Autobiography
As soon as you leave you enter
memory, and that small emissary
of yourself immediately loses
its credentials. No longer yours,
you can’t recall it, or send it
instructions on tactical lying.
You may have armed yourself with
heavy qualifiers, been Henry James,
but turn your back, it’s theirs.
Thus, memory. And each fresh
installment of yourself, though
exquisite, is still lump clay.
Even the other tack, sincerity,
has zero chance because revelations
have nothing to do with memory.
Trapped, you have only the whim
they toss at you to put on.
You are a small being now, just
a fraction of the old self.
Your mother tongue begins to suffer,
like an émigré’s. Plainly, you
were the aggregate of what you gave
up. Now you are suspiciously
plural. What is happening to you?
It is like glimpsing someone who
favors you in an old movie
you used to like. And yet,
the costume is absurd, not to
mention the horse. Or these
others, also with your face, jerk-
ing their spears in the air.
Spilled change, their faces turn
briefly to the you they obviously
can’t see. And the barbaric
shouts they make, this cast of
thousands swarming over the dust!
La Bohème
Someone said it was like country music.
It was clear what she meant, the way it gets
hooks into you faster than you can protect yourself.
And close to life, too, as when you peel away
the layers of interference: clothes thick and ill-
fitting, the zest with which the hero’s roommates
approve the echoes of each other’s banter,
while furtively observing her from the corners
of their slum. Still, it’s the way it happens
there in the dark: love’s expiring air, reeling
out a sumptuous music as it goes—and dawn
rising to contrast the poverty of the whole thing,
absorbing stars as the scene changes. Conveyor-
belt silhouettes glide by outside, bored
and unconcerned with the fat girl everyone’s
made such a fuss about. Just like country music.
You know you should getup, make your way
following whatever threads of pride you still have left.
But you stay, letting it happen, convincing yourself
of its significance, as she, leaning up from her deathbed,
cuts loose and goes straight for the last-row hearts.
And you sit back while the endless swansong drills
your sternum as if it were a rock, against every instinct
that could have meant something more dignified,
before the death and the pity started,
before it all got so terribly out of hand.
Versa-Lite
I remember driving once over Lake Ponchartrain
on a slab of highway plunging
through the horizontal like desire
rocketing to the past in order to correct it.
They have stations every few miles
for the disoriented, spinning in mist, to stop
and collect themselves, on the theory
that these collections would resume
their former composure before another
wave of mist or darkness sucks them up.
The fact is, they are various, are they not,
shattered and reformed, glued back
as long as they think the bridge comes down
on the shore. But the mist is primordial,
the darkness diurnal, and their tail lights
merely stream over the water’s smoky skin.
One night, a few years ago, a 737 approaching
the Kenner airport lost it and plunged
into the lake. Drivers on the causeway
saw the fuselage lights shoot past
and the vessel, like a great mistake,
descend and belly into the hidden water—
some supple, prehistoric bird. Even there,
the lake was so shallow, just a dirty scrim,
that the tail fin maintained its metallic sail
above water for weeks, appearing
and disappearing through waves of fog
as if stirring, as if about to be under way
on an odyssey so impossible it would
take a new Homer, sizzling his foreword
through the mist, to raise a meaning
from that ambiguous, fated vessel.
I remember the lake this way, too,
the incomprehensible shelving of its layers
and the odd sense that it became
the visual equivalent of murmuring,
the not-distant but unfamiliar
apprehension of things going on,
for which you were not responsible
and yet not entirely free of, either,
and so all the more it became imperative
to plunge toward the horizon
where land was waiting, meaning everyone
had returned, who had driven or been driven.
How puzzling to think you are who
you were, looking for the rest-stop, pausing
there to reorient, then moving into
the turn lane, joining the procession of lights.
As soon as you leave you enter
memory, and that small emissary
of yourself immediately loses
its credentials. No longer yours,
you can’t recall it, or send it
instructions on tactical lying.
You may have armed yourself with
heavy qualifiers, been Henry James,
but turn your back, it’s theirs.
