To the Left of Time Page 5

One can also enjoy there its famous grapes.

  For T3, I’ve inverted a crater on the moon,

  I call it a dome of deep-sea-blue

  cobalt. It depends: do I want to fly or drown?

  T4 and T5 enjoy the slopes of your wings

  and explain east and west,

  then lead slowly down to the Valley of Ptaah.

  I watch from above.

  T8, T9, I don’t know how many more,

  since from here

  it’s an inch-by-inch ride down

  for my hand (which is blind)

  and my fingertips (which are not)

  until the shallow bowl

  (between, say, T6 and L1)

  where I will lay my soul

  and pray my head

  to keep.

  For Second Lieutenant J. Wesley Rosenquest,

  who, on May 1 or 2, 1877, was the first white official

  to shake the hand

  of Crazy Horse. He gave him and his starving people

  hard crackers

  and beef on the hoof. Took place on a flat

  beside Hat Creek

  in what is now Nebraska, the good middle

  of our country, where Crazy Horse and his ancestors

  lived for millennia. Hitherto,

  most white officials,

  and some Native American officials,

  were trying to kill him.

  Lieutenant Rosenquest deserted

  within a year. Later, in the brig,

  he blamed it on a “fast set in St. Louis.”

  There’s mention of him as manager

  of a 14th Street theater in NYC, c. 1889.

  Eighty-eight years later, I walked (must have) by that spot

  many times. Lived in the neighborhood.

  Even given geological slips,

  given street widening,

  given the little tilt

  of our planet, and America,

  I walked (must have!) right through

  the place in the air where the bad half

  of that handshake

  took up space. Many times right through

  the wrong hand

  of that handshake.

  Tristan da Cunha

  I’ve reserved a ticket, one way,

  to Tristan da Cunha (37.1167° S, 12.2833° W).

  Then it’s onward

  to its cousins Inaccessible Island (37.3167° S, 12.7333° W)

  and Nightingale Island (37.4167° S, 12.4667° W),

  which is my last stop. First called Broken Island,

  then Nightingale Island, then Love Island,

  and again, finally, Nightingale Island, is where

  I’m relocating. I’ll take a boat

  from the Cape of Good Hope.

  It’s 1,750 miles to Tristan da Cunha, the main island.

  Then I’ll paddle to Inaccessible Island, about 18 miles SW.

  Since it’s inaccessible, on to Nightingale, 16 miles SE

  (I paddle well), where I’ll buy one acre

  from the rockhopper penguins, the most

  cash-strapped inhabitants.

  Overcrowded, they’re happy to sell.

  I’ve chosen a spot on the wind-diminished side,

  near the big volcanic rock called Big Rock.

  This is where you’ll find the better nests.

  Real estate anywhere is easy to assess.

  I’ll open a little mail-order guano business.

  A tent, a spoon, a salt-to-sweet-water kit.

  I’ll plant some lettuces in rows.

  I’ll keep a tiny camp stove lit.

  Pardon me, I’m sorry, lickety-split,

  it’s time to leave now, time to adios.

  Oofty Goofty

  Slap his face? That’s 50¢,

  though a lady with a glove in

  or on her hand can do the same for 25.

  Oofty needs to pay the rent.

  Mornings, he rises, flips

  over his plank—making his bed—in the doss

  house hallway. You want to use a fist?

  To the face? Oofty’s got to charge you a dollar

  for that, and if you break his nose,

  a dollar more. Hit him with a length of garden hose,

  tire iron, a sack of sand?

  Two bucks across the belly, back,

  and if you want to do his kneecaps,

  that’s a fiver. Oofty can’t afford to miss much work.

  Oofty’s got a son to feed

  and his wife’s on another whiskey tear,

  which is hard for Oofty to bear.

  Shoot him? Stab him? No.

  Even a flesh wound

  can turn into a funeral

  and, as I said, Oofty’s the father of a child.

  Lobotomobile

  It works to sell cold and creamy things.

  You hear the bells after supper—time

  for the music of the children’s throats.

  One kid across the street never had a dime.

