Poor In Flesh

 Spite against his limits, 

because money was born

far away from him, 

so he had to farm as if 

he were working, and God

was a powerful Christian. 

      Hatred of vanity

the most pained evidence

of his jealousy--the schooling,

the superhuman dollars, 

      the leisure line

that lays down for the lucky

to walk across. Worked hard

and lived a family. Prayed

      the flesh 

right off his skin. The afterlife

a living woodchipper--

there to shred in real time

     the wicked

into sputtered flecks, and likewise

thresh in reverse: unshred

the birth curse of lowly means

    and churn out

a fully shaped tree in full flower. 

Not a sequoia of knowledge,

or a birch of exacted revenge. 

A willow

of elm, an ash of catalpa, 

a rage of buried waste upended.

Will We Be In It?

Last Fall we made a monument
out of transformed pity and
          canned rain.  It bled and
kept bleeding.  Hosting all those
moments got exhausting, but
who can honestly say
they've ever wanted less?
    And what now
                              and why?

A stopped life can't stay,
    either, or prolong anything
but the empty pause.  Sometimes
            it takes stretched years
to remember that.  Or
try to keep the pause, we
       freeze it in Winter like
keepers.


No, we will not be in it,
                      Not always.

Sea To The Thieves

Every Thursday

       Knuckle Nero transports 

Blue Island crabs from 

the flu hive. Smuggles them

lifted still from the crate

off the docks, where fishing crews

stack them after a few days

     at sea. On that island

everyone has a cold. Something

about the cold sea-spray, the

acidic rot brine of gull shit,

ruins respiratory systems

     at the rate of

Agent Orange or straight ammonia. 

Locals live and hospitalize and die

by coughing fits. Everyone 

  except

these fisherman, who are out

at sea for days at a time--

so whatever's toxic about the air

         at Blue Island

they get some regular relief from. 

Though they come home 

to the faces of wives and children,

blue from nautical emphysema. 

The life expectancy of a 

      fisherman's wife is 

thirty-six. But a first mate or

crew man, if he doesn't 

die at sea,

could make sixty with nothing to

slow him down but loneliness:

when he retires, there's no one

at home to keep him bored. 

The thieves who troll the docks

live well into their eighties-- 

further proof 

irony is good for your health. 

They're on the island only long enough

to steal a few crates, smuggle them

in an ice truck or under a tarp

to the mainland, where people 

breathe with the full capacity of the sun. 

Since they make their money there,

they're mainlanders. And twice a week

apply a faint blue tint of makeup

         to their hands and faces

and double as crabbers and dock men. 

Among them, Knuckle Nero is the biggest earner,

John Prince the most skilled thief, 

Myron Grotto the most convincing fisherman. 

They've lived long enough to filch

               three generations. 

Crabs a dull blue, piled high as 

        purgatory, each crawling

over the others like a horny blind man. 

Knuckle and John have moved enough of them

to have developed a kind of philosophy about them. 

Myron, who plays a fisherman well enough

to think like one, looks at a crab 

         and holds it with 

no opinions. "That island is one big 

trap," Knuckle says, and John picks his teeth. 

"A trap the ocean put out there on the land. 

What it catches it eventually takes back. 

Its prey takes bait, and makes a buck off it--

what folks outside that trap call 'a living'."

                                    John nods

while Myron applies a little more face paint. 

"And then we come by--nab the bait

and expand the trap--feed the reach of the sea."

"Could say we're agents of the sea," John adds.

"Could at that," says Knuckle. "The real

fisherman," Myron says, blueing the

bridge of his nose, moral

          as a ghost. "Working men

bringing sea to the thieves." 

B.O.H.

From a bag of hungers

he removed another bag. Inside

      it, a burlap sack. 

Inside that, a paper 

grocery bag. And in that

the withered scrotum of a

plastic one. Inside of which 

was a drawstring rucksack; 

  and in that

a ziplock bag. A ziplock 

clear enough that, if

       lifted to the light

its contents can look back. 

