The last sound heard before the silence
Settled on my flesh in wisps,
Was the shriek of frozen ambulances
Wrapped in sharp, revolving red.
Then the holes in my skull sealed shut,
And on my tongue I heard the tang of brass.

At first a ringing whine rose high and faded far,
Then bells began, each dim and laced with smoke,
And merged with walls of wind upon crisp water,
Blooming high in white, white only, drifts
Of softly falling, falling softly snow
Until they blurred my shapes of sound and speech.

The memory remained awhile, and moving lips
Became the shapes of sound I could not see
To read, and all my mind filled not with silence
But with ebony brushed on ink
Within which all stars died, and dying gave
A single bloom of tones beyond all song.

It moaned and chittered, groaned and sighed.
It gaped and grinned at me, inscrutable and blank,
As shells evicted by the sea are spurned
By waves, and parch above the dampened sands,
To be polished first by dust, then honed by rain,
Into white basillicas of stone.

Made new, I loved large gestures,
Marking furrowed face and curl of lip.
I memorized the signing hands that stripped
My half-guessed comprehension bare,
And learned at last to wait upon a glance,
Upon small words quickly scratched on slate.

As days to years enlarged their rule,
All records writ within my skull were smudged,
And songs and music drifted off to send
Pale emblems of their realms as tribute
To the stone that once had formed a throne
Encrusted with unsensed pleasures shrugged.

All that treasure spent, all gems corroded now,
All metals melded into dust, all trace of walls
Where once the filigreed firebird sang,
And drums of heroes' skins were stunned,
Were but shadows strewn as features faint
As lines of light on planets seen from space.

And then, with time, all that stood erased,
And sands and seas swarmed over all,
And ruled at last alone a world of frost,
Of ice, of snow, of sheaves of glass,
Until along the farthest strip of polished shore
One distant crystal glinted, gleamed and chimed.

Above the Boulevard

She slept in such taut sheets of flesh (Oh soft
mauve eyelids bending brows in Ah!),
That on her skin my wandering fingers found
That loveliest of landscapes, round
Cool pools of musk, fresh folds of fern,
Her shores of breath, her seas of bone,
And moved within such realms of bliss
That, in her soft shelled ears, our kiss
Spanned years, as on her pale breasts formed
Whole constellations in a silver swarm,
Which our brave bodies hotly held in thrall
That the day delay, that night refuse to fall,
Until, a sated Siren, she slept at last as stone,
And I, awake, gazed down with ancient wonder bound.

In the Town Hall Graveyard

In the hayed field thick in dusted mist,
As the noon whistle of the village hissed,
We noted how the dead were neatly placed
Within their time, and how all were given space.

We remarked the craft of marble wreath,
And supposed that those who lay beneath
Were, like us, clad in the fashion of their day,
A fitting garb in which to meet an eternity of clay.

We admired the fruits of Arbor Day and said
How lovely are these trees; how well kept and fed.
The trees ignored our admiration, as was their right,
And spawned a host of shadows, imitating night.

The hill beyond, round and mirrored as a globe
Climbed once in spring, above us hovered
In high and wind smoothed walls of slate
Through which their naked branches scraped

An etching of themselves slashed onto sky.
We were late, late to the day and the bird cries
Made us see the gray and shaken sheets of storm
That sheathed us soon and drove us down

Into the brambles where the ancient Indians lay
Separated by the mesh of time from the weather of the day,
And resolved at last to sightless calmly wait
Upon the last nights opening of the gateless gate.

"The slashing brambles took our eyes away.
The rain in sheaves removed our clay.
Our dried skin, in husks, remains asleep.
To awaken us, you must dig deep

"Beneath the earth of whittled leaves
Beneath the grief that no longer grieves;
To awaken us you need a careful touch
For you must dig, but never dig too much."

We turned from the field and its hustle of birds,
Where sunlight once played on summer words,
Playing now to only carven stones
And to the silence of abandoned bones.

