It is raining and the boulevards of
Paris
are breast-deep in bones. It is usual
for images in the rain-lay of April
to merge like ascending elms
down Saint-Germain or Saint-Michel.
The boulevards are the rivers wind owes
to the eyes' reflections, light
to the panes transparent
in the domes of air wind weaves
along Sacre Coeur, the sphered
mirrors in the belly-up
of imitation louvred upon the water
the lone gull skims, antiqued
in its art of flying.
Down the Seine, all troves
of antiquity have bones,
the fluid and the permanent,
the rock, the sea's seed,
the hunk of air
swinging between two trees
along the banks of Quai Voltaire,
the wheeze of wind
in the clochard's lung
shelled and fractured
by screams in the night air.
The bones of leaves along Pont Neuf
seethe
when spearing the unpredictable
sheers of grass growth.
The bones of Baudelaire
have bones, timeless weights,
looms of ochre in their bethel's shapes
poem-shadows like Norse runes
or punctuations, splintered by the bones of spider's
writer's tongues.
In all our streams of consciousness,
the rivers of Paris run
down the escarpments of imagined time
their portmanteau of images
falling, boned together
like language or bat wings
aspiring to inspired flight.
In the single dying of a stone's
last breath there is progress
we will all come to
in time, falling, each of us,
through the rain of our breath,
imitations of the Dantesque,
fused by the body's currents
down the chutes of Montparnasse
birth-wet and river-deep
in bones descending.
* * *
From The Hunger Wall (Grove, 1995)
St. Jacob's Church of the Hanging Hand
He believed that touch
was a simple ride across a stream of velvet
at the skeining stall
or the sting of fire along brazed brass,
or when lightning cooled
in the wet sleep of a valley brook,
he had faith
in the promise of sensation,
the predilection of the body's mortal frame,
subdued, enraged as the hunger moved
to close the spaces
of what seemed to pass
and what, indeed, remained.
But nothing, no one
could predict the draft of terror
invading space so near the tattersall of jewels
the beggar's thumb had grasped.
What miracle of want
had fused his fingers to the Virgin's lace,
as if from an eternity of directions,
a hand or hands in cobra fashion
spiked his wrist,
and gaining force whipped
the venom into feral pitch?
No sooner had he dreamed at dawn
that in the cold posture of prayer,
a soldier's ax had freed his palm,
thought, the conscience vein,
was numbed to infinite suspension.
He remembered how before King Charles
lay
in composition for the viewing mass,
he ordered all his fingers
sparred, to keep from being seized,
untombed into the darker death of neglect.
Above the reliquary
the beggar's bone, a deformed winch
propping up the vault of air,
points at the accused avenger. Opposite,
like a feeding plover wading light,
the Virgin, boasting pearls
as high as faith can rise,
tempts the heart of human nature
to face her mirror of greed.
No one breathes.
Should the statue move, all tombs will open.
* * *
The Skinhead
On hearing the Berlin Wall
had fallen, a symbol of nothing
more a wall could do,
he bellies up from his bunker
in the hummock, a lizard Lazarus,
rolling back his rock, tongueless,
more a hiss than a grammar
his wattled throat suspends.
He says that hunger needs a stomach
or a stone the mind can't climb.
So, he finds behind the moats
of pavement a fleet of heads swimming
out, beyond the safe perimeter
of status, stroking, out like flags
from breast to sky, their rigid hands.
How their tongues, cocked back,
applaud the fallen angel's
pitted eyes and hooded skull.
At what moment did he know
we were the weapons, triggered
by our love for flux?
In what shortness of breath
had he known to push
the Ethiopian down a stair
to prove that footing is all,
that, microscopically, any movement
is a centipede with legs,
or that paranoia is a motion, hardly
noticed, idling slow, then fast,
a million years of stutters racing
hatred with fitful starts?
