Why (it just won’t fucking stop)

        Even if I’m . . . 
        
        Listen, even if I have to write this stuff just for myself, I’ll do it. One way or another, my mission is to conjure up a rejected world, to . . . 
        
        There are many poets whom I like, Wanda, Gary, Sonia, Joy, Lawrence, others, but they’re not enough. Each minute -- with its screwdrivers, elbows, snot, jobs, kids-raising crises, phobias, genocides, rap arias, whatever -- is a world in itself, a lifetime, a maze of creativity and death that mocks the very poetry we extract from it, deriding most of all the academic factories where images are punched out by tool and die operators whose expertise is so great that they never once deviate from the right calibrations necessary to produce the one-eyed fetus that wallows in its genetically engineered perfection. 
        
        (Oh Sonia, oh Lawrence, ska with me in the ballroom of illustrious effusions where Dr. Cosmic the trombonist has come back to life blowing in ecstatic recollection of Margarita the Rumba Queen whom he stabbed to death in 1969.) 
        
        Who has exiled me from the House of Poetry? 
        
        Who has told me no ironing boards are allowed in my sonnets and odes? 
        
        Who is this aristocracy of language who own, just as capitalists as a class own the nation’s financial wealth, the patents on all the nouns and verbs? 
        
        Well I’m cleverer than them and so here I come, a Mr. Gimp limping forward like Chester on the old Gunsmoke show. 
        
        Oh it’s hot today in Showdown Town 
        but I got my six-shooter 
        and I’m dressed in my prettiest gown 
        so dance with me please 
        in the saloon inside Dr. Cosmic’s anarchist trombone . . .

For you, whoever you are

        1 
        At night, while reading the newspaper, I fell asleep in the chair. 
        I woke up with a start ten minutes later. 
        I went to the window and looked out at treetops churning the air. 
        Beyond the next house, the universe’s edge stretched forever. 
        Nothing was there. 
        
        
        2 
        July 22, 1906. 
        The day is sweltering The perspiring Krumlauf girl, grown up now, hands baby Edmund, her son, to someone in the stone church. The river laps jetty poles in her mind. She disappears into the water’s sound. 
        
        Men with gnarled faces drink beer from a bucket behind Otis Elevator. They wipe the foam from their moustaches with the backs of hands heavier than Christ’s butchered heart. 

        Horse droppings on Getty Square. Bread dough rises in kitchens rank with the scent of women whose dark eyes go nowhere a sane man wants to travel. On the river’s far bank: beyond the trees and cliffs, a hint of something not quite defined. 
        
        Pastor Von Schlichten cradles the infant, who in 10 years will watch his Uncle Herman, home from the European War, fondle a laughing woman’s knee, then storm out of the room for no apparent reason. The next thing anybody knows, Herman is vagabonding his way through Brazil toward Paraguay. 
        
        I slip my hands inside the minister’s hands so I can briefly feel the child’s skin. The infant, cooing in my face, does not know who I am: his future son. 
        
        Even as the day winds down, the heat doesn’t abate. In spite of this, at dusk kids in knickers run footraces in Van Cortland park. 
        
        It’s winter now. Wind-battered treetops churn the night air. A forsythia twig stabs the universe’s border. Nothing is there. 
        
        I walk along the street. A man in oversized coat limps into an alley while scratching his balls. 
        An icy rain slices the eyelids of anyone who doesn’t want to see. 
        The buildings are empty. 
        This is where I come when I hate feeling lonely. 


        3 
        Everything is alright now. 
        I put on your hands like gloves and stroke your dog’s fur. 
        Also, I taste the inside of your mouth with your own tongue. 
        I’m a little afraid but I don’t care. 
        Inside the nothingness the world’s breath is everywhere.

Hymn to beauty

The steelmills, closed.
The high school fullback plunges off tackle
across the goal line
into dogpiss-stained snow.

