WILD CHERRY

This ain’t no regular Pepsi, friend
It’s Wild Cherry
And a dour woman practices
Her violin nearby
I inhabit the tree’s shade

Because my face is in recovery
From beers on the boardwalk
At Coney Island
Sun like a whip
We saw the pendulous

Nest of some greeny
Parrots there
Choking the electric transom
And invaded by sparrows

Foreign women walk by with
Shopping bags
Or run by in sports bras
Birds dip and shiver

In a pile of fine dust
Amid the cobblestone
A taxi screeches

Men with cigars seem ubiquitous
Coloring the air
One way to live is to write

The gist of what’s happening
So to know it

Today I loathe
Meaning and think only

In quale and burst

The dogs don’t smile
But they appear to

My very own sister approaches
Talking on the phone

With our parents
Who are in New Mexico
Overfeeding hummingbirds

The same thing
(Sugar water)
Acidly coursing my stomach

The woman with the violin now
Taking furious notes
With her free, claw-like hand
My sister’s talk

Slow and melodious
Because that’s what’s
Happening
My pen running

Out of ink
Dusk approaching sly
An elderly woman
In an orange wig
Warbling some senile aria

Oh no she spies
Me writing about her
The obvious, lazy disdain
Sing if you can sing she says
And I’m cowed again

SNOW LIKE FROZEN LIGHT

Noon is hard on
a priest. An egg
wants company
and so cracks.
This is my shepherd
this wind
patiently embracing.
I am not so
easy. Love like
an unassailable
soil. But at least
not timid
with hate. That
man that
is my father.
We know only
what might be made
to sing
through mishap.

HOLY THURSDAY

It is Thursday and I just
Read Blake’s “Holy Thursday”
A song of the poor
And of the sun’s relativity
But he is wrong
Because the sun is not
A metaphor
A song of the sun
Is continuously sung
Do the poor sing it?
Yes, they do
The poor sing of the sweet
Torpor of the sun
Moving like an ancient woman
Over the horrible silence
Of the land
What do we deserve
From the air?
It shuttles tirelessly
These hot notes
It is even less
A metaphor than the sun
First a metaphor, then the eyes
Close contentedly
And what has been lost
Drags in the melody
Of the ancient woman’s ragged
Dress, who is also not a metaphor
What has been lost
Is too easily
Found to be believed
And the poor stare directly
Into Thursday’s air
Like nothing
And everything at once

HOLY THURSDAY REPRISE

Switched from William to Blind Blake
“Panther Squall Blues”
A gift from Ed
To complement Willies
McTell and Johnson
The recording bathed in static
As if it were the secret voice of air
Set loose by time
A song about frantic love
I know the long dead
Laugh uncontrollably at our attempts
To love right
2:57
You write from work
With a barely restrained panic
Born not of love
But assuaged by it
“The sun, the warmth, the grass and your hands”
Fifteen hours fifty-eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds
Into the day
A great wind gathering
A wind that manifests while at the same time
Remaining invisible
Like the great gathering love
Which waits for you
Laughing uncontrollably

ON THE TORPOR OF NONVIOLENCE

I’m done with innocence
William Blake’s that is
Read the first half of his songs
This afternoon and now
Sit sweating while the cat sleeps
This is what it feels like
To be old snow, says Colin
As the mere effort of existence
Peels away from one like a bathing suit
Turning inside out
Eyes salty
Listening to Public Enemy
A tornado in Brooklyn
And a cockroach on the wall
The size of the mouse in the cupboard
The cat won’t kill
Startling awake on the sill
Only to yawn
Blake’s lamb's post-millennium skew
Angels dehydrated
In the air-conditioning

WAYRRULL

The big bang is an initial step. The first step taken in existence. Or, more likely, the first step after a long period of stillness, or inert intensity. Which is probably why that first step was so large and unwieldy. Whenever one takes a step there is an imbalance. This imbalance, what I call disequilibrium, is what insures that existence endures. It is only possible for things to happen in the first step of disequilibrium. And even if that first step was huge and distant and only abstractly perceptible, it still steps. The first disequilibrium, what the Aboriginals call Wayrrull, or “the thrust behind things,” is present in each consequent step, each pulse of disequilibrium that continues to this day. One way to picture it is to think of concentric rings. The big bang is the outer ring and each movement in the world taken by each thing is a new ring. We are tempted to say “directly at the center,” but how could this be? With so many loci of movement, so many steps simultaneously taken, how could there be a single center? Disequilibrium is about dance, collective. The first step is followed and interpenetrated by innumerable steps; each connected, each necessary, each unpredictable.

