A STUDY OF THE HUMAN FACE


For whatever reason the mirrors all turn black. It's winter. The family
sits around in straight-backed chairs, hair growing. Pieces of shirts
flake off and float to the floor over time. The father says, "Good
night. I love you," but his mouth doesn't move. No one reacts. A
thistle grows up through a floor board. Flash-forward: the boy--who
is now a man--feels a confusion of eyes. He pulls some film from a
large frame in the wall. It starts snowing outside the windows back
when he was a boy. He relaxes. He brushes his girlfriend's hair. They
will talk after dinner. He's been home twice in eight years. He
remembers the sonogram. It baked in the room and it grew. He de-
parted, happy to ride into the wind. The  voices! he thought, his
joints and creases coming undone . . .

CORNELL EGGNOG (I CAN SEE NEW YORK
FROM THE BATHROOM WINDOW)



Celebratory, lake effect Buffalo--

The tumbleweed had lights and ornaments

It's a holiday! Literally, schizoid!

Ride with it. Reel for notice

Tornado-ravaged dune by dune, one Midwest, one runway to Culture

The flyleaf, made of tobacco censors,
covers the apple-dragged-down in a peel
of willows burned to forge a cure . . .

Though I know I'm half a shift's drink away from making
the sort of coruscating confession I missed making when
I was first on notice about these things, Kerouac's Pic,

or Ginsberg's White Shroud (I trimmed the butterfly bushes).

IRIDESCENT GREEN


All I know is it's not hot. The sand rinses itself
and rinses itself. The camera crawls over long shadows.

The director says "look desiccated." Embarrassed enough to pull
   a tumbleweed with a hook and a reel.

You've got the movie playing on the VCR. You've got the commercials
hyphenating the movie playing on the VCR.

The Virgin Mary came riding down Mt. Lassen on a snowmobile.

All up and down the sides of mountains stood grave markers
for the remains of children.

The years have piled up. The observer is suffering an ulcer.

Two hummingbirds create a twist of wind above blossoming ocotillo.

BETTER AVERAGE

It's like steps you walk down--the taller husband, the wife,
the boy, the girl--each a foot shorter than the

seventy canoes left in October on the beach of the island lake

The patients remain asleep in the nursing home

(There is a painting of all this)

The boy, the girl

That was the last thing she heard, smoke from a chimney
visible from her chair, the old turntable with no record on it

still turning nearby trajectories pulling away from one another

the ache in his wrist when the jumper cables sparked in
   the grass

POLLEN


A tower of cement--some sidewalk wrapped
around a rod and rained on.

The whole back forty.

There's no TV in the house anymore, just windows, weeping
in the morning. I can taste the dust in my bedside glass of water.

The reasons are not important. I keep getting back up.

POEM


I'll say it as well. These theaters look like fence posts diminishing
into the wind gusts of a Thursday. I was at the front-end, large as
a dinosaur. I could see the audience well enough--little powder
puffs of imagined mythologies--weather vanes turning. Then, slowly,
rusting to a sudden stop. The door in the sand-side of my night
on stage reduced itself, it multiplied. The wide aisles swayed over
little waves, small gills full of sky, and I was breathing, moving deep
   into the watery light.

THE HOUSES


Forty at least, houses . . .

The family sat around the campfire
eating snow
while flying stars ignited, flashed out.

There are usually three kinds of silverware in a drawer.

We dug a round hole.

It wasn't the shape of a frozen Great Pyrenees.

The feet stuck up out of the grave.

Then there was the house, and the tarantula. It lived in a dry fish tank.

No one understood the sky, its gold like a harbor,
bells just after nightfall, the creatures with grass on their toes,
the fog not something terrible at all . . .

Pain filtered in through the lights but was diffused
in the fridge inside the gallon of milk.

CHROMATIC

Listen, she said, Boy Scout . . .

Not my
Neighborhood,
Black and white,

Affected speech, everything frosted with rapture.

How many times can one be the One?

I thought she was tough enough.

On the weekends I'd escape to the pines.

In starlight I could see the others,
Stupid with narratives,
Shocked empty by heat not the heart.

MAGNETIC HANDHOLDING


Rows of docks line the water--anesthesia--

off the drop kicked edge
the water made a document

of our faces--

Dreamer, she said, stale smoke coming out of a certain star

We were welded

Leaves from fall blew through the bones of our ribs

I remember this because of the lilacs, the roots soaking in lemony
   salt water

You'd imagine a lunging future tied to such soft twists of buffed-tired
   hairs

"Let me know you're just barely alone enough"



-----
below, yesterday's offering (I was in the air) This post is today's. Title
from Jennifer Moley's The Middle Room

FROM CYPRESS TO CYPRESS FLEW THE TRAINS

We crimp the edges of the thing--it does--

the thought becomes
the object--

--the object turns our thought around . . .

Light simplifies our endstopped motion.

My hand rests on
                       the chair's hard hard chair-back.

