Jan 1, 2007
Soon there'll be the elephant rumbling from the apartment above
The plump, brown children performing their acrobatics
and their parents who chide them in Spanish
But now, there's the quiet that follows a breakfast
of bacon and tender eggs. My poor timing with the spatula
my laziness with draining grease from the dead ham
mean smoke in the rooms, an odor that I'll regret later
after returning from my walk
I'll regret the impregnation of pig fat into my couch
and wonder if they can smell it upstairs, though
I can't smell their meals, so I'm undecided if they cook
Mexican, or American, or perhaps they are epicures
and I'm guilty of racial stereotyping
I'm certain of my next door neighbors, whose aromas
of curry, saag and paneer blend with their loud, hyenic laughs
They are unfailingly polite to me, and I don't know why
except that they've been bred to be
Upstairs, a toilet has been flushed; I listen to its piped waterfall
On the street, a truck sluices through last night's rain
which forms because of dirt in the atmosphere, clumping
molecules into drops. It's as if people threw their pollution
up, the way kids throw glitter at grandma, but instead of laughing
the sky shudders and wrings, and the unwelcome soil gets redeposited
We're all--the Mexicans, the Indians, and me--thinking
right now
in our native languages. Maybe we get along because at night
quiet except for snoring and rain
and still except for our cooking haze settling into our walls
our vocabularies mingle without the impediment of speech
Later, I'll probably see them and say "Hi", and they'll say "Hi"
and for me that's the only word, but for them it's a second word
or a third word. They know their own culture.
They're learning mine
I'm the stranger, welcomed. I'm the guy who fries bacon, buys
Indian takeout, microwaves cheese burritos, all with an American accent
Jan 2, 2007
(somewhat inspired by Naming
of Parts)
Today is Filing of Letters Day
Tomorrow with be Doing the Books Day, followed closely
by Sweating the Taxes Day
But today is Filing of Letters
The letters in their burial mound, white with envelope snow
red with Christmas card blood, my dead animal of a year
that can't be identified without an autopsy
That's today's science lesson, reading and dissecting each letter
even the company communiques assuring me they apprecaite
the way I pay on time
Each postal date stamp revisited, each envelope a coffin
whose body I exhume, reading for clues. Where was I
on the night of November the 5th?
Home, no doubt, no witnesses, except neighbors who see the light on
which could mean anything, officer, he often goes out, we see him
toting his fencing bag, big as a body
Fencing, you say?
Yes, officer. He says he likes to stick people
The detectives could deerstalk all day and prove nothing.
They'd
cart back my boxes of letters, my mausoleums
And maybe they'd call in a profiler, a specialist, who would
claim I was no killer. Just a poet. A lone poet,
with no
conspirator behind a knoll.
He worked alone, chief,
the man would say
Jan 3, 2007
My right arm reaches over
and before I know what it's doing, it
finds the pillow where you are not
You aren't specific these days, you
are not where I thought
or when. Instead, you're somewhere
up front of me, instead of beside me
Except. Except there's a you in my head
a you you are not, exactly, but close
You're close, some days, close
as that pillow that's warm, I realize with a rush
warmed somewhow by you who are not there
Jan 4, 2007
It's Menuhin playing St. Matthew
The black and white footage still reveals
his blonde hair, his nobleman's face
cast in spotlight
He has a build like a champion horseman
He's still while playing, moving just what
the music requires, his bow arm that can
be a piston is, during Bach, an oil pump
like you still see in Oklahoma, perpetual
motion. Menuhin's eyes aren't on his fingers
or the conductor, or the audience. They're
inward, on the music. To play the Passion
he parts the air like earth and views Bach's new home
Bach, who instructs him on the tonal mathematics
of the planets, who now composes for Menuhin's
other family, his siblings whom he left when he was born
Each note surrounds his stillness. Each phrase echoes
Menuhin's conversation with Bach and the angels
Jan 5, 2007
El Vampiro's
woman resolves from the mist
that's like a cigar smoke shawl over the tree branches
Her twelve foot long train, ebony lace, unwittingly
brooms the floor's flour dust. She is to Mexican
gothic what Aphrodite is to the grecian urn. Any man
would succumb to her, plunge his face into her, drown.
