27.

                Transmigration of souls,
a popular belief worldwide, absurd on
                the face of it
but no crazier than a soul showing up once, right?

                For a moment—
you come back as a sea anemone if you don't
                comb your hair right—
forget the rules. The big IF is an Eternal Soul.
                But again,
since something has to be eternal, why not a being—
                and if one,
why not a fixed astronomically large number playing
monkey, monkey, who's got the monkey  forever?
                It explains the law
                that says
for each human born, one sperm whale must die.

                Mathematical
quibbles come creeping in. Are souls matched to forms
                by 1st-choice/2nd-choice
logarithms like when grad students are matched up to
                 internship sites?
Can a particular form Repeat
                 before the entire Shuffle's
been negotiated?

                Computer
modeling has yielded no answers,
                wind tunnels grapple
with known and unknown variables,
                theories
proliferate virally, preparatory apps have yet to reach
                Beta phase testing,
so these karmic dice will just have to be
                trusted.


28.

If your voices are
Full-Truth why are thousands of them trapped together
           in plastic bottles of
                         saponified
                                         oil?
                                              We are All-One you say.
Yes, I get that. And I read every single tiny name printed on
the label like the names of our KIA's on war memorials.
                                  You have become ordinary words like
                                                                                  slave and
                                                                                           free and also serve
                                                                              the next-door God of
                                                                                   cleanliness and must
                                          be applauded for both trusts.
                                                       (Has Bronner himself joined you or does
                              he dance for Palomar's voyeurs?
I know you can't answer.) Your scripts are fixed liturgies. Am I prepared
                  to become one word and take a vow of silence otherwise? Spend my                          
                         days scrubbing backs and floors in fellowship with other voluntary
mutes? (The finest print is:                
         tortured,
blind,
          Bronner deeded All-One-God-Faith
astronomer Israel's church his Essene birth control, planetemples,
calcium-malt corn-sesame mineral-bouillon and the patents
                        for his soaps. Holocaust-orphaned and electro-shocked
                                             Emmanuel
scribbled the names of the Six Million until he died. Entombed himself
                                                          in work and cant.) Yes. I'm fond of            
                                                                      words and
                                                                                soap, honored to add
                                                                  my voice.


29.

I stopped short of my desire, conned like the Lion in a poppy-field.
I fall for it every time: You want a big bang now—or walk a few
more miles for what's behind the curtain?
                                                          You didn't offer me a fuck
                                                          when we met.
Something danced on your face and in your voice that reminded
me of the fish that got away when, you know, life got difficult and
then routine.
                   I sorely wanted to know you—but then
                                                                    the top buttons
                                                                               of your oxford
                                                             and jeans coaxed
                                           It's in here—
                                                             and I plunged in like Ahab.
I had already done the same with Anna, but this time I thought,
No kids, no marriage vows, this one's a purer quest—all spiritual.
Oh my!
           Yet, it could have been. You did offer a sparkling friendship
into which I was encouraged to drop hooks for every fish I'd lost,
           but I was not prepared for lashing to the mainmast
           and what that meant,
                                          Martine.
           Instead, I leapt at leaping fish and had one of the best times
of my life while the boat sank underneath my feet
                                                            and mermaids grew gray.


30.

I'm immortal thanks to your love? Èske w grav, are you serious?
Lucky for me, manman has made some plans, nothing to brag about but
just enough. She whispered, Tout griyon yo te peye, all the crickets
are paid. I said, Go free now, I will follow my own way, in my time,
through the window you opened.  But Madam Heron will not let you through.
Èske ou pare? she'll ask. I have no questions about you. At heart
you're a freeloader, a shoplifter, a pirate, one of those sparrows
of the air who doesn't have a thought for even the sparrow who flies
beside you, thrilling you and keeping the chase-tail merlins off their game.

It's my own nature to love you this way. Just the thought it might be true
we human beings can exist without I'm sorry's and After you's
makes the blood feel brighter. It's my nature to long for deliverance,
for the pleasurable, and the white. But you've mistaken me for Anne
your wife if you think for one minute I will bow down to the idol
of compromise, forgive and forget, or settling for second best.

