Sinners Welcome: Poems Read online

  He spat in the punchbowl and smelled like a foot.

  His forehead was a ledge

  he leered beneath. When I was sent to tutor him

  in geometry, so he might leave

  (at last) ninth grade, he sat running pencil lead

  beneath his nails.

  If radiance shone from those mudhole eyes,

  I missed it. Thanks, David

  for your fine slang. You called my postulates

  post holes; your mom endured

  ferocious of the liver. Plus you ignored—

  when I saw you wave at lunch—

  my flinch. Maybe by now you’re ectoplasm,

  or the zillionth winner of the Texas

  death penalty sweepstakes. Or you occupy

  a locked room with a small

  round window held fast by rivets, through which

  you are watched. But I hope

  some organism drew your care—orchid

  or cockroach even, some inmate

  in a wheelchair whose steak you had to cut

  since he lacked hands.

  In this way, the unbudgeable stone

  that plugged the tomb hole

  in your chest could roll back, and in your sad

  slit eyes could blaze

  that star adored by its maker.

  THIS LESSON YOU’VE GOT

  to learn is the someday you’ll someday

  stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears

  shed, ready to poke your bovine head

  in the yoke they’ve shaped.

  Everyone learns this. Born, everyone

  breathes, pays tax, plants dead

  and hurts galore. There’s grief enough

  for each. My mother

  learned by moving man to man,

  outlived them all. The parched earth’s

  bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched

  the instants I trod it.

  Other than myself, of course.

  I’ve made a study of bearing

  and forbearance. Everyone does,

  it turns out, and note

  those faces passing by: Not one’s a god.

  THE CHOICE

  Once in northern England, I got a few pub drunks

  to drive to Wordsworth’s house, local thugs

  whose underheated VW (orange) took me

  fishtailing down icy hills,

  through hedgerows in an unlit labyrinth

  reminiscent of the library stacks I wandered around

  zombie-like each day, not composing

  verses but waiting in scarlet lipstick

  for the bars to open. I’d left my homeland

  fleeing a man I’d faked first caring, then

  not caring about, and in months of Euclidean solitude

  I’d writ no cogent phrase. The notebook in my knapsack

  was a talisman I carried into train stations so as not

  to look like a bimbo. But bimbo

  I was, and open, the bound pages were only white wings

  to nap on. Near dawn, our caravan came

  to a sleet-glazed window—a child’s stumpy desk

  with the poet’s initials penknifed on top.

  It was my first stab of reverence,

  when that hunger to emblazon

  some surface with oneself became barbarous

  wonder at someone else. W.W.—

  jagged as inverted Alps, unscalable

  as a cathedral’s gold-leaf dome.

  After that, grad school was a must.

  There I posed as supplicant till enough

  magnificence had been poured

  down my throat that I could whiff

  the difference between it and the stench

  I spilled. When I told the resident genius

  that given the choice between writing and being

  happy, I’d pick the latter, she touched my folio

  with her pencil like a bad fairy’s wand,

  saying: Don’t worry, you don’t have that choice.

  And in a blink of my un-mascara’ed eye

  the intricate world bloomed into being—impossible

  to transcribe on the small bare page.

  (for Brooks Haxton)

  A MAJOR

  I’ve come to see a dread-locked man

  play Mozart like a demon (someone said) with angels

  harrowing his back, or like a seraph

  sought by succubi.

  The black piano waits wide-legged, in boxer’s pose.

  It’s a sarcophagus that stores

  whole flocks of birds, banks of cirrus clouds,

  Egyptian forest groves,

  and a thousand metaphysical motes

  to sting a watcher’s eyes like sleet.

  A corps in funeral dress lines up in rows,

  but the piano holds the most tonight.

  We gather on its rim and hunger towards it,

  till the stage man props its jaw wide.

  Then out strides this lion-headed man,

  whom everyone can see the weather in. Then

  the winds inhale, and the bows tilt at even angles

  like the tiny masts of lifted sails.

  Right away, the piano’s notes unknot

  some inner ropes in me, hoist some mainsheet,

  loose in us some breeze, and with a broad wave

  of the maestro’s wand, we’re off,

  the notes skittering us along

  like surf. The keys are black and bone and pose

  a hurried order. When his lion’s head

  drops back, his face becomes a soft-edged mask

  lifted in defiance of the night we came here

  stalled in. See, my face is wet

  I never haven’t breathed so long. I’ve seen

  a death with order, meant but no way mean.

  He’s sprung our sternums wide

  and freed us from our numbered seats.

