After Apples, Listening

They have all gone now,
the fire engine-red Macintosh,
under batter with cinnamon,
gone to day school
on yellow buses
with brown-baggers,
or bruised to a freckled
taupe and plowed under
for ransom and ritual.

Some have had the life
crushed out of them
for Thanksgiving cup.

Standing on the stiff lawn
downwind of winter,
I drop the first cold
moon of November
into a fractured wheel
of apple limbs
and hear the bark
beg away.

A pine ridge,
thicker than a catcher’s mitt,
grabs half the wind
riding off Monadnock
and squeezes out
wrenching cries that hang,
like wounded pendants,
on necks
of far, thin stars.

Deep in the Earth,
in a thermal tube
of its own making,
an earthworm grows
toward a rainbow trout
sleeping under ice
and waiting to be heard,
or the last of an apple’s pips
still this side of the grass.

Once Screamed to the Flag-waving Drunks
at the Vets Bar, Late, in the Evening

Fifty years now and they come at me, in Chicago,
Crown Point, Indiana, by phone from Las Vegas.
I tell them how it happened, long after parting, one
night when I was in a bar thinking of them all.
               
**

Listen, gunmen,
all I can smell is the gunpowder
on you sharper than booze.
You wear your clothes
with a touch of muzzle flash.

Is it a story you want…?
Listen to the years ago,
to the no shooting,
to the no rout,
to the just dying.

The day stank,
it wore scabs, had odors
to choke tissues and burn
secret laminations of the lungs.
Rain festered in soot clouds,
rose in the Pacific
or the Sea of Japan,
dumped down on us,
came up out of yellow clay
like a sore letting out.

The air must have been
full of bats, of spider weavings;
it was lonely as the lobo,
yet a jungle of minds
filled it with thought leaves
shining with black onyx.

Who needs doctors at dying…?
Prayers sew wounds, piece heads,
hearts, hands together, when blood
and clay strike the same irrevocable
vein, arterial mush; when God
is the earth and clay, silence,
the animal taker leaning to grasp.

Listen, gunmen,
listen you heroes in mirrors
only you see into, we through,
it isn’t the killing, it’s the dying
must be felt, associated,
even if it stinks.


Blood freezes in hot days
of dying, is icicle inside movement
of trickery less than glacier’s,
where a man crawls to his maker
up his own veins, is touched,
feels the firebrand burn in the cold.

Where are the shade trees, cool drinks…?
Once I froze in the confessional
against the fire.

He was a Spick,
they said, washed his skin
too much, wanted to sandpaper it white,
be us, be another man.

But we wagered ourselves
to get him out of a minefield
live as breathing, comrade shot
down in the clay in the rain
in the time of bright eyes rolling
with thunder’s fear.

Was it him we carried, or the stone
of his monument…?
Tons he was of responsibility,
one of us despite the Spick name,
man being borne to die.

God is everywhere,
the catechism says, my son says,
now, years later. It was once
a divinity we carried on the poles,
with his balls gone pistonless,
no more a god to his woman.
His image rolled red on the canvas,
burned through the handles of the litter
as secret as electricity; Spick shooting
himself into us, Godhead shooting signs
up shafts of wood.

Lugging God
on sticks and canvas
is frightening. We felt this.
Jesus! We screamed,
have You let go of this god…?
Do You fill him up making him burn
our hands? He wanders now for times,
rolling himself together,
womanless, childless, a journey
in dark trees, among leaves,
in jungles, to get near You.

God seeking God
at the intercept of shrapnel,
the tearing down and lifting up
by our hands, God
in the cement of death.


Oh, gunmen,
it’s the dying not the killing
you must speak of. This day
is theirs, not ours, belongs
to the gods of the dead,
of the Spick we carried to his dying
and all his brothers, none of them
here among us.

Drink, gunmen,
one to the Spick and grave’s companions,
jungle flights they are in
to match their god with God.

And think, gunmen,
who among us have the longest journey
among leaves, in darkness,
through the spiders of trees,
now.

From Vinegar Hill, A Small Red Star for Me and My Father

This appointment came when light tired, this arrangement, this syzygy
      of him and me and the still threat of a small red star standing
        some time away at my back, deeper than a grain of memory.
I am a quarter mile from him, hard upward on this rugged rock he could
      look up to if only his eyes would agree once more, and it’s a trillion
        years behind my head or a parsec I can’t begin to imagine,
they tell me even dead perhaps, that star. Can this be a true syzygy
      if one is dead, if one is leaning to leave this line of sight
        regardless of age or love or density or how the last piece of light
might be reflected, or refused, if one leaves this imposition? The windows
      of his room defer no light to this night, for it is always night there,
        blood and chemicals at warfare, nerve gone, the main one
providing mirror and lethal lens, back of the eyeball no different
      than out front, but I climb this rock to line up with another rock and him
        in the deep seizure of that stolen room, bare sepulcher,
that grotto of mind.

Today I bathed him, the chest like an old model, boned but collapsible,
      forgotten in a Detroit back room, a shelf, a deep closet, waiting
        to be crushed at the final blow, skin of the organ but a veneer
of fatigue, the arms pried as from a child’s drawing, the one less formidable
      leg, the small testes hanging their forgotten-glove residuum,
        which had begun this syzygy, the face closing down on bone
as if a promise had been made toward an immaculately thin retrieval,
      and, at the other imaginable end of him, the one foot bloody
        from his curse, soured yet holier in mimicry of the near-Christ
(from Golgotha brought down and put to bed, after god and my father
      there are no divinities), toenails coming on a darkness no sky owned,
        foot bottom at its own blood bath, at war, at the final and resolute war
with no winner.

Oh, Christ, he’s had such wars, outer and inner, that even my hand
      in warmth must overcome, and he gums his gums and shakes his head
        and says, sideways, mouth screwed into his outlandish grin,
as much a lie as any look, as devious, cold-fact true, “I used to do this for you,”
      the dark eyes hungry to remember, to bring back one moment
        of all those times to this time; and I cannot feel his hand linger on me,
not its calluses gone the way of flesh or its nails thicker now than they
      ever were meant to be, or skin flaking in the silence of its dust-borne battle,
        though we are both younger than the star that’s behind us
and dead perhaps, as said; then, in a moment, and only for a moment,
      as if all is ciphered for me and cut away, I know the failure
        of that small red star, its distillation and spend still undone,
its yawn red as yet and here with us on the endless line only bent
      by my imagination, the dead and dying taking up both ends of me,
        neither one a shadow yet but all shadows in one, perhaps
a sort of harmless violence sighting here across an endless known.

Child of the Canal

With cold iron we pulled her
up through a mouth of ice,
the pale blue and white dress
twisted as if some unearthly god
had fouled her further paleness,
eyes hammered shut, her hair
caught in one final sweep. Night
too trod silver on her face
where a faint star shone.

Parents, rooted, twined, came
part of the moaning adrift
on darkness, wind and water
at turmoil. This was her
great step forward, escape
from smaller joys, a mouth
of water at elsewhere sears
away the parching, leaks down
through the dry scars of July,
a throat driven arid by August
with its harsh fistfuls.

At another time she ladled
the worn pewter cup at well,
cooled her lips with a moment
of deep rock, roots shifting
underground, years of sediment
from up this other rocky throat.

Stars shine there, passing
softly through the bucket handle,
where the Seven Sisters see
Seven Sisters in that low field.

Oh, we raked her in from the stars.