Fuck you and the arrogant horse you rode in on. Love isn't the height
and breadth of heaven. It is hairs in a mole. It is nails in a heel.


31.

A pseudo question and untrue test, when after months of catechism
everyone answers the same one word — Yes  — your Catholic Confirmation
a vestige of the Socratic rite of initiates to the age
of reason — each passed a vial of hemlock and asked — Do you love life?
Instead some moron bishop bobs his head and taps your unshaven cheek.

How incomplete that platitude Things might improve  — how taboo for you
to place your own chips, red or black — your parents' investment — passage
filled with pain, the feeding, the overseeing. You are their property.

How meager the dished up diet of freedoms — frown or smile — brown or blue —
leave the top button open or button it — virginity or lust —
spend the whole day housecleaning or just dust the Hummel figurines.
Dropped in a pail of water — Live however you choose.  Preparations
for free rein consist of genes to trade your tadpole tail for sticky feet.

The sole alternative is taking matters in your own hands — a knife
or pill jar.  You didn't ask for life — we offer it, but if your choice
is No thanks — I'll kiss you and walk with you there. That's the least I can do.


32.

The so-called freedom you're constantly blabbering about is nothing
but abstraction. Once you give it definition, Tom, edges enter
the picture. Genesis describes a time when there only was water
and an overneath where a spirit moved—free—mind without weight over
weight without mind. Remember our time at Seabright with blackened tuna?
We didn't get what we dreamed about, but what we got was good. What's real
breaks the legs of thoughts, brings tears, and serves food with hot sauces. We ate what
the waiter brought and a hundred dances hid inside the spicy crust,
half a dozen margaritas bloomed in our heads, and the skinny-dip
we took in full moon-lit obsidian was the highlight of our month.
Your “freedom” would have brought us just the grilled fish that we ordered—rare, fresh,
but without the clarity of unintended consequences, dead.


33.

God's reading all the fucking poems, the cold bastard—that's where they wind up!
I think I'm writing something useful (for?) only to discover
he's decoyed me and legion other aspirants into churning out
odes, elegies, sestinas and sonnets simply to feed his sweet tooth:
he heaps them on his coffee table to read during pitching changes
and between innings of baseball as well as during all the time-outs
he's inserted into football games. If those beer-sotted sports fans knew,
there'd be eggs through stained-glass windows and public pissings on “The Barefoot Boy.”

I should be tickled someone takes an interest but his total absence
of discrimination sucks out the joy. Why can't his choirs of angels
furnish him verses? Does insignificance of theme or oddity
of device make us such addictive snack food? Does he go rummaging
epic tragedy when he surfs over to The History Channel?

But you know what upsets me most? I keep hoping I will succeed in
opening proud portals or windows in poems I know perfectly well
are only cheesy sandcastles. I mean, goodness gracious, I built them.


34.


We're posed American Gothic before the Luxembourg Palace clock.
It's 12:05. Three dolls perched on foot-worn marble stairs, and pink flowers,
leaked from Anne's left ear. From my right ear, above white flowers, two matrons
shared a laugh. How did the nice Czech coax them out into the photograph?

Take me to your bed once more before you go.
                                                                    Anne will welcome you back
                                                                    if you ask sweetly.  
             Look at the snapshot, don't you see it?
                                                                    All I see
                                                                    is that it's too late.
             There's still an hour till the cab comes.
                                                                    No. Drink your Coke.

Everything she owns is packed up. The kitchen's bare but for her suitcase
and the rickety No. 14's we sit on. A correspondence
between the physical and spiritual stares us in the face. A clock
in the valise still ticks. An inch outside the window, a brick wall waits
and an odor of piss wafts in search of poignance. Her eyes are dead set.

She was not here. No flowers or little figures ever spilled from ears.
My Coke and her Sprite are no realer than their logos, gas phantoms held
captive in sweet water, and food chemists waving molecular wands.

I would like to think there's something more to all of this than what appears.
No, there's just us, Chè, cloven lovers knee to knee on two trembling chairs.


35.

