Dothead, page 4
milk of the real.
We must grow our hearts up
in this hothouse
of broken windows
because our bodies
have grown up by themselves.
Vets nest
in the hollows of buildings,
and in rushes the sea.
Baby, be good to me.
THE DOLL
I give her earring eyes.
I loved that topaz glower.
Her skirt I cut from a bra she forgot.
For hair I skim the shower.
For lips…no lips for her.
I just don’t want to hear it.
No tongue. The sheddings will suffice
To localize the spirit.
Barbie’s got soap-scum hairs
Glued to her chemo skull.
Looks like my doll’s all tarted up.
I rub her stale fish smell’s
False incense off my fingers.
And now the fun begins.
She did like a poking. (All too well.)
I shake the box of pins.
She stares up at the ceiling.
I take her in my lap.
Pain will be new to these parts. The eyes,
The heart: I mark a map.
CROCODILE PORN
Pebble-plated
noir and olive
with a palm-pale
flip side, she is
lying sly, her
brow an eyelid-
fitted islet
in the knee-high
Nile shallows.
Ever since the
Eocene, the
scene has hardly
altered; love re-
quires all its
stubby-leggèd
snaggle-toothèd
devotees to
dance a two-step.
Now his heavy-
breathing maw is
moving in an
antediluvian
heavy petting.
He is gently
agile in his
next maneuver,
getting her at
last cloaca
to cloaca:
Linked, they sink in
zodiac-a-
ligned and kissing-
kismet genome-
swap, two uglies
bumping uglies,
age-old algae-
covered lovers
going under
in a fade-out
swirl of delta
silt and bubbles.
JOINT EFFORT
Let the hunchback lie hump down
upon the Bactrian camel. On that snug foundation
let the leper stand tiptoe, balancing
the cripple’s cane on his nose, while the cripple,
upside down, balances atop the cane, index finger
on the hook handle. Let the cripple’s legs scissor
and interlock with the gymnast’s, whose chalked hands
should support the flat-footed orangutan.
Let the orangutan be trained beforehand
to hold a dead veteran overhead, the body draped.
On the veteran’s shoulders and hips let the retiree
align the rubber-nubbin feet of his walker
and, standing tall, wear a hard hat with a flagpole
coming off it, atop that flagpole a circus elephant,
one leathery foot planted, the body rocking back.
On the top curve of that elephant’s S-shaped trunk
let the seal lie arching its back, on its whiskery snout
a beach ball that looks like a globe, spinning.
Let the five-star general clap his hands on that beach ball.
You know he wants to. Let him do a handstand on it.
Feet on his feet, let the poet turning clockwise
support a fruit bat on his head, and let that fruit bat
in turn support a larger fruit bat, between whose ears
should rest the toe of the ballerina’s vertical left shoe.
Let the ballerina hold the stepladder steady.
At this point, the tower will have crossed the cloud cover;
the shelf should be in view, and what is kept upon the shelf.
Now let the child skip school. Let the child
climb the tower to its tippy top and place her hand
inside the jar and bring the cookies to earth.
THE TOP
SAVE THE CANDOR
Every tripod-
toting birder
knows it never
nests on urban
girders. Even
fences set its
scalded-crimson
head askew, its
waddle swinging,
wings akimbo.
Few have got it
on their lists and
fewer still have
caught it singing,
this endangered
North American
candor, cousin
of the done-in
dodo, big-eyed
Big Sur tremor-
tenor — only
ten or twenty
hang glide over
Modoc County,
humbly numbered
(as their days are)
for us crazy
crown- and throat- and
belly-gazers.
Any niche as
fragile as a
candor’s renders
its extinction
certain. We can
sabotage its
habitat with
half a laugh or
quarter murmur,
fluster coveys’
worth of candors
off their branches,
which, abandoned,
soon are little
more than snarking-
grounds for minor
birds, the common
snipe, the yellow-
bellied bittern.
THE METAMORPHOSIS
When money changes hands
The fingers morph
Into digits. Your changed
Hands grow slowly
More grasping, their once-
Fine arts increasingly
Sketchy. Even a handshake
Takes the measure
Of a stranger’s worth.
Your hands, once changed
By money, never do
Change back, hardened
And sharpened, knuckles
Turned to nickel, cuticles
Tipped with nails. Every
Morning, your left handcuffs
Itself by a Bulova
To a speeding commuter train.
