Alabama, the poems

ALABAMA

COUNTERLIGHT

I breathe another time
eye a stone in the wind

it's nothing
nothing

hands hard and empty

a swallow falls
falling through smokey air

sickle moon
above the evening fog

grey ropes in the trees

Light crosses

hatched light
across my path

I move through the light
of another time

edge of the moon
cutting the shadowy flesh

eye of a bird falling
falling

a stone in the wind

it's nothing
nothing

ropes in the trees

SPITEFUL KISSES, WASTED YOUTH

There are perspectives so deep,

objects and persons so fateful,

perhaps to speak of them is a crime,

Of what I was nothing remains but the sun.

'Boy,' he said, 'grab holt of her mane

with yer left and aim a kick at the sky,

like this.' And he was up on the mare's back.

Eighty-one. 'Shit Sam, if you can, I can.'

Bright the shack where death

peeked through the misty window.

Rags of smoke in the hanging valley.

Quiet horses adrift on the gleaming grass.

The timber drew a green line

across the granite slope.

He told of the frozen Dog Soldiers

at Wounded Knee and his breath hung

on the air before him.

Death lay on the cropped clover,

his big body cold.

Blood stiff in the gelid flesh.

The peak's schist glitters in empty air.

Ice on the rocks, high up,

flashes it's menacing signal.

The dead man sprawls where his last step took him:

Chillicothe Sam.

I slept in knotted sheets

exhausted by your spiteful kisses.

Dust blasted across the blacktop

and the truck rocked like a ship at sea.

Big coppery clouds boomed over the prairie.

Light rubbed our eyes like amethyst sand

and yellow day was dwindling.

Red dust hisses along aluminum skin.

Hunched and hurtling and alone

we bounced across the grainy plain.

Red grit in the mouth, red snot, red sweat,

red coughs, red tears.

We coupled and scratched and fled,

one from another:

fortunate children of a fortunate land.

Hard dirt yard freckled with dog turds.

The tick hound sleeps in a sliver of silver.

Sunbeat gray plank bunkhouse

in a haze of motes and midges.

'Glass Enclosure' ripples through the tattered screen

like snowmelt over igneous rock and yellow silt.

I looked at you and loved you

with mercenary eyes.

You set your traps for me

bit I slipped through your gaps

like a wolf.

That boy lay broken on yellow ground:

A dead kid spread on the cool soapstone.

How did he come to hook and split himself so open?

Dry tears choked him and I

spilled the dust that smote him.

I burned the brazen sky with my fingers

and I burned the houses and

I burned the bed we slept in and

I burned you.

10.

I remember the grinning kid who shot me

as I lay on the hot stones on the empty highway

Old Mexico! His black hair tossed in the sunburnt wind.

He squinted against the light and he

looked scared when the gun went off.

11.

Your small brown breasts groaned against me.

We fucked and moaned as my tears watered your hair.

In that bed-wreckage, in that flesh-collision

I was the dark one. You shone and flew like Guadalupe.

I stripped you of your sexy treasure

and when I woke the young sun kissed your arm

and I saw the razor swing across my ribs.

I took your flags and honey.

You left me scars and sleep.

12.

Of what I was

a wasted youth,

nothing remains

but the sun.

CHERUBINA'S SOMNILOQUY

Black waters mourn like exiles

lonely eyes whipped by white winds

in the russet dawn. This impure sea

has carried off prophetic voices

and these enigmatic sands hide

prints of sacred singers.

This island reeks of prisons.

The sky at night is jet:

I look for my white zodiac

on the rusty ceiling of my cell.

Like idols of the Nile I see

around me, all around me,

men with beastly faces.

I hold your letter in my hand:

'The one who is known, my love,

he does not know.' Your poem

is in my breast, not in my mouth.

I keep it for the lean years

and I will need it. 'Do not

mistake the glass beads of a theory

for the jewels of knowledge.

Leave childhood behind you:

exaltation awaits.'

In your blond eyes stars splinter

into possibilities. The black

tragedy that surrounds us

is not our tragedy. The green

orchard is a shrine of violence.

You grieve my love because

you are outside prison and all

your friends are inside.

It's barely day. The sun

makes of the window a golden

rectangle of light. My body

throws its shadow black against

the wall. The dawn transmutes

my flesh to substances

of violet and viridian.

There are false me of action:

their very act is an obeisance.

She who achieves wisdom

vanishes abruptly. She

who is known does not know.

