Technorage

poems

Northwestern University Press

Contents

Desk

Every thing
I say of the world
is less true of
the world

than of myself.
The desk
is a timetable,
a cliff to lean

my elbows on,
a boat to rock
asleep in, a night
in the open.

I'm having
to show up
and sit down
to hear out

whether to sleep
or reach down into
the wake of
these others.

Customer Service

This guy at the counter today, tousled hair, eyes darting then holding like epitaphs do to their gravestones, face like a cracked baseball glove after so many catches and flubs and so many despondent benched innings, he's saying to me, sensing my impatience that if it could would annihilate anything in its way, "Go ahead of me, I'm just getting my things together," and there I am at the head of the line pulling out of my pocket some small change to make things easier for a smiling clerk — the name on her tag says SHARON, Sharon who restores instant hope of us who stand in line waiting, Sharon who will never hear her name spoken by me even once. And now I am stuffing into my pocket — where else? — some receipt that for all I know has for its final journey hand to hand, to wallet or pocket, finally to a wastepaper bin or to a couple of free laundry cycles or to just plain being lost. The guy at the beginning of a growing line is saying, "No one else is gonna do it for me," and I'm saying, "That's for sure, you gotta do everything yourself," he's saying, "That's for sure," and then finally saying, "My mama isn't gonna do it for me," with some tacit rage of having said that hovering in his face. Hell yeah, I back off from inside my body to even further inside my body just so self can be involved, feeling implicated as always for existing in the first place, navigating its own churning motives. But what is this self? Do we have to get into that again? Here is what the self is. It is a grand perhaps, knowing involuntarily that the words, his, mine, just came out that way, I could be him absently staring at a retro bubble gum machine, he could be you, he could be right here reading your querulous story, someone looking down at you from up here, don't look to me, don't even look to yourself, the answers are more obvious than we are, me, him, her, we, them, and, I'm afraid to say to you, I'm relieved to say to you, what you already know. You. You are anyone else.

The Afterlife of Deer

Anything but unsurprising is
a habit deer have
What they are to me until they happen

in snow/leaf/wind
sun/rain/moon
is nothing if not always serendipitous

In my globe of space and time
they change place with one another That
is what memory is

That is why we die
interchangeable
shadows of scud-clouds scudded across winter's

blade-scraped ice
Heaven is the same
for them

frozen pond
empty swing sets
heaven

* * *

unfortunate birth
uncontrollable circumstance
heaven
they dream of corn
our underworld
this ice pond

Heaven's roof we walk gingerly upon
or its ceiling cracks
Death is beneath us
Heaven is beneath us
Earth is beneath us
Joy is beneath us Contempt

always looks downward

* * *

We are told not to feed
Whatever record left behind
only yesterday

the nuanced tilt of the two halves
of the hoof prints
whatever thought them up

not all that mindful
The oaks start bearing
Pea-sized acorns

cut down on predators
there is no other choice but life and more life
or less

and let the animals starve
and not to feed
just watch That was what our life was

* * *

Their tracks get all mixed up for us
for us their silence is
unheard of

a time before paradise or loss
that calm of theirs good sense
Best to go unseen
How have their carcasses been disposed
You can't see hear
you can't even smell

* * *

Did I tell you about three of them
the family I talked to
as to pets or children
baby talk what I said depending
so little on them
surprise didn't speak a word it washed its hands

Their very appearance is a cliff
I walk off
and fall to earth and live to tell their story

My memory
is a thief and my imagination
an undertaker

some family
surprised
unmoving

One Question foe Ed

Are words all there are for crying out loud, all the great and good and lesser books, ballads, screeds, prayers, deeds, constitutions, obits, wedding notices, birth notices, evictions, letters, e-mails, bills, phone calls, last cries, first babbles, chants, recipes, warrants, epitaphs, eulogies, revelations, no matter how complex, how lyrical, how moving, how true, the brightest sentences, the most pellucid paragraphs, the most effulgent chapters, all of Proust a winsome chandelier, Hemingway a hotel sconce or two, Basho one lit match the wind cannot blow out and then it does, a mockingbird's manic samplings mostly erasure while I read some Whitman and then the pastor reads from scripture the part about the garden at the end of Revelations, in the middle of the City of God, Who said, let there be light, who was God talking to, Himself, Nancy crying in near silence, her whole family quieted for once, Nancy, her mother and her sister and her brother heads bowed down like daffodils through all the words?

Out of the Vortex

Gust smattered gobs of snow glommed to spruce
limbs
shingled white, then, through snow fume, a hint
of living green,
the ecstatic without the static, without confines.
Outline is idea, any process is arriving at a humble
clump of words,
so if I say I'm down on my knees what ceiling,
what hands take mine and pull me to my feet?

* * *

What fashioned the soft blue tree shadows — no,
not shadows,
wisps of night across day heedlessly laid down,
whatever these are, a gladness I am otherwise.
Humankind hidden, hypothetical as slurred trees
down street,
no shape is but that necessity strictly conforms,
no one
walks into the eyes, nothing out there to kneel.

