monoprints by Douglas Kinsey

 

This book is dedicated to Matthew & Rachel

 

 

The Marranos (the swine) was the name given to the converted Jews in Spain, the “New Christians,” more specifically those who converted from the mid-fourteenth century onward, usually under great duress.  This class suffered greatly under the Inquisition, especially those who converted as a response to the Edict of Expulsion of Jews of 1492.  In A History of the Jews, Abram Sachar writes: “Tens of thousands of the new Christians conformed outwardly, went mechanically to church, mumbled prayers, performed rites, and observed customs.  There was a suspicion that converts did not baptize their children or that they immediately wiped the stain of baptism from their heads.  It was believed that they secretly observed the Jewish holidays, ate Jewish food, retained Jewish friendships, and studied the ancient Jewish lore.  The reports of numerous spies tended to confirm every suspicion.”

 

 

 

“My pious forebears called this world the world of lies, and the graveyard they called the world of truth.  I was preparing to be a writer in that world of lies, eager to add my portion of falsehood.”

                                                          -I.B. Singer

 

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“If dreams are the teachers of the waking-ego . . . duplicity is the essential instruction they impart.”

                                                          -James Hillman

 

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“An unbeliever once expounded to the rabbi of Berditchev that even the great old masters had erred gravely, that Rabbi Akiba, for instance, had taken Bar Kochba, the rebel, for the Messiah and honored him accordingly. The Rabbi of Berditchev replied: “. . . When God saw that the soul of Israel had sickened, he wrapped it in the acrid linen of the Exile, and that the soul might bear it, he swathed it in a numbing sleep.  But lest this destroy it, he wakes it from time to time with hope in the false Messiah, and then lulls it to rest again until the night is passed and the true Messiah appears.  And for the sake of this, even the eyes of the sages are sometimes blinded.”

-Martin Buber, Tales ot the Hasidim, The Early Masters

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Copy right Information

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THE KABALIST

 

I have an indoor mind: a small room,

a focused light, many books

and one window, shoulder height.

The only parts of nature known to me

are my wrists, hands and fingers:

they move, are warm, and change

too slowly for serious study.

From window, a large world

full of rows of things: bushes,

 trees, rivers, cows in line.

Is a boring text, this flat grid.

On my shelves, even the meanest book

retreats in depth and joins with all my books,

petals moving toward the fertile center,

and can place me back and back behind myself

reading the book behind the book, until

the blossom opens and we form one text,

one complete mind, the one order.

 

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THE MARRANO

 

                   “Art is the remedy for the worst diseases of the

                    mind, the corruption of consciousness.” Collingwood

 

God wants the souls of the faithful,

not their corpses.  He has carrion enough.

In The Golem it explains

from the moments of the highest danger

he saves us, always in the form of wonders,

like making a new man.  For this truth

we struggle in disguise.

I moved to Hamburg or Seville, bought

a bakery or clothing store, a new name,

and lived openly, spoke like a native.  I was

a kind of native, the most internal exile.

I could not change my name

because I was committed to disguise,

from Weiss to Scheiss, Hermano to Marrano.

I am His pig. To hide Him I renounce Him.

My teacher cared for me, a prize student.

To spare my feelings he asked me to leave the class

during his diatribes against the Jews.

I listened from the hallway, grateful

for this lesson in accommodation.

Modesty and secrecy are virtues of the chosen.

Study the pig for modesty.  The cat

buries the emblem of the world.  We learn

in secret, through closed doors, all love.

I welcome the need to convert, create

an adequate corruption of the mind

fit for understanding, for the sacred,

the one text, the one ungainly text,

saying Alles in Ordnung ist,

meaning another, unimaginable order.

The Gnostics were right, the world is made of shit.

I made my life a work of art expressing this.

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THE MIRROR STAGE

 

This is a cheap hotel and I am I

despite the wavering mirror that lowers my brow,

lengthens my Jewish nose and buckles the left

side of my head (in fact the right) like forceps.

When I sway an entire cast bulges back:

Laughton as Quasimodo, the Elephant Man,

long-faced joking Joyce, Sailor Nan

doing the shimmy-nautical but nice.

