"Everybody removed the masks."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Birds without End, Poem for Oona Hyland
Art Factory, Gweedore, Ireland
Split infinity, the moon jelly
breathes under a boat.
It doesn't know it's hiding.
I don't know my dream
until I see it, the pianos
paired down to harps
in the art factory, and
a table of dead crows
whose wings are books now.
Every crow is a book
and the angel has
a sheep's skull for a pelvis
and many for a spine.
And my god the spiral
in the stone. The terror
of massive crow
and sheep angel
femur spokes for crown.
And I was lost and lost
looking for the place.
And then you rained
your godsends.
What I want
to tell you has more vowels
than I can pronounce. (I've
given you a metaphor
instead of a map, reader.
That's what they give you here.)
Listen to the sea birds
passing over in the dark
the bids of quiet astonishment
in the grass.
Look at your own hand
and then the bog tree.
Your slip is made of red.
Your dress is made of poem.
_______________________________________________________________ Dangerous Place to Stop a Fable
Hurry washes her hands by the light of a night light whose square of silver print is an etching of two deer-horse creatures sprinting, one at the other's flank, the one in front with his front legs up and the one in back with his back legs up, and they are the best three toe horses of Oligocene, the Mesohippus Bairdii, according to the South Dakota School of Mines. Hurry's dog can't sleep, and so that night Hurry sleeps only during the very last hour of the night and in that hour Hurry's relationship to war is that she dreams she is in the Trojan one, running up a stone staircase behind a woman with dark hair. Normally the hum of the war is like a heating and cooling unit, and you can't hear it until it stops, or you remember you were hearing it all along, until the silence, when the pressure on your inner ear goes back to zero. Hurry might be a woman or a man in her dream, and she can hear the Trojans shouting from below the castle and they sound so close and so loud and the
re are so many of them she is terrified. A woman on the television demands two spring lambs for a hand-made doll. The doll is a spell, and the likeness is perfect. A neighbor's saw covers up what the television is saying. Hurry's dog goes to the door to smell where the noise is coming from. He's essential to the fable. At eighteen, he's the ecstatic truth. Please believe me. The doll's going into the fire, and the death isn't quick. And Hurry's dog sits in the sun outside the door. How convenient the dollmaker's a neighbor. In the war, on the television, no one's dead yet except the lambs.
*
Hurry loves the sudden appearance of animals. She wipes the pee smell from her dog's feet and carries him in to the quilt he sleeps on. The firemen clear away the pink crosses from the dead teen's memorial, but the skid marks are still there, cutting a path like a black cat to the yellow leaves and scraggly trees that stopped her fall and started her fall, and it's so beautiful with Halloween coming on. During one of the rare, hard rains, rabbit pellets flood the walk at the skid. Hurry has twenty definitions of ghost and each and every one applies to the wavering blanket of bird shadows covering her by day, and each and every one applies to the enormous owl at the side of the road the other night just sitting there for the second in the headlights as she road by. Hurry holds her dog's toes up to the light to see the quicks, even in the dark toe: she can see it and the nail's curled too much. Hurry cleans her dog's feet, between the toes so he bucks his head against her cheek
. This is a good sign. The owl could have been Hurry, and the branch coming out of the hole in the barn could be a hand grabbing at a skid, and this is a town, and this is an owl, and this must be the dead girl flying off. Hurry must really be in the whole world.
_______________________________________________________________ Us in the Dark Wandering Home
For Kevin and Pam
I found the Aristotle paraphrases
_______________________________________________________________ Imago Mundi:
war poem for Anselm Kiefer
I.
And in the painting
_______________________________________________________________
Eurydice at Mammoth Caves, 1983
Prologue
"Eurydice at Mammoth Caves, 1983" and "Hologram" are two chapters of the same poem, both set at Mammoth Caves. In the first, the Eurydice of Greek mythology finds herself in the caves after the fatal bite to her foot on her wedding day. (Some members of her wedding actually show up in the caves.) She's traveled from Sadorus, Illinois, her hometown in the poem, to Mammoth Caves.
"She was there, limping a little
The Metamorphosis of Ovid "Concerning love, I know a conjugation..."
John Nash I. They take our picture into the cave, goes missing, some of us too pale (I think I managed to miss flying from a truck I lose track of the truck but not the fire, I look in a windshield and see how black the bird II.
The tour bus idles on the gravel, she left her money at home, not to go missing from the picture They are the slow eye. They put a rock down from whipping around They sign the back III.
