#lithole

[asbestosmeadow]

Peanut Butter

I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact. If you get right down to it the new unprocessed peanut butter is no damn good & you should buy it in a jar as always in the largest supermarket you know. And I am an enemy of change, as you know. All the things I embrace as new are in fact old things, re-released: swimming, the sensation of being dirty in body and mind summer as a time to do nothing and make no money. Prayer as a last re- sort. Pleasure as a means, and then a means again with no ends in sight. I am absolutely in opposition to all kinds of goals. I have no desire to know           where this, anything is getting me. When the water boils I get a cup of tea. Accidentally I read all the works of Proust. It was summer I was there so was he. I write because I would like to be used for years after my death. Not only my body will be compost but the thoughts I left during my life. During my life I was a woman with hazel eyes. Out the window is a crooked silo. Parts of your body I think of as stripes which I have learned to love along. We swim naked in ponds & I write be- hind your back. My thoughts about you are not exactly forbidden, but exalted because they are useless, not intended to get you because I have you & you love me. It’s more like a playground where I play with my reflection of you until you come back and into the real you I get to sink my teeth. With you I know how to relax. & so I work behind your back. Which is lovely. Nature is out of control you tell me & that’s what’s so good about it. I’m immoderately in love with you, knocked out by all your new white hair

why shouldn’t something I have always known be the very best there is. I love you from my childhood, starting back there when one day was just like the rest, random growth and breezes, constant love, a sand- wich in the middle of day, a tiny step in the vastly conventional path of the Sun. I squint. I wink. I take the ride.

[asbestosmeadow]

Barking

The moon comes up. The moon goes down. This is to inform you that I didn’t die young. Age swept past me but I caught up. Spring has begun here and each day brings new birds up from Mexico. Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.

[asbestosmeadow]

[asbestosmeadow]

AMENDMENT

trouble is

resemblance performs

an autopsy

pronounces me out of body

then nothing fits back in as it did before it was

taken out

the bones I know hunt for me in someone else's rind

[asbestosmeadow]

Red Shift

Here I am at 8:08 p.m. indefinable ample rhythmic frame The air is biting, February, fierce arabesques on the way to tree in winter streetscape I drink some American poison liquid air which bubbles and smoke to have character and to lean In. The streets look for Allen, Frank, or me, Allen is a movie, Frank disappearing in the air, it's Heavy with that lightness, heavy on me, I heave through it, them, as The Calvados is being sipped on Long island now twenty years almost ago, and the man smoking Is looking at the smilingly attentive woman, & telling. Who would have thought that I'd be here, nothing wrapped up, nothing buried, everything Love, children, hundreds of them, money, marriage- ethics, a politics of grace, Up in the air, swirling, burning even or still, now more than ever before? Not that practically a boy, serious in corduroy car coat eyes penetrating the winter twilight at 6th & Bowery in 1961. Not that pretty girl, nineteen, who was going to have to go, careening into middle-age so, To burn, & to burn more fiercely than even she could imagine so to go. Not that painter who from very first meeting I would never & never will leave alone until we both vanish into the thin air we signed up for & so demanded To breathe & who will never leave me, not for sex, nor politics nor even for stupid permanent estrangement which is Only our human lot & means nothing. No, not him. There's a song, "California Dreaming", but no, I won't do that I am 43. When will I die? I will never die, I will live To be 110, & I will never go away, & you will never escape from me who am always & only a ghost, despite this frame, Spirit Who lives only to nag. I'm only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn't ask for this You did I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing will ever change That, and that's that. Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless I slip softly into the air The world's furious song flows through my costume.

[asbestosmeadow]

(Thibault Raoult, from Disposable Epics)

[asbestosmeadow]

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

i

Tell me it was for the hunger

& nothing less. For hunger is to give

the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light

whittled down by another war

is all that pins my hand

to your chest.

i

You, drowning

between my arms —

stay.

You, pushing your body

into the river

only to be left

with yourself —

stay.

i

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding

mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel

in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.

And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing

to surrender.

i

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.

Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.

Say autumn despite the green

in your eyes. Beauty despite

daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn

mounting in your throat.

My thrashing beneath you

like a sparrow stunned

with falling.

i

Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.

i

I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once.

i

Say amen. Say amend.

Say yes. Say yes

anyway.

i

In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed.

i

In the life before this one, you could tell

two people were in love

because when they drove the pickup

over the bridge, their wings

would grow back just in time.

Some days I am still inside the pickup.

Some days I keep waiting.

i

It’s not too late. Our heads haloed

with gnats & summer too early

to leave any marks.

Your hand under my shirt as static

intensifies on the radio.

Your other hand pointing

your daddy’s revolver

to the sky. Stars falling one

by one in the cross hairs.

This means I won’t be

afraid if we’re already

here. Already more

than skin can hold. That a body

beside a body

must make a field

full of ticking. That your name

is only the sound of clocks

being set back another hour

& morning

finds our clothes

on your mother’s front porch, shed

like week-old lilies.

[asbestosmeadow]

cartographies of silence

1.

A conversation begins with a lie. And each

speaker of the so-called common language feels the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against a force of nature

A poem can begin with a lie. And be torn up.

A conversation has other laws recharges itself with its own

false energy. Cannot be torn up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus the isolation it denies.

2.

The classical music station playing hour upon hour in the apartment

the picking up and picking up and again picking up the telephone

the syllables uttering the old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar living in the formal network of the lie

twisting the dials to drown the terror beneath the unsaid word

3.

The technology of science The rituals, the etiquette

the blurring of terms silence not absence

of words or music or even raw sounds

Silence can be a plan rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence it has a history a form

Do not confuse it with any kind of absence

4.

How calm, how inoffensive these words begin to seem to me

though begun in grief and anger Can I break through this film of the abstract

without wounding myself or you there is enough pain here

This is why the classical or the jazz music station plays? to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

5.

The silence that strips bare: In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan

Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry where this could happen not as blank spaces or as words

stretched like skin over meanings but as silence falls at the end

of a night through which two people have talked till dawn

6.

The scream of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore it asks itself

How do I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them This is useless to you and perhaps to others

7.

It was an old theme even for me: Language cannot do everything–

chalk it on the walls where the dead poets lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of the poet the poem could turn into a thing

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head alight with dew

If it could simply look you in the face with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

till you, and I who long to make this thing, were finally clarified together in its stare

8.

No. Let me have this dust, these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

moving with ferocious accuracy like the blind child’s fingers

or the newborn infant’s mouth violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago taken this method

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy the pure annunciations to the eye

the visio beatifica if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant holding up a simple ear of grain

for the return to the concrete and everlasting world what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, these conversations from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green