Fossilized

I do not wish to begin, so I slowly peruse a cataloged catalogue of words.

Suddenly I am fastened upon the word “linoleum”

(I know from certain sciences that it was once made of solidified linseed oil,

but that in my time of living it is nearly always fashioned of polyvinyl chloride).

We poor folk know the word and its appearance in the world, for it covered our

hallways and kitchens and living rooms and bathrooms,

but sometimes there was carpet or a rug mixed in (though no one ever really noticed).

I don’t fucking know what she used on her wrists.

All the gods that are false, damn it, damn me,

shrink this earth like uncured leather

so that I can no longer taste in my own unsacred mouth the iron of blood,

so that I can know less well what she set free in her turmoil and her anguish;

may my bones be ground into meal for failing to stay that dreadful blade.

I shudder to speak but I am less than a weaver of lies.

Sometimes the truth cries for the telling when I do not wish it,

when I would give a thousand rubies that shimmer like as many suns

to never tell of what I know. I suffer less than she.

Her hair is very dark and she often wears it tied in one loose knot

and she returns, scars not yet set upon her arms, to find that

the man she lived with had left the blood that seeped upon the floor, he left it

spattered on walls and in droplets around the bathtub, he left it

for her to clean.

I don’t know if she used some formulation of ammonia to scrub her horror,

some different, natural, caustic cleansing element, or a synthetic relative. I did not ask.

Although I was miles away, I can see her there, stoic on her knees,

hair like night from dye that he once asked her to apply, a reddened sponge in her hands.

Could she have washed it all away with only water if she had added her tears?

Carmen 38

There was a man sitting at a table with a glass of whiskey and

two curses: he found himself more interesting than anyone else and

he was mostly correct.

Accounting

I sat next to you at the wedding and I wore a green shirt,

the one shaded like grass nearly dying for its want of water,

my red tie knotted loosely, and black shoes that were not shined.

I cannot recall what you were wearing, save that it was a dress, but

I remember that I did not know you on first or second glance

(it may have been the first time that I truly noticed your eyelashes),

and then my smile of delight on recognition.

I had come to the wedding because rumors of the reception had promised

the irresistible extravagance of bacon-wrapped shrimp and an open bar.

“I want whatever is red and can be poured into two glasses,”

You said to the bartender. He handed us two bottles until you went back for more.

I never said goodbye to you. I had seen the hair of a woman I had hurt very deeply

through a window. She was sweeping up the dust and grime and beer

from beneath the tables in a bar like many others, where the waitresses

wear their skirts too short and the beer is too expensive and too cheap at the same time

and I’d already spilled wine on my shirt to match my tie so I spun around

and went across the street and ordered three double vodkas and left a twenty on the bar

then went back across the street and certainly said cruel and unfair things

to that unfortunate girl, though I do not know the precise wording,

and from what I was told I was found by old friends laying face-down

in the grass by the river and that sounds just like something I would do.

I never said goodbye to you and eight months later you were dead.

Carmen 36

Carmen thirty-six is considered spurious.

In Memory

The first thing that I will remember of you

is that you described an intellectually deficient

*man (*Homo sapiens)

as one who, when put with his ideas into an enema, could easily fit into

a matchbox .

The second is that someone, once in foolishness, asked you if,

having had all your previous wishes, you would desire

a dinner with Shakespeare, and you responded (I search to quote correctly)

“…the only reason I want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to,

is ‘cause I can meet him, anytime, because he is immortal in the works

he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost

certainly be a disappointment…”

And the third memory,

because men such as I must have some conclusion, I say to you,

that most times when I recall your face I think of a day in Lebanon,

in the year of our imagined Lord Two Thousand and Nine,

when you were beaten by fascist thugs adhering

to the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party.

You had defaced the swastikas that adorned neighborhoods

in the segments of Beirut. You refused to fight against them while your friends

pulled you away from their fists and boots

and you said, “No, no, I will not fight.”

I remember you that way:

battered, brilliant, the man

who taught me how to look at Orwell,

to be fearless in the faces of those that wish to kill you.

You taught me to tell them to bring the rats.

You taught me to tell them that they could kill a heart but not a memory.

Your mother named you Christopher, perhaps after a saint killed in Lycia.

You must have been bleeding on those streets on that day. The newspapers,

they spoke of six men that attacked you; their boots, their heels, their fists.

I can see you in a room in your hotel

with the bruises rising up like a loaf of bread

and a bottle of contraband whiskey in your hand.

If it was your moment then or now,

let me murder the timekeeper.

Let God raise a shield against me

and be torn into pieces.

__________

for C.H.

