TRANSLATION AMBULANCE


They call them tracers and they sit in the dark
With the video versions of what is not you

Bright arcs over gray

“a choreography of human barks rising from the bunkers.”

A doctor,
From Pakistan, enters the Elysian fields of light

Speaking flawlessly

Not making eye contact . . .

A maelstrom of wood plugs up
The fallopian brake where the trees fan out

Sends the boxcars flying

Jet propelled, seeds riding in pasty water

Being born isn’t the great accident

The pure cells ride the
Heavily burdened ones

(a wasp gall explodes)

A surfeit of fortification goes straight to the damaged boy’s forehead

The other ones look out at the sand—

some daydream—

East of Kabul—

Half notes, Whole notes, a soundless impasto

a gambel's quail, way up on top, calling for a mate

LAKE CADILLAC


We were out under
The giant umbrellas

The long white sex of the moon shining--

Unblemished

The marble neck of Nefertiti--

On the bones of the last dinosaurs

The stars are an alignment of tear ducts

Allegorical triumverate

A pinhole in the night for each wound

These comets
Of the new century--

Sentimental as liquid paper

Then an albino pigeon comes walking
Out of the bushes looking like Peter Lorre

I can't put a deterministic spin on it

The Heavenly Ham (TM) only partly defines the fork

Mars shining on the rim of the sky
Like a sinking diamond . . .

Stars reflecting back to where she's softest

Where the water gets deepest

WHO BUT I, O RECKLESS DEATH


It's a secret,
the blackness . . .

swimming at the heart of it.

Skull open
like a pool in Beverly Hills

the way the antibiotics travel

(she wears no greatcoat)

love flung outward

the geese half-mated with the swans

and the blood on their wings

and so it is with the sand and speckled eggs

two boats
two boys

trees filmed over with ice in the middle of summer

her hair keeps flying out of her open mouth

an owl dies on its branch

another Monday on the ring of Saturn

TURNING SEVENTEEN

A poem online, the link here, from Minnesota
Review . . . (which isn't published in Minnesota,
by the way) . . .

HALF-MOON EPIDEMIC


They sing in
the street and

the hounds capitulate

a body yearns against such resistance

a preambulation . . .

drowning over and over
like a mania for success

the ticking inside your own mattress sinks deep into the lost last day

a block of ice the size
of a car battery

that way they still find the body

It's the water that listens, stay way past midnight

the cloud of her hair

bats gagging on lightning bugs . . .

the bones might have yellowed

but they remain white for the moon

I used an eraser on her
until all I could see was
a violin on fire

a kite made of moonlit concrete

get used to it

it's not a funeral procession

(children glimpsed through the trees in a single file)

let your guitar fill
with campfire smoke

let her drink at least half of the bottle of wine

I met you once

you were naked and floating on top of the ocean

and I was in an airplane

NINE-HUNDRED POUND WHEELS


there is a train derailment

rainbow of spirits spiraling out before the flat blades of mountains

one all over the other
one opening inside the next one

coal-fed reflection in seamless black water . . .

Rain falls cold in its restoration

each drop stippled with moonlight . . .

her state of mind is her exuberance,
another bottle levered inside a knothole of pine

and I swear we could see
the trout looking up at the sky . . .

Nine-hundred pound wheels

I counted her ribs

two more animals who lack reason

(two naked breasts standing up in the cold)

a telescope emptying in the aftermathof the roar
made the splinters of steel heat up

the idea of the rational

wind shearing off in her eyes

the soul sputtering up out of the fog of its waking state

Win a Bunch, Lose a Bunch


The Tigers win a bunch of games in a row
and then practically fall down all over the field
and lose lose lose. It's like a fix is in, like
that World Series a couple of years ago. Nobody
home. Leland put everyone in a shake-n-bake bag
and dumped it onto the field for this game
so the players can feel a sense of Starting Over
and it ain't workin' . . . New batting order,
same old Swing! and miss. This is a strong
team--the talent is there. Come on!!!

