AMERICANA

Once, I liked to recite
the place-mats from diners:
Rob Roy, Tom Collins, the dead
medicine of 1930's cocktails.
Now I don't bother smiling
when old radios play old songs,
when the crumbled Italian cobbler offers
a gulp of olive oil to boost your hard-on.

The great wars are over.
I know nothing of food rationing,
of headlights painted black
to fool U-Boats along the dark coast.
No dead soldiers washed up on my holiday shores.
Only a salty taste, sand grit bathing suit,
my disconnected howl from the back seat
as I learned to read from billboards,
saw the Moon Launch between cartoons on a Saturday.

Oh, black-finned Cadillac,
body of angel and hearse, bring lovers
to the dripping resin of young pine trees.
Do the Twist 'n' Shout
while missiles moan in silos below.

I am tired of it. Lay me down. Take me over.
Let me sit as I once did by the kitchen table,
split from the womb at the World's Fair,
fingers stuffed with prayer.

HARD FORMULAS

Upon your silence, I come crashing.
I am lost salt and siphoned minerals,
I am your accident.
Let me take a light shaving from your bones,
a tangled grey snarl of hair.
I will taste something tonight of who I am.
I wish for the hard formulas binding me to you;
stitched red calligraphy, the spider-light of veins.
Let me touch the stem of iron still gleaming in you,
because I know I will find through this I am only
a deduction, a nub, a glistening sea-root that broke for air.
Inside, each of us carries a portion of the first ocean.
When you break, what will be left?
Only your scrubbed, grey shoals.
Only me, gripping like lichen to my own bones,
a scattering of rocks and calcium,
my blood running rich and dark as tar
to mark the lasting burn of your deposit.

TALK OF DUST

You go through several stages in the acceptance of dust:
Revulsion, a vague, feeble want of escape.
This settles into the mind at last as a kind
of terrible glory.
What vibrates in our lungs
could be the final, desperate filaments
of Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, Jimi Hendrix.

Look! The late afternoon sun blazes with dust,
gold motes lit up like a decaying consciousness.
But the awful science is always behind it--
That dust is just our sloughed-off spores of abandon;
bone-shavings, hair and skin, our umbilical cords
murdered worms, burned as medical waste in New Jersey.

There is no life without dust.
Nothing can be said without
the low murmurs of the dead behind us.
We're alone, yet we know that is not the end of it.
My last lover still here, gathering her ashen beards,
her spider's nests beneath the radiator.

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.