Dark Wild Realm Read online

  In that world the children of demigods

  were doomed, and if I survived,

  who would be left to love?

  No one knows anything until he dies.

  The stones I dropped into the well

  rest on the bottom, and the water

  over them hasn't spoken, and so—

  stone- and water-silent—and so, and so.

  LOST HORIZON

  They would come, blown off course, in their wheeling,

  spiraling, then hovering, trash-like flocks,

  and settle on the weekend seas of irrigated fields and parks,

  like ducks on ponds too shallow for paddling—

  or from a distance they might seem to float, though

  in another sense held up by mirage and meniscus,

  which meant you had to blink, refocus, to see what was

  or wasn't there. Occasionally, in their midst

  something bold, big-billed, and broad towered above them,

  whose wings cast shadows large enough

  to make its own weather, a foreigner among so many strangers.

  And this was my first taste of the floods and plagues,

  the rain that would not end over the unprepared lands.

  And yet the birds, lifting one by one, retraced what they had

  been,

  while filling up the emptiness they had made, returning

  to wherever they had come, if such a place existed for so many.

  AUBADE

  Quietly the mornings used to start

  as if the breath escaping from our mouths

  was meant to fill the room

  and that would be the day's requirement:

  a volume equal to its space, arriving

  as the sun arrived. Then we could hear

  the sparrows fussing in the pyracantha,

  the river of traffic from the freeway.

  Then the wonder of the moment was that

  the day made room for us at all.

  But now we know the place, the numbered

  hairs, and have seen the figures of ourselves

  along the road, searching for the street

  that leads into the avenues, then through

  the intersections with their crossing guards.

  Look how far into the day we've moved

  and yet we're still in bed, awake, silent.

  Escape or stay I used to tell myself,

  waiting for you to shift and touch my leg

  so I might turn to kiss your lips.

  BOAT RENTAL

  From the shore we could see the work it took to keep

  the bow straight—constant adjudications

  of wind and current. The boat, a kind of shuttle

  threading elemental warp and woof. Each rower

  faced the direction of his going, away from where he'd stood.

  When the storm blew up they struggled to return.

  Earlier, when it had been our turn and the water smooth

  with intermittent scuds that slapped a beaver's tail

  against the skiff, I thought, "Who doesn't love

  the middle of his life?" My voice whispering

  crucial adjustments, not anticipations

  but greetings of air and water, mediums of resistance.

  And then a man's voice, as if along a wire, traveled

  from his mouth, in the middle of the lake, to my ear:

  "Put your butt down, now!"Advice offered too late

  to the tipping-over canoeist? Or from the shore,

  more threatening, more resigned: "Why did we ever have

  these children?"

  A teenager soaked from a water fight screams

  for the other teenager to stop his splashing.

  He doesn't stop, and she wouldn't want him to, really.

  Amid their laughter and commotion a flock of mallards

  rises from stockades of bamboo on Duck Island,

  circles eucalyptus and palms, and then returns.

  What was once over the horizon is all around us.

  The instruction in J-stroke not so much remembered

  as imprinted—the saving gestures—and, of course,

  the world divided between paddlers and rowers.

  ("There's room for a thermos and small ice chest.")

  Few make a journey of diversion; most want a moment,

  not a story. It felt good, then, to be afraid for others—

  to see the storm approaching and the boats racing

  for the dock. Finally, we all stood under the boathouse

  and watched the vessels fill with rain. Those of us who were dry

  were quiet, and those who were wet laughed,

  uncertain if all the others had returned. Nevertheless,

  we took pleasure in the cushions lifting off thwarts,

  oars and paddles drifting away, the thermos bobbing,

  while a plastic sack caught by its handles sang above us in a tree.

  COMMON FLICKER

  Old nail pounding your way

  into bark or creosote,

  intermittent tripod

  of legs and beak,

  derrick, larvae driller,

  when I look up from

  my mind I see what

  you are: feather-hooded,

  mustached, gripped

  to the steady perch;

  an idea of the lower

  altitudes sparged

  with color, a tuber

  of claws and wings

  and an eye unmarred.

