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Glutton
Ropes of my dead
grandmother’s unreproducible
sausage, curing for weeks
on the front porch. My mother,
thoroughly
Americanized, found them
vaguely shameful.
Now though I
taste and taste
I can’t find that
taste I so loved as a kid.
Each thing generates the Idea
of itself, the perfect thing that it
is, of course, not—
once, a pear so breathtakingly
succulent I couldn’t
breathe. I take back that
“of course.”
It’s got to be out there again,—
… I have tasted it.

Whitman
Once, crossing the Alps by car at night, the great glacier suddenly there in the
moonlight next to the car, in the silence
alone with it.
•
I heard Robert Viscusi read only once, on a rainy night in Manhattan.
At the end of a long evening, he read the final lines of the first poem in the first
Leaves of Grass, before the poems had titles.
He read with a still, unmelodramatic directness and simplicity that made the
lines seem as if distilled from the throat of the generous gods.
Early Whitman’s eerie
equilibrium staring as if adequately at war’s carnage, love’s carnage,—
•
… suspended, I listen.
•
This is the departing
sun, distributing its gifts to the earth as it disengages from earth
without grief.
Elation as the hand disengages from its consequence, as the sovereign soul
charmed by its evanescence
toys with and mocks the expectations of worlds.

As you listen, you think this inaccessible
exultation indifferent to catastrophe’s etiology or end
is wisdom.
•
A poem read aloud is by its nature a vision of its nature.
Vision you cannot now reenter, from which when you sound the words within
later unaided and alone, you are expelled.

2. Soundings
Soundings of the world, testings
later forgotten but within whose
corpses you then burrowed, feeding: wounds
that taught the inverse of what adults
asserted, even thought they believed: taught
you do not have to hold on tight
to what you love, its nature
is not ever to release you: each testing, each
sounding of the world
one more transparent drop
fallen over your eye and hardening
there, to make you what you secretly
think by trial you have become: perfect
eyeball, observer

without a master. (Untranscendental
disgusted-with-lies
homemade American boy’s eyeball.)
•
Each creature must
himself, you were sure, grind the lens
through which he perceives the world.
•
Illusion of mastery the boy could not
sustain. Now you have no image, no
recollection of incidents, people,
humiliations, that showed you how
small, absurd you were—
but as if, in all things human, hegemony
breeds loathing
soon all you can see is that the ravenous,
dependent, rage-ridden
brain you inhabit
is not a lens, not a prism you have
flawlessly honed that transmits
light, but this suffocating
bubble that encases you, partial, mortal,
stained with the creature that created it.
•

You are the creature that created it.
You You You you cried, reaching
for a knife
to cut through the bubble
smelling of you. Why did soiled
you, before you even knew what sex was, want
to put his thing in your mouth?
The corpses on which you had so long
fed, turned their faces toward you—;
priests, they said, you must invite
priests to surround you.
•
The question became not
whether a master, but which.
You schooled and reschooled
yourself to bind with
briars your joys and desires.
•
This. Before a series of glamorous or
pure, compellingly severe
chimeras that mastered
the chaos I perceived within and without
all my life I have
implored:—

this. REMAKE ME in the image of THIS.

3.
your gaze, Walt Whitman, through its
mastery of paper
paper on which you invented the illusion of your voice
the intricacies of whose candor and ambition
disarm me
into imagining this is your voice
fueled by the ruthless gaze that
unshackled the chains shackling
queer me in adolescence
(unshackled me maybe for three days
during which I tried to twist out of
knowing what you made me see I knew
and could not bear that I knew
immured in an America that betrayed
the America you taught still must exist)
Ginsberg called you lonely old
courage teacher
but something in young electric you
was before the end
broken

wary alerted listening buck
that seeing all
cannot see or imagine
itself broken
the melancholy spectacle
through your mastery of paper
as you entirely predicted
transformed into the gaze of others
•
The event, or many mini-events, only implicitly recorded in a poem.
After his father’s death but before dressing the mutilated bodies of soldiers, as he
walked the shore-line touching debris, flotsam, pierced by his own
evanescence everywhere assaulting him, by “the old thought of likenesses,”
his own sweet sole self like debris smashed beneath his feet at the sea’s edge,
as he walked there, the old exultant gaze, like an animal’s poise, was gone.
What is left then but to revise and enlarge your poem till the end of time, the
eerie early equilibrium smashed, the old confidence like a stream that was
always there now gone, like the dust you can’t cease staring at clinging to
your shoes?
But impossible to face becoming detritus, impossible to face it naked, without
armor, without ideas about Idea, America, song about Song,
impossible to smell the breath of death without visions, broken, makeshift,
aiming at an eloquence that so insinuates, so dyes each vision with the
presence, the voice of the singer,
we who have seen what we see through his sight are his progeny,

impossible to face death without progeny as spar on which to cling.
Robert Viscusi, the bullet you aimed at Leaves of Grass bounced off its spine
and landed, hot, intact, where I now still sit.

FOUR

Three Tattoos
ONE

Maria Forever

labyrinthine intricate
coiling pent dragon
TWO

THREE

BRAD
•

gaudy skin prophesying
the fate of the heart
reminder that if you once
cross me
I can destroy you
indelible capital letters
written in flesh to remind
flesh what flesh has forgotten
•
It must be lifted from the mind
must be lifted and placed elsewhere
must not remain in the mind alone

As You Crave Soul
but find flesh
till flesh
almost seems sufficient
when the as-yet-unwritten
poem within you
demands existence
all you can offer it are words. Words
are flesh. Words
are flesh
craving to become idea, idea
dreaming it has found, this time, a body
obdurate as stone.
To carve the body of the world
and out of flesh make
flesh obdurate as stone.
Looking down into the casket-crib
of your love, embittered by
soul you crave to become stone.
You mourn not
what is not, but what never could have been.

What could not ever find a body
because what you wanted, he
wanted but did not want.
Ordinary divided unsimple heart.
What you dream is that, by eating
the flesh of words, what you write
makes mind and body
one. When, after a reading, you are asked
to describe your aesthetics,
you reply, An aesthetics of embodiment.

Things Falling From Great Heights
Spasm of vision you crave like a secular pentecost
The subject of this poem
is how much the spaces that you now move in
cost
the spaces that you were
given
were born to and like an animal used but then ran from
ran from but then thought you had
transformed
enough to accede to
the choices you made to inhabit the spaces where you
when prompted repeat the story of how you arrived
they cost your life

O ruin O haunted
O ruin O haunted
restless remnant of
two bodies, two
histories
you felt the unceasing
force of
but never understood,—
terrified that without an
x-ray, a topography of
their souls
you must repeat their lives.
•
You did not repeat their lives.
You lodged your faith
in Art—
which gives us
pattern, process
with the flesh
still stuck to it.
With flesh, you

told yourself, pattern
is truer, subtler, less
given to the illusion
seeing frees you from it.
•
Or, you did repeat their lives,—
… repeated them by
inverting them.
How you hurtled