Gap Gardening Read online

  loss of memory in its

  silvery green

  a drawbridge

  7. So Long

  butterflies

  distort every mention of sand

  you punctuate your feelings

  with a puff

  on your pipe

  a thing or two will come up

  around the edges

  you can guess

  the effort behind a red cloud

  *

  the house comes crowding round

  to seduce us with

  not quite oriental rugs

  *

  irrelevant patches

  light mostly

  elsewhere a joke and then

  the white blouse

  more sun and the girl selling ice cream

  there on the beach

  skirt caught

  the wind

  hugging its visibility

  Psyche & Eros

  for Harriet Hanger & Peter Craske

  I. The Marriage

  For all her beauty

  worshipped

  but unloved

  what greater complaint

  when the damp towels

  curl up

  in baby form

  abrupt sense of home life

  but marriage is certain

  I believe

  the girl wants to die

  maturing

  caught on a back stroke

  finger language

  she must have lain

  down in a place of caves

  as if wet earth

  a resting place for blood

  for the dark

  swoop

  strokes her body

  into bird

  II. The Crisis

  That she should suffer

  from happiness

  its ambiguity

  neither watching the time

  nor making it contagious

  the sisters: breaking the

  blinds

  punch waves of dust

  and rainy fear

  at any rate: they

  cheerfull step on the brake

  “it isn’t for taking

  your pulse

  (its panicky skid)

  but a serious addition to knowledge”

  so she says she can’t

  that’s right

  live

  (say the sisters)

  being in the

  a foul

  dark

  venemous

  sweet

  snake

  honey

  with tangled coils exuding

  eyes tucked in under

  darkness

  feathered lids that no

  it rears

  square of skin should escape

  up for

  his caress

  you even

  now

  in short:

  drowned

  in a slick of pleasure

  III. The Catastrophy

  Not so dreadful, really, what

  she does:

  opens

  more than her legs

  but he

  can’t take it

  this eye to

  eye encounter

  when what he wants is a lay

  the lamp scalds him the light

  enlarges

  his notion of hurt

  the burn

  and the bandage both

  making memory

  the earth doesn’t

  turn

  it’s deflected

  it’s his back

  turns

  he walks off

  the same

  IV. The Labors

  So it comes to this

  (always?)

  direction: labor

  to get him

  back

  get him to

  corn barley millet poppy

  chickpeas lentils

  beans in a heap all the

  seeds in a heap the

  seeds of the world a

  promiscuous heap

  and they laugh at her:

  chaos is human what more

  do you want

  love you

  as separate

  a person

  what woman dreams light

  must face the sun

  dreams fierce and blinding

  dreams waiting for evening

  dreams golden rams

  a vestige of sun

  you can love and live

  but life

  the river who could

  contain it

  stream of semen

  in a hip flask

  and the last and hardest:

  the trip

  down

  where

  the blood

  slows

  her feet are

  dragging

  they

  won’t they won’t lift

  no horses

  whinny

  she breathes

  sleep it’s a journey

  to death

  it would keep her beauty forever

  answer: she’s tempted

  (to please her lover)

  But he

  a taste

  of the past tense

  has stretched his

  one way grammar

  now

  he’ll rather have her

  grow old

  and comes to her aid

  a happy ending: to love

  love knowingly

  body and soul

  in the old story

  they call it going

  to heaven

  from The Ambition of Ghosts

  Home Drown

  1.

  Bach on Sundays, again, in

  so many churches. The

  synagogue

  a ruin. Also Gedächtniskirche.

  Some chords, still, between scorched

  arches, hold

  my breath

  though the air,

  here,

  is sealed

  against seepage.

  What

  was it, mother.

  More wishes

  on the bone. Gold,

  articulated

  bars, warm, in your throat.

  Or hand.

  Baroque,

  the space between

  words and

  what has “happened.”

  Like, in 1749,

  the Prinz von Anhalt

  was struck by fascination

  and “couldn’t

  see anything as

  it was.”

