INDIANAPOLIS, 1995


Take 465 east, turn right
On Meridian . . .

Pulled a muscle

Right there past Strip Mall, Indiana,
My ex-wife

Up from Cataract Lake,
Her sliding scale

Welded to the chance of some half-haunted military pilot . . .

My father
Somewhere in a Camry
Torturing toll booth attendants

I'd by then spent months with the owls
Across the street from the Gilmore Car Museum,

Out in the pines

In Hickory Corners, Michigan,

Which was where
I'd written

"Self-Portrait"
Because of the way the wind made the horses seem wild . . .

I remember the Atlantic Salmon spilling out of the boat I found to rent
On Gull Lake

(I hung three
from the branches
of a tulip poplar)

The schnapps stood half-frozen next to a fizzing beer

I don't know where we went
In Indianapolis

Since we were done going anywhere overall

I remember my blood pressure
Was 160 over 1o5

(My God, she said . . .)

There was a comedy club
and watered-down martinis

This was all at my father's house--

An orderly arrangement of too comfortable chairs
And fly fishing rods crossed

Over the gas-jetted fireplace

We made it through one day there

Not looking at each other's faces

Drinking bourbon

Relieved that we could just talk past what had been

And not have to get undressed

It felt bad being there in that city

Which is why we got in our cars
36 hours after meeting

And drove 200 miles in opposite directions

To our once-and-for-all separate places

Way out in the country

LONGING, FROM THE GROUND UP

Stay right there, bleak in the crystallized mood of a saturnine ledger of cyclical promptings

The thing first rode in
On its battered tricycle

Ineluctably born

Thirty years old, like
A basilica of plastic fruit

Floor of the city, searchlights, dome of this little bell jar of sea monkeys

You could spot it on the GPS
The pinstripes
The Italian shoes

the journey down the alimentary canal

Open all day, subtracting huge zeros from anthrax

Then John Kennedy Toole falls into a canal full of escaped alligators

Hold it!

The photograph shows you all grown young, listing casually in bed

Staring through a glass of Tang

Engagement in international affairs is like a fork in such fatback

Still, one must sometimes feign interest

THE JAMMED LOG POSITION

The trees' personalities become quantitative
at sundown

the hognose snake

like the veins in her wrist

lightly scored

I wanted to feel more real--the body of a lover

night seeping into the boathouse

a calendar that doesn't go back

cold motionless well

the intervention of the deep on her cochlea

Creosote--a nightgown's lifted over the shining wheels

and then the thunder of the passing train

like black nail polish

Her breath was dusty with naked flowers,
the sweetness of weeds

the way a hand turns

blind as steel

while the mercury bursts from its glass idea


***
title ripped from As a Friend, by Forrest Gander

31 DAYS


It's probably better to withhold comment. But screw it.
I had no intention of framing the poems below
with National Poetry Month. I had no idea it was
upon us, quite frankly. It was time to create a new
series of canvases, which, more and more, is how
I view these compositions (if I think much about them
at all outside the present moment of struggling
to make each one work). Someone told me today I had
a poem a day for 31 days. I wish they hadn't.
If anything I was moved to write by the anxiety
of having written close to nothing for way too long.
But I do like the idea of attaching dates to a series
of compositions. For instance, The Nervous Filaments,
the book coming out next spring, was written
between July 6, 2007 and July 11, 2008. I didn't
plan that, but I like that it is so nonetheless. Just
over a year. I don't know how many poems I wrote
during that period of time. Two-hundred? I kept
forty-three for the book, many substantially revised,
some not revised at all. I have no idea how many of
the new poems below I'll use. The same night
I type them onto the blog I usually revise, maybe for
a day, and then I make a hard copy. Paper gives
me the perspective I need. I revise, usually cutting
way back. I knew going in that the title of the eventual
book here was going to be Orphan, Indiana, but that's
about it. They are representations of reality. In some
way they all really happened. "Tell all the truth but
tell it slant." Care of E. D. I can't exactly express how
deeply I feel these poems are in conversation with the
paintings of Howard Hodgkin, however. I feel indebted
to his genius and vision.

