1. homilies from home
You’ve got to put your pants on in the house of fact.
And in the house of fact, when you take off your shirt,
you can hear your shirt cry out, Facts are the floor, facts
are how you make the right side talk to the left.
I’m washing my naked belly clean, and doing it with dignity.
I’m turning around, trying to see the filthiness
that keeps making me filthy. I’ve scraped away
my molecules right down to the atoms’ emptiness
and arranged the map’s folds so that nobody
can see it breaking into fits of weeping.
Now that even our eyes have their dedicated poverties,
now that even our eyes are chained to their slavish occupations,
whatever the soul lacks drains the soul to nothing.
I hate to admit it, but even the house of fact is a house of ruin.
2. rest
The strange is done with, over,
the strange that late at night you returned
to chat with again and again. No longer will anyone
wait for me in my corner where
good is bad, where that tight-lipped morning
of tears by the bay means nothing anymore
to anyone. To be cleared of the inks that stain
my ankles while watching my eyes go blind in the mirror
is the kind of rest that the seventh day promises
but never brings. Instead, the species
climbs aboard the ark of copulation
and ignores the forty days and nights of rain.
And the much-talked-of soul that the rain denies
burrows deep into the mud of so much pain.
3. spider
Look at the spider with the enormous body and tiny head,
a spider of no color: today, when I kneel
down to look at it more closely, its many arms nailed
to a many-armed cross are a prayer in a code that only God,
who’s forgotten it, can decipher. And its eyes
invisible to my eyes, which guided it like a pilot
through the wilderness of space,
no longer steer its legs across the intricate,
almost-not-thereness of its web. Each thread
it spins with the finality of fate divides its head
from its body. And the poor thing,
even with so many legs, doesn’t know which way to run.
Just look at its abdomen, huge as the stone blocking
what’s-his-name’s tomb, that the head’s condemned to drag around.
4. if the sun should blacken to an asterisk
Honestly, when I look at life straight,
I’m just another blind Brooklynite — not because
I can’t see that Jean-Jacques was an idiot,
or that Saint Peter being nailed to the cross
upside down isn’t the purest measure
of my humanity, but because my eyes
can’t see my illiterate skeleton and the razor
and cigar that will outlive me. So try to save a day
for when there are no days, reason with the lens
inside every healing wound, witness how your
own inner grace, gnawing at itself, gets baptized
in phosphates of hemlock and error.
And so what if the sunset arrives from Athens?
So what if no trace of anyone survives?
5. the last to be excused
Remember the old aunts, sarcastic,
chain-smoking, gesturing with their canes,
scoring point after point with their widowed lungs?
How was I to eat with them as they pushed
around their plates not peas and carrots
but distance and disdain for their silly nephew
still trying, at his age, to forget
how being old is as new to the old
as being just born is to the just born —
even their glued-together, half-cracked
china radiates impatience for the pity
that the young want them to want.
The way they kept saying mother —
like it was all in caps — saying it like that
as if they still felt her eyes on how
they handled their knives, forks, spoons,
making each bite harder to swallow.
The day is coming when there’ll be no water
in the pitcher, no eternally dying father
served up like canned spinach and corn,
no brooches of affection their absent lips
pin to the air. And as that silence
slowly breaks the hours in two, I’ll be
left alone to dine with the nothingness
that, just for form’s sake, says grace.
The table will be set with shadows,
the phantom food served up by shadows —
and all the dead mothers come to this repast
will sit down on chairs of dust
in the wake of that last supper
in the kitchen gone cold where I’ll hear the last
maternal “Serve yourself, Tom”
smothered by that dark where no one can tell
the knife blade from the handle,
or the food from the plate, or the plate
from the table, or if there’s a table at all.
6. the eternal dice
omg, it makes me cry to admit that I am human;
to feel the heaviness of all your bread I’ve eaten.
Oh sure, you claimed you raised me from the dust,
but where’s the wound fermenting in your side?
You know nothing of those Marias who split for good.
omg, if you’d been born a human being
today you’d know how to behave like God.
But in your always everywhere hard partying with perfection
you feel nothing of the pain of your creation.
And so it’s us, the poor fuckers who suffer, who must be god.
Today, in my middle-aged pupils, I see the glare of candles
lit for my death-row vigil. omg, old gambler, take up
your crooked tricks again, and let’s throw your cooked pair of dice —
in the fated luck you dole out to the universe
maybe we’ll roll snake eyes staring back at us like death,
maybe you’ll deal two aces black as the grave’s mud.
omg, in this night gone deaf and blind,
you won’t be able to play because the poor Earth itself
is just a single die whose edges have grown rounded
by rolling too many eons through the battering sky
and nobody now can stop it until it rolls into a hole,
the vast hole, omg, inside a single molecule.
7. the other garden
In the Garden there was a spider.
And because the man knelt beside him, the spider
overheard him, the agony of his prayer
like the fear of a fly who can’t steer
any other direction than into the web stretching out
no matter which way the fly veers. The spider
felt the threads of all being vibrate
through him — and so it vowed to be the answer
to the prayer of the man praying to his father
to let this cup pass. But on the cross, when the man cried out
to his father not to abandon him, his father
did abandon him. And so the spider
vowed to weave a web so tightly around the father that the harder
he’d struggle the more he’d be caught.
8. what hasn’t yet come is already over
If it rains tonight, will a raindrop be my cell?
Will the bars the sky lets down
take one look at me and turn to steel?
Now that the hot afternoon is finally done,
done the cups of tea we drank with your mother,
I want to ask the rain to yank my strings
back a thousand years. But even back that far,
will the rain still be my prison?
To be lost in the minutiae
of our vacations from the soul, to forget
the Vedic threads spun out beyond my end,
to press against your breasts obedient
to the purest pulses. Yeah, sure. Make the story
of my life the story of my never having been.
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