The Crossing

1.
We didn’t make the journey ourselves.
Our families did that, on hands and knees
hiding in the backs of fruit trucks pretending
to be sacks of grain, bodies pulled shut.
On the roofs of freight trains glaring silver
in the noon light. My grandmother pushed her head
out the slit window to see the sun and was blinded
by the sight. When they reached the border
one family turned back. They went home.
The other carried their homes on their backs,
in their bellies, held it between their hands
as they crossed the line into whatever nothing that was promised.
One side looked no different from the other then.

2.
This is a country where they sell meat
in the same place they sell pants.
Meat on little sticks,
meat smoking on the table in front of us,
red meat slivered and shiny with egg.

The pants are for the men. The women
wear diaphanous robes that fill with air
and stay full always. Beneath the robes
they are invisible. Their bodies end
at the neck. Above, faces with eyes
turned down, mouths closed.

There are no women here at all.
Just these ghosts, gliding silently along.

Act 1

The first act: the attic, moonlight at the window,
two poor men dressed in rags, burning what they love
to feel warmth, not realizing that in winter
nothing keeps the wind out. The poet watches his words
take flame and laughs to taste the smoke.
Food is sparse now. Money, too, is low, though time

is not as precious and he doesn’t think to save. Enough time
he thinks, to keep us hungry, looking out the cold window
at snow too thin to cover the dirty street. The smoke
dissipates, the garret turns grey. Any love
he’d once held for the romance of poverty is gone. Words
make only a little heat in this unfortunate winter

and even in the wood-stove hold no sparkle. In winter
they need lit candles to write bad stories in time
to pay bloated landlords that won’t take words
for rent. His friends depart as he stands by the window.
He watches them bicker, dance. Soon love
will turn his philosophy to smoke.

Months have passed since he last smelled the smoke,
the rich unfurling feathers at his nose that winter
steals the softness from. Consumption in love,
he hopes. Lust, decadence of emotion, stasis of time
to delude misery to the kinder sting of jealousy. At the window,
when she knocks, he puts his words

to use, but she faints, and leaves him only words
that on waking make her recall the smoke
that last baron spat into her face. But then from the window,
light enters.  Hands touch, and even in this winter
it ignites. Never mind that there is only so much time
they can have to rest their bodies at the fire. It isn’t love

they look for here at introduction. It isn’t love
that she looks to when she crafts the words
that let him think he knows her. He thinks there will be time
to uncover more than her name, her flowers, more than this smoke
she waves shyly towards him. After all, it is winter
in Paris and two people can stand at a window

hand in hand to forget that time has no affection for love.
There is a wide clear window words are hurled from
but this smoke between them heats. The winter loses frost.  

The Meat

What the men taste they cannot fear.


They have tasted elk and boar and bison and beast.
The skin of the beast turns crispy over the fire.
Its bones, whittled down, make remarkable tie pins.


And the women with their fruit fill their arms with color. Their
fingers have turned black with the dye. Their teeth are always dark,
their mouths exaggerated with stains.


On a rock there is a creature with the face of a man.
It will not die, even when they pull their fingers through its flesh.


This is how we began to devour our enemies raw and wriggling.


It takes time to become accustomed to the way the food feels, 
moving on the tongue and down the throat.


It is a prized delicacy in some parts of the world.
They will charge you just for sitting at the table 
even if you change your mind and opt for the tenderloin. 
The wine is the best in the world -- smell that bouquet.


The men and women drink the wine and eat the meat.


There is nothing more satisfying than this.

The Basket

Your basket, full of stones.

What you carried to breakfast.

The water behind the house is grey and full of bodies.
Stepping stones, bones --
it all feels the same when your foot presses down on it.

The house looks like the houses children draw.
The roof is sound but there are only two windows, facing the sun.
Or the moon, when the moon is out.

You have never seen the moon. 
You wake only when the light is full 
and broken into pieces you can hold.

The basket is not full of light
but you hoist it up and carry it home anyway.

Once, you thought you saw the moon
but it was only a shadow during the day, 
cast onto the side of a tree.
If you saw the moon you would sing to it.

Your basket, full of stones:
Your hand on the handle, gripping it.
Your arm, your shoulder, your back, 
bearing the weight.

You carry it home. 
You lay the stones out in the pot and boil them
until the water tastes like earth.

Poured hot into mugs, you breathe it in.

Winter Sound

Somewhere it’s snowing, and it looks like this:
figures in the house, behind the glass window,
the wind just a distant sound that blows the white on white,
the trees just lighter and darker shades of disturbance.