“A hysterectomy is no act of God, I can tell you that,”
Aunt Frieda informs her friend, Ethel Buchwald, in the bleachers.
Ethel doesn’t care.
“Lookit that,” she says, pointing at flecks
of dried cake mix under her fingernails.

A half hour later, score tied 7-7, a minute left to play.
Gray sky. A mush of snow and dirt. The home team, using
its last timeout, huddles.
The wind blows through the bleachers.
People stare at the field stoically.
“When Lennie was born I thought . . .”

On the other side of town, west of where the river
winds past the axle works, a trail leads
to Sakowski’s back meadow
and the roofless farmhouse.

Birds chatter in snowy trees.

The bleachers, empty now.

Written in notebook at 21st St. and Baynard Blvd. after 1 a.m.

        The only nonexistent worth remembering is the normal. Even the calmest among us has genitals made of Swiss chocolate, each testicle and ovary wrapped in gold foil . . . 
        
        What did John once tell me about Steve? There was a bathroom with sky-blue wall tiles. The “above”: so close, can you believe it? Steve loved it, listening to a capella voices sing a 16th century madrigal on his newest CD as he squeezed out a turd. 
        
        “Yes,” he thought, dreaming of repairing Indonesia’s economy. And . . . 
        
        It is, as always. Somewhere in Latin America tonight people weep at sentimental stories and kick soccer balls on rocky fields and hide hand grenades in their worn-out shoes, then trod furtive paths that wend between moonlit trees on the outskirts of cities in which dance clubs are filled with sweaty stompers who hear the faint sound of the slug’s jaws as it eats a lettuce leaf miles away in a rural locale the CEO wants to dominate but never will. 
        
        Or will he? Well, let . . . Forget it, listen to that melody: the sound of rainwater trickling down a hill! 
        
        Earlier I saw the evening star trembling just beyond Lucinda’s brow. 
        
        By the way, where do the Americas begin and end and why, half a world away in India, do college kids gape at jasmine petals after snorting coke while squatting on a riverbank where cremation fires burn more transcendently than the imagination all night long? 
        
        The wind tonight is saintly and can heal. 
        
        Sssshhh. Close your eyes. Sleep well. Dream of the real.

New Café Bar

Only 40 or 50 yards
from the hotel, just past
the parkinglot where the tigercat,
thin because of cancer
or a mouse famine, squats
like love gone haywire
on a rag in the corner
of the guard shack --

yeah, that’s where it is, on the corner
of 34th and 8th.

Inside
in the half dark
of a time
(nonlinear:
the juke
and the box in
different
time zones
dancers whirling
everywhere)
we all cry out within, a sort of
masquerade party’s going on.

Look here at the old
baldskulled guy, the one
with wire-rimmed spectacles,
how he’s sticking
a toothpick in his ear --
it’s our own
papa of post offices
Benny Frank

and over here Flo
Nightingale’s smooching it up
with a cop in the back booth

and lookit Tommy Jeff, tweaking
a black woman’s ass while with
his other hand he scratches
sentences in a notebook:
“There once was a certain
African nigguh
who when I saw her
made my dickie grow bigguh”

and then right here
(ain’t he a sight for sore eyes!)
Al Einsteen, his beersoaked mustaches
dripping on the floor as he doodles pictures
of photons on a crumpled napkin he’s just finished
wiping his nose with

and --
“Who invented the Bowie knife?” a comic
asks a confused UCLA student in LA
a day after --

Bobby Bobby or whatever
your name is get your ass in here or else you’ll
be late for fucking supper!

Wasted

On the arm’s
body-side, just shy
of the armpit:
a bruise,
the dark inside of a dog’s mouth
or an infant charred by an explosion.
Her tongue
licks me where even death can’t get. I swim
out the window and through a tree
and eventually crawl onto a beach
so far south I don’t know where it is.
Lazily I roll onto my back.
Blinded by noon sun and blazing sand
I come in someone’s hand.
Soon I’m back where I was.
The bruise on the inside
of my arm:
dusk’s color in the lot
behind Gibbon’s Auto Repair.
Whose bed am I in
and why?
At 5 p.m. I have to meet Salerno at the Palace Bar.
I walk to 9th and Ivy
and go in.