* * *
Audienca
On Vermont where the flames first burned
her down among the stones, she tells
the captain she cannot
identify the fire in question, that
the riot whistled flight
into its feet. Nor can she remember
any shrub so swift to conflagration
in the valley's poppling heat
as mimosa breathing the wind's still spirit.
In uniform he reminds her of a spoon,
the colonel feeding a hundred
innocents down the throat of a well
in Guazapa. The swallows tarred
the shade stones like griffins,
and no child dared presume
a father bored with sleeping
was alive.
He is not listening. She breathes
each syllable of smoke
into her lungs, afraid
that whispers only
to a dog knee-deep in cactus palm
keep the order of day trivial,
how at dawn siroccos
drain the bougainvillea,
and the patron saint of alms
picks the beggars' pockets.
He has cuffed her hands
down with reminders, this is not
El Salvador. She is illegal.
She wails. And remembers
how she leaped, rape-wise and sure,
with herons into the deep bone well.
The colonel crawled knee and night
to hear her boundaries break.
The swans no longer sleep
beneath the arbor's bower.
She can go to tell, the captain
tells her. She has broken bail.
She shows him what
the fires know of hunger,
there beneath the well's rimrock
where the amaranths grow,
she will show him
Normandie and Jordan Downs.
There where the bethel's light
guides the drover's sheep
above the sedge and spinneys,
she will show him fire, how
at night along the road to Tenancingo,
children parade their cargoes
to the swoon of whippoorwills.
By day the dust of ragged fathers
swell the sea,
contrition for each burial.
She will go to jail.
From Lusions (Grove, 1997)
The Eskimo's Twelve Expressions of White
(for Miroslav Holub)
I
Iced on the bone
bridge of the eye,
a tear glances at a fire.
II
An ibex sleeping
on the steppes
of the great Siberian snow
becomes the moon's horizon.
III
Fog crawls in
at the lip of a lake.
An Aleutian dog has laid down
his steaming breath
to praise a mountain.
IV
In the eye's reflection
stalactite, seeding water,
drips down the hanging scarf
of a cave, now warming.
V
The twenty spears
of a reindeer's horn
bleed before the fish man
whittles bones to eyelets.
VI
The harpoon towing
the whale's white fin
across the Bering Strait
stiffens to track the marmot.
VII
To outrun the elk,
a snow hare lunges deep
into the throat of a glacier.
VIII
A snowbank drifts in the
wind.
The bear's tracks limp
back to the lost logs of fire.
IX
The starved harp seal,
moled to higher ground,
laps at the light of the Aurora.
X
Water soaks the fur of the stoat.
His weasel coat browns
to ermine in winter.
XI
Within the spined avalanche of hair,
a woolly mammoth sleeps,
frozen in the mountain's skull.
XII
The fire
at the bone bridge of the eye
glances at a tear, now warming.
* * *
The Astonishment of Living
I saw beneath the spreading elm
two talking girls with rainbows
in their eyes. I saw their lives
on separate shores of the river
yield up their buckets to the falls.
Every drop was bathed in the fragrant
shawls of eglantine. Every leaf, in wind
rising up to comb each branch,
sent a whisper out along the banks--
let go. Lose all the breath in rain
and every strand of light in fog.
Let go of the tongue's crow
until it sings along with rocks
and runnels as if it were divine.
Let go of honored sky and earth.
Let go the horizon in between.
Lose all the sunlit undulations
of the season's wheat. And sing!
Call out to seeds, to grass, to all
that breathes into the pores of stones.
Let go the sovereign moons of space,
the celestial lulls of aureoles,
breathing out a planet,
pulsing out its days.
And where the stars ignite in showers,
let them fall. Recite the moment's song
that tomorrow wind will bring in squalls.
Free the century's melody as you would
a line or burden down a well.
Allow the astonishment of living
one reed or willow, feeding
swallows through a hungry night
until they weary of elation.
Let all buckets fill, all loss be light.
I saw two girls weaving rainbows in their eyes,
and daughtering in me their dreams, I grew
astonished by all conception,
the frail grandeur of life.