Fragments 10

I imagine certain moments, your hair in waterfalls

thundering from a fountain that was never built,

your blouse torn apart like a bee sting that had

pierced into marble, opal, gold or silver idols:

the poets of Rome did not

have such as you,

to make a stone as living as your lips

______________________________________________

your impure curse brews a stare that sets old forests

scorching upon the leaves that hang on dead men's trees

______________________________________________

I lick up your ashes in the manner of those red carpets of empire

that exist as if great evil did not dwell in bright-lit halls.

I watch the children of a fruit tree murdered in the daylight.

I see flowers that your mother places (lovingly) wither on your cairn,

and I wish to place them on a pyre so that you would not persist.

_________________________________________________

The imprint of your hands in dark-skied memory,

A thumbprint in sand waiting for the moon.

_________________________________________________

Oh come now, crocodile, to weep such tears

As if I had not seen your sharpened teeth.

Lt. John Pike

I know that his boots were black and heavy as they shined like Italian history.

I know that for three years his salary as a police officer for a university

has been slightly more than a hundred thousand dollars a year

and that on the same day Puerto Rico was discovered (for the last time)

he leisurely sprayed a chemical agent into the faces and lungs of students

sitting passively on their own campus; their heads bowed, their arms linked.

I know that his apartment complex has a swimming pool (aquamarine)

and a tennis court (night-dark green, white lined) and that he lives in no. 616.

I know that when he is not wearing riot armor he manages the Records Unit,

but I will not know the sort of man he is unless he does not put a bullet in his head.

Lioness

On this night, all the while listening intently to her breathing

and the way her heart beats as we cleave together,

I have set my lips upon very much of her;

although perhaps it is imprudent to say this

when considering the jealousy that may arise at my privilege-

Where I glance as she bleeds from playing music through the night

and around her thumb the seeping red has the taste and scent of a strawberry;

but at a moment in time when violence, pestilences, or storms of earth or air

have made strawberries impossible to purchase, even in massive marketplaces.

Where I stare when les autres offend her and fail to appreciate

the danger of rousing one who wields the knife of a butcher, skillfully,

even while drunker than a stone has ever been;

or as she plays a particular variation on a minor chord that evokes Seville.

When once gouges rippled in deep furrows like sand dunes

over my shoulder-blades, she soon stopped where she stood, noticing this;

her grin became as summer days when lightning strikes the sun

(I confess in this memory I generally remember her unclothed,

though it may be that she was bundled in preparation to trudge in snow,

tawny scarf spun ominously about her neck, a swan shaped unlike a swan)

She said, “What will you tell the next woman about those, when she asks?”

I replied, “I will say, ‘How is it possible that you do not remember

needing to put them there, mademoiselle?’ ”

She shook her long blackened hair and her irises quaked in accord,

(And if there was a God of Power then this world could not exist thus,

where the oceans of her eyes do not display the hues of all flame)

and she laughed and laughed but I saw, a divination in glass and smoke,

the day in my future when I shall be a blind man sitting in a wicker chair.

These dreams and fragments of the past, I kiss (leach) from her fingertips

as she sleeps with heavy blankets strewn across her body, socks still on,

her hand half-curled in beauty just above her collarbone:

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

I brush my mouth behind her earlobe and (vainly) whisper-

a rose, my love, its bulb flowering

in the dark of an autumn night,

need only be brought out

when one wishes to tempt the thorns.

Carmen 35

Brick and concrete, silent stone soon to be fashioned into walls

(rocks mingle with the bodies of fallen men to make the mortar)

that keep out dreaded barbarians, but never cold-fingered Death

as He lightly glides in a tarlike cloak-

Hurry masons, craft barriers against the bite of the white-tinged wind

that already has stripped the trees bare down to their bones,

that whipping wind that wishes to peel the flesh from the living

like paring the skin from a fiery red apple.

Carmen 34

To produce upon demand (or request) is a curious thing;

as if the moon were to become full a week before its time

or if flowers were to pierce the icy ground of winter

and dot that snowy quilt with the sun-bright daisy

or the ancient royal blood of the violet, of the crimson poppy.

This disturbance in the tides, the wolves, the lives of women,

it finds a mirror in each of those vibrant, foreign colors.

The light of a slowly dying sun controls these elemental shifts,

although once the withering of the green meadows

of the Earth, mother of all,

was blamed on the Lord of the Dead.

The stolen, abused goddess-child is now forgotten

as though she were three leaves gracefully falling.

Melpomene, you desire so many things on this day. Your impatience

is perplexing: the seasons turn on their own accord,

infatuations end, fault lines are promises, the stars shed their shells,

the dusts of a thousand novas have combined to make my ink.