That stillness slashed the grass with blades of wind
And made us wish we could a thousand acts rescind,
But we knew our wishes were for naught,
For what is easily sold is dearly bought.

Instead, we startled life in a flash of wings,
And in that moment came to present things.
We went home, made tea and sat together,
Held hands at evening and talked about the weather.

Dark Matter
for Tom Mandel

Love must see all things that are
But not with any eye.
The thought must rise from darkling waters,
and still gloss clear and dry.

The heart must mimic life lived large
in it's sentences and fate;
accepting time without an end,
and enter at the gateless gate.

The body, all it's time undone,
must yield itself to air.
The soul, a dream no longer dreamed,
must freeze upon the spiral stairs,

That lead up to an arc of light
which circles in that storm
where no eye sees all things that are,
where that which is, is born.

THE INTERFACE
-- for my father

1.
The empty rituals and dusty opulence
of the nightmare's obvious ending dwindle,
and the sounds of departing automobiles
fade into the humm beyond the cul-de-sac.
Inside the house my mother sits quietly,
surrounded by the plates of finger food
that everybody brought and no one ate,
and wonders if she should begin to take
clothes from the closet, call the Goodwill.
Some blocks away, the Methodist minister hangs
his vestments on a peg, and goes to lunch.

Later, I drive the Skyway to the town named Paradise,
park the car at the canyon's rim, and sit awhile
in the hot silence of the afternoon looking out
at the far mountains where, in June, the winter lingers.
On the seat beside me, a well-taped cardboard cube
contains what remains of my father. I climb out
and, taking the cube under my arm, begin to climb
down the canyon's lava wall to the stream below.
The going is slow, but we get to the bottom by and by
and sitting on some moss, we rest awhile, the cube and I,
beside the snow-chilled stream.

The place we have come to is where the pines lean out
from the boulders at the edge of the stream,
the place where what the stream carries builds up in the backwater,
making in the mounds of matter an inventory of the year:
rusted tins slumped under the fallen sighs of weeds,
diminishing echoes of the blackbird's gliding wings,
laughs buoyed in the hollow belly of stunted trees,
gears, tires, the bones of birds, brilliant pebbles,
the rasping windwish of leaf fall crushed to dust,
the thunk of bone on bark, of earth on wood, the silence
of ash on water. And in such silence, he fades forever.

2.
The stream, its waters revolving round
through river, ocean, clouds, and rain,
bears away the hands and eyes,
but still the memory remains,
answering in pantomime the questions never asked:

Are these reflections but the world without,
carried on but never borne, onward, westward,
towards sunlight glazed on sea's thigh?

Or are such frail forms shaped upon this water all
the things that are, and we, immersed above in air,
the forms that fade, mere mirrors of the stream?

Perhaps this life is all that is and, once lost,
the end of all that was, with nothing
left to be, with no pine wind to taste,
nor sun to dapple mind with dream.
Perhaps it is all ash dissolving,
our lives but rain in circles falling.

Or perhaps we are the center of all circles,
our fall the final fall of night because we are
that single soul, that heart of stars,
that place where sun and water meet,
that golden hand whose placid palm,
once we have shimmered into sunlight,
remains forever open in the coldest light of day.

TERRA INCOGNITA

1.
This rusted field, these shattered skulls, this stained and ancient road

that runs beside the bleached river where the carp fatten on brown dugs
and shoals of human offal until, sated, they drowse above the slime.
This place of iron dust expands while downstream swarming shallows roil
choked with the crocs’ warm morning meals -- the flesh flecked bones
glued with children's gristle and lepers rags, caught between the
pointed teeth
like some vile floss of torn tendons, all breathing flesh consumed.
Upstream our evening's dinner entertainment continues....
Unspeakable acts involving children and machetes
unfold repeatedly until the thin hacking arms cramp,
and the detritus is flung into the stream like feathers plucked from
birds.
And in the still and baking heat, the ears of women, dry and crisp,
whirl in the disinterested wind....and so, and so....one turns to go,
but still...

