The City of Smoking Mirrors

2011-10-25T09:47:00.000-04:00

Caves below the mountaintops and in our lives

Some of us went right up
to the mouth of the cave,
It was a long walk through
the hottest part of the day,
and someone imagined
pools of blue cave water
lit by uranium as the sun
lingered in the west
like a bad penny. This was
where some turned back,
where others hung back
smoking Marlboros, picking
at the nearest rocks for fossils.
I tell you we were there
watching as the climbers
pulled themselves over
the lip, into the darkness.

Of course, a few returned with tales
and some didn't come back
at all. Someone with a lantern
thought she found petroglyphs
at the far junction in the main cave,
someone with a geologist’s hammer
brought back handfuls of staurolite.
Even after it was found out
it was the devil lighting
the far end of the trail, the dirty
plaintive woods and even
the rocks themselves--I am
no longer anxious to cross
and am rightly ashamed
of the time I left you all there
so I could wander the far eastern
meadows below the peak
where ladybugs grew by the thousands
on granite outcrops warmed
by the summer sun.

2011-10-25T09:37:00.000-04:00

The Bureaucratic Dangers

One time I told a guy
it was a big deal that
I'd climbed down
from the Rockies
to live in the deep
wooded valleys of the Miami.

I'd driven a red truck, towed
a short u-haul trailer,
lived all over the place,
discovering gringo
America in New York
villages and small
Rustbelt towns where

I was just another dark-haired
foreigner until I spoke,
told them no I didn't
want their jesus
or a way to heaven
that meant reading
another book known

already to me as tinder
for the fires my friends
and I burned to feed the huge
devils on our backs.
Like throwing chingazos at the moon
I come to you expecting
nothing. By hiking the deepest trails
of your heart I am burned
by the light I find there.

2011-07-13T22:00:00.002-04:00

Letter to the full moon from Huitzilopochtli

Tonight, I pray thee shine somewhere

brighter than you have before, salt

the sky with your presence. The thick

skin of our backs. The hard

moon rays beating down on wide

fat nipples. That summer I spent

in the forest, along the rocky creeks.

Drank beer all day, some of us

chasing girls, chasing boys. In that

long stretch of ponderosa and

white pine where there were rattlesnakes

wound up like bike tires left to rot.

As sure as the stars in the sky

were beacons of the unknown, for destinations

unnamed, O dear Luna, cover the night with your pale

light, that it may be the last reminder

of those years before the din and racket

of the outside world let us in the rough

door, the skin droor and the smoke roaring.

2010-09-16T11:23:00.003-04:00

Motorcycle riding days, 1977-78

'pa mis amigos motociclistas

Not like I want to
go back, when Cotton
Belt locomotives ran
between Tucson and Las Cruces—
it’s not my
favorite time, but
I want to thank you
for keeping
me in mind. I haven’t
ridden a dirt bike
since 1980. And
all that desert east
of Juan Tabo Blvd.
has since been plowed
to make room for houses.

In that short year I owned
a Kawasaki KE 100,
beat it up so bad
that when the bank
came to take it
they had to carry
it out in pieces.
We used to ride
out to the high
desert. We used to
take turns
racing on well-cut
tracks that had been there
since the 60’s.
Then there was danger—
yours or mine,
the resentment bred
in working-class kids
who had to live
among the rich.
So for a while,
when my dad
could afford such treasures,
Rudy and I
rode with you,
smoked with you, learned
how to fight,
how to compete
with riders and bikers,
some meaner than others.

But the other thing is this—
for the first time
I saw the desert
on my own,
was often lost
watching the high
mountains in the near
distance. Your big dream
back then was to ride
all the way
to Santa Fe, my dream
was to keep riding
away from the cruel, paved
roads awaiting us.

Don’t write me
to tell me about
Jesus. My heart
is hardened plutonium
on that subject,
and my religion consists of
faith in my children, fear
of the powerful natural world, all
the women I love.

2010-05-31T10:43:00.001-04:00

Life along a Tributary of the Ohio
For F.F.W.

I have been
in the underworld
for years. Jesus
doesn’t know this—
No one can
see me farm
the shade
I love so much
that I’ve taken
the small
ripe fruit I call
manzanas crueles
to plant on the other side,
where the desert
begins and toads
writhe in the knowledge
of mud. One time
I waited for a guide but
like my father
He was covered
in dust and useless.
Now, this has changed.
I live under oak.
I see the stars only
when I wish, through
branches thick as myth.
Why should I stay here?
His eyes mean
nothing to me.

2010-03-25T20:20:00.001-04:00

Why We Love Evil

Wallace Stevens hated Robert Frost.
He’d seen that New England poet in the bar
one summer in Key West.
Normally, Frost would sit next
to Stevens in the sun, and they would read
newspapers. When it got too hot,
each gathered his towel, slapped
on sandals, trundling off
to small, thatch-roofed cottages
on the leeward side of the Key.
There’s nothing to say about
the violence Stevens knew: a whipping
through a candle-lit
window, some bruises the next
day at the beach. So when the queen
of the water appeared to Wallace one
afternoon in a dream, with her hands
pretty and shorn of rings, save
a glittering red pearl, he shouted
at night, to his rival: I’ve seen
you mean and I’ve seen you walking
the strand for an answer
the sea might give you
about violence, about love.
Whisper not about its threats,
the way it sweeps endlessly
into all of us like air.

2010-03-21T18:45:00.000-04:00

Desert Two-Step

O, some of us
grew up in some pig town, some
hill town where they
used to take coal
where the drunks
could be run-over by trains.
Once a year, the hard
brown river overran
the poor part of town—
the soul of the place
was in the gas
stations lining the main
drag. Few of us went
elsewhere, wherever
that was, because it all
looked the same
from the windows
of the ‘71 Catalina
your father drove.
The madness came
on command back then—
a dry storm in the mal-pais
one day could make
snakes crawl to you at night,
but uncontested, you pasted
the black sky until
you could leave.

2010-03-06T09:59:00.001-05:00

“Stronger than you think”

You could be anywhere
in America, sifting
through someone’s garbage
like the brave raccoons & skunks
who still make the night passage
from their sewer grate homes.
This & that speckled bird
swims in the high cold air,
waiting for snow to melt—
the sky isn’t there then, or now.
Before the sun acts, then,
a small cardinal has started
his love song. It’s all about
the corner you’ve turned, the turn
you’ve made from the backyard
ken of dead dogs sleeping forever
in suburbia, under the grass, under
the tiger lilies.

2010-03-06T09:51:00.000-05:00

Astros Mestizajes, 1

At the Grave of Virginia Trujillo Carrillo, 1935-1996

Death has whittled down
your mean view on life
so that now, in my dream
you are thin, young, and kind
more like my daughter than you.
It is the distilled sense
of loss when someone
you love dies that builds
flowers. Away
from your real life.

Your husband, my father,
rides next to you in eternal
dust, for that is the form
he chose. I have loved
both of you as I love
ashes, the insubstantial.
I have even gone as far
as this to take pebbles
from your grave to spread
in my garden.

2010-02-05T16:00:00.001-05:00

Inside you

the smaller man is always alcoholic, beaten
by the deafness of the world as much as by
his own woes, sewn like grapes onto his sleeves.
Of the far and dark periphery, though,
the greater man is always manic, taking
a stance when you would never want to,
taking with deep thick gulps the rich tobacco
smoke. Once, when he was young, he saw

his father beat a dog and heard his older
brother talk about the edge of the woods
where when you were older you’d go
to burn a different kind of fire, the kind
that left you and your friends scorched
the next day and the next.