  Wing-handled hammer

  packing the framer's blow,

  face stropping the hardness,

  drumming and drumming,

  your song is your name.

  This will cure me,

  you declare. This will

  heal the fractured jaw,

  soothe the vibrating helve

  so I can eat, so I can sing.

  INVOCATION TO THE HEART

  Speak to me now,

  alive, outside the body,

  massaged,

  lifted from this package—

  rigged, hybridized,

  a chunk of sulfide

  breeding worms—

  scorched, glittering,

  unburnable.

  The severed veins are eyes,

  ears the pericardium.

  No longer

  an abacus of click and slide,

  no longer the engine

  of this or that fist

  but a machine of foreclosure,

  aurora of occluded sky,

  veil over the fetish.

  Fill my mouth

  with imperfect speech.

  Remind me how you are

  part pig, part parachute.

  Root in me, slow

  my fall.

  Remember that each of us

  lay dead awhile

  waiting for the other.

  A NIGHT AT THE WINDOW

  The moth detaches from a leaf

  and swims up through the dark

  to flutter at the screen

  through which the desk lamp shines.

  You could almost say its wings

  are oars, the legs like walking

  rudders, except it doesn't float,

  it skitters upward, out of sight,

  and then returns, while the night

  from which it's made withdraws,

  and the light, a star so far above,

  yet hot enough to burn, unwheels

  its arms. Nothing stays, though

  in a while the day comes on

  and you can leave the window.

  But who remains to watch

  the navigating legs, the unfolded

  sculling wings? What holds the place

  until the night returns—the bang

  and flutter—as if across the day

  a face is formed, sun-drenched,

  searching, wise with what it sees

  and then unwise, caught

>   in its own light and then released.

  THE LIFT

  Birdsong in the morning air

  and the whir of my neighbor's lift

  as it raises him in his wheelchair

  onto the bed of his truck.

  Not someone to pity, he locks the wheels

  in place and like a gymnast

  on parallel bars manages himself

  from his seat and then, in a move

  too quick to see, disappears, though

  because I've been there beside him

  I know he's on all fours crawling

  to the tailgate where he swings

  over the edge and continues

  in the dirt of the drive. Sometimes

  when I'm weeding the garden

  or admiring sunlight through leaves

  the electric whir of the lift, followed

  by its silence, breaks through and then

  the hoof-slap of palms on the ground,

  the scrape of shoes pulled along

  by his strength, and I see him

  as I did the first time, hoisting

  a chainsaw, by block and tackle,

  and then himself, into the blighted tree

  towering between our yards

  and which, limb by limb,

  branch and trunk,

  he cut down and stacked.

  TO A CHAMELEON

  After moving the clothes dryer to unclog the vent

  I find your bracelet length of bone,

  curve of vertebrae, spine

  that is also tail, saurian claws

  like clasps unclasped, and your skull

  fallen away from its sharp neck.

  It's harder now for you to understand,

  harder for you to listen.

  I once tried calling you back

  with a pill cap of water, dead flies,

  and something more absurd, a reptilian

  whisper—all for my son's benefit,

  who stood as still as you had stood,

  leashed to his shoulder. And then

  when unleashed you disappeared,

  but left behind a writhing tail.

  You were a lesson, at first, of love

  that never repays itself and then

  of absence and grief's forgetting,

  but now what benefit is there

  having found you, a fossil

  unencumbered except by memory

  and the sound of my son's breathing

  and the chain and collar that still hangs

  from your patient skeleton—the coppery

  blue links and rusted white ash.

  NIGHT STORY

  There was an understanding of how the pages

  of the book unfolded, like owl wings,

  when my mother read to us, and how the words

  of the familiar story, laid out in furrows,

  skirted the farmyard—chickens, pigs, a tethered goat—

  and lay like clouds over a billowing land,

  or shadowed the white house with black lightning rods

  while parked near the shed stood a truck as old as a grandfather.

