Bukowski no. 2

Before she slams the door, she yells out at me,

“Be a man!”

In anger, I briefly consider toppling my bookshelves over,

But do not force Gogol and Goncharov to fall into Borges and Cervantes.

I want to ask about the men who drink their families into bankruptcy,

The men who beat jealous bruises into their lovers,

The men enthralled in evil who assault children,

The men who remember nothing of war except the color of France’s soil.

I sit silently on my bed.

I wonder which she wishes me to be.

Carmen 43

“With the right wind,” he said, “you can catch the scent
of the flowers from up to seven miles away.”
The jasmine sprawled white on the eastern wall
of the last small house he owned before her eighth birthday,
before he began to move away from the sea.

Bukowski no. 1

Between savagery

and honesty

falls the shadow.

I won’t break his jaw just because

you left me for the smiles he gave you

and now you talk to him,

but I’ll have six more vodkas and feel young again.

When you finally die it will be from my carving, curling knives,

or maybe it is my flesh beneath the steel.

I can no longer tell.

Devotion

I struggle to reconcile a series of phenomena:

unsettlement a sibling's betrothal or divorce can bring,

four books by Spanish and Latin masters that lay upon the table,

red hardwood leaves bowing to the seasons as I grow older.

Much has been forgotten by swamps

and trees that perish like my lover's cigarettes,

to say little of myself- but I attempt this.

A library was once burned to the ground; which is to say that

this has occurred many times. Philosphicically, irrelevantly,

if a record is not altogether lost it can be said to still exist,

even if no force can unearth or produce it.

Our lives subsume light or fire and piety is the mother of sin.

She is beautiful but I cannot betray the opera,

viewed so often by those who no longer hear;

the story hates and rejects the air, tears fill opaline eyes.

I will not read a calender's page or tell her name.

Carmen 42

Just last night, the queen kills herself again

As Aeneas sits on his ship, sails set

For Italy and the glory of war.

Oh Elissa, heart like sand at low tide,

You who fall to sharpened sword and bright pyre,

The man you broke your solemn oaths to hold

Does not weep for flames that rise in Carthage-

Dry-eyed, he shrugs at the desperate flare.

For the son of Venus, love weighs less than duty.

Carmen 41

if god is a river,

the devil is the riverbed

A Beauty

With pale pink fabric, with floral design

Her skirt clings to her; she cleans a counter-

I gasp, trace from ankle to perfect hip.

If I live through a thousand newborn springs,

I shall not again be so amazed by flowers.

Experience

I have seen no endless glaring deserts,

Nor witnessed avalanches that, falling,

Murder iced peaks and blanket a sharp slope

Like mothers that warm their wailing infants.

If by accident I accumulate

A great many years, I may yet set eyes

On the Temple of Athene in its ruins;

Join Byron in condemning Elgin’s Earl,

Offer my head to anvil for Her birth.

I may yet set eyes

On the ravages of my Empire’s wars;

Build clean wells or strong-walled schools, fly away

Before stone erodes and horror remains.

I may yet set eyes

On fields, no longer red, in Bretagne;

So many untouched trees and rolling hills

Belie spilled blood, bones that are now worms.

I may yet set eyes

On a field of my own, tilled by my hand;

My children run, they sprint to catch the wind,

I am afraid they will become heroes.

I may never be any of those men,

But today I brushed my lover’s hair in the sun.

Fragments 11

the god of thunder once rode on his horse after a battle

cursing the storm that matted his hair to his head

and, beside him, his treacherous relative, bane of the world,

laughed quietly into the curve of his left hand with twisted lips

___________________________________________________

because I have become old enough to die, I worry not:

the man fated to die of thirst can fear no wall of flame

___________________________________________

I know a woman with children and sadness.

She pretends but all pretenses are exhausting.

She is nearly alone again but children remain

and so she cannot indulge her despair.

I mean to relate to her a humorous occurrence of an earlier day,

but I forget the details.

Carmen 40

Shall I tell you of your face in the leaves,

As if you do not own your illusions?

Pray, whisper of how you are still surprised

When glass is broken and mirages fail.

Revenant

The story unfolds in many places: in the modern age

it takes place in Houla, before this in Constantinople,

and earlier still on the hilltops of Jerusalem

(an echo of the descendants of Amalek, may he not be forgotten).

The night falls and brutal men walk within it.