2010-01-05T16:53:00.001-05:00

A Darker Self Easily Revealed in Winter

You are made of darkness, the dark
root of your life shaping you beyond the dirt,
beyond the hay. Of existence you say
little, but the bitter secret is that
the dead outweigh the living—the black boughs
of winter trees guide the sky along
just like green branches bend in summer storms.
What you know of love is restrained not by
your heart or your old hard hands. None-the-less
you are the black road in front of my house.
It’s winter and late in the day—fires
have started all across this cold land.
I’m waiting for you to go away, to take
the wood from this old man to burn.

2009-11-04T21:20:00.001-05:00

This is the word of H. as transcribed this afternoon

There is peace, and there is war—
the near and far colliding,
the pleroma of stars and planets
opposed to our very undertakings.
The sun god Huizilopochtli
whispered that to me in the blue twilight:
he is sorry for the crude tears, the blank
crystals—he’ll wipe our faces
if we want. There’s always
time on this earth, he says,
in between the solid smoke
he breathes. This jefe from out west
the war god, too, has told me
there is no peace, there is only war
and the shattered shades of love
we live though in dreams. Look
he says, there is the black lake.
go to it. Watch its power in winter.
Watch the arms of oak and maple
shade the sky before sundown.
There is peace at the end of the sun.
There is peace in the green flash
between frantic moments of daylight.

2009-09-23T12:37:00.000-04:00

For the Drummer of The Jades

I remember how, outsmarted you took
one last class with Master Bartlett—he tore
into your words by not talking of them
at all, in class. Later, walking through
Lennon Park I told you how I’d cracked open
sheet after sheet, sky after sky, all
while looking for a good poem. I’d met
three of four women and they meant nothing
to me, their perfumes, the way each wore her hair.
You, you were listening to the Monkees,
trying to get the hometown ballad right—
but nothing came out sounding like when
a man’s put to heartache or promise
in the high desert when he’s watching a fire
from a faraway ridge and can do nothing about it.

For the wicked had come at night
with the late summer stars blazing
like older women in love. For me, right now,
there is no sound in Ohio that sounds
like the echoes of old mountains
at 9000 feet singing in the sun. Dusted,
I ran the high path only once when we climbed
from the desert into the pines.
So I called to the sky to meet me
In the infatuated South. There was
A run of cold water coursing
From the top of a hill—you know
My soul I left for her to find
forever in the turquoise sage,
and in doing so left my name
for her on this very page.

2009-06-23T17:48:00.000-04:00

The Regime's Horrible Plans

Take the world, for example.
If I press your palm into the map
you’ll see a whole new continent--
imagined maybe, but true.

This much I know: the police attack
wasn’t a random event. Went they out
from the barracks, charged.
The sound of their radios in the plaza
was like the first fist thrust
out of a cage, at all of us.

I continue to covet faith. The last martyr
to me is like a dream attained at dawn—
and at last you’ll be free we’ll be free
except for the crack of static in the air.

2009-04-14T09:21:00.000-04:00

Catalogue

Citalopram freezes me
in a netherworld
neat and quiet. Sometimes
I find myself sitting at the edge
of my bed, and there’s nothing to say.
On the other hand, buspirone’s
action is unknown. It mellows me,
I mean structurally. The sound
of the grass growing in spring
sunlight, beyond the animal
ledge is what I hear. And when
I’m worried I take lorazepam,
which allows me
to perform without fear. The dark
woods, dense and all consuming,
linger but do not
trouble me. Then, there’s the stuff
for my heart, to slow
the deep volcanic pressures
running though my Chicano veins—
everything has to thin out
if I want to live. In the desert
air of Santa Fe, of sanatoriums
I dream. And when I wake
I drink strong black coffee—there’s
no sugar anywhere in my kitchen,
there’s no sugar in my blood—
that’s the fifth pill working
through the night,
which is filled with lucidity
and light. My lover’s
thighs still beckon even
as the last dear pill
passes and I give in,
I lose myself to the wind
of sheets, the script she’s drawn
from her dresser drawer—
this place is old, and what we’ve
found we taken in for good.

2009-04-08T17:32:00.000-04:00

From the Silent Hallway

Something purer was calling—
the friendly sweet flavor of the smoke
could only last so long before it all
turned to ash. Before the past
caught up with the present
and you found yourself loathing
someone else in a dream of curled
bed sheets or worse—there she was
again, pushing back the thick curtains,
revealing daylight. Outside, what you knew

of the city had been replaced by the blooming
suburbs: all the oleanders, all the wandering
marys spoken for or simply replaced—
I can’t help it that they put in the yew
bushes and silver maples before you arrived.
My house is still yours, bleak Midwestern
ghosts included. What choice do I have
but to accept Northern winds and sunless
days? Why, we’ve been hoping
for rain, the kind of rain that lends itself
to rumors and fortitude: what did you do
with that other person, in your dark
little brick house by the river?

All I can say is that by the time
you get this message, the chemicals
will have begun to flow into
another patient, somewhere in a southern
city where the tulip trees have already bloomed—
O, to be there, gray wanderer, in the bright
corridors waiting with the rest, looking out
from the big picture windows
to the rolling hills of central Tennessee unfolding,
the river only miles away.

2009-04-06T11:33:00.001-04:00

The Cold Wind Blowing in Dark Woods

I’ve led a furious life, changing
wives in the midst of kindness,
in the midst of heat. The Phoenix
desert did me no good—the deep
canals seeped into my imagination,
I wanted to travel downriver, beyond
The dried rocks that used to hold white
rapids. When I try to explain this confused
past to friends who haven’t seen me
in years, I remind them first
of the desert acres where I grew
large as a fist punching the dry air—

One day I was with a woman
at the park—there was a fake
lake filled with duck feathers
and dirty water. For the night,
she would betray me
before coming back
to save my life. Or was it
the other way around? For she was
as a still night in the deep
reaches of Sharp Mountain,
when all the black birch boughs
speak another language—

and I understand the words
She spoke the first time
We talked standing next to a Blue Palo
Verde tree, the 737’s thundering
overhead, floating fast to earth.
I stayed with her so that I could
look through the 50 year old
windows of my dutch-farmhouse
home, now, waiting for my children
to return from school—
the weather has turned again
and my thoughts wander to the last
days of winter, the morning glory seeds I’ve
saved to spread in the backyard,
along the fence where my property ends.

2009-03-31T09:11:00.002-04:00

H. Addresses the Fold at Mid-evening

There was a blue light in my dream
last night—under a sliver of moon
I was fancy dancing with a girl
I knew in college, her ponytails
flying in the dry air—I awoke
to the world I’d made the day I decided
to leave her forever. I cut loose
the last threads connecting me
to Ysobel—I looked in her blue
eyes and wept one more time.

Brothers, I took my black dogs,
I went away with another
woman to the dark birch
woods—she later gave
birth to our children,
and we lived in a valley
where mud was as thick
as summer was green,
beyond our means, always
In love. And I am now

writing you for no
reason at all—there’s a cold
drizzle outside even though
It’s spring and the blue grackles
sing each morning, the young
ones, new flyers, wing and flash
before they land in the grass.
For the meanest of seasons
I’ve found no secrets at all
In this Midwestern scene,

So I call you out, unadvised,
to weep with me for our sister
who must wait eight months
to know if she’ll live to see us old.
While the drizzle surrounds us
we wait for midsummer to shine,
O you of the darker connections
who are still waiting for any night
in your endless desert light.

2009-03-21T12:57:00.002-04:00

The Mexican Astronauts: Huitzilopochtli in “Neskyeuna”

Flew over the Mississippi, one
on his way to Illium, the other
on his way to see Machu Pichu.

