after Gerald Stern

The insect was yellow with crumpled-black banded legs
        and shellacked back that would outlast us
        and wistful eyes from what I could discern on that trail
                between fields,
and we laid him out in the open air under a sky fast-blue with
                change, wedging
        a leaf beneath his triple-belted belly so he didn’t rest on
                plain dirt,
        and we placed two cloverblooms by his head and he was old
you said, could tell by how definite the stripes were, how
                complete
        the patterns bold and dark, almost engraved,
and he was beautiful in that pasture of thirty-three cows and we
                drank
        milk in the blaring heat and ate the cake you’d made. We
                were
        the only humans there—unholy-seeming things with two
                legs, dismal histories—
drinking and eating around his elegant husk,
        and from the furze, fellow insects rose, a frenzied static
                around our bodies,
while he remained in situ an unremitting yellow, the color more
        vivid, louder now that he was a remnant. Was color the
                purpose here?
Yellow had alerted us to him, and we took care
        with leaf and clover to make his bed.
The insect’s gold our togetherness, its death from which we fed.

First, the sting
in your nose.

Then in your eyes,
a furnace flared

To hollow
your face.

Flies above
your empty sockets.

Maggots made
your split skin.

Another cow dies
from breathing

as you swallowed
from the same air.

How many days before
it wintered you gray

in this wilderness turned
makeshift-graveyard.

How many hours
before the lesions,

before your vomit
hardens the earthen

floor. Somewhere
a house ages cold,

no longer warmed
by the hearth

you once tended.
No one lights

any spirit money.
No one chants the way.

He has thoughts he doesn’t
think about. Birds might wake him
but they don’t. My thoughts
feel like speech—how one animal
makes nature—until I speak to him.
We use words like a tree uses light:
there is a process we don’t see but do.

A kid I don’t know hits another
I don’t know. I say stop stop
to myself. Speech keeps
happening against me.
The boy wakes to cry.

Remember sleep, in May, in the afternoon, like
a girl’s bright feet slipped into dark, new boots.

Or sleep in one another’s arms at 10 o’clock
on a Saturday in June?—that

smiling child hiding behind
the heavy curtain of a photo booth.

All our daysleep, my love, remember sleep

like brides in violets. Sleep
like sleepy pilots casting

the shadows of their silver jets
onto the silver sailboats
they also sailed
on oceans miles below.

Such nothingness, on the other

side of which
infinity slid
into eternity, insisting

that we had lived together forever—and did.

When my daughter drizzles gold
on her breakfast toast, I remind her

she’s seen the bee men in our tree,
casting smoke like a spell until

the swarm thrums itself to sleep.
She’s seen them wipe the air clean

with smoke, the way a hand smudges
chalk from a slate, erasing danger

written there, as if smoke revises
the story of the air until each page

reads never fear, never fear. Honey
is in the hive, forbidden lantern

lit on the inside, where it must be dark,
where it must always be. Honey

is sweetness and fear. I think
the bees have learned to embroider,

to stitch the sky with warnings
untouched by smoke. Buzzing

is the sound of bees perforating the air,
as if pulling thread through over

and over, though the thread too is air.

why must itself up every of a park
anus stick some quote statue unquote to
prove that a hero equals any jerk
who was afraid to dare to answer "no"?
quote citizens unquote might otherwise
forget(to err is human;to forgive
divine)that if the quote state unquote says
"kill" killing is an act of christian love.
"Nothing" in 1944 AD
"can stand against the argument of mil
itary necessity"(generalissimo e)
and echo answers "there is no appeal
from reason"(freud)—you pays your money and
you doesn't take your choice.   Ain't freedom grand

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

The boy is interested in black holes
because he doesn’t know how to say
death death death. Just, infinite dark.
Event horizon. Singularity. The boy
teaches me how to mouth the absence
I won’t imagine—the dark keeps going
without time so it can’t hold words.
One of us will enter it. And then another.
But the boy makes an exception: rats
can escape anything, are a synonym for
what I call meaning, what you might call light.

Silence in this suburb of cars and dogs, of roar 
and rumble, sudden thump at the railroad crossing.
But this morning before 5 am, there's only the wash, 
the waterfall of cars on I-25, which sounds in my ear 
almost like the sound of blood in my arteries—
that inner traffic.  In the pre-dawn silence
a bright crescent of moon, darkness visible,
the flared edge.  Now a dog barks. Now a single bird.
Another.  Now a car in the distance.  Dog.  Bird,
farther off, this time.  Just this one moment of silence
before the traffic begins, before the full choir of dogs 
and birds and coyotes flush with desire, as I begin, 
shook and shaking now in the lea of in the wake of 
in the grip of what unnameable fierce beauty. 

The white bowls in the orderly
cupboards filled with nothing.

The sound
of applause in running water.
All those who've drowned in oceans, all 
who've drowned in pools, in ponds, the small 
family together in the car hit head on. The pantry

full of lilies, the lobsters scratching to get out of the pot, and God

being pulled across the heavens
in a burning car.

The recipes
like confessions.
The confessions like songs.
The sun. The bomb. The white

bowls in the orderly
cupboards filled with blood. I wanted

something simple, and domestic. A kitchen song.

They were just driving along. Dad 
turned the radio off, and Mom 
turned it back on.

the broken pleasure of knives begin, weaves incompressible
intrusion on inescapable spreadsheets

I have a death watch count down, termination amongst the
swell of three-quarter fools who dance reptilian obedience

do not raise above the star’s subtle shades of lowered eyes
that shuffle into place

the flowers brown and wilt. the street turns gray. no sound is
possible in this counterfeit circus, only the faintest groan labors
out of something, like an organ swollen from so much marching.

will I always stare into the darkness of those who wait in deadened familiar, not suitable for the main course; gone up in flames, done up in toxic blossom, 99.9% similar, alone facing inquisitional preconditions for normal?

a billion miles away, I burn, we all burn, the ice melts, the multiindustrial playhouse brings more boom boom to the local meat market.

almost underground, next to preservation first, down the corridor to a crypt like, discarded, hopeless outdated metal file cabinet, locked in a room, waiting for benediction, new icons for teeth.

somewhere someone says, chemistry for the future. somewhere someone says there is never enough mesmerizing heads, dieting on crystalline traditions, exchanging water for wealth.

It’s like ants
and more ants.

West, east
their little axes

hack and tease.
Your sins. Your back taxes.

This is your Etna,					
your senate						
											
of dread, at the axis					
of reason, your taxi					
					
to hell. You see
your past tense—

and next? A nest
of jittery ties.

You’re ill at ease,
at sea,

almost in-
sane.  You’ve eaten

your saints.  
You pray to your sins.

Even sex 
is no exit. 

Ah, you exist.  

Like the human brain, which organizes
The swirls and shades of the bathroom tiles
Into faces, faces
With expressions
Of exhaustion, of disdain. The
Virgin Mary in the toast of course
But also the penance in the pain, and the way
My mother invented
Plums and tissue paper, while
My father invented the type of
Sudden kindness
That takes you by surprise
When you’ve expected to be chastised
And makes you cry


 

Reading, we are allowed to follow someone else’s train of thought as it starts off for an imaginary place. This train has been produced for us—or rather materialized and extended until it is almost nothing like the ephemeral realizations with which we’re familiar. To see words pulled one by one into existence is to intrude on a privacy of sorts. But we are familiar with the contract between spectator and performer. Now the text isn’t a train but an actress/model who takes off her school uniform piece by piece alone with the cameraman. She’s a good girl playing at being bad, all the time knowing better. She invites us to join her in that knowledge. But this is getting us nowhere.