What else could you possibly offer me
But your very flesh?
Or do you wish I would dwell in the ruins of your soul,
To take refuge there, like a Barbarian
From the siege of Rome’s legions?
Fifty years, a feast of shattered bulbs
Among festoons of crimson crepe paper
Faded by time
Like debris strewn about the shore.
What else could you give to the one who had been your master
but your very flesh?
This, no matter how much you always
Denied me not the greetings
Of those who open their lives to summer,
But the farewell of hostile winter.
May God take his holiday,
An old woman in an airport,
sunken cheeks,
turns toward a window
where sky comes in and
we can see metal villages
take off, glide down.
Her face suggests she knows
how society got this frenzied,
worried, driven to vacate.
She may know too where each
of us is going, returning from,
and why airports reek of grief—
her face is a rare manuscript
of grief. Her years spiral
slowly in memory like a galaxy.
Her attachments drift aboard
Tonight my memory is
a palomino exuberantly hooved
in an alpine meadow.
I ride the palomino bareback
and fall off, replacing air
in lungs with fear,
pushing fear out and breathing
again. I hold out
a sugar-cube on a flat palm
for my memory,
which nuzzles with a soft
gray mouth, nips
the cube, leaves lovely
equine slobber. The tail flicks out
at a fat fly, makes broom sounds.
Sunlight, the old sheriff, jumps
News: a signature of flight
stays imprinted on blue-black strata
in Earth’s uncertain crust.
(The body vanished long ago.)
The British, desperate like
everyone for fuel, mining in
the vicinity of Hell, uncovered
this icon of wing, which dates
from when flight went
unnamed in air. We glance
at accounts concerning
“the fossilized wing of
Earth’s first flying thing.”
Shall we congratulate
this synecdoche of dragonfly
set deep in Derbyshire coal?
In my hometown, an avalanche ran over
an empty shack, crossed the highway,
crushed the schoolhouse. The children
were all home eating boiled peas,
scratching themselves, wanting to go
outside in the snow once more before
bedtime. That evening’s event ended
schooling in the town. Children ever
since have traveled twelve miles to go
learn in the next town.
Cameras remembered the sight
of snow versus building. People
would recall the sound without
describing it. They couldn't go
around talking about how loud
snow could be—how long the sound
With such fashioned metal and wood,
he didn’t mean to leave his mark, imprint
“Tam.” Mostly he was building shelter,
earning wages, securing premises. Also,
he was one to impress his will on
the present, not the future. That
rubbed handle nonetheless bears
an inadvertent mark only his palm
could have left. This other handle’s
darkened by days, by years, of perspiration,
his specific salts. This mechanism here—
he repaired it himself. Note his deliberate,
improvised way, the practical jazz
of rural labor, making things keep
functioning when parts aren’t available
right away. This workshop is cold.
Life imposes on us.
Memory superimposes,
layering life’s imprints.
Into an aperture
between life and memory
moves the photographer,
who listens to light,
convenes shadows,
constructs position.
In the dark room,
life and memory wait
while hallucination bathes,
inscribes itself on a
pane of white-space,
coalescing like epiphany
and now rising from the
On the Gold Coast Theatre building, a concrete mask
pretended to moan. Or sing? We weren't sure which.
We deduced it despised a violin and bells
hanging below it, an architect’s tacky gifts.
There was concrete. There were bricks, glass, wood.
To these we donated our need of symbol,
our weakness for decoration. Our bodies
represented us in front of the old Gold Coast,
which had left behind its design in order
to become. We are there no more, have scattered
to a heresy of heres. Our memories are
synaptic masks that pretend to moan—
or sing? We’re not sure which. Our memories
design an architecture of absence.
Some valleys you passed through replaced
themselves in memory.
Their mystique deepens like loam.
A glacier of forgetting moved into others.
You never know: should mind’s climate
change, these might be recalled.
You cannot remember entering even
one valley without having felt changed:
Maybe you sensed descent into routine,
or escape into meadowed ease—
or knew involvement with anonymous
mass humanity lay ahead, urban sea.
You entered that one valley—remember?—
by train. A pleading wish to be from that valley
seized you, a wish not be you.
As you gazed on and out, your forehead
The mariachi
trumpets fade with the red gored sun
mellowing at dusk.
Children dart behind,
scuffling in the dust, brown wrinkled skin like
scabbards of lost dreams.
You sit in the dark
a silhouette singing Spanish songs
of lost love and pain.
I hear church bells
in your voice, the lonely pang of night
keeps you drifting
between dreams and sorrow,
of lost opportunities, things unsaid,
actions incomplete.
You lay beside me
Mad eyes,
glazed and deep,
slice slowly,
dissecting each
motion.
Lost in
phosphorescent seas
whose waters
we have
long since
forgotten.
Men dream into flesh
between long nights,
weaving their breath
into memory,
and believing
that memory
mirrors the world,
as if men's names
were not just water
singing softly
to be heard.