Is it not enough to be immortal, must you be forever praised?

Offerings

Rising from my sleep, the Holodomor enters my mind

and now, beset by details of a ghoulish fantasy,

I see myself wearing an overcoat, in warm boots

as I walk across the crystalline dirt of November

on my way to confiscate Ukrainian grain.

The image now shivers. What shall be done when I arrive?

What will be found when I leer inside the hovel, holding my pistol?

It is early still, not truly winter, so the children will not yet

have begun eating one another. Praise to Janus,

that such things will wait for his month. What then?

I have heard that some of the others have taken women,

if they have found them alone; no matter, it is less an evil

to abuse the dead than to scuff the shoes of the living.

When I breach the doorway, it is more likely that I will vigorously laugh

in the manner of a pyramidal overseer (one desert traded for another)

and cruelly knock over a few humble chairs before turning

to make exaggerated searches of an entirely bare cupboard.

I take a long drink of vodka from my flask as I stare into a face,

the eyes that are half a face: a boy younger than four. He is afraid.

-Blessedly I am shaken free of this reverie by the ghostlike figure

in my bed. She makes a sound, resembles Garm having a daydream.

She pulls my right hand into hers, smiles in contentment

and rolls toward the wall, pulling me to her. My left hand

traces down her spine, pausing at the knots that time has tied.

There is a statue in Kiev. It is of bronze or something like it.

There is a little girl and she is very thin and wears a dress

that stretches from the middle of her calves to her neck

and the sleeves fasten mid-forearm and her hair is in braids.

She clasps her hands over her heart and in one of them

she clutches five spikelets of wheat.

She stands on a short concrete pillar with eyes blank like fields

and often red apples fresh from trees encircle her feet.

Damnatio Memoriae

I think of the Biblical injunction against the vain repetitions in prayer characteristic of the heathen; enjoying an irony that the savage, imitable Book provides. Even one iteration of praise is a vainglory if the god attested by Matthew the Evangelist does not exist.

Some handfuls of centuries later, Lev Nikolayevich, Count Tolstoy, sets forth a masterful work of prose in which the futility of life is thoroughly exposed; the eponymous character sensibly sends herself to the grim iron path of a train (it is left untold if she is reborn elsewhere as a dove). Then, somewhat inexplicably, Tolstoy turns attention to his alter ego for a conclusion; the aptly named Levin wrestles mightily with his small, complete, universe, eventually deciding to abdicate in this struggle. His final declaration: that he would continue to pray and hope, though he did not believe the impulse to be reasonable.

Life’s mechanistic terms (the water, the food, the avoidance of certain weather patterns and pains) make it an inevitability that more than one man will live a single life; some millions may combine to only four or five distinct lives in total. What does it mean to a leatherworker or farmer to fall in love, when the armies of whole nations have been fed to crows for the sake of a Helen or a Sita? Jesus the Christ is cobbled together and popularized by Saul of Tarsus as an admixture of Dionysus and Mithras; The Son manages to imitate or else plagiarize the Buddha on multiple occasions in spite of the separation of a continent and a millennium: the young Messiah’s now-legendary betrayal and eventual resurrection in the savage form of Medieval Christianity are variants or mimicries of those daggers that eagerly tasted the flesh of the aging Julius Caesar- the numberless holy blades that conferred godhood to Caligula and Caracalla.

At times I am shaken by an impression (a star’s thumbprint on my eyelids as I slumber) that all events of life are a rendering of what has come before: tomorrow, my finding a scarred nickel on the roadside is not only prefigured, as is the date inscribed, 1985, but I have already spent the coin or have left it forgotten for decades in a dusty glass jar; or while standing in a shower, washing off a woman as the steam furrows its eyebrows at the third frost of autumn, that each cascading droplet is the exact memory, or recreation, of a previous cleansing and that the tile shall seem very cold to my toes when I emerge.

The barest compromise available appears to be the best one. It is not that all things have already passed, nor that our lives are mirrors gazing into one another, nor even that every other living thing is an automaton while I am free of such oppressive strings; rather, it is true that nearly all that has occurred or shall occur is and was foreordained. The hopeless worship of a fictional god by a fictional character, celestial tyrants modeled on the Dictator and his dynastic descendants, the length of my beard, the dryness of the apricots that sit upon my desk: these things were always to happen. However,

Once in my youth I was walking in the forest behind my home and I remember that the leaves were in the trees though I do not know if they were dying; let us say that it was spring. Since invention is the order of the moment let us also say that it was morning, the particular rose-colored morning that paper mills make possible. I was playing an unambitious linguistic game. I said to myself, “Dawn, this rose in the air. Don, to put on clothing, or to assume a thing, as Ajax did before his lethal madness. Donne, the poet, with his grudges and his fleas. Dawn, the name of a woman or the feeling of knowing that a woman of any name shall never return.”

