Voices In The Blue Hills

This is the place for translation.

For making rubbings of
things into other things, other forms.

Where the skull gets translated
as leaf and log, where lists of my gentry
are unraveled
and dispersed like seedpods. Where gravestones

sprout like hens of the forest.

All around me is the unbrushed
hair of years. Bunched, yellowed. This, too,

gets translated

into words and bodies
as I lunch in the abandoned stone house.

Why have I brought these terrible
apples here

to eat alone?

It is with this question that I continue
with my work. Push the softened

blue hills at their rest
to mold with
future’s unloving blueprints.

How Many Of Me

How many of me were there
when I came out?
Flailing and reaching with
how many hands
at the glowing streams of light,
eyes flickering
to the
tunes of autumn?

And was it a terror
to see me there, upside-
down and shaking, gargantuan
mass of myself
so gustily birthed, with so many limbs
and so many eyes, and to
kill all but one
and
allow it to leave?

One ingenious invention
from the
billion-celled
ocean.

How many of me did you drown?
Bury without marker?
Did their toenails drag when you
hanged them? And with how much
rope?

There is, somewhere,
a photo album entirely of my
portraiture. My
likenesses;
which, every moment, expands
and enfolds.

Will they march with me through the years?
Twins masked
by the blurred cone of time’s hat.
Roaming like invisible clocks.

A layer of feathers
growing upon me in equal number to they,
and to years.

It is good to die with
eyes open, they say—and my eyes
were open. Taking
stock of the
moods and allegories of this world,
this sparkler in the green night
towed behind us.

Learning To Write With My Left Hand

In the dark, frost coated blue.

Fish meander
about in the
tank, dulled blades of the tropics,
murmuring
in only
cheap silences.

I wait and watch my brain
record its solemn, loyal functioning;
oh, how cute. How brave.

Muscles twitch like violin strings.

The lamp just
went out
in the neighbor’s window.
I didn’t even know it was
on to begin with.

And that box of tissues on the
bequeathed dresser
looks almost morose; but maybe
that’s just because
I know who brought it there.

The Postcard

Someone probably paid a little money for it.
I didn’t pay much. Three for a dollar out of a shoebox
in a maritime chopshop. The sign said
“Relatives For Sale.”
Then a stack of old postcards
in see-through envelopes. Photographs of people
all of which I figured were long dead. The ghost-like
faces of children. Women in black dresses
at the beach. A family on the bumper of an automobile.
One man standing proudly with only a
foggy lake behind him.
This one had been tinted blue and given a decorative border.
And in the middle, two people from the stomachs up
kissing. The man almost shorter than the lady,
as she seemed to bend to him.
Her face merely a profile, his more
of the whole thing. Taken by surprise, I think,
a tight and flat pucker to his mouth.
Whereas she had full control of her grace and love.
Or the appearance of it. Softer. Her sweater buttoned
to her sternum. Daring in what
corner of her eye could be seen. On the back, a space
for a message. And a space for an address.
Neither one filled in. Rather, sideways along the top in
blue pen written: Josie and Luther Goreman
Taken in Wilder, Tenn
about 1920

We had a few short
happy years together.

I have since wondered about Josie and Luther Goreman.
Who was it that arranged this photograph? Said, alright
now kiss you two. Said, we’d like it blue please. Or maybe that
was just the blueness of time. Who wrote
the message I’ve read so often? Summed things up
with such courage and simplicity. Was it Josie,
or was it Luther?
Whose fence is it
behind them? And why were their happy years
together so short?

I’ve also come to think, since I purchased this piece
of paper so long ago in that damp, quiet store in winter--
among maps and hooks and buoys, harpoons and
wheels as tall as me, a full scuba suit in one corner
a hundred years old with a skull behind the cross
hatched mask--that it is my most beloved and prized
thing. That I will keep track of it, of
The Goremans,
for the rest of my life.

The Lying Web Of Shadows

A cat with no face appears in the window--and I’m on the third floor in here.
The houseplants are whimpering little blades
that chatter like prisoners.

She’s pregnant--belly full ‘a eyeless numbers.
She grooms her fur with her little jackknife of a tongue, and I tremble.

Can’t help but think this is a
threat of some sort, some implication
at my demise.

“I’ll call the fucking cops!” I shout.

Then

without much noise, a woman enters the room
and lets her clothes
slide off

like ice sheets melting into the Arctic.

“What on earth is it?” She asks.
“You look concerned.”

The Something

The thought has a thing, and sun is a blinking eye
Coerced into the long stare at her children. Wind pauses
For reverence at our eulogy, as if anyone cares,
Which if brief, formal and boring.
Pigeons throw their voices like ventriloquists, a
Boy bounces one green grape infinitely.
This memory as thought as thing; the idea as
being a thing once
And only once;

A blind man rolls a cigarette and invents language.
What’s the difference? He’s been sold, but a useless slave.
He does not remember a motel outside Pittsburgh.

The dark cozies up to the dark there. Only our night continues.
In the night, there are not only pictures, but figures.
Not many nights but one after the other. A sequence of nights.
And imagined forms, and nostalgia.
Memory clips the wings of the ocean. A certain
Immaculateness brightens them, hurries us along to the water.

Brownish white, Egypt crawls out of the cave
With its body wrapped in sack-cloth.

The stars are merely pygmies.