Self Portrait, Castello Bibbiano, Italy, 1999

Propped up against the wall an unhinged door
slants acutely. From behind it two hands
emerge—or are they sinking, its shadow
reclaiming the last human evidence?
If this is a portrait, it’s a portrait
not of a man, but his body’s absence.—

What man is depicted by the absence
of himself? Gradually has the door
erased him, a timelapse of self-portrait.
It has avenged its lost hinges, the hands
it took as trophies give evidence
of his hubris. At right, the door’s shadow

extends. The walls’ corner draws the shadow
away from the door to contrast the absence
of body behind it. No evidence
must mean something. But nothing’s there, the door
hides no thing,. No effort made by the hands
to grasp no thing. Calling this self-portrait

sunders the self—each piece needs a portrait
of its own. Consequently, the shadow
has an equal presence to the hands
and everything else in the room, absence
included. Frayed wiring, empty door
frame, exposed radiator, evidence

comprising a whole body, evidence
of precise intentions. Thus self-portrait
includes tiles and walls as skin, the door
is another limb, the muscled shadow
flexes along the edge of the absence
of the human torso under the hands.

Unaccounted for though are those two hands,
the still anomalous evidence
of the human body amongst the absence
of the rest of his body in the portrait.
Light pours from outside the frame, the shadow
runs from them, the hands framed over the door.

Yet the hands remain, bits of self-portrait
less evidence of self than shadow—
the room filled with the absence and the door.

Litany

I am an answering machine
in a sleepy midnight email. Typed
questions have no human tone, yet
I have to answer.

I am an answering machine
in response to the years apart. Time
passes marked by mistakes for which
I have to answer.

I am an answering machine
in the night-emptied street. Drunk
on everything, even a phone call,
I have to answer.

I am an answering machine
in conversations about me. Honesty
is at once surrender and challenge, both
I have to answer.

I am an answering machine
in my dark room. Arms enclose
and hands fold together,
I have to answer.

I am an answering machine.
Whether you like the truth
of my words or their sound is immaterial.
I have to answer.

Personal Ad

I want someone
scared and alone as I am,

distant and barely moving.
Binary stars, a thousand light years

apart, spiraling in slowly, orbital
math on a scale so small

gravity doesn’t notice. That way
convergence is ours first,

the universe’s, second. Everything will
matter in that order.

Zen Anaesthetic

From two decades of anger:
my body’s origami shape.

Everything layered
inward. Perfect sheets

of pain that threaten
to tear when alone become

compounded a thousand-fold
into a tempered will.

The painstaking effort—
the calm through the violence

of forcing my shape
to accept the designs.

Staccato

for Franz Wright

Choose:

Shotguns loaded
with words

vs.

a thousand pages, rifled through
at 125 words per minute

centered on
the hole in your
head, your shame’s exit

which you want seen.

I didn’t invent eyes, not
mine.
I can’t uninvent them

there are no words
with a cigarette. Still

you’d say
fuck it, I’ll give everything
at once

Or?

Or nothing. Go

ahead,

shoot. I’m listening.

Tithing

This building’s architecture
resembles my mouth how it closes
around my tongue, makes room and echoes

The hollowed arches, vaulted ceilings
I’ll bet this place is expensive
to heat in the winter. Words left in my mouth

stifle in worship
which we will colloquially call “distilled silence.”
From behind my whiskey face I ask

if you like this year’s vintage of your martyr’s
restraint. The way my jawbones break,
reset, become reliquaries. The arches of the roof

how many of you died to raise them? Is this worship,
to make me the hypocrite, my mouth's roof
built of all the words that I buried

in the tomb of my throat?
Jesus. What it must cost to heat this place.

Tourist, to a store clerk. Amitchka; 1996.

We burned them
their beautiful language
all those words for snow
burned their tongues, eyes, and ears
blind men in a snowstorm have
only their hands and
Snow melts quickly. There is no way home.

And I suppose you think an apology enough
if it’s written on a 75 cent postcard.

Greyscale Rending Of Habit

I grew up holding tight
my wrists, out of habit

to keep my hands quiet.
I grew older, and needed

something to hold them
for me, when I couldn’t

keep still my bones

inside. White

and black for balance,
bound tight at all times.

Fieldwork

The cut worm forgives the plow.
Drive your cart over the bones of the dead.
William Blake


In the time of your
harvest: Your
plow. Their fields,
their bones. Your
cart, your
seeds. Their forgiveness.

Now fallow fields, cut
worms hallowed
in celebration and hunger.

Build your
cities, turn forward
drive over and on
into the night. The dead
will understand.

Commuted

Muted footfalls
soled in flexible cleats

like declawed soccer shoes,
longing for the rigid spikes

they never had. They make do
with friction, itself insecure

and poorly miming
a simple machine of violence:

the deathgrip tenacity of multiple punctures.
I think on this for a week

while my right eye is bloodshot,
the other still white. Things

that resemble teeth
too soft to bite, not cleaving

but cleaving to. A grip intimate
at the level of molecules.

