No Whale In Sight

Here I am with this sack of brine soaked clams,
standing in the silt of a clear stream.
Morro Rock, just down Cables beach,
a miter streaked with guano, reaches
a tuft of clouds charging southward.

The break known as Hazard Canyon——
the waves of slatish Pacific curl around
a rocky point and break in neat rows
between uptilted strata of stone. The boys

in suits of neoprene ending at their ankles,
wrists and necks, silently shift
the constellation they form, in long
scooping strokes.

In the coastal hills, a grove
of eucalyptus planted in rows in the grey
clay soil, a few exposed roots drag in
the stream’s fast moving water like teeth
knocked loose. The sun is a cool white.

A thin boy has stood up on his board,
the wave darkening to match his suit
as it rises up above him. The plume
of mist lifting off the crest, the boy’s
loose shoulders and blank face.

獨坐敬亭山
李白

眾鳥高飛盡
孤雲獨去閑
相看兩不厭
只有敬亭山

Empty Seat at Jingting Mountain
Li Bai

A flock, high, flies off
One cloud drifts away
We two gaze, us both
Just Mt. Jingting stays

When I Asked Him

He stuck a cigarette into
the end of his curved brass
filter, lit and laughed a mouth-
ful of smoke, he
waved his hand in
the space between us,
and I asked again.

He shuffled around to
the banana tree beside
his toilet sunk in the
concrete between the building
and the back wall.
He placed an iridescent
cicada carapace the size
of a thumb
in my palm, laughed
another mouthful,
waved his hand in the air

The Wobble

The steep slopes of the ravines
dropping away from the road shone
with bright waves of purple needlegrass
simmering in the August heat. We three
boys, first summer home from school,
stood at the top of a street that led
down to an unbuilt housing development.

The red paint under the grip tape
of my board was scraped away
to bald laminate wood at the edges.
A moment of held breath from all
of us, and then we dropped the boards
in front of us and planted our feet
with a kick push jolt and down.

Dave was off to the left, kick drifting
his way down the left verge. Pete
whooping behind me, the irregular rasp
as he dragged his heel. The asphalt sun punished
but smooth let me pick up speed.
I deepened the bend of my knees,
clasping my hands at my lower back,
bringing the weight into my left thigh.
Whir of the bearings rising in my ears
with my thumbs throbbing noisily.

A slight bend left as the road bridged
between drop-offs on each side.
Just a slight shift, a little lean &
the first wobble. Slinging my center
to the right, I ungrounded, felt
a rising wobble. The next bigger and
less expected. The delicate dark crack
rivening the dashed yellow centerline.
The board, gone, out from under my feet
flashing its collage of Powell Peralta
Bones Brigade stickers as it shot off the road
into the deep canyon, a slip of red.

The speed dragged me in a tumbling
fall, with just a grasping clutch to keep
me from following. It was my red fingertips
I first saw. Then the drips from my right eyebrow.
Shins & forearms & knuckles next.

Pete stopped and ran over. Holy fuck, man!
Shit man, shit. Dave! I'll stay with him.
Go get help! I can still see the pattern
on the soles of his Vans as he kicked off
uphill toward town. Pete picked a bit
of gravel out of my cheek, & a small
shard of glass from above my eyebrow.
Shit man, it's a lot man. He placed my
thumb at the wound and told me to press
and hold. You look really bad, man.
Fuck you, Pete! Thank you Pete.

I bled there all afternoon as the
sky began to fill first with yellow,
then orange and then red. It was
a dark purple except at the edge
when Dave came back in his mom's
old Cutlass. I studied the felt
lining that drooped from the ceiling
as he drove me, scabbed, bleeding,
torn up, to the clinic, and the whine
of Kurt Cobain's voice wound through
"Heart-Shaped Box."

The Daytime Song

The work you do is for you,
Baby brother, only not for you.
Ministered in fullness, abruptly.
The scryed cramped handwriting
Of geese on the soccer grass obliges
Us to rewrite the hopes we once
Had for the father for the autumn.
The crumbled asphalt path is papered
In dry leaves. Worn, weathered, wizened.
A badger makes a full heart’s …

Complex Syntax
 
A man on a bus thinks: I can make
a sentence out of this: Language, he says,

Folk Song

The leaves on this tree
are enraged.  We choose
our mates by the shapes
of their heads.
 
