Ants (Brighton Writer's Workshop Poem #1)

If you smash an ant
in a specific way and drag
its scent-organ along a surface
other ants will follow
looking for food.
If you find a child
who does not wince to tear
an ant apart under a microscope
you can guide its hand in swoops
along a surface, until
a river the color of pupils navigates
the labyrinth of its name.

Jellyfish

In the long curl of a tentacle:
a kind of laziness,
an understanding of currents.

At the edge, where the bell sweeps in
the way a person holds herself to herself in a crowd:
an understanding of space.

In the crush of a large bloom, and in its quiet:
an understanding of going-and-returning.

---

Jellyfish have no mythology
and leave few fossils.

They have no lungs or gills
and cannot lie.

They can sometimes perceive light
and sometimes make it.

---

Jellyfish are not really fish; they are
a language, at least

if I had made them; and if love
is every frustrating, terrible thing
I sometimes think it is

then its vocabulary would live in seawater
and understand currents,
and space, and going-and-returning;

and it wouldn't breathe, or lie,
or believe in anything but itself;

and if you wanted
when things began or ended, or at other times
all of that soft, close language would be there, luminous and solid
the quietest of paper lanterns.

Termites

....

The light hit Xsphthl first.
The ants poured into the nest
clicking their mandibles.
Xsphthl was disemboweled.

Lkmnstf thrust his big head
out of a broken tunnel,
stabbed and stabbed the blind
weight of it into the ants.

Kmtynnn, the soldier
split himself open
entangling the leader ant
in the sticky stuff within.

More soldiers came.
The shouted chemicals
made them furious.
They attacked everything.

The ants stacked the fallen
in mounds, to be carried back
and eaten. Tonight they'll return
and hide, and wait to kill us.

This is the history
of the Rdskld Colony
from the dense heartwood
to the shelter tunnels.

---------------

Small fingers pull and pull
the branch free. Above,
a voice says, "Mom,
it looks like writing."

Prayer for waking

This. and then/
humming from beneath--
no more water--

Check temperature.
Look for hands, for only hands, for both hands.

With the skin's vision, see
the bundle of self
sockmonkeyed among sheets.

where the air gets in it makes
the self of interior surfaces
from the leavened matrix of lungs.

The first movement is always forgetting.
Then some sort of roll or curl.

Like two untended aquariums
the eyes pull the light in
the body resolves:

In front of the mirror, fingers;
after a shower, mouth.
There's time for one last question
but it already seems not to make sense.

Prayer for the city

For the surface of it,
the palm-read waters and smoothnesses of streets

For the clear light,
when it is clear, and for all the light

For the lines that draw
the cars along 'em, the buses'

airy wail down avenues
heard from an upstairs window

For their roaring
and straining at green lights

For the flesh slips out in August,
glistens, then turtlenecks away for winter

For the virtue of sleep surrounded by humans
For waking, being among them.

Prayer for summer nights

As if my mouth opened.
As if there pulsed from it a sound,

like an unwound thread
curling over the waters in this city

and in the air, in the waters
suspended in the air.

As if that sound crashed, receded,
crashed among sleepers

like the first sign of the beloved,
sharpening their dreams to hungry points

waking them openmouthed and grasping.
As if they rose onto their elbows,

then their hands, lips aching forward,
as if that was the way humans

had always recognized each other
in the dark. As if the air disturbed

by that collective gesture, the outlines
of all those rising faces, produced an echo

that I could hear under sweat-soaked covers
and over the buzz of air conditioners in other windows

and all the paraphernalia of sleeplessness
in summer. As if the echo would wrap me up

in the contents of those myriad desires,
like the strange clothes of a returning explorer.

Better Human Trap

The better human trap
would be something like a zoo,
a place to go and look at others’ misfortunes
a place to consider the boundary between one’s
self and those misfortunes--bars
or glass? Thick or thin? In this human trap
there’s one door between in and out
and everyone, on both sides, crowds it.

The better human trap
would be a curtain in the evening,
puffing out of a window, as behind it, a person
makes dinner alone
waiting for you, just you. Bench tests have determined
that this is the least-effective human trap; once inside
you will try to escape.

The better human trap
would be a city or another place
where humans live, where they would feel
un-trapped enough to use resources
on raising children, with a horizon all
around, ready to be cinched tight.

unconventional entrants (miniature #6)

If we are talking about vulnerability
the pads attached to wires and the windows
of the first floor
of the building next to this one
are yellowed and dusty.

Experiment with short line/long line/short line and no punctuation

Two years ago
while I sat on the fire escape of the red building
where I lived

the fire escape thought
platform stairs platform stairs platform mechanism
for lowering stairs

Two nights ago
I sat at a table that thought ashtray slurpee cup water pistol
freeze pop wrappers

under a sky
that was seriously considering heat lightning as something to do for a while
after college maybe

The electricity
in my nervous system has always kept this inventory as a levee system for the regulation
of certain impulses

words for the sound a bullet makes, in order of how familiar with the sound the speaker wishes to appear

bang
gunshot
pop
snap

Summer poem #2

The couple painting the next-door apartment knocks off
at two AM, squalling out the door, disrupting
the ambiguous domestic scene of them painting
through midnight, with all the windows open.