They’re not here. Only I am . . . and you

The official poets go their way, I go mine.
One minute I’m here, then I disappear.
The tree-shadow, lengthening as the planet rotates,
grows slowly, as secret as can be, the silence between words.
Open or closed, the eyes see clearly now.
No need to chase what one wants to write about,
it comes naturally, of its own accord, a moment or a thing,
an emergence like, on a still day, an Atlantic wavelet
spilling onto Jones Beach sand,
then inching forward and depositing
an evaporating message of foam on the feet --
tiny bubbles slide between the toes, then are gone.
Although I wasn’t asleep, I wake up now.
Like a cat stretching on a windowsill,
I lean lazily into light.
What light? Of this moment.
It’s what I wanted to write about.
I followed, became, a tree shadow
and the next thing I knew this is where I was. And still am
even when I’m not
and go in.

Dear Helen

“You’ve always had a special place in my heart, Bobby. I even kept some of your youthful writings in a box,”
you told me on the phone yesterday morning after saying
Aunt Lori had died in a Yonkers nursing home.
Before that call, the last time you and I spoke was 19 years ago
when I showed up on a whim, no advance notice.
Toward the end of that night, in a house not far
from an old cattle-slaughtering barn, I gazed out a glass door
at a row of firs, beyond which
an abandoned engine block sat in a snow-dusted field.
Behind me you ridiculed a visiting Hindu,
an atheist cabinet maker whose fingers smelled
of coriander, which, like pure emotion, made no sense to you.
Years earlier, pregnant, you told me, “I made love to Jimmy
on the float,” and I pictured afternoon water
lapping the platform’s lake-eroded sides
as, after he entered you, you gasped in recognition:
violently, a single sperm extracted itself from a pack of others
then pushed, like an idea that wouldn’t say no,
through your egg’s zona pellucida while shouting,
“Bitch, this pregnancy’s for you!”
At what point in that forced marriage did your drunk husband,
his conga heart the loudest instrument in a band you didn’t know about,
first rumba by himself in his hardware store as if it was a ballroom --
and, if you know the answer, does it matter anymore?
Twenty-five years, then divorced, and it never occurred to you to ask
what you should’ve asked:
“How did those flying frogs in Africa evolve?”
or
“Was Jesus’ cross made from the wood
of the cherry tree George Washington chopped down?”
Your skull, pounding worse than with a sinus headache,
is the door Luther nailed his theses to
in Wittenberg when the Protestantism you inherited, unlike now,
still attracted the raucous-spirited: German peasants
rowdily roaming back roads as they jabbed
their pitchforks into the bellies of moneylenders fat on sauerbraten.
Dripping with those murders’ gore, I once,
in an industrial field overlooking the Hudson,
convinced an Otis Elevator secretary to jerk me off
while our grandpa, the one-eyed custodian, dusted pews in St. John’s.
I am what I am: what the weedstalk left behind,
the bad seed which sprouts, like a past
you didn’t know you had, in your mind.
Whatever you have in that box isn’t me.
I am the Jew or Hindu who befuddles you.
You went your way, I went mine:
you got elected to the local board of education,
I became a creep,
the family’s lone ecstatic,
its moody black sheep.

Journey notes written while crossing here to there

At first what you see isn’t the border but dust
and pictures of lopsided houses drawn in it
by kids with sticks
as lorries piled with bauxite or irrigation pipes
rumble
by. If it’s
the line between Karnataka
and Goa, off to the left stands a red-roofed shack
with a Coke sign on the side and if
it’s the boundary between
Chiapas and Guatemala where
in a light the color of
the Virgin’s piss
the Chinook helicopter soars above
(as Dr. Ricardo Sánchez says)
the planet’s doomed protectors
you’ll see a toucan on a branch, and if
it’s the border between
sperm and egg its thickness
will be more
much more
than
(so it seems)
the universe whose stars and galaxies
startle us, but no matter what border we dare traverse
there will be
a shed smelling
of maize booze or cashew toddy or rice liquor out of which will step
a military guard asking for our papers
and regardless of how bona fide they are
whether or not we’re shot on the spot is a toss of the dice and when