A fan blows all the other group photos in the split second of the camera flash. or a 3 in the camera flash, I turn eternity, or half eternity. a dismembered newspaper IV.
I go missing. Sunburned even as I turn a number The man I love consults the picture a likeness on the wall by now. *
They have an easel with an oil exactly as it looks, not in the actual sky like a sunrise, just the oil V.
The seals sound like birds. The children with their backs draw the new house the frantic creaking door wings beating prehistoric Maybe they will draw me VI.
The egrets fan from one tree Their voices are under-water voices, A crow screams at its reflection That bird hates gifts, VII.
They have colored lights and cartoon characters around the stalagmites, of the sublime, beautiful in spite of wrapped around Illegible. You can have one VIII.
Their map has terra-incognita the old mapmakers called where the line stops no accounting for the umbrella My imagination makes something My foot hurts but not enough hurt A song IX.
They have a throat singer sounds like a number of them. inside one mouth, of the air near water. and send up a cloud of gulls. we feel the vibrations. the vibrations are there The jaw at rest. Our role models For instance who limps as I do, In the Masonic temple because in life, he has to walk sideways X.
They have Jacob's Ladder bottomless. I believe him. Therefore they have pogonophora riftia, and black smoker ocean vents who don't feed on light. My mother grew something nothing to do with leaves, of the bowl, and laundry soap graininess, and there was a smell and quilts with crop circles side-stepping A gift like a cave should always XI.
They have the unfinished paintings the half colored in They have a blonde child on a gray with a pink bucket on her head, at her feet. They have blue stars sits a real white rabbit The rabbit seems larger than the girl. as she is small XII. In her Lavender "Mammoth Caves" running up to her right shoulder, If you look long enough at a word, A word is never at rest. move with her song. The small blonde XIII.
They have a guide, a teen, enter me and several women who frown and laugh They no longer have to the two sounds shells. Maybe They have a petting zoo and a tent away, who will rub your shoulders XIV.
In the split second the women know their young guide who were made to leave who covet a green kleenex and a tiny (plush) XV.
Every sulky daughter covets portrait, thousands of numbers when she looks up close, Funny to think scrolling the concrete poem, that are Orpheus' head, * A child tries Lemniscate. Lemniscate, (to the tune She grieves because she tried let his helium balloon go, She let hers go like this both of them her hand still up widening between her hand her thinking is just that, She can keep her balloon like a secret, to show him The man I love the same way a leopard in his mouth. getting away, XVI.
They have a barn with a black roof "Mammoth Caves (arrow They have of the world's walking sideways XVII.
To call the birds, I knew I wouldn't I wasn't but I wanted at my wedding. instead of rice is why you should stay you should not. XVIII.
They have an Irish of an Eagle's nest a human leg. the Donegal people They have no painting XIX.
Soaked sheep's wool of the ancient ring Mary anchored the grainy texture enlarged by the water. Down the hill the tiny museum XX.
I have this life as sheep's wool Mary suspended in water swimming On my wedding day when I opened and I forgot and I (quick) hid my breasts No one expects my wedding party though people are always Two ring bearers their faces bracing of the air. of seeing an eight or a three, whose ribbon separated, on one plump hand raises her eyebrows The breath of the flowers
_______________________________________________________________
Falcarragh, Ireland
of Albertus Magnus, and the milky way
was certainly full of stars. I couldn't stop
reading the revision of Magnus saying the lunar
rainbow appeared to him twice in one year,
not the once-in-fifty-years of Aristotle.
I have only seen the lunar rainbow once in a lifetime,
over the high bog of an ancient gravesite
lit by a ringed moon. The whole thing
with a small rain.
It was midnight and the arch was black
and every color, and the new burros and sheep
made such a racket instead of sleeping
that we knew we were seeing something profound
among the sock puppet headstones
in the deep August light, us wondering whether
the souls of the layers of the dead beneath us warmed
to the rain under the phenomenon,
us in the dark wandering home.
of the pool you've
added a wiry ship,
lead, ashes, and
a dress. Little planes
have landed on the ship,
shitting little fires; partly
they obscure the lineline
linelinecrossthrough, linelinelinelinecrossthrough,
of someone counting the laps
he swims. A little plane
comes out of each
orifice of the dress. The war
goes on. More little dresses
need to blow off the line,
and land on the painting's
little ship, but they don't.