The change spares
Your wrists at first, but in time
It plaques on up your arms
Like green on copper
Or ivy up a league.
By tax season, anything
An unseen hand can bundle
Is a fund, anything
In reach is a rung.
Your hands are nothing if not
Climbers, and the high
Is worth it, there on a ledge
Seventy-five stories
Above New York, the usual
Empty hands pointing up
While yours, in answer, raise
Like two feelers
On a metamorphosis
Your long unfeeling
Middle fingers.
LINEAGE
And Flintlock begat Springfield, the breech birth,
And Springfield begat Enfield, and Enfield begat Gatling,
And Gatling begat Maxim, who begat Rat, who begat
The blessed Twin boys Tat and Tat,
And Tat begat Kalashnikov, who begat Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov.
To make yourself a dum-dum bullet
That will on impact rip apart,
That when you shoot somebody’s stomach
Will lodge a fragment in his heart,
I recommend this simple method,
It’s quick, and quite low-cost,
Just take a switchblade to your bullet
And carve a little cross.
Messrs. Smith & Wesson, little one,
Are here to share a lesson, little one,
Never walk to school alone,
Always bring your piece along.
O piece, O piece, O piece on earth,
O piece in which all men exult,
The silly girls want pretty ponies,
The smart ones want a Colt.
Pop-pop-pop quiz, facts are facts.
Forget your reading: Add, subtract.
Arithmetic admits no sentiment.
Sixth Commandment, Second Amendment.
And Winchester begat Remington, and Heckler begat Koch,
And Walther, son of Luger, begat Glock upon Beretta,
And their lineage spread across the earth, to the shooting-range
Appalachians, to Stockton in its hoodie, to the camo-vested Dakotas,
Yea, unto the kindergartens of furthest Connecticut
Their children and their children’s children spread,
The automatic and the semiautomatic, the all-American equalizer,
The sawed-off, the cocked, the locked and loaded manstopper, childstopper,
For such was the will of God, the granddaddy of all Founding Fathers.
John Moses Browning, born in Ogden, Utah,
Took, in his smithy, the measure of men.
Nine millimeters, end to end.
WELCOME HOME, TROOPS!
Observe the Argive,
redivivus
with his Bethesda
Special prosthetic
elbows, his Versed-
reversed remember-
remember, looking
alive in olive—
the aftershave
civilian, the crew-cut
oorah. His stop-
loss odyssey
went Kabul, morphine,
Ramstein, Stateside,
and back—round-robin
desert wrestling,
tag out, tag in.
Now, retrofitted,
the soon-to-be
robohobo
thumps down the Jetway,
a glint in his eye,
springs in his step,
no place like home.
ARE YOU HUNGRY?
Because I could eat.
I could eat a horse, but my girlfriend wants me to cut back on meat.
I could eat this office building, all umpteen floors of it, cubicles, struts, and caulking.
I could spoon Osiris out of the river Nile and wash him down with the blood of Richard Dawkins.
I could simmer khmer in a pol pot and still have room for kim jong-il with rooster sauce.
I could snatch the Lean Cuisine from the beeping microwave of my boss’s boss’s boss.
I could wolf down a vampire and sink my teeth in a zombie’s neck.
I could pick off stars like chicken feed with a peck peck peck peck peck.
I could go for a Russian sub right now and savor its nukes like so much pepper.
I could gut a thousand laser printers and feed my yawning maw their paper.
I’m kind of hankering for the dark matter at the galaxy’s gooey core.
I could detach my mandible and swallow until my midriff matched the skyline of New York.
I could shred the Great Plains and the Ukraine alike, a one-man locust swarm.
I could s’more the marshmallow moon on a stick until it’s droopy warm.
Seven spheres my caviar, seven seas my primordial soup of the day,
I jones for the bread bowl, the surf and the turf, the Prime Rib and shrimp tray,
The succulent, truculent hurricane, the delicacy of its eye,
The three worlds, the four winds, the pastrami and the rye.
TASTE BUD SONZAL
Lot’s wife looked back and froze to salt. I look up and burn to sugar.
My master’s ashes swirl worlds. His chalk dust turns to sugar.
I’m all sweet tooth and golden tongue but still can’t say your Name.
Water is life, granted, but Lord I sure yearn for sugar.
Stir into the sky, dissolve, let your atoms sweeten the rain.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. You alone return to sugar.
Beauty, like birth, takes labor. Be rule-bound, but be game.