Tonight I watch with English subtitles, but next time
I'll stare uncaptioned at ice coffee eyes and cream breasts
el doctor
so chivalric, young Marta's neck pricked twice
the mad aunt, mad but right and righteous and the true
hero, gargoyle faced, lithe, a dancer among coffins
Did they joke on the set? Catch a smoke between scenes
of blood and deceipt? I bet they did. And I bet
in bed they dreamed of fangs and "Cut!" and grinding pelvises
thick with flesh and cotton. I bet the monsters they played
snatched their heartbeats. I bet they woke up praying
Jan 6, 2007
It's the Flintstones TV, the bird pecking the show into stone
Or maybe it's the Wonkavision: "'You should open your mouth
a little wider when you speak.'"
Or, likely, it's you saying, "Can you imagine how it felt
being the captain of the Titanic?"
Most men would tell their pals, "Dude, she's hot," as if
that were an Ensteinian word equation, the pinnacle of
compliments, the unified female complimentary theory.
And your eyes are black as a crow's feathers
Your lips are wet like whisky
Your hips curve like a champagne bottle
You are, dude, hot
But it's the anvil in your heart my ears catch
the rap of a steady hammer, the ping sounding from
your depths just like the Titanic's warning bell must
have rung during her descent, before the ice water
stilled it.
You have an accountant's certainty that things add up
or they don't. You're the lion who hunts and then sleeps
You, laughing, collapsing around around your core, but
reborn as a star from gravity and dust.
Jan 7, 2007
The lake has mist like water twelve seconds before boiling
You step to it, reach, let it lick your fingertips
"It's not so cold."
Until our clothes drop, until the air pounces on our skin
until you dive and spray me, until I find and envelope your furnace body
"See?"
The current ignores us while we taste each other's salt water
then sluices between us, a chilly aqua bible
"Let's go back."
Fifty-seven laughs to the tent that tumbles us in, strips us, zips us
The trapped bird feathers stoke air, vapor heats our lips
"Let's go back."
Jan 8, 2007
The devil rides along in the car
humming the Flatt & Scruggs I'm playing
commenting on the beauty of leafless trees in streetlight
Like the best genius devils, he's invisible
but chatty. At first, I mistake him for my own thought
which has slipped into what ifs
Like rambling banjos, brains play the tunes we put
into them. But the devil's waiting for the three measure rest
when he'll draw his own bow on my fiddle
Jan 9, 2007
Is there such a thing as sleep appropriation?
The antonym of deprivation, the consumption of
too much sleep
The sleepless find their dreams usurp reality:
The grocery people plot revenge
The cats regrow front claws
Oxygen contains germs with fingers that
inch them down the throat
The sleepful? They awake unsure:
Who owns that quilt I love?
Did I email her this morning...or yesterday?
I miss my dreams; they thrill me more than
driving to work
The sleepless brain forces dreams onto the world
The sleepful brain's addicted to dreams
Even when I'm awake, I demand movies--
the nearest unreal substance
Jan 10, 2007
The pinnacle of conspiracies is not the Illuminati
or Free Masons, or Kennedy's removal from life
or baking bread that always lands butter side down
No, it's secret elderly after dark society
By day, they don Clark Kent goggles to mystify us
with their doddering. DeNiro was never a finer actor
than Mrs. Kittle, who claims good potatoes must have
fewer than fifteen eyes. Goats over sixty play our
daily accordians; we don't imagine them with Fenders
and Gibsons
But one night, whistling past a retirement graveyard,
I heard a rustle under the mulberry. Two lovers
had attached their bodies and ages, a naked one hundred forty one
sighing their Olympian pride at yet another 10.0.
Since then, I've attained geriatric paranoia. The other day
I overheard a toothless clergyman predict a revolution
to occur after shuffleboard, and lead by septugenerian banditos.
Jan 11, 2007
How much help is it, really?
A CD for cancer
Science says it's better than prayer from afar
which has no effect,
and I believe that, believe in doing something
the person recognizes.
Still, I feel empty as a flower pot
"Here, sorry about your breast, sorry
that your daughter now defines death as your absence
sorry I'm not a genius and can't cure you in secret
and sorry, so sorry, for my useless, sorry, sorry life"
But to you it will be sweet as fresh squeezed peaches
You'll call Rob, you'll agree I'm the momentary Kris Kringle
Your daughter will be fed stories of me along with her beets
Do I give the gift for you, or for me? Doesn't the collie,
when it
drops the rabbit's corpse at the door, beg a pat on the head?
Jan 12, 2007
The Toyota's dome light is on
I first peer inside like a thief, hoping to see
the dashboard Ganesh statue, overcomer of obstacles
but there's just American-looking refuse
Finally, I knock on my neighbor's door. The young man
with the pirate face answers. Yes, it's his car.
"Oh,
sorry, thank you."