I call my right eye
my Rage eye, like I’ve that virus

in the movie that makes
people tear each other’s throats,

but I don’t tear.
I just hold on, running.

Souvenir

The Holy Mary’s Face seen
in cheese sandwiches in those trees
caged within concentric iron circles
in sidewalks in a metonymy of forests
on a dirty window in Hartford, thinking
of those consecrated dirty fingers

and was it mischief or desperation,
did they solve something
at the intersection of God
and loneliness. Is it this, the why
that calls crowds back each day
despite their own doubt praying

the next time they came back
they’d see it too in a Reformation
of eyes finally able to see God
without asking where to look?

Music For Marcel Duchamp

the waiting slits open each minute, protracts
the angles of incidence from the emptiness

inside-a portrait of knives
in sound, edges

of others’ lives Dopplering past;
A fountainhead of envy drowns me.

I will be seen a man with something to say
but cut off, as in conversation.

In A Landscape

I must impose. I am
the ocean, the only thing
displaced on the flats, undessicated.
Stomach full with salt and names,
holding a trumpet. Enough spit
to split between valve and desert
I play a dirge, Miles Davis
on a viking funeral pyre,
but it’s the world that’s mourned,
carried on the shoulders of notes.
My hate burns the air
then like Ouroborous heats itself
to flashpoint. I made this place,
not the sun. Mine, the blinding
shell of the sky, the rocks that pulse
in my sight like atria, I have lost
her. Mirage and rage. The dirt
ocean boils and it’s there,
the sound of my breath
paused in exhaustion,
running to catch an arsis.

60 Thousand Dollar Question

James Brown at the Boston Garden
dancing onstage, staccato hips
he shakes fast as if seizing

the crowd’s attention
not on the tension, not
the guns on stage right and there, left

in from the streets policemen come and here
they stand with him, all in their vested authority
and uniform they are scared to death

oh, this man with a microphone and oh,
that drummer is major tight, listen to that swing
listen!, you can hear

his sticks sound the gunshots unfired, the silence
all the way from Memphis, the hole there stays
a second then it’s swung closed with a snare offtime

Mr. Mayor give the man his sixty thousand
and go save your city, we just want to dance
here, not in those streets, go—

watch James go, he’s saving us all,
get on up and dance and see
that man feed us, hungry for the beat

Carnot Engine Of Summer

I am trying to exit the air.
All the books I own

when I sleep the fitful sleep
of a man resting

at his specific heat

coagulate
to lorem ipsum.
They dredge
themselves through my dreams.

Reluctant, the day’s heatnoise
sublimes to memory—

work defined as “weight lifted
through a height”—

the cognate of my body. A glass
of cooled water

sweats then surrenders
its relief.

Fragments From Inside An Architect

1.

[...]all things kneel
to ideals because it will not do
to buckle[...]


[...]like bees, blind
and building not a fortress
but the scaffolds to encase it
midst construction...forget
the fortress. The stacked carapaces,

the volume of

exhaustion, together & yielding the lost-wax
cast, the absent spire at center-[...]

"passion-a word born to mean suffering"[...]

2.

Mine is not the mouth
of an architect, teeth set

& grinding at the wrong angles
for textbook drawings,

please leave with the impression
that I have no designs. I am only alive.

Conversations With An Answering Machine

I scold my mother again,
for her pronounciations

they sound wrong, she speaks

like an illiterate clerk transcribing books
by drawing the shape of letters

i think of a Haitian birth certificate I once saw
written in phonetic French
that i could read if i spoke the words aloud

in xeroxes of color photographs
she's saying my hair is red
because she remembers it that way

it's rust, copper, not red, i say
she nods, yes, red.

Stalled

far off above redbrick walls
hangs the red in the sky aloft—
there, the prismed sun shot down
by evening,
by night
and the merciful
breeze in succession.
White ligatures of cloud.
Shelves emptied of books
and food and the echoes
of footfalls on wood
fill the open rooms,
call them stanzas.
The united hum
of contented air conditioners
lining every street
hanging from windows
as over a parade
watching not people
but their passage.

Found Objects

this kid pulls up
on tv, his mother rifling a pocketbook

only she’s not his mother, total 180 yeah

you mean the Oedipal
photo with him and the camera

in the mirror? Why his hands are enraged, obviously.
She dies, bookie took their kid, debt paid.

This Is All Miles Away

I remember the vast

the night that could unlid the ocean, sky

hinged by the hurricane dike,

the old fort.
Three cannons, time took one, left

the others without iron
for decades. Behind it you climb the field overrun by stones ingrown in stillness

maybe thrown and
falllen from a great distance, discs arranged

like hanoi towers
inlaid shallowly, or

suggesting ribcage,
burden carried, life

spent towering
then death,
but then

so do the years.