  Who said there once was water enough for boats?

  Who told me there existed things called bookmobiles?

  I saw a book once.

  When I touched it, it turned to dust.

  There was no rag man.

  There was a bone man, on a bicycle

  with a basket. And bloodmobiles,

  remember them? During the night

  bombings you’d see them every day. The knife

  grinders came by cart in summer, by sled in winter.

  I knew a milkman once. White milk truck.

  Fred the Breadman’s wagon was the smell of dawn.

  During the fever years, inoculation vans

  drove the wrong way on no-way streets.

  Toot, toot, ding, ding, here, over here!

  To the lobotomobile

  should those wanting to be numb

  come.

  History Island

  None of us go there anymore.

  It’s a defunct resort

  town in winter. The rust-colored sea’s thick waves roll over

  sideways, slowly. The boardwalk collapsed

  and was hacked into fist-sized chunks—to sell

  as pieces of the True Boardwalk, reliquarily.

  The Old Hotel, after the termites ate their fill,

  became—was the same color as—the potbelly

  of dirt on a grave. Still pink, the pink

  of a pint of blood in five gallons of water,

  the cotton candy wagon’s cotton candy maker spins

  not a skein, not an airy thread.

  That man with six-foot stiff-kneed legs is gone, his hat now

  a blacked-out lighthouse

  at the end of the stubby shorebreak.

  A whole generation or two came here

  in the years between the wars.

  It was as if certain things never happened.

  The whole island is an underlit room.

  You’re in it now, we’re all in it now,

  and an eight-foot bucksaw

  leans, more than a little bowed, cocked, taut,

  against a wall.

  Frank Stanford at Sixty-three

  (1949–1978)

  There’s still a hole, Frank, a dented molecule,

  a cracked genome in the poetry of America

  you were meant to fill, to make

  disappear. I’ve met a handful

  of people who knew you in your flesh.

  One said to me: The last time I saw Frank

  he was passed out with his face

  in a plate of strawberry pancakes.

  The previous evening involved a chainsaw

  and a couch. Another watched you wave

  an antenna above your head in the rage

  of a lightning storm. I knew you by,

  and from, letters—those arranged

  in words, in splendid order,

  in lines and stanzas on a page,

  and those in envelopes (some with map
s,

  pictures) left by a mailman

  at my door. So what you’ve been dead

  a third of a century? Many of your friends

  (with the exception of those to come)

  are dead too, or old, or their cancers’

  (and more still to awaken, cell by cell) taproots deep.

  A somnambulist’s yo-yo, you called a spider.

  I saw one last night

  on my porch. To defer crime,

  and to help the spider stay alive,

  I left the light to burn.

  Onomatomania,

  the word for the inability to find the right word,

  leads me to self-diagnose: onomatomaniac. It’s not

  the twenty-volume OED I need,

  nor Dr. Roget’s book, which offers equals only,

  never discovery. I accept the fallibility of language,

  its spastic elasticity,

  its jake-leg, as well as prima ballerina, dances.

  I accept that language

  can be manipulated toward deceit

  (e.g., the Mahatmapropagandi, i.e., Goebbels);

  I accept, and mourn, though not a lot,

  the loss of the dash-semicolon pair.

  It’s the sound of a pause unlike no other pause.

  And when the words are tedious,

  and tedious also their order—sew me up

  in a rug and toss me in the sea!

  Language is dying, the novel is dying, poetry

  is a corpse colder than the Ice Man,

  they’ve all been dying for thousands of years,

  yet people still write, people still read,

  and everyone knows that nothing is really real

  until it is written.

  Even those who don’t read

  know that.

  The Nervo-Sanguine

  Always nervous around the cheerful,

  though drawn to them, always leery

  of the happy, I now find myself cheerful,

  and that makes me nervous. I am

  an adequate citizen of a great nation,

  which has done some bad things,

  but no worse, and arguably fewer, than other

  states and manners of governing, including none.

  I didn’t believe: Don’t plant seeds

  if the birds are watching.

  I believed they’d take their share only.

  I was wrong.

  I did believe: Rain follows the plough.

