
Lyric/Resistance
The distance, from gryphons of stone
stuck in place, from the young Muslim woman
who grows up in such few square meters
(the star Delta Gruis is fruit topped with cookie dough),
is my punishment.
Bright star, accidental digger,
tell me about the margins of the fronds, other windows,
other screens, other suns: I’d like a stroke or a seizure,
I’d like a six-petaled volcano to be my travel document.
*
All the little people of the monarch’s dance—
we are being invaded by champagne running out—
the invaders are a detachment of villagers whose
Urdu is not quite what you would hope it would be,
but their fetal abnormalities (and other containers) we
hope we can forgive. I tried to enliven my mother
with the help of Voltaire-paper wrappers, the immensity
of wool and mohair, hiding from the Endlösung
that never comes. Winter, winter of stony fish,
winter of debris flickering across the yellow-shafted
face, tell me something about warm waters, tell me
if the house will grow on me when the invaders
become invisible with the sun. What number of copies
of the book is just right? The witness is vague and arch.
*
A sport where you gentlemen-confectioners—
chiefly for knifes and sword blades? no—
for the joy of the stream, for the upholstery,
produce in sums of money amateurs
(predatory water beetles) who share the long long dance.
These are the parts of the language. Death, in my will,
is a chamber without a chair, a fine without heat,
all of us concerned for the smaller evidence (exhaust fumes
of personal sentiment), the umpire’s finger
going up like the stock exchange produced in cans.
The ball resting against the cushion of fuchsia flowers
draping my legs, the size of botanist-mafias (Bob Dylan,
all of the greats), those very sounds, great auks, parish
churches to the tuft-grass apes. The village green (whose
tales are full of humour) deters attack on the major poets in
their 16th-century moods, as we equal diminutive-
invasions, the leap in the park, the leap for the lock of hair.
*
I went to Miami Beach,
molasses shaped to the cornice
of tongue-climate. There,
the ant lions and snake flies
came in from offshore pedicures,
the holiday was a vital area
of psychoanalysis. Dry leaves are
aging. The schlubs (identified
as Homer’s Troy) are members of
the secret police, skeleton-water.
*
I am afraid of:
spraddle, the tartufo-spree
of the Tarim, evaporating,
with not much of a defined bed,
evaporating into pollen sacs,
cartoons. I am afraid of:
thatches of trout lilies,
making me stay away from school.
What is not covered by insurance?
The weeklong wiggle of the hips.
I am afraid of gliders,
I refuse to drop closer to the ground.
After the fall of Jerusalem—
after laissez-passer at the Wailing Wall—
the black river out of gear,
the one who worships idle threats.
*
When my mother—
through the arrows of idle-memory—
became hybrid
back-formation,
of lower rank than the angels,
then I brought bad lack (wryneck)
to translating her ear,
and in the local tango (or polka),
the infection, they said,
was minuscule:
like the dry
monsoon, a simpler sugar.
*
On the order of Janis Joplin: these
feast days (the appalling loss of life I knew
in the third battle) are theater-colonies,
where I cannot take action to prevent accidents,
I cannot, in the evenings, startle with Pop Art,
I cannot be a small sharp blade to stiff leather.