I know I'm from mirrors and unlit windows

where the unprepared, unsober lit self

leaps with horrid gestures.  I do not look back

and myself through my own eyes: a drunk tourist

who killed a fifth of Carlos Tres-a regicide-

and deicide by birth-in the old resistance

afoot in Burgos. My other American self,

my bright little Escort, my machine,

efficient, snappy - all its latent power

lies locked in the underground garage

beneath the plaza.  I'm in the sacred place

to honor fiction.  This is Mio Cid’s

monument city, here's where he tricked the Jews

with a locked casket of sand he said was gold

to pay for his pure service of King and God,

drove back the tolerant, learned Moor and earned

exile for love.  His home in the Cathedral

is more sacred than the Leonardo

(doubtful) Virgin or the Jesus standing

on an ostrich egg who raises his elephant hide

arms to curse the Loyalists or bless

behind their fans dry-eyed girls in white.

We all serve by resistance and deceit.

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FREEZE FRAME

 

In hammering summer sun, in paralyzed air,

I fished a small brook that fell between

two moss-slick boulders, so cool it seemed

a great cave of trees, the water clear

and absolute: each minnow, each pebble

hung in that green generous light

as if the water were a current of air,

a perfect clarity to see the trout

laws, then rise to my fly in a flash of trust,

bolt and stop in that blessing of sight.

 

And after, on the deck in full sun,

the seven mountains that I built it for

standing guard against the worst our rough

continent beyond could roll at us,

I sat naked and alert in that heat.

And the iced coffee in my hand stopped, the hand

no longer mine as it raised the class

forever to some mouth, the ice in it

an iceberg and a spot of light crossing

the dark North Atlantic, steady in storms,

 

down to the warm seas.  I could see

it gain and lose again its yearly flocks

of migratory birds, each bird

ragged and raucous, fishing in that sea ­

the plankton that surrounded it in passage ­

as it shrank in the omnivorous bleak green

and touched the lip at last, the cool throat,

where the reel stopped and the single frame

in perfect clarity froze, fixing me

in my own sight in that unmoving air.

 

The glass rested the durable teeth

in that skull and I entered the air and water

that penetrated through its rigid smile,

and was the eye that saw everything suspend

there with no mouth to shout or arms to strike

out and fear.  My daughter called.  I answered.

A stray leaf continued its flutter down to the deck

and I regained my mouth, my hand, my own

nearsighted eyes, to recompose

into steady measures the world that stopped.

 

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A SHORT SEASON IN HELL

 

                   for Rimbaud

 

His face fills with tormented red

as he fumbles the unknown language, words and sounds,

and in him swells the panic of the child

among staring strangers who refuse to understand.

 

Abandoned by language, her most complete dependent

who learned his world in her skirts, found his house,

his street, the body’s smells and sounds and lines ­

to feel, to eat-a world ending loss,

 

until to rescue him the two arrive ­

his wife and daughter, with deft waving of words

and shaping of sounds with swift fingers, expressive

precise words, the flood of comfort of words

 

in loved mouths, a corner of tooth, saliva

at lip, the crest and trough of a wave that carries

closer in flood in a boat filled with flowers,

him to himself, rising and falling through mist.

 

Still with spyglass on shore he sits between them

and drinks a brandy.  His daughter, with his face

on his mother's body, reaches for his arm

and covers him with her silver intelligence.

 

her generous laugh, and leans across to whisper

a joke to her mother who joins in chorus with her.

His wife leans against him-scented air,

rose, linden, white tobacco flower ­

 

and the stranded one returns, touches her face,

having burned with the childlike terror of the dead

who hover among us to make the last revisions

unable to shape the words that must be said

 

before, in the grass, they assume their fixed positions.

 

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RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE SURVIVOR’S MANUAL

 

My instructor was urbane and trim in quick-dry

nylon with a cool, bored confidence.

He demonstrated how I should anoint my-

self on himself-shark-shit in every crevice,

heavy in each armpit and inside each thigh,

and the hard part, Look, it isn't awful,

the mouth.  I stared, gagged, and he said,

That's the most important-what’s terrible

Is the idea.  The stuff was dark tan and tasted

Bland, like cold oatmeal, and I followed.