* * *

Cut and dried aesthetics, art at its most frugal
the universalizing principality of smother-love —
some universalizing thief
has taken all the fine detail away, as proof
that we've always been losing our memories,
white drop cloth over sidewalks, driveways,
abstract forms — balustrades on fence posts.

* * *

Thrown pots on lampposts, pedimented flat roofs,
eaves
beveled to bedding for the wind's insomnia,
bushes — overstuffed sofas — plush cushions
on car tops,
the un-dug-out cars awaiting derelict orders,
marmoreal empire — what absentee would want
to rule
this inhospitably over the upholstery of the air —

* * *

Hedges are blizzard-coral, a great reef crystallizes,
cold sunlight
screened is arctic-aquatic now, under an ice cap
we live,
even breath asphyxiates, even its own passing, nether
shadows.
Silted earth's ghost — a heavily, indrawn vagary
—
drew frost-graffiti'd windows, specifics randomly
stippled —
that there is subject to this the human wish.

* * *

What of those leery leather oak leaf gloves no one
wears,
who would go out in this would become statue,
sculptured marble, I can't make out the sign or name
of my own street,
who would pull me over them like a sweater,
who would like to be undergone gone under.

* * *

Footprints shallow, a pathetic picket deer fence
snow picketed with less precision than the fence,
similitude, what a sham, it sculpts no clear edge,
rounded is edge, what a beautiful sham is this,
do you see,
the blind eyes of the neighborly windows,
it must be dark inside the average houses,
indefinite all day rends and shrills this squall,
you want that?
Do you really think you know who we are?

* * *

What of the fictive emptiness, what is purpose
down here,
snow, that which surrounds me, you You,
you are not a curtain I or we need to open.
The neighbors occupy the world they seem,
Eyesight falls so far in me, my happiness
no need to touch my flesh or hers, that, her shining face,
not today, this another sort of surrender,
midafternoon I lie down in my warmth.

* * *

Bushes tabletopped and then tented over,
three juncos dart in and out of one of the gaps,
two come back out, but I have seen more go in
than go out,
go into a permeable enclosure there.
It must be better altogether like that.

* * *

These branches more than half draped white
and shouldering more snow than branch,
the snowfall so hoisted above more-of-the-same
is lifted up,
held up into you and from these eyes.
Whatever you see, I would like to say
whatever you make of this I would make yours,
whatever we look out on and we abide
be lifted up, for the beautiful is ours.

Our Heron

Observation isn't serious play. It is living serious. Same heron. It's used to us, we are as twilight. When we walk down shore. Hand me the binoculars. I'll hand them back. No I can see it with my naked eye. Cup your ear. Drink what I say. Because what was that last squabble about? If we draw too near the heron it will go, meaning that for it we will have gone.

I can't see it every day all day. Sunlight has nothing to do with our sharing the sight of it. I want twilight. A heron is a "how to" book on twilight. Open anywhere. "How to" is a lonely phrase. Lonely is a start. Try saying so. Try making up and try inconclusion. Try twilight.

Then try reading a book so good that every page is dog-eared and you know how safe the heron out there in the reeds feels just about now. Each twilight try the same heron the shade of twilight. Twilight hushes to such tones you have to look so carefully at what you see you become hushed yourself. Then a heron. Pulled forward by fish, the baiting saint of the shallows. Its elongated neck tapers to the beak that always precedes head and eye and ears, the beak being both an emissary for and a tender of the senses.

Sometimes behind slender reed it would vanish to sight, we couldn't make it out, and trying to was like trying to interpret a flyleaf.

For twenty-odd minutes we'd watch for the heron while we brushed mosquitoes from one another's faces. The mosquitoes would have drowned in our hearts if they could have.

Damnation

I kinda like this one, Bob. Leave it.

— The Joker, Gotham City Flugelheim Museum, Batman (1989)

Francis Bacon's Figure with Meat. On both sides of a man seated in a chair as black as can be is a side of meat, hanging wondrously, without hooks. They could be the plucked, flensed wings of an angel. Angels, those birds without trees, nests, or eggs. That man is stationed inside what through the stilled, troubled medium of precise obscurity appears to be an ever receding hallway. Perhaps the ever receding hallway is the negative space behind all canvases. Perhaps this man is fasting. If this man were in the light, what would he do? He ate what is dead and he is alive. He's seated on the throne to interiority. What an atrocious kingdom. It is as postmodern as Abu Ghraib. His head should be a skull. Three holes: two eyes and the lurid gray slur of a mouth. If he is screaming, his scream is a gagged quiet. Get your eyes down on their hands and knees. Pray, weep. Be skinned alive.

