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yourself against, how
cunningly you
failed to elude love.
•
Love
is the manna
that falling
makes you
see
the desert
surrounding you
is a desert.
Makes you think dirt is not where you were born.

Plea and Chastisement
When the exact intonation with which
at the sink she said
“Honey”
at last can sound in no one’s head
she will become merely the angry
poems written by an angry son
•
“Honey”
•
which is a cry not about something she must
wash or my latest frightening improvidence
but another wound made by my failure of love
which must flatten the world unless I
forgive her for what in an indecipherable
past she fears she somehow did to cause this
•
At five
thrillingly I won the Oedipal struggle
first against my father then stepfather

In our alliance against the world
we were more like each other
than anyone else
till adolescence and the world
showed me this was prison
•
Out of immense appetite we make
immense promises
the future dimensions of which
we cannot see
then see
when it seems death to keep them
•
I can still hear her
“Honey”
plea and chastisement
•
long since become the pillars of the earth
the price exacted
at the door to the dimensional world

Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall
Though she whom you had so let
in, the desire for survival will not
allow you ever to admit
another so deeply in again
Though she, in, went crazy
vengeful-crazy
so that, as in Dante, there she ate your heart
Though her house that she despised but
spent her life constructing
still cannot, thirty-nine years after
her death, by your ratiocination or rage
be unconstructed
you think, We had an encounter on the earth
each of us
hungry beyond belief
As long as you are alive
she is alive
You are the leaping
dog
capricious on the grass, lunging
at something only it can see.

Late Fairbanks
As in his early films, still the old
abandon, a mischievous, blithe ardor.
Through unending repetition, it became
part of his muscles.
To leap, push
against earth
then
spring.
But the ground under him has changed.
He doesn’t remember when it happened.
When he wasn’t looking
the earth turned to mush.

Against Rage
He had not been denied the world. Terrible
scenes that he clung to because they taught him
the world will at last be buried with him.
As well as the exhilarations. Now,
he thinks each new one will be the last one.
The last new page. The last sex. Each human
being’s story, he tells nobody, is a boat
cutting through the night. As starless blackness
approaches, the soul reverses itself, in
the eerie acceptance of finitude.

For the AIDS Dead
The plague you have thus far survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.
Writing a poem, I cleave to “you.” You
means I, one, you, as well as the you
inside you constantly talk to. Without
justice or logic, without
sense, you survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.

Tyrant
In this journey through flesh
not just in flesh or with flesh
but through it
you drive forward seeing
in the rearview mirror
seeing only
there
always growing smaller
what you drive toward
What you drive toward
is what you once made with flesh
Out of stone caulked with blood
mortared
with blood and flesh
you made a house
bright now in the rearview mirror
white in the coarse sun’s coarse light
No more men died making it
than any other ruthless
monument living men admire

Now as your body betrays you
what you made with flesh
is what you must drive toward
what you must before
you die reassure
teach yourself you made
The house mortared with flesh
as if defying the hand of its
maker
when you pull up to it at last
dissolves as it has always
dissolved
In this journey through flesh
not just in flesh or with flesh
but through flesh

Mouth
It was as if, starving, his stomach
rebelled at food, as quickly as he ate
it passed right through him, his body
refused what his body needed. Recipe
for death. But,
he said, what others think is food isn’t food.
It passed right through him, he shoved
meat into his mouth but still his
body retained nothing. Absorbed
nothing. He grows
thinner. He thinks he cannot live on
nothing. He has the persistent
sense that whatever object he seeks
is not what he seeks,—
… now he repeats the litany of his choices.
Love, which always to his surprise
exhilarated even as it tormented
and absorbed him. Unendingly under
everything, art—; trying to make
a work of art he can continue to inhabit.
The choices he made he said he made
almost without choosing.
The best times, I must confess, are when
one cannot help oneself.
Has his pride at his intricate
inventions come to nothing?
Nothing he can now name or touch is food.
Sex was the bed where you learned to be
naked and not naked at the same time.
Bed
where you learned to move the unsustainable

weight inside, then too often
lost the key to it.
Faces too close, that despite themselves
promise, then out of panic disappoint.
Not just out of panic; only in his mind
is he freely both here and not here. The imperious
or imagined needs of those you
love or think you love
demand you forget that when you smell your
flesh you smell
unfulfilment.
We are creatures, he thinks, caught in an obscure,
ruthless economy,—
… his hunger
grows as whatever his mouth fastens upon
fails to feed him. Recipe
for death. But he’s sure he’ll learn something
once he sees
La Notte again. He’s placed Duino Elegies
next to his bed. He craves the cold
catechism Joyce mastered writing “Ithaca.”
Now he twists within the box
he cannot exit or rise above.
He thinks he must die
when what will not allow him to retain food
makes him see his body has disappeared.

Rio
I am here to fix the door.
Use has almost destroyed it. Disuse
would have had the same effect.
No, you’re not confused, you didn’t
call. If you call you still have hope.
Now you think you have
lived past the necessity for doors.
Carmen Miranda
is on the TV, inviting you to Rio.
Go to sleep while I fix the door.

Presage
Here, at the rim of what has not yet
been, the monotonous
I want to die sung
over and over by your
soul to your soul
just beneath sound
which you once again fail
not to hear, cannot erase or obliterate
returns you to the mirror of itself:—
Mumps, Meningitis, Encephalitis
all at once, together, at
age eight or nine—
•
(later, for months, you dragged your left
leg as you walked, that’s what everyone
told you because you hadn’t noticed, you
were undersea, the entire
perceptual world
undersea, death your new
familiar, like the bright slime-

green bile you watched for days
inexorably pumped from your stomach)
•
or, later, at thirteen, TYPHOID,
when the doctors said the next two days
will decide if you live, or die—;
you tried, very calmly, to ask yourself
whether you did actually want to live,
the answer, you knew, not clear—
then you heard
something say
I want to live, despite the metaphysical
awfulness of this incontinent
body shitting uncontrollably into a toilet in
time, this place, blind self, hobbled, hobbling animal,—
•
You are undersea. These are not entwined
ropes, but thick twisted slime-green
cables. Laid out before you is the fabled
Gordian knot, which you must cut.
Which you must cut not
to rule the earth, but escape it.
All you must do is sever them. Your blade
breaks, as the ties that bind thicken, tighten.

Elegy for Earth
Because earth’s inmates travel in flesh
and hide from flesh
and adore flesh
you hunger for flesh that does not die
But hunger for the absolute
breeds hatred of the absolute
Those who are the vessels of revelation
or who think that they are
ravage
us with the promise of rescue
•
My mother outside in the air
waving, shriveled, as if she knew
this is the last time—
watching as I climbed the stairs
and the plane swallowed me. She and I
could no more change what we