I enter my apartment. It's full of heat. My shoes
will dry soon
My damp cap's fabric smells like a cat
My fish's bowl lamp is lit, so I say, "Lights out, Sam," and
set his sun
I picture thousands of dome lights left on right now
all over the city. If the power grid hushed, satellites would
snap shots of a fuzzy constellation Cincinnatus. I smile at
my power
I stopped a star
Jan 14, 2007
(missed a day, so here are two unreleated poems to make up for that)
1.
Mine is a paper generation
We were taught that civiliation began with the Guttenburg Bible
Music could be played by ear, but the only real music was sheet music
With a name like Schirmer or Mel Bay inscribed on the cover
Each spring, eighth graders judged each other by hair-to-earlobe
coverage
pant length, and Mead binder cover. We'd decide to date
because
we both liked college ruled notebooks over standard
Scientists discovered the cosmos through napkins. Chalkboards
were
merely surrogate paper. They constantly shuffled through
their notes
When the time came to awe their peers, they would present a "paper"
No electric devices held our art. No child drew with a mouse.
We
had construction paper, and watercolor paper, and Kraft paper,
and
cardboard and posterboard and currogated boxes. A little girl
demanded
before a vacation drive, only a coloring book and Crayons
We modeled our worlds with paper. We flew paper airplanes,
and folded
oragami giraffes. Plastic had captured hobby modelling, true,
but architects
still built cities from foamboard covered with creamy paper
All reporters took notes on paper. They typed Kennedy's
death, which flew
onto acres of newspaper. A thrifty executive would allow his
secretary only
onion paper, which now deserves only 9,280 web site pages, decreasing
daily
You weren't a man if you didn't read the paper. Our mothers
could be charmed
by scented tissue carnations. I learned to write cursive on
brown paper with blue
lines, which would disintigrate upon erasure using a Pink Pearl.
Sherlock Holmes captured elite criminals because they composed missives
on fine staionery
which even my generation acklowleged as a class indicator. We
loved stationery, and inks
and envelopes. If you wanted to impress a girl, you wrote
love poems with a fountain pen
on gold parchment.
We respected our ancestors of stone writing, who spoke to us with
chisels and granite
Our heads were, after all, rapped by Moses' stone tables each Sunday.
But under our
covers, by flashlight, we prayed to the Chinese and the Egyptians, who
mastered papyrus
They had rescued us from lives of masonry. We could now paint
our history
just like the girls I knew who scribbled thier love in diaries that
locked. They embedded their
souls in paper.
2.
To play Bach properly, you must deny entropy, or
at least, you must believe that life is ordered, that
the music accurately shadows the universe
In Bach is Kepler's desire; the strict music of the heaveans
Jan 15, 2007
We get the blues
Or we're having a brown study
We want clear minds
Transparent reasoning
Green with envy, yellow bellied
red faced, pale faced, gray or ashen faced
Pollack paints our our emotional portraits
Each human's skin a prism
Until the date, until the job, until the crime
the faith, the war. Then we sort and discard by shades.
Jan 16, 2007
On my driver's-side window was a tiny water droplet shaped
perfectly in a Star of David
A Hannukah miracle! except the holiday's passed
and all shapes are miraculous, my ex-wife's sister's baby may
coo over a nipple-shaped droplet, a bat may perceive a water
moth, dive, echo locate the glass and bank, its wings' wind
smudging the droplets, my neighbors may stop, remark on
the Hindi letter just there, my other neighbor's kid spots the
Spanish double l that's pronounced like "y", a pattern I
recognize, I filter, I make meaning, all droplets--and none--
are shaped by miracles
Jan 17, 2007
She bends over the tangerines like an astronomer
who cups his eye to the tiny end of a cannon-sized telescope
What fascinates her are the blemishes; some are rashes
some are tattoos, a few are wounds
She's troubled. Scientists breed out these defects
They get stock options for sponsoring that desirability is
uniformity
She wonders what genetic warps businesses would desire
if all their customers were sightless
Jan 19, 2007
(missed another day, but this time I knew I was doing it.
Just a blechy day, and very tired right now.)
1.
How did Will do it? Pen and candle
a heart of iron
2.
The leftover bacon, dry as its original hide
I touch the Buckminster domes of fat
Jan 20, 2007
COLORS
Red
nick my finger quartering a strawberry
Yellow
there's no crayon color for the sun
Black
her severed hocky stick on the dining table
awaiting the suture of electrical tape
Green
Maggie stoops to kiss the emerald snake
Orange
cats curled in Halloween buckets
Purple
I've often typed in the royal dye that offended Horace
Burgundy
the scotch droplet on her lower lip. she smears it to her
hand. she paints it on the leather car seat.