-- but the “when” is already
irrelevant
as is
or so it appears
the forsythia
in winter

(all those
yellow syllables, a story either
long gone or still not
begun because the teller’s
mother hasn’t yet
given birth to her or him

For Nikos

Hunched in heavy rain, the trucker checks his rig’s wheels on the muddy road in the landfill.
His nude elbow, a beautiful syllable, drips obscenely.
A monstrous stink, everywhere.

We back into a dumping area, get out and slosh ankle-deep in mud, as if we’re disappearing into a language that long ago had decayed into mush. Barely able to keep our balance in the wind, we heave rotting fence-sections onto mounds of storm-pounded slop.
Pitiful seagulls, trying to fly, eat a gray sludge, the air.
Everything is here:
The misshapen lawnchair half-buried in a morass of sodden enigmas.
The dead child’s tiny schoolbag filled with pencils whose lead is darker than the shadows on eyeballs’ other sides.
The soft curve at the top of the question mark which stands treelike in a yard in someone’s mind.
Old forks and knives.

Like the wild Atlantic smashing beaches, the rain comes.
My son laughs.
The pickup stalls, up to its axle in goosh.
As the wheels churn, what do we hear, vaguely, beyond us, in the wind?
The clitoris’s obscure stanzas?
The nostril’s mastery of the vocabularies of breathing?
The sound of someone writing over and over again in the White House the same last sentence in a paragraph about dead ends?

J. L.

        Back in his home state, there’s this scene: four blue morning mountains; below them, to the left in the valley’s southern corner, a tobacco shed which every year sinks a little deeper in the earth. Not far from this shed, in an old house surrounded by unmown grass, JL was born to a mama with a broken‑down car who couldn’t get to the hospital on time. 
        
        He remembers “stretching out my hands in an effort to touch everything” while growing up. He also remembers other things. A comic strip in which 2 kids dressed like an alligator. Huge birds gliding low over a forest lake. “The rugged outdoors” -- a camping trip; he can’t quite recall at what age, possibly 13. 
        
        Quiet Jeremiah from the south. He doesn’t talk much, although, when he does, sometimes (“Maybe it has to do,” he jokes, “with the full moon”) no TVA dam can hold back the flooding words. Then he tells how, from places with names like Hanging Rock, he squirmed north to a Jersey rug factory, learned to wear baggy chinos and carry (he laughs) “pounds of lint in my pockets”. Sometimes he searched out strangers for companionship: secret explorations in motels in nearby towns. "It’s a way of passing time,” he comments, then relates a story about a man he met once at a foodjoint near Neptune City in New Jersey. 
        
        Three or four times each summer he sits in a boxseat at a Mets’ ballgame. He likes to study the pitchers’ deliveries. He talks about pitching styles in a passionate, but scientific, tone -- as if he were a zoologist describing, in minute detail, the eating habits of Jamaican flamingos. He tells how in a game’s late innings, his concentration grows increasingly intense. “I sort of become the pitcher,” he says. He claims he can feel, then, the ball roll off his hand, a hundred miles an hour. All this is because his father played ball with him decades ago. "He inspired me,” JL says. 
        
        Jeremiah, a relaxed, aging man with white hair sits on a bench in the 18th St. park. A teenager passes holding a thundering boombox on his shoulder. Tree leaves are about to turn gold, orange, red.

Yugga

        Germs, yes germs! 
        It is germs that Jesus spoke of when he proclaimed that the lowly would inherit the earth. 
        Germs kill and only in killing is there life. 
        What magnificence there is in death’s geneology. 
        And everyone plays their part, what could be more wonderful than this? 
        