Our pond a shiner in hard early light, something night did before it
barreled off like the freight train, leaving behind a gratitude for calm.
Dawn neither denies nor over-dramatizes the chronic abuse,
beatings the bloated weeping willows and warty spruce have grown used to.
Crows, nurses who have seen too much, weave coarse fibers into a loose gauze
bandage of cold air they callously, accusingly slap onto the bruise.
The huge volume of darkness below the surface is cold; heavy; thick;
not wet—only what was dry wets. If evaporated, it could inflate
a small heaven with hurt air. Fish lurk, we imagine. Tasteless mussels
in their beds. Weeds we imagine waving don't. Slight warmth presses up from
the heart of the earth, enough to give diatoms ideas but no more than that.
A bare tree with a still rook oversees our helpless, passive eyes—
mirror the passing clouds, squalls of rain, geese, cranes, sun, moon, cold and the twice
daily and once nightly box cars—containing nothing of our own but
low appetite fish, self-replicating swarms of gnats, a staunch beaver
with a bright birch hutch and a rivalry with a muskrat but no mate.
The rook could lift its wings and fly off but it won't and we won't. Sorrow
attaches us. We can't picture ourselves on a whitewater river
or great lake full of strength. It's a mental trap. One of the pond weeds
breaks the surface with prim gray buttons for darning needles to sun on.
Autumn algae blooms, thick custardy lumps, green-blue, unbearable, until
ice comes and numbs it, winter the best time of year, waiting for silent
snow to cover us overnight and offer hare tracks in the morning.


36.

Napoléon writing
                        Je suis pour les blancs, parce que je suis blanc,
                        I'm for the whites, because I'm white
        and
                       Liberté des noirs signifie l'esclavage des blancs,
                        Freeing blacks means slavery for whites
                                                                                   was as blind
to L'Ouverture's ideals as Toussaint was to Bonaparte's misanthropy.
Before the French attacked Crête-à-Pierrot, Dessalines opened the gates
for those who don't feel brave enough to die. Some unexpectedly stayed—
white as white but with black blood in their veins, Toussaint said. Open your eyes.
                                                                    
Tom, I don't want to be what you want me to be. I don't want to join
the papiyon in flight or to spit on God's cheeks for what He has done.
You want me to be part of your so-called independence when you are
already more free than I am. What I am looking for is simply
                                                                                       contentment.

                                                                                        No more?

                            Non, pa pli! I have no hunger for ecstasy—
which incidentally is what you find so agreeable about me.
It's not the blood that is or isn't in your veins—it's that you want it
to flow more powerfully, and I don't want this. This is your greediness.

Don't play the country girl! Who do you think you're fooling? Oh, I'm Haitian!
All that bloodshed in my heritage has left me traumatized!  Bullshit!
Do you think my people fled Shangri-La because it was too quiet?
You and I are the same except that you're fleeing from difficulties
you anticipate and I from trouble I've ignored too long. Don't I want to be
content too? And doesn't your lip curl in an unforgettable way
when your pleasures edge you towards orgasm? What scares you is not excitement
but living outside of convention. Oh, he's a married man! And white.
But you're already beyond the pale, Martine. Why go climbing back in?

Tradition's a thing to master. It's not suffocating me like it
is you. What fills the world with blood is neglijans nan bon konpòtman.

Martine, get a grip. Fills the world with blood?  We're sitting drinking coffee.


37.

Don't degrade your mind—,  my tiny literature professor began,
—a free, independent entity desperately fighting enslavement
by agendas not its own. Don't require it to slog through boring tasks,
including the books I assign. All art is a pursuit of liberty.

A grade-school teacher once asked me to memorize and recite "Johnny
Fife and Johnny's Wife," and after I did, and swore a pact with my mind:
it promised to remember everything of interest, and I promised
never to memorize anything uninteresting again.

                                                                     High school
went well, except for grades. Then one day in 3rd year a great teacher
asked us to memorize ten lines of some great poem, I forget which one.
I didn't want to just say no, and I looked at the lines and wondered
if they weren't interesting enough to just stick on their own merits.
Needless to say, they weren't. I don't have that kind of memory.
But I fixed them anyway. It was no big deal. What was a big deal
was that I could no longer remember the things I did love.