We dove in the bright tank and saw them sidle

up with their long, cold invulnerable bodies

and we swam through the gleaming pool with ease

of sharks moving through the vast heart of a jewel.

 

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AMERICAN INNOCENTS

 

I

 

You were the ball I was trained to keep

my eyes on, with your alien blonde hair

and eyes of the alien blue, staring at me

hanging over the plate, myopic, dazed

 

by the light tent of hair you loved to spread

over us, your gift for music and math,

long legs, a careful way with words:

you said I had “a semi-recumbent walk.”

 

I barely knew the difference between

Gentile and Jew, and wanted to marry you.

But you knew. Your lawyer-father knew.

Silver Springs had one or two. He threatened

 

to cut you off. The night you got his call

you stepped out of the dorm for air, to clear

your head, and when I followed you were gone,

running down the street, your yard-long hair

 

streaming straight back, your silhouette

flashing to gold at each distant streetlight.

I chased you four blocks and when I caught you

you didn’t know who you were, or me.

 

I steered you to a small cafe, you stared

an hour at rings of light in the black coffee.

I was afraid to breathe and make them waver,

and when you raised your face I didn’t know

 

if you were back. “This is forbidden,” you said

in a child's voice, and you sang for another hour

with absolute pitch to the tune of Là ci darem,

legato, your submission and consent:

 

“No, no, no-no, no, no, no.”

II

 

The Anschluss could not prepare me for this

midnight invasion by the red-eyed,

white-faced American children, nor could Vienna ­

there they posture grandly for a week,

shrug and console themselves with the less messy

and preserve the order of acts in the family romance,

no hurrying so, content with the pace of la ronde,

diseases and love-wounds in tolerable doses.

 

My first exile, in Jerusalem,

with my neighbors Martin Buber and Max Brod,

the starker ones, prepared me better for them,

and for my wife, her pure Quaker service,

for all the unaccommodating spirits

who scream as they bend, as they must bend.

 

Now the tall yellow one, after her hours tonight

a little hysteria is afraid she will lose her mind.

She feels in the muscles of her face

and throat a new and terrifying looseness.

Nothing is broken in her American soul ­

I have watched them from my windows as they raced

with one another on their bicycles

to their tutorial on Kafka with me.

 

I have heard them chatter about the Book of Job,

these young who never been herded against a wall

or awakened and arrested.  So I said to this child:

“In this situation a gentleman should withdraw.”

And he will, and tonight, educated out

of the world he's constructed from innocence into exile,

and learn to love with his eyes over his shoulder

searching for the handle on the door.

And she will regress to a greater loyalty.

 

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THE DYBBUK

 

Sick with fearing to need you and my last refusal,

I watched the house across the way, the late night

scattering of lit windows-tall stairwells

descending in the fog as columns of light.

Then all went dark as mine, power failed,

my radio stopped its throbbing of Ravel.

I heard a window crank open wide

into the September chill, and a rough call

for someone nameless.  Then I stood inside

their room. They crowded me, touched my face:

I saw myself as many, then as one

trembling before me, cupped hands raised,

eyes slow, offering-not from obligation,

but wholly-then the swift inhabitation.

 

Then back in my room I watched the lights return

at window and stairwell, hear Ravel resume,

and see you toss in bed with sleep-heat, murmur

something indistinct-my old name.

Now the shock of double vision, its perpetual

astonishment being as I sit

beside you and watch you turn through other eyes

they want what I do not want, and do it.

Not from over my shoulder, but from within,

I see myself, and myself fully replaced,

lift the sheet and drive for something human,

some spirit that had died come to live

in me and offer me, that loved you in the past.

I see myself with honor give and give.

 

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FAMILY PLOT

 

I was a dutiful son to the end.

In the smallest lapse of duty

I dream of her frown of pain.

Now it has been 10 years

since I have been to her grave.

Will I leave 10 stones on her grave?