The leaves on that tree
need no longer glow green.
We select our lovers by
the markings behind their ears.
 
The leaves on this tree
are becoming saints, leisurely,
in the appropriate way—— Buddhas,
Sebastians, Eriks the Red, Salmon.
 
Thank you, wheat, for your
sacrifice.  Thank you, sesame
seeds, for going to the press.
We love what nourishes us.
 
The leaves on that tree
are not our children, do not
actually burn at the sill.
We love only us.
 

Index

Bashō wrote: Year after
year, on the monkey’s face,
a monkey face. And looking
at monkey faces, it would be so
alluring for an ugly human
face to emerge on my
mind’s silver-coated plate.
It is a monkey face. We
see by our own lamps:
reveal forms encoded
into darkness by covering
them with nets of light.

That night I went to
meet you, the pigeons sleeping
on the cold power
lines under the train
station didn’t
look like pigeons at all—
head-sized
beetles, less animal
than metallic movement;
one leg on the wire;
their heads
sunk into their iridescent
collars. Pigeons, they’re
pigeons. One of them sleeps with one
wing open. What’s she
got on her mind?

You are as dear
to me as my thumbs.

Notes Toward Identifying a Father

People call them elephants. People often
dream about them when the dreamers
want clarity. They live out of doors. They
live in big places like Africa and India.
They do not live in big places like Canada
or Antarctica. They live in big places
because they are big. People cannot
hold them. They are big like elephants.
Other animals’ sizes are compared to elephants.
They are too big to lift, but most people
would like to carry an elephant
for protection or help. They are
very strong and very helpful. They can
lift many large things. They have long
noses called “trunks” in the middles of their
round faces. They use their trunks
to lift and touch the things they want to
lift or touch. They have large soft ears and
rounded bodies. People think their heads
are large for their bodies. They have four
legs of equal length the size and shape of human
torsos. Their feet seem not to be separated from
their legs. Elephants are grey. If they are not
grey, they are not elephants. If a similar animal
is white, it is called a “white elephant” and is
a god. If a similar animal is pink, it is called
a “pink elephant” and is a figure of speech.
Many elephants have two long teeth curving up
out of their mouths. Not all elephants have these
teeth people call “tusks”. An elephant is an
elephant with or without tusks. At the opposite
ends of their bodies, they have short, thin tails.
The elephants piano wildly. Ivory is a common substance.
When divorced, they subsist on boxed dinners. Sofas are 
debilitating, really. How did he get all that stuff 
into the storage space? The front window is blurry. 
A little stained glass all at the top.
Watch. He has stopped moving.
The light through the dining-nook
Window tracks across his face.
He will deteriorate wildly, soften and
Elephant off politely.

The Fire

The fire ashes him. The wafer-

Breakdown

The bus I’ve boarded is filled
with passengers whose mouths have
 
just closed after months of singing.
Little starfish, or cloves, punctuate
 
above their chins.  The driver breathes
and shifts heavily on his vinyl seat.
 
The first floating neon sign sputters on.
I feel I am a threat, an inappropriate
 
handkerchief.  The rubber-lipped doors
squeak when they close.  The bus motor
 
hums all wrong, like a wave rising out
of the sun’s afternoon shimmer.  This startles
 
the driver a little.  The passengers have done
their nightdance.  Their gods have answered
 
with a matte darkness, but it is not
in the sky.  It is in my throat.

From The Shu Pu  

Because he writes at a certain time, the circumstances either provide harmony or provide discord. The mottled grey pigeon touching down on the tarmac the early sun paints at a slant on the sidewalk either fills the space left for it, or it flies in the seam between what could and what should. When harmony is, writing flowers like a fountain of possible liquid in the park of what is and what has been. When discord is, it leaks away.