*


The book--its arc--feels completed, and it really has been
for several days, and yet I've been torturing some old drafts.
Interesting, how you can transform a thing that is sitting
there buzzing with latent energy, but if it fails after
one or two tries, it's gone . . . Place the sheet over the
face of the victim. Or, better, just place inside the fenced-in holding
pen for future poem-parts.

Some go too narrative--in gutting the thing you stopped flying,
began telling--or you assembled a clothesline flapping with
possible one liners. Several of these are no better than the old
versions, some are worse, and a few really fell into place. Another
problem is a couple became so new to me all over again that I now
have to wait months before I can read them with any kind of
objectivity. Meanwhile, I find little scraps like "Ant with Celery"
pretty compelling, the speed inside that little black window, the
density.

But I have no idea what may happen. I could use a vacation.

SAULT STE. MARIE


It's later than that, dark in the baggage carts

the wing of the plane, balsa sticks

I assembled it, painted the paper . . .

watched it fly over Lake Superior and never come back

I fell asleep and dreamed stars
scattered over my dinner plate

I much preferred Capricorn, casual

I put the crop money in certificates of deposit

Years later I met a woman
and she was something disabled to a birch

the oyster mushrooms
bubbling up amidst trout lillies . . .

or Sault Ste. Marie, caskets coming home from the war after midnight

The heart is a belief referendum

a spider fern raised only on bong water

we're talking almost 1980

The Shining, in a theater east of The Goodwill

several owl decoys
stared out the glass front doors of the lobby

patriarchal, and bearded

She struggled under the stinging of that stripped wood

spring-mottled light on her shoulders

a sharp-shinned hawk threw its voice at the sky

the wind made music through a mobile of bird bones

the over life-size head
of Chaim Soutine's not exactly what you want to look at

while drinking a Bloody Mary

The Soo Locks Hotel

plastic glads dripping rain
in the sunshine

a payphone out on the street strapped tight to a phone pole

WALK THIS OVER


It's like they kept wanting

a night light goes on in the eye

a willow and the creaking in the wood of the ark

boy will you taketh this girl

(including the wild chicory in her hair)

the bed unmade

48 teeth in the comb that are Republican

But this is the mechanism
for a detonation of wonder:

the proboscis

T-bills

the more primitive bone sculptures

("assemblages" they're called in New York,
while in Indiana we call them "Elaine")

and Henry Darger

that, or else we
lose our shirts

it's the quagmire of basic
teenager anatomy

a box turtle blocking the road out of spite

white cabbage butterflies
stopping to drink from her tenderest nerve endings

the sacred and the profane

one minute you're balancing your checkbook

the next some thug is touching her linguine

A DONE THING



We're talking cold bricks

a box spring consumptive with rust

hysterically riddled with saplings

(it's the chaos of such non-narrative witness--

dog and deer skulls both grin at the moon)

so she reaches inside him--

and forgets where she was born

bees pour over a knot of wood

a stone keeps falling through a bottomless well

Memory, the most viral of manifestations

(a kind of "neighborly" soup-bath)

But she remembers how it was: illicit, extemporaneous

a play with two acts
right in front of the car

the pillows sat side by side

the smell of cut pine as she fell, and fell

it wasn't Deuteronomy

a cowbell rang through the lupines

although his spine was now broken

birds settled inside the trees prepared
for the immutable comfort of rain

motionless, but for the tears springing from his paralyzed eyes

how the boy comes spinning up
out of the calm blue ocean

She'd wanted to fuck him for years

then found the hole like a beam of light where the sun stilled the ice in him

an essence diffused in a river of blood

ripples of the everlasting

A COUNTY ROAD


a circle goes around a branch

it's a mirror of grief's ecosystem

one rhythm, two feet . . .

a commoner radiance the water implies
because it's watching too

green herons in a panic under the raceway nets

the largest sturgeon emerges
and spits a fine pile of shells into a basket of roots

pastoral as purgatory

head not heavenly with clouds

feet swinging above terra firma

And the day before yesterday?