Then she can hold up her head

among the dead and we're back

in the old collaboration,

lying to the living,

the dutiful cousins who visit

among those obliterating

fixed waves of stone ­

lying to the dead.

 

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HONEYMOON 

 

On a piece of our honeymoon

my Aunt and Uncle lay

(he was a crude-mouthed clown)

one thickness of sheetrock away.

I never learned to bear

his bullying idiot humor.

It was no win.  If we

roared to our bodies’ content

and let the blooming slats

play ground bass

or eased into love in silence

his jokes would be equally foul.

But we were good-a slow

grind and discreet gasps

and the next day on the dock

his rancid patter made

my shy wife writhe

and I iced to contempt for life.

His life, and my own.

My mother was there. For years

she let me know how shamed

she was by the dirt ingrained

deep in the hollows of my ankle

on show on the dock before

her idiot brother-in-law.

Again the lawless child

trying hard to be good

and betrayed by his filthy body

in their spanking boisterous world

that I fled for the precincts of art

in sneakers without socks

and a carefully preserved

shredded turtleneck

with my unacceptable wife.

Now nearly everyone's dead ­

but the wish to be forgiven,

to forgive, to give, to get,

burns in this need to complete

the broken cycle of debt.

 

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THE RELIGION OF ART: 1 FEB 58

 

No one more remote than us

at twenty, I seem doll small

in memory: the lens long focus ­

a tiny man, a tiny hospital.

 

When I left you on your high bed

you were white-a porcelain flask.

Our new son was bright red

and puckered like a dragon mask.

 

For a full day we timed contradictions,

you dozed, I read aloud to you

how son kills father, father son,

in Don Juan by Victor Hugo.

 

The Don while canonized at Mass,

wrings off his head in his high coffin,

flings it and kills the spiteful priest.

Better a devil of liberation

 

Than be a saint.  You were being natural

until delivery and gas.

It was a simple country hospital,

no nursery, no wall of glass.

 

I got to see you, stunned face

to face, with Matthew in your arms.

You were so addled with the nurse

you forgot my name for the State forms.

 

I was too dazed, so mastered by what

I thought I should feel, I never knew

what I felt-desperate

to kneel, to celebrate with you.

But I could never really force my breath

to thank, for the single time he skipped

us, the child-killing Angel of Death

who delivered us bathed in blood from Egypt.

 

It's what I thought was due, to buy

my son from death.  I had the rite wrong.

I only had to claim him from the rabbi

(who never had him) for a song.

 

A tiny refusal.  Your time was full.

My mind stank with the need for prayer.

In the religion of the Great Dispersal

my shul was the record player

 

turning the world on auto-repeat

eight times, before I could find

the firmness of Bach's first Cello Suite.

How adequate the seizure of my mind.

 

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BURMESE TEMPLE BELL

 

Each dawn this great bell

is struck for each sin ­

one hundred eight blows:

the world is gathered in

the circle of its voice

and everywhere within

a great order rung.

It tolls through the school

were sleepy children learn

the ciphers and the rule

to wear inside the face ­

not rule but sub-rule

that they can never break.

They chant in unison,

breathe in its metal breath,

their cheeks to its brass skin.

My own careless life

summoned by this bell

with its low resonance,

from dreaming half awake

or dawdling with words in a room,

would lose the small self,

the small waste of time

in that trembling embrace and dance

that calls me whole to home.

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UPROOTED


After a scouring storm in the Coastal Range

we went out to check the damage,

my daughter doubtful, tightlipped, tentative,

my dreamy son thrilled with wreckage,


something to fix, man's work, fallen trees

to move from our narrow road. He could,

my Luftmensch, get his treehouse if we found

some small uprooted redwood-


fair game, like fallen fruit or gleanings.

We circled, cautiously, a pond

normally so mirror-like it disappeared

among the trees that stood around


turning their leaves to undergrowth. The mirror

trunks that rose from that pool

seemed like the kabalistic tree of life-

inverted, doubled and made whole.