A CONNECTICUT POEM


A mountain stretches between heart, and mind--

little battlement of naked teeth

like crampons

the skeletal hands of a certain professor

who grins dangling from the bells of a Connecticut church

The hills are such a popular song

Listerine

and a chapter filled with shoulder dogs

a long hooded maritime consciousness set to dream violin

a little down time with the humidor

the boy I'm reminded of loved the reality of eye contact so much

he began hitting his puppets with a Lincoln Log

the truth is so stupid

the lion sits with his cup of punctured zebra

his head spinning around

like a turntable

Love drips off those bells

It's The New Sentence

Shut your eyes and your mouth

think of a creek while we undo the buttons

I could get you on the road to something endless

THE WIND IN THE FURNACE


It's what you don't get to sacrifice

the worm writhing in the tequila

"imagination"

osteomyelitis

the way heat rises out of the flames in a furious rush

the X chromosomes blurring the face of the moon

detached retinas

glowing flowers growing backwards like a jar full of extracted teeth

and the sky that summer--nothing but bats

and the deck of cards left out on the screened-in porch

and the burning candles

and the knife and the spoon with no fork

the three foot pike living in a half-acre pond in Parma, Michigan

Christmas trees burning

cataracts

memory

RUBDOWN


There's
a lot less money in the bank. You're composed
though, sunshine ricocheting off the cool water
to the smell of leaf litter. Another rub-out moment. And you
000say this
out loud to the fish,
to a bird (who is dim and green and you might even say he's
000poppy-seed),
because of all the foot prints
on the beach
in old snow.
You can feel how your days move
in crabby little circles--
imaginary dotted lines go from house to job to car to
this spot you love on the water, in a boat with no fishing pole,
a Diet Coke in a McDonald's cup,
(Time to rub-out, you said last fall at your sister's,
to which your nephew responded,
in private, the Detroit Lions mostly out cold on the field,
toppled like beer bottles, but with enough crowd noise
going to make it feel like a game, your nephew,
bouncing a soccer ball on his knee,
an hour or so later, stops, very casually, says
So how about I get my mom to give you that rubdown),
another outdoor life experience.

PERSISTENTLY MONASTIC IN LATE APRIL


Not in the Lesser Antilles

Exactly

(too many iguanas)

Perhaps in Gaul--

Whatever the case, there was volcanic ash in the wine--

A circle of cenobites
Eating Graham crackers

With Caravaggio . . .

You could have kick-boxed a rainbow that afternoon

(no radio waves)

And the woofers

Fell right out of his hands . . .

Funny how desperate are the little ranch castles trimmed out
In hostas to compliment the Yankee banners

Tacked sagging in the double-paned

Winter fortified

University-leased

Cracked storm windows

Behind which stock quotes scrolled along ceaselessly

c/o The Dish Network

I'd love to say I punched a tarpon

Or a walleye

A spring came flying out of the tripoded camera

And hit the sitting subject on the forehead

Not what we expected--

Sir Walter Scott with an aluminum bat

Guacamole and Fritos

Next stop: Branson

We thought we were pretty much doomed to succeed

THE KALAMAZOO ASSOCIATION OF STREET PUGS



Of course you can live unhouseled in your dome,
pages meant for books

blowing across Oakland Drive--

wine and glass make drizzle,

a sort of grimace,

like a heavy-set first grader farting

then chewing
his vitamins . . .

The plane trees roar up near the clouds where their eyes are

now everyone's pregnant--

the florist,
Nick's teacher,
the Linowski twins . . .

There's nothing like dinner in a snowmobile suit

Mrs. Dinesen will now serve the coffee

a mittened hand waves a white fillet of sole

and smoke boils out of the Little Theater

the books sit stacked

all purple- and green-spined

It's too warm

the best years are over . . .

The man with the side-burns stands at the back door

THE GENTLENESS OF HERBIVORES



Not enough landscape in your sleeping pill

that's one problem

that it was free, like heaven's enormous crybaby

Men

long neglected, stoned

super-attenuated

too much history in bourbon

too much Sepia Dream

his watch the size of a sundial, and the tassels

a bucket full of tip-ups

"The Battle of the Bands, with Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes"

I'll take the Ravioli

I met Larry Poons in an alley

and he gave me some centipedes

Now the deer talk quietly to me between raindrops

LITTLE STIFF DREAD POEM


I love my marbles

Not much more to say

I have the desire to drink

I use cloth bags

When I wake out of my slumber arrived at the workplace
I know it's not endless

the dwindling weather of palliated faces

the ten ton jars of
Lite Mayonnaise . . .