ALL THE SNOW IN HOLLYWOOD

Tall and wild, like
a sunflower peering
over some bleached
fence. But today
stuck on a bus
beside a woman not
reading Absalom, Absalom!
All ride it sits
there, a beautiful
old edition, unopened.
In my lap, Susan
Cataldo never closes
and the words singe
will remain here heard
like Atsuko Tanaka’s
electric dress is seen
returning something
of me to myself, tall
and wild, an ibis
but something more
drably American. This
bus will leave me
in Washington unless
it’s headed to Philly
which I fear for
at least an hour.
Worse, I fear the deep
sadnesses of girlhood
which suffuse the ones
I love even as they turn
into women. But fear
to me, tall and wild
and boyish still, though
nearly thirty, it is only
a moment of holding
my breath and gone
on the wild, translucent
air that commends us
to move impossibly fast
through it and then
into the very future.
It does not scare me
that I have to dance
to get around the TV
couch, dresser, doorway
in our suddenly tiny
apartment. Only another
week and we will
inherit the ceiling
fan. Chinese ice
coffee hurtles through
my brain. The bus
now far from Philly
thank god. If I were
a philosopher, I would
say Singing is a means
to group identification
but I know better.
A song is a button
we press when we
want to thank god
even if we never have
believed in him or her
or it or all the snow
in Hollywood.

A FINE RED HAIR GROWS ON HER ARM

A dancing bend begins at her wrist
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A jug of hope is paced in her skip
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A faint of dust escapes to her ear
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A sudden emptily taps at her air
And a fine red hair grows on her arm

A POEM FOR JULIANA

Begin again as
we must. Never
against but
a movement
toward all
else. Do not
believe the things
they tell you
about time. You
are just now
beginning again.
You are just
this place
becoming
ours. One hour
or day, one
month or year.
Only the dead
will really know.
Who are they?
Songless ones.
Who are you
Juliana? A color
an odor a texture
a light and soon
a singer of good
news. Hello.

A CENTO FOR SOLIPSISTS

after Creeley and Williams


You tree
The element in which they live
Your lovely hands
Scattered, aslant
Wandering among the chimneys
For no clear reason
You tell me that I love myself
The night the cold the solitude
The dishonest mailman
It is all a rhythm
At the small end of an illness
Quiet as is proper for such places
My days are burning
My love is a boat
As real as thinking
And yet one arrives somehow
A big bearheaded woman
All her charms
Hart Crane
The plastic surgeon who has
A tally of forces, consequent
Or me wanting another man’s
Sad advice
That profound cleft
Without other cost than breath
You tree
The element in which they live
Your frosty hands
At the brink of winter
Long over whatever edge
They call me and I go
Still too young
For no clear reason
Pink as a dawn in Galilee
I feel the caress of my own fingers
Or with a rush
You send me your poems.

A Mini-Noelle for Kendra

7

Midnight, beery, Halloween, Kendra
sidestepping men. It is not
necessary to disguise
neglected things. It is not laughing if it
is never not laughing, a disguise the mouth
makes, a red dust


of sound. I wanted to kiss
Kendra, but she was
the one calling. Winter
low, a vibration
the birds avoided. Cinema
made of animals repeating this
new terror only


deep enough to see. It
was the kind of mistake
for fishermen, Kendra, a loss
of weather-worry that
brought us together. We watched
a girl die in a bouquet
of snakeskin. What do you


say to a girl like that? Do
you ask a landscape to explain
itself? Everything is a detour for girls
like Kendra: the twitter
and twitch of debris, a warp
that rescues
the mouth until a girl


can only use it to utter
verbs. And what is not, in
the end, an act of
thought. I took this girl
named Kendra dancing and never
once lost my mind. Does love
proceed from men


or from trees? Remember
how we explained wind by embracing
the animal that slept
in our house? Every tooth
could be a jewel
every time the word Kendra was spoken
could be a bell breaking


into peal. Listen, there
is nothing wrong with birds. No
disguise will teach
the children the value
of happiness. This is my room
of real laughter, it echoes Kendra Kendra
Kendra against a little hammer.

A Variation on a Line by a Painter of Women

No differences accrue
standing naked in the doorway
with your bouquet
of shirts. I knew a tiny

man with a fork in his own thigh
by his website. It begs
a definition of knowing. Love, it is not soft
for confabulists. It is like a banquet

where one wakes already stammering
between drool, a ghost
eyeing plates for the future
of its name. A person, likewise, is a horde

of accumulations, mostly
unknown. It begs a definition.

SONGOING

3

It’s not as if the air
doesn’t touch us all
the time, which might
as well be “a rain
of breathing arrows”
There is an oscillation
here. Here. There
and here. Thus, you
can’t watch the sky
accurately enough.
So say love is a manner
Of depicting the world
honestly. So say we
have ruined this adverb
by talking. So say
we have nothing left
but to sing.

SONGOING

2

I came here wanting, I left
at the back of a mouth.

Tonsil: Sometimes leaving
the opera is the opera. Adjacent

tonsil: My dear friends, they write
the best American poetry

in the entire world. Inner ear:
Forever north of so

much, a hive of oddly
shaped birds, bipedal, perambulating

the ghost-walks. Call to a ghost, say
Here Ghost, but my friends they

speak only to colossal
ghosts. My friends say, Here

Hemisphere, here. It is always that
way with them: one on

their shoulder, yet voices
thrown in unruly yarns across

the continents. Ventricle: One’s
life is as simple as

an arrow. Pointer finger: an arrow
of failure that does not pause.

