A
COLLECTION OF SONNETS
THE DOORWAY
The wind is unrelenting pressure. Back
twisting current pushing a humid heat.
Lay‑down light exhausts by eight a.m.
The day stretches on like maddening hell.
Wind on the surf, the old Cape Cod house.
Papa, on some kind of pills, sprouted female
breasts. Freakish parantheses, for all his humor, progress,
with its maddening pressure, drove through
his chest.
That house was riddled by termites, its main
beam softened. Carpenter ants carried away the porch.
A virus tunnelled into the plasm of a cell,
ate a gene, turned the body into hell.
Each footstep from the doorway of that house
is judgment, the doorway now a disc of light.
CALENDAR DAYS
Calendar days zipping by like stations
of the N train under crowded Manhattan.
Days scrolled and rolled like serpentine
Lucifer
whose unsleeping eyes let light into the
world.
All time is tuned to the pulse and we are
clocks,
our coiled springs pinned at the genitals
that mark the seconds in streams of steady
desire.
I'm dying into my son. Minute by minute.
Packing up, carrying bags to the porch.
And suddenly he's gone, and we're alone.
Minute by minute, days bleed into months.
Days of desire, you like Eve in late
October, laying the leaves and naming the
tree,
in whose branches night and nightmare creep.
ANCESTORS
The elderly sit on a rulered line thin
as paper, edged narrow as a cut.
At ninety‑eight my mother's father lodged
on a Brooklyn ledge so narrow swallows tipped
him vertiginously into air. Antenato.
From his second story window the light was
shut.
I burn a piece of paper and watch the ash
flake and rise on the currents of the heat.
Dart, and sail, like swallows at dusk. My father.
These words.
That word. On a sheet of filler
paper.
Priests are almost all elderly now.
Turned pages falling out of the book.
No sacrament to bless their speechless fall.
And upward floating drift, smokeless pall.
SKYSCRAPERS
The sky glows red behind the Twin Towers,
streaked tonight with ribbons of light and
dark.
The earth's turning in the sun's radiation
lends an aura of astronomical calm
to these monuments. Eighty years ago
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring
irritated
the tympanum of cultivated man. Fierce
ritual of music on the eve of war.
The rite‑‑bloodletting, fertile, passionate‑‑thrummed
the pre‑historic rhythms of the age.
Neanderthal, Cro‑Magnon, Technical man
bequeath to these Kong‑haven towers the
cyclical moon,
not this Mayan‑calm of glowing red,
celestial thought in the mind of a peaceful
god.
BROOM OF CORPSES
Glittering like a clock dial, polished glass,
the suburban home reminds me of Chicago,
city of soot and smoke, pitch‑colored wraiths
coughing blood in the streets, wine‑spotted
vestments. Traveling the country from north to south I rolled
through thousands of miles of dust,
rainshadow dust.
Charcoal dry.
Chicano poor. Lemon
groves in Texas gave out green like cash.
One history, many deaths‑‑a broom of corpses.
Back home, our city's diminutive lake takes
the sails, and off the yachters go, round
and round, from noon to midnight. What woe
assails these hardworking souls, fools
swirling
in a teacup like flakes of crumpet, time‑dead?
GREEN OLIVE
The gnarled fist unclenches, becomes a hand.
Holding nothing, a green olive maybe,
no pimento.
History's moving fast.
The wearying spillers of blood are spilling
their blood.
In the myth, Charlemagne believed in
education,
but as many people know today as then.
The ghosts of Cahokia Downs and Macchu Picchu
dark‑screen knowledge of the lunatic night.
An F‑15 lies buried under ash,
immobile as stone, while crustal plates lift,
and acid tongues of extinction spit out
genes.
A meteor hisses like one of Hussein's
missiles.
On a mountain near a bay a huge white cross
confirms
earthly motions of outlandish agony.
WILTED IVY
I sat far too long by the north window,
numbed by a dream of pendulums‑‑earth's
turning
making day and night swing, summer and autumn
beat against the walls, first left, then
right.
