To the Left of Time Read online

  sticks of dynamite

  taped and rigged to an alarm clock,

  that nine-pound jagged rock,

  the sheaf of white-hot needles, etc.

  I shall continue to move.

  And I know now, too, how—when I leap

  a bottomless gash in the earth—how to calculate

  for it growing wider while I’m in the air.

  And a clinician, a mental

  health professional,

  asked me why I liked rivers!

  Ode to Those Who Study the Miasmas

  Praise all who wade into the swamp, rubber pants

  up to their waists, anti-

  venom in a vial around their necks,

  each with a pencil, a machete.

  The pencil for notes—what went wrong

  here, there, everywhere.

  You know what the machete does.

  The miasmatists try to find the root

  beginning at the end

  of where the root reaches.

  They sometimes die doing this: passing out food

  to the starving, the line so long

  they starve before it ends.

  They try to understand the world’s malice.

  Why one man smells a stink on another.

  Why a man (his grandfather before him,

  his son to succeed him) pie-charts

  the decades, the centuries, of blood feud.

  The miasmatists stab a microscope into a living louse

  to count the lice that will emerge

  from its next deposit. They burn

  to minimize the returns.

  They’ll dive into the swamp, too, if they must,

  lead around their waists.

  They’re trying to find out some truths they don’t

  want to know.

  It’s need that decides how deep they dive.

  They’re trying to find out where not to go,

  so later we can go there, or we can hide.

  Praise them.

  Ode to the River That Abandons One Channel and Finds Another More Suited to Its Purpose

  The river goes where it needs, its nose, its lead waters

  assigned the task of sniffing a faster way

  to the nearest salty sea. It turned hard right, around

  instead of past Apple Hill,

  then a lazy logical left into our valley of cowbells.

  It took first our church

  where the aged and the children sheltered, singing.

  The rest of us were filling sandbags.

  The river removed much, and killed.

  A river goes as a river needs to go.

  The town bank was gone, though its vault

  still stood, atilt. Most of us

  believed in the Lord—two boys

  were found alive the next day floating on church pews

  a mile at sea! We knew

  enough not to take it personal: the river followed laws

  we understood. Pour a bucket of water

  on dry ground and watch it go

  where it goes. Some of the drowned

  were found. We built new houses

  on the new riverbanks

  and our abandoned riverbed

  became, seen from space

  (we saw pictures),

  a long, pale line by day,

  a deep, black slash at night.

  Ode to Asa Bundy Sheffey,

  which was Robert Hayden’s birth name,

  reduced from three trochees to two.

  It was a family issue,

  his unhappy mother giving him

  to unhappy neighbors, the Haydens,

  who raised him, and called him Robert Hayden,

  though they never bothered

  to make it legal. From time to time,

  he’d see his blood parents—in a blur, his eyes so bad

  he never knew what they looked like,

  nor even what he himself looked like,

  without his glasses, which

  were so thick sometimes sight got lost

  inside them. Might he have left,

  or found, some poems in those dense lenses?

  An austere militant

  of reticence: Robert Hayden Asa Bundy Sheffey.

  Permissionless, I’m adding three more tumbling trochees,

  making five in a row, to inject into your name

  even more velocity. They’re all I can give you,

  in gratitude for some truths

  you left, in deep-set ink, on the page.

  Ode to the Archipelagoes of Discarded Chewing Gum on Sidewalks

  As one who’s walked head-down for miles on city streets,

  I’ve come to see them as if from an airplane

  over Pacific chains

  of atolls. Black as cooled lava, hard, flat,

  they are not islands risen

  from the sea but dropped from the sky.

  They sink into concrete and cling.

  They become another substance altogether.

  Happy spring after a winter under snow, ice.

  They lie too low for the shovel’s scrape.

  It doesn’t matter if each island gets no shade

  in summer’s furnace: they do not soften.

  Discourtesies, of course, each delivered by a big god.

  Each bears the DNA of its creator,

  who’s probably gone by now,

  drowned when, greedy, he overloaded his canoe

  with yucca and breadfruit,

  and went down

  between Funafuti and Vaitupu.

  Ode to Scars

  The scars on humans’ faces draw me to them.

  I wear none significant on my face,

  though a six-inch welt is on my chest

  where it was opened

  and closed four decades ago.

  A student in my office once: small white quarter-moon

  on her lower right cheek.

  In the institutional light

  it was a pearl in three-quarter eclipse.

  Praise her scar, for she earned it.

  Praise the man whose forehead fell on his shovel

  before he finished digging his own grave.

  Another man shot him, thinking

  it was deep enough. It wasn’t.

  He who shot him hanged.

  Praise the scar there unrisen.

  Praise the scar parting my friend’s crewcut hairline.

  A blink deeper into the circular saw

  he leaned over . . . ?

  Praise the scar like little railroad tracks

  up the back of one friend’s head,

  and whatever minute scars—on the child,

  her mother, and my friend—the surgeons left

  when they worked to bring my friends’ child to the world.

  Praise all scars, which, by definition, reveal

  that something, one thing, one

  thing minimum, is healed.

  Ode to Lichen

  . . . caresses / Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.

  —Hart Crane

  Gray, olive, blue-green, fusty white, scabrous,

  glued to rocks and trees, this flora of farthest north,

  of so far south there’s nothing to attach to

  but ice and penguins.

