How many stitches did you get
Brother ghost
Your tantrums rooster me up
Come home with me
My nice is so tired
Let me see your stitches
My body and yours is
only a situation
a wrung sponge held dry underwater
Come home with me
Let me show you my models
I will bake you some bread
Here are the rocks
I would have gathered for you
The last blue thing is not like the first red thing
I know few things and they are not
the great and happy things I’d hoped
Cars overheat in steep desert air
Couples agree or argue over how much
or not they love each other
The perfect sky is blue
The perfect sky is black with stiff specks
of faraway tombstones flicker hello
I’m still here don’t shut your eyes
why don’t any more you love me
so look at me why don’t you don’t is why
A perfect sky buries its dead
A perfect feeling knows no edge
but the atmosphere
from which feeling is finite
conditional to the history of blue and red things
Love and do what you want
My dad always tells me who has died and how
St Augustine says that
Very seldom do I know them
Once, I killed a boy for a dollar-fifty
I own no spoon
no news to annex
to truer correspondence
Only a letter knife
for a place setting
at midnight’s crowded table
Every guest will bring another
a water over rock symphony
Meanwhile, my skin suit only rusts—
so much rain on a tinny roof
The guests sing anyway
The guests will sing anything
The guests will sing
but it doesn’t mean anything
so we put in words
Rings of water and of rock
As from below
a heavenly host will sing
Delirious rain, picture your mother,
mist, made in a cow pasture
by a man she barely knew
Who barely knew before he named
her felt foot upon the mountain
how moisture mastered over time
abrupt cornices, later
destroyed angles, kept
every letter he sent
well-loved words
Brother ghost, I admit
more than your uniform
your smile scares me
in the family photo
If I use my imagination any old where
you will be disturbed if it’s there and not
relegated to where you are used to it
But why not there too if I use it
only in the poem it will never be a poem
A person is more likely to change
his profoundest convictions
than his commonplace ideas
In a book I am reading Fellini says that and that
Augustine never advocated caprice
An unknown woman says to my mother
I’m so sorry for your loss
The new blue thing is not unlike the old red thing
Night and we don’t even know what
to do with our garbage
Brother ghost, put away your kiss
it is too wet with tears and you
are too dead for either kissing or crying
Once I killed a boy for a dollar fifty
My sister stitched close his eyes he couldn’t see for a week
She walks these hills in a long black veil
I spend my time staring at a wall
An unknown woman makes a joke
My mother laughs too hard
You view the world from your own
and confuse it with absolute truth
Ted says that only when you’re dead
you get flowers if you are a male
Maybe this is why men give them to women
when they are supposed to be alive
Mother is an oak tree now
The sky keeps having babies
Everywhere you look there are more
I am that heap of dirt
you try too hard not to notice
the green tarp on top looks not at all like grass and never will
fool the woman in the first row
I am going to take off my hat now I am going to
for I am shocking
The oak tree is shaking
The moon is beginning to scare me
Is honesty so laudable if so why
Because it is right no because it is
difficult
I know the thousand dreams a thousand children dream
I was ten in the year of the blackbird
when a flock clothed our lawn for a funeral
My sister and I were sharing secrets
about our bodies and a pink bedroom
Please don’t tell my mother we covered
our mouths when we kissed so that only our hands were kissing
Life is an affair of people not of places
Wallace Stevens says that and that
for him the trouble lies there
Not here where I am and you are lying
still as red carpet stretches
under unknown women in blue dresses
Yes you are lying you are over there
The oak tree’s leaves winked once again
I walked inside a room
The cat was white and brushed against my ankles
My sister wore a halo
My brother, the lion, with his hoop of running fire
Brother ghost
I waited until dusk
until the last of evening sun had done
percussing across the kitchen floor
had hidden your wooden prayers
among drawers
under any cooperative slip of tongue I could muster
many other underthings
Then outside
where hurried light could not decide
upon which branch to settle
each leaf moving in terror
as if it might be chosen
I rode my brand new ferris wheel
all round the setting world
He was my brother
He was my mother’s brother
He was my lover I sent away
I told him I loved him but like a brother
His sister loved him
His mother loved him
I loved his sister
I loved his mother
His father I did not love his father
His father did not love his father
His father’s father did not love his father
His father’s father did not love his mother
His father did not love his mother
His mother loved his father
He did not love his father
He loved his mother
I loved his mother
I loved him like a brother
A guest a host a ghost a beast
A mother and a father who disappear
when I am in fifth grade
I break my teeth on a swing set
My sister hers in a swimming pool in third
A sister is a brother who is
not a brother
but a kind of
invisible ink
Brother ghost
I read your letters on the rock
Mirrors can be captivating
and therefore dangerous
here are the rocks
I have gathered for you
blue and red things
other underthings a
thousand children
read your letters
dream of
people not
of places keep
your flowers
Between the arbitrary and the obvious lies the essential
Between a mother and a
father lies a child who is sexless
I think sex should
be about god, even if it isn’t
between this world
and the next, but one’s world and another’s
Between one word and
another lies a meaning
Between truth and
untruth lies something white
In the state of Georgia
between Waycross and Macon lies nothing
but dust or almost
better gas up before you go
O brother deeper down
than even I could ever
be born again in familiar forms of you
Bird to bird
Branches to branches
He’s dead now except he’s breathing
Between breaths she is thinking
a thousand children dream of blue and red things
To the end of the hall and back
where ever you look how this or that
dire thing will happen
Then some beauty shoots out of the sky
into a handful of weeds
Bird to bird
Branches to branches
The clearest water she saw all day
|