       But standing and 

squinting isn't the same

as interrogating with hands, 

so that also gets opened. 

Inside, a felt bag 

         the size

of a swollen thumb--the kind

kids keep their marbles in. 

But inside it, none of that.

A leather satchel. 

A lot of literal yanking 

pulls it free, and what's there

but a purse to hang 

on one's shoulder. 

But which shoulder?

Then it's all there, the flat

eureka--descendants 

    of bags of hunger

rarely come with instructions.

           At best

the ones you read into them. 

Some Words From The Risen Old

Wise, not necessarily 

in the things she says

but

in the way she bears herself. 

And what does that mean, 

wise?

There are a few things

she keeps in view, being

tactful about them. 

Strategically so?

Not really. She 

rarely sits down 

and concentrates 

on the name and number of them. 

So how does

she recognize one of those

intelligible bruises

when the combustible zigzag

of people triangulates 

the plain-born fact of one? 

Intuition. Antennae

that grow out of her own 

      mind's history

brush against them. Instead of

bumping into them wholesale, 

she waits for them to pass

and lets herself

get calmly palmed along

in their wake. 

Avoiding the 

messiness of collision?

No, undermining the 

importance of it. The 

barely audible ability

of old style wisdom:

take not where you leave not

but with no hands and fewer words,

give.

The Gates of Fact

    And were you careful? 

Yes, we were very careful. 

And did you look after 

        your own kind?

Yes, we looked for our own

when we were kind. 

And did you drag your 

   dead brother

along the epigrams  

of the poor? Sometimes, when

something sounded poor to us. 

Did you laugh

   with gold in your mouth? 

Sometimes. (One hot afternoon

             in Tivoli Gardens

            I saw a guy knock 

            a tooth loose

            on a crack pipe

he'd fashioned from a length of TVP

he'd lifted from a construction site. 

Handed to me with a freshly leveled smile. 

Blew smoke right through the gap, 

                 grinning and blinking.)

And did you hold yourself 

above the others? Sometimes.

    Only when busy

holding ourselves. And did fear

make you generous? Sometimes.

And the future ghost of yourself

          in others? 

Always. And did you tend 

quiet? And did you share tact? 

    Did you redirect your

health into others? 

                We tried. 

And how did you try? 

We had children, even

when we didn't have children. 

And having lived as long, were you 

          visible? 

What do you mean? In the ways
    that you bore yourself,


were you visible?

Well yes, but only when

   the arms of someone else

          bore us there.

On Earthly Wardrobe

Mystery nudes, with 

pick and shovel, in the heaven mine. 

Hack clothes from stone, for cotton ore. 

Not a stitch on them 

that can't say "thread". 

A ragged hole in the afterlife

supported by seams--

tiny as a dresser drawer. Its insides

pocked with closets. Nudes

at work, under light

of their own skin. 

Main characters in Renaissance paintings,

the whole kibosh of Greek gods,

porn plums straight from video…

An old man stands quietly in his fat,

a girl changes before her

very eyes in a mirror…

hydra-headed fantasies 

of the teenage brain

                    then

a body slumped alone in a shower

             then

crowds of condemned Jews

along with every shade of healthy slave…

All working thirty hours a day

down to invisible night

to make this a well-hidden

and discrete dressing room. 


And so we bear their lost sizes

on our very bodies. 

Porchsipping

Practicing time like a god, 

then freeing it from the 

   baby cage

of her rib weather--all the different sized

hours flap away like orgasmic

        pigeons--

all while she sits

two inches to the left

of sunset, sipping marijuana tea. 

A camera of filth and wonder, 

the reflective wobble 

of her cup's water-lens. 

Heat slows it down. Beats

   of sweat

its follicle children. So

goes the lazy smile

as it flies off her face

to the gutter north of its pleasure nest. 