Pink
the sunset cloudlight when you murmer against my neck
Jan 21, 2007
He's risking a drop from the rock wall
asking a lot from traction, from boots on slush
but it's his ceremony, to survey the trail
the old acreage, before setting his legs into their run
Twelve seconds along, he sights the dome to his left
It's supported by four pillars, with a poem by Wendell Berry
engraved in a spiral in the concrete base. Some night he'll
sneak in and worship poetry by flashlight and constellations
At the fork, he heads right. Always counter-clockwise to
savor the penultimate river. Apartment buildings grow on the
right
mounds and willows on the left, a tan grassy shallow is frozen
after two weeks of rain, binding the weather to the soil
There seem to be thousands of mosquito icicles in the air
melted by his panting. His thighs feel thick as horses, his
feet
swell in their socks. No other shoes have compressed the
virgin
white blanket. If he slips, cracks his skull on a bench,
he'll be lucky to live
Around the horn, a half mile, the sign advising, "No air horns"
Who would mistake this floral arena for a football stadium?
Now he flexes his fingers; his brain measures whether to shut off blood
Not yet. Not yet. Death won't trespass on him today
Eight and a half minutes, the bridge to the right like an amoebic arm
He jogs to the middle, stands, whirls once with his arms out in
awful ballet, then leans on the iron rail.. One day his
gloves might freeze
there, but not today. The river flows under ice. He
searches for comatose fish
White drops fall on his nose. He looks up. They're
like cotton meteors
and for a few moments he tries to duck them. But he needs to
run again;
his car will want brushing, its engine block stoked, its skin heated by
steam
He finds his belly reacting as if he were stepping onto a stage
Because she promised to show. She'll be prompt, a fine
timepiece. She'll
be hungry for French toast with marmalade. She'll surround
his waist with
her furnace hands, and her mouth's vapor will arouse his throat.
She'll
walk him back down to the temple, where they'll wonder about a kiss
Now he crosses the small river, on the bridge with fossils in the stones
and the cottonwoods nearby that resemble upturned women's legs, an odd
macbre farm, an image she'll thrill to. He glances up the
hill to his right. She's there
waving from the rock wall. She shouts his name. It
echoes between his heartbeats
Despite his pace, he feels he's running slower than snow.
Jan 23, 2007
(what's this? another skipped day? I must have
thought the 21st counted for two.)
1.
Sharp Objects
The knife tip marks a comma in the bookshelf
I drop a push pin into the garbage disposal
The scissors are a whale's mouth, open to strain wrapping
paper of nutrients
The boy needs a bandage after his mother's remark
The skyline, after dark, after rain, after settling my glasses
Their date was spoiled: three-prong forks are better than four-
"Spiny fish don't make good pets, dear."
His suit was cut like paper
No Hollywood ending for a blast through actual glass
The cheese smells like wet orangutan, and tastes like burnt gravel
2,
Dull Objects
A bust of the first businessman to build a scissor factory
Raw gold. What glitters brighter is the fool's version
He was no more dangerous than a moist, balsa axe
Secretly, and quietly, she drew dragons with her worn, fat pencil
The boy knew less than my handbag, and quoted his first spelling book
like gospel
yet I ate his praise; he adored me
better than the biplane he gaped at
The nickle in the library book. Its date is 193_
They say a corpse's eyes film over, like a fish's after its gills stop
Jan 24, 2007
Waiting for the furnace repair, I discover that a hot bath
isn't a luxury. I'm obliged to my emergency sauna, I bless
the Dracula vapor that my skin sucks for sustenance. No
other time did I grin so hard at my finger art in a bathroom mirror
except maybe when I was four and a half, but those memories--
if any--have long evaporated. Roughing my legs with the
towel, less
for drying than circulation, I consider that this memory might vanish
Scientists aren't certain. Do we lose them, or lose the
ability to access them?
The first is driving up to your 2nd grade house in Iowa and there's an
Ameristop with good rates
The second is that certainty that past homes exist, but where are the
streets?
If we could record our lives, wouldn't we end by only watching our
histories? Hospitals
would lead the dying into the grave by way of memory. They'd
say, "Here, Mr. Flatt.
Watch your seventh birthday while we make you comfortable.
Your family
will be here soon."
Our memories are our souls. We spoon a few into books and
songs and our kids. But
most die with us.
