No. 5,000,000,000,000
I have seen the floor up close too many times,
but I have never seen God's backside,
nor have made a mountain move.
In gathering pools of red green blue you might
just find your fix, all you who crave
the violence of novelty, spoils of liberty—
But here, a place remains untouched
by wrath, some void that looms below
fiction, delivering up the craft of dread
where data and bile slip through
the same constricted vessels,
emerge in streams of sonorous hum,
cyan magenta yellow wash.
This is the purging of sense from salvation,
the weft and warp of chatter and the tapestry
of noise, in which I am woven and spidered—
I am a cracked and glazed ceramic shard
inside a Byzantine mosaic of the Pantocrator
Here is my body, stippled in pixels of light.
TO DEATH
I am sick to death of WASP-y
older women—their waspish waists,
and rounded r’s, and bottomless martinis.
They crowd me in my sleep, aging
Lauren Bacalls in herringbone pantsuits.
Will someone please explain
these women to me? They spring
out of cabs and smirk at you. They
saunter into and out of your life,
always a hand poised on a cocked
hip—the other cigaretted, wafting
from a willowy arm, with liver
spots. They pose like steaming teapots.
The other day I left the shower
and found one lounging in the bedroom
door—a resurrected Hepburn, twirling her
Manhattan by the stem between her forefinger
and thumb. She wore jodhpurs, riding boots,
a mannish blouse. I wore a well-placed towel.
Really, Darling, she said, Really.
Often enough, my dear, I said.
Really, she said again, I think you should
consider being clothed at all times.
NOT BUCCANEERS
I met a civil war ghost
Lazing in yonder field
He said, we didn’t fight for you
And I said, what for then?
He said, and don’t say glory
That’s not why
And I said, well what for?
He said, and not for money
We were not buccaneers
And I said, what for then?
He said, speaking for me—
I ain’t sure what the others
Thought—but I just wanted to
Get out of the house
LET’S GO SEE THE COUNTRY
I miss the sound of highways
And the cunning of the road
Sweet menace of the badlands
Oh, how I miss those violent meanderings
The jagged guardrail gutters
Bodies strewn beneath the trees
Left just for you and me to see
A shoe balanced precariously
Atop the mile marker sign
It’s just like you to notice
That type of thing, Dear
MELANCHOLIC MYSTERY OF THE STREET
for Giorgio de Chirico
Now they call that some kind of game there,
Some mumbled shibboleth differing every time
Except for the place of anonymous stress
On the third syllable—it’s the key, I think, precipitates
The clicking. On the other side, some hole,
Torn backwards on itself. I am running now in
The thin scrim of night, picking through
Hovels and backwater sties. All rot involves
A loss of love, in the print of a onetime caress,
I reflect on grids of stench. My breath floats
Above me, good, angel, good. All horrors are forgotten
In the coma of crisis. Now, now, now, now. Silent
Huffing. What thought inside this gross disindividuation?
All sluglike and martyred to desultory cringings
At daylight. Fumblings for order at this crux of nothingness
Brought into fullness of focus. EX NIHIL AD NIHIL,
Graven on a Park Avenue column. Tiny ripples of malice.
Like a Mormon prophet, some frontier Jeremiah, stands
With his body, finger outstretched. Let’s talk theologian talk.
I am turned in and out again, sick at the thought of the night.
Oh, silvery wounds and the slavering hungry,
Eloquence drained from a hole in my belly.
What sour magic drinks from the cups
Of abandonment, scooped out
with specialized tools.
DISINTEGRATION LOOPS
for William Basinski
In pits and wrinkles,
old musics appear and degrade—
song falls away in tatters,
the syntax of sadness
Stretched thin over axles and spent into ribbons,
the notes drip from limp tongues,
a remnant of once—
smoke polished organ strains sifting the tiles,
goodnight, goodnight, goodnight...
sweet, sweet, sweet...
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