Poetry Magazine, Poet, Spring 2007

HIDING

for Richard

I spend the morning

looking at photographs of my dead sister,

dark mannequin posing

beside husbands, parents, siblings,

her son—people who look like extras on a movie set—

the years’ battering superimposed on her face,

reminding me of Holocaust images, olive-skinned

girls who died in showers at Auschwitz.

Even in the photo where she

wades in a nurturing Atlantic, she

reminds me of some Jewish Ophelia, her

moribund drama hemorrhaging into the spindrift,

thick shadow snuffing a nirvanic beach.

Last night a friend told me she felt

my ex-wife had not been good for me,

that I had hidden behind her like an eclipsed sun,

and I thought about how my own mother was a piranha

who each morning at the breakfast table

stripped her sons and daughter to the bones.

Years later, my father would tell me

he sacrificed his children to appease his wife,

offered us to her as if she were some pagan goddess

who needed to drink daily her own family’s blood.

We all learned to hide; it is our legacy—

my sister and I, even my brother,

skulking in the custody of his own rage.

We grew out of childhood

like houseplants in a hurricane,

domestic pets abandoned in a jungle;

floating out of body in public places;

passing like ghosts through marriages and jobs;

watching ourselves fuck spouses and greedy strangers,

naked bodies move; not recognizing ourselves, honestly

not knowing how we were going to survive the relentless invasions,

the ambushes and slow, secret military movements,

this thing other people simply called life.

THE ONTOLOGY OF DYING

“And round about his home the glory

That blushed and bloomed

Is but a dim-remembered story ...”

—Edgar Allan Poe,

"The Fall of the House of Usher"

Daily the blueprint waxed more labyrinthine;

convoys of trucks wound through the ravaged plot,

delivering colossal spools of wire, miles of virgin pipe,

rare timber from Amazonian forests. Expense

grew like a tumor. Electricians, plumbers,

carpenters scurried like slaves in a concentration camp.

I let them build it, watched like some ancient Greek

crashing the chamber of The Fates,

observing his own destiny being woven.

Board by board, floor by floor, like a scientist

creating a clone, they erected the house, despite the moon’s demurral.

For weeks, I wandered its autogamous maze of corridors,

jamming empty rooms with gewgaws, ottomans,

divans, plush wardrobes, and impenetrable tomes.

By diurnal light, I loitered in the garden, watched the landscape

flex its muscles like a rabid dog stretching a chain.

The boxwoods grew in perfect orbs, antiquating the gardener’s shears.

Roses bloomed, untouched by worm or beetle,

standing in perfect rows like Nazis at attention.

Azaleas, camellias, and gardenias blossomed in perfect proportion,

emitting ambrosial redolence, immune to the temptation of overgrowth,

requiring neither pruning nor cultivation: the apotheosis of purity.

Tourists came by the busload to gaze upon the architectural

wonder; aspiring poets paced in rapture, scribbling dithyrambs

with Dionysian facility. I conducted tours, flinging wide

doors to my most private chambers. Engrossed strangers

ogled my treasures and trinkets with a smutty awe.

Winter never came.

The house, as sterile as an operating room,

sanitizing its own guts like a self-cleaning oven,

required no maintenance. The sentinel of the sun, never questioning

orders, yielded its watch to the night without the protestation of dusk.

Midnight felt as safe as a bed, lingered as quiet as a convent.

The teeming Eden, with its inexhaustible prowess, preyed upon me like a Minotaur.

As I grew pale and my appetite waned, wisteria bloomed more fervently.

The walls of the mansion shone like an infant’s scrubbed cheeks.

I flipped through thousands of pages of unintelligible works

like a philologist trying to crack a code; I hurled vases,

mirrors, cups, plates, and grails upon a floor of stone.

They were unbreakable. I rushed into the courtyard

armed with a chainsaw, the gnawing teeth soon

ground to silence by bronze stems and steel limbs;

cracked the skull of an ax on a trunk made of iron.

I wept like a prisoner in a soundproofed cell,

screamed out in the night like an atheist in a riptide.

One morning, my arms and legs finally shed like withered petals,

my body sculpted into reptilian litheness by the chisels of time and necessity,

I slithered down marble steps, across plush carpets,

through a malaise of rooms into the garden,

where the maniacal sun greeted me like a spotlight on a guard tower.

As I crossed the boundary of the estate, like an inmate cutting through a fence,

I heard the crowd, behind me, pounding on the golden door.