The Afterlife of Deer

Harvest midnight
Carcass strung up on a basketball hoop
is still twirling

Harvest bleeds
gyres
on driveway

the sun shining down Where you are
they are
never to be lost or found

no ghost with pen can put to speech or song
one who looked up at me
from the golf course

through the windshield of my moving car
made eye contact and held it
and looked and looked

Memory drove away

* * *

sight of tongue
sleight of eyes
To disappear only to reappear

Key deer all trust and littleness
shying almost
right up to us

in a dream they showed up dark green
bleeding sap
from the teeth of a backhoe

And did I tell you about the
one just
outside

I was the guy
whose office window that one walked by
like I wasn't there

indifferent if from many singled out
one of those heavenly days
glorious enough to die

* * *

Deer grazing up in the clouds
able to bear
them

Look up there
Up there
are spring flowers and overgrazing and harvest

Not so near nor so far
No ghost pen can put to tune or speech
wind both fierce and light

Grazing on snow falling upwards
for all I know
All I know

hurts and the afterlife
of a world of hurt
lets me near them

* * *

Above that you are able
to escape That You Are
or may be able to bear

the one that walked out of the scrub
across beach front right
up to lake was no longer a cherub with antlers

and bent down as if
it were itself an if
and lowered a head as an if

and drank from the if-ebb
It might have been a ghost
Alive still or probably not

death doesn't have a prayer


TechnoRage

If I could walk there or note it on a laptop
it wasn't me —
that false loosestrife was many fruited, and jewelweed was the same
as fireweed.

My wife reads books on clouds
that wander lonely or out loud.
What forms inhabit the sky rain a little heaven across
gnarled vineyards —

it is the spell of sensations
that keep our observations
going, enough that whole days we walk out of each other's
minds.

Dead mole on the state park road, plump little comma
without a sentence.
Overhead the same five herons
day after day surprise me anew.

I've seen this family flap out from the cattails and rushes.
They disregard my regard.
Saying so is a way to remain.

Waxwing, pass me a berry.
I'm hungry and the bladder campions are too many invasive footnotes
to look up.
The definition of realism —

which is all in the margins
when night settles herons
and moonlight takes the thrilled lake for a last little ride —
is glossophilia.

Seaside goldenrod, golden Alexanders.
Best yet, oyster plants gone to zany seed —
terrestrial starbursts, these goatbearded clusterfucks somehow radiate:
"human happiness

will destroy the earth," Albert Schweitzer said of amateur naturalists.
As for silence,
it doesn't exist, concluded John Cage, in his own nearly endless
book —

whatever silence isn't
I want a little bit of.
And as for darkness,

"We're lost if the lights go out,"
Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, once electric light abolished darkness
in Japanese interiors,
In Praise of Shadows.

The heron cast no shadows that far up; down here
I am afraid to be afraid.
I might miss something, something that misses
me.

In the flicker of gaslight
families were destroyed.
Soon, out of the board feet that was Nottingham Forest, in that barrens,
replaced by their children,

factory workers plotted before they were hunted down.
Luddites. First to be called "frame breakers."
Soon it was a capital offense to break a loom.

Man created the machine in his own image.
As for the soul,
"I think that this is something we know exactly
nothing about"—

John Muir — whom Emerson, after a transcontinental ride
a private coach, met and praised,
"a thinking man."

"Thought without reverence
is barren," abstruse Carlyle.
Come any thought but silent spring, please, I'll get down
on my knees

in the lake shallows.

It's all deep ecology.
The lake at its lowest level in decades is beaching
the pleasure boats.

Machinery spewing out machinery, the Transformers movies,
digitalized visuals
sensational on polyethylene screen
in a climate-controlled environment.

The term "environment" is used here sentimentally.
What the audience sees is irrelevant; what is relevant is that human
forms
sit in a darkness made comfortable by Freon

in chairs designed to maximize comfort
at minimal cost, pleasure goers in rows —
escaping work, or home, unwittingly supporting an industrialized
aesthetics —

"the human frame / A mechanized automaton," Shelley wrote,
"Scarce living pulleys of a dead machine ..."
"Men are more easily made than machinery," Lord Byron, for a brief
period outraged.

Say yes to cyberutopia
and instant democracy.
Idolized Keats was actually not wealthy enough to vote.

"Poor lonely worshipper"— Muir said of his self.
Bishop pitied the obsessed, her own unlikely nature,
"poor bird," lonely, worshipful — herself — her sandpiper, her fish,
her moose.

"Computer banks have become our nature," Lyotard wrote
of the postmodern condition.
Server farms take up four percent of this nation's unlimited
power.

It's night in the restaurant dumpsters.
It's worse tonight than night somewhere because the War
is right here on our screens.
The bombs are bombing the bombs.

So we can despise all of creation.


Foreclosure of the Moon

Shit slams into it
all the time I
know what that looks like
I have a window

to a white washed
blue jean
day moon what a
gyp of a vision

no one needs
except to
open our minds
to poverty

perfected even the
poor are out of
the picture not
a houseplant

or a spider's
good sense
to hang to What's
to be done

with the human the
mechanical
reproduction of anything
that is human

war on leaves
get the leaves
out of here
houses just keep

pushing the sea
into itself it is
only human to watch
sea push back

same breaking
old sea wind
hard over street same
old cold

up there
ours to say why we fear
distance
ours to say why

when we fear the cold
we fear ourselves
where are the controls
to turn that off