after the game
Fenway Park. The stadium was lit like the Pantheon, like Apollo's eye-annihilating home, a gods-piloted oracle seen by Ezra Pound when he was in his cage detained by American GI's, bright lights to deprive him of sleep at night. A dog chasing its tail in the agitation of its prophecy.
Light into the olive entered
And was oil. Rain made the huge pale stones
Shine from within.
The ultimate American sport, bravado's quavering game heating up the barrel of spit and chewing tobaccos in the machine-gun fire, from a bar on Cape Cod of inveterate alcoholics with tanned and wrinkled necks to a dim cabin in the woods of Vermont with no cable and only radio. Tonight New England perched on the Plymouth Rock of its kinetic myth, all cannon salutation and salvation.
My insect instructors have stilled, they are probably stuck together
in some bliss and minute pulse of after-longing
evolution worked out to suck the last juice of the world
into the receiver body. They can't separate probably
until it's done.
The post-baseball crowd spilled out into the parking lots and onto the streets. The subway station swelled with the hysterical anonymity of human mass. A singer I know was playing on the subterranean platform a Coldplay song, his guitar case open wide as an insomniac's sunrise for dollar bills. People waited for the train to take them back to the suburban petri dish of mortgages and marriages gone bad. Teenage couples with chewed-up fingernails and pimpled cheeks. Kids in Red Sox jerseys and caps growing up strapped to SUV seat belts and a depleted earth.
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.
A little girl of fearless eyes in her father's arms reached out her hand to touch the shimmer of her grade school summers and high school winters in the air. A sad-faced small boy looked away, knowing his childhood is savagely silent and unreadable to the adults, at the lake of his summer camp where his playmates dive in the obscene opulence of July's scorched mirage, their bodies greased by illuminated water as small miracles of survivable accidents. A girl stood barefoot on the platform's cold, sordid surface of assurance, her fingers interlaced with the boy next to her carrying her heels, their smiles and talks the sunburn of an ancient promise undeterred by the fallibility of movie dialogue and jukebox numbers, her toes curling on a lazy Sunday morning and his mouth filled with the white organic oblivion of solar flares seeping through the blinds - they could taste each other like the smoky pink of flamingos and the impersonal azure of the sky, their faces the makeshift expressions within the parentheses in a long line of quotable desires.
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.
The train came with a grinding shutter, a metallic announcement of tremors and breaks. The driver inconspicuous as stock charts and obituaries. I located my seat among the scattered morning papers and hip-moistened polyester seat covers. Passengers rode out the swings and bumps in their earphones, hand-held game consoles and cell phone text messages. They were working up an appetite for the holiday barbecues over the grills, the biting smells of burning charcoals blueing under the sizzling blush of fat, the drinks and swimming pools, their reflections in the rippling mirrors a hybrid of the Holy Land and hydrophobia. What is the thrill of holding one's breath without the pale-knuckled anticipation of asphyxiation. I remembered a friend swimming punitively every day in the sea after his father's death from drowning. Once he swam so far off the shore that he thought he would never be able to make it back, the current pushing him away from the bobbing buoys marking the shallow reefs like a vibrating belt of lilies. An ex Catholic aspired to a life of priesthood and celibacy, he must be at his closest to what was prior to men and God, the salt in his blood glowing for its homecoming, and when panic and exhaustion made him look at the face of his estranged, womanizing father, he prayed for forgiveness, forgiveness of his arrogance for knowledge.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shinning and glittering -
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.
And if I still knew how, I would have prayed, the spikes and silks of the silent words, the igneous corridor of the broken sound streaking above the attic windows and bird nests. I have to give it all up to have you again, the beginning of freedom behind blood-stained bars, the stainless steel toilet without toilet seat and the towels of army standard issue, shoes without shoelaces, in this uniformed existence between breakfast and lights out, longings are carved into the wood of the butcher block, the freedom to love and drown and be someone without knowing what it is.
Light into the olive entered
And was oil. Rain made the huge pale stones
Shine from within.
The ultimate American sport, bravado's quavering game heating up the barrel of spit and chewing tobaccos in the machine-gun fire, from a bar on Cape Cod of inveterate alcoholics with tanned and wrinkled necks to a dim cabin in the woods of Vermont with no cable and only radio. Tonight New England perched on the Plymouth Rock of its kinetic myth, all cannon salutation and salvation.
My insect instructors have stilled, they are probably stuck together
in some bliss and minute pulse of after-longing
evolution worked out to suck the last juice of the world
into the receiver body. They can't separate probably
until it's done.
The post-baseball crowd spilled out into the parking lots and onto the streets. The subway station swelled with the hysterical anonymity of human mass. A singer I know was playing on the subterranean platform a Coldplay song, his guitar case open wide as an insomniac's sunrise for dollar bills. People waited for the train to take them back to the suburban petri dish of mortgages and marriages gone bad. Teenage couples with chewed-up fingernails and pimpled cheeks. Kids in Red Sox jerseys and caps growing up strapped to SUV seat belts and a depleted earth.
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.
A little girl of fearless eyes in her father's arms reached out her hand to touch the shimmer of her grade school summers and high school winters in the air. A sad-faced small boy looked away, knowing his childhood is savagely silent and unreadable to the adults, at the lake of his summer camp where his playmates dive in the obscene opulence of July's scorched mirage, their bodies greased by illuminated water as small miracles of survivable accidents. A girl stood barefoot on the platform's cold, sordid surface of assurance, her fingers interlaced with the boy next to her carrying her heels, their smiles and talks the sunburn of an ancient promise undeterred by the fallibility of movie dialogue and jukebox numbers, her toes curling on a lazy Sunday morning and his mouth filled with the white organic oblivion of solar flares seeping through the blinds - they could taste each other like the smoky pink of flamingos and the impersonal azure of the sky, their faces the makeshift expressions within the parentheses in a long line of quotable desires.
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.
The train came with a grinding shutter, a metallic announcement of tremors and breaks. The driver inconspicuous as stock charts and obituaries. I located my seat among the scattered morning papers and hip-moistened polyester seat covers. Passengers rode out the swings and bumps in their earphones, hand-held game consoles and cell phone text messages. They were working up an appetite for the holiday barbecues over the grills, the biting smells of burning charcoals blueing under the sizzling blush of fat, the drinks and swimming pools, their reflections in the rippling mirrors a hybrid of the Holy Land and hydrophobia. What is the thrill of holding one's breath without the pale-knuckled anticipation of asphyxiation. I remembered a friend swimming punitively every day in the sea after his father's death from drowning. Once he swam so far off the shore that he thought he would never be able to make it back, the current pushing him away from the bobbing buoys marking the shallow reefs like a vibrating belt of lilies. An ex Catholic aspired to a life of priesthood and celibacy, he must be at his closest to what was prior to men and God, the salt in his blood glowing for its homecoming, and when panic and exhaustion made him look at the face of his estranged, womanizing father, he prayed for forgiveness, forgiveness of his arrogance for knowledge.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shinning and glittering -
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.
And if I still knew how, I would have prayed, the spikes and silks of the silent words, the igneous corridor of the broken sound streaking above the attic windows and bird nests. I have to give it all up to have you again, the beginning of freedom behind blood-stained bars, the stainless steel toilet without toilet seat and the towels of army standard issue, shoes without shoelaces, in this uniformed existence between breakfast and lights out, longings are carved into the wood of the butcher block, the freedom to love and drown and be someone without knowing what it is.