Here, it is fall, though the air still feels like summer.
Something tells you you should be marching,
though you don’t feel like marching:
every step you take pinches your toes.

It could be that your shoes don’t fit.

But the seasons, too, seem uncomfortable
with handing off the baton. They’re sitting around
instead, having coffee and chatting about
why one is sadder than the other, whose hurts
matter more. When the coffee goes cold
summer stands, stretches and evaporates

leaving autumn staring at the empty chair
that is winter. The silence that doesn’t talk back
even when you think you might want it to.
Quiet that, beaten down with fists and jabbed
with elbows, poked with sticks, stabbed
with knives, remains quiet.

Somewhere there’s a house where the only noise
they hear is the noise they make for themselves.

The Hippopotamus

they are said to be the most violent animals in the world
their jaws can close over a man’s head and snap it off
their bodies move unusually fast as if they are smaller
but they are not smaller their mass is extravagant
when they move through the water

          the water moves aside

not for religious reasons but because there’s no place to go
but aside when a leathered tank goes slopping forward
you will go left and you will go right and you will go away
their heads swing open like jewelry boxes
but there is no jewelry inside, only teeth the size of small fists
not pointed the way a panther’s fangs are pointed
blunt, even, but when the jaw swings shut whatever’s there
is riven into pieces -- what is inside the mouth and out

what is inside swallowed whole what is outside left to rot

still, i confess that i love the hippopotamus, with its tendencies
towards unwarranted violence who has not wanted
without reason to destroy everything
that was unnecessary to his happiness? who has not wanted
a jaw so vast it could fit the head of an enemy between its grasp?
who has not wanted to force the river out of its bank?
to be feared by the clumsy? to jostle muddily around?
who has not wanted not to be afraid?

Salt Herring

I brought back a jar of salted herring from Berlin
The tin lid clamped down around the edges, pressed
Like a pie crust. On the flight back I had eaten
Handfuls of fresh fries, and woke covered
In salt, my hands smooth with the grease.
My hands on my face, mixing the oil with the sweat
Or whatever water sat there. My eyes. My hands.
What I saw: the grained blue fabric of the seat ahead
And the gray groove of the tray set back. The voices
Gutturally incomprehensible and soft around me.
No music. No melodies. The sound of the wind
Outside the plane or not the wind but the plane
Moving the air so that the plane was the air:
Plane air, plain air, just what we breathed, just what
We meant by pulling in that soft fume, slowly.

Self-Portrait in Three Parts

1.
We turn the fan outwards to funnel the smoke.
We watch it sift through the blades, above the fire
Escape. Up the stairs, the roof. Painted silver
It gleams like wet stone under the no-sun.

The girls lie there anyway with their eyes closed
On wide red towels, not sleeping.

2.
I have no identity, and you cannot disagree.
Your vision of me is only one version
Of self I’ve had the pleasure of pretending to be.

The me I am alone is still not one with itself.
The hand clapping, etc, all of that, nonsense indivisible.

When it is clear that the voices inside the head
Are only those that my mind has chosen
Then I will learn how to talk with strangers.

3.
When the sweat has already gone inside the skull
The condensation will kill the flies that sleep there.

Wet thoughts lead to bad dreams. That is what they say
when you come to them with bad dreams.
Wring out the rag where the thought was born,
Wring out the rag with both hands, and hard.

If you can find the rag, lay it out
On a piece of hot rock
And let the cloth evaporate.
Let the lizards play in the fluff that remains.

monodramas

Neither
After Beckett

It’s not the neither we fear so much as the either.
What choices we made we did not know we were making.

If nothing were the only choice wouldn’t we have accepted it?

But something and then a lesser something;
between these two things there can be no peace
only indecision (that inability to know what’s right is right
even when the wrong was certain to have cleaved
you from crown to feet) remains

staggered between the doors, open or closed,
or, more likely, open and open, your feet moved
as quickly as the fluttering oak’s seeds
with their curious uptilt
turning leaf to propeller.

You were, in other words, going in circles.

If this was a quality you admired in me,
my sense of justice, my ability to see that nothing was wrong
and nothing, equally, right--

They say that a woman, waiting for her lover,
gave up and turned into a tree

or didn’t give up, kept waiting until her feet took root
and continued on until he returned.

Living, he saw only that the she he had known was dead
and in its place stood the brown remains
of what had been devotion.

He turned away from that half open door.

He went back to town and married the butcher’s daughter
whose hands were not quite stained with blood
but smelled constantly of the metal and tannin
of the knife and old soap.

They sat in the winter and ate jerky together
pulling it into pieces until it was soft again.