Their footsteps are unspeakable, their weapons split the air

once, then handfuls and dozens and scores and hundreds of times and forever

the air is broken and even the beasts that feast upon carrion are wary.

The door is torn from the hinges, the family huddles together in a corner.

Both men, a day laborer and his decrepit father, are taken quickly outside.

The wife of the younger screams out "Why do you take them?"

and is silenced with a stroke of a truncheon that splits her head

from ear to eye. Suddenly five or six children are running

but the only door is blocked by a titan who leers and laughs

and he smells like a festival of sacrifice and his torch is the moon.

The other men within the house kill the youngest child, a girl, first,

then a boy about six years of age. A girl of nine years lunges

at the savage men like a hero. She falls.

Her older brother falls beside and quietly covers himself

in the blood of his family and he tries not to breathe

and not to cough and he prays silently, which is not his custom.

The other children are dispatched without excessive torture;

the woman who lays unconscious receives the mercy stroke.

The men illuminate the house and, satisfied than none remain alive,

continue up the cobble-stoned street.

The boy inhales the red-heavy rust of the night.

The scene repeats.

Dryad

Summer is near.

His hair is blond and it bears a vague resemblance to cirrus clouds.

On his back he carries a skin of water, a skin of wine,

and a bundle swaddled in blackened cloth (the size of a man's leg).

On his belt he carries a sheath with a hand-length blade.

There are certain appearances that demand the existence

of painters or sculptors, and Morea the Hamadryad possesses one of them;

her irreducible visage shall no longer be spoken of.

He walks up beneath the immense mulberry tree that is Hers.

"Morea, you are looking very lovely." He pauses, his left hand

brushes a tendril of hair that had been obscuring her eyes,

and suddenly a bough on the tree shifts, as if to smash a fly.

He raises his voice. "Your charms are no longer mine alone,

are they? I hear rumors from the birds; rumors that others have,

shall we say, taken many naps in the shade you cast upon the ground?

That you let them crawl on your body and mind... oh, it disgusts me,

like the silkworms you indulge. In every wintry berry you permit

them to pluck and use for food, it tempts me to call upon Megaera!"

Men have thrown themselves upon spear-points to avoid such glares.

She growls.

"Speak of The Jealous One on pain of doom,

Bright One who rides upon the heavens,

for she is more idle than you seem to think

and is not one to give thanks for vain invocations."

"Save your cautions, woman. I did not come to bandy words like a eunuch.

I bring to your hearth and home a sword, and ruin."

She begins to weep and there is a rustling in the canopy above

and she is ancient, unbelievably ancient, to be seventy feet tall and more,

and the leaves fall, first one and then a dozen, and more. She speaks.

"Have you still not found a mirror, then? You fear blindness so intensely;

but I have viewed you many times and still I see. I drank in your power

and still we both have glory! Why do you grudge what is natural?

Why should strangers not seek refuge, why should I not be hospitable?"

Her eyes focus on the bundle on his back

and she gasps. "That... that is no bow. What do you bring to my home?"

He unties the packet, the dyed fabric drops and drapes the clover.

An axe falls down with barely a protest from the earth.

She shudders. The land groans as her roots shift. Insects panic in swarms.

"So that is what you think of me? Prideful as your father, then,

Pythian Apollo: of course Daphne was not enough to sate your craving.

Here, I will help you on your way!" She seizes his belt knife and draws the tip

from her kneecap to her hip. Water and life flow out instead of crimson,

a deep seam of sap seeps from a furrow in the mulberry tree.

"Is that enough for you? No?" She shrieks,

she shrieks and turns the knife to her breasts and the berries fall

as if winter has come with all its snow and she carves herself

and cries. Her wounds and tears are identical. She cries out,

"How proud! How like the sun! It would be different if I had wronged you,

but here I am, rooted and constant, and for what?"

He seems unfazed and lifts his murderous tool. The honed edge bites deeply.

Morea's ankle lets out a sheen of milk or water or wine, and then again

the axe comes down and she stumbles and one foot

disappears; a pile of coarse sand remains.

He continues and each stroke unleashes more rage than the last. Sawdust flies.

The berries blanket the earth. She whispers slowly, punctuated with gaps from pain:

"Why? Why now? When the dark goddess sits on her throne below

and I am but a withered crone, a shell of the mother that fears light,

-none commune with me or seek the shelter of my arms,

and on so many days in that gloomed season we have laughed

together and no hair then hides my eyes and you truly have seen me...

is that why violence comes now, do you loathe ripeness

enough to cull it with forged iron? You would not dare to injure me thus

if I appeared as the old woman of your memories and your future!"

