Three Poems

NEW ENGLAND OEDIPUS

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With eyes that debrided sleep,
he’d been the only sound on this side

of New Hampshire, except for
a cough somewhere, the lisp

of a kite in perfect wind, snap
of a stick, what went unsaid.

At home, her ash hairs spread
like tinders, dimmed

L’s receding, skeletal.
Fall would be thin this year.

This time things would go
listlessly: To side-stepping

chirps of the clock, the woman rocked
through dark until one blind blood-

scripted eye was opened
and she groaned with surprise.

“Don’t,” she shushed, to young thumbs
thirling her back, red singe

of her brooch-scratch, sunset
easing her into senselessness.

And as her mistake gave in
to disease, she opened her mouth

and told her last child
(these clinging nerves,

this gossiping chorus of leaves)
how beautiful he was, how much

they had to share: the gin, the sky
all riddled with clouds, everything

coming and going, so little
remaining between.

SIGNS BY NO LAKE THAT GREEN

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Mass2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

I.

Past droplets racing up the wind like insects, voltage
cracked the passage between me
                                                                                          and the mountains.
Geese had been gathering like authors, ruffled dignitaries
                                                                                                                                                 at the edge
of the lake, their feet black-rubber-stamping
sand pocked with human knee-prints.
                                                                      A gull cried,
puffed, and plummeted
                                                            to peck one Canada goose
on the nape. Shivering stripes of life obviously symbolized loss and conflictedness
for an instant.

II.

                                                                 Through smoke stripes coiling
                                                                                               from the open gas grill,
                                        I recalled a poet I’d long looked to, leaning in his white
pinstriped suit pants,
a towel where the white hairs on his nape
stood up around the thin green pool
                                        in his collarbone. He must have been thinking his way
                                        around lines
                                                                      like these in this poem you are reading
until he came to the part
concerning a dream in which
a goose was quacking about the tranquility
                                        of the natural landscape, how lightning, in contrast, once set
                                             a mattress factory in Brooklyn on fire.

III.

                                                                 As wide awake then
as I am now, I marveled at how phosphorescent algae
on my fingertips created five firefly lakes.

                                                                                               Like the mirage of a plume
                                                  in the poet’s quick-blinking hand:
the green tail of a pony that my grandmother once painted
in Brooklyn, back when one
could gallop anywhere.
                                                  By that time, the pink goose-crossed
band of clouds in the sky had spiraled
between the mountains and behind both
                                                                           his eyes, the caduceus of sentence
and line, mercurial as the gesture with which I wanted him
to ratify my expression, my torn Pumas, even the scribbling goose-plumes
                                                            I was going to write about. He smiled and signed
the blind air between us,
                                        a hair-thin lightning charge
as his medium.

MY DIRTY CHAI

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Mass3.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

You, no mere au lait, clove-spiked,
big mouth watering

                                   by a thumb toned like a bean in the sun.
Eye black as devil as coffee,
breath of tea, complex leaf.

Your fleshy kisses
above the rim, your emerald eyelids slanting rhyming

lashes. To press another kiss to the skin of the milk.
To taste the lotus

beneath the verdigris.
How to articulate-

steam whisper suggests a navel-cave, a spice-store
powering wide-moving swans

past the low sump of today.

O, my concoction
re-enacted within the drinker’s knowing,

deepening feelings to inhuman depths
of cacao of Maya, edible
                                                            gold waves
                                                                                of heat.

What lies beyond that, the tongue knows,
but it cannot speak it.