  This venerable life form

  will not grow on ice

  nor penguins. It’s a fungus,

  inside of which live algae.

  Stubborn, cleaved to trees,

  to tundra, gravestones, slag heaps.

  It’s been determined: It could live in space!

  The air alone provides food, rain.

  It takes nothing from that on which it lives.

  It helps stone turn back to soil

  so slowly the stone doesn’t notice,

  and it feeds a few creatures

  in hard years: reindeer, and the larvae

  of my favorite butterfly, the Common Footman.


  Let us praise their benefactor, lichen!

  Let us raise that which lies so low,

  let us include it in encomiums,

  and let us not forget

  lichen’s inclusiveness, its understory,

  nor its gray-green ubiquity.

  III

  A Man’s Little Heart’s Short Fever Fit

  Poor as a dog. Poor as owl scat tufted

  with mouse fur and a chipmunk’s hip-

  bone. Poor as a louse without a valise.

  He liked the deepest caves,

  the getting to the bottom of them

  (the deepest, about seven miles down, ending

  in a not-so-square three yards of packed sand),

  and he liked better: climbing out.

  It was harder climbing out: up, up, up,

  poor as a punched bus

  ticket, poor as a poorhouse evictee,

  poor as a hole drilled in dust.

  Did I say he liked the deepest caves?

  Small caves breathe, middle caves sing,

  the deepest caves roar.

  He liked the deepest caves.

  Did I say he loved the abseiling, abseiling down,

  and the inch-by-inch rock climber’s winch

  up, up to the cave’s agape mouth?

  Did I say what, and whom, he loved

  (and he did love what and whom),

  even when he made a failure of it?

  There’s a Word for It

  When it rains on a dry garden, there’s a word

  for the smell that results.

  The word is not aromatherapy,

  not to my ear.

  The oily essence released is.

  A word made from stone and the blood of gods,

  if gods have blood.

  It’s not a tasty word, not a word first for the mouth.

  Not for my mouth.

  I loved the smell. I lived in a house

  surrounded by cornfields.

  We needed the rain and we were glad

  for the silage it provided,

  but no one ever said: Smell that!

  No one ever said: Note the ozone notes,

  the hint of cedar, the whiff of fresh grass stains.

  Someone did say: Corn’ll stand up stiffer tomorrow.

  I’m grateful there’s a word for it,

  even though the theorists said language can’t

  be trusted. Oh where, oh where did the theorists go?

  I think I know.

  I’m very happy

  to learn there’s a word for it,

  though I’ll never write it

  nor ever say it aloud.

  I will take it in my nose, gulpfuls

  with my lungs,

  until the former ceases to sniff

  and the latter fly away

  over low brown hills.

  Blue with Collapse

  The devil’s in my neck.

  Everything I hear is overviolined,

  even the wind, even the wind.

  It’s like walking in nurdles up to my chest,

  squeaky and slow.

  It’s spring, the blooming branches

  nearly hide the many dead ones.

  A squirrel, digging for a nut, upends my frail

  tomato plant and fails

  to replant it, even though he has the tools.

  I find this kind of squirrely oblivion everywhere.

  I was a man filled to the top

  of my spine, filled to the lump

  on the back of my head, with hope.

  Then I read a few thousand history books.

  Little, and nothing, perturbs me now.

  Even the beheadings, even the giant meat hooks

  in the sky, more frequent each day,

  bother me not

  a tittle, not a jot.

  Praisegod Barebones

  I’m taking this name: Praisegod Barebones,

  the pseudonym of a long-dead preacher.

  Why? I, too, have an impulse to praise,

  am unambivalent about God,

  and bare bones, unless

  they are burned, is the way it will be.

  I like the bang, bang, bang, bang

  of those four syllables in a row.

  What would my friends call me—Boney?

  Boney, don’t you know me?

  I’m taking the name because

  It’s difficult not to write satire.

  Juvenal wrote the above, in Latin.

  Look it up, you can do that easy now

  and not need to climb a library’s high ladder

  to haul down a creaking book

  like I did when I was Tommy Lux,

  who is gone now, absorbed

  into PGBB, who is like a good verb that absorbs,

  and therefore makes superfluous,

  its adverb.

  Attila the Hun Meets Pope Leo I

  I doubt it went well

  for the Pope. There was horse sweat and saddle smell,

  there were hungry men, unsated and sated,

  the acrid of blood on iron,

  a thousand cooking fires

  roasting the roastable. Who translated?

  Scribes were present. Attila smashed

  his wine cup on the table, splashing

  the Pope’s cassock.

  Attila, that night,

  polished his boots with it,

  the Pope weeping in an oubliette.

  I’d rather think of another Attila: Attila József,

  the great Hungarian poet.

  He was teased as a schoolboy about his given name.

  For most of his life, if he had milk

  in his coffee and someone else did not, he felt guilt.

  Attila followed by József

  lives before Attila followed by the Hun.

  And so I wish it to be for my daughter, or son,

  and as well with their daughters and sons.

  Along the Trail of Your Vertebral Spine

  —Jenny

  Starting near the top,

  I part the shades of your hair

  above your nape and there

  it is: C4, the spine doctors call it.

  I call it First Cairn,

  and dedicate it to the promised

  rains. Next stop is T2,

  often compared to the oasis

  of Al Taif, known for its sweet water and dates.