  Night, dark earth, brought darker clouds.

  Lightning flashed. A red tractor, all but its nose

  in the barn. Calm and clear and plain,

  my mother urged the boy out into the thunder

  and rain to drive the animals back to their coops

  and stalls. Hair stood on end. My sister squirmed.

  The great chestnut tree split, caught fire. Half

  fell in the pond where the flames soon died

  and half fell on the barn. All of this so long ago

  a boy could reach the blackened tractor

  without anyone saying,"It's only a story,

  life doesn't happen this way."

  But how else did hair rise on my arms the first

  and last time the story was read? And what woke

  my sister from her dream where she stood

  in a forest, burning, among an alphabet of flames?

  TURKEY VULTURES

  The red drill of their faces, pink-tipped,

  grubbed in gore, cyclopean in their hunger

  for the dead but not the dying, lugubrious

  on their perches from towers, in trees, where they

  convene like ushers on church steps.

  Heads sculpted to fit cane handles, claws

  to dibble seed, to sort out the warp of the snow

  from the woof, unwind the gray bobbins of brain.

  assiduous as cats as they clean, wing scouring

  wing, until the head polished like a gem

  gleams, and the ears no more than lacy holes

  are sieves for passing air or molecules of gas.

  These birds, who wear the face of what will last,

  congregating but not crowding, incurious

  and almost patient with their dead.

  IN MAY

  In May the paths into the dunes

  are roped off from foot traffic

  because the birds amass to breed.

  You can watch them through binoculars

  from the edge of a parking lot,

  white invisible deltas that drop

  and glint, cataractous floaters

  against the sun, rising from the sea

  or fluttering midday from nests

  spiked inside the broken clumps

  of compass grass. Or on a plaque

  read about a lighthouse stretched

  like bones beneath the waves.

  When Heraclitus observed,

  "You can't step into the same river twice,"

  did he mean you couldn't trust

  experience or thought to illustrate

  how "nature loves to hide" beneath

  its own swift surface? Did he mean

  there's pleasure in deception,

  not despair, delight when we recognize

  a tern's or plover's flash and glitter,

  silhouettes that navigate thermal rivers,

  declare themselves like scraps of paper,

  then disappear?

  SHELLEY'S GUITAR

  How much more beautiful it is

  because it's Shelley's guitar—

  a coffin of trapped song

  in a body like a grave.

  Because it's Shelley's guitar

  it's been put on display,

  a case within a case,

  a wooden hand inside a velvet glove,

  and nearby, the torn copy of Adonais

  that held his heart for thirty years.

  Next to it, other incomparable relics:

  his baby rattle, a watch, the plate

  off which he ate the beautiful

  raisins of his diet. Everything

  encased, preserved, though

  the heart now is only a stain, a watermark

  on pages his widow used to save it.

  Never mind the guitar was given to his friend

  Jane, as if it were the heart

  unauctioned, a neck

  with tuning pegs, gut strings, arabesque

  filigree. And never mind the guitar

  was meant to be a pedal harp

  he couldn't afford. "Take this slave

  of music," the poem says,"for the sake

  of him who is the slave of thee."

  Whose heart is it but Shelley's?

  Whose grave, whose book, whose glove and raisins?

  All those things that have been given

  either by "action or by suffering,"

  left behind, collected, to prove

  the dead have substance.

  BARDO

  Dangerously frail is what his hand was like

  when he showed up at our house,

  three or four days after his death,

  and stood at the foot of our bed.

  Though we had expected him to appear

  in some form, it was odd, the clarity

  and precise decrep
itude of his condition,

  and how his hand, frail as it was,

  lifted me from behind my head, up from the pillow,

  so that no longer could I claim it was a dream,

  nor deny that what your father wanted,

  even with you sleeping next to me,