A Few Poems

I read this evening at Northwestern, along with three very talented students. Here are a few of the poems I shared, and a few I wished I'd had with me.



The Brain of the World Was Recalling Itself


in a Polish deli on the Northwest side of Chicago.
It had a kind of seeing and so perceived
the red, raw and broken all around.
Stubborn joint and gristle. The knife’s bright
entitlement. And it wanted none—no
more—of this; it wanted only to open out
in gauzy, combed formations.

All night, it had sat regal as a cake in a case.
Then, after the third shift, a man in a quilted flannel
and workboots spotted with plaster walked up
and pointed at it—didn’t even give it a name—
and an aproned woman slid her cold rubber-gloved hand
under and lifted it—quivering, gelatinous, delicate
folds unfurling then collapsing
into themselves—to the scale.

It was heavier than it looked. It wouldn’t be cheap.

She printed the label, set it on a small Styrofoam tray
and wrapped it in plastic, quickly, the way
they wrap the legs of the dead, to hold their shape,
while she thought of her husband at home—
up now, drinking coffee,
eating the sausages she’d left. She hoped
the way he’d begun to wheeze
when he came up the stairs
was nothing.

She didn’t notice it fighting against the cellophane
with a sharp right hook and deep ongoing keening,
every tiny chamber flexing, each
a lung gulping freedom.
She just passed it to the man
who grunted his thanks,
and if they’d noticed each others’ faces,
now they forgot them.

The man carried it through the market,
carried it through his weariness.
He grabbed an onion, fist-sized moon,
to bob in the broth around it,
knowing how its translucent layers
would gradually part,
like a sweater from a blouse,
a blouse from the slick cups of a bra,
pearled husks like morning
pared into a woman’s curls.

In an hour or two his wife would start the supper.
His kids would be up now, sitting mussed in pajamas,
in front of the TV that goggled loudly
in the language he only understood in scraps, the noise of it
everywhere, dividing his life from theirs,
making his a transparent, brittle peeling.

Under the plastic, it shivered, it pulsed;
it towed the man into his long afternoon
and tossed a shy light, like plaster dust, or loss,
up onto his face,
and anyone who saw him carrying it
flashed fleetingly on flesh—

the chicken’s cracked neck,
scrotum soft in the hand,
moonish sediment on the infant’s head,
her shoulder that first evening—how it almost glowed,

it was so pale,
a child would have guessed it was made of spun sugar;
an old woman would have said the purest fat,
the kind you can burn in a lamp if you have to,
or spread on hard dark bread;

and anyone close enough to look into the folds—
(flushed, bluing)—
would have felt strange,
as if they’d known all this already;
they recognized it from some throb behind the eyes.



Lookout


First we thought it was the shadow
of a duststorm or a swarm
of insects sliding over the ridge
and across the plains, the way it darkened
and rearranged the land beneath.
Then you saw the massed particles coming closer
were not bug or buffalo, but people,
carrying their young and old,
passing over the earth
as the earth was passing
in its own living skin.
All this with a scorching
want that lowed in a loudening thunder.
What was there to say?
Our tools were simple
and carved from bone.
We held them fragile
as artifacts, our eyes
smarted with dust and with sun
and we watched.


Cheyenne

I need to clear the bracken and weeds
that stick to my swimming thighs.
I went down and down, I swam
beside the boat, near its sucking wake
and tall, dangerous sides. I pulled
through water hung with mud and slick
shale-stumbled banks running up to trees
and scattered logs bleached white by the sun.
The way I loved seemed to be confounding
everyone. I was not alone, I had
a friend I did not even need language
with as we paddled side by side.
I was not shopping, scanning
the horizon for what would be a better
life. I was beside that ship of people
being ferried safe inside their deaths.
We would all arrive around the same time
but me by my own rhyming muscle.
I swam until the water grew warm
as a body around my body, until I was
in a liquid I had been before.
I opened my eyes against the current
and the stripping weeds, pulled
myself ever further into the folds
of the past, back to the riversplit
where it all began, scrambling out
onto land tingling with bramble and branch.



Late September


Gulls slide through the sky.

It’s one of those days
I’ve tried to get out
into my actual life.

Late September and I don’t even need
art to heighten my seeing.

The low spotlight of the sun does it for me.

Each blade of grass sidling up to its black.

Trees lapped by shadow and the Great
Lake’s frayed unending waterbreath

amid a yellowjacket hum
and the whirring spin of crickets singing
we are all just river pouring over
the wheel.

From here, I can see them at the park.
They are framed by the green ruffling

and all the times we will not be.

He leans against the slide reading a paperback.

She climbs the red step.

He lifts her into the cup of the swing,
and she throws her head back laughing.

I can’t read their faces, only their forms.

They have the same saturation into body
that turns the grass to strips of light.
I am one of those
who can’t forget, who loves
the one burning branch turning the tree
to something various and mortal,
something true.
Who sees the world a long way off
even when it’s close
as this girl I love now running up.




The SBC-Ameritech Endangered Species Carousel


The children wait in line, hopping,
hoping for their first choice—
a fiberglass panther black as a car,
a panda smoking bamboo,
a harbor seal with velvety questioning eyes.
Measured by the bar, they clamber on,
beat their feet against the creature’s bellies,
say, giddyup, hurryup, while their parents smile,
wipe ice cream from their hands and mouths.
The recorded organ bells out clownish now, louder
as the animals shiver up and slide back down
on fat brass screws, threading the afternoon
with their tragic imagined grins.
Only the gorilla stays level,
looking down under lidded brows,
his heavy knuckles bolted to the floor,
and the boy on his manlike back looks worried
that he’s only going round and round.
He’s crying now, It’s okay, his mother calls,
as he passes behind the lion,
the swan, the mandrill, the camel,
Don’t worry, Hon, it’s almost done.