I knew a naked woman—on the couch
and in the town we'd find the darkest
parks to search each other for love. I'll never
forget those difficult days yearning
as she and I walked through the Sonoran
desert at twilight. I would walk
barefoot and nothing would harm me—
I was in love and couldn’t be bothered.
When the mesquite trees turned in the wind
she said it was my voice moving though her hair.
In all that is and was
the spiked sun was nothing, our sidewalk
voyages were over by midnight. We lived in homes
where no one loved us. No wonder
we married next spring, on Walpurgisnacht,
in what used to be the deepest oak
woods lining the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson—
the Magistrate was there, in black,
with her leather book and velvet robe.
In the apple orchard afterward we drank
keg beer and white wine from paper cups,
walked into the fields to see bright petals breaking
in fistfuls from tree to tree, there
where years ago shakers had cut down
the forest to make room for planted
rows of quince and McIntosh.

2009-03-17T15:53:00.000-04:00

The Mexican Astronauts: Huitzilopochtli in Memphis, Unbound

Once I flew to Memphis
to sleep with a swan—
the summer clicked to a halt
and I was as green as golden
water is at sunset.

At first, on the hotel
bed we sat crossed legged
while behind us on the desk
a dell computer spun old
tunes: we were old enough

to know we'd held each other
one night long ago
in the Sandia Mountains--
everything was different then.

The air was thin as ice
on a skinny pond, midnight
air, late spring. But this time
there were no stars to discover.

Only the hot summer sun
blasting from behind the thick
curtains that tried to keep out daylight—
it wasn’t my fault—I loved her,
I loved her that afternoon,
touching her face, touching
the small space she made for me

in a hotel room strewn
with thick white pillows, magazines
abandoned luggage. I loved her
as the sun went out
over the whole Southeast--

we heard the night birds
even above the roar of the planes
ascending from the Memphis airport,
we made plans as we traced
each other’s palms, finding

the small lines that led to one
another’s bed, a soft white
dream, a scene too often explored—
here in our heads and under the sky,
so often remembered, and never denied.

2008-12-08T11:42:00.000-05:00

One Time Crossing the Desert, Hot Blooded Huitzilopochli Dreamed

I decided to live in the modest
fog I created with my body,
not the hot lights you made
with words. I can never
understand the fragments,
the pain and drugs
lost to the earth
that one day in late August
when I refused to talk to you,
or anyone. If I could
get the solution
to this solitude on the hill,
this gray space
I've built up here to compete
with your tomes, I'd open
a trap-door tone to my work
leading me to a secret
basement, another room
where I hesitate to sit.

I told you my friend
I've gone over to the dark--
the photo record will show
my brightness like
the moon's, but I am
easily obscured. Still, the devil
came in the dark, her
bright body a lie
I accepted in the half
light. I knew
what went on
in every midnight
kitchen where the witches
made the last martinis
and prepared for bed.
I had to let that all
go. It was crazy
but I stopped dreaming
of you and everybody else.
Instead, there are vast
woods unexplored, chasms
and meadows of the heart--
I have taken
supper under great boughs.

When we both
longed for the weather
to change, for a second
home to appear in the Adirondacks,
I made a note of your fancies
hoping you would list
mine in order, like some
kind of chant, like some kind
of ulterior motive, leading
to a small home in the high desert
away from the crowds,
the stacked river rocks and blue
wrought-iron gates
glad to have us
the barmaids across
the highway making
quick notes glad to have us.

2008-12-04T16:13:00.000-05:00

For the missing and dead H. replies to Xicotenga

About the heaven you invented: the day
I slugged one of the Catorie brothers
with a river rock because I didn't want to lose
a fight comes to mind. We were behind
the John Roberts Dam, ambushed
by people we thought were friends--
they, being from the white trash
part of town, living in the cheapest
tract homes bordering the cruel desert.

After that fight you and I would walk uphill
and down along the dry arroyos
unable to talk. It was simple and I wished
it would all go away--the kids who talked
about Led Zeppelin, the working class hatred
growing in me like a deep blue plum.
So about the cave I invented: in the summer
I'd try to see as many ways as I could

out of the desert. Even walked to the one
girl's house who didn't understand me--
the best she could do was ride with me
out to a prearranged place in the desert
where she'd placed a real bayonet
in the rocky arroyo for me to find--
all we did was drive around and then
I took the knife back home: it was
war booty, taken from a dead nazi

in 1943, stolen by the secret heroine
of this poem from her grandfather's
home in Kansas. I'll never know
why she wanted me to have it,
but after that I left for the dark
I'd begun to grow in my head,
a dark like the wide swath
of white pine and Douglas Fir
on the mountainside, underneath

the sun. I had, long ago, knowing you
O time machine mechanic,
sold that old dagger, that symbol
no one could abide. Its money
bought a real dime bag we smoked
up behind the same dam, right before
tenth grade homecoming. For the first
time I said to you in my ghost voice,
for the first time I said to you
this is our world, the land, the sky.

2008-09-18T08:58:00.000-04:00

H. writes to his muses to understand the death of the Novelist D.F.W.

"I am ambivalent about the gringo's attempt to convert me to his god."
--Guadalupe Carrillo Trujillo

Those of us who survive dream of the forest,
thick stands of Western white pine, sometimes
the deciduous woods of Pennsylvania,
black cherry and white birch. One time I even went
apple picking, only to drop into sleep to dream
an even deeper dream, a scene containing all the bright eyed
muses I've known, those visions I've counted on:
there's nothing I like better than falling
asleep under the constant hum of late summer crickets
with my lover, holding her tender body against the light.
Who told you that non-existence is holiness? I can
almost hear the final fury of fall, the balding
grass, the resigned and dying spiders rebuilding
their webs after the unrelenting wind,
the unused day-lillies swaying later in the day.
And sometimes it is her body I imagine
under apple boughs. I am suddenly and irreversibly
drawn to her song, I am pulled to her heart
and it is upon her heaving breastbone I make my mark,
my tongue wild with harkening desire.

2008-05-06T10:30:00.000-04:00

De Las Montañas Sandias
for Rachel Hadas

Let me tell you about getting lost
on the Embudo Canyon Trail—
the first time I walked up into the Sandia
mountains at sunrise I had taken
two handfuls of brown insubstantial
dust from the road behind me
to rub between my hands. All I had
was a couple cans of cola, a compass,
a lighter and a pack of Chesterfields.
I had climbed all the way to the first
plateau, 7000 feet looking over
the Elena Gallegos Land Grant,
so that I could pray to my god
for deliverance, for some way out of love
that would leave me alone in the piñon
hills for a while. That afternoon I crept
along each switchback until the desert
turned to Ponderosa forest. I thought of
a diamondback rattlesnake waiting
where the woods turned—what little
water there was, singing in the granite stream,
as I killed my death with a heavy stone
I plucked from the trail, then etched
my name in a dry rocky
meadow with a black branch.
There I was, heaving.