  Your steel’s

  caved in, mother, its

  blue sheen

  drowned.

  2.

  A place repeated

  inhales

  time

  seeps through

  the layers of years.

  Enlarged river bed, eroded,

  this,

  my porous skin.

  Half

  of Pascal’s body

  was glass. He always saw,

  on that side, the abyss.

  Crystal

  nights.

  If I

  were sure I’m drowning. If

  I could solve

  my memories. They gather

  to eat. But I’ve unlearned

  pity. Mother,

  always a li
ttle colder,

  floats

  among the algae, eyes

  beginning to rust.

  3. tell me about your illness, mother

  “I’m so planned. And nearly

  crying. No, no, I’m song, the smell of scales

  doesn’t upset a widow.

  But streets, their bubbles:

  suddenly

  the fish inside my head. Just

  when I kneel

  down on the curb to play

  for my lost

  keys.

  You are unnaturally tall,

  I nearly couldn’t seal you. We’ll

  have to

  grind

  your parts into the score.

  And now good night, my chill,

  it’s time

  to climb into my wishes.”

  4.

  This is where hands clutch at

  a door, straw, wisp of smoke

  pulls out my breath.

  My eyes,

  all my eyes tremble and

  run from my head in long flight.

  Be calm. Don’t forget.

  Go tap the dark for unsuspected

  switches, a way

  out of this, the furniture,

  its cold sheen,

  to what? The furious

  grief springs on your back, ardent

  reproach, a reddish seal.

  “O thunderweather,” swears Old Shatterhand. How

  like frightened, trying

  to relax his smallness

  into the wild space of the West such as,

  but this,

  this anguish, think of seeing:

  your mother

  turned liquid.

  Grey wash, warm, on the floor.

  5. nightmare

  Farther and farther

  off key, this,

  warm air, even

  breathing. Mother

  peals the skin back,

  and a red sheen breaks,

  sears

  my lungs. I can’t

  swim

  against the dream.

  Only a tight

  layer of perfect pitch

  could seal

  my bloodstream against

  Next

  scene. The river,

  present, and full up. Still,

  bubbles from

  deep years, and mother

  pulls out a plaster cunt:

  “This is

  your flesh.”

  The air

  bursts with drowned fish

  If I could solve my

  memories

  would I

  awake?

  6. leaving

  “Only drowned souls

  can’t

  come back to haunt you

  in the channels

  of your body, a fire

  goes out

  in water.”

  Old selves

  seep through my

  skin, no tenderness

  in our mutual muscles.

  Distance,

  growing, drifts

  between our words, the air

  hard with motion,

  even a song

  can turn into a demon:

  warm air, even

  breathing, living, articulated

  limbs,

  and the window rattling

  the whole time.

  Try

  to keep an eye

  on your tears,

  mother,

  you’ve never

  gone near water but to drown.

  the reproduction of profiles

  Facts

  i had inferred from pictures that the world was real and therefore paused, for who knows what will happen if we talk truth while climbing the stairs. In fact, I was afraid of following the picture to where it reaches right out into reality, laid against it like a ruler. I thought I would die if my name didn’t touch me, or only with its very end, leaving the inside open to so many feelers like chance rain pouring down from the clouds. You laughed and told everybody that I had mistaken the Tower of Babel for Noah in his Drunkenness.

  i didn’t want to take this street which would lead me back home, by my own cold hand, or your advice to find some other man to hold me because studying one headache would not solve the problem of sensation. All this time, I was trying to think, but the river and the bank fused into common darkness, and words took on meanings that made them hard to use in daylight. I believed entropy meant hugging my legs close to my body so that the shadow of the bridge over the Seekonk could be written into the hub of its abandoned swivel.

  the proportion of accident in my picture of the world falls with the rain. Sometimes, at night, diluted air. You told me that the poorer houses down by the river still mark the level of the flood, but the world divides into facts like surprised wanderers disheveled by a sudden wind. When you stopped preparing quotes from the ancient misogynists it was clear that you would soon forget my street.

