Dothead, page 5
As Botticelli’s Ursula Undress
Holding her own seashell on Crab Kythera.
Imagine our own lonely Sol
Stripped bare
Letting us in on her full name,
Solitaire,
And the implacable black hole
At our galaxy’s core
Pussy Galore.
2. The Short and Happy Life of Plenty O’Toole
This one died in golden paint,
Fleshious metal, trophy blonde.
This one splashed among piranhas.
This one, while she danced with Bond,
Swung in his arms as a pistol rose,
Took the bullet, and took a dip.
This one licked some poison dripped
Down a thread onto her lip.
This one suffered death by hammock,
Strangled in its rope cocoon.
This one drowned herself in Venice,
The only one who died too soon.
How much better so to perish,
Well before the next year’s film;
Not to move into his flat,
Wipe his sink, or cook for him;
Mix the drink, then see him irked you
Served him his martini stirred.
Even worse, for all the jam he
Wipes on his pajama shirt,
Old man’s diet, tea and toast
(How old is he? Ninety-four?),
He can go to sleep in sagging
Age and wake as Roger Moore,
Only in his dossier
Rotting like a Dorian Gray.
Leave the balcony unlocked
And he’ll slip out for days and days,
Where he’s gone top secret, always,
Never one Wish You Were Here.
He recalls them by their perfumes,
Names them, like champagnes, by year.
3. Hymn to Sean Connery
Connery, how did I end up
A double 0 thirty-year-old
Father of two?
So must all international adolescents of mystery
Grow into men domestically mastered—
For the hand that begins as a Walther PPK,
Knuckles by the cheek, index finger in the air,
Ages into a handshake
And signs, signs, signs away,
And time that strolls past the daydreaming
Camera shutter
Has been known to turn without warning
And with the gun hidden at its side
Shoot daydreamers dead,
The circle swaying to and fro
Before it tumbles to the lower right-hand corner,
Goes white, and dilates
Into the first scene
Of the rest of a life.
Connery, before the baccarat, you, too,
Held earthly burdens, earthly offices—
Bricklayer, coffin polisher, milkman;
Connery, eternal bachelor, may I, too,
Someday unzip this mortal scuba suit
And reveal the tuxedo beneath.
IN A GALLERY
Notice the face of the Infant, the deep-set
eyes, the sharpness of the nose.
His body is tallow, his face is stone.
The dissonance is Photoshop.
Not one of the Kings, not the lamb, not the Virgin—
only the Infant in this scene
is staring the camera down, so to speak,
observing us observing him.
We know that the Master could show, when he wished to,
a youthful softness—witness his
Madonna and Clouds, his Persephone,
both paintings dated 1515,
the same year as this one. The Virgin herself
is much more childlike than her child.
That gaze is deliberately worldly-wise,
or maybe otherworldly-wise.
To its left, on loan from the Prado, you see
Self-Portrait with a Tongue of Fire,
which the Master completed the year of his fall
from Barcelona’s cathedral scaffold.
The titular “tongue” is the paintbrush with which
he paints himself as on a mirror—
with fractures to both of his arms, he was forced
to clip the brush between his teeth.
Foreshortened, it’s roughly the length of a tongue,
emerging from the bitter smile
of an archangel smitten for heady ambition.
He soon preferred his handicap
to his hands; he never did go back.
I had to lick myself onto
the canvas, he wrote to a friend years later,
like polish off the boots of God—
ET TU
So now you’re mouthing off to God, too?
The voice He gave me’s too strong not to.
FUGITO ERGO SUM.
The escaped slave’s motto.
Get down on your knees and do it.
Slowly. The way you were taught to.
Mine eyes have seen the glory
As they damn well ought to.
An eye for an eye won’t sate Him.
Good thing I brought two.
LOGOMACHIA
a. NEUROSCIENCE
What used to be illusory
Is measured now in real mists
Of neurochemicals
Nothing neural is chimerical
The “Mind” is nothing, while the Brain
Is nothing if not realist
Assaying with a fine-tuned spine
Its parts per million of pain
(And skeptical of love or poem
Until precise receptors hum)
It turns out Marx was right, a hymn’s
A little hit of heroin
The Lord, the Lord is IV morphine
The Devil is in the endorphins
b. ERASURE OF THE FINAL SCENE OF KING LEAR (I)
Take away meaning.