Maybe that happens anyway at age 16. Maybe it doesn't.


38.

Leaf and limb lopped off
again,
again,
you send up every little shoot

you can
in a raw test of wills
you'll win.
How many reaching-outs do

I have left?
Cut me, I quit.
I won’t keep getting up
and getting hit.

But you're as tough
as tungsten iron,
inch-thick trunk
bunkers underground

far more concerned
with self-perpetuation
and preponderance
than

pleasure or honor.
To your minute
lime green ears—
peppering a grass

thin and sick as
syphilitic hair—
too artless
to eavesdrop any

secrets beyond
the ticking of pavement ants,
let me confide
something

before I
snip you off and leave you
strangling in air:
the reason

I'm out here
with these blades
has more to do
with estrangement than landscape.

Fingers bitter with your injuries,
when I
go in for lunch
and wave

my pruners Hi,
my wife stops a knife
mid-air
and cocks an eye at me

as if to say
So much
for half an hour’s peace.
I don’t know how we know,

but we do.
This sunny late April noon
is our last chance.
She places

her knife down
on the board.
I don’t hurry to the sink
to wash my hands.

Quitting
is as seductive as anything
I know.
She just won't, though.


39.

The fearless children were all hit by trucks,
my father used to warn us.
Grandma said no, they're forced underground
to brood and accumulate strength
like cicadas on the sap from tiny root tips,
awaiting their Go.

My big sister said they leave—have a quick look
around, then trade their souls
bit by bit for the next steppingstone
toward she-had-no-idea-where.
 
I asked, Then who are the children
who assume their shapes, eventually
reach the stature of adults?
Is the brave boy's infinitesimally
gradual transmigration osmotic—
one breath of courage floats free
to be exchanged for the inert air
of a less daring sort of child
who's timidly awaiting his chance
to take the brash one's place and try
his own hand at riding the bronco
for eight seconds of excitement?

Whichever kind of boy you are,
I want you to know you're welcome here
with me for the duration.
Tell me to fuck myself, stick the nagging
right back up my ass—or curry smiles
and look to me for everything
you need. Only grow straight.
The distance between frail and evil is wide,
the distance between frail and brave
is the breadth of your little finger.


40.

"While I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me,
and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would
have taken it," Mum Bett declared. "I heard that paper, when it was read.
It says all men are born equal and have a right to freedom. I'm not
a dumb critter. You call me wench and nigger — yet you and your fellows
are no better than I thought you.

                                                It was in May — just about at the time
of the apple blossoms. I was wetting the linen that was bleaching —
when a smallish girl came into the gate and up the lane and straight to me
and asked me without raising her eyes 'Where is the Judge your master?
I must speak with him.' I told her my master was absent and would not
come home before night. 'Then I must stay,' she said, 'for I must speak with him.'

I set down my watering-pot and told her to come into the house.
I saw it was no common case – girls in trouble were often coming
to Master but I never saw one look like this. The blood in her veins
seemed to have stopped — her face and neck were all in blotches of red and white —
her lip was bitten through — her voice was hoarse and husky — and her eye lids
seemed to settle down as if she could never raise them again.

                                                                                        I showed
her into a bedroom next the kitchen and shut the door, hoping
Madam would not mistrust it — for she never overlooked anyone's
wrong-doing but her own, and she had a partic'lar hatred of girls
that had met with a misfortune – she could not abide them. But she saw
me bring the girl in — it was just her luck — she always saw every thing —
I heard Madam coming and I threw open the bedroom door. Being
that I could not no way hide the poor child — she was not over fifteen —
I determined to stand by her.

                                          As soon as Madam had got in full sight
of the child, her eyes flashed like a cat's in the dark, and she asked me what
that baggage wanted. 'To speak to Master.' 'What does she want to say to
your Master?' 'I don't know Ma'am.' 'I know,' she said — and there was no foul thing
she did not call the child. When she had got to the end of her bad words
she ordered the girl to leave, who then raised up her eyes for the first time —
she had not seemed to hear a word before — she did not speak — did not sigh,
nor sob, nor groan — but a sharp sound seemed to come right out of her young heart –
it was heart-breaking to hear it! 'Set still, child,' I said.