Everything nothing

she finally stepped off the heavy table and waited

it was the quietest birth so far

tunnel sinking and then rising under the Detroit River

all of her sisters singing together with their eyes squinting shut

no hidden agenda

no discussion the next morning

WILDERNESS


It's not a matter of scale

(worthless imaginable)

a cup of tea for your doll

and cloud to ground lightning

He took it out behind his desk
and then he just looked at it

a fin growing out the back of his head . . .

Americana

Just do it

Essentially

I'm glad you are grown now--

(tall amongst the Michigan fruit trees)

glad our hands rest
on this same rocky island . . .

the window pane
the window pane

She used her checkered dress as a moonlight boat

looked out at the spruces
standing still under the Northern Lights

called them her Sentient Pines

***

Other--one might say new-ish--poems
below . . .

DINOSAUR ECONOMICS


It could be what you see is what
you think, less

world

more mind

Inhospitable, riding a raft of green
John Deere promotional swans, no distinction

between the honking bird

and the smiling company logo . . .

I've got no purchasing power

There I was, on the horizon, somebody's detestable toddler

and now I'm sailing along

in love with this blonde woman's incredible lap

Contractual bondage?

or just a clause, with no down payment,

in the manifesto
of pure being . . .

I remember driving out of Jasper, Arkansas,
and arriving at Dinosaur Land--

another asterisk in the fetishization of the American sublime--

and how at that moment I felt, if asked,
I could honestly say I'd been to the moon . . .

So just score the seeds and then soak them

It helps to adorn such relics--

the merry-go-round of a morning glory
spiraling out of a stone baby's eye

And who cares about infrastructure

(throw the blue print into a hot spring!)

A single kiss--I'm dreaming--
floats languidly upon the history of her dotted line

It's called sharing

THREE RIVERS, 1998


There's a lot of blue on the snow

shades of distances nearby . . .

Someone presses pause on your life

846 windows

And you're a spectator in all of them

A few joints
spill into a shape like fingers

Welcome

from this point on everything unfolds
predictably:

Alan Flaska gets drunk

straw falling out of
his hair

It turns out there is no vitamin D
in charisma . . .

Then you remember the covered
bridge

sleepy, stirring in a cloud of swallows . . .

rocks piled like a toothache
in a white
freezing stream of water

that rises like a celestial escalator

over the hill and away from town . . .

A woman I have recently decided
to hate has moved back to Granger

Shoprite, a new Walgreens

the moorings of dumpsters
vanishing like boats left in the woods

in the rear view mirror . . .

For ten minutes I watched a bare tree decide to do nothing

A single white cloud hurried
across the dim weatherless sky

I picked up seventeen beer cans

I already live where the water stops

WORLD-WEIGHT


Community logic

figure and ground, a plastic opera of benevolent intent

Real small effects . . .

You call your little group

Dancing in America, Inc.--

one-hundred painters of the dailiness school of South Bend

brushes stab at sheets
of brown paper

somebody releases a purple balloon out the front door

gesso sloshes out of plastic cups (it spills on naked feet)

the smell of unprimed canvas unrolled so rich

Cadmium orange for everyone!

warehouses and fast food restaurants

the helium tank

and another balloon flies off like a memory of nothing

But then sometimes you're suddenly aware

of the moon standing wide open behind you,
a latte glued to your lips

you look over your shoulder

Your spirit life is like the moths outside
who can't read the neon sign

but won't leave

A muzzle for atonement

RAISED UP

Beth Roberts

From the dual fists of the church, small and white,
you undertsand the stuff of beauty

dripping Jesus to be (in the flesh understand, hand-
to-mouth understanding) as a page, dissolving undeserved.

And as you empty the thought or fill the feel,
you surround the hole of the mouth that wells up

and understand: Jesus in the middle of the night,
star-crossed on a high road with a mouthful of this.

***
from Brief Moral History in Blue