Over my head the ivy wilted. Dark hair hanging
out of a bowl, filtered light. Left.
Right.
In '76 the pundits reported the death
of the republican party. Today it's the democrats.
McCarthy and Marx are arm and arm in the
twilight,
and I hear Twain's ironic laughter, and
Nietzsche's.
But at my back the north light glows wanly,
and my ivy's dark waxen leaves hang
lusterless
like the hands of a ghetto girl with an empty
syringe.
Water and miracle‑gro have no effect.
CHIMP IN A CAGE
The sun burned in the humid sky like an iron
brand over a kettle of water, everything
suffered.
Dainty Japanese ladies under parasols
wilted beside their husbands in shirt
sleeves,
carrying jackets and souvenirs. Animals
dreamed of the Seventh Seal, when fire would
fall
and they could roam the human streets
searching
for souls to drag to their appointed places.
One gargoyle‑like creature with Caucasian
eyes
hid in a corner to defecate, almost
human in its need for privacy.
Everyone felt a twinge of shame as witness.
Then with two handfuls of his lumpy smut
he charged the bars and flung them at the
crowd.
THE ATLANTIC
Money is no help. The roads lead to roads
and these to the shore, where the last road
stops and the sand and surf threaten‑‑what?
No uplift from the Atlantic. Stand and stare.
No man or woman is pure at heart, hell
is green and deep, apolitical, horizontal
like a shark.
Turn your back and run, find
the road, burn rubber, drive till the sun
comes up.
The poem of the final breath, the poem of the
dark
is better read on the patio at noon where you
can laugh at the ridiculous, know the absurd,
the sainted laugh, eat your sandwich, laugh.
Later, when you wake, the odor of iris in the
shade,
the cobalt coma of sin, will stop your
breath.
THREAD AND NEEDLE
The spider makes a deadly web, blankets
the compost heap and catches bees that hang
like black and yellow ornaments, chitinous
husks clicking in the summer breeze.
Your destiny is written in your hands.
You fumble, all thumbs. Cry in frustration,
"Am I responsible for this? I'm
no cross‑stitcher, thread‑and‑needle
man."
Time to get out of politics, leave
the job to women, who spin by inclination.
Napoleon loved his Josephine, but she
loved only his loving. Eva Braun knew,
artillery shaking dust from overhead,
never trust a man to spin a web.
THE SACRED FIRE
The day's on fire‑‑the blood‑dimmed tide is
loosed‑‑
we've been through this, the sacred fire
lives.
The green unchanging fire of adolescence.
The country's many headed like a hydra
and wont be killed, however many heads
are lopped‑‑no golden fleece awaits a slayer.
West side lovers die in each others arms.
A dusky Cleopatra from Jamaica
exits to Brooklyn to nurse her Anthony.
Every fall we rake away our leaves,
trade in our cars, fill the bins with corn.
Life at the root readies itself for change.
This keeps me steady, like a mule and plow.
The furrow's magic is the seed comes up.
NIGHT--AVE
No Cerberus to guard this mouthful of darkness.
It's terrible, whether in war or at home.
Home.
A suburban row of houses with lawns and
trees.
Circuits of phosphorus falls and
springs. Summer
fogs.
These, perhaps, were truths for him.
Life is exile, we live alone and die.
What blind science has to say is true,
the rest is sociology. He had
no politics, no pedigree, no money.
Scepter and crown come tumbling down, yes.
I want the solace of your eyes, watery
grottos where the hooded figures rise,
incense your worshippers burn for you and
light,
like dawn, that tells me when the night is
spent.
GEOMETRIDAE
The worms lower themselves on strands of silk
with military daring and precision.
Time to abandon the tree. Midsummer.
All mass movements have an inner spring.
Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists,
maybe atheists, a movement of two,
black worms against a field of green,
corpses.
Nature abhors the blood of Italy, the flood
rushing from the heart, counter‑creative.
Green troops in the desert under Schwarzkopf.