Sawdust flies.

She shivers. "I will tell you this. You make a mockery even of lust.

There will come a time with true lovers, the which you shall never be,

and they will speak to each other through cracks in forbidden walls and later

there will be grim fear in Babylon near a tomb and dark shadowy horrors

that are also lionesses, and on that day in your high chariot,

gaze upon the lands and find my trees, all bearing red fruit.

You will see the truth of love in every bloody berry,

and in that reflection you will see a coward and know that you did less and"

her voice ceases, for she has fallen.

Naiad

Many things have been said concerning the nymph Salmacis.

I have heard a story of a youth that glimpsed her through trees

and their leaves.

She sits on a grey boulder that is surrounded by a stream

(and when old women tell the story the water is cold and

when old men tell the story, the temperature is opposite).

Seeing her there, he says in a whisper,

"Should I pursue, knowing as I do

the danger posed by the lady of the water?

Even children have heard the stories;

of ambitious, amorous men who crept slowly

toward a certain curve in this murky stream,

only to find their feet affixed by reeds,

webs of weeds holding them tenderly and then

without a rain the stream rises higher and higher."

He chooses to ignore his imagined peril,

else there would be no tale. In daylight he approaches her.

When she sees him her eyes are like tomorrow's rain.

She laughs slightly. "I was just about to ask you,

my dear mortal, if it was the case that you were very brave

or very foolish, but with bells on your toes you would be less absurd."

He makes his decision quickly.

"Be that as it may, lady, still I pledge to you my steadfast hand.

As surely as my heart beats in this moment,

I will adore you until I am no more."

She lowers her chin and her eyes are lost in her hair.

In a spray, she whips her jaw forward and grins.

"That is a promise to which you will be held,"

she says. She kicks him in the stomach

and he hunches over. She shakes her head

and he is turned to stone. She pushes at him with her shoulders,

his petrified body rolls clumsily into the brook's path.

"Oh, you'll be the same forever? Such an oath,

though less terrifying than it would be if you could keep it.

Sleep now, and dream of storms."

The tale seems outrageous and in all honesty I would not believe it

myself, save that I have seen his face in the sand of a beach in Miami,

and years later in a low corner of the glass that holds my whiskey.

Grey Rose

I.

Certain repetitions are unavoidable. They can be excised, but they arise.

And so it comes to this moment, that a woman is dying.

She has a name, for a name is given even unto a horse

or a slave or a kitten.

We will call her "Grey Rose."

She was born.

Now on this her bed of death, she coughs. She coughs.

It is said that at the moment of death, that the most pure light

floods into consciousness like lava on a barren mountainside,

moves across the sky like a bolt of lightning that sets trees ablaze.

It is said that we see all the most beautiful moments of our lives

before we depart.

II.

Grey Rose was wincing on her knees

and her eyes were closed tightly,

her head inclined to the left.

The man standing above her was violent and her lover,

her love. In his right hand was a stainless steel folding spade.

Black paint was on it, to one degree or another.

He struck her just above her right ear and the steel sheared

and she fell and she shook twice there on the floor.

She tried to rise. Her hands scrabbled on the wet floor.

She fell again. The blood from her head flowed down the heartwood

of the pines. He stepped over her and opened the refrigerator. He grabbed

two glass bottles of beer with his right hand.

Later she would remember reading something about head wounds.

Something about fistfights or flashlights. Her blood was in her mouth

and the spade had been left on the ground and where it had tasted her skull

it had once only been the color of silver but then shared space with red.

She laughed til it turned to a cough. She had recalled an ancient truism

first said by a marauding Goth to a priest of the Roman tradition:

-Father, how does one wash blood from gold taken in holy conquest?

-My Son, I do not know of a way.

-Father, your ignorance is of no great importance. Gold does not bear stains.

III.

It was that particular pine heartwood floor that she saw most, in her final moments.

There were other unpleasant things, and they should perhaps not be downplayed.

-The first marriage to the violent man,

how she had sought his hand again

twenty years after her first pain and divorce,

and because of this, tasted her life on pine

while the folding shovel sat quietly

-Children she loved the way that peasant women love the loaves

that are beaten before the baking.