Today a Cossack mob, bloody swords

and muddy, wheeling horses. We stood

huddled at a cliff~s edge by the outlet stream,
yesterday a trickle, now a flood,


and looked down at a clump of calla lilies

rooted at the pond's edge, draining

brown water from their white throats, then down

choking again, mouths gaping,


filling with water, until the last roots

loosened and we saw them tear

past us over the cliff above the valley

flowering in shreds into a crueller air.

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TARZAN & CO.


I lived in the caress
of the most dangerous
wolves, apes, big cats,
knowing them in my hands,
the thick ruff at the throat,
the soft skin of the belly,
the vulnerable crotch
and their rich Edwardian speech,
taking on their powers
with their fearsome tenderness
like the English nobleman
who turned toward savageness
against the systematic
savage trade from home.
This was after the war,
after the famous photos
of death camps and the entrance
of the new word "genocide"-
our apartment overcrowded
with Jewish rc-fugees
sleeping on the floor.
Growing away from childhood
I turned for my defense
to a sterner animal code,
more instinctive, perilous,
than the mild rational world
of my accommodating home.
Sometimes I would stand
at the corner for an hour
buried in my book
until some thoughtful neighbor
would grab me by the elbow
to steer me across the street
still absent in the dream
of an animal poise of body,
faster, more alert,
enough to seize the cobra
arched and ready to strike,

to save the young, swimming,

with a knife across the belly

of the treacherous crocodile,

and knowing a hidden language

that I had been denied,

the message of the spoor,

the tum of twig and vine.

The stunned, reluctant ones

mannered and civilized-

these demons I defied

with outbursts of secret power-

I would teach them all!

This was the dream of knowledge
I returned from as a beast
to change the world to beasts.

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TIRED WITH THE HUNT AND COLD

 

Tired with the hunt and cold

I sat down to read

like a scholarly, mystical Jew,

the traditional text of the stream

crowded with life and fast

between its granite banks

of glacial residue.

The trout and crayfish hid

as if I had designs

but I was already flown,

outward and inward at once

in a constant tumbling race

over the gravel and past

the man on the bank, breathless-

its motion my stillness.

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TO PROSPERO (on setting Ariel free)           

He was pure spirit and kept

your wishes pure. Now you are

free of him and can imagine everything.

How did you tolerate so long

being the slave of such a chaste instrument?

Caliban did not balance things out.

You willfind other drudges. If not,

you will dirty your hands only.

But free of Ariel you will struggle

to control yourself the way

you controlled Caliban, and

for the same reason.

The strange face on the subway

that caught your stare

and flew open, knowing,

then feigned indifference,

you will carry in a different way.

The other face, violent,

covert, that sizes up

you and your daughter

and follows as you leave the train-

your own rage, even at your brother-

will need to discover a new

kind of restraint now that you

are capable of human vengeance.

Your own art will no longer

leave you safely above it.

You have not let go of anything yet.

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KNOW THYSELF

In civil Berkeley, at a table white with poems-

the garden dizzy with ever blooming rose-

after thirty years there's nothing we can't say

to one another what's unspeakable

dissolvedin time which is getting hungrier

and greedier. But I'm poor at sincerity-

not in order to mislead, to hide, to burn

the incrirninating invoice, blueprint, order

for the mass gas chamber, tools of torture,

cannibal feasts or the new nuclear slaughter;

nor with the self blindness of a lover,

transparent and involuntary;

nor with the sincerity of suicide,

the one truth that cannot be repeated;

nor with the confessing self, too poised in its disclosure.

It's that I don't understand the images

that glare and vanish, lurid in the silence

of the inner theater their history

of hidden forces, that true knowledge.

I can't understand the guides that lead me:

I am dumb, opaque, dense, fucking dumb,

bat blind, groping across that gulf,

a shithead, head packed tight with shit,

and end with myself a poem called Know Thyself.

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TIME-BINDING

 

I stood waist deep

with an old professor of physics,

recently retired and aimless.

"Oh, a conference

now and then." Oh, his body!

Muscles in faint bands

across his chest and belly

and slack gaps between them.

And he swims like religion.