The Lost Wax Method

After Mayakovsky

It's after one. You're probably alone.
All night the moon rings like a telephone
in an empty booth above our separateness.
Now is the hour one answers. I am home.
Hello, my heart, my God, my President,
my darling: I'm alarmed by the alarm
clock's iridescent face, hung like a charm
from darkness's fat ear. This accident
that was my life will have its witnesses:
now, while the world lies wholly motionless
and sorry in a crapulence of stars,
now is the hour one rises to address
the ages and history and the universe:
I swear you'll never see my face again.

The White Fires of Venus

We mourn this senseless planet of regret,
droughts, rust, rain, cadavers
that can't tell us, but I promise
you one day the white fires
of Venus shall rage: the dead,
feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each
of us will have his resurrected one to tell him,
"Greetings. You will recover
or die. The simple cure
for everything is to destroy
all the stethoscopes that will transmit
silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
solitude as one admits
the bayonet: gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.
Living one: you move among many
dancers and don't know which
you are the shadow of;
you want to kiss your own face in the mirror
but do not approach,
knowing you must not touch one
like that. Living
one, while Venus flares
O set the cereal afire,
O the refrigerator harboring things
that live on into death unchanged."

They know all about us on Andromeda,
they peek at us, they see us
in this world illumined and pasteled
phonily like a bus station,
they are with us when the streets fall down fraught
with laundromats and each of us
closes himself in his small
San Francisco without recourse.
They see you with your face of fingerprints
carrying your instructions in gloved hands
trying to touch things, and know you
for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains,
trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape
past the window of this then that dark
closed business establishment.
The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music
converged on by ambulance sirens
and they understand everything.
They're on your side. They forgive you.

I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves,
who are as diamonds to the Andromedans,
who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds:
namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains,
their expressions lodged among the drugs
and sunglasses, each gazing down too long
into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony.
O Andromedans they don't know what to do
with themselves and so they sit there
until they go home where they lie down
until they get up, and you beyond the light years know
that if sleeping is dying, then waking
is birth, and a life
is many lives. I love them because they know how
to manipulate change
in the pockets musically, these whose faces the seasons
never give a kiss, these
who are always courteous to the faces
of presumptions, the presuming streets,
the hotels, the presumption of rain in the streets.
I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.

The Incognito Lounge

The manager lady of this
apartment dwelling has a face
like a baseball with glasses and pathetically
repeats herself. The man next door
has a dog with a face that talks
of stupidity to the night, the swimming pool
has an empty, empty face.
My neighbor has his underwear on
tonight, standing among the parking spaces
advising his friend never to show
his face around here again.
I go everywhere with my eyes closed and two
eyeballs painted on my face. There is a woman
across the court with no face at all.
They’re perfectly visible this evening,
about as unobtrusive as a storm of meteors,
these questions of happiness
plaguing the world.
My neighbor has sent his child to Utah
to be raised by the relatives of friends.
He’s out on the generous lawn
again, looking like he’s made
out of phosphorus.
The manager lady has just returned
from the nearby graveyard, the last
ceremony for a crushed paramedic.
All day, news helicopters cruised aloft,
going whatwhatwhatwhatwhat.
She pours me some boiled
coffee that tastes like noise,
warning me, once and for all,
to pack up my troubles in an old kit bag
and weep until the stones float away.
How will I ever be able to turn
from the window and feel love for her?—
to see her and stop seeing
this neighborhood, the towns of earth,
these tables at which the saints
sit down to the meal of temptations?
And so on—nap, soup, window,
say a few words into the telephone,
smaller and smaller words.
Some TV or maybe, I don’t know, a brisk
rubber with cards nobody knows
how many there are of.
Couple of miserable gerbils
in a tiny white cage, hysterical
friends rodomontading about goals
as if having them liquefied death.
Maybe invite the lady with no face
over here to explain all these elections:
life. Liberty. Pursuit.
Maybe invite the lady with no face
over here to read my palm,
sit out on the porch here in Arizona
while she touches me.
Last night, some kind
of alarm went off up the street
that nobody responded to.
Small darling, it rang for you.
Everything suffers invisibly,
nothing is possible, in your face.
The center of the world is closed.
The Beehive, the 8-Ball, the Yo-Yo,
the Granite and the Lightning and the Melody.
Only the Incognito Lounge is open.
My neighbor arrives.
They have the television on.
It’s a show about
my neighbor in a loneliness, a light,
walking the hour when every bed is a mouth.
Alleys of dark trash, exhaustion
shaped into residences—and what are the dogs
so sure of that they shout like citizens
driven from their minds in a stadium?
In his fist he holds a note
in his own handwriting,
the same message everyone carries
from place to place in the secret night,
the one that nobody asks you for
when you finally arrive, and the faces
turn to you playing the national anthem
and go blank, that’s
what the show is about, that message.
I was raised up from tiny
childhood in those purple hills,
right slam on the brink of language,
and I claim it’s just as if
you can’t do anything to this moment,
that’s how inextinguishable
it all is. Sunset,
Arizona, everybody waiting
to get arrested, all very
much an honor, I assure you.
Maybe invite the lady with no face
to plead my cause, to get
me off the hook or name
me one good reason.
The air is full of megawatts
and the megawatts are full of silence.
She reaches to the radio like St. Theresa.
Here at the center of the world
each wonderful store cherishes
in its mind undeflowerable
mannequins in a pale, electric light.
The parking lot is full,
everyone having the same dream
of shopping and shopping
through an afternoon
that changes like a face.
But these shoppers of America—
carrying their hearts toward the bluffs
of the counters like thoughtless purchases,
walking home under the sea,
standing in a dark house at midnight
before the open refrigerator, completely
transformed in the light…
Every bus ride is like this one,
in the back the same two uniformed boy scouts
de-pantsing a little girl, up front
the woman whose mission is to tell the driver
over and over to shut up.
Maybe you permit yourself to find
it beautiful on this bus as it wafts
like a dirigible toward suburbia
over a continent of saloons,
over the robot desert that now turns
purple and comes slowly through the dust.
This is the moment you’ll seek
the words for over the imitation
and actual wood of successive
tabletops indefatigably,
when you watched a baby child
catch a bee against the tinted glass
and were married to a deep
comprehension and terror.