  i had already studied mathematics, a mad kind of horizontal reasoning like a landscape that exists entirely on its own, when it is more natural to lie in the grass and make love, glistening, the whole length of the river. Because small, noisy waves, as from strenuous walking, pounded in my ears, I stopped my bleak Saturday, while a great many dry leaves dropped from the sycamore. This possibility must have been in color from the beginning.

  flooding with impulse refracts the body and does not equal. Duck wings opened, jeweled, ablaze in oblique flight. Though a speck in the visual field must have some color, it need not be red. Or beautiful. A mountain throwing its shadow over so much nakedness, or a cloud lighting its edges on the sun, it drowned my breath more deeply, and things lost their simple lines to possibility. Like old idols, you said, which we no longer adore and throw into the current to drift where they still

  Feverish Propositions

  you told me, if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature, which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the cold, along with the restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to change the location of the sycamores. I expected reproaches because I had mentioned the word love, but you only accused me of stealing your pencil, and sadness disappeared with sense. You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands because, you said, it could not be contained in itself.

  if we could just go on walking through these woods and let the pine branches brush our faces, living would still make beads of sweat on your forehead, but you wouldn’t have to worry about what you call my exhibitionism. All you liked about trees was the way the light came through the leaves in sheets of precise, parallel rays, like slant rain. This may be an incomplete explanation of our relation, but we’ve always feared the dark inside the body. You agree there could be no seduction if the structures of propositions did not stand in a physical relation, so that we could get from one to the other. Even so, not every moment of happiness is to hang one’s clothes on.

  i might have known you wouldn’t talk to me. But to claim you just didn’t want to disguise your thoughts! We’ve walked along this road before, I said, though perhaps in heavier coats not designed to reveal the form of the body. Later, the moon came out and threw the shadows of branches across the street where they remained, broken. Feverishly you examined the tacit conventions on which conversation depends. I sighed as one does at night, looking down into the river. I wondered
if by throwing myself in I could penetrate to the essence of its character, or should I wait for you to stab me as you had practiced in your dream? You said this question, like most philsophical problems, arose from failing to understand the tale of the two youths, two horses, and two lilies. You could prove to me that the deepest rivers are, in fact, no rivers at all.

  from this observation we turned to consider passion. Looking at the glints of light on the water, you tried to make me tell you not to risk the excitement — to recommend cold baths. The lack of certainty, of direction, of duration, was its own argument, unlike going into a bar to get drunk and getting drunk. Your face was alternately hot and cold, as if translating one language into another — gusts from the storm in your heart, the pink ribbon in your pocket. Its actual color turned out to be unimportant, but its presence disclosed something essential about membranes. You said there was still time, you could still break it off, go abroad, make a movie. I said (politely, I thought) this wouldn’t help you. You’d have to kill yourself.

  tearing your shirt open, you drew my attention to three dogs in a knot. This served to show how something general can be recorded in unpedigreed notation. I pointed to a bench by a willow, from which we could see the gas tanks across the river, because I thought a bench was a simple possibility: one could sit on it. The black hulks of the tanks began to sharpen in the cold dawn light, though when you leaned against the railing I could smell your hair, which ended in a clean round line on your neck, as was the fashion that year. I had always resented how nimble your neck became whenever you met a woman, regardless of rain falling outside or other calamities. Now, at least, you hunched your shoulders against the shadow of doubt.

  this time of day, hesitation can mean tottering on the edge, just before the water breaks into the steep rush and spray of the fall. What could I do but turn with the current and get choked by my inner speed? You tried to breathe against the acceleration, waiting for the air to consent. All the while, we behaved as if this search for a pace were useful, like reaching for a plank or wearing rain coats. I was afraid we would die before we could make a statement, but you said that language presupposed meaning, which would be swallowed by the roar of the waterfall.

  toward morning, walking along the river, you tossed simple objects into the air which was indifferent around us, though it moved off a little, and again as you put your hand back in your pocket to test the degree of hardness. Everything else remained the same. This is why, you said, there was no fiction.