My son complains witheringly
that I never see him fully
in the present.
I see him at all ages.
The child peeps out
frightening his cousins
by running across the beams
of our old barn,
blowing up toy trucks
with cherry bombs,
playing under tables,
screaming at eight
"I don't want to die."

As my father sees me at all ages,
the child he could toss
high in the air and the heavy one
still too much a child
to see him in the present.

Talking to this old man
I see myself at all ages
till now. Now to see
myself as this.

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CONTRA BOTTICELLI

An angel scurries on an errand-a speaking dove
in tongues of flame compels him from above:
his childish face is screwed to tight focus,
emptied of the personal, just pious.
The virgin and the one who crowns the virgin
shine in momentary rapture. Each one
bears the face of a child Venus dissatisfied
as always, Mars asleep as if he died
in post coital boyish abandon.
These are the ones who jerk us without mercy
as puppets in the hands of children.
You stare out the window in another city
and the sunlight pours through your blouse
and body making you a faint delicate shadow
in a white flame. Your mind is lined in your face-
you do not see one thing outside the window
and murmur under your breath and re-collect
the inwardness that holds this world in place.

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THE TOY

 

Look at him circle (his key
unwinding behind his back)
the woman with outstretched arms-
this gentleman in black

who shrinks when we laugh at his fervent
celebration of life,
bowing at the waist,
his glossy back to his wife,

to-imagine what you want-
a Minister of State,
a grande dame on her rounds,
the Poet Laureate,

a whore in a doorway, slouched
and elaborately bored,
or portly kapos and bankers
swaggering abroad.

To all that appear, he bows
and his hat brushes his feet
with the calamitous respect
he's compelled to repeat and repeat.

Imagine him falling in love
with one who sings from her window:
unable to stop and smile
he sickens at each bow

as the central Mother of Sorrows
with a club in her outstretched hands
cries and demands that he stop
and he starts to puke as he bends.

Aristotle says
the comic figures we love
are smaller than life and shrink
as we laugh and loom above.

By now he can barely be seen,
our laughter has made him so small
he slips through the tight floorboards,
through layers of floors to fall

and fall to where we no longer
can see him. But still one hears
from deep beneath the foundation
the intimate howl of his gears.

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LULU (after Alban Berg)

Leering, leaning over my chair,
he was a bear, uncombed, half dressed,
speaking too loud, too close:
"I'll show you the real beast,"
waving at her, his indmate terror.

Her body like a leopard. He followed
like a leopard, nothng her guard
to catch it down at the soft moment
or defend her as his own, hard
his teeth against her teeth, sweet blood.

Locked in this. I envied
the courage of desire, swollen so great
tolling through him as he followed
the strong musk, the weight
of sumptuous hair she brushed aside,

the falling and the loose. As she listened
in her low gown she spread
her body into a moist knowing smile
that grew across the vast bed,
heated the room and glistened.

I, the dispassionate and calm,
felt that shining hammer in my eyes,
blind them and burn my mind. My teeth
and fingers curled for attack, surprise
and speed in the darkening room.

I was a sleeping dog curled
among them, dreaming of death.
I know that fall of mind to drift
inward without the world, my teeth
locked in my heart, my mouth glued with blood.

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MISALLIANCE COMMIITEE REPORT

Secretly, we lust for our creation:
the way her ass doesn't move,
her churchy speech. With her hair tied back
she personifies Severe Adoration.

You can hardly tell she's human.
She inspires love. A boy beside her
sits with sheets of hair below
his shoulders, and his face

full of dreams of his last battle,
on the beach with two after his cash,
and what he sees through his fists
hovers like motes on his eye.

Behind them sits her husband, cool,
designed for her stiff body,
face crumpled in a frown, the mind
of an apologist for desperate acts-

for terrorists against the Abstract Wrong
that overwhelmed the home he fled,
and left him logic and the Word.
She is created to please the boy

alongside. It will be a year
before they act the last scene.
It will be clear why we gave her
a deceptive body, him a frown.

