Poems

This happened to me.

With a Stick

My father knew of snakes-he said
They hid under the places in the dark
Where people threw their trash,
Sliding like wild train tracks ahead
Of prodding fingers, eyes hard
Like windows, mouths full of ashes.

We found a wet place.
He crouched.
With a stick he flipped the plastic
Sheeting away-and it struck,
Tail lashing, body coiled like rope
And thrashing in wiry loops
Until is swirled over at last,
Playing dead until we moved
Our light from its glistening scales.

A night without stars reflected
In the slick pond water hanging
Like a raincoat on our shoulders.
We walked uneasily, checking our steps,
Toes edging over the rigid earth,
Never running barefoot through the trees.

This is one of a series of a half-dozen or so "painting poems." In these I wrote poems inspired by paintings such as "Girl Before a Mirror," "Nude Descending a Staircase," and others. This one is about the Japanese printmaker Hokusai, whose series of "Views of Mt. Fuji" (there are over a hundred of them) are instantly recognizable to most people. Usually the one people know is the one of the wave.

24 Views of Mt. Fuji

Hokusai the gremlin's job is very simple:
each hour of the day
                                he scrambles
across Linotype and makes
                                                "bloody sunlight
shrouding the barn"
                                into "dappled apples
of light made the barn an orchard."

He flips through floppy disks and demagnetizes
"her bloated corpse, boiling with decay,"
                                                                to "her body,
one breath past sleep."
                                                He pauses at "a stink
like grade school frogs and formaldehyde"
but shrugs and leaves it at
                                                "the stink of a fresh
broken bottle of perfume."
                                                He stares at
"my mistress' eyes" and smiles.

This is not a children's book. Look at the artistry:

The careful gradual introduction
                                                      of perspective,
the influence of the few Western paintings he's seen.

The gigantic somber glow of Red Fuji climbs off
the page,
                       claims its own standing,
                                                                "a demonic
shape cast from iron, not yet cooled,"
                                                                (the view past
the boatmakers, the men building the houses, the view
up the river,
                        under the bridge) "a mountain reduced
to an icon, snow dabbed on its tip like the brush strokes"
"of a feather dipped in blood," "serene in the distance
and as unreachable as" "the slop we walk on, feet slapping"

the gremlin smiles and Fuji grows around us,
Hokusai
                how well you have wrought

I wrote this about a childhood experience I had in Lima, capital of Peru. I lived there for six years in the early eighties.

Outside School, Lima

I saw it on the flatbed: a horse
belly slit open, large chunks
of meat missing, hide flapping

like a flag, tail dripping off
the edge of the truck

cars jostled to follow it, every one
full of children like us, begging
their mothers, asking
for nightmares

I got none, but I have to tell
the story, or else the horse
died in vain, and the children
will have nothing to worship

no flag to follow
no rules to break and later obey

This poem was the opening one in my collection Housebuilding, and also gave it its title.

Housebuilding Near Montague Farm

It loomed like a skeleton taking shape.
Bright clothes clambered over angles of fresh cedar,
Called out like sandpaper, and sat on stumps
Pulling splinters from their toes,
Axes leaning against their sides.
I could see the holes the windows already were,
Could almost picture a bed hanging
In the empty air, woolly coverlet flapping.

Leaves rustled. They passed a joint, tossed
Their long hair, batted at each other with sweaty caps.
One was tossed a beer from the ground,
And it twirled up like a comet, twenty feet.

Sweat and Donna Summer on the radio,
The breeze barely blowing, and it was all,
All I could do not to spin around
And scatter the nails I had been entrusted,
Spin and whirl the leaves around me
To blow through the frame and weave
The sky I saw into a blanket of summer,
To watch things build themselves
And know nothing of coming apart.

Both of the following poems were written during my spring 2000 trip to Australia and Taiwan. It was my first time to both places, and I really want to go back. At some point I will get around to putting up some of the photographs I took while there.

Driving to Tainan

I came all this way to visit New Jersey:
Blank concrete barriers under smog,
Highways robed in rice paddies.
Granaries coated in rust rust
Idly. Trade rice for more
American grains, and this drive
Is one more trip through waste, waste
Of nature, of wild.

The city Tainan is strokes
And motorcycles, a rush to buy
And sell. Here, there, everywhere
Adolescents gather, girls to giggle,
Guys to pretend.

Down an alley we find a square,
An empty lot loomed by cosmetics ads.
Plastic sheeting circles plastic tables,
A sizzle of shells, sashimi and squid.
The fish eyes are everywhere, and
Taiwan beer tastes very familiar:
Perhaps there is only one beer, and many bottles.

A man at the next table is,
For a moment, my friend Will, the artist,
In every detail but eyes,
Hair, beard, chin, cheeks.
The recognition of his laugh makes me
Laugh, so I inhale differences
To exhale similarities.

So, then: there is no where, there.
There is only who, and when,
And why, and the answer
Is always.

--March 24th, 2000

A Three Kingdoms Story

The wise man sits in the Three Kingdoms story
Playing music on his lap harp.
The wise man sits in the Three Kingdoms story
On castle walls, to make the siege
That rages shorter, casual
Though all is discontent.
The wise man sits in the Three Kingdoms story
And I am sitting on a park bench
By his park-bound monument.
Around me past the stone park fence
Taipei grumbles, heaves, and shakes, but
The wise man sits in the Three Kingdoms story
Playing music on his lap harp
And I am listening

March 28th, 2000