One time I walked
until the trail ended. From where I was standing
I could just see the sheer rock face where two climbers
were testing lines, a thousand feet above me.
It was Albuquerque—dry, still air,
small campgrounds in the Sandia foothills
made from native granite, rock shelters
where we could drink and cook
all night, talking of the stars, speaking
in whispers when the small animals around us
arose to live their lives under the brilliant moon.
Last night I dreamt I read your poem
under the insufficient starlight of southwestern Ohio.
Where I am now Dunbar’s ghost lingers
in the soft afternoon—there is a tenderness
out here, to the rolling hills and thick stands
of white oak that could not exist
in the hot desert places I once called home.
Is it me or my heart that cannot stand
the way you’ve sketched-out my sad, dirty
town as a place for your pale rebirth?
I might as well be in Columbus, waiting
for the bus to take me home. I have been spared
the full-blown horror of schizophrenia,
the voices and disconnections hanging
like loose threads in my old Navajo blanket—
when I left Albuquerque I kept a locket of hair,
a gift my first lover cut for me ages ago.
One night I burned it under an oak tree—
I’d started the fire with a pile of dry white
clover flowers I picked in my yard.
So goes the procession of the Lord into the night sky.
It was the city as seen from the woods, the city
inverted like a bright mirror in the night.
You see, when I was young I’d climb
all day just to seek the cracked mountain’s
secrets, the dry passages, the thick scrub oak
that told me I was near the top of the range,
able to see the volcanic peak guarding
one edge of the Navajo Nation. The air was thin,
I could feel my heart for the first time pushing against my chest.

2008-03-28T09:01:00.000-04:00

Carta de Huitzilopochtli a J. S. B., con Humildad

Every day you have to know I’m up here
On the banks of the Greater Miami fighting
The gringos: I am one of those men
You called forth in one of your poems. And because
I live so close to them, I can taste their greed when I eat,
When I break bread at daylight, sitting
In a clapboard dutch-roofed farmhouse
That overlooks the oak-lined street.

Listen: this morning I drove my son
To school. I thought of the war, I looked
In vain for any other dark haired heads
Like mine stumbling through this wicked
Part of Ohio I never imagined in my little
Desert home. My son’s eyes tell me I am there
And otherwise a part of a greater nomadic urge—
To leave the Chihuahuan wastelands forever in search of water.

2008-02-29T20:18:00.000-05:00

Uneasy Travelers on the Ghost Trail, 2008

For Mark Lee

When I returned it didn’t matter. Twenty years
in the hardwood forests watching thick
green rivers weave their way in places
I’d forgotten—it was at Lake Nokomis
I saw the comet bear down from the northwest
sky and should have known it’d take a long time
to sort out the future. Now I am here

thinking of a desert home, whether or not
I could stand the small black widows
or even the sunlight—I’ve gotten used to
the thick oak and maple filling most
of the forgotten southwestern sky—
most importantly, there is something here
to keep me from dying. The first lilac buds and viney
morning glories scatter patches of color that conquer the winter.

So where are you today, dear traveler? I cannot
envy one man’s death in Tucson
Arizona, cannot figure if you swerved
to avoid the sun or simply because you erred
in reading a map too closely, to confidently.
I am here on the other side of the country
beginning a ghost song for you—lately,
unsure of the afterlife and whether or not
to be brave, I have sacrificed my only peace
today to pray for your deliverance.

Where we are tonight depends on my life now—
on a clear straight road in central Illinois
one summer I stopped to watch the grasshoppers
flick across thick grass plains. I was on my way
to New Mexico, and had stopped because I could
drive no more with out becoming drowsy.
From far away you meant to call me
on my meanness, what I said one lost day
years before your hero died.

2008-02-29T20:06:00.000-05:00

The three resuscitations of Rudolfo N. Carrillo

At first he rolled his eyes—I thought
he was looking askance at paintings
of Manolete on the wall. Then he toppled
sideways onto the floor—we were somewhere in New Mexico,
judging from the light through the windows,
judging from the stone-dry air of the house. I was there
to help his soul out. The morning I arrived,
my father was sleeping on the couch—he looked
like a child. There was nothing wild in his shape
but I could tell he was dreaming—this is the body
that carries the seed, this is the hand that harvests
the hard yellow maize and grinds it to paste.
But I was dreaming too. So in my dream my father
seemed alone in his own mischief. Against
the stucco walls of his own home he wandered
like an empty ship. This was the second
resuscitation. When I breathed deeply
into his very soul I lit a furnace briefly, a pale
glow that didn’t last. Remembering how
it was done, I began to sing—
for the third time my father awoke,
stirred by the electricity of hope he found
in my face. He told me so before he left
the room, before he slept and I left
him to his quiet doom.

2007-12-08T16:41:00.000-05:00

9 Elegies for Jon Anderson

1. Notes for the poet Jon Anderson, dead at 67

An insubstantial vision of the Tucson Mountains under nightfall
grows in me like rain, but only in my brain.
Outside my window in Ohio, November blooms one last time,
and there’s a neighbor counting fine, thin, dimes
as she walks to the coffee shop. Dogwood and Sugar
Maple hold onto their leaves. Even if I saw myself

in those trees I would not tell you what I became.
Yet the darkness you brought with you
to Arizona lingers in my words now: you feared nothing
even when you walked among prickly pear
& Palo Verde, alone, thinking yourself a saint—
living in the Sonoran Desert is fool’s luck, after all.

Jon, the only thing your poems taught me
was that we have so little time.
What’s important is that this knowledge gets beaten out
by whomever, the authorities, the man, some
administrator, some teacher who cannot understand
an accent, the way one walks in public,
the way one might shout out “Mayakovsky”
in class to wake all the young sleepers

So I am going to work on this poem until I love it.
And after living with in the attic for three days, unshaven,
unwashed, I am going to take it to a small, tightly knit workshop
in the Catskills where some smart 40-something who went to Bucknell
will re-write it for me in pencil, calling it
sad and knowing, brave about death, unsure of the afterlife.
Later, on a leather couch we’ll talk about the alkali wastes
of Southern Arizona. her small hands
on my thick Mexican shoulders like branding irons.
This, Dear Jon, will shake me away from the eternal sadness
I feel for you, your dwindling away into the night.

2. Of the Land and its Treasures

I live in the land of the apple tree
where the children never really grow old—
here, no one knows I left my first wifey
years ago to be with the woman with whom
I formed the perfect union: Northeast and Southwest
meeting in those naked mating days, unfamiliar
cross-country diagonals when each had
by mistake strayed in too many beds, then
lied over and over, like broken clocks.
You probably know the rest of the story—
this or that university, second-tier’d
& stuck, unlike those great, hunky, state schools
out West. Listen: when the ground water dries out in Tucson
I‘ll walk down to the Mad River for you,
I’ll pick the sweetest red apple to place on your grave.

3. St. Botolph Blues

A bad place to start—outdoors,
on Cumberland Street
we’d light a joint when the girls
had walked down toward
the frozen public garden.
Here, my brother-in-law’s little dogs jittered
on the fresh, dry snow
and each girl took out a Marlboro
as he and I huffered down the thicker
marijuana smoke. One time

we walked all the way
to South Station and back
so that we could take a toke—the sisters
glowed in their post-colonial
educations which would take each
to her own small planet.
When we reached the tracks
they told us that Nick and I
looked like typical Boston
crack heads: our eyes were
orange coals and our mouths
stood open and dry. We couldn’t
stop laughing. But before
we caught colds we were lost

on the invisible safety
of our voyage—we were all white, we were all
white when we passed the J or stood
in front of the old Latin School
rubbing red resin from our fingers
so we wouldn’t reek of anything
but the city, the steam from holes
in the street and the smell of food
cooked and sold in batches on Mass Avenue.

4. Dia de Los Muertos

I’m going to evil acres where I work among the dead—
The songs I sing to them, well, they all line up
In chairs to hear me hit high notes every morn.

And at lunch, among their kind I stuff my mouth
Along with their god, who sits with them, kindly
Holding back any judgment--it is not the place

For judgment. They try so hard to share; sometimes
It's like the crusades, the younger ones sacrificing
Themselves for others or mistaking the older gents

For leaders. Why, they’re not even readers. Every piece
of meat is like baloney or ham cut up. That why there’s
war and why we’re here—to eat the ugly, salted goods

they leave for us, even though these are sometimes only words.