Outside the bathroom, my skin as red as lava, the moist blanket dries
leaving goosepimples. This cold is different, somehow.
I worry it might not leave, that I might
not awake, that someone else will own the memory of finding me with
frost on my eyelids.
Jan 25, 2007
The article's title read "Ultraviolet glow
lights up spider sex"
Should I be startled, that scientists peek
at arachnids making their two backed, hex legged
beast? I wonder, if I agree to a university sex study
and I'm filmed having sex
and I'm paid for participating, is that, legally
pornography?
Parts of the jumping spider flouresce under black light
causing a rumba betwen male and female, a sultry
disco fever that includes the girl batting her eight eyes
black as Italian olives, and scuttling away. The boy
scampers after, jiggling his appendages like stadium glow sticks
You see them, don't you? The grinning faces in lab coats?
Their
palms itch, slightly at first, then like fire ants. Five
minutes from now
they'll dowse the hot lights, switch on the dark, paint vaseline on
their faces
and jitterbug in each other's moonlight.
Jan 28, 2007
(very bad, missed two days. Must write three today.
whew!)
1.
Despite the snow, I'm as drowsy as a lion
because of the electric heater with its savanna air
Maybe the Africa gene in my capillaries is turned off
I can't walk for days among grass and gazelles, sipping water
from leaves
Instead, I crave fruit juice and snowballs, and fitting my sweatered
back
into a white ground angel
2.
Round, square, rectangle (the locomotive square)
and always the compass pins, two or three, that point
not north and south, but at right angles to a cube, or maybe
on a vector to gravity
We call them faces. I think it was because of the winding
holes
on the grandfathers, the holes like eyes, empty orbs accepting keys
that didn't unlock any thing, but instead wound up their time
Not the containers of the mechanisms. I mean the owners, the
creators of time
Until calendars and pyramids and stone henges and hourglesses and
clocks, we didn't have time. We head to measure it for it to
be--which is
to be human. Before then, each morning bore a new sun
3.
Crab hunting never entered into her mind, at least
not crab hunting with a gun. But then, until she met Reginald
her mind had been confined to business the way yolk is held
in a shell. He cracked her. She sought sauteeing
The gun, like Reginald, was harmless. It shot a net
an homage to spiders, a string blanket that confused pincers
It was Melinda who did the killing. But lately, like a rusty
slide
she found she didn't enjoy it. They lived so short, anyway,
and
offered so little meat, they were hardly worth the boiling water, hardly
worth the whistling steamboat steam of death
Melinda pointed her gun. She pointed it at Reginald.
She fired
His gun hand was covered is if she'd spit on it. He dropped
the gun
and said, "I invented it for you, anyway. I drowned the
killing in beer."
She tossed hers aside, surrounded his waist, grazed his cheek to hers
They scuttled their four legs sideways toward the house
Jan 29, 2007
"Sonnets are for sissies!" she says over Wheatabix
"And Shakespeare was a pansy ass."
My eggs are running, but not fast enough
I swab up their yellow lava with my bread, stuff
some words back into my mouth, and chew a while
A fortnight later, our bedroom stage is set, the old queen size
thrusting out into the middle, surrounded by tangerine candles
walnut date rolls, lilacs and tawney port. Snowy outside, the
heat is up
demanding she lie naked on the quilt
William is in my right hand, while my left sends tremors across her
thigh
Pavlov dreampt this scene, the woman submerged in love, ringing with
the bell
of old words written to one woman, maybe, but also all women
I start "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,"
and then "Thy bosom is endeared wtih all hearts,"
then "That god forbid that made me first your slave,"
famously "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
finally, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"
In our homemade twilight, she provides wet stars from her eyes
With her body, she atones for her error
Jan 30, 2007
(just some phrases)
Cloak and danger
Last night's clown collaboration
His cloying sideburns
I sharpen the pencil on my molar
My favorite sweater is leaking!
Jamboree Iguanas. Two for $30
These aren't little missions. The people demand our potatoes
They order steamed lemonade with mint ice cubes
Along the lake, hungry gnats fly in cloud formations toward us
She pounded the music into him like beef
Alone with the lanterns, Melody threw water at the moon
Jan 31, 2007
(this is cheating. I wrote this on Feb 1...but I really
wanted to have a full month!)
It don't seem right, when poetry
gets stuck in Language LaBrea
when we skip the progress from
"her alabaster hip"
to hip
to hippy
to hip hop
Sometimes there ain't nothin' wrong with
slamming with
the angels who slap that bass