Excerpt from "By the Entrance to Cordova Mall, I Sat Down and Wept"
"I was a secret
that the hurtling-into-summer world
had kept too well. I turned,
the key, I drove into the day
that didn't know my name,
drove myself sane again,
and came up hard to the first red light."
"Play Dead"
"Gods envy us because we die, they kill us
out of jealousy, and sometimes
just because they're bored.
When I was
usurped by death...The ghosts roam nude
except for their despair, eyeless
in the underworld, unable to see, to touch,
to taste or hear the world that was so good
when they were too dissatisfied to notice. Hell
is the place the dead who don't know
they're dead go, or where the dead who've always
been dead go when they die in earnest, filled
with small gray flowers that seen up close
are balls of dust. But they don't
see them, though dust clings to them, covers them
like shrouds, if they wore shrouds, if they weren't naked
and dismayed, stripped of whatever made them
whatever they were. Whatever made them whole
has left this hole to call themselves, if they
could call. But they're just shadows
at noon, when shadows are abbreviated, barely
cast. The dead move fast, nowhere
to nowhere in no time at all."
"Somewhere Off the Coast of Cyprus"
"Gods don’t get what they want, they stumble,
falter and halt at the frontiers of fulfillment, puzzled
that power isn’t always pleasure. They want
to know what know is (
I have known, I knew, I know, I will
know, I will have known), instead learn only no. (Conjugate
this, decline every noun.) No happy ending to this sentence
for a god, sentenced to helpless
potency, all will and self-belief but somehow
substanceless, a notion of force that steals a form
and calls it body, steals a body and calls it mine, impervious
to touch. A litter of porous marble’s all that’s left,
paint-stripped but still stained, nothing that anyone
could use. How useless immortality becomes
in time, rubble retrieved from a receding river
in a year of drought. The goddess has no arms,
the god’s hand drawing back the bow
is missing, there’s no protection for them
anymore. Acid rain worms through their statuary
skin. Better to wait for the waters
to return, the mildewed monuments to finish
crumbling. Let the shipwrecked cargoes sleep
where they sank (myths buried in them
like birds that won’t be heard), gold leaf and lapis lazuli
dreaming of love, whatever love means to a god."
"What It Is to Burn"
"It's always four a.m., flourescent-lettered
sleepscapes littered with green and yellow
lights, with petrochemical artifacts, debris certain
of its own uncertainty under the stainless
-steel moon: the whole scene soiled
with reference, so many
garishly painted gods sewn back
into the thigh after the ash of
see me
for what I am. Wake up
and call it arsenic, benzene, lead,
dioxin, and mercury, or various
banned pesticides. No rain
in months, a necklace of smoke
strangles the neighborhood
from someone's still-smouldering trash
fire (defying the no-burn order), the smell of money
smothers commodity gardens and yards. Faith
clings like sweat, fine sheen of airborne
dust and pollen, lies to the skin
and won't let it be clean. History
is what's left behind, decide
in favor of the hidden costs (whatever's
waiting half-outside, what is
that stain?), and crawl back
toward sleep again."
"Approximately Nothing"
"Any unanswerable problem is a god,
some sky from which winter falls
and the rains of no significance,
another plush and vagrant error
overflowing local sewers. (He was
the weight of the world, the grace of fact
frosting the windowpanes, this pain
disguised as rain. My never-friend
and guide to coldscapes seen through
glass, sharp-edged but also
blurred, too eager to be compromised,
mythologized: he was that
too, and saved me just enough.)
The accidental ghosts break through bare branches
like late winter light, and then retreat,
the penitentiary sky shuts down again.
And Shakespeare is a backyard sparrow
foraging crumbs, the frayed
and faded cardinals chase it away.
They are a little policy
of secrecy and domain, pugnacious reign.
If it were human, it would know me,
call me by my name."
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