  I had an uncle (we all did) choke

  to death on a lungful of that lie.

  A man came to our school

  with a map of the world,

  which was bigger than we thought.

  Huge red pincers

  of a sickle crossed by a hammer

  closed in on us from the Pacific

  and the Atlantic, which was closer.

  We had a hammer, a big hammer,

  at home, and a sickle too,

  and a larger version called a scythe.

  Where the machines couldn’t reach,

  we went in slashing.

  This man with the map wasn’t cheerful,

  he was angry, and afraid,

  which, I later learned, had a bigger name.

  He said we better sleep in chairs

  with rifles across our laps.

  He said we better cut our goddamn hair.

  He said good thing there’s a mountain

  between us and the air force base.

  I remember little of cheer, until now, after that.

  Ancient Blades

  Where are most ancient swords—scabbard-

  less, handleless—found? Riverbeds.

  Swords/swordfights . . . riverbeds?

  If the river was shallow and the thought

  was not to stain the earth with more blood?

  To make irretrievable the stabbed man’s sword?

  You didn’t leave a sword behind,

  especially an enemy’s whom you’ve slain.

  Did every river have a Bridge of Swords,

  which then collapsed? Was each a hope-to-be-hidden

  murder weapon? Steel, blade-grade,

  or iron, or bronze, was precious a thousand years ago,

  more thousands. The anthrop- and river-ologists all know

  riverbeds are the place to look

  (if you’re looking)

  for ancient blades, though they differ

  as to how they got there.

  Most, most tediously, think: for the gods.

  Many think: abluvions, earthquakes,

  flash floods. Others think glaciers

  passed over battlefields

  and dragged the swords to the rivers,

  which were meant to take them to the sea.

  There’s a new argument toward which I lean,

  led by a professor from the Colorado School of Mines,

  that proposes they were taken to rivers

  to be washed of blood

  and many leapt from the living men’s hands,

  wanting to become long, swift, silvery fish,

  but they could not.

  Credits

  Many of the poems in this book first appeared in the following publications:

  Academy of American Poets Daily Poem: Grade Schools’ Large Windows; Onomatomania; Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming. American Poetry Review: A Long Line of Nightingales; Ode to the Joyful Ones; Ode to the Eating Establishment Where the Utensils Were Chained to the Table; Ode Elaborating on the Obvious; Ode to What I Have Forgotten; Ode to the Pig Rolled from the Castle down a Hill to Where the Peasants Wait with Axes; Ode to Gandhi, Who Wrote a Letter to Hitler Asking Him Not to Start a War; Ode to the Moment Between Dust and Dust; Ode to Those Who Study the Miasmas; Ode to the Archipelagoes of Discarded Chewing Gum on Sidewalks. Atlanta Review: My Father Whistled. Boiler Journal: There’s a Word for It. Caduceus: The Milking Stool. Cordite (Australia): Lobotomobile. Cortland Review: Nullius in Verba (Take Nobody’s Word for It); Double Barrel Sparrow. Field: Praisegod Barebones; Attila the Hun Meets Pope Leo I. Five Points: For My Sister; Ode to Chronic Insolvency; Ode to Pain in the Absence of an Obvious Cause of Pain; Ode to the River That Abandons One Channel and Finds Another More Suited to Its Purpose; A Man’s Little Heart’s Short Fever Fit; Frank Stanford at Sixty-three. Greensboro Review: History Island. Massachusetts Review: For Second Lieutenant J. Wesley Rosenquest. New Yorker: Cow Chases Boys. Normal School: Indigo Felix; So Bury Me in a Barrel. The North (UK): Glass Eye; Tristan da Cunha; Oofty Goofty. Ploughshares: Ode While Awaiting Execution; Ode to the Eraser as Big as a Bus. Plume: Manure Pile Covered in Snow; The Day; Ode to Scars; Ode to Peep Tubes and Their Makers. Poetry: Ode to the Electric Fish That Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish; The Horse Poisoner. Poetry Paper (UK): Blue with Collapse. River Styx: Along the Trail of Your Vertebral Spine.