  We levitate as one and try to match

  the thunder in his chest

  with all our hands.

  (for Awadagin Pratt)

  WAITING FOR GOD: SELF-PORTRAIT AS SKELETON

  Need is a death’s head—SIMONE WEIL

  The winter Mother’s ashes came in a Ziploc bag,

  all skin was scorched from me, and my skull

  was a hard helmet I wore to pray with my middle finger bone aimed at the light fixture—Come

  out,

  You fuck, I’d say, then wait for God to finish me

  where I knelt; or for my dead mother to assemble in clouds

  of the Aquanet hairspray she’d used abundantly

  in her bleach blond Flashdance phase at sixty when she’d phone

  all slurry and sequined with disco playing to weep

  so I’d send cash, and once she splurged on a bloated sofa

  and matching Lazy-Boy recliner where her fat love could sprawl

  with gold chains on his hairy chest while she painted the mural

  of hippos to honor their nude abundances. Was it God

  who dragged her from the kitchen floor

  where she’d puked and the guy had pissed himself

  to detox, to a rickety chair where she eventually sat upright

  with eyes clear as seawater? Yes, I said

  to myself one day, kneeling, I believe

  that’s right. Then from the hard knot at my skull’s base

  I felt warm oil as from a bath bead broken open

  somehow flow upward to cover my skull, and my hair

  came streaming down again,

  and the soft clay crawled back to form my face.

  (for Kent Scott)

  AT THE SOUND OF THE GUNSHOT, LEAVE A MESSAGE

  That’s what my friend spoke

  into his grim machine the winter he first went mad

  as we both did in our thirties with still

  no hope of revenue, gravely inking

  our poems on pages held fast by gyres


  the color of lead.

  Godless, our minds

  did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp

  until we sank. His eyes were burn holes

  in a swollen face. His breath was a venom

  he drank deep of. He called his own tongue

  a scar, this poet

  who can crowbar open

  the most sealed heart, make ash flower,

  and the cocked shotgun’s double-zero mouths

  (whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelain

  and not a few locked doors) never touched

  my friend’s throat. Praise

  Him, whose earth is green.

  (for Franz Wright)

  ELEGY FOR A RAIN SALESMAN

  Dear friend, I heard tonight by phone

  of that ghost bubble in your brain.

  It was not the pearl of balance one fits

  between lines in a carpenter’s level

  to make something plumb, but a blip

  in a membrane that burst so now

  your fine brain is dead—

  that city of mist that nests in your skull

  will never again flicker with light.

  Flying the red-eye home, I talked to your mom tonight

  by air phone. Through static

  her voice stayed calm, wondering when

  to unhook the hospital’s bellows.

  She thought a trip

  to the beauty shop would help, and John,

  how you’d have cackled at that.

  That winter when I was broke

  and camped on your sofa for months,

  your dusky laugh kept me alive.

  Each night in a menthol fog we drank

  till last call.

  Once staggering home, we stopped

  to crane up between buildings, lines of windows

  rising away in rows. We listed in wonder,

  leaning together like cartoon drunks. There was

  a rectangle of sparkled sky you pointed out—

  beauty’s tattered flag—we pledged allegiance to—

  mittens over our heaving chests,

  cold to break your teeth on,

  a jillion stars foretelling none of this. Your mom said

  your last sight on earth was your own face

  in the shaving glass—in that hermit’s flat on Colfax Ave.

  where I watched you tape to the bathroom wall

  the first New Yorker rejection of hundreds.

  So that monocled asshole

  on the letterhead must have recurred

  like wallpaper four hundred times

  behind your moon face rising. Freeze

  that frame. Let me hold awhile

  with imagined hands that face,

  as you might have briefly held that day

  the worn oval of soap,

  idly, with no thought of its vanishing.

  Let me watch you shape in your palm

  a frail Everest of shaving foam,

  then smear yourself a snowman’s face

  with coal eyes staring out. The night

  that drew our drunk salute has now

  bled into that skull,

  glazed its porcelain with spider cracks

  like a Grecian urn. Our time’s

  run out, no epitaph on which to land safe

  appears in my oval porthole. The prairie slides beneath

  me white as any page. And rain has hardened

  into ticking sleet. Sleep, friend, as I cannot, reading

  the lines you left,

  streaking behind you like a meteor trail:

  …. I wanted to be a rain salesman,

  carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,

  selling thunder, selling the way air feels after a downpour,

  but there are no openings in the rain department,

  and so they left me dying behind this desk—adding bleeps,

  subtracting chunks—and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms,