GODDESS

Whoa, I said. That sounds like you saw a goddess.
That time you took too big a hit off a joint
at your friend's place in Philly, started coughing
your lungs out, got a really bad head rush
and sat back in the spindly, second-hand easy chair
to close your eyes, and let the black come funneling in.
That's when you received your particular vision,
or hallucination, or whatever you want to call it,
of a real Fifties-style house wife in white dress,
all cool, immaculate moon-strung flesh,
who waved her arm like a game-show girl
at a painting in dark Rembrandt oils
of sausages and various kinds of sandwich meats.
Oh yes, I said. She might not have had
many arms swirling in helicopter-blade embrace,
she might not have had a dun-colored bosom
you could have been drawn up into
like the beginnings of deepest ocean.
But yes, certainly. She was a goddess, none-the-less.

FRAGMENT

Who among us is up on the latest theories? You once thought time
was portable, sensuous, like the molded pink plastic transistor
radio, so cool in fifth grade, that now sits on your shelf, a
truncated muscle, a side of beef sliced from the prom queen.
Remember your theory on nuclear holocaust?
How outmoded is that? And who was contaminated?
The boy who peered through the dreary summer screen door
at dusk? There was a glow to him, like the sulfur of smashed lightning bugs, the screen door stretching like a net to catch some specimen. When did fear of others become a guilt you couldn't get rid of? You can't hold onto these things, there's nothing in them except the overwhelming urge to go under. Why keep returning to your hometown, just to note how the building goes from neighborhood movies to porno theatre to born-again church? Who can keep time with the shift of dove-grey rubble? Who can stand such restless breaking, and still hold a voice?

SLOW NUMBERS

How easy it is to think my parents have pulled up to the curb
in their silver Hyundai to kidnap me. I have been bad. I have squandered their money, drank their liquor, burped up vomit at 1 AM. There must be a resort somewhere that will take me. Some silver trees, empty egg-shell fountains, a few dead ferns reminding me toward piety. I could almost beg for the Venetian blinds shut against afternoon heat and starched white lab-coats crossing their knees, tricking me into saying something so familiar, I never heard it before. If you asked me now, I could already fill in the questionnaire from memory.

I enjoyed the train ride here. Someone told me they still shoot stray dogs, out beyond the scrub-brush fence posts that mark the edges of this county. Someone told me the cafeteria is terrifying, but only after it is closed and the dishwasher is running. Someone told me that the band here only plays slow numbers, no matter what your request.
I get to work with a scalpel, whittling away at the alphabet. I send a telegram asking for the Sultan's head and a quart of whiskey and am surprised to have it answered. At the weekly auction, I do my best, try to stand still, keep my place on stage. But always, I lose myself to the beat of slow numbers, click my fingers, start to sway.
They picked me first before the lights went out.

ARIA

I'm your star, and I'm singing. How far can that light go?
When radio voices still speak through the static between planets,
nerve endings can be stretched from here to San Francisco;
all the facts of the world fitted on a single microchip.

I will sing tonight as I heard the drowned mistress sing,
on a tug-boat buoy in the open mouth of New York harbor.
It was an aria, but if you wish, I could lay down
a disco beat, or a loping, Big Band swing, or maybe
Country Western would be best.
The category is True American. You take your pick.

You told me by this Spring we will have run out
of new things to say to each other.
I guess there's some comfort in that.
I made up that bit about the drowned mistress;
it seems to have stuck. Everyone's asking me
how many songs she has left in her.

I'm spinning, my nerves stretched from Chrysler to Mission Street.
I'm channeling the Big Bopper as his plane goes down.
It is night, there is snow, but I can see every glossed kernel
of wheat rush up at me. I'm counting all the loaves
of bread that will be made from that silent field,
but those are facts, not miracles.
I'm standing, mouth open,
full of light going black, swallowed whole.

CONQUISTAWHORES

I have seen the darkened lands
Laid like a stain, laid like a plan
I’ve seen them spread across these shores
The ends meet the means; of course, you’re sure

Here is the fire, here is the hand
What we forge now takes command
We break like seeds, or tired whores
We feed the fire of conquistadors

God and the Devil, hand in hand
They’ve compromised, drawn up a plan
The feast is laid, the wine is poured
The word gets out, a poisonous spore

The Kingdom Come-and-Get-It Plan
Is bankrupt now, you understand
We blame the flame, the need for more
We drink the ash of conquistadors