They all drift down, they all drift down
   (not like leaves
   in an autumn breeze,
   not in some poem of lace,
   nor Japanese
   trifle of dank moss and leaves)
drift down like chunks of poaching pork,
bobbing without purpose like corrupted fruit
until the brain is singed, burnt bare,
flayed open and exhausted of all care,
all sense of rage -- until the phrase
"Can you imagine? " is answerable
only with one word, "No,"
and the single image that might impinge
on drowsy lurkers in plush cave chairs
is a jet of blood erupting in a syringe
plunged in an eye, that the seeing beast
blind itself at last with sleep,
and away, turn away, turn away.

2.
Where the silent flame's parabola
sinks to rest on burnished dust
we wear a golden mirror set
into a sphere of silvered white
wherein a kiss of air is wrapped
around a living skull and kept
so that the mirror hovering low
above the lunar surface might
reflect the skull's companion,
and the Earth that rose against the night.
The globe, blue black, breathes with sparks
of light at night, by day is slashed with white
over green and umber swathes which are,
upon closer circumspection, seen
as the familiar edges of our continents.

And so our land becomes landscape.
mapped, measured and made flesh,
forever frozen beyond touch.

The storm-swollen Red Spot of Jupiter
and the swollen iris of a dead man's eye
in the backwash shallows of Lake Victoria are
-- each seen from a proper distance --
the same cold circle shut
to any possible meaning
we may wish to assign to it; a metaphor
without resonance or consequence;
a frame of no fixed reference,
a grid on which we dance as if death
was something perpetually happening to others
on some sound emptied of actors,
and run by robots on the dark side of the moon.

3.
Let me say this again --
To know is not to have.
To hold is to release.
No hands can close on any light,
nor any light illumine
what lurks between your eyes.
Look close, look deep within.
There is only dark on deeper dark.
It is obvious. Manifest.
You are but vacant matter.
It is not one. Never one.
Always it is always,
now and forever, Zero.
Your inventions, holy icons
and philosophies of air,
will not avail you.
The machete hacking the child
into chunks of screaming meat
is the actual, is the real.
And this sweet lust lives deep in you.
Oh ,yes, lives deep in you --
without meaning, care or memory.
And you know this to be true.

4.
Between our small hands grasping for the light
and our gnarled hands closing on the dark...
we know nothing, we learn nothing.
The dead eyes reflect the moon rising
over the waters of Lake Victoria to no purpose.
Our delicate chamber music, our greatest Symphonies,
are spewed over the shore of Lake Geneva,
over the vaults of gold, to no one’s benefit,
signals to the deaf who have neither signs nor hands.

“O Beautiful for.....”
   For what?

For the garroted cellos of Bosnia?
The jigging afternoon cabaret of wounds?
The circus of snipers? The shattered girl
whose head is a nest of gnats and bullets?
The singer whose throat is home to maggots?

And then She rises in the rose light.
She knows the old songs.
She knows the ancient, chanted spells,
the tempo of bones slammed on taut skins.
She knows the patterns etched
in shadows on the caves' walls
by a million campfires. She knows
the stench of the tents warm with sleep in deepest winter.
These things are her dowry, her teaching,
her legend and legacy.
  And so she dances
  with the shadows of dusk
  until the ages turn to rust.

5.

Behind the golden mirror
that frames the rising earth
above the mountains of the moon
is the skull beneath our skin.
And it chortles and it grins,
and stutters without meaning,
"Within your golden mirrors....
are but bags of rotted dreams."

6.
Seal him up in tight white armor,
and place him tilting, inflated with wet dust,
on the sifted stuff of space, frozen in fine drifts
on the sealess surface of the moon.
Wrap a mirror made of gold about his face,
around that white helmet that seals out space....
and make him lope, loose upon the grit,
bobbing like some inflated toy, to stand aslant
beside the flag fixed on a stick
that it might for some time seem to flutter
bravely on an unclaimed airless world.
And call the earth from its dark deep to rise
within that dread mirror until it, gravid, looms
above the pumiced dust that never lived,
above the razor teeth of mountains
raised beyond the hands of rain...