                                                                             At that, Madam's
temper rose like a thunder storm — she said the house was hers and again
ordered the girl out of it. 'Set still, child,' says I again. 'She shall go,'
says Madam. 'No, Ma'am, she shan't,' says I — "if she has a complaint to make,
she has a right to see Master, who is the Judge — that's lawful and stands
to reason besides.' When dinner-time came, I offered the child a part
of mine but she said I had no right to take Madam's food and give it
to her, and I did not — but — poor little creature — she could not no more
eat than if she were a corpse. She tried when I begged her, but she could not.

Master came home at Evening. I got speech of him as he was getting
off his horse and told him a poor afflicted gal had been long waiting
to speak to him. He bid me bring her in to him after his supper.
I knew Madam would berate her to him — but that did not signify
to Master – he always went straight forward to do the right. When he sent
word he was ready, I took a lighted candle in each hand and told
the child to follow me. She did not seem frightened — she was just as she
was in the Morning — except that the red blotches had gone and she was
all one dreadful paleness, waxy white.

                                                      We went to the study. Master
was sitting in his high-backed chair before his desk. Master could not  scare
anybody — he looked like an angel that pities – not like a judge
that condemns. I set down the candles, walked back to the wall and stood there —
I knew Master had no objections — Master and I understood one
another. 'Come hither,' says he. The girl walked up to the desk. 'What is
your name?' 'Tamor Graham.' 'Take off your bonnet, Tamor.'

                                                                                     She did take it off.
Her hair was brown — a pretty brown and curly, but all in a tangle.
Master looked at her — the tears started from her eyes, and she quietly
wiped them away with the back of her hand. She was not given to tears.
They were not her demonstration. If ever was a pitiful look,
it was the look then on Master's face. 'Hold up your hand Tamor,' he said,
"and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help
you God!' She did. 'Sit down now, child,' he said and drew a chair up himself.
She fell into the chair and clasped her hands tight together – then burst out
like a little child and cried and cried and wrung her hands.

                                                                                   'Why did you not
complain before?' Master asked. 'Did you realize, child, that if your father
is taken up and convicted on your oath, he must die for the crime?'

'Yes sir, I know it.'

                          He was an awful looking man. He had close cropped
grey hair, and when I led Tamor in, it rose and every hair stood stiff
on his head. I've seen awful sights in my day, but nothing near to that."

[Drawn from "Mumbett," manuscript draft by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 1853]


41.

They gave her the most beautiful baby clothes,
black velvets, Chinese reds,
things her dad recalled thirty years later—
a guy who couldn't tell you
what one soul had worn at a wedding.
Then as soon as she saw herself
in mirrors, she swore off dresses,
anything with pockets or buttons,
skirts, jeans, hats, tights, belts, maryjanes—
pretty much everything that wasn't
sweat pants, tee shirts or sneakers.

In junior high, she let the jeans back in
and her standard wardrobe was set for life.
The well-dressed guy who finally
talked her into becoming his wife
caved in and agreed to be wed
in their “comfortable clothes,”
though she eventually caved in too and wore
a pair of fairly elegant peep-toe pumps
someone thought were Dior.

Though everyone kept telling her dad
no one was losing anyone,
there was a lot of weeping all day long,
the reason for which I was
to thick to put my finger on.
As she finally hauled him up to dance
to our ragtag orchestra
of bongo drums, guitars, fiddles and flutes,
he did remember then, after all, clearly,
what his own wife wed in—
white satin cocktail dress;
white patent leather shoes;
white cap with black mesh.


42.

