That year I began to understand the words burden of proof
—how the free market of ideas depended
on certain lives laboring under that burden.
I started feeling in my body
how that burden was bound to our backs
keeping us cramped in old repetitive motions
crouched in the same mineshaft year on year
or like children in school striving to prove
proofs already proven over and over
to get into the next grade
but there is no next grade no movement onward only this
and the talk goes on, the laws, the jokes, the deaths,
the way of life goes on
as if you had proven nothing as if this burden
were what you are.”
-
(Knotted crowns of asparagus lowered by human hands
into long silver trenches fogblanched mornings
the human spine translated into fog’s
almost unbearable rheumatic beauty flattering pain
into a daze a mystic text of white and white’s
absolute faceless romance : : the photographer’s
darkroom thrill discerning two phantoms caught
trenchside deep in the delicate power
of fog : : phantoms who nonetheless have to know
the length of silvery trenches how many plants how long
this bending can go on and for what wage and what
that wage will buy in the Great Central Valley 1983.)
-
“Desire disconnected meetings and marches
for justice and peace the sex of the woman
the bleached green-and-gold of the cotton print bedspread
in the distance the sound of the week’s demonstration
July sun louvered shutters off Riverside Drive
shattered glass in the courtyard the sex of the woman
her body entire aroused to the hair
the sex of the women our bodies entire
molten in purpose each body a tongue
each body a river and over and over
and after to walk in the streets still unchanging
a stormy light, evening tattered emblems, horse-droppings
DO NOT CROSS POLICE BARRIER yellow boards kicked awry
the scattering crowds at the mouth of the subway
A thumbprint on a glass of icy water
memory that scours and fogs
nights when I threw my face
on a sheet of lithic scatter
wrapped myself in a sack of tears”
-
“My thief my counsellor
tell me how it was then under the bridge
in the long cashmere scarf
the opera-lover left
silken length rough flesh violet light meandering
the splash that trickled down the wall
O tell me what you hissed to him and how he groaned to you
tell me the opera-lover’s body limb by limb and touch by touch
how his long arms arched dazzling under the abutment
as he played himself to the hilt
cloak flocked with light
My thief my counsellor
tell me was it good or bad, was it good and bad, in the
unbefriended archway of your first ardor?
was it an oilstain’s thumbprint on moving water?
the final drench and fizzle on the wall?
was it freedom from names from rank from color?
Thieving the leather trenchcoat of the night, my counsellor?
Breathing the sex of night of water never having to guess its
source, my thief?
O thief
I stand at your bedside feed you segments of orange
O counsellor
you have too many vanishing children to attend
There were things I was meant to learn from you they wail out
like a train leaving the city
Desire the locomotive death the tracks under the bridge
the silken roughness drench of freedom and abruptly floodlit
parapet
LOVE CONQUERS ALL spelled out in flickering graffiti
—my counsellor, my thief”
-
“In the heart of the capital of Capital
against banked radiations of azalea
I found a faux-marble sarcophagus inscribed
HERE LIES THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE
I had been wondering why for so long so little
had been heard from that quarter.
I found myself there by deepest accident
wandering among white monuments
looking for the Museum of Lost Causes.
A strangely focused many-lumened glare
was swallowing alive the noon.
I saw the reviewing stand the podium draped and swagged
the huge screen all-enhancing and all-heightening
I heard the martial bands the choirs and the speeches
amplified in the vacant plaza
swearing to the satellites it had been a natural death.”