Yugoslavs marching grim and reluctant.
Chanting, "To Anacreon in Heaven."
Millions of Muslims face their sacred city.
The Fourth, Bastille day, drum‑steps of the
police.
JULY 5
The water of the Styx is powerful poison.
Alexander swigged a drop and died.
Here we have a lake as black as chaos,
touched by the setting sun as I look on.
Last night a flotilla of red‑eyed boats
assembled
by the Stygian island where the fireworks
flew.
Sillouettes in the glare like a hundred
Charons
to whom life announced its phosphorescent
bias.
But darkness nipped at my heels like a dog,
drove
bias and delusion into fits of fear.
It was the darkness in the eyes of Stalin,
Himmler, the born and unborn, who wait their
chance.
Raw chaos rears up in men, looks through
their eyes,
and welcomes fools who celebrate with fire.
JUNK YARD
Damp‑furred dog smell, rusted dirt, weeds.
Plank‑floored Burlington box car heaped with
metal,
gears, housings, bearings. Nudes and hubcaps
on the walls.
Engines. Dog smell and gasoline.
A shack with window and door. Inside, a counter.
A man, on the phone, leafing through a
manual.
Stack of dead tires, on top, a cat, sleeping.
Hood ornaments‑‑Indian head, sleek plane,
Hermes‑‑pitted chrome, dulled‑‑a chrome nude.
This iron monger on the phone catalogues for
profit
valves and pumps, the cams that stoke the
fire
we fuel with dollars bartered for our labor.
Faithful copies stamped The American Way.
And Minos, "Watch your step, that door
is narrow..."
CATHOLIC SCHOOL
In Catholic school Franciscan monks in black,
white ropes knotted with aves round their
waists,
taught us the meaning of Christ. Those virile men.
And when we didn't listen they beat us blind.
The girls were taught by nuns in another
building.
Separate playground hours kept us apart.
But summers on the beach destroyed that
tyranny.
Our throbbing motors nudged us hull to hull.
A lifetime later, Fascists long since dead,
and Communists choking on their Spartan
bread,
a girl whose name I can't remember lifts
my hand and runs her finger across my palm.
That nitro‑glycerin touch could blast a hole
through hell, did, and will‑‑nerve‑fuse and
womb!
SHOWER OF GOLD
Broken love.
Empire of trembling buildings.
Earthquake at the knees that sets one free.
I climb the shower of gold to the cloud's
dark belly.
What air is here, refined, like the home of
bees!
Fractured eyesight, the world in glinting
facets
spreading beneath me. Aqua vita in the cell.
I dare to sip, come crashing down to hell.
This single‑vision brown of prairie soil.
What is it prevents me from living in this
world?
Not privation, wandering, unsettling age,
years passing with increasing speed.
The rhetoric of change, pompous new world
order.
But the atom and the gene, money and power,
the thin degraded consciousness of men.
TIME
She watched her baby die, the snows claim
the livestock, and stored the infant in the
shed
till spring.
A hundred years later the golden corn
fights the wind to swell the bushels with
cash.
Methodists and Catholics and Lutherans ply
the banks,
turn out on Sundays to hear a homily,
send their kids to college, then replace a
hip
to walk another dozen years in town.
A son, or someone else's, fills the gap.
New Year's midnight, snow or stubble. Time.
Not my history. Not anyone's.
No more
than the field belongs to the ear of corn
or to hard‑handed women who handled the hoe,
breaking
clods, husbands heaping their hope in God.
THE FOX
It came crashing through the woods, driven
towards me ahead of the deer. My uncle said,
"If you spot a fox, bag him. The pelt is
worth
the price of your Marlin and a year's supply
of shells." Through the fall leaves, sharp snouted, he passed
an arm's length from me. I drew a bead, then relaxed.
It never knew I was there. Kept moving.
Gone.
Later, a doe.
I saw her head and side.
No buck.
I would have squeezed one off at a buck.
I had that hot intensity to kill.
The fall woods along the Hudson creak
with desire, the air inflames it, burdens the
heart.