5. Gate’s Pass, Desert Star

The best are killed or wounded by alcohol.
Of the Sonoran desert at night,
one time Ted and I were sitting in the red reaches
looking for Andromeda. There was talk
of a generic finish to the quest—
some of us would drive home
with a bottle of tequila pinned
between the seat and the door.
No one knew where’d
we’d be ten years after he, or I
sighted the twilling mass of starlight
at once like a bright, midnight eye,
like the whole city beyond Gate’s Pass
bundled tightly, a glowing fist ready
to take the last bottle and smash it
onto the scorpion-drenched rocks,

6. For Those Who Believe in the Dark

For those who believe in the dark
I am with you in Schenectady
where the Niagara-Mohawk power plant
fairly glows in the subdural twilight—
in the woods, we’ve all grown suicidal,
we’ve seen the lovely leaves twirl each fall
to the forest floor. Still, there are cracked,
open acorns here too, other travelers
on this one game trail that leads to water.
If you believe in the dark, its powers,
I am with in you this shuddering mood,
where the fog changes to smoke and
forever, in front of the mirror, you search,
you search for some trace of your face,
how your temple once framed your jaw,
how your eyes once knew the air, the light.

7. A Stark Flash of Morning

This morning I’m taking the clear
blue of albuterol into my lungs—
if I get closer to the truth
I’m already dying, the parched desert
of my back spent years ago on labor
that went nowhere. See, I know
you didn’t like us speaking in metaphor,
but the cold hard grain of winter
wheat stuck in my shoe is beginning to ache
of the earth and the mud and the dirt.

Last night I was in the land of the dead,
the acres of dread I craft in my head
when the drugs are working right.
No matter how I tried and tried
what I remember best, now, was the way
my life was framed in the skirted interiors of suburban
homes, junctions with large trees, a warm
breeze from the West that told me I was home.

Anderson, if I remember correctly
what you taught us in class, this poem needs to end
with a stark flash from my life, not the scene itself
but the feeling, as if I could capture for you or anyone else
that moment on ice alone for the first time, not quite
cold, not quite warm under the winter sun floating
way up there, where none of us could go.

8. Bear Hears of Your Death in Manhattan

One time we were talking on the phone. Bear and I
decided to cry because the Times Square
HoJos was empty as a burned-out church
along the Passaic. But then we laughed:
snow was falling in southern Ohio
like the snow falling in Upstate New York—small
white disks I caught on my black sweater that morning.
I told Bear then and there that you had died
as he walked the streets of Soho near Washington Square
Looking for anything to make him happy: food, a bit
of marijuana, even a bottle of cola. He’d been homeless
for three weeks in Manhattan, finally finding a place
to crash with a Navajo chick who’d moved
to the city ten years ago to take care of her brother.
She was a bruja, part Mexican and full of a mean fire,
what she learned of desire on the res. That there was coffee
every morning in her smoky home was enough for him.
But there was no sadness in his voice for you—
of where he’s from, a little Apache ranch
south of Silver City, New Mexico, the dead get up
to dance in their bones when they hear fiddles play.
& there is no pain because the television does not exist,
the television does not exist, it is not shit where
his buffalo graze on a rough green set.

9. The News from Hatch, New Mexico

In my last passage through Tucson
I let the remains of the Mount Lemmon fire
fill me with ash. With wild ash.
I tried so hard, when I was there,
in your presence, to build the kinds of poems
leading to lightning. The simple story of my departure
rings like the Catholic bell in the school where I teach—
Jon, I tied to reach you through the undistilled language
of opposites I learned from the New Mexican farmers
I saw every September, driving sacks of green chile and fresh
meat to the market along the Rio Grande.
I could not help but notice their voices,
the way they talked to each other in small restaurants
where the old and young sat together waiting
for coffee and huevos rancheros, their eyes flashing
with humility when the sun rose from the Sierra
Oscura for the millionth time. Back then, we had not read
your poems or anything from Iowa that hinted
of another world beyond those mountains.

2007-08-02T19:52:00.000-04:00

H. Peers into The Mirror of Tezcatlipoca

I have my dogs, my companions
every time I draw down the slope
of a line that leads to the smoke
chamber--I see the future unfold,
untrue lies spreading like delicate foil.
Then there’s the oil I put in the tank--
the deserts I kill and the thick
groves of cottonwood I depict
where none had been before,
make my gift seem seldom and sick
with abuse: how else to write tomes but while
tanked, if only to fool the older fools
that you’re good at what you do. You’re
good at what you do.

2007-04-12T10:58:00.000-04:00

Ohio Garden Season Matrix

In this season, this month,
the root of my life has grown
in the earth, a pleasure to behold--
once again, facing spring I cling
to dirt like a new vegetable
waiting to be nourished.

The simple mask of God hasn't appeared.
Blind to the sun, I sit
in the garden waiting to be plucked,
believing in rescue, believing in green hope.
Reassured by warm light on my face

spring is right in planting in my brain
a crazy seed that blooms like a blue
morning glory. I continue to call your name--
Darrell Dillon, lost to the flames of some unknown,
your curtain call caught us all off guard.

Now in this chasm of love, I believe
we were kids when we last spoke.
Now the common crab-grass fades,
the journey Westward has ended

and the one God who rests
in the clouds can speak your name.

2007-04-12T00:34:00.000-04:00

Dream Job 27:

As evil Albuquerque dwindles
in my rear view mirror I’m reminded
of the dead I’ve left behind, withered
by the blast of sand and heat endemic
to the high desert. Here and there,
among the sharp peaks, the scene repeats
itself in petals strewn to celebrate
the coming of our Lady to the shady

bosque where cottonwood blooms in April.
Alone in the front seat of my imaginary car
I rear back to let the dumb ride pass
into neutral, along the railroad tracks:
what hope I have for the future lies
resolute on the backs of those who’ve stayed behind--
from here in the Ohio wilderness I hear
the rain at night trimming through
the outskirts of Bernalillo county,
I make a pact to observe the loss I feel
every moment I’m away from the steely
shapes that mark my past like branding irons.

2007-04-12T00:10:00.000-04:00

Tierra Incontrovertible

In this version, I’m dying
for the bucolic white pueblos viejos
que encontré en mis viajes--
In one town I met a cruel woman

who with her mirrors drowned me
into the other world--black oak
trees bundled on the land, silver
maples dropping red packetsof pollen.

Pero, recientamente, en mis sueños,
después de esa película,
tocaba guitarra como un rock star,
y abrí las piernas de una rubia foyable--

I found myself protected in those chasms
where she was a new pebble hidden
by a thousand years of shoes and drums.
A maker of the first earth of mirrors,
I am there, on the run.

So in bed we killed some poems, one at a time,
distilled old wounds from another life
into small, shrill cries. Everything seemed new,
her small brown back in the yellow haze of sun.

2007-02-18T21:49:00.000-05:00

Mi casa es su casa

Cheat the devil of plains and blizzards and you’ll sleep
a million years in a gray house a peach farmer built.
Once I did a dial-up to Hell to find out
who was calling--I walked down page after page with a pen
like the men who write-out mortgages between trips
to the shelter of newly built homes scattered like snow
in the great white suburbs. I live in a home the bank owns--

steam rises from the sink in the kichen, collects
on the walls of cabinets where it’s like sweat--
I’m swearing the house is alive. Even in winter
the windows crack with ice hanging at the corner
of each like a blue coronice from upstairs--
every nail and board the old farmer left behind laughs.