While muttering these and other words I passed by an enormous smooth stone, left by the floods that came in autumn. If I had stopped and rotated this monolith some seventy degrees, perhaps everything could have been different. I have not yet decided, but I may choose not to touch it upon my next opportunity, either. If such brutality as has preceded me was necessary in order for my existence, it may be unsafe to alter in any way the arc of history.

Rivals

In their hard chairs, the people are somber.

I sit, improbably, in one corner

Of a room draped in black, funereal

As the water in my glass of whiskey.

I notice melting curls that the ice makes.

My hand holds your essence more completely

Than the coffin on the dais ever could,

To say nothing of those with tears held in their beards.

Women accompany your retinue,

They place their hands upon a darkened suit

Attached to some man who dared to love you,

Though you loved none, as if to soothe that pain.

I have seen into the eyes of women.

I have seen true hurt, but these, these rejoice.

I drink until ice clashes with my teeth,

I permit myself to laugh at them all.

Your true friends? Such a farcical display!

Your dregs there? They only wish to be me;

They weep always from impossible desires.

Their companions? Tonight, honest women;

They will shed their dresses, sweating on your past,

Smiling because they think your heart made you alive.

Carmen 33

A flood rises on a foreign city

And I wake. The sun glows. My love, she stirs

As if she does not remember this choice, this day,

(But how could dawn smile without her consent?)

And her eyes are blue like the sky never is.

She considers the time. Softly, she asks

If I will retrieve her shoes. I nod assent

And heavily step across a small room.

In chains, I feel the Bird at my liver;

I thirst sitting in a pool of water;

I wrestle with the mightiest boulder;

But, knowing my evils, why this torture?

Anything, any blood or pain or want,

I can endure; yet I curse my breathing

As my thumb brushes on the leather in my hands.

She hides her feet away; the ocean is boiling.

She stands; the comets fragment in the cold.

Oh, agony, to hasten her vanishing!

Moonshiner

My friend is a large man, a behemoth

Lurking in shadows of certain nightmares:

His woman mocks him sometimes, she calls him stupid.

I do not eat enough? He buys breakfast.

My mind sends itself to shambles? Like god

He makes salvation fit into a thin wafer.

He is a creator, a moonshiner;

His mason jar is like absent lovers:

You can pay for it, but it's better if you don't.

Pomegranate

There is a crow standing in the roadway.

Doom flies quickly away when it hears my coughing.

Autumn comes again with all its colors.

Trees are prisms for a moment, ‘til the weeping.

I have seen memory’s broken glass door.

It opens like new seeds from fruit, or a woman.

I recall Pirithous, long at his feast.

It is an ambitious thought, to steal the stolen.

Lady, dark as angry skies, forgive me.

I gave you no choice, now the earth is perishing.

Carmen 32

If I died today and all my thoughts were written on some straight line,

onto notebook paper that stretched like elastic or stars,

that summation would probably

be more than what you or your favorites did,

but I accept that it may not matter much.

Three Thoughts

Sometimes when I am not yet drunk enough

(and Ovid and Virgil are left on their shelves),

I intentionally get in emphatic arguments

regarding facets of life,

and I take a wrong side

purposefully,

to enjoy how people find aggravation

in finally proving themselves correct.

I have sometimes seen people

doing enough cocaine to dust the local mountains

and they speak loudly because they have important things to say,

as if their voices (thicker than straw and quick to burn)

can make their ideas into wordless towers.

I once read a lot of Bukowski

but I stopped because

I kept being tempted

to write poems like this one.

Meditations 10.29

I was thinking of the way she kisses

When the moon has died, when night is very dark,

And then about a serious question.

Yes is the answer, Marcus Aurelius,

Wisest of all men who wore the purple-

Though I would amend that simplicity,

And note that you would have become poet

And not philosopher if she had shared your bed.

Razors

There was a soft glow from another room

Lighting the hair on her calves like cobwebs

Or the fresh delicate silk of spiders,

And I think them mad, the other women,

(Modern as the make-up on their bathroom floors)

For drawing steel upon their wintry legs

As if exposure made them beautiful-

Trees without bark holding succulent fruit,

Fish cold like ghosts swimming bare of their scales.

Some times, my love does imitate those girls.

She shaves, she scrapes, her flesh is a mirror.

Upon that sheen I see the face of death,

But she sharply grins when my eyes are upon her.