She has tattoos on her upper arms.
When the pizza guy came, she called back
into the place, "Do you want lemonade
or ginger ale?" I take it on faith he answered
and his answer balances her
tattoos: She has tattoos
on her upper arms, and he has an opinion
about whether he wants lemonade
or ginger ale. Both of them have masks
for painting, both of them wake me up
with raised voices on the way out,

and I imagine it is me
                                     arguing
with my father for the last time
before the things we have in common
compel us to mutual silence:

"Why are so many easy things
not easy? Why is it that for a thing
to not be easy requires a sort of whole-world
involvement, a weighing and comparison?"

They are making some sort of decision,
carrying paint cans that will never
say "thank you" or wash dishes. Their hands full,
an almost-empty pizza box thuds
on the porch. He says, "Are you going
to eat the last piece?" 

How the self gets in (miniature #5)

His wide mouth pursed,
                                         spat ochre over his hands
against a cave wall in France.

If he will let you,
                            touch him
on the squarish divot of a trepanation
scar over his brown eye.

LSPWVT #3, Body Poem #4

I need you to stop leaving body parts in my apartment.
I opened the odd-shaped cabinet
where I keep old T-shirts
and there was something thin and slick
in there. I think it was a spinal cord.

I've gotten used to the teeth
clicking around in the sink
when I run the disposal,
the flash and smell of hair
when I turn on the range.

I'm reasonably certain these things aren't yours
but something about them feels human,
as if the dowsing rod of my DNA could vibrate
with strange pulp and keratin.

How do you choose them? I have yet to see
anything straightforward, like a leg
severed at the thigh; instead,
you placed the tight, unreadable scroll
of an achilles tendon at my pillow.

I should be, but am not worried about the gore.
I always expect an optic nerve
with a little invitation
to plug in, see what a corpse sees
but you're more subtle than that. You know
my fixation on sounds,
and indulge it with good words:
orbital, tympanum, neuron.
When you left me a nervous system,
it was beautiful. I turned the lights off
and watched it flicker in the dark.

Still, I dread the point you're making
about my language of self and other, the literal way it
looks in,
stripping off skin to unlock the jaw for speech,
uncovering dull, wet muscles.
This can only end one way; you bringing me
a particular nothing, the sum of all these parts
for which I will have no name.

More love for WCW

Over the tree behind the neighbor's house
there is a star or
a planet or a very, very slow
airplane.

I've felt for weeks
like something is going
to happen
to upend my most careful plans, and
this is
it;
this is what is happening.

The Snake, Cool Animals Poem #2

The snake sticks out of the water like a finger
waiting to tap on a desk. It looks at me, in to my waist:
the Worst Amphibian Ever,
strikes lazily.
Suddenly there is a frog between us. The snake
kind of crunches it--the frog's body actually shortens
between its jaws, dying
only as much as I would.

I am some distance back.
I didn't do that; my body did it, kept me safe.
"What would you do
without me, eyeless fish?" it asks. I don't know,
don't know. The snake says nothing, turns a nonchalant arc,
dragging its frog-leg beard.

True or False, pretentious page poem #1 (not to be confused with the rest, which are pretentious sound poems)

Wolves howl because they can't make rope;
the sound of it is a sound-rope.

In August 1846 the moon
skipped one of its phases.

I have touched every object
on your bedside table.

The comb and mirror
represent the moon.

when the moon forgets you in the city
it is for lack of wolves, to shout their rope and haul.

(unnumbered)

Some nights I just run downstairs
to the vending machine
of wrong choices, and keep myself up
pushing button after button.

Holmes' Love-Song to Watson, Miniature #3

my dear friend, I do not need London
's yellow light at evening, my violin,
my syringe, a hundred kinds
of tobacco-ash, the strangenesses that cross
my doorstep, my glass, my hat, or any thing
like I need your energetic
amazement.

Miniature #2, untitled

It’s like holding a small animal
in my chest; the feeling of a tiny heart beating
furiously, or what a tree feels like
in a thunderstorm, something that
was just supposed to think, really
and not-move, and is now trying
to do both of those things
very
quickly.

something I'll never forget

another human sound
outside my window:
the long ambiguous note
of the old tom who feuds endlessly
with the raccoons there.

I don't know
if the spooked moon
over the neighbor's house
is rising or setting.

the spy

The spy holds a slide to the light.
The slide is a distraction. In the slide
his son plays by a pool as his wife looks on.

The spy pours a shot and drinks it.
He looks at himself in the mirror.
He thinks, "There is only so much
time."

The spy is the best spy in the world.
He thinks of it as doing his job.
His family is asleep.
He puts the liquor away.
He looks at the slide again.
He remembers the day he took it.

first!

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