The best is at rest.

On the patio, and barefoot. 

Fireflies descend the 

pale height of her zero dollar body. 

An affectionate hallucination

I could wipe from my eye,

   if I wanted to: 
caught in the Faberge diving bell
   of each bead,

July fire above the treeline.

Walking blind on a light breeze

to cool her thighs, neck, small of

back and breasts, and spectacularly
     disinterested
                    long calm belly. 

The Palm Reader Covers Her Face With Her Hands

See these palms, see them
knowing, knowing the whole life first,
before me.  See what's in them, all of us
or only me, what was and is and what will
wither.  The hands that move faster than
the mind put worlds in place without
sowing.  If we are grasping, what are we
even holding?  Fingers reaching out from
hot center that we may feel each other really,
maybe offer.

All of you are books, deeply written,
and I will memorize each line and
read you long into the night
instead of sleeping.
I am not

a psychic, just a reader.  Not a mystic,

but a feeler, I see like Aristotle

that lines are not written

into the human without 

reason like thoughts

in the eye like light 

in the mind.

He had fire hands, square palms, flushed skin,

short fingers, kept comfortably close
to his midline, either curled in
at the stomach
or holding
one another safely
at the small of his back. 
He wouldn't show me.  So I wrote
his story for him.  Watched
him keep going.
And never told him.

Murder Ballad

Rain opened wounds on the lake

and road puddles. Dawn Fine, the mid-wife 

held the baby up to the lamp. 

Everyone in the family saw

the aberration from their own angle:

the knife that was born with her,

buried in the side of her head. 

This was far deep in 

           country, several hundred years

           beyond the nearest city, where a

           natural death was always more natural.

           Villages on the edges of lakes… 

           Farms trailing off like ellipses…

           hills in various stages of pregnancy. 

    The youngest daughter with the pale

skin and freckles in her hair, shy as grass

that folds over to one side when the wind blows it, 

ruptured like a dandelion 

                              under sudden breath. 

The man who began the baby in her,

soon as he took the youngest part of her, fled. 

Hence the small, leather-handled knife

buried in his half-born daughter's head. 

The mid-wife said,

She'll die by morning

if we don't remove it.

She'll die now, if we do, said her father. 

Has to be done gently, said

the oldest woman in the room, like 

separating twins. After dropping statements

on the table

and comparing the length of them, 

they decided to let the night 

find the morning 

                     where it could. 

At dawn, they rose to check on

the baby, the knife, and the 

daughter, and saw, like sharp

outlines of a hard, new parable--

the daughter had died, while the baby and knife

had lived. 

The Plan

If the pain gets worse, we will hold it.

We will wake it gently when the night has passed,

 let birds land on it and take strings

             for their nests.

If the pain gets worse, we will call it sweetheart.

We will dance it across the room,

offer it a stiff drink and let it get some things

            off it's chest.

If, still, the pain gets worse, we will place it in front

            of a kaleidoscope and stare at it. We will

            break it into a hundred glittering pieces 

            and go deep into the center of the center

                    and never come out, but

                                    it's okay because

                                    we were in there all along.

We Were Silent For a Long Time

As the fireworks struck insects down above

Our heads she told us the story of a friend who will

Never be satisfied by any man thanks to the horrors

She suffered at the hands of her father now she is sex

Mad but then she was only helpless and the story survived

Her because yes she was alive and always uncomfortable

On the fourth of July it sounds like war if you've lived it

You won't cheer I told them I am present within the

Material object which represents me but no one

Wants to hear about that it's like planning the

Baby's funeral before it is born.

Woke up late and the dreams kept

Peeling for a stretch of soft afternoon

Yes I am alive and this means I light cigarettes

At breakfast and then go wading in the bathtub

In a state of damp indifference I put the statue out

To sea (After it has been worshiped it must either

Be disposed of at once or worshiped daily from that

Time forward) I have been to the sea and don't believe

It has a death