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AFTER THE REVOLUTION

They both held their breath at separate windows
breathing so softly that the faint
rush of air would not interfere
with the fluting of the thrushes back and forth
across the four corners of the garden,
and savored together the lente, lente,
the darkening room, the bird song
in the middle distance and the crescent moon
rising. Their silence in this vigil
was important. His voice had grown mechanical
and oppressed him with his own spirit's death,
laboring for the cause that changed and changed.
He was once so passionate in battle
and beautiful. Trotsky said his eyes alone
were revolution in the name of more perfect love.
That was the evening he disappeared.
She never knew when he left the room
whether the Security Police arrived
and he went out to meet them, or merely walked
into something unofficial,
a new life or death in the newest order,
the moon behind a cloud, nothing and silence.

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ORPHEUS DOWNTOWN

I left you in disorder, set in it,
part of it, it stays with you.
I could never save you from this.
Your sweat stiffening a white blouse,
cups of stagnant coffee, an open jug,
a trapped mouse that dragged itself
back into the wall to rot.

No place to lay down my books.
No place to write.
In the bedroom window
blinds and no light.

You washed uhe nightlife from your face
in the bathroom rnirror, the blue shadow
from your eyes, the reds from everywhere.
You froze on uhe pedestal of fallen clothes
into a statue and stepped away
into somenhing natural and mild,
preparing for a new life.

The sadness was always ready:
I looked at you lying on the couch
by the front window, ice blue
from the streetlights, your breasts
flattened as you lay back, your face
turned away. I turned to the door.
Your coat hung there: hood up,
arms out, a cornic effigy of death.

"I was good enough for art
but not for life," you said,
refusing che gift of my book
of poems about you.

This departure from your body
parts me from mine, both betrayed
by my mind's love of design.
I am merely a singing head-
even at the climax always devising.

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MAP OF THE WORLD, Martin Frobisher, 1578

He sailed by this! Across short seas,
around misshapen continents. The rough
sense is there the way a child might draw
with wax crayons the world it heard of.

Knowing the world as we do, as we have
come to know her, how crude this is-
a deformation of her features
into loose and simple symmetries:

South America is round! Between
the Pole and a pancake of our West
he has drawn a broad passage to Cathay
which lay there hungering to be possessed,

the great dome of her head bowed over
the route in formal welcome. Her body
richens down the map. Under a world
of ice he imagined the open arms of a sea.

He called this dream of water "Frobussher's Straightes,"
like my conceit when I sailed in, so knowing,
thinking I knew you then, and knew myself.
I need more facts to find you now.

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BOMB SQUAD

You stood nearby, nervous, looking at your shoes,
then up at me, poking with your toe
at rubble, waiting, turning, raising your brows
to question. Should you stay? Where would you hide
from this one an atom bomb I was assigned
to de fuse, knock off with one blow
its explosive cap. I raised the sledge,
poised it above my head to aim true,
and swung. The bomb went off I tried to lunge
and throw my arms about you that we two
could fuse in that last, late instant.
But it was too late, you were too far.
I tried again, revising my old intent-
and not to explode, dreaming you close, then closer
again, again, but always the white flash
was too fast I always too slow
to speak, to reach, to call out to you.
At the end, just me (this is as far as it would go-
keep this picture) lunging at you.

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SIMON'S DREAM

The road was carved up the mountain
through live oak and toyon. I could not see out
past the mossy trunks, thick leaves and mistletoe.
An ancient, air encompassing California Laurel
reached over the valley & I climbed
out of the tunnel of trees to be God's spy
to sway over the wall of the mountain, endosed
in many arms and see the valley curve in mist
down to the ocean. Leaves fell away
as my boots cut through moss and orange lichens
but there was no clear view. Patches
of the next mountain and a pair of deer
dawdling in a high pasture, the stag nuzzling
her flanks and sniffing her, patches of valley
twisting in steam beneath me, the smell
of ocean through the crushed bay leaves,
the smell of more that must be seen.
I wanted to throw my mind into the air,
get a hawk's view of the turning land,
or hang there in the tree until the year
strips its leaves away, pulls aside
the curtain, lets me stare with cold abandon
at the fissured body that fills the largest room.