        Even the literary world has its role. In fact, it will one day soon -- this is true, I’ve heard the rumors – join the AMA. Just think of how logical such a move is. After all, university creative writing programs are the literary equivalents of hospital ICU units. Their purpose is to preserve an intensely ill communication form, poetry, that is on its last legs. By hooking up this form, this irregularly breathing body, to a variety of academic machines, a creative writing program’s “doctors” manage to keep the dead carcass artificially alive and spouting preprogrammed phrases that have been inserted into it by means of a microscopic computer chip surgically implanted in the brain. 
        
        You see, in this manner, and in this manner only, is poetry still “alive” in the US, except for . . . 
        
        Of course, there are always exceptions! Look at the poems hanging like strings of spittle from the mouths of drug-addicted poets with scabies or AIDS or hepatitis c or no sense of etiquette. Only in these patients who aren’t allowed into the creativity “hospitals” does the wood thrush’s legacy still live. See how marvelously these prophetic partial cadavers scratch their asses with one hand while with the other hand scooping leftover macaroni and cheese from the dumpster behind the Golden Apple Luncheonette. These are the angels who visit the bedrooms of the pompous in the dead of night and dance lewdly in the dark corners of the absence of knowledge. These are the frightened and confused ones who have listened closely to beauty’s incoherence and have learned in the process how the arbitrary infliction of pain on the already desolate is the only thing the world guarantees. 
        
        In celebration of this . . . Well, this is what I will do. Having woken up one night from a blackout while walking along an unrecognizable street in Queens, I . . . But I’ve told this story before . . . I don’t even have time to think anymore. All I can write about is what is happening right now at this exact moment -- 
        
        Nikos stomps out of the bathroom in his underpants maniacally yelling, “Who got my toothbrush? Adriana, you got my toothbrush? I need my toothbrush! My mouth stinks!” 
        
        Look at all these papers and books piled on my desk. Look at the facts from all these documents that are banging around inside my brain. Why shouldn’t it be mandatory that for any new lyrical poem to be considered a great lyrical poem it must include the following items? -- 
        
        * Prior to U.S. military/economic intervention in Puerto Rico almost a century ago, the island produced most of its own food; now, while the U.S. petrochemical industry flowers on that tiny nation’s shores, the island, stricken by massive poverty, must . . . 
        
        * City Discounts on Market St. sells cigarettes cheaper than anyplace in town. 
        
        * Adriana’s black hair is thicker than her mother’s. 
        
        * Monsanto wants to buy control of a significant enough portion of India’s water supply so that during droughts it can jack up water costs and sell the water to rural Indians for giant profits -- and if they don’t pay well then they can just fucking die of thirst! 
        
        Poetry equals sensitivity, have you ever heard that? I’ll tell you . . . But why should I? Figure it out for yourself.

Fragile simplicity

Worked with an old toothbrush
into the cracks between blue tiles,
the white grout oozes thick like the world’s
true cream, spreading

into the slimmest fissures,
sealing what’s necessary, always
delivering its heavy message,
not male, not female, but both.

Look at the world! each
tile’s in place and the seams
are perfect once the excess sludge
is wiped clean with a damp sponge.

For days I walk around in a happy daze,
amazed by life’s variety:
all the things I’ve seen
and even those I haven’t.