Yes, I know all that bullshit about every snowflake being different,
but is this an arts & crafts project? Every snowflake does exactly
the same fucking thing every single fucking time it falls from the sky!
The din of fiddling insects on a hot summer morning—easily
numerous enough to dismantle the neighborhood and everyone
in it, if they took a notion to; but they just keep twiddling their legs,
every last one of them, every dag-blasted day.
                                                                   The reason Chinese
look alike is that they are; sound like they're spewing gibberish, because
they are; and every tiger, every bluejay, looks and sounds the same.
                                                                                                   If
it mattered, we would know the different shape of every flake, trace how each
glided, pelted or spun through the air; the shi in each young student's eyes;
what taste this  crouching tiger has for biped game; the feathered nuance
in the syntax of fluffed or spiked or fallen crests on jays; the piercing
wail of the singular, disaffected katydid who ached—who begged
katydidn't harping next to him—to wet his mandibles in blood.
Instead all 20 sit in kindergarten snipping paper snowflakes.


43.

See the short-tail shrew
and scorpion duel,
how the shrew dodges
lightning
             strikes
from the scorpion's tail,
then pounce!—
an opening to stick small teeth
    into an Achilles heel
    somewhere.
Blarina toxin disables
the arthropod
and the shrew starts dismantling
lunch.
         Watch the four-inch
shrew and four-foot
garter snake fight.
Snake has no chance.
Nothing's as fast as
a hot-wired small mammal.
         See if you can find room
in your heart
to spare
            Nelson and Sheila
   what your saliva
   holds for me.
You know firsthand
a parent's love
doesn't dart and weave
like spousal infidelity.
Trust me that they can trust me.
     A fair fight between consenting adults,
Twain or someone
called marriage,
and if the “fair,” “consenting” and “adults”
is not quite accurate,
the rest is on the nose.
     Defenseless as slugs,
kids see two great beasts
circling
and think they are encircling them.
As long
as we keep things
at arm's length
they can continue feeling safe
and we
can continue keeping
something in perspective.
     You're a good mother,
I know, and only hope
you still believe
I'm a pretty good father.

You know where to slip it. I do too.
When they're grown,
we'll post a YouTube.


44.

When Bukowski made it
                                   all about form—
                                   “I had no content,” he said—
the last man in the world
                                   he expected to be imitated by
was the drunk whose stool
                                   was two stools down
                                   who called him names like Drunk Heinie.
A third drunk had brung in a book of Heinie's poems
                                   and made everyone
come look for laughs.
                              But he read them out
                              with this melodramatic voice
and it didn't work,
                          it wasn't funny,
                          there was no high language to
mock.
         Heinie staggered in
         an hour later and tried hard to beat them all up
but that didn't go very far either
                                             and they decided to quit
and just drink,
                     maybe they'd be more
                     in the mood to duke it out later.
I'm not sure what happened
                                         later, I wasn't there anymore, but
the same asshole comes in a couple days afterward
                                         and he goes up
to Heinie and says “You know that guy
                           who gives you money for the track?
He listens to you, right?”
                                   “It's a con,” Heinie says.
                                   “OK, it's a con,”
the asshole says. “I fucking understand it though.”
                         “So buy me a drink,”
Heinie says.
                 “No,” the asshole says.
                 “First you gotta tell this to your guy—
what comes outa my mouth's a lot like what Leon Spinks does in the ring.'”


45.

     When they nagged her at school,
she said
Fuck you,
and when ragged at home,
she said

     Fuck you.
When they threatened her
and when they punished her,
she said
Fuck you.

     When they offered rewards,
she said Fuck you,
stop telling me what to do.

     They suspended her repeatedly,
then put her in a special school.

     Her parents learned
to govern by consent,
her teachers learned
to lay off,

     and by the time she was 10,
things were going pretty well,
though people

     still sometimes forgot,
until a Fuck you
reminded them
who they were

     talking to.
Now and then
someone called the police
when they thought
Fuck you

     in public
called for it.
It was no one's fault.
The idea of bossing

     children
was fairly ingrained
in the culture,
and she understood that.

     Still, a please,
a question mark,
was not too much to ask,
she insisted,

     and she probably
was right.
When she could
ignore bossing peacefully,

     she did,
but Fuck you
remained at the ready
if you got in her face.

     Brushfires had to be put out.
Conflagrations threatened.
Infernos loomed

     as possibilities,
but day after day
went by,
and she grew up.

             A lot of people,
grandparents and such,
struggled
with contorted ways

             to say,
“She turned out pretty good.”
Somebody said
each child must pick a

             row to hoe,
and that was hers.