Her grandchildren who had mothers just the same

-The hazy way that her head felt like a sunset in a modern age,

after coal had had its way

IV.

The slight realization that property is owned occurs. The children arrive.

Her house is owned, and in her name. After her passing, it cannot be the same.

Some few thousand dollars exist in one or more savings accounts, no doubt,

even if not remembered.

Her grandson has been hurt very badly by many people

and he has hands like gnarled iron and he has never cried and will not cry

when Grey Rose breathes her last. If he thinks on this,

he will suppose that he demonstrated bravery, or enlightenment, or death.

V.

The inhuman scream from the brutally tortured is in fact a reiteration of what it means

to be alive. In the moment of descent the purity of the future becomes clear.

If flames surround our feet and roast our life away, we deign to call them gods.

The knife that kills a careless tourist in a darkened alley becomes the kiss

of the Madonna. So many, so many in the trenches, and all of them with prayers.

Oh, the consolation of irony! They are faced with infinity,

with the closing of eyelids, the solace of coffin or urn or saltwatered grave.

They cry for God with swords carving out their abdomens,

with bullet holes in their lungs, with cancer at their bones or pancreas.

In the very last moments, they are all shown the most gruesome memories

of life. The unspeakable abuse of adults to children, of men upon women,

of fire on every living thing that creeps or runs or flies or digs beneath the ground,

all the most clarified evils, every man or woman sees these things before their death;

they compare these things to the future, the nonexistence that is the melting of a thread,

and they say of them-

"God, my god" or "mother, mother, my mother" or "Oh, my, how beautiful."

Six Seeds

I.

Today the air was clean like chemistry,

Like the bottom of a small swimming pool.

Today I cannot write of a dead boy.

But if I could he would be very young

II.

The most alarming facet of nature

Is perhaps the manner of reflection,

And repetition, of beautiful things:

Teeth all identical, sharp bayonets

Held ready to give a shark one more meal,

Bloodied flesh torn then turned back into blood.

We are now in ravenous months, the spring

From which life flows. This hunger, in its turn,

Will create a barren land where once lived flowers.

And every year when the snows melt, the spears

III.

Some were purple, some crimson, some yellow.

I held them with care after their demise.

Later, my love will bind them together

And they will wither on the windowsill.

New storms will seem angrier than the old,

But I will not fear their thunder and wrath.

I fell in love with her with the sea blackening.

A man lives until the day that he dies

Carmen 39

I have had very grand ambitions.

I will be more frightening than any man

who has not been a butcher of men.

I will burn the churches down

when I can be sure that those within

worship the one true god.

When a tree is planted I will set fire to the roots.

Carmen 38

Without knowing what it is to die, I am left with very little to say.

Is one a savage if bodies killed in the crash of war are not mutilated?

Can one be a Monster if they do not abuse their children?

The meanings of words are polluted and obscured.

My thoughts leave the woman I love, for a moment, to fixate upon

some simpler tasks. Perhaps a condemnation of my father,

or someone who wrote a bad book, once.

My dear, the wine turns quickly to vinegar.

If you will not have things one way, will you accept the other?

An Abrasion

My lover is exceptionally beautiful and would remain thus

even if she were not mine. Each day when she sleeps

I say small unprayers that her dreams will become more pleasant

than they are. When she sleeps her claws are duller than mallets

and sharper than swords- I gash myself with them and grow drunk

with the glory and wonder of my courage. When she sleeps I whisper her secrets.

"I am dangerous beyond your ken. I would kill the sun if I feared shadow."

Because she is a woman her body is soft in the most perfect places.

She sings. If I, too, sing, then it is as if I breathe and stone, too, breathes.

I sympathize with the exultations of the ancient priests, those that tear

hearts away atop stair-stepped pyramids and send souls to a dark master,

those that move hands like knives upon the necks of dove-white doves,

the red-beard who chains the largest of his male slaves to a tree before letting

out the blood: to know a god is real is insufficient.

Ritual is the manifestation of belief.

When I lay with her and her teeth rend slightly at my flesh, she is satisfied with this.

I dare not do the same to her. How could I ever stop devouring, if allowed to begin?

I would be a madman sentenced to death for ripping her limbs from her body,

for twisting at her neck, gnawing her liver, for every awful detail of my horrific feast.

Of such is the kingdom of heaven.