"What are we doing here? "
Making this record, this snapshot of the times.
Scrape up some dust,
climb aboard the flame,
depart -- depart forever,
that only prints of boots remain.

7.
In the shadows by the seawall, if you look quite closely,
you will see some gleams of gold, some shards of heart,
of shells and flakes of bone that once were smoothest pearls,
reduced now to the endless leavings, the scraps of the oceans' meals.

Life draped over the deepest fissures
...far down in the Marianas
...in the billowing fumes of submerged volcanoes,
where whole continents are disgorged
and animals on stalks waver in the dark,
their valved mouths gaping to feed
on the plumes of pumice and ash.

"Que sera, sera.
Whatever will be, will be"

8.
The patient indifference of scavengers
stripping an abandoned carcass on the veldt.
The torches in the night that have come with the rope.
The stone steps leading up between the squat legs
to the swollen belly. The marble face, the flint lips,
the teeth of steel honed to perfection with a file,
in the place where they sacrifice to an iron sun
not from fear or thirst for gain and glory,
but for an entertainment, merely for the fun.
The flayed skins that frame the abattoir.
The spotlights swirling to announce
The unveiling of the icons, the symbols,
the arms raised in salute...the sign over the entrance:
The Triumph of the Will.

9.
Aerial bombardments seen from far out at sea.
Dawn's early light.
  Rockets' red glare.
   The ships slipping beneath the burning oceans.
    The hissing wall of flame.
     The storm of fire.
      The sun released on Earth.
Shadows burned into stone.
Shadows dancing in the ageless cave.
  The magnification of the face into visage.
   The smirking triumph of imago uber alles.
The severed shells of daughters' ears
scattered on endless shores.
  The deep architecture of the chimp.
   The thought that thought is but a program,
    that dreams themselves are but
     cathedrals of software, echoes of wetware.
The engine.
The airfoil.
  The disassembling of matter.
   The "secret" of the atom.
    The final solution
     to all evolution.
The reading of the endless code
contained within the spiraled shells.
  The long laminate nails.
   The oriental smile.
    The van ride into the dark.
     The plane ride, nude, over the ocean.
      The plunge without parachutes,
       awakening to your final screams.

10.
The constructed photograms
of the self, that it never age nor fade.
Gleams of Hornitos in the slant
of the light in afternoon ballrooms.
The slow drifting swirls of the sea
as seen from a house in mid-heaven.
Slabs of raw sky stretched over grids of green.
Roads of rippled steel across the scrubbed wastes of Antarctica.

Aluminum tubes packed with chatting meat
shot like bullets deep into the dark flesh of dawn.
Pillars of poured stone. Buffed sheets of bent metal.
Songs injected in the ear sanding dreams as smooth as glass
Signals in from the clear and endless air,
while at the south pole a white eye stares
without blinking into the deep silence
where signals go out but no answers echo.

Slim soldiers, sunken in a torpor
behind the alarm wire. Trees dance without the wind.
Sleeping far off sirens slash the dark.
Nails scribble love letters on stainless steel.
In the room of crystal walls and burnished floors,
our fetishes hover behind slabs of glass:
Soul suits of dried weeds and reeds
sewn by leather fingers with strips of dry skin.

11.
(And I woke and saw your body's banner bright
against the umber buildings as a silver jet slicked by
lined out against the sunset sky like love's true arrow.
And the clouds rose over night in golden blooms
against the jadegleamed wall of trees
until the gull pirouetted down on evening's fade.
And your wine was cold upon my lips.
And I wished to live the life of the body forever.)

The corpse lolling among the corpses
in the brackish back waters of Lake Victoria.
The eye of that corpse among corpses
stained white as dirty snow.
The iris of that eye surrounded by red,
and rising in that dead iris
our single dead moon
daubed pale upon the bright noon sky,
reflecting everything we are.

New York City, 1996-1997

Poetry Magazine