The darkness is a shroud:

within the act the truth burns naked.

For the wise, you taught me,

acting is thinking. Avoid the

calamities of crime, marriage,

and suicide. I remember ...

I remember your voice: 'Speaking

is singing,' you sang. 'Sing

and be silent.

I will open a chamber of blood

and sink my white palms in it

to mold a tawny cockatrice.

No poem, my love, no poem

can save hot youth from

misperceiving lizards for

dinosaurs. I will pull through

somehow with the help of

clouds and bridges. Enter

this red virgin's court

where words are blanched.

In the grip of terror and delight

keep mute: the gold will find you.

Without fear there is no courage.

Your friend Hakim has said:

'Has the day come when virtue

is called crime, wisdom is

become folly, and glory become

shame? Then burn the city.'

A shadow crosses the brazen

sea. The wind scatters on

the cold stone: sulfur, salt,

and quicksilver. I was

in Paris once where the arsenal

is a library. your friend

speaks from jactation's tower.

Are you a mopse that you mock

sacred things? Pray not so.

Once in the north I saw a swan

tangled in a green monkeypuzzle tree:

she thundered free and swept across

black water. I read: 'You write

so charmingly the epitaph

of my mind.' Don't curse me!

I am like a girl lost in a library:

a girl with a sad dream

for a soul. To invent is to recall:

creation is active memory.

White smoke rises from hieratic

hands and green stars flash

like wings over the blackened font.

If you have felt desire

you have already experienced tragedy.

The glow in the sun is from

the blazing library and the smoke

makes me week. I feel

like Hypatia falling ...

falling in the screaming street.

Are you like that philosopher

laughing at people on the

burning shore form the deck

of his sinking ship? I pray not.

Breaking a promise, you told me,

that's what give the weak

their only taste of freedom.

I will keep faith.

I see before me, up above the water,

three figures flying:

the stabbed man, the parthenos,

and the acolyte. On the right

he dies, while on the left he

worships and thrusts forth his arms

to catch her, in the center:

a barefoot girl, white wrapped,

pearls in her raven hair,

whose knowledge knocks her down.

BAGS

willow dogs whisper in the slant green rain

cool ivory rings link solitary stars in coils of snow

and the wind laughs like a girl in an empty room

moonlight in snowy pools bends like a willow in the black wind

coils of rain on a december evening

wet streets empty as white rooms

silent hours snow and a barking dog

quite slope of avenue between rows of willows

buds dust each branch with a breath of green

on a march morning heaven as blue as liquid metal

wrinkled by swift thrusts of chill spring wind

young gusts spread roses like a knife

as yellow cat tops garden wall of brick

and blind windows wink blue avenues

azure days ambush a city transfigured by solitude

into an ivory ring on a smooth brown finger

linked to a system of dreams in a quite room

and canine light on a white house cuts through a pink shutter

like a shank between the ribs of an old

man whose junes have stained his blue

veined muscles and ambushed his final flesh

ALABAMA EXEQUY (This poem is for D.M, C.W., A.M.C., C.R., and all the innocent victims of racism.)

How many tears does it take to fill our hands?

As few as the knives that cover our tongues.

The deathmoth's phosphorous robe, what fire feeds it?

The apples, the roses of ice, the rooks of sad suns, and in the end, the cooling horizon.

If sand in the arms of the mother is only the clock of the sea,
when will the tide speak?

When the slim palms of the bride discharge their soft sermon,

when the stars dapple her wind-stuffed steeple.

mutilated silence

masked mouths

a noise like a broken rookery

a shot which spilled the starlings blood

kissed lips glass

the darling brood bought killed

baptized confirmed named

panic pours through a hole in the mirror

three particular crystals of carbon

three drops of oil

three nitric rosebuds

three black stars falling forever

three electrons shriven in white smoke

those fingertips never to touch your face

six hands knead the lost bread

of the sinew never to dance

oh the virgin eyes that looked on Jesus

six breathfulls of prayer

three hears quenched

oh girls of Birmingham

oh children of Alabama

Clockwork burst in the morning

Memo in the afternoon

Before the evenings grace of grief

And night wrings out the flesh

The body slowly loses distinction

Small soles turn to pebbles in the path

Young legs tussocks strewn with cypress

Torso mossed bank shades of willow

Cilia curl about the saplings

Brown irises of sorrow

Stare from the depths

Of the furrowed ashlar

Old wall fire-stained

And Lichen-healed

And you who kill the children

We know you --- damn you