THE HUNGER OF SAINTS

I stop in the park by a fenced-in statue of some Polish saint,
while nearby, a prowl-car sweeps the hedges with its low headlights,
searching out miscreants. From a block of plain grey marble
the saint's head rises up against a blue night sky swollen
with the city's incandescence, and he looks out into it
like a teacher expecting nothing more, nothing less
from an unruly classroom. At his feet, the old women
of the neighborhood have placed a procession
of store-bought candles which pucker and gleam
with the wind, and other, stranger offerings:
a plastic deli container full of pickled red cabbage.
Strange to leave at this altar some semblance of hunger
that has long since left him, given in a mute attempt
at conversation. The old women with their nameless
ointments and swollen ankles wrapped in ace bandages
and their long yellow corridors swathed in the sticky
grit of ammonia, the faulty fluorescents ticking overhead.
I try to look back to the first secrets of their long-given thighs,
of boardwalks and dance halls and the dim confessionals
that came afterward, of their steady eyes as they calmly blanched
a young son's wounds, wringing out the blood
from the washcloth into a dirty bucket.
How completely they have surrendered themselves to the future,
to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds, so that this one
may beget and beget, all the while laying
candles and red cabbage at the feet of the dead.
I ask for the songs their saints have never sung.
I ask for the way these women sleep at night,
heavy, stolid, broken but firm.
I ask for the flare they put to the sputtering wick,
for their careful grasp of the uncertain.
I ask for one small name to say against the dark
besides my own.

THE END OF HISTORY

Oh, the fathers of this country
with their fingers numb
from gripping the wheel,
as if that were the loom from which
they could spin new bread, or pry loose
land mines that never went off,
giggling with dark intent.

Happy accidents.

The war is not over, they said.
The war is still going on.
Victims made fresh daily.

Direct your attention, please,
to the bluish smudge on that satellite photo.
It shows us with our best face forward.
(Company picnics are not what they used to be.)

"Read My Lips.” Such a lonely slogan.
Someone’s father said it once.
Now it can be done from any corner of the globe.

Sign language is out.
Soon will come the Morse code of heartbeats.
Even that can be deciphered.
And the poisonous son claims
all our tongues are tied to his own.

Leave me the fuck alone.
I don't want my moods lying around
for fear of hearing them whistled as a jingle
on some stranger's lips.

Words are like insects, aren't they?
Burrowing through what white spaces
we have left.

And who are you? You’re not the wheel.
You’re not the dry-lipped father with the cold compress.
You can’t break the fever. Your words keep turning over,
back to zero --- the loom is stripped.
Like an amnesia patient odometer, like a car hood flashing
nothing but heat and combustible miles, like a tombstone
blank with glazed fire --- You call that an equation?
You expect me to buy that?
You think you can just add a period
And say that’s the end?

REGIONAL SLEEP
What a strange tune the dial of night is turned to.
Beneath the wind that whips through my window is a larger sound, a low, insistent chorus of trilling whispers that throbs like a pulse-beam in and out of my hearing. If this were the country I'd know it to be crickets or peep-frogs, but this is Brooklyn, so I have to assume its source is sickly and artificial. Some great asthmatic air conditioner unit wheezing from a factory rooftop, some gigantic engine shorn of gears, spinning idly out like an old man trying to make sense of his missing teeth. Or perhaps (and this is the best part) its cause is something darker, more looming and subversive. For all I know, an alien invasion is underway, and this is their mind-conditioning ray making its sweep. I am one of the few left awake to hear it. Most of my neighbors have already lapsed into a numbed and mildly troubled sleep, their dreams spilling into regions of white noise and emptiness as their cerebral cortexes are busily reknit. A lurid scenario, yes, but such over-saturated color schemes seem to fit best this era where, as all the big fiber-optic conglomerates are constantly reminding us, "anything is possible." I for one am shocked at myself that I don't throw on sneakers and shirt right now and run out into the streets, driven by an obsessive curiosity: Just where the hell is that sound coming from? Maybe it was all those air-raid warning drills I went through as a kid, my ears shrieking with mechanized hysteria. You come to accept that the sky is filled with invisible bombers, that the impossible is just another steady constant. So instead of maniacally searching, I shrug and switch on the TV, get ready for sleep, for my own dreams to succumb to a gnawing chorus of white noise. Perhaps the night is inventing for itself a new kind of dark music. Perhaps the wind is being retrained. Perhaps, if I only listened, I could learn something from it. I don't care if this mystery has an answer. Hang up. Refrain.

PERSONAL AD
So let me start this by telling you a little something about myself. I like to raise skeletons from sunken boats. I like to take the seaweed crusted to their tarnished skulls and comb it over into a variety of hair-dos, starting with classic 1940's styles and moving on up to the present. They say you're as naked as the day you were born, and I can't argue.

I have thrown whole dinner parties for the victims of airplane crashes, thinking how each place-mat might be a map showing them the way home. I am a great believer of etiquette starting in the womb. I have written whole theologies based on this fact.

What I'm offering is a gift. One free waiver to anyone willing to trust my methods without a second guess.

Is this a break with tradition? No. It's a way of shoring up the walls, of cutting to the quick of that overdone modern question: "Are we all really just alone?"

We are never alone. None of us are alone. None of us have ever really been alone. None of us have known a single second where it's been just us, and no one else. We are never alone. Won't you join me?