That's life in the basement

a plate full of vegetables

just in time for your cousin's play about peony fraud and blood auks

It's better than the clowns on the escalator of doom

Please be at peace with me!!

and then the cymbals crash

I get out at 5:30

I still do smoke a lot

ENDLESS CEMETERY


It strikes you

Standing in the hangar, the dream delicatessen

the iceberg lettuce and
wind shear

the head of somebody's leftover child

like splitting wood

the acacia being the only memory that falls after dark

I dreamed of houses with no floors

no bedrock
or sky--

Progenitor

a compound pinnate

and a freezer full of skulls . . .

my twenties became the silver motion light makes
000below the blue
skin of water soldered to steel by bad earthly living--

eggs shot from my body

Are you a girl

or a manikin

the fifty-first page was a black umbrella--

a soft reimbursement--

like eating your way through the ocean floor

DOMINION OF INSECTS


Yeah, talk into my hand

you, with your stone albatross's

your tongue

I thought of marigolds blossoming in Dixie cups

but it was just your body in the Radio Flyer

Time to say Grace

I'd look at the fork
the spoon
the knife

We were that afraid

And the little four-legged rodents like pill bugs

white mice
and a pillow

unravelling

I'd look up

You'd have this pound of meat loaf on your face

what could we do with our naked arms

You with your muse

and the goddamned candlelight

every trash night

THE NECK OF A HORSE



Little is said then, her new hands

pale as the sand along the river

Six weeks in
and the creature divides

No skiff

the smell of burnt oranges . . .

She wonders about the dream

a fountain lights up like a translation snapping into place

Vitamin B in syringes

the tiny flat cakes of his nipples

(and the smell of fall leaves)

The little ball shoots up tight into place on the trembling tube

she's panting

the bricks pile up in the fire that is the last day
of confinement with the stunted vines struggling up through
the broken stone all along the cobbled lane

an ibis flies out of the world through a missing manhole cover

she remembers the burning trees

washes out the memory with a hose

THE SKY'S ON THE LAND


It's so cold because it just rains, and won't snow.
So this water gets into--gets under--your warm
coat. Eats at your joints. There is a sound like
cardboard being thumped, not the snow sound--
angels dying, or breathing. I've had to resort
to a couple rows of tater tots on a cookie sheet.

THE BITCH



Rows and rows of boats in dry dock

red meat

and beans

I can name that tune in two notes

Teeth in a glass left for years on the bedside table

the unambiguous testament of the cloudless sky perfectly empty
over miles of basically dead water

flashes of red in the dark

a memory of green

the cold moss in the hands and the rain

He dreamed often of Lascaux

the barnacles of death

the ten tits on a wolf

he took a bolt of black cloth and he made crows to talk to

the human body

It's 90 percent water

EVERYONE YOU SEE ISN'T EVERYONE


The kid who played cornet

the serious
problem
that developed in the late sixties

with saddle shoes

I mean the fascist blight as echo . . .

the neo-incorrigible
codification of your basic Epsom salts

blood running over the beach

Arthur Lee

people slapping their kids

I mean rods and aluminum bolts

All you need is an Allen wrench

wind

and an abandoned one room school house

in eastern Indiana

RAPID EYE MOVEMENT


He said it wrong, the world

and like fire

the ghost of his hands and the laughable attrition

falling and dying

those first thirty seconds on a bike no-handed--

Somebody looks up

You could be screaming on a "northern corner"

no kiss on the breeze

that one collapsed vein

The sky flatlines --

They want to be birds

BETA CAROTENE



Yes, I say, to the spirit world

A non-electronic intrusion

A whirl of leaves begins
spinning on a lawn
and moves through the street

It disappears in front of my car

Philip Glass on piano

Green tea spilling across the walls of the aorta

A fish begins thrashing in the toilet like a blindness in one eye

I HAVE NO REAR VIEW MIRROR AND I AM INCOMPLETE


Google this aerial view of southern Indiana

Why not

Insinuated like stitches in the wiring
of your cell block

stud finders in a tool kit with dental floss

Your mostly over-examined

Petrified

Lilacs

The wind continued to bang one shutter

I couldn't drive north fast enough

Daylight savings time--

Subtract one hour from hangover

FOU


I found this to be a compelling online mag, enough
to post a link to it. I liked the poems by Heather
Christle, and then others. I love the design, the way
the poems have so much space to float around in.