Thus, memory. And each fresh
installment of yourself, though
exquisite, is still lump clay.
Even the other tack, sincerity,
has zero chance because revelations
have nothing to do with memory.
Trapped, you have only the whim
they toss at you to put on.
You are a small being now, just
a fraction of the old self.
Your mother tongue begins to suffer,
like an émigré’s. Plainly, you
were the aggregate of what you gave
up. Now you are suspiciously
plural. What is happening to you?
It is like glimpsing someone who
favors you in an old movie
you used to like. And yet,
the costume is absurd, not to
mention the horse. Or these
others, also with your face, jerk-
ing their spears in the air.
Spilled change, their faces turn
briefly to the you they obviously
can’t see. And the barbaric
shouts they make, this cast of
thousands swarming over the dust!
La Bohème
Someone said it was like country music.
It was clear what she meant, the way it gets
hooks into you faster than you can protect yourself.
And close to life, too, as when you peel away
the layers of interference: clothes thick and ill-
fitting, the zest with which the hero’s roommates
approve the echoes of each other’s banter,
while furtively observing her from the corners
of their slum. Still, it’s the way it happens
there in the dark: love’s expiring air, reeling
out a sumptuous music as it goes—and dawn
rising to contrast the poverty of the whole thing,
absorbing stars as the scene changes. Conveyor-
belt silhouettes glide by outside, bored
and unconcerned with the fat girl everyone’s
made such a fuss about. Just like country music.
You know you should getup, make your way
following whatever threads of pride you still have left.
But you stay, letting it happen, convincing yourself
of its significance, as she, leaning up from her deathbed,
cuts loose and goes straight for the last-row hearts.
And you sit back while the endless swansong drills
your sternum as if it were a rock, against every instinct
that could have meant something more dignified,
before the death and the pity started,
before it all got so terribly out of hand.
Versa-Lite
I remember driving once over Lake Ponchartrain
on a slab of highway plunging
through the horizontal like desire
rocketing to the past in order to correct it.
They have stations every few miles
for the disoriented, spinning in mist, to stop
and collect themselves, on the theory
that these collections would resume
their former composure before another
wave of mist or darkness sucks them up.
The fact is, they are various, are they not,
shattered and reformed, glued back
as long as they think the bridge comes down
on the shore. But the mist is primordial,
the darkness diurnal, and their tail lights
merely stream over the water’s smoky skin.
One night, a few years ago, a 737 approaching
the Kenner airport lost it and plunged
into the lake. Drivers on the causeway
saw the fuselage lights shoot past
and the vessel, like a great mistake,
descend and belly into the hidden water—
some supple, prehistoric bird. Even there,
the lake was so shallow, just a dirty scrim,
that the tail fin maintained its metallic sail
above water for weeks, appearing
and disappearing through waves of fog
as if stirring, as if about to be under way
on an odyssey so impossible it would
take a new Homer, sizzling his foreword
through the mist, to raise a meaning
from that ambiguous, fated vessel.
I remember the lake this way, too,
the incomprehensible shelving of its layers
and the odd sense that it became
the visual equivalent of murmuring,
the not-distant but unfamiliar
apprehension of things going on,
for which you were not responsible
and yet not entirely free of, either,
and so all the more it became imperative
to plunge toward the horizon
where land was waiting, meaning everyone
had returned, who had driven or been driven.
How puzzling to think you are who
you were, looking for the rest-stop, pausing
there to reorient, then moving into
the turn lane, joining the procession of lights.
Scenes on an Obelisk
The people across raise the flag of their laundry.
A cypress blocks St. Peter better than atheism.
Little bits of animation link up
into archipelagoes: beetles are the traffic
up and down a trunk, the trunk forking
in time to wave alike over a passing car
and a rooftop full of aerials.
All that was spirit seems naturalism
caught in the light.
A cross-dressed monk feeds the poor
cats of his block from a can.
Their satisfaction leaves them mild
for the morning, as he slips behind
a human-dwarfing door, exchanging sunlight
for a dark hallway’s eroded slate,
and the darkness takes him
before the perspective does.
