metal confetti on sparking cars snarling smashing asphalt and granite
shattered watch-crystals radio voices flecked with excitement spittle sizzling airwaves
oozing aloe nectary neon god who let me see the gas seep out
and form new words in air, color-words of neon morning
behind the rectory where I’d stayed the night, cold blue jays a maelstrom
in the air above the shed
beside which a little one had fallen to the grass and the dog nosing it looking at it
as if this bird were the condition of everything
frail body of a bird vortex of fear and alarm
the dog with instinct criss-crossing its brain and the little bird fallen
as if nothing else existed and were the dog to devour it our world would end.
I picked up the jay lifted it to the roof of the shed where it died after a few hours while I watched and the world kept
kept on kept
kept on. How can it keep on going when a little bird is dead?
Blue vortex above the whole sky and echoes still
from anger and alarm the sky awhirl with sounds only I can hear.
But I like it at dusk
thieving sun carrying it all under his tattooed arms when I go down to the bridge and from under the arches
fly the bats in streams
reminding me of eyelashes going absolutely skitterish and crazy my eyes in and out as if seeing were the sun looking down on the long line of us waiting
ready to jump off the edge like kids at the carnival and that sensation oscillating with another of trying to run the other way the joke the joke is on me the joke is me
because a man made me this drunken hair left sprawled here in a torn dress for a year or more – longer – still – a lifetime
sprinkle of needles on the floor shavings of unknown metal twinkling eyes
glistening trail of a tear one tear falling trailing down on my hand the counter the cabinet door the floor and still a tear bobbling there in its own mystery
down the street a flood of tears my own and everyone’s and the sky always gray with our confusion,
violent historical clanging brilliant –
loose wheels wobbling down the sidewalk after the car smashed a streetlamp a wall
a skyscraper – after leaping a hydrant missing a vendor frozen stiff at the sight of it careening and then dead still
but the wheel one wheel keeps wobbling down the street and bounces into the subway
and another wheel I am that wheel wending my way through the crowd in the Cathedral
of St. John the Divine
I pretend no one can see me but men turn and look at me women scowl at me
as if I were naked but I am only beautiful. My loveliness is an invasion an x-ray
eyes of I-can-see-nipples and they are looking right at you and
my ass is an entire ballroom of happy marriages and
my hips are those buses in India that carry everyone on sides and top
through all the smoke or departing spirits I was looking for Mr. Divine
and found a boy tucked away in a chapel praying for his mother
and I said let me take you I will be your mother Boy Beautiful
I have room to spare for one more inside myself I’m only a girl on a reef
hugging shivering knocking knees there’s room on the mainland of me
and he let me kiss his nose then departed.
Oh Mr. Divine your St. of all Johns where are you? I cried; all the shadows
of the never-finished cathedral gather and conspire toward completion
on the last day but completion only when the work is equal to the spirit
and that will never be until the last day or perhaps there is no day but the last and this most certainly is it.
Congregations come and go cathedrals stay a little longer but are fading even
before they’re finished. On this day my hands in prayer
form a candle in cold flame and giving smoke that writes my name
that will disperse as quickly as it forms
and my name in smoke the only prayer I can pray.
*
I've been working on various poems, mostly dredging out old notes (luckily I never through out anything, but so much is lost from the Backspace and Delete buttons! -- though I try to avoid them), and this one above is a considerable rewrite of the last few days, working over a fragment from one of the long poems I never finished, oh so many years ago, when every word I thought of got sucked into the black hole of one or another epic project (some I finished, and even published parts of them here and there).
This one evolved from a very long time ago -- from a story I brought into the Fiction Workshop I took with Donald Barthelme. The story was about a woman kidnapped by a fisherman; they lived at sea for years, and he brainwashed her so that she remembered nothing but seawater and his absolute authority, but saved herself in the end through the power of memory: a fragment, a flicker of something true, being enough to preserve a soul.
The story sat around for years, then I started reading everything I could find on the sea, sailing, maritime issues; and various key feminist works, particularly on gender differences in consciousness and language...that was, for years, my modus operandi: absurdly extensive study and research of a pair of topics that were related only in the way I expected them to warp and woof within the poem. Years would pass, and I now have several banker's boxes of notes and drafts, and a wall of books, representing both "completed" and abandoned (but not forgotten) long-poem projects.
Oh, it was a bad idea...if the idea was to write something people wanted to read! All of this started in my heyday, five wonderful years of fellowships -- FAWC, Stegner, and others -- when I had too much time and great ambitions...it was, some years ago, like digging miles underground, tunneling like the Count of Monte Cristo, and coming up to air, and looking around at a waste, with no one there but me.
...which is pretty much like the persona of the poem, "Lady," above -- now, more of a bag lady whose brain I've tried to get inside: Yeats's Crazy Jane, a bit; Roethke's "North American Sequence," as well.
Perhaps most long poems should be boiled down to a monologue.
Anyway, I like the careening, but still with (I think; to my ear, anyway) a careful cadence and measure at the core; I'm aiming for cinematic without ever leaving her head, much -- "French Connection" car chase of the soul, with NYC as canvas.
Very different prosody and language from most of the work posted over the last couple of months, and from the small lyrics of the past two years; maybe I'll start a new project, consciousnesses on the edge -- finding their temperatures, filming them with my prosody, and seeing where they take us.