2007-02-13T17:05:00.000-05:00

Wither

If you count the days beyond recall,
notice first how my voice has changed--
the range is all fucked up, disjointed by time,
solid enough but somewhat an echo
of an earlier rhyme. You’ve got to figure
my body’s passed, too. The skin, by now
shelved by scars, will not admit it once
held stars against the tightest thighs--

this lover and that has slimmed by
on haste. Nothing to deliver, nothing
to conceive. So now I count the planets
swimming in the sky like lost birds,
I count each time I bend heavenward
like a fool without a mission, trying to make

the last transmission of the seed, this utter
and unholy need diffused by blackness
unrequited and unknown. In my threadbare
speech the need to know I have regained,
and only the solitude of your undressing
keeps me here, above the fray
like some unspeakable and worthy cloud
that calls me to account, that simple
moment of lust when all is equal

and you, supple on the couch, extend
the life of your moment into each corner
of my eyes: what its like to die for you,
for once, inside your arms, how the hollow
of your back still arches in response
to different constellations, all this time.

2007-02-13T17:03:00.000-05:00

Crocodile, Dinero

For all the monks who have ceased to be
in this unordinary life, I count
the funky, the solicitious generals
of commerce who make their cash upon
the trash of others--out here where the wind
comes crashing in gales, in tornadoes
when spring cracks open, these men
who want my cash will only cry when crisis

bends back their ribs to find burnt hearts
clashing with the saints--that money taints
the life of others is no joke. They poke
and poke the empty masses who are cajoled
only when they can imagine themselves
healthy at the bank, wiping their fingers dry.

2007-02-13T17:00:00.000-05:00

The New Money

--for Darren Chew

The offers come like starlit tribes of fancy
denominations meant to please the eye.
So when truth winds down a note or two
you find your self counting: the busy
days, when without much left to do you list
successes by the amounts of pain you’ve caused
some poor fellow to endure--he’s no match
for the pitiless guile that glues you to your desk.

In some space other than your own the sleet
is thick as webs and coats the streets, no answer
for the demand you’ve made today. Still
as a thousand ghosts basking in the Son’s
eternal kiss, your life has become all of this--
a crock, you spend your days on a sunless coast, alone.

2007-01-31T18:55:00.000-05:00

Horario

En la hora muy malvada
durante una psicosis de amor,
ya vino el viento de mi alma

y me dijo: Corre, hijo, porque eres tú muy lento--
los árboles del verano
bailaban, también el llano
temblaba como una rinconada.

En la hora más que allá,
durante el return,
estaba corriendo y me caí--

recuerda m'ijo,
no hay nada en este mundo
que está muy lejos de aquí.

En la hora que se llama el return
volví con mi armadura de amor
con mis brazos duros, con mis manos
que conocen todo tu país.

2006-11-17T18:15:00.000-05:00

Desert Morning Glory

Who will die at night
now writes
during ape
hour sometimes--

Dread disease
is strong you see
& I ask
your pardon
for taking

the small
black and white
image, folding
it into my wallet--

For all I know
It’ll keep me
safe in flight

I poor H.
was marred by you
for the 2nd
time, a soul-stitch
burning crowbar time

I decided to forget
the clear line,
the spread-
open look
I get when I fly

O of supple mind
did H. describe
the inside

of a tangerine
he knew--

Your being your
being is like

I cannot stumble
long enough
but your being
is like the trees
You seek to avoid
the violet hour.

2006-11-17T18:07:00.000-05:00

Gate’s Pass, Desert Star

for my friends at the University of Arizona, 1987-88

The best get killed or wounded by alcohol.
Of the Sonoran desert at night,
one time we were sitting in the red reaches
looking for Andromeda. There was talk
of a generic finish to the quest—
some of us would drive home
with a bottle of tequila pinned
between the knees. No one knew where’d
We’d be ten years after you, or I
sighted the twilling mass of starlight
at once like a bright, midnight eye,
like the whole city beyond Gate’s Pass
bundled tightly, a glowing fist ready
to take the last bottle and smash it
onto the scorpion-drenched rocks.

2006-10-23T13:53:00.000-04:00

Where Wyoming Boulevard Meets Paseo Del Norte

This is the day they put Virginia in her grave—
The bright desert loomed like a healing planet
Sent out in dim early morning to light
The way home. There was, in the high reaches
Of the Sandia Mountains east
Of the cemetery a road to Santa Fe
We took after the service, driving her little
Station wagon all the way from Madrid
To Galesteo where we drank warm beer
In a grove of cottonwood before heading for a brick building
In the state capital where we’d file her death certificate—
Of the way back home, I can only recall the fluttering
Of my inner heart as the red desert rushed past,
Alien, unknown, without revision.

2006-09-19T16:31:00.000-04:00

New Century Calendar

1.

Mistress of a darker day
what prayers can I offer you
knowing that I’ve gone my way?
And of the slippery day
when we first met on your couch,
I drink to your touch
under increasingly fluorescent light.
Who is singing now, while shyly
whispering some archaic come-on
in the ear of the guitarist,
and who is missing from this Atlantic foam?
Of the light I have told you
how I sang one night to a crowd--
I ask you to seize the onrushing
commotion of memory, say, those wicked
tourists and their funny way of talking.
For in my evening travels
I’ve followed the sky as far as I can go--
let not the absorbing darkness
fool you into thinking of me
absentmindedly, when you’re
at work, dreaming of a better world.

2.

Builder of cities,
living where the plains meet the Rockies,
the vivid, red Southwest bursting
from atlases like the geraniums on your porch,
the struggle of the Northern Plains barely reached you.
But by now you must’ve read
of the natives Lincoln hanged in 1862, and how
their cold ghosts haunt the dreams
of suburbanites building pretty homes above
the confluence of the Minnesota.
There, where steam still drives parts of my Twin Cities,
I’ve finally had a chance to meet my doppelganger
in the deep woods bordering my neighborhood—
white oak, crimson maple, and buckthorn being
my constant reminders of a world beyond this, obscured
and possibly unknown to you.
Right now, thick, ugly geese,
while fleeing to Texas are making drafty V’s in the sky,
and everything rising is like smoke: my breath,
the acrid fumes of the northern
sawmills that sleep from time to time.

3.

In this whisper land, I for one,
hear its loneliness, the hard ground
freezing deeper every day, the water reduced to ice,
the grass finally undone, trampled and
shoved to the side, covered in mud.
I know it won’t be this way
when we meet under the stars,
which turn differently up north—
through the boughs I’ve learned
to count constellations as the clouds shove by!
And with this love of shapes
I’m at ease with neighbors,
who want nothing more than to see
the Milky Way shine above their homes.
You see, it’s late here,
and the crackle from water freezing
on my bedroom window
insists I sleep wrapped in bundles of thick wool
blankets dyed red and yellow
for the mornings when I’m sitting awake
in the cold, holding my bare feet
steady in the new snow to mark the progress
of my people up North
where no one speaks words I know
with the grace of drying rivers.
Because for me dying means drying out, bones and all,
in some thin arroyo outside of Las Cruces.
When that happens, you can sprinkle my body with salt,
fill my mouth with oranges.

4.

When the phone last rang
I had just changed months
on my new century calendar,
pulling a stiff ply of dates
away from the world painted above it:
yellow roses some months,
other times a serenade or some useless scene
from Aztec history, and the Saint’s days,
all imprinted with a Catholic importance
that tells us assuredly what’s next, what awaits--
The first warm rays of March were gleaming across still frozen
ponds and the mud hadn’t shoved it way past boots or books
left on still banks last summer.
It was that light streaming around me,
over my face and arms that made me sing,
the sudden whipping sound of wet branches,
the painful shoots making their way out
in one warm patch of earth where a sewer grate
commanded the path of water in my suburb.
The way I look at it, I’m still alone,
without the cross, no pal
of the lost who now seek me out
for some solace since I’ve braved
torture, the light, and the midnight sun of high latitudes.