Kneel and ask of rogues
the mystery of things.
Fire eyes flesh: Come hither.
Question the old and miserable
Father power. Stand up.
No prophets should we stomach.
Prisoners, witness, I create my lord.
Joy lies in blood, bread,
art, medicine.
His name, name, name is lost.
Bare-gnawn noble speech,
honour this toad-spotted heart.
Warlike tongue,
spurn, bruise, speak!
The law is paper.
The law cannot govern
the dark place of sweetness.
Rags and stones
reveal this blessing,
a flawed joy, but not
a bell that rings for the slave.
Bodies, alive, atremble, touch us
with urges poisoned and brief:
Time is a stain, a plague,
a cross deserving
a dog, a horse, a rat.
Never, never, never button your lips:
Wonder has usurped his soul rule.
The journey calls.
We must obey what we feel.
So march.
b. ERASURE OF THE FINAL SCENE OF KING LEAR (II)
Birds, butterflies, foxes
thrive in my bosom.
I sweat and bleed
and feel their sharpness.
Father, brother, husband,
sister, wife:
Love all in my name.
Sickness is before you.
I come.
I place below thy foot
my heart.
Wisdom should breathe and bruise.
I answer you
with my son.
I am here, nursing death,
blessing from first to last
the clamour and the pity
and the howl, howl, howl.
Here on the cross
I am desperately present.
Look up.
a. RADIOLOGY
Picture the fibrous spokewheel-
scaffold of an infinitely thin
wafer of orange
held to a window, transilluminated
in its circumference of rind.
Now picture a volume of human
reduced to planes and fluttering
under my thumb like a flip-book
showing the disease in action.
Every one of those planes: hundreds of lines
stacked tight enough to resolve
the speck not yet a lump.
Every one of those lines: a string
of pixels end to end, razor-
luminous horizon round a darkening world.
Each pixel: a point geometry
defines dimensionless, no height,
no width, no death. I see what ails the body
by regressing body back to spirit:
the volume a stack of planes, the plane a row
of lines, the line a string of points,
and the point, at last, nothing at all, all form
substanceless by radiologic proof. I read
no images more imaginary than
the mind’s, every layer of it immaterial—
the gray matter,
the white matter,
the dark.
c. STEM CELLS
In the hospital’s hothouse,
cardiac strawberries blink on a vine.
A walnut shell hides a brain rich
in good fat; a lychee’s peel,
a pale eyeball high in vitamin C.
The doctor has good news!
His pharmacopoeia has given way
to a cornucopia,
one that spills ovarian grapes
and bananas that promise never to go soft.
A single stem has borne, has birthed fruit
that shall not be forbidden us.
The pomegranate spleen, yea,
the kidney-bean kidney shall be ours.
Splendid! delights a voice
over the hospital PA system.
Splendid, you summer-sweet sons of Adam—
using an apple seed of Knowledge
to grow the Tree of Life!
No one can say whose voice it is,
but its hiss is a scythe’s.
d. HERETICAL FUGUE
That Christ
did not always exist but was created
by, and subordinate to, the Father.
That the Father
and his Son are shoot and cutting, Christ
at the moment of severance created.
That the created
Christ was distinct from the true Christ
as the living God is from your dying father.
That Christ,
by being born of a virgin, created
a rival cult of the Mother.
That the Mother
is always indulgent, the Father
always angry toward the life they created.
That the Father
tortured the Son in front of his Mother
until she wailed please stop for the love of Christ—
d. SHADOW-CROSS FUGUE
I just couldn’t breathe in its shadow.
It weighed what the cross weighed, that shadow
Cross, more than any shadow should. No
Sun could shoulder that kind of shadow,
No man kneel there without a shudder.
The dark beams crushed me flat as shadow,
My flesh, grass, matted by the shade. No
Way a mere cedar cross could shed so
Much dark matter, so weighty a shadow.
I just couldn’t breathe in that shadow
Until I made myself a shadow-
Swallowing sea and swallowed shadow
The way a sea will swallow daylight.