The dark comes on those who miss their chance
with vengeance, traps them where they are,
till dawn.
LIFE WITHOUT A WHORE
When the house is full of relatives, two
tables
are laid with plates, one in the kitchen for
children.
There my sisters and younger cousins sit
on stacks of books, getting a purchase on
Babel.
The men smoke cigarettes and cigars, talk
money,
winnings at the racetrack, baseball, play
poker.
The women work, listen, gossip about
whores, bitches, stinginess, ageing, men.
Nothing changes but the children in the
kitchen.
Everyone's shifted a generation. And I,
accustomed to the women's talk, prefer
the whores and bitches, gossip about the
passions‑‑
Medalia d'Oro's rich black taste is good
though graves need tending and the whores
have vanished.
THE PAST
The Past is Prologue, the saying goes, carved
dutifully on the pillars of College Hall,
the letters in gothic, shaded by the elm
that has itself seen some history.
Bookish men asserted primacy of thought.
Men.
Matriarches blanche. White
men! Rage.
Today the past is sweaty political arena,
a ring surrounded by hating factions as neos
slug it out, too much light and heat.
From a union between Night and Hell sprang
dreams,
discord, vexation, and doom. Nietzsche saw
in a spinning vision how the power of
resentment could damn the joys of life and
carve
above the future's door, "Abandon hope..."
THE TRIPLE GODDESS
The triple goddess, politics gone under‑‑
spring, summer, fall, waxing and waning‑‑
a silver sickle sat on her head like horns‑‑
a round of years swollen like a pumpkin‑‑
in her silver‑haired phase she carried
the instruments of death, cut the thread
that held you to your sanity. Medea
in the brain but not as beautiful as Callas.
Arthritic now, she whimpers as she walks,
though she keeps a trick or two in a shoulder
bag.
That's the come down‑‑a carnival bitch with a
bag
of tricks‑‑the whore of New York, an ace
of trump stuck up her sleeve. Trump!
Those eyebrows. Plucked from the whore's crotch and pasted on!
TO MY MOTHER
Coming across the gateway, you limped in pain
from all the sitting as though the thousands
of miles
gnawed away your muscles and left you
crippled.
But age and time even a plane can't cure.
You came and stayed awhile and then departed.
The zinnias strengthened their stalks and
climbed
to their multicolored heads, tomatos ripened.
The grass browned in the sun. Nothing noticed.
And over the prairie at the end of June,
the wind carried dust on sheets of heat.
On the shore of your thigh in a thrill of
light I woke.
That moment struck us apart and the distance
widened
like a sail against the sky. The ocean blows.
Wind shifts the sand and leaves no stone.
LEADING THE CHARGE
On the plains of central China the hordes of
Khan
sprang from the grass, one man, one horse‑‑democracy.
Tents, mare's milk, and meat. They rode against
Uighurs, Kharismian, and Kin, became an
empire,
took the Turk, like a pearl from an oyster,
and set
him in the royal diadem. Europe lay
like a sack of toys to entertain a king.
All Christianity laughed at the Mongol might.
Samarkand, Kiev, Constantinople fell.
The empire grew beyond imagining, from the
Pacific
to Poland, the Atlantic only a step away.
Jengis died and it all began to fade.
Our vanities and petty spites torment us
still‑‑
Jesse Helms leading a charge in the Senate!
THE WALL
Done!
The words are said. It's out.
Tears
can't unsay them. But there are no tears.
Ice clinks in the glass, the bourbon is
poured.
This is the hard time. Stare‑down time. Break.
Like ivy in rapid motion up a trellis
nerves clutch the spine and crowd the brain.
"Give me back my power. Stay clear of me.
She steals by evasion, stabs by implication.
There's no accomodation with that
bitch."
Done.
Alien feelings. Your sense of
right
and personal loyalty have clashed, crashed
and crushed the feminine logic of your life.
I've loved the way you see through negatives.
But now the wall‑‑the will you cannot fathom.
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