The people across raise the flag of their laundry.
A cypress blocks St. Peter better than atheism.
Little bits of animation link up
into archipelagoes: beetles are the traffic
up and down a trunk, the trunk forking
in time to wave alike over a passing car
and a rooftop full of aerials.
All that was spirit seems naturalism
caught in the light.
A cross-dressed monk feeds the poor
cats of his block from a can.
Their satisfaction leaves them mild
for the morning, as he slips behind
a human-dwarfing door, exchanging sunlight
for a dark hallway’s eroded slate,
and the darkness takes him
before the perspective does.
The Digs
An archaeologist said the garden paintings
were preserved when the building collapsed.
We were moving into a new phase
like an industrial plant or an ordinary
moon. The queen was late twenties—
already old, already mother to a child
grown big enough to weather a dynasty.
We stood on either side of a new trench
and heard how the hanging gardens
descended all the way to the ground level
of a distant past; how she could see
the capital from her country villa.
Useful, too, when her new husband
wished to visit—but keep an eye on things.
The garden paintings that brightened her
when she walked underground were now
the glories of the state museum. In sorrow
and quick surprise, I saw the two figures
of women on either side of Pluto’s garden
joined at the brink, while butterflies
of that pale field above caput mundi
probed oleander and fled the stone.
An archaeologist said the garden paintings
were preserved when the building collapsed.
We were moving into a new phase
like an industrial plant or an ordinary
moon. The queen was late twenties—
already old, already mother to a child
grown big enough to weather a dynasty.
We stood on either side of a new trench
and heard how the hanging gardens
descended all the way to the ground level
of a distant past; how she could see
the capital from her country villa.
Useful, too, when her new husband
wished to visit—but keep an eye on things.
The garden paintings that brightened her
when she walked underground were now
the glories of the state museum. In sorrow
and quick surprise, I saw the two figures
of women on either side of Pluto’s garden
joined at the brink, while butterflies
of that pale field above caput mundi
probed oleander and fled the stone.
from Sonnets to Hamlet
There is no inwardness like this:
floor after human floor collapsing,
pipes and fittings, miles of artifice
melted into the original mash of being,
selves exiled into the surrounding wood
like stuttered jokes, revenants with no more
ability to nourish than perishable goods
miles from the hungry. The locked door
stands guarantee to the role of matter.
Smoke like an idea’s shadow occupying
all the room, shelves sway and shatter.
Wind going after is like the body’s dying
into the body of a growing text,
each story pressing rapidly over the next.
from Sonnets to Hamlet
One foot on fire-ant dirt, and the mound
seethes, as the tiny warriors spread
a teeming liquid shadow over the ground,
jealous ghost, certain sponsor of the dead
were he to appear. He? It is genderless
as an avalanche, indifferent, wild to plunder.
The image of fire yanks me from my dress.
I would be, though dead, defender.
Webbed in crows, cured, my sternum-shield
earth-ripped, enemy of consummation.
Leaving the bone-case, rot-peeled,
I would move directly to my station.
Some of fire would fill me to the good
if, in my inwardness and death, I stood.
Sonnet
The mountains are out today, and air
has the faded shimmer of air through binoculars.
The weather begs report like the memoirs
of a man to whom life has seemed unfair.
And yet, the categories don't declare
how feeble the wish to argue particulars
in the drone of airplanes and whine of cars
(but how round the weather in the glare
of summer sunlight!). Midsummer's approach
puts mind in view of meridians, as if
time harrowed drama as well as trees,
leaving less and few and out-of-reach
what once was both individual and massive,
if only to cull and correct the histories.
The mountains are out today, and air
has the faded shimmer of air through binoculars.
The weather begs report like the memoirs
of a man to whom life has seemed unfair.
And yet, the categories don't declare
how feeble the wish to argue particulars
in the drone of airplanes and whine of cars
(but how round the weather in the glare
of summer sunlight!). Midsummer's approach
puts mind in view of meridians, as if
time harrowed drama as well as trees,
leaving less and few and out-of-reach
what once was both individual and massive,
if only to cull and correct the histories.