her snore,
and that means
nothing but what it’s helped me to do,
and that’s fall asleep.

Heroism

I woke up
thinking I had
testicular cancer.
I was sure of it. At
first the fear was great and
upsetting as I felt around down there
and located what I thought were
several lumps.

But then I thought, what if I became an
expert bow hunter, and my testicular cancer
aided in my bow hunting ability? What if it helped
me kill a superb Buck in the wilderness, a
Buck of great beauty & wisdom & balance,
tasty venison, & this Buck began me,
my life as a famous bow hunter
& fed me, & throughout the state of Wisconsin
my unconscious mind walked superb &
earned me celebrity, friends & glory? And all this
came from my testicular cancer?

Ghosts are there reading newspapers and laughing

I seen the bald head of a
ghost on the train. He
was reading a newspaper. I knew
it’s him because he had that faint
pink light coming off of him.
No one else noticed it, but I
noticed it. I remembered his funeral.
Then he saw me remembering
his funeral and he laughed at my
memory. Except, he pretended
he was laughing at something in the
newspaper.

The Elephant Bird

You were said to be
the biggest bird
we’d ever known.

Bones, feathers,
archaeology,
myths in one--

smiling death in Madagascar.

You could feed many
for months.

O
your size*,
o
your grotesque size
really gets me,
it bewilders me, I am on my knees here:

that’s the honor you still have
you stuffed museum doll.

One of your eggs
is big
as a wall
mirror, and I look in her,
and I see the elephant
head nodding forth like a Christ.

Angel of growth. You caw
or roar
with cancer
in that category, roar

at the gun-
shots of my ancestry.




*10 ft. tall, 1,100 lbs.

For My Brother, Who Is A Tremendous Eater

I find it hard to believe, in fact,
that he knows what he is eating.

Perhaps one day I’ll switch his sandwich for a mitten
and I have no doubt, he will eat the mitten
right away.

He talks while he is eating. But,
somehow the eating also emanates
sounds that resemble talking.

Actually, the sounds he makes may very well be nonsense,
and it is simply the act of eating
that is producing these various
syllables and grunts
that he has convinced people are speech.

In any case, I respond.

I can see his mind while he is eating.
It looks like food.

When he is eating a rolled up taco, for instance,
that’s what his mind looks like: a rolled up taco.
Even if I am talking over Big Sur,
California.

It doesn’t really matter
as it all drips down
his hair-covered arms.

The Museum of Sleep

I sleep
with stuffed buffalo
and King Kong.
Arrowed, buckshot, skinned and
tortured, these giants
roam silently down the hill,
dolls of my moments, buffalo
and apes.

Underneath the feet of the
buffalo and apes
are thousands of babies
crawling beneath the
covers of the dirt, creaky little voices—these are

unborn babies, non-
conceived babies, like
turnips in the brains of their
parents who live in
Wichita, Milwaukee,
South Bend.

They, in my sleep,
my nocturnal tank,
respond to my various calls,
my guttural mews, my roars,
my moans and my brays and
whistles.

Galloping, I cannot make them out
as I draw them on paper
in the dark room, the scribbled
head of sleeping.

When I wake up
I am filled with sawdust.
I begin to talk. Talking
is my drawing.
It wakes her up. And before
I can stop myself, I’ve said
a number of strange, disturbing things.

Pink St.

The cat
sleeps half-
burned

on the sofa’s
corner.

While on Pink St.
below
death rolls
on.

Who is this mayor
of Pink
St.

who
comes
in awful cans of
pickled, inert
human
paste?

His mind
is famous
for having worked
miracles
in other cities—turned

tombs
into lampshades
covering lightening.

Now, it’s a
trick he’s gone and done here to us.

All that’s left is
black stumps
and
half-burned cats
and dozens of stitches
running up and
down
like zippers on
our hearts;

of course,
not mine. No, not mine.

Of course, I’m here
in a jar myself. My eyes
in bags, my
genitals wrapped
in
gauze, my hands
disassembled
like jigsaw puzzles of
clouds

come on!

Who’s done this to us?
Who’s
gone ahead and
done something
other than the usual
wake up
and yawn at their dreams of lions
before changing the batteries,
cinching the full
bag of trash
and tossing the tepid
water
of the
Hydrangeas?

Collections

There is a dirty mandible
floating in the glue of my gray matter.
These are the fossils
of my family members
who end themselves
each minute
and float past me
where I select their bones,
their teeth, their
vestigials.

Too much comes off daily
for one farmer
to push alone
in a slow wheel-
-barrow,
out into the
dark field.

So, they’re dumped,
strange,
into the bland jelly of my
fluorescent heart, which
is soulful and
is near me. It grows
nothing.

Short of true regeneration,
cataloguing is my industry,

collaging, steaming,
horticulture, mega-
-ton
smiling

Oh god. Laughter.

Laughter + bones.

Observations

The sky
has
two suns in it.

One is the reflection of the other.
One of the suns is
me,
I am that sun.

I speak of godlessness
because I am godless.

No,
I am not godless;
I am god and I am
happy as he.

Happy and
godless
as the lion’s bloody face,
the saguaro that does not
move or shiver,
just stands there
in the night
as the stars
circle
him.

The Octopus

Was an inventor in heaven.
He invented many things,
his own birth
one of them for instance,
crawling and scrawling out
this shape on the wall
in the theater of the sea.

And he invented colors and he invented writing.

Yes, I knew it was you—
only your bulbous brain has enfolded
so completely to imagine this gibberish,
octopus, whose
limbs are the alphabet
camouflaging into nothing.

The Huge Shadows of Hands

It’s a grotesque
and bloody
movement they
dance into the room.

Dressed like old women
in nightgowns
they take turns
reminding us that ghosts
are waiting
in the living room
for us;

all we’ve got to do is
go on in the living room
and talk to the ghosts.

Some New Season

It arrives flaming
on the back of a crocodile

floating dead
down the Ganges.

We all work to pull it through,
pull it happily to the edges of our toes.

It is cooled when it comes up
and the mud, too, is cool.

How has it cooled in that time?
Some aspects have been removed.

The crocodile’s throat is stuffed
with weeds and muck. Her eyes
are still,

and someone set her on fire for us
and sent her down the river.

Yes, that’s what it’s like.

Magic Outside of the Drugstore

There was a man standing underneath a tree.
I don’t know what kind of tree it was. It was
planted in the sidewalk and he was standing there
underneath it, staring at it.

He had a white beard and long white hair that
curled around the backs of his
overgrown ears.

He also had a suitcase
and eyes that seemed to shine like
stones out
from all that water
of hair.

He kept standing there, staring,
so that you knew he was making something happen.

It would just take a while:

Eventually, he would move
closer to that tree
and the tree would move closer to him,
and they would float together
after a number of years and
form one thing, and you’d just see the tree
standing there, or maybe the
white ends of his hair on the
bark, but no one would know
it was a man in there,
the last ends of a man.

The Neighbor

The old man chopped off
the heads of his flowers
and sanded his teeth
as was customary each morning,
then locked his lock twice
before passing me.

He smelled
of ham and homefries.

Once again
he passed back
as I turned around
to retrieve something I’d forgotten.

Perhaps
he’d forgotten something too.

Perhaps we’d
forgotten the same something. Perhaps
this man was my roommate.
Perhaps he had forgotten me.
Perhaps he was my father,
my father beheading marigolds
or tulips or queen anne’s lace
under the windows,
forgetting something
because he is dead
now, and the dead
don’t have memories.

Anyhow, the door came open
for the second time and as I stood there
he actually seemed surprised to have it come open like that,
as he made a little gesture with
his beautiful old face.