2006-08-24T13:53:00.000-04:00

Six quatrains for the cops who beat me

--for Marcus Benner and Richard Lilliard

The reason for my peace
Sneaks forward
Like a ten-year-old kid in the grass
Trying to catch bees.

We pass this way and that.
The woman with a womb
Like a fire is waiting for me
To come to bed.

The cool sheet was like a dream
After I was beaten. I lay soaking
On a gurney, like a wet clay figurine
Shit out by god. When I tasted my blood

I knew I was god. The sound
In my head was of a thousand
Hives honeycombed by the angriest
Of bees. And the gringo doctors

Circled this and that, what
They wanted to remove. Curled
On the edge was me, what was left
Of my soul, the deep hole

Those men had left in me. Still,
I have no anger. Every morning
I wake to kiss my son, I wake
To kiss my daughter.

2006-08-18T19:08:00.000-04:00

Trail 347: Manzano Foothills, 2004

Because I can’t quite catch the last late flight
from Albuquerque, I hike its scored
riverbeds to sight the granite shelves rising
behind the town, leading me to what I see
atop the southern reaches of the Manzanos:
The range’s sharp cusp rises from the river valley
where sun lights the Chupadera and the leading edge
of La Jornada del Muerte is like a dreary sea to me.
In the town where they still make wedding gowns
from the slivered dreams of home-grown cotton
There is no light from Trinity-- the seamstress does
all she can to clothe her daughters from sunny eternity.

2006-08-18T18:54:00.000-04:00

Night

If I ever want to fly, I’ll cut down I-25 to the Soccoro exit,
where there are Texans driving their yellow
Cadillacs and grey Lexus SUV’s along the road to Cruces,
where a driver might see small brown snakes crossing the highway.
There’s a place along the Rio Grande serving
as an outpost for la Migra: sure, I’ve heard the stories
about how they stop anyone with straight, black hair
and how the hippy kids hide pot underneath ice and fresh fruit
pulled from the refrigerator shelves of a Safeway in Belen.
One time on the road I followed the map
to the right, trying to sight the spot marked Trinity:
all I came up with was the sudden heat of summer sun
dessicating a land of dry, bone-colored minerals
where everyone in my family chooses to be buried.

2006-08-13T20:37:00.000-04:00

Poem for Christopher Salas, 1964-1997(?)

From the dream world I crossed
into yours to get a haircut,
but it wasn’t that simple.
The first time I saw you was after
I had argued with the barber about
the length of my sideburns
and if such luxuries were permitted in hell.
Then you caught my eye: there you were,
sweeping cut hair of all sorts
into a black plastic dust-bin
with a handsome straw broom;
Your legs were reduced to stumps
and there was a small bump in the floor
where the hair was burnt to ash.
Otherwise, you were young and alive,
wearing a pale-blue sweater vest,
your hair neat as the barber’s son--
I was embarrassed to see you there
seemingly happy in your task
while I had nothing else to do but
leave, hoping to sweat in the cool
fall air of my real world, later,
when the sun cleared the trees.

2006-08-13T10:51:00.000-04:00

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2006-08-13T10:49:00.000-04:00

2006-08-12T11:22:00.000-04:00

Ficciones Exemplares:

for Dev Hathaway, RIP

I knew I wouldn’t get the job when the suitcase didn’t show up and I was left to wear a real dead man’s shirt, tie, and jacket to the interview. Well, you know what they say—when you don’t have smoke, you don’t eat. I hope that doesn’t bother you. I think its kinda like cigarettes. Without some sort of motivation, you might as well not eat. It’s not the same. Not hungry. Most definitely. So, we get into town toward dusk, and there above the southern horizon loomed the gigantic sky girdling towers of the Mid Atlantic State Power Facility—I thought back to ’78 when there had been an almost meltdown—I tried to feel any traces of the psychic fear left over from that event. The restaurant was sure crowded—as to emphasize the strangeness of my new surroundings, the place itself read like an English tavern complete with bangers and mash, fried fish, darts and serving wenches flying everywhere--
If you’ve ever read John Barth, you might recall his one novel when a loosely manic wanderer actually ends up teaching grammar at a state teachers collage in order to put some structure into his aimless life. On the other hand, yesterday in the grocery store, a woman plucking a tabloid from the counter in front of me assured me that upon looking closely at the phtos inside the NEWS, she could detect subliminal messages. I of course assured her that I had read such things before in THE CLAM-PLATE ORGY, a common book in college classrooms in the late 1970’s.
But back to the story. It was the quiet cleanliness of the town that was most noticeable: unlike the Pennsylvania coal towns north of the Cumberland Ridge, these towns did not suffer from the eternal grime of anthracite dust that had made its way into every brick, granite-surface or store-front. Yeah, there was the MAC machine across the street, and the twice-weekly newspaper, and even a Sheetz Gas Station/Sandwich shop. Yuengling on tap everywhere.
I don’t think I ever really did anything to provoke what happened next. But for some reason, I must tell you now I am not responsible for the events of 10 March at Cumberland Valley State Teachers College. The Day started like any other in my life: the need to purge my self of sleep, of aliens, of Sasquatch, of my parents’ dirty bedroom. I awoke depressed and naked: since I knew my clothes hadn’t arrived overnight, I had no pot to smoke. But I had washed my underwear and socks in the sink. I was ready to go because I had brought my pharmaceuticals in my briefcase, and had picked-up a pack of Marlboros from the bar. A word on the hotel: like the many I’ve stayed in, traveling to weddings, readings, conferences, wild affairs, funerals, meetings, and reunions, it’s all the same shit—seemingly antiseptic, darkly reminiscent of the many many people who have slept on this bed, who have put their bare feet down on this rug after fucking or dreaming.
It was when the chair of the department left me alone to go to the bathroom. He left a recorder playing and handed me a sheet of questions. It wasn’t going well. The funny thing was, he had a watch like mine, and me seeing this while he did not would only add to the outcome of this foray into this den of smiling, lovely lions. When he got back he was sans watch, of course. Finished with the questions? He suggested another cup of coffee. I’d had three big ones already: one at the Sheetz where I bought some razors anti-perspirant, toothbrush and toothpaste, one at breakfast, and one on the way to campus with the search committee chair who had free cup of coffee card with her, a gift from the local knick-knack store and coffee seller. "Not really a coffeehouse," she had emphasized at the only stoplight in town.
It was while we were sitting in a big room of four laminated maple tables put together to form a big rectangle. I noticed one of the search committee just looking at my hands (which were getting sweaty and which I was rubbing on my jeans) a lot. Now I know it was the watch I remember I really had to go to the bathroom. As the interview ended I tossed my Pepsi (this was a Pepsi campus) and watched as that one young interviewer walked by slowly. She asked for the time. Instead, almost reflexively, I said to her, looking her into the eye like the devil I am: “Pepsi cola hits the spot. 12 full ounces, that’s a lot.”
It’s not really worth talking about lunch or the fabulous African-American cooks ( I hear one is from Philly) they have to make you anything you want in the Faculty Dining Room at Cumberland Valley State Teachers College. Or the long walk to the swimming pools and tennis courts. The day was blue and the sun was hot. There were some kids in shorts and baseball hats throwing something in the air. And it reminded me of high school and I got sick as I ate my plate of salad because I was jonesing and all the coffee and tranqs in the upper Midwest wouldn’t help.
Of course, it was when the reading started that things had gone entirely wrong. You know. Some of the earth children and freaks I know out there get a vibe—you see someone taking notes when they couldn’t possibly be, you hear one or two words that change the direction of everything; unknowingly, your hosts show signs of boredom or indifference that only you the poet know about.
Half way through my poem about the burning, fiery effect of hell on sinners of the worst kind, terrorists, statesmen, mullahs and generals, I noticed two robust, shall we say, fat-ass cops standing in the back of the medium-sized ballroom that I was reading in. I had just gotten to the part where Henry Kissinger and Mullah Omar are forced into acts of bestiality with alligators when I noticed the cop was talking to the chair of the department, way back in the back near the door where kids were standing. My poems ended. The gods of the old Aztec empire got their way again. There were claps. People eating chips and drinking Pepsi. Officer Luke Robinoski would like to talk to me? He was pasty, and as he greeted me and asked for my ID, the chair of the department grabbed my left hand and said “what the fuck are you doing with my watch?”
At this moment, I heard the fatter one say into his shoulder mike “we got a problem here.” Because the audience had left so quickly, I rapidly felt alone and caught in some sort of bizarre dream—your watch—dude? What? I bought this watch at Marshall-Fields last week, while I was in Chicago for a conference covering the postmodern dynamics of poetic interfaces! At once, I turned around at the poor old man who had started to look like Ceasar or Laocoon or even Lao Tzu. It was then I kicked the cop in the nuts, and taking a cup of coffee, smashed it into his face. This hurt me almost as much as him, because behind all the fat was a thick, impenetrable skull.
I remember running. No one could catch up. Too stunned, too incomplete. I remember running to the English Department. It was dusk and the sky was turning red and beyond the Cumberland Valley, to the West, my children were running freely, happily. I was just running. The first thing I saw, a fire extinguisher. I broke some windows. I found the watch in the bathroom under a toilet when it had slipped from his elderly hand as he wiped his ass. His: a Pulsar. Mine: a Seiko.
In retrospect, I hope that the college will deduct some money for the broken windows from what they owe me. After all, I did pay for the airline tickets. And about the watches? I thumb-tacked both fuckers to a bulletin board and ran again. When I got back to the hotel, still running, I found my suitcase freshly delivered, sitting next to the delivery van that had brought it. It was just a matter of time before I caught a greyhound out to Pittsburgh where I caught a night train back to Chicago. I had to take the train. There, in the first class sleeper, the West-Bound Empire of America, I unrolled my suitcase, plucking from its center, a green, thick joint of Minnesota Northern Lights. When I got home I found out my left hand was broken, and my right knee suffered bruising from falls I made on campus; in my frantic efforts to bust into the English department, I had cut my hands badly. And I had to go the mall to get a new watch.

2006-08-12T02:44:00.000-04:00

I Live in Darkness:

I live in darkness so when I dream
I replay a time or two I’ve lived,
but make it pure and obscene.
There’s the inevitable incense
of the holy odalisque and in fact
the dream is all about her after a while:
it’s never back to darkness,
but back to the dim regions of her
inner surroundings, which border my house.
On a thousand vast and troublesome acres
the possiblities, because of our union,
are nameless. Earth and clay turn the same way:
in the deep chasms we’ve conjured
with our pushing and pulling on the bed
we’d taken to the fields, we’ve led the way home.

2006-08-12T02:40:00.001-04:00

Part-Time, Nights & Weekends:

The down time drifts
like a lost balloon--
everyday there's rain
and the sure chill of seed-birds
foraging on the lawn.

A friend tells me
like dry soil
he expects autumn to stir certain
fertile memories in him--
waiting for August
without a gig, you begin
to fear friends
and the odd ex-student
you see every morning
at the bus stop. Once
the fertile lover of books,
she looks you in the eye
mornings when you can
barely take coffee.

The fear of growing old
as they forget you. The tv
confusing your words when
across the street you know
they're writing poems.

2006-08-11T16:15:00.000-04:00

Conflation

The first thing I tell them is that I liked
a girl down the street and her brother drove
a 1968 Chevy Chevelle with a fake license plate
upfront that said “BEAST.” I don’t tell them
how my brother and I couldn’t date either Denise
or her sister because Beast would certainly
run us off the road like mourning doves
hobbling on the desert streets for no good reason.
But I do tell them my brother and I succeeded
in getting them stoned while sitting next to the hidden north side
of a local lutheran Church where scottish pine grew
around the fake adobe building like we were in Atzlan or something.
That night, I had a dream of cluttered back-lot alleys fertile
with the red clay mud of a wet Albuquerque summer.
Sometmes, I finally relate, I go back and all the homes
are red colonial brick with Georgian trim. And now
there are so many trees, so many species besides
the wind-swept Western Cottonood. Trees
with names like purple light of the sun or green flash of life.

2006-08-11T16:14:00.000-04:00

Songs for Orpheus

Brother, there’s a whole system of crazy notes
playing in Bernalillo county. I heard them
one night after Nelson died in a fire.
When I got that message it was easy to picture
his small home burned to the ground.
Not even the cross I kept on my bureau
or the pure tank of distilled water
I shared with my lover could save him.
It was Ken who called us at eight
to the relate the story. Now, with him gone too,
I sometimes stand in my new back yard
facing the great white oak where I wait
for the morning sun to cast a thick shadow that will open
a bleak underground realm where the dead shake off heaven’s hook--
The bells I hear now call me from steeples out of reach.

2006-08-11T16:13:00.000-04:00

Our Sad-Eyed Lady of the Llano

When it’s silence you’re looking for,
You must forgive my impulse
To go on like so many geraniums
Blossoming, not knowing how brief
Existence weighs the rock
Of nothingness against them.
With the drought boiling
In central New Mexico
Farmers are digging wells
While chilies wilt on the vine.
It’s the time of summer
When even the reservoir
Dries and you can find cutthroat
Trout dying in muddy corners of earth

Where water once stood.
They’re no good for eating,
And the fat bullfrogs that used to fill
The little marshes inside the Bosque
Never came back after the last time
Men upstream cut the flow to feed
The green lawns of Albuquerque’s
Summer season. Once thing:
I never came back because
I saw a hollow face in every window
Where a matchbook patch of grass
Grew in the adobe suburbs,
Where the so-called kings of golf
Swung at nothing.

2006-08-11T15:39:00.000-04:00

H. Writes out the Sadness in his Heart

After twelve years, you’d think the long stretches
of black birch and dogwood I’ve endured
on my drives back East would’ve painted me
the way they inhabit the long Pennsylvania winter.

If it was all a dream of cute, mid-atlantic odalisques
and deep chasms holding deeper rivers
then I am quite satisfied. For in the presence
of such bodies I was humbled.

Driving one morning I saw in the distance
a semi-tractor flinch on the ice of I-81--
I was on my way to Harrisburg to catch a train
and the snow had been falling all morning.

Bowie was singing s on my blue SUV’s CD player--
“The Bewley Brothers,” real cool dreamers so turned on
he’d made a sad song about their mishaps.

So when the disk started skipping

I thought about the time I slipped
on my slick wooden porch, tearing my left knee apart.
This is all the suffering I abide by--I’ve become
a fool for the cold morning that finds me shivering.

Somehow, I wish you were here with me
cascading down the turnpike, stoned
on the last tid-bits of a Beatles song that
has wrapped me up & into the invisible highway

beyond my hood ornament, shining on the Western horizon
like one of Belle Starr’s tits. Listen: the deal is this--
my sister sent me a telescope for Christmas
and I intend to visit each planet again.