The last Court Green, and The Hat, issue 8, are two
other recent things with an above average
number of rigorous poems . . .

DIDGERIDOO



The Russians

They're at it again

Eating broken-up pieces of frozen vodka

Fish piling up in their deserts

I kept losing all my marbles

Two frisbees
Full of stems and seeds

The steelies, the puries . . .

And all those silos out in Nevada, shining

This is during the Vietnam War

I remember . . .

The soft short snouts of sharks breaking through flyblown cages

The blood in the water

The ice skaters' panties on T.V.

Quisp and Quake

No money for light bulbs

Mott the Hoople

Head shops

THIS IS HOW IT SOUNDS BEFORE REAL THINGS START HAPPENING

I was eight again

Losses--I'll get him

A monarch squeaks squeezing
out of its transparent chrysalis

The windows blew out of our house that summer

We have so many shadows

A car burning in the Parthenon

Barbie with her head on backwards

I CAN'T REMEMBER


Twin loaves, or bees,
turn into butter . . .

the box turtle retreats to his lounge

he's a playboy

the serialization of friendly animals in print has officially begun

Sebastian the scimitar

Globes of primordial jealousy--

the organs purring
into substance

while it rains and the peonies rot . . .

I failed there, in nautical heaven

too manic

sailing right past the buoys of ill repute . . .

I confess though

like yeast rising

It's the German engineering

Do you always wear black clothes?

I take a highway

I cross under a road I once lived on

THE MUSIC ROOM


The piano is blinded by sunlight

but this isn't a screen

one by one the stitching falls through aquarium green

arrows of blood

and the white white lipstick

a V ripples out on the dark lacquered wood

the rain forests maybe

hydroponic displacement

the pad on a crutch pushing down

kissing is like dreaming into somebody's mouth

the sun fading tight to the color of crayons

that crushed smell

her heartbeat

and she's wearing absolutely no perfume

WHAT YOU TAKE WITH YOU



I have no clear idea

the tongue

It's a monetary bastard

Frozen under
the heralding

of trees

from the Superior Basin

to the foothills

of Legoland

We're surely going to hell

In the ulterior
grace of God's

Hinterland

The Sirens are given jobs in tanning salons

Odysseus
be damned

we did a 360
around that

billowing dream--

desire with its cock turning to stone

the moon

with its elastic blonde hair

In winter the ground freezes

SAINT PAUL: A HERMENEUTICS



Expect rain in the tri-state

Now buy a Slim Jim

We interrupt this program:

The Lord is the dead pen you shake back to life

They found him nailed

That rabbit in the lowing pines

Crying like a girl

This isn't the usual beach/woods stuff, an outer illumination

The father with his goose bumps

And terror

The sensuality of the melting Communion wafer

"dripping down the inner thigh"

(But enough John D. MacDonald)

The Jesuits walked home in the rain

They voted Paul off American Idol

The exquisite delicacy of condoms in foil

The rosaries spilled into each other like ambergris

Cellophane, on a pack of Kents

(A Tareyton smoker would rather fight than switch)

Confirmed in the late sixties

In private I took off my shoes

I touched the veneer

I took a fourth name

My father made a nicotine halo

My sisters kept sleeping in their little row

I remember it snowed the first time I listened to Abbey Road

POEM FOR THE END OF WINTER (Insomnia)


They weren't dogs exactly

a citadel

something foaming at the bank

and me with no alibi--

fresh pencil shavings

I'd come across water

huge beams of redwood with televisions bolted to the clouds

a dime flashed:

I had the great fish by the gills

Freon pouring out of its eyes

I remember my mother, the instant she stopped dreaming--

like a circuit breaker--

three or four sparks in the bathroom mirror