The shadow splashed down, and the sun’s light
Spilled over—only I was the light’s
Sole source, both the prism and the light
Beam split into the eye’s wide palette.
The splash displaced a volume of light
Equal to one sun, this light the light
That made of the shadow-cross a light
Cross to bear, the light that raised my light-
Weight body until then strange to flight
But now, death made light of by his dying,
Light-footed, fallen, risen, flying.
c. PANDEMIC GHAZAL
Virus infinitely versatile. Virus
Of guardrail, iPod, turnstile. Virus
Eager to go
The extra mile. Virus
Seaborne, colonizing
The Enchanted Isles. Virus
Airborne, whistling
All the while. Virus
Discreetly flashing holster
And assassin smile. Virus
Smuggling fever up
The Red Nile. Virus
Of folk song, urban legend,
Official denial. Virus
Squatting on the sky
Chameleon-style. Virus
In New York City scheming
How to make a pile. Virus
Never standing
Trial. Virus
Believing God
Gave it guile. Virus
Making a killing and
Making it in style.
e. THE WALTZ OF DESCARTES AND MOHAMMED
There is
No God
But God.
I think
Therefore
I am.
I am;
There is
Therefore
No God.
I think,
“But God,
But God…”
I am,
I…think.
Is there
No God
Therefore?
Therefore
Good for
No God
Am I.
There is,
I think,
“I.” Think
There: For
There is
But God.
I am
No God,
No good.
I think
I am
Here but
For God.
There is…
I think there is
No God but the God
I am there for.
f. FE
Translate chemistry into Spanish, and iron
is faith—this pile of shavings,
the Devil’s own toenails, the same
ore that’s at our origin, heme.
Of all the metals, the ferrous to me seems
fairest. Aurum is more ardent, argent
rarer, but blood’s core ore, though everywhere,
is precious air. I prefer
meteoric iron, pig iron, iron wrought or rust
(its every red felicitous for us)
to fetid sulfur and the fey ironies
of faded faith. Without heme’s boxcars, our
carbon would oxygen-starve, without heme’s
hexagon, the only Ferris wheel
air cares to ride. Breath’s effort otherwise
would be nothing for, sigh after sigh heaved
through a sieve. Hymn heme,
this matter of life and breath, using the very
inspiration it is carrying. Hymn heme
for carrying us home,
in the femoral Styx, in the infernal vein
this iron oar of the Ferryman.
g. HOLY
The firefly sees a knife twist in the lid of the jar
and thinks: Okay, at least this kid is going to give me stars.
The stars will tell you, even emptiness has pores—her black
holes open by the thousand when she sprawls and suns her back.
Our one-way ears, the face’s clustered input/output jacks—
just block the ports that hook us up, and watch the screens go black.
The eyes are mine shafts, and dripping they lead down to the mind
whose diamonds tip our heaven-drills. Evolving or designed,
this holeyness is all the evidence of God we get,
that and the patient rain of showerhead on shower grate
whose local summer says, Step in and open up your mouth,
says Drink and sing! because what’s out wants in, what’s in wants out.
It’s why we cut windows in any place we mean to live—
the airtight suffocates us. We survive by being sieves.
Spermaceti, blowholes gouged by the Lord God’s harpoon,
sing in their ice-cap chapels, Blessed is the breathing wound.
g. DEVOLUTION
Pink, filigreed, whimsically intricate
At ear and iris, man marked
The pinnacle of God’s rococo period.
Showy technique tricked out that late art—
No more the high geometry of angels,
Those perfect freehand circles, lines, and angles.
Man had been veined labyrinthine, studded
With senses, jointed with balls, sockets, hinges.
His mind was a jungle of nerves, his skin
All marshy with sweat glands—an omnium-
Gatherum of naked, downy, hairy; squishy,
Knobby, slippery, pimply; round, sloped, flat.
The Master, grown sick of his own slick skill,
Longed for heart and the heart’s simplicity
That made the sun and the other stars.
And so he started to unstack
The odd fantastic shapes
Of vertebrae, unwire
The self-indulgently
Complex cerebral cortex,
Reroute the circulation
Into a sloshing trough,
His specious species rinsed
Of its once-precious reason.
That knotty body
Was soon streamlined
Into a flatworm
Devoid of eyes,
