to rape her in the leafy grove, I’ll say what I saw
in the plainest words. I am not asking to be forgiven
for desiring 1080p, though I am asking
whether or not she asked for it: you’d think
we would have laid that one to rest (it seems
so strident, air-lifted from the 1970s
when I did not watch tv and also called myself a womyn—
a word it’s hard to dress in a kimono) but apparently
we will never. At his trial, the thief (Toshiro Mifune)
sits wigwam-style in tethers and laughs maniacally
as he tells his version, though in somebody else’s version
she’s the maniac who laughs. We ask, but the new machines
refuse to say much more than this: that everyone
will get their chance to laugh and everyone
their chance to wield the knife—
be careful, it is sharp and growing
sharper, the more I spend.
When first I was given the one lily
chaperoned by two green pods,
I strapped myself in like a cosmonaut
to absorb the whoosh of seeing
its pods open one by one.
Because what mind cooked up such extravagance,
spot speckle pinkstripe smudge —
someone call a fire truck
somebody call a bomb squad
somebody call a pharmacist
for a Valium prescription.
Because the beauty of the world is soon to perish;
everything is burning up too fast—
lily number two goes off like a bottle rocket, leaving
the bloom and withering on the same stiff stalk
and the heart torn between them as the petals drop.
Oh, I might have asked for a simple daisy, something
to inflict a subtler vanishing…
without all this ocular pyromania
and the long-bones-dressed-up-in-a-coffin
scent. Plus there’s one pod yet to detonate,
which the yellow pollen grains are trying to defuse
by lying scattered on the table,
precisely scattered on the wooden table
in a manner calibrated to this trapezoid of winter light.
for Ben S., 1936–2010
My friend said: write about the dog in The Odyssey —
four hundred pages in. I found him lying on a dungheap
where ticks sipped his blood, though in his youth
he’d taken down wild animals, eager to kill
for a man the gods favored! Who comes back
in disguise; you expect the dog to give him away
with a lick or a yip, but this is not what happens.
Instead we’re told that “death closed down his eyes,”
the instant he saw his master after twenty years away.
And I wondered if my friend had played a trick—
setting me up with this dog who does not do much
but die. When the gods turn away, what can we do
but await their unturning? That means: don’t think
that after so many years of having such a hard pillow,
the dog wasn’t grateful. But I wonder
if, for the sake of the shape of the plot,
the author ought to have let him remain
for another line or two, if only to thump again his tail.
Because the old feeder feeds nothing
but squirrels, who are crafty and have learned
how to hang so it swings sideways until
gravity takes the seed — I bumble down
to this store of bird knickknacks and
lensware for the geeks, and while
the clerk is ringing up my Mini
Bandit Buster ($29.95), spring-loaded
to close the seed-holes when a heavy animal alights,
I read a pamphlet about bird-feeding, which I had not thought
was complicated, but turns out
is. Yes I bought the costly mixture
— not the cheap stuff full of milo—
which the birds kick to the ground, where it becomes
an aggregate of shit and chaff.
But I’d not known you must sweep it up
so as not to spread the pathogens, and space
your feeders far apart and dump
the seed each week and clean the feeder tube with bleach.
And you should whitewash the windows of your home
so the birds won’t crash — you’ll live in twilight
but your conscience will be clear. Otherwise
it’s best not to feed the birds
at all: your help will only kill them, has killed them,
I killed them says Wild Birds Unlimited — thanks,
now let me tell you that your wind chimes
turn this place into a gong-tormented sea.
Outside, it’s just another shop in the strip mall;
used to be that this place was a grove
of cedars where I knelt in the purplebrown duff
while something holy landed like a lunar rover
on my shoulder. But listen
to what sings in the grove’s bright stead—
computer chips provide what you would hear here
if they weren’t — mechanical birds
on plastic boughs, always flowering.
Light leaves the air like silty water
through a filterpaper sieve:
there is a draft created by its exodus
that you might think that if you rode
you too could slip away quite easily.
Is this why they call to mind the thought of death?
Squeak squeak, their song: I want to go
but I am stuck here, it is a mistake
being incarnate; I should be made
of the same substance as the dark.
If they must stay, like us they will be governed
by their hungers, pursuit
without rest. What you see in their whirling
is not purity of spirit. Only appetite,
infernal appetite — driving them, too, on.
On my wedding night I drove the white boat,
its steering wheel a full yard wide. The dress
bellied out behind me like a sail
as I gripped the lacquered wood
and circuited the bay. The poem
by Akhmatova having already
been read, the calamari and cake
already eaten, I stood alone
in the wheelhouse while my friends
danced to the balalaikas outside
on the deck. I could not speak
for the groom, who left me
to the old motor’s growl
and the old boards’ groan; I also
couldn’t speak for the moon
because I feared diverging
from my task to look. Instead I stuck
my eyes to the water, whose toxins shined
with a phosphor that I plowed and plundered.
And no matter what has happened since,
the years and the dead,
the sadness of the bound-to-happen,
the ecstasy of the fragile moment,
I know one night I narrowed my gaze
and attended to my captaining, while the sea
gave me more serious work than either love or speech.
I followed your red stocking hat
down the river of summer snow
until you carved the turn that stopped us both
with a spray of crystals. A prosthetic leg
lay on the ground, wearing a red
running shoe; we almost took it
to the Lost and Found, but skiing on,
we found more legs
perplexed the mountain. Leg
with thermos, leg with scarf, tableaux
with legs like bowling pins
struck down, though some were propped
erect, against a rock. Art installation
or object lesson? — first the body loses,
then it loses what it puts in place
of what it loses? — I thought
Mount Hood had come to life
to hammer this in. But I kept on
after your red hat and soon was overtaken
by one-legged men, a human wind
I whirled among for just a human minute.
Below, I saw them swallow you, then leave
you with the mountain shadowed on your back,
your red hat wagging, happily, it seemed,
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