Secret ambition

        The way I imagine it, it’ll be 
        a major, thousand‑page work 
        begun late one night 
        while I gobble mangoes: 
        an epic poem about Frankenstein, 
        how he was the true Jesus ‑‑ 
        a collection of different people’s bodyparts. 
        In summary, the story will go like this ‑‑ 
        his love for the world was so gigantic, it distorted his physique and made him horrific, particularly the face, which looked like a square cardboard box upon which a kid had dreamily drawn a visage that just missed being human. 
        Poor Frankie: each cell, freckle, fingernail and genital hair recollected being excavated from the pauper’s graveyard by a mad scientist who ached to create the perfect heartthrob, a colossus who could crush the local bully, play flamenco guitar, invent TV a century early and one‑handedly lift a mountain boulder as if it were as light and small as a pimple on a wren’s knee ‑‑ and all simultaneously! 
        Of course, the scientist’s project backfired. 
        Only a few months after his unique birth in a laboratory where caged mice had been taught to repeat by rote the names and birthdays of all the kings who’d ever broken a promise, 
        Frankie was executed by government decree. 
        His crime? ‑‑
        he was, the prosecution proclaimed, “excessive”
        (he couldn’t stop eating
        brockwurst and sauerkraut,
        and he’d taken to hanging around a local wool mill
        where he swilled cheap gin and in a booming voice
        crooned wild tunes with the loom operators).
        After he was slain,
        instead of a normal funeral
        the police just let him wash away in the rain.
        No one momentous mourned him,
        only the common folk, intrigued by the way
        he’d momentarily turned everything so topsy‑turvy.
        “Gee, he was a great guy!” they still say.

Each river has its own specificity

Self-portrait of the shadow under the fire escape

        “Bad ass” the tough guys on the corner call me as I pass.
        I approach an apartment building, go in, climb the stairs, knock at 3‑C. A woman answers. When she sees me, her cunt squeals, a hog at the moment of  slaughter. In my head, an audience roars with laughter. My business isn’t to be liked, it’s to do what other don’t: get things done.
        My biography, when it’s eventually written, will begin: “He knew what it meant: the kill’s thrill.” Pulled myself up the bootstraps, yes I did. From day one, I was a legend in the making: a street‑urchin who, through diligent self‑education, transcended anonymity and got on the TV stations --

        fall, winter, spring and summer,
        what I am, is a serial killer.

        When I started my career, they nicknamed me “Bird Murderer.” They called me this because my sense of ritual spurred me to develop a symbolic signature destined to capture the pundits’ attention -- every time I offed another victim, I left a canary with slit throat in the corpse’s mouth. Even today this is what I leave as a sign that I haven’t abandoned those who believe in me.
        I employ such symbolism for two basic reasons --
        1. The only thing more loathsome than people, and therefore ripe for extermination, is a category of creatures stupid enough to let its individual members sit in little cages and warble pleasant notes not far from urban rivers upon which can be seen, floating this way and that, barge‑sized tumors that have been surgically removed from the bellies of gluttonous infidels who feast on the holy and apostolic church’s remains.
        2. Since all canary ditties are a feeble imitation of an otherworldly music we can never hope to comprehend, the birds must be penalized for daring to blaspheme    our ears with their doltish solos.
        And so I do what I have to --
        every day I butcher a bird, then conclude my act by mutilating a putrid human.
        My gifts to the country are --

        children seeking dreamy sweetness instead suck red milk from the craters where my breasts used to be

        I create holy silence where once there was deafening song

Spring behavior

        I stand on the sidewalk in front of my house.
        Red is under his car across the street.
        It rained for 2 days, but now the sun is out.
        Because it’s April, I do what people sometimes do in spring:
        crouch down and stare at my tiny city lawn.
        I love what I see:
        ragged clumps of crabgrass and weeds.
        I wonder: Is my tolerance of such lawny chaos a sign that I’m a slob? But if I am a slob, and if I also happen to be wrong about God and there is a God, then the fact that I’m a slob will be a virtue since the slobby God who invented crabgrass and weeds would certainly feel more kinship with a slob like me than with Nazi gardeners who do to crabgrass and weeds what, if they had been alive during a different era, they would have done to Jews: root them out, kill kill kill
        By the way, have you ever noticed how each individual grassblade is a miniature green tampon waiting to be used by a midget muse who, in spite of being tormented by her monthlies, nonetheless knows how to make a guy’s head go ga‑ga with poetry?
It’s a nice day.
        Red’s still under the car across the street.
        Maybe I’ll go for a walk. In the shadows under the dogwood trees near the Brandywine Creek, who knows what I might find ‑‑ maybe a lottery ticket or a comet fragment or a woman with swollen ankles or a Kurdish refugee or an uneaten Big Mac.
        The air sure smells sweet today. Flowery.
        Which way is the park? Oh yeah, over there.
        Who’s that guy behind me? Is he the paranoid Jesus who gapes back at us from the bathroom mirror? At night in his bed does he sweatily imagine fingering the Liberty Bell’s dark interior? Is he following me?
        Even if he is, I don’t give a shit --
        my knack for survival is . . .
        If tomorrow somebody tries to prove me wrong by telling you they saw me in a bodybag, remember this: I’m playing possum, I’m doing a trick.