I'd say wingless annihilation,
perception reveals all things, and then it groups them,
all living together--

On God's Earth.

Then perception is ashes, or it simply ends, absorbed ...

UNIVERSE NETTING . . .

Thing which is a collection. It forms a sort of
pool over the neighborhood. Better him than . . .

Or you mow his yard before he even
wakes up. It is mental. And spiritual. So he cuts

the snake in two with a shovel. I picked up a garter
snake, cool to the bones of my hand . . .

I woke up earlier in the dream. He's still in it
half the time, clocks of salt blowing off cliffs, an

echo filling the rain barrel . . . Today I watched a great
blue heron eat an enormous carp. The violence

wasn't even principled--beautiful directness. Impaled
under large banks of shining clouds. An hour later

the heron's head was floating above a throat
the exact shape of an enormous fish. Then it flew across the bay.

SKY BOOTHS REVIEW


Here's a review (it appeared in Barn Owl Review) of Sky Booths
in the Breath Somewhere. Thanks to Jay Robinson.

IT'S ALL CLEAN GOOD FUN NOW


Last thing I expect: a night full of Godard
I come out to the flower stand (really just

my car) and two bugs are vehemently
polishing each other. Up on the hill

two teenagers storm away from each other--
they're having a tiff. Pauline flies

in a plane over us, coming back from the beach.
Militant, you know, coffee houses,

the bookification, snorting, but clean,
in army fatigues--a General Electric bag--

I used to find my shirts in the park lost
and found--my car phone rings (it's as big as

a miner's hat) and I hiss who's there . . .

IDENTICAL MOMENT

I want to drive my Honda to the center
of your very being . . .

The bank canisters go shunting away from my driver's
side window . . .

The tellers, and you, talk to me,
the sound of coins hitting linoleum.

I've been there. Distantly, I've listened to the
thighs, swarms of bees, walking away.

Nature's orgasmic. Like the stop sign of you sliced through me,
and we were at right angles, the creek running up over

the flange screws, the red painted metal.
Butterflies turned into paper clips just before they hit my eyes.

Remember? We called it tin-shed week--a garden hose, and root starter.
Yellow roses swirling in the rain barrel, leaving, alone . . .

I don't hit SEEK anymore. The black bear sinks away through pines,
the light turns green, and all I can do is start over.

EAVESDROPPING

In the shadow of the house a house a lung

Bad news comes on Sundays

The moon is rising in its veil of natural smog

The catfish, muzzled, keep crawling ashore, not barking, not knowing

*

Let me start again: no matter the content I am apparently still screaming

Screaming while the day sinks into night

Screaming while the wind shifts more easterly over the water

*

Suddenly all is quiet again

My parents are holding drinks in their hands, smiling into a mirror
   at each other

I walk down a narrow stairway into the basement and I
   write this poem

VERACRUZ


He didn't care--the arrangements . . .

Pieces of the alphabet--
the phone's earpiece makes
a temporary showerhead--

burned around the baseboards going home.

Lakes, everywhere, drowning with fish.

I threw the cakes in a local dumpster.

She continued waiting to eat.

THE WILDS

I was part of a thing--a handle--
a wire turning colors--a string of gut.

Wind blew through there, this insect

struggling against. I'm starting to know your.
Quiet. One more motion along.

A light then shook the door. Start telling
(start opening) everyone you know. You know

They're running through the hallways . . .

CAROTID

Crash is solvent. Time
keeps replaying inside.

Your ninety-eight fingers
are wind gusts,

your driver’s license fluxed up with blood.

What matters changes in an instant.

You had such a terrible crush.


*
Just for the record, blogger, so called, "disappeared" my poem
"The Sentence" as blithely as one swats away a fly. So that
was the poem for the 11th. "Carotid" is the poem for the 12th
(because the system was down again, after having been "down"
just a few weeks ago for over a month). Just fyi.

THE SENTENCE


Say I'm still
dragged
into it

the sentence,
misshapen
ghost

of the senses,
the dreaded mailbox

standing in the windy

hallway.

Others saying

Yes, Tuesday, yes Wednesday, yes, yes!

One less ocean of eye.

THE ANTENNA

On top of the house--snow, long moods . . .

Inside the house
Designers want to capture the essence
Of the renaissance!

On top, the pillows are ripped open,
The feathers dragged openly across the ridges of snow drifts . . .

Inside, tables are square.

They obey the laws of perspective though.

On top of the house the old antenna sits crashed and dumped
On its side and remembers some of its friends who are dead now.

THE FLOORPLAN

One view: I was standing on the other side of the mirror.

I don't know--it was our father, our older brother,
standing shaving the front of his face off

and flushing it away down the drain.

Everything got pinched into a circle deep inside me.

The cicadas whirred out in the starlight, the warm fronts coursing
over the green-shadowed hills of the Carolinas.

But I was just staring into the toilet--alone, light ringing
against the white tile, white sink, white tub, white rim around

the still and slightly darker circle of water.

