The Brooklyn Rail

I SAID TO MY SELF PORTRAIT

The arms sit looking down on the legs
wishing they did not have to lift
themselves, garments, harmonicas,
charms, karma especially armor, ever again.
They look down on the legs so singular
of duty and envy them. The toes do not
worry about illegibility, a word attached
to leg, legible, legal and illegal,
but the toes worry about the obliterating
weight, the obvious darkness wherein
they often dream like inmates on two buses
rumbling side by side down a dusky road.
The elbows peers from their corners
at the arms and have no knowledge
of the palms. The palms consider the legs,
lower arms, while the legs are suspicious
of the suspension of the palms,
how they only touch earth when the body
crawls. Inside the crawl of the veins
is a steam trying to escape. Outside the veins
is what ever is made in advance of Death.
Inside the steam breathes longing and speech.
Outside the advance of death is hunger.
Inside your hunger is emptiness. Outside every
hollow is a shell. All the parts have
definitions apart from the parts you feel.

AN OPEN PLOT

When she pulled out her pearl handled switchblade
the metal catching moonshine was like a small lightening
breaking from her grip. Afraid as she was of ghosts,
she had perhaps only half listened to the children.
They had seen in the districts of distress the undressed
afflictions, sights of bloody address and sadness.
We took the path behind an abandoned house of worship,
the angel’s warship where the devil’s bullshit was whipped
by the lips at the pulpit. I had been telling the family a story
about the future to keep from losing my mind and gotten us lost
among modest headstones made of everything but stone.
“Exit” had been painted hastily on a sign above an open plot
holding at the bottom of the darkness, a door. The mother
holding that blade of caution before her was the first
through the door. The children, then I came after.

PEDAGOGICAL APRIL

To receive the methods said to cure
the students of their one dimensional
technological addictions, the teacher said
they’d have to solve an incomprehensible
word comprehension problem given
the first night of class. Baggy, eyeballers
of digital theater struck additionally dumb
by pollen & sunlight clouding the margins
of their gestures, students and teacher, wrote
to be rescued while constantly being rewired
like lines of traffic rerouted by a man
made entirely of trumpets. Inside the thunder
of spring was “a rustling of coils” & people
going about their business one hundred percent,
but when a portion of the so-called enemies
of the state placed in prison spotted an eyewitness
news chopper over head the illegal inmates
formed an S.O.S. with their bodies
And the machine caught their cheers & waves,
meaning “I have a witness, I shall be saved.”
When the soldiers came with their guns,
The villagers came with their camera phones
Casting video like stones thinking
inside the machine: “I have a witness, I’m saved.”
In the fourth month the teacher told the students
“You must have a little dark invader in you
to pierce the deeper implications of the piece
And the peace we study.” And briefly
feeling became a kind of lucrative living,
and briefly by less briefly the joy
and suffering of others became a kind
of transaction inside the machine
carried everywhere by the suffering
and joyous outside the machine.
The noise made the past feel so immediately
past. In the first week of the month
the teacher had assigned music
and dreams to the students.
If some one dreamed of destruction,
it was not mentioned. “The teacher responds
to the world the same with or without war”
said the teacher, sending the students
out to put language to what?
To take notes in the margins of which fire?
To wait for the next clue to fall
from what mouth like ash?
To trust this language like smoke?
It sounded like a “serious” of questions
because the classroom window was open
to sirens and because pollen sidetracked us
like the sirens out of eyeshot so the longing was
a song dividing traffic first at a distance
then in a tremble, then a passing distraction.
I was quiet as the teacher’s shadow
the whole time. Season of passion
seasoned with rain and autumnal spasms,
medicinal sun received in three dimensions,
April, I’m certain there is still a much version
of me within me. A path painted with pollen
colors the feeling between us.