My dear wife,
still lets fly two, three a day.


46.

You raise your face, snarling: 'Comment contenir le nègre?' How to contain
the black?
               Here's how I did it:  I lay like a fresh puddle beckoning
soot to solution and Bombay cats to lap me up. You trotted up
and stepped in, and I—silent, bottomless and elastic—drank your foot
and it dissolved beneath your startled eyes.
                                                              How can you die and yet remain
strong enough to climb streetlights where lunas fail to find satisfaction?
How can I sit and expect to keep love I haven't earned or even
made a case for? You lowered yourself of your own accord but you can't
say why.
             I don't have anything to bring you tonight except this milk,
mint chocolates and dumb veneration—and never did. I can't contain
a single limb. Your other foot sweeps overhead, and the one I tricked
and made plenty of room for is lifting itself back out, to follow.
Libérer les nègres!  You've found your opening, and with the light you'll fly.
The way you still sit beside me reading tells me more about you than
all our time unclothed.
                                So much of you I'll never know. I could've run
with you immortally perhaps, a wild horse. Instead it's just goodbye.


47.

The baying of the hounds on the thrall's silent scent—clamor dueling with
stealth, the stressed beat pursuing until its quiet partner slips away
and the dogs lapse too, or he's trussed and led back for punishment and warm
scraps of brown hare tossed in reward to the pack—something interrogates
the wisdom of our hunting him. The gods made him slave, they made me skald
and likewise made our lord our lord, but who's to say they demand we bring
death only the gold we were born to? Don't fugitives and wanderers
wash up on distant shores to claim new lineages of nobler blood?
Didn't this same thrall slay a Jute thief who crept into the village once
when we left women and children unprotected in our drunkenness?
Maybe he knows something we don't. Maybe he knows a place where creatures
great and small have opportunity to change one fate for a second,
skald to lord, lord to thrall, thrall to warrior or tiller of the soil—
a place where even a woman might make choices respecting her toil.

If I were a braver skald, I would follow this thrall into the woods
myself to drink what he thirsts for and see if it will free me as well.


48.

A young manager, two masked thieves with guns and a safe full of money
is a recipe rich with drama because of what's hidden.
                                                                                If all
three men knew they each had a boy and a girl of about the same age
maybe there's no drama but three proud fathers drinking a beer upstairs
at the bar: the thieves still have guns, the manager's still young and the safe's
full of cash but the guns stay hidden in their clothes and the focus is
on the snapshots of the six beloved children slid out of wallets
slipped out of their back pockets.
                                                   Several things hidden at this moment could
worsen the drama but they stay hidden and don't. The young manager
for example hides his racist rant and gets off with a cold-cocking

this time. There's a later episode in his life when the racism slips
on through but instead of getting what he deserves the woman he hurts
forgives him because she had thought pretty much the same thing about him
a week or so earlier but hidden it — so this big makeup sex
thing happened. Reconciliation, she said, is like the collapsing
of a dam. One day,  she said, there will just be a smooth-flowing river.
                      

49.


  D
on't have to
put an “e” on “lov”
                           or d
                               o
    enny
        thing       egg
                         enst my w ill.

  D
on
't
ha
   ve a
      nag
            i'll a
                  sk 4 the last dance
                         or ride off with into a

sun                                                                                      u
set.   No.  D o n ' t  k n o w  n o t h i n '  'b o u t  h i s t o r y  b     t
sunny                                                              yesterday

my li                                                b     t
     fe was filled with pain au chocolat     u
i can C clearly now

the rain has gone
& all my
           yes
                ter
                    days
have lit a   f   o   o   l
HIS  WAY
     2

t  h  e  
g  u  s
            ty
                br
                     ea          
                           th
                                  of   h u r r i cane c a r ter ' s
                              cyc
                        lop
                  tic
    s a l l y
       go
 c  r  o  s  s

the Mersey
Don't you go downtown
The saddest thing in this whole wide world

is to C my baby walk    talk of the weary.
                       the      the
                       walk & talk

