Mercury

Mercury

Hush-a-bye

These fish that surround me like icons
on the blue battlements,
they are a risk I have never been willing to take.
Gorgeous feathers all look alike to the Jamaican girl there,
carrying a list from her auntie
into a northern climate.

don’t you cry.

One orchid
one jar of Katydids
one broken mirror
two limes
one skull
six periods
two large spiders (male and female).

Go to sleep you little baby.

As a child, I carried fillings of mercury around inside of my head.
Mother would call and call, but I could only hear the train in my ears,
moving down its tunnel of blood toward the dark heart
my father gave me in his pain.

When you wake

I’ll never get used to my orbital lenses where only the center is clear
and everything else falls away.
In the dream my girl was eating chocolates—
no, she was eating the cooked hearts of chickens
one after another.

you will see

The musak beside this escalator is playing a tune the Irish learned from whales
before the great slaughter.
Are these your lamps, O poets, fueled by blubber and blood?

After the priest had finished with her, she went into the garden behind the rectory
and filled her mouth with red clay.

All the pretty little ponies.

A Separate Life

You're not here,
not in the sky
nor ground nor water,
not even the fire.
So what do I do?
I hold the cat instead of you.
I hold this black ball of a cat,
which, at the moment, doesn't
particularly want to be held.
There's something in this cat
that reminds me of you--
not in its heat nor gaze nor touch,
soft as that might be,
but more its manner
of living a separate life
next to the one that I have
here.

You're not here
though the river is
and the tree
and the fly that drinks
across my wrist
and the stone that shapes the water
that shapes the stone.
And the ashes that relinquish their DNA
have spoken in their small, small voices
that you're not here.

The shadow is a significant other
as is the frozen breath
as is the wind
beneath the door to our bedroom
because, even as weak clues
to the spirit, they are here
and you're not.

A Target

Don’t call me that other name,
that time-warp you folded me into
with your Movie-Tone death.

The stress lines in black and white, the crackle of speakers:
These brave lads aren’t coming home.

Near its source in eastern Turkey, the Euphrates appears to run uphill
where a bloody Kurdish child tries to eat the orange
I have given her in the rubble of her home.

When I awake above the Atlantic, my wife is gone, so I walk the isle
whispering her name above the hiss of engines until the door to the cockpit
opens and I see her there under the arm of the pilot.

Dear Mother,

He talks in his sleep and prays to your god he never believed in.
Last night he told a man he called Lucas to step down from the tractor and fight.
This morning after we made love he corrected my grammar again.

She got the rug with royal blue crosses framed in tan
that they bought at the covered market in Ankara.
He got the samovar
that they found in the shops of Erzurum
with an airman from the American missal base.
How much is that in real money?

The camera pans back from a fogged, green mountaintop,
and the music builds as he holds her there dying on eight wide-screen TVs
up against the wall
of a Target.

Across the aisle, more screens with talking heads:

Those who seek their other in pornography
may find their lives as viable as the tumor
behind the ear to which they hold their cell.

Sight Unseen

Beneath the swing set she fed
her little brother a toadstool.
Not to be saved by the reflection in her patent
leather shoes,
not to be caught up by the angels
flapping on a neighbor's clothesline,
not to be recollected through the green lense
of a Kool-Aid pitcher,
carried by a mother long dead,
she denied her innocence then and there.
O child,
O bloody cut healed then picked then healed then picked,
O storms who drive their winds harder in the night,
take her sight unseen,
orphan that she is,
into the witch's cottage.

And so the brother
sits alone on a log
in the park
knowing that something is coming
through the gastropod of his inner ear:
the spring on a screen door
slammed in the last century,
the crunch of a tadpole (still alive)
fed through the claws of a crawfish,
the whine of a child's pet ferret
crushed on a road in a D.C. suburb.

You there in the toll booth,
a fly is on the tube to your oxygen tank.
You there on the seat of that toilet
six miles above the earth,
hurry up, a child is at the door.
You there in the corner of that elevator
where a fight has broken out,
is that a tooth beneath your foot?

You there.
You.
There.

Before the Gander

I didn't wake up with a large pod by my bed.
On that road to Damascus, I didn't spot a UFO,
but a somehow pleasant hum fills me, as though
life weren't all that bad after all, as though dead
birds hadn't accumulated under my windows. Or
am I just imagining this interlude from these, of late,
patriotic mites scribbling on the blank slate
of my sleep, conducting their erotic wars
in my dried up snot and tears. Big and happy,
I’m a vegetable cultivated by a commander
of intergalactic tramps who records my snappy
come-backs for posterity. Before the gander
came this program shaped like a golden egg,
and monogrammed along its helix: GREG.

Wildlife Management

Bees and clover winter in the sad facts
that pepper sleeping children with doubt. Never
walk under a blossoming tree unless the act’s
reflected somewhere—a pool, the eyes of your
dog, a compact mirror. You’ve probably seen
the way geese lose formation as soon as you hear
their distant voices. Do you think they mean
to hint at suicide? Have you considered a career
in Wildlife Management? As long as you’re
down here on your knees, you might as well take
a good look at the grass. Is that a tear
or is it dew? Does it really make
any difference where the water came
from when the reflections are the same?

Those Were the Days

We found the Nordic wallets more challenging,
the way their flippers shook
when we opened them.
The blood wasn't as bad as with those
we abducted from the Argentine Mission
while all of the mothers were praying inside.

They were small but we cleaned them anyway
in the tidal pools along the coast of the Tierra Del Fuego
while enormous jackrabbits watched
through the cataracts of their sun-damaged eyes.

I remember Bertrand singing sea chanties
he had learned from slavers on the Ivory Coast.
Viscera flew from his hands
as he accompanied the lyrics
with lewd gestures.

They don't make money like that any more.