Absolute Reckoning

Copernican, heliotrope
in a satellite, I was born
sunstarved and remote.
Telescopes
in my eyes and anger
for lenses.
Binary pinholes burned
over every inch
of the world,
the deist’s single reflex
lensed redundant—
Imago inverted. White
through a blinding keyhole.
Legacied across night’s retina,
in the great cold
distance,
I remember
everything.

Night Skein

I miss that darkness,
even the stars hid. Behind us
the frozen beach, the sheer wall
of rock still killing drag racers
in shitbox Civics, eliding photos
from yearbooks. Litote voices.
Makeshift crosses the markers
of heres and theres
where drivers slipped hypnotized
into sleep and didn’t wake.
Hair like mine, lips I wanted
in an oval face, darkness,
uncloying scent of a girl
at seventeen terrified
of going home and me,
not driving my sister’s car.
Locked hands,
her little thumbs,
bring me back that darkness.

Portrait of The Artist As A Young Forest

Somehow I earn the name
“breadcrumbs”- this,
the first time I am
made object,

a map for Gretel;
A girl traces with her tongue
the freckled landmarks
sunscarred on my shoulder.

I, Hansel (unobjecting to the role)
in wearing this map cannot see it,
and wearing it I am the blind journey,
amnesia of destination and direction.

I and my body keep from each other
those halves of the route: I cannot read
through another’s eyes, my body stays mute.
I kiss her in kind, I am going nowhere.

Prizefighter

Rage is a vector, the body a matrix
of fists in a serial montage of intercalary
bruises. Exhaustion accretes as a discrete
asset, divides the audience in two factions:
one craves the end, the other’s gaze
capitulating after witnessing sufficient
damage. When the victor stands,
when the money changes hands
and the animal grins appear
defused of symbolic lust, then the fighters
dissolve and waft through the ropes
into clouds of handlers, medics, clergy,
the crowd’s voices precipitate
from the perspiration spilled
on the bloody relics of gloves.

John Cage is Dead, Solo Performance for Air and Rooms

A man takes music
from the world, calls it his,
crying I invented this,

throws a relic metronome
into the dormant pit
of violins that whittle it down

to an integral of dust
and meter, assumes
the office of his baton

and opens his hands
in a dexterous language.
He revokes the audience,

their voices gated
in victimless crimes
scaling up and down as effigies

for sounds he cannot harvest
from his own body. Discrete
and terrified instruments

sealed in evening gowns,
cummerbunds, arrested expressions
and comminuted smiles

fixated to the moment of a pendulum
swung but unwilling to betray
any complicit sound. Wait

for the conductor to drop
his arm, for the sound
of breath resurfacing

in a hundred throats
like a gasping crucible
spitting ingots of silence.

Wait for the answer. Let the exits
swallow them whole if they try to escape.

Adiabatic.

Someone threw out a house
on this beach. The skeletons
of many species of rooms
can be identified by the size
of their remains. Someone
lived here and died hunting
shadows: first to thin the herd,
then to cull the weak;
then for sport, then
blood, then to recycle
man’s ruin; melted a car
into bullets, played rainmaker
with clouds seeded
by mercury, shot out
the belly of the world
through the navel. “Ego
death”. Casings lathed
and spent for a great
starvation of purpose.

Ad Campaign For A Non-Habit Forming Soporific

What we call a man’s black heart
is an autonomic response:

when he wakes, prepare
his body – quickly, while still
in situ, before he moves

bones sleep-set in
parallel surround the locus
of his throat and eyes atop

the capital of the spinal column. Through
the eyes he is transparent, the night
uncoils from his spine to
lodge itself in his chest

and registers opaque
on our equipment as

insomnia. Autopsies have concluded
that a lifetime of sleeplessness will
deny the heart sufficient time
to regenerate dead tissue. Necrosis sets in,
layers compound, eventually

everything stops

it gets harder

to fall asleep

and all we can think

is of

black.

Concert Hall In The Shape Of A Human Body

I can hear
the colony of names rousted
from echoes in a hive
of raindrops. Black
coruscating air torn
shining and machined
by volume. The ear persists
for its audience of slicktongue
leaves, learns to appreciate
the glissando, conduct
and enjoin. Cloudline
darkly mute. Then
that single crash that opens
the sky, closes, and smiles again
the thousand scintillating mouths
that glitch and abrade as if teething
bonewhite on palmed light-
motifs. Streetlights carve a hollow
in the night from which bricked walls
emerge. Canons of Ourobouros
delta treads roll past,
fording intersections
filled with shortlived rivers.
All this for hours and then
the reprise: sparse percussion
of footfalls on asphalt
and the sills that forgive
ingress to a single drop
before the flood's reign invades.