  D
on't have to
put an “l” on “ove”
                           could  p u t  an  “r”
                           & g
                              o
  enny
        where

       i      w a n t
       i'm   f  r  ee  as  a  l i b r a r y
       in    w i n t e r
       i'm   a   s o u l   man
       do

do do do do!
i'm a soul on
                   i  c  e
& everything  n  i  c  e
& EZ

baby
baby
U can't
hear my
heart beat  b      t    L I S T E N
                    u
                            doo wah doo
do

u
want
     to
    know
    a
secret or eat  1 more monte cristo?
kiss me

yes
you can kiss me
when I'm dead
& gone                        I won't bite
            I'm still human

the little  h             m    u         n       u
                     o                    c              l     i
who
    once swam
   in the semen
                                     R  angels

from the  r e a l m s  of  g l o r y
now sing GLORY GLORY
2 THE NEW BORN KING


50.

But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. —Gospel of Matthew


      I am 200 pounds,
      all of which the Catholic catechism
      says
is tare:

and when I die,
the weight of what I'll take
is Ø,

until
      the general resurrection,
      when my spirit will be reunited
with the 200 pounds

to either be punished
or rewarded with
      qualities I lack now,
      making me subtle, agile, impassible
and bright.

On that glorious day,
if I should succeed
in earning it,

      I shall be attractive to you,
      and you,
      as my wife,
      shall be to me.

Although it may seem trivial then,
more of those pounds will be muscle
      and fewer fat;
      maybe the penis a little thicker;
      you'd like that.

If it's torment I earn,
I'm at a loss
as to why God would bother,
      or what exactly He plans
      to do,

      because
      I have already known
and lost what I,
both tare and soul,
most want,

lost hopelessly,
and by my
      own sins of neglect,

      much more than my physique,
      which followed my retreat
from you both tare and soul

as I rolled on,
curdling the milk around
      my heart
      and blocking passion's blue torrent
      as if there was no judgment:

I don't fear His hell,
think heaven possible again,
believe a thing.


51.

Auspices only go so far,
then comes time to shove the swelling waves
aside and hunt plump mussels huddled
underneath the massed mirage. Are         
the children strong enough to swim the black sea,
to ward off whales themselves?
Couldn't I be a good example in desiring,
in venturing?
And you're going to be fine as well.
Don't you have plans tucked, dry, under
the gunnel eaves, dreams you've deferred
or been too shy to touch?
I hope so.
I don't know where I'll be or when you'll hear
from me next but there's nothing  
more to me than what I've shared with you,
and you've been gracious to listen.
I've attended you this entire time too.
You spoke so eloquently
about how you piled gray shucks here, pearls there,
building up both genii,
and I think we see each other clearly,
hulls in a shipyard, whose ribs
were formed from common lumber.
We've turned out differently, but why feel ill
about it? We're two good, solid craft,
strakes elegant and planking tight.

I launch alone now, bound for
whelks and walruses, much hard work.
                                                      Martine
             played the role of mermaid, of a siren,
                          her one lure, my own desire.
For that, I'm sorry,
I needlessly hurt you.
Still, wish me fair winds?   Luck?


52.

Every point inside an infinite circle is its center,  Alam
writes in Tiferet.

                       To cede the point, locate and untie its tether,
dissolve the grain of self and join the course of nevermindfulness
through white shark mouths and gills...

                                                      Each failed attempt at embrace is a signpost.
Marking the pinch and sighting backwards along the pathways of restraint,
each failed kiss, each failed attempt to comprehend a lover's thirst,
each failed rapport of yin and yang when line and hole repel, or color
absent shies to add its voice to spectra disbanded into choired black,

hand over hand, to drag myself back along the cord that pins me down,
cheeks wet and hot, palms chafed—first feet, then legs and torso dwindling behind—
and the future begins to look as if eventually I'll just be
tears and rope-burn knocking on the door of one of Dante's driest hells.

“Who's there?” a gruff voice calls.
                                                “A soul to be delivered,” I say.
                                                                                           “You gave
up everything! What makes you believe in the moon-sailor's fenestra?”
 
The lover dogs of God are howling all,  Alam writes in Tiferet.