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GREAT HORNED OWL

On a dawn walk I startled
a great horned owl, wary,
near, on a low limb
of a tree downhill from me.
Those slow wings opened,
broad as a man, two men,
and he sank fast down
into the hillside in blank
silence, a wall toppling its
whole enormous length
that does not touch a thing.

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LOVE AND WORK: Apple Picking

This is not our real work. We do it
badly. Lots drop. We begin too late-
tense after coming home from work.
It is nearly dark and the wet October wind
numbs my hands as I grapple the sharp bark
along the boughs to reach after the hard
apples that reflect the last light
longer than anything else green moons,
red moons, swelling with light against the leaves.
Always the impossible twist over my head
and backwards, to the ripest at the top,
the branches' end, my legs wrapped tight
around the tree. You are shivering-
even in this dim light I can see-
as you catch the apples I toss around you,
off balance. I am the Lord of Self Misrule
up here, fumbling the delicate fruit with ill aim,
swollen hands, making a fool of myself,
hating the work. I would rather climb
you stand with skirt lifted, limbs dark,
though your raised face is bright into you.

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THE GHOST MOTHER

After I stopped the pursuit
of a permanent bone white calm
with constant implacable hunger
that shone like silver wire,
I began to eat again,
again to hurt like a woman,
and dreamed I walked with my friend
in my black mourning dress
and saw his dead mother
at the low end of the garden
as it dipped toward a stream.
The first evening mist
rose shining, dizzying white,
and there from the heart of it
a young woman strode
to a child that sat in the grass.
Her white dress clung
to her long waist, pearls
hung on her breasts and swayed
as she walked with her dancer's walk.
Bright yellow curls
seemed painted around her face
and she turned and smiled at me.
The sitting child was me-
how I longed for her
to pick me up and hold me
and not disappear
in a cloud whispering no
but come and reclaim my body.

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NO WORD ("O word, thou word I lack." Moses and Aaron)

The warden with his armed guards stalls
in the dull green hall, circles and retreats.
They question us in groups of two and three
and leave us standing about no need now
to return to the old cells. A conviction
settled into place like a glacial boulder
known to everyone at once, all over,
that one of us is God. No one seems to know
if it is him or her that has received the word
or is the word. All think
It might be me, and suffer in ignorance
of their hidden nature, know that all suffer
and that suffering is an old sign.
One man, slack pants, dark stains, white
walrus moustache, says to everyone young,
"If they must kill someone, let it be me."
But there is no threat now. The guards are kind.
They will not be trapped again killing a God.
I cannot write without embarrassment
about myself, and I see this in others.
What is hidden makes us modest. Our hopes
leave us too close to every shameful wish
we have for ourselves and the greed that yells out
our names among the constelladons, yells at us,
makes us clasp our hands on our knees
and speak down into them to hide
our eyes. We have stopped dreaming of release
from this prison. Any quiet thing
might be a sign of something else.
Four women laugh among themselves
at jokes they keep from me. The pregnant one
stays alone and laughs at a private joke.
Her breasts shake. Her laugh a breathless hiss.
I think she's mad. We try to believe
in some coherence, even drunken, wild.
Our questioner, a young lawyer from the city,
now weard her soft suit unbuttoned, and throws
her arms around me in confusion and cries.
Each of us in our cells wants to be loved
for the right reason, and that too is hidden.

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WITNESS

His mouth stops. I stare, trapped
as he pushes out his lips to shape words
but nothing follows out of the decent
comfort of silence into speech as if
he stands before a perfect God that does not
need us and does not need to understand us.

At last, a scraping, an insect noise,
out of his constricted throat,
with which he speaks of what he saw when young
as prisoner and barber at Treblinka:

the wife of, and the daughter of, and the wife
comforting the child with a nonsense song
to unknot her face and close her eyes
and he with silence for them and no words
and they were almost certain that they knew
what they would find in the next cement room.
The strict Jewish women were unashamed
at their nakedness before him. His silence,
his forced smile, a collaboration
with them and with the whole design, made him
into something not to be considered
as he cut their hair not male, not there.
And their voices in his locust voice rose:
smile, allow us a moment to be calm.

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ANOTHER FALL