While Working Towards A Chrysalis

I though I had
emerged broken, tried
to mark time by
watching a bruise
soaking through my
palm spread wristward
like a watercolor
impaled

pain enveloping,
doorknobs holding
back my passage
in contempt, laughing

then the poem sends:
Dear Canary In
Mineshaft.
Stop. Breathe
Deeper. Stop.

Untitled

So I stay awake all night
watching the third worldly tide

(darkness) recede
and catalog everything

with my peripheral vision
and its superior eye

for divestiture. Or
as an oceanographer

diving in a bell, delivered
from sensory deprivation

by the ringing in my ears,
nitrogen bubbles, paroxysm smile.

Colophon

I would fill the journals
you've left to me as gifts,

perhaps the slim one
bookmarked by a knife

which cleaves to or through
the signatures depending

on the weight of bound material
and hilt as balanced over a door

I leave ajar. But.
As the knife

turns the door in,
sometimes the air resists,

the book falls
face open to the floor,

the doorknob severed.
A trap for game; though I am

a solitary animal I can hear
the warning of the words

I will not write:
All hinges on me. Some alarm.

Atrium Car Ceri

descending the hill

through the vascular night

glide twin halogens,

systolic dark

edging their light

spasms then closes

reflexively behind them

as though a wound.

Anecdote

Sometimes at night
the world gets in.
Moonlight floods the yard,
the shadow opens a window
where the light from the house falls.
Something in the tree line.
Fear jarring my clay heart,
cast like a bell, sounding
distance. I could run
but where to, I am now
an island, portless. The dark sprawls
and yawns; I think:
If I am parallax between this door
and that window, it will think me
an army. Now. Calmly
I should destroy the stairs.
Please let my finite light prevail.
If not, then
I hope the jaws close like doors.

A Convex Hull

Inward I go mute

teething a thought that gestates
and passes with the gravity
of a kidney stone, under inversions
of trilobite battle formations
lit by the capillary effulgence
spreading from the single lamp
that depends from the ceiling.
The walls bicker and vie
in race of palettes.
In the morning
my landlord will finish painting
and fully translate the room
but now with all the furniture
tucked in a corner my echoes
triangulate and return amputated,
toppling on a dry hypotenuse.
The room contracts to bound
the irreducible space of self:
finite, cutaneous and lacking
in positive pressure it spills forth,
scalar like fever escaping a clean room,

then I have a voice again.

Prosopagnosia

All tomorrow’s for reservations. People ask
for masks and venues to wear them while I
like a comma, scenting bright
pixellated warmth, follow a girl
through nearly hermetic conversations.
I don’t ask her name because
I can feel its memory in clots of braille
on my tongue, a thing known only
to nociceptors on fingertips
and I want to go blind.
All my words are inmates rattling
enameled cages, begging pardon
in sentences from a Panopticon tongue.
I crack a beer with my eyesocket; the cap lodges,
blood monocular. Then the lights go red.
I am costumeless. Decoupled.
Somewhere a train is leaving.
And when the speakers’ volume calves
I drift away,
the silence denudes me.

Will And Testament Found In A Dead Man's Room

In life, a rhetorical enclosure;
in death, the walls remain
as delimiters, discretely
parsing the without
from within. If a forest
closed 'round in the years following
his departure, an owl's call
will splinter the pastoral
silence on any given night
and the world will shrink away.
A blink of whiskers. Then haste
to steal the last crumbs
from a sack of rice in the hutch,
the hunger that eats caution
and gnaws at suspense
in the same shining dark
that fell over his eyes
and into his possession
in his last hours, folded
into his estate so as not
to escape indebted.

Sawmill, Duet for Cigarette and Anxiety

I am a blue guitar. Listen
and I will play like a blind man,

lapcradling anonymous chords:
the root of addiction, the minor

key a variation on loss, the major

collapse of the world into harmonics:
Twinkling eyes, the sky’s starlings,

calling. The wall of sound
whirls about and some wings are lost

to high powerlines or muted
in collisions with buildings. I pick

with denuded quills,
my voice sundered

into a thousand throats
swollen with stones

to grind down the words,
spitting out harmony as grist.

Aubade

Whiskey snarls, the bluesy drawl
of a harmonica parsing breath

on the radio, weaving across
the staccato yellow meter

of the night half elided.
The one-way canon of engines

sings muted. Gazes swerve
to follow me, red floods their faces.

The blinkback seconds drawn long
in exhaustion or autonomic sympathy

for ears filled with sirens. Seizures
lock the lines of traffic at each

intersection. I tap bags of saline,
thirstier than John in Herod’s cistern.

Hyponatremia for every eye
in the waiting room while

I ply my trade outside. Mark
the doorframes of every room

in the city. I come for you