How much salt must a lover sweat to earn his sugar?
Spurn that dirty sugar. Indulgence decays.
Most of you is water. What remains is salt.
Bitter is best. Sour surely deserves praise.
If you can’t stomach these, better aim for salt.
No sweet-talking Judgment, Amit, come the end of days.
Just you wait. Your honeyed words will sound the same as salt.
DYSTOPIARY
No weed’s a weed but in
its gardener’s eye
forever seeing otherwise.
This is the same
dissatisfaction that
deemed even Adam
an unbecoming growth
and wedded both
to seed and spade, to breed
and birth in blood.
A gardener whose vision
is keen enough
can see a weed in any
deviance of green.
And this is why I fear
Utopians
and everybody in
the business of
perfecting out of love
the world we have—
these gardeners of men.
You can’t foresee
before they come to power
who’s going to be
the weed and who the flower.
1914: THE NAME GAME
Asquith had it from Haldane,
Who had it from Poincaré,
While Viviani’s tête-à-tête
At tea with Edward Grey
Revealed that Bethmann cabled
Paléologue to say
The very thing Sazonov said
To Moltke’s attaché.
I see London,
I see France,
I see Clio’s
Underpants:
Muse of History,
Muse of the Meuse,
Pardon my French,
But Muse, j’accuse.
It’s time for the name game, children, the blame game.
Come get your clues. Now what begins with B?
Beginnings, Baghdad, Balfour, Bosch, Berlin, let’s see:
It’s time for the name game, children, the same game
That launched a thousand dreadnoughts
That launched a thousand dead men on the oil-dark sea.
The innominate equal the innumerable.
Statisticians do their Sommes,
But the nom de guerre and the nom de plume
Leave all but the scholars numb.
Remarque, Barbusse, Sassoon, and Graves
Saw through a sniper scope
Their future lines, as fine as crosshairs
Trained on the Death of Hope—
Surely an epic theme, in time,
Source of their deathless fame.
Collar a scholar, you find a schoolboy
Out to make his name.
Joffre muttered to Lanrezac
During the “Marseillaise”
The same thing Falkenhayn confided
To Ludendorff the day
Kitchener cabled French what Haig
Was told without delay,
Rational actors, learning their lines
For Passchendaele’s Passion play.
The names, the names, the names remain,
These letters, nailed in place,
Though soldiers down in the soiled earth
Though Tommies drowned in the solid earth
Vanished without a
Marnefully sobbing, hiccuping Ypres Ypres,
The mum of the lad (she, unidentified; he, unidentifiable)
Expects no Clemenceau from stern War.
A nor’waster pulls into the Gare de L’Waste.
Don’t worry, O generic Mum-of-Lad, O mute
Liverpudlian Hecuba in your unisex ankle-length
Gabardine coat: Bad news has Gavrilo Princip aim.
The War Office telegram will target you by name.
BLACK HANDS
Laudanum-lullabied, schnapps-
Nightcapped, hemophiliac
Kings and hot-blooded counselors
Sit up in bed with chest pains,
But when the doctors arrive,
Stethoscopes out, to listen,
Each unbuttoned silk nightshirt
Reveals the crisp soot print of
A black hand.
Gavrilo Princip’s standing
On the wrong street this June day
With his hands in his pockets
When the archduke’s open-top
Car takes a right turn and stops.
Gabriel feels a soft throb,
Looks down, and sees to his shock
There, at the end of his arm,
A black hand.
Charcoal on the cheeks is best
For night raids gathering fresh-
Blown roses off a thornbush.
In a land that is no man’s
Lies a man that is no man,
His helmet glowing yellow-
Green then going out again—
A firefly cupped in night’s
Black hands.
Kindest of all: the Harlem
Hellfighters. Ich black slave, du
White slave, they chuckle, poking
A cigarette in a near-
Dead Bosch’s mouth as if he were
A new dad. Yet in this hell
They bring hell, give hell, and close
The black eyes of their black dead
With black hands.
JAMES BOND SUITE
1. The Astronomy of Bond Girls
I want to name stars the way Ian Fleming named women.
Every falling star a Domino Vitali,
The star of Bethlehem rechristened Vesper Lynd,
The polestar reliably Moneypenny.
Bodies celestial deserve such invention,
And not just the stars, the blonde comets, too.
Name one for Honey Rider coming
Again and again, almost the same gold