SONGOING

for Macgregor


the sun. the sun. the sun.
the sun the sun the sun.

I wake in the crush / of days, the way

everything holds

together merely by the stewardship

of tiny, voiceless orbits. Or

perhaps there is too much voice?

the sun. the sun. the sun.
the sun the sun the sun.
thesunthesunthesun.

An unsung land is a dead land

Can I call it a rain / of breathing arrows?
Does the air fear / space? Here is a representation

of you—any / you.

The sun folds into it like a melody / in the ear.

Who will sing the sun? My friends will sing the sun.
Who will sing the sun? My friends will sing the sun.

Ireland Darksomes

No death is for only
one. Faces
are either empty or grown full
with ferries. These faces
are nothing
if not swimming
with death.

after Jack B. Yeats


Swans, snakes, whatever.
It is spring and the world wants
to divide, to flay
into strips. The first word
is always wrung from a stone, a tooth
a tongue, whatever. It
is always wrong. No. Yes.

Cork


Skellig. A foliage
of eels. Copying centuries
in a beehive’s embrace. A toehold
of stone. It was the only
island on the island on the island
devoid of crows. We were famous for loving
nothing so much as nothing.

Skellig Michael


There is no sky
that is not also
a sky above horrors.
A mute grey mare
leaps the cliff thick
with blood. Her rider is and is
not at peace.

after Peig Sayers, Blasket storyteller


Carpaccio of wood
pigeon, beetroot and rocket.
A long-armed star scuttles
in from the wall, Bowie
familiarly ecstatic. A limp light
patiently droops into pub
after pub. Beamish, Powers.

The Ivory Tower, Cork


I touched you coming
out the small stone
enclosure. We paid the farmer
a single coin for to
traipse up and down those
precarious steps. What is delicate that
lasts longer than god?

Staig Fort, Ring of Kerry


Birds exploiting
the wounds of Cúchulain
for sport. Crows looming in
dark knots above
the Hill of Tara. The gannets’
great white island and a brazen murder
of crows on the Rock of Cashel.

2

Restless seagulls inch
across the backyard, peck a Casio
keyboard dusted with snow.
Cat prints fill in
and disappear. These things persuade
at song’s loss. But there
are no empty silences.


What little sadnesses
dance free from the black
backyard wires? Around them clutch
the roughly turned veins
of vines. Even in
the black, a blacker black
escapes.


A seagull gracefully
circles bones
abandoned by schoolchildren.
It is bird
weather. Lefferts Gardens.
The 99-cent store
is as big as the cathedral.


The way the
trees make space for space
nearly guts
them. Leftovers
are picked clean by strays.
Day tugs
itself into shape.


I wake and am pervaded
by a kind of reverence. The neck
of a turtle knows
how strong one must be to do justice
by the sun. Your light, it is wrong
to think it solid. The only
solid thing is thought.


Can it really be so
strenuous, this letting
the world appear? Annuals
unfold, a leaf
curls brown at the tip. How does
one say a brown word? The melody
is like hunger.


And yet, how hopelessly
absorbed is man, to think the straight
lines straight? As
if each didn’t pitch, each
zoom oblique
at the slightest cock
of one’s curious head.

NOT A FEW WANDER HOMELESS ON DARKSOME PATHS

1

A bell is unable
to resist entering the bedroom, my
hand around your
calf. You look through solid
glass, your glasses, and then through
solid glass again. Where they
cross is unreal. I am dying.


The tree belies the gentility
of the air. I have
to see this. I have brought you
this bell, simply
by cocking
my ear. Once a man ruined
a part of it with his fist.


The world is not simply
the case. It is what is
called
for. Calling does
not invite reasonableness. It
beckons calling in
turn. The world is an invitation to song.


The snow stops
at our bricks or our
windows. Or it doesn't. It finds
a way into the grasp
of thought. It begins snowing through
language even. For hours. I can't
believe how cold it is.


A bell, tree, world, snow. You
are stranger
to me than any violence.
The poet wants to
be a thing and so
recommences all. Here I am
thinging somewhere at your back, full.


What is this unshaken
peal moving through
the memory of a bell? The peal
of the remembered is an
appeal. Just as sunlight
on the sleeper
gathers day into its shapes.


And yet, an artist must pick
up everything. The sky’s
trick is one
of remaining impossibly
aloof. One gulps.
Just the other
day I was strangled by it.

23

(birdsong)

I am not speaking
of the song of

(eyesong)

existence, I am
singing song

(amsong)

is existence

(HER IS BETWEEN THERE)

after Adrian Piper


Hold the back

of the camera

against the middle

of the front

of the triangle

from the nipples

to the navel

and the room

in the mirror

in the picture

holds the spirit