The Monk's Insomnia

The monastery is quiet; Seconal
drifts down upon it from the moon.
I can see the lights
of the city I came from,
can remember how a boy sets out
like something thrown from the furnace
of a star. In the conflagration of memory
my people sit on green benches in the park,
terrified, evil, broken by love—
to sit with them inside that invisible fire
of hours day after day while the shadow of the milk
billboard crawled across the street
seemed impossible, but how
was it different from here,
where they have one day they play over
and over as if they think
it is our favorite, and we stay
for our natural lives,
a phrase that conjures up the sun’s
dark ash adrift after ten billion years
of unconsolable burning? Brother Thomas’s
schoolgirl obsession with the cheap
doings of TV starlets breaks
everybody’s heart, and the yellow sap
of one particular race of cactus grows
tragic for the fascination in which
it imprisons Brother Toby—I can’t witness
his slavering and relating how it can be changed
into some unprecedented kind of plastic—
and the monastery
refuses to say where it is taking us.
At night we hear the trainers from the base
down there, and see them blotting out the stars,
and I stand on the hill and listen, bone-white with desire.
It was love that set me on the journey,
love that called me home. But it’s the terror
of being just one person—one chance, one set of days—
that keeps me absolutely still tonight and makes me listen
intently to those young men above us
flying in their airplanes in the dark.

The Belief in Baleful Stars

As if the face were of a man

Leaves flap through the dark windows
like stiff-veined flags. Wind stirs
much of the street. An uncut lime

is small and fits in the palm’s hollow,
near the wrist. It turns like a key:
the apartment door and the neighbors’

door, the front door to the sidewalk
beneath the tree of urgent flags,
and the windows which seem so much

like passages—should be looked through,
but not stepped through. Inside the refrigerator,
the light blinks out again,

again the calm of cold puts off expiration
a little longer. The smell of the wind
before its charge through the window,

the odor of gas announces the maniacal blue flame,
rising smoke wraith and the sweet forgiving smell,
the long dedication of the tea whistle, the tea’s

wheaty steam. On the teacup’s lip, very nearly
saying it. There is no detail. No turn to make.
Only the heat before, the heat after.