There are no more dresses
over the pool or under
the air craft carrier
in the post-war painting,
and they are miles from
a girl waking from a
sound sleep. Her feet
dangle. She is sitting
in for the bicycle
that sits in for the
angel, an artist's model
for a casualty, so tired
is she with her hair
hanging over her ears,
her striped coat behind
her on a hook. Her sleeves
rolled up over her shoulders,
she sits on the stretcher
balanced on treasure chest
and up-ended box. A sink
is in the room. The
porcelain gleams from the
corner. My bird sings to
the helicopters on
the television. Actresses
thin as ashes and pale as stone.
This ship on the pool wall,
the same. Ashes. Stone.
When my birds sings,
it's a needle in the air.
In the distance, the artist's model
for a wounded angel
with her hair hanging
over her ears. She'll give
us the time of day in heaven.
From her late wound, with the new shades of Hell.
And Orpheus received her, but one term
Was set: he must not, till he passed Avernus,
Turn back his gaze, or the gift would be in vain."
before we go down
in case one of us
thirty or forty of us,
in our summer clothes.
closed my eyes,)
the white doors (doves?)
onto the road.
and the sirens
a bird buzzing my cheek.
to make sure it's gone
must have been against my hair.
a child cries because
I'll tell you what the dead want:
they take.
They are not missing, I tell them.
to stop the photograph of us
like a bird in the house.
H E Double Toothpicks.
of forty-or-so people who might go missing
In the split second of seeing an 8
the number on its side, and it's
It's forever,
flapping in the teeth of a palm.
red geranium smell, strong
on its side, and it's forever.
all night. There I am,
to numbers
In the copy.
up against the mountains
of the hill
except for a cloud
that breaks and spreads
no painter anywhere,
left with the weather.
The birds sounds like seals.
to the headstones
across the street,
of a great heron,
over the roof.
from memory.
to the other above a picnic.
or mouths coming up for air.
in the gift shop window.
a child says, watching it scream.
around the stalactites
placed here and there
cooling the blow
and they have potted roses,
the rust, and a souvenir map
a pencil full of small stones.
for a song.
spaces
sleeping beauties,
and starts again,
for the birds inside,
over the sea.
to my desire,
inside the trees.
inside my shoe,
to stop walking.
is every sleeping beauty.
whose one voice
Spooky undertow
he sings the sounds
I try my hand
He sings so strong
Sometimes we don't know
until they stop.
Our jaw at rest.
invisible.
the ghost
of the tallest man
in the world
whose foot killed him, too.
they know him
just like now,
up the stairs.
which our tour guide keeps saying is
I've never come to the end.
the mammoth worm with the red plume
that feed the fish
Everything is red around the lower rungs.
in a clear bowl (the world, I think).
cave texture fingering up the insides
interplanetary in pink and blue,
back in the terrarium craze,
sewn onto them, and a goat
a water dish.
over-run the border.
of Thalia Lincoln,
birds of paradise.
heating and cooling unit
two white balls, one larger,
on them, and behind the balls
with huge red markings.
Large for its kind
for hers.
T-shirt, with little white footprints
she sings.
you can see it moving.
The words on a girl's chest
She reminds us of a thousand years.
solitary reaper.
who says, Sad heaven,
before I kill again,
from the group photograph
and dig around inside their purses.
think about
coming from the world's
they never have.
with a pig's tail wagging,
the yoga sellers
for five dollars.
of seeing an eight or a three,
complements their sulky daughters
a boyfriend at home,
full of shells,
state fair extra-terrestrial.
a typographical theme-park
instead of a face
eights or threes turning on their sides.
I'm one of those,
the thousands of numbers
in my hands.
to take back a spell:
a scab of symbols.
"boil, boil").
to show how another child
chimp face on the red balloon.
to show the boy next door,
looking up,
in the white sky
and the white string,
that her demonstration
a specter balloon flying away.
and let it go
like a number,
how people lost theirs.
maybe thought
when I went missing,
A special boat
his yells are mine.
a few miles up the road
that reads in white block
pointing left)".
the ghost
tallest man
up the stairs.
a single register is necessary.
be able to fly.
of a flight culture,
bird song
We were going to throw doves
because bird song
on earth, and why
famine painting here
where rests
In real life
burned the leg.
of the burning.
caught on the gravel path
of cemetery.
in a fishbowl there,
of a headstone
I mistook her for a mermaid.
the townspeople have filled
with their own wedding dresses.
soaked and strewn
around the cemetery gravel,
like a goldfish
over someone's grave.
my robe opened
the curtains,
my relationship to the world,
from the mountain.
in the curve of this cave
getting married here.
enter the gift shop at a run,
with the changing temperature
In the split second
one ring-bearer
who has her little bracelet
on her father's leg,
instead of smiling into the camera.
steams the glass.