The mirror grew deep as a forest . . .

The one fogged window was a black stamp, nightmares not moving
through it, not a suggestion or a conduit away from or toward any

hint that reality was cleaner, more orderly--it just hung there.

GLOSSED: THE SPIRIT SAYS COME BACK HERE

I can't stand on a piece of hard earth--I can,
but I am so not going anywhere--better to be manic?

evanescing into, anyway, slipknots

You are a chain of astral fog
My lungs and even my arms feel stuffed with the brightness of
   air-conditioning

I can't make any sentences, I'm unable to think, because the
words feel like they floated away two months ago

Explain this separation--but at least I'm no longer sinking, shells
   of lead
growing around the thing I've been humoring inside, subtle

Three inch holes in the sod, I'm going to inter myself

But ten million pages flying backwards and the light shifts;
   it goes black

I get ten miles or so up inside the clouds until I disappear
   from where
I'm standing but when I look down I see no one but then my
   brain erases

WATER AT THE DEPARTMENT SPIGOT

The scholarship's
on women

Breathing all along the line, waiting

Gazelles of evil, the way he made those crabby
little lower case "r"s

I don't know what idiot means but I know one when I see him

It wasn't even fun (until
we froze all the flowers)

Drinking in the sky, followed by that one last exhilarating thought

THE SOUL-STIRRING MELODIES OF ORPHEUS

Normal isn't true     All safe!

We grope
We are not sane

We feel the better part is forcibly simple

How would you characterize the sundown

Slowly like the skull's own
teeth set rigid in a dream

The ceiling is covered with chairs

Pieces of the people keep falling

YES! SOMETHING ELSE.

So what about hot dogs?

Are they simply awful
or are they better than

Antiques Roadshow? We're all dying from

something.

Poems like this
should be that easy.

FAILED CANNIBAL


A marination of yellow--
stain-flavored, post-blossom--
but with accents of blood
wrung from gauze--

I call it wheelbarrow wine . . .

*

Everywhere in America it is time to make the cream dressing.

Stick an Olive in your Cocktail.

"Everything Throbs" canto

I'm out in the dusk with the trucks and the dogs.

*

It's not food-coloring, malleable as positions red as the tides,
camera of interiors, decked with cilia, drain field eclipse,
the taste buds of the color blind . . .

I keep trying the colonization of handwriting--

an action toward Red . . .

I need to sail right through the overarching vessel

THINGS SUPERFICIALLY SO UNLIKE US

This smoke will last,
will not be smoke
someone's

eyes, hair fanned out over moss, and acorns, behind . . .
The wood relaxes into ash.

It isn't burdened
with
Remembering.

A child said it looked like the man was killing the woman.
What's wind

were it not for trees--smoke and bones,
two bodies a secret,
buried in the swells of the

sea? Forty years later the insomnia of stars.

Who was the watcher? Who the lover?

THE MOON AS TORN UP FLOWERS

Whenever my blood goes thin
with metal

Rain falls between trees, crashes into the cement

It steams then, like you want
to drag long fingernails over your back

Or the other
Sun comes out it stays dark and the animals

are isolated in the basements
The humidity, the bed is smashed and smashed

You remember the finer days--

Humans and dogs in the surf, no school again for years

Then God invented the doorknob

A DOMESTIC PRODUCTION

A lot different
if you spread them side by side.

Sheer mouths, see the mountains,
stacked to your breast

Each bad piece goes into the blender.

Your middle part is hungry.

That is a sing-songy
memory of bed-wetting you're torturing there.

First it eats a plant, sniffs a mailbox, waits in the hallway;
wants something soft, repeatable.

I DON'T NEED AN ALARM TO WAKE UP


Too long I’ve waited and now I know
humility

The aspens do a 180--none of this has to do with dream-analysis

Spark plugs divorce
a cleaning

I pick up a place on a branch

(it otherwise remains earthbound)

The computer searches all the data--long smooth
“planers of wood”

*

I want to use a word like “crutch,” or “crotch” . . .

(explore the grosbeak?)

The earth isn't the "earth" to everyone . . .

Although "the woods” is not an imposter.

A LACK OF AFFECT BORDERING ON THE DISORDERLY

They come to claim their intellectual property . . .

Big-balled, Anubis stands by with his briefcase

Never mind, they counter,
Edward Kienholz isn't underwriting anything

Death and barns

Beehives coffins stamens wrecking the bonfire mist

Ironing shirts underground but by moonlight

A CORRESPONDENCE WITH ENMITY

Nothing should come from such
Circularity--

Sins . . .
Splintered

Draconian, your window blinds

Shut and fucked
Lights

Dragged until the heels made grooves

The empty shoes sat in a southern exposure
a tautology

No features anymore

the ambiguity of maggots

Everything goes to pieces if the skulls turn blue

AT BIG SUR

by John Weiners

Lizard under the stone,
bees buzz around us through
the two trees full of canaries and
    in the burnt grass
yellow poppies.