DisturbanceDisturbance
House of Rifts
Even the floor boards are so dry
they draw back
from each other for that ironic view so long now
they shrink into themselves leaving
gaps like slow digs
to China surrounded by gradual cliffs
tipped like the great and natural
geographic forms splinter first with a single blade
of fake hay from a storebought broom you flick
grains of sand and toast back to the surface
vacuum distilled matter till
the soil of geologic larger rifts breeds a need
for a spoon to lift
evolutionary flint the dust of domestic realms
gone environmentally unstable
upheavals raise mountains out of molehills
chasms part for water falls down precipitous
stone into arroyos where coyotes bay
at fluorescent moons
where you could pose to take another shot
of this grand canyon landscape and send
a postcard home with uncharacteristic interest
you reach scraping against scree your hand down
past the inner laval place of quakes the board
just to feel
in the cooled stream of things the golden carp
nudge what you can’t catch
voices lilting upward from the buried
silt down there the scent
of brewed herbs ceremonial fires leaves
an aftertaste a faint
glow from below at night tints the house
as if from far cities’ lights
obscure the stars
TO THE BONE
(from Be That Empty; first published in Green Mountains Review)
One against the other across
the fleetingly infinite field:
that dry crackling of pallid
corn stalks clacking comes close to it.
behind them mountains range like steppes
between the tiers of fog they coddle.
it's autumn coming close
again and you need to compare
this one to autumns past, recall the other
sputters of color too good to last.
something you need to say, something
you come close to:
wind in its limitless visits--
especially in fall when it cleans
the overblown trees--
wind in possession of you
says it best. but you go on anyway,
trying to pen the breeze:
this fall phenomenon different
from summer's in its macabre
celebration of the lifeless,
in its forever rewritten memory
of what comes next. sorrel
leaves swirling in a whirlwind
mimic your own compulsive
repetition, its own circle
of yearning so close
to a kind of comfort.
quickening conversations
of geese flocking south
chill through your thin skin:
behind it a choir of silence
undefined rows you
closer to what you'll never forget,
what you almost remember
this time. closer to its name.
the heart overtaken. the bare staves
waving at boughs' ends, the musical
red wings: something
they almost say, more like a sense
hunched in darkness, an ache,
a suspicion: every time,
closer to it, closer. hear
hard light on the hillside
flatten the visible scale
into two dimensions, and you're in love
with the flatted third:
the way it breaks you down,
over and over, to mean you are
alive. the way you rub it in
the wound that you never
come close to wanting to close--
as if you could scrub away the whirling
of everything else and come down
like snow to the center, the eye, so close
to the purity of knowing inside this
present pain, that searing
white place without wind or words.
Variation 16: Actor
from Interval: Poems based on Bach’s Goldberg Variations & the Predicament of Embodiment
So. Call me obtuse, it isn’t what you think. My angle
on method? It’s not some avoidance tactic softshoe
get-me-out-of-me shuffle, ta-ta
I’m off to transcend. No, it’s a hallelujah
chorus raising the rafters in the theatre
of souls that passes as my skull. Wait up, MacDuff,
attention must be paid. That’s why I do it—to let each
make a scene center-stage, because personality,
you know, is death-defying, that’s right, it’s all an act
in the wings, and I am as many I’s as Zeus
gave Argus and honey, I strut them
like a peacock, in top form. Call me a dodo, I am not
extinct when like a bird I fly the coop of earthly bounds,
equity transmigration, toasting a born again role.
I take a fresh soul home with each new script,
and honey, I can go home again.
And again and again. What you see
is not who I am: In my one
singular sensational shape I don and slough a slew
of disparate selves. Think it’s distraction I’m after, anything but
humble little me? Don’t you just wish
you could live once in this be-costumed bod, and die
night after night, and die, and die, and die, and still—wonders—be
this attractive? Call me vain. Shameless. I’m saving face-
lifts by means of masks. An I for an I? Sleight of hand?
Out of body experience? Honey, it’s all here in my vita.
Call me a condiment, in solid standing,
fluid when handled and poured. Over-
soul, when called I come: It’s sexy but not
sexual, lovely but hardly love, escapade, yes,
but never escape. All entrancing and never having
to bow out. So call me any time. Any one.