I didn’t look back. I crawled on my cavernous belly until I reached

a nameless place where clouds eclipsed the sun, where I was soaked by rain;

where autumn arrived and green leaves browned; the restless sap

swallowed its song; the creek’s throat froze over; the night was filled with ghosts.

Like an exile, I set up camp there, burrowing into the earth,

subsisting on rodents, berries, husks. Seasons arrived and

departed like gurus. I evolved toward a certain complacence,

like that of a flash of lightning content to foil

the monologue of thunder.

LAST WORDS

Cut loose from the womb of my ship,

drifting like Icarus in this white suit,

destiny is broken down to numbers,

x amount of inhalations, x temperature

tolerable, knowing that a breathless

demise is what awaits me. You tickle

my ear like an insect, urgent whispers

wrapped in static; dissecting my silence

as if I were the first person to enter

the house of God. There is no gauging

my location now. This is true transcendence,

mind meeting the unknown, language

unavailable, the brain itself groping for

impulses to send south to the body. This is

what I wanted, to die in the mouth of the sun,

lungs imploding like a flattened can, all sense

of mortal obligation cauterized like a wound.

A moment can indeed define a lifetime,

karma be vaporized at the threshold of death.

Light floods like a big bang; kiss the earth

for yours truly; tell the paparazzi I went home,

energy forever burning in the belly of the mother star.

WALKING UNSURE OF MYSELF
(Election Day, 2004)

for Richard

A black dog snarls behind a white fence.

I'm changing my clothes like a good American.

A man gives birth to a war; his wife
suckles it until her breasts bleed like IV bags.

Handprints on a Christmas card.
The receiver has not been hung up.
The taxi driver keeps honking his horn.

What occurs between breaths is a red herring.

The kettle has been whistling for an hour,
and I think something is wrong downstairs.

A man is selling fake flowers outside the post office.

The fortune teller is battling a migraine.
Wind has swallowed my itinerary.

A man in blue goggles is on his knees outside the bank.
The rape victim is scrubbing herself with a steel brush.

I cannot keep my hands off the telephone.
I am married to machines, and part of me is dying.

I am in a black hole picking tomatoes.

The heiress holds her hand over a lit candle.

Someone is planning a bank robbery.
The nun is renouncing her vows.

The tycoon wants to push the prom queen onto the subway track.

Another fast-food restaurant plants its flag in our hearts.

Flies are circling the dead bird. I forgot to pick up milk.

The war is just beginning. I need to buy new shoes.

The dog in the next yard is missing an ear.
Effigies are being burned in the ball field.

I was blowing up a doll when I heard the news.

The brakes were shot, and we had to crash into the wall.

I cut down the oak as my mother wept in our doorway.

Neighbors kept coming, bringing meatloaf and deli trays.

Blood on the blackboard.
Lunchboxes scattered in the gymnasium.

We were glued to the television,
waiting for reports on the plane crash.

A snail is slithering across the interstate.
The debutante enters the unemployment office.

Take this carnation before night falls;
soon we will be too busy to talk.

There is a shotgun shell in the sandbox,
a dead cardinal on the basketball court.

Someone has left a cigarette burning on the altar.

The valedictorian plucked the wings of a butterfly.
The wrestler broke his arm doing a cartwheel.

I woke up with leaves in my hair.
There was ketchup on my diploma.

So many compulsions, so little time.

I swear I saw a woman struggling in the backseat.

It is my job to clean the dragon's teeth.

The shutters hadn't been opened for years;
light stampeded through the glass, and I recalled
collecting nets in Phoenicia. I died a violent death.

There were tire tracks on the museum floor.

So much space, so little god.

The baby was floating facedown in the swimming pool.

We walked barefoot through fields of snow.
Doves were flying above the belching chimneys.

The helicopter is on fire. The cop loads his rifle.

A robin is perched on the molester's gravestone.
There is police tape around the monkey bars.

A man in a wheelchair spins in the intersection.

A tortoise is crawling through tar.

I placed my ballot in the dead monster's mouth.

WHAT I SAID TO MYSELF

Choose the butterfly over the chrysalis.
Choose light, the ballroom, the well-lit restaurant.

You have for lifetimes strummed minor chords
on the coast of a dead sea. Think major, spindrift.

The sex between you and grief is becoming mechanical.

Despite your vestigial sentiments to the contrary,
a scab's story is much greater than that of a scar.

Your cock is not an umbilical cord, it is your
heart's mouthpiece. Choose sunrise, please.

It is time to do something that might cause
embarrassment. Let emptiness mother your child.

Put away the map, where we're going won't be on it.