Only in the midst of the mundane does sanctity exist

In the morning, even before black coffee for breakfast, I fall
in love with the trees. 
“C’mon, hurry up,” I imagine Francis calling to the monk whom Francis leads
to the train tracks in the meadow.    
“But what are they?” the monk asks, unable
to decode anything outside the 12th century where he and Francis dwell.
“Oh, they’re just from another time, don’t worry about them,”
Francis answers. 
“Man,” I think, amazed by how unperturbed St. Francis is,
“and on top of everything else
he used to talk with birds!”
The holy exists.  Look at it, wracked by dry heaves, lying curled up
in the holding cell’s corner.  And look over here too,
how the caged Haitian parrot in the ramshackle school
quotes Madison on the need to centralize the planets’ revolutions.  Listen
I want to inform you about what the woman from Arch St. told
the hairdresser’s niece on Foglietta Plaza near -- 

the point is, it’s all linked.  A  waterbuffalo roasted 
in a burning hootch in Lao Cay one night
when flares lit up the dark gaps between mamasan’s teeth
is what I smell at the Camden ferry dock.  

Our Father who art the code’s silent swish as it travels from one axon to another in the monkey’s brain,
I speak to you now being to being, one
sack of weirdnesses to another. 
Father, listen to the horses’ hooves as new riders fall in love with gluttony’s prairies.
Father, pity me, my throat’s a cracked streambed in drought heat!
Father, in the valley of the shadow
that hides shadows inside shadows, I ghost dance until I know what knowing is. 

It’s true:  I’m your reincarnated Francis.  In the mornings when I wake, small animals
nuzzle my legs, purring
as I pick
burrs and thorns from their fur. 

Leave me alone, God.  I won’t
warn you again. 
Amen.  

I have to

-- away is into the rain. Into
the soothing
cold sound of it. Drumming on
the toolshed roof
or the slicker’s hood, it echoes, announcing
itself, battering
stone and twigtip and mailbox and . . . drops explode, gray-
white silences splash
and spread everywhere, the newspaper
in the gutter is soaked. I want to tell you . . .

The leaf-clogged drain is like the inside
of the bag-checker’s head
in the supermarket. Each of us
is this filled up. "Here
is my credit card and whatever else you need,” I tell him, then leave
with a bagel, a bag of potato chips and
a map
of the of night clouds’ topography and how
to approach
the homeless’ fires burning in oildrums under the El close to the expressway. The conflagrations’ glow pierces
"the souls of warlike men who rise in silent night”
as a giant Boeing floats hawk-like above the fieldmouse
sprinting toward the silo in the dead cow’s belly
further west.

-- but first, step one:
someone drives a cart filled with old people
and suitcases while a younger man
with eyebrow hair longer than some folk’s beards
strides into the airport men's room
like a professor seeking a book in a library.

I have to go now, the trips are all
about to start. My mother’s
waiting at LaGuardia, Uncle Bill’s already in
Myrtle Beach and I told Brown I’d meet him
in Baton Rouge. But even
before I leave my flight’s
over and it’s dawn and I’m
already here. Look
how the Eiffel Tower leans, a thought testing
its infrastructure’s strength, straining
away and downward, just to prove . . .

I wasn’t, but now am, a new arrival.
We all must heal.

Van Gogh . . . Well, everybody knows who he was.
But this isn’t him, it’s me.
Does this surprise you?
It better
fucking not.