To Make a Start: from Paterson
And just as time begins to pass the rigor
sets in, leaving nothing but stiffened beauty,
a pair of boots, a dog, and a yearning quest
of continuous loss over continual gain. Particulars
ease forward reticently. The hope of the general--
the only genuine hope--continues its rolling.
Furthermore (or perhaps however), these ends are rolling
on progressively as always, falsifying the rigor
of the first and calcifying hope and pain into general
anesthetic. Means shift meaning faithfully toward beauty.
The edges shift, shake, and oscillate the particulars
within, blurring the simple itinerate quest.
Is this the everyday, constant quest
of movement between crowded streets, rolling
forth? Are these them? These the particulars
we wanted when we dragged this dead dog in rigor
up, swabbed the blood from its ears, releasing beauty,
ghostly, from a concrete mutt? Arrived has our general.
It's hard to explain the exquisite truth in general,
but more so when you're an undead retriever mix back from a quest
that included drowning in the grey expansive beauty
of the Atlantic City ocean where the horizon sets to rolling
and lapping at your feet. This grey is a grey of a rigor
so severe that all who see it see only its particulars.
The dog is it. The one with all the particulars.
Her moves are to become our moves, her sounds our general
approach to all and all that will be. Rigor
is her only requirement. We shall leave, naked, on a quest
for it all, but only if all of it begins with rolling
freely out in its own direction and beauty.
The only thing that counts as far as beauty
is concerned is this: divide up the particulars
into categorical desires, then smash them with a rolling
pin. A fine dust will be generated and a general
feeling of peace will wash over you and your quest
will end. Breathe deeply this dust, for it is your rigor.
There is only rolling in this nothing beauty.
There is only rigor in these murky particulars.
There is no general thought in this categorical quest.
Looking past
suction-cup arrows
and cheap plastic bows,
my brother settles
on a toy wooden
musket and coonskin
cap, hung to the left
of the sale window
in a Blue Ridge
tourist store.
Our parents buy a
second set, and we’re
matched the rest
of the day:
exchanging empty
rifle cracks from behind
the boulders along
the clean hiking paths
to the top of the
mountain.
At the summit,
my brother raises
the butt of his gun
and rams it against
my cheek; his face: red,
angry. Our mother
scolds him, reminds him
we’re brothers; we don’t
fight with each other;
we’re not savages.
In the afternoon,
our father buckles us
both into the back-
seat of our car, and we
close our eyes for the
long, winding drive back
down the Parkway: two
Boones, two Crocketts, foe-
less, now, and silent;
sleeping on and off.
I have a picture
at home: A doe-skinned
Mother, papoosed,
paused mid-stride along
a game trail, bare foot
lifted and waiting
to slip silently
into the oil-painted
underbrush. White streaks
filter down through the trees.
Caps in my pocket,
striped raccoon tail pinched
in the nape of my
neck, I imagine
Indians, smooth, dark,
hatchets in hand, bows
on their backs, quiet –
each frozen in step
as our car turns tightly
around another corner.
10-21-08
Oh,
Your path explodes, vomits, if we’re that kind of poet—which, truth be told, we are, because we all are; otherwise, we say again (though in a slightly different context), why bother?—out and away from silk and graffiti and awkward, painful teenage fucking in the ruins of the somewhat less than pure products of America but nonetheless products, and ones Hamilton would have swooned over at that.
We’d hoped, oh
And for this reason we find ourselves thoroughly discouraged. Oh,
And each time we hope for a monument, that for once what we seek will not be fixed in decay, and will not spread out into the brackish waters and rust away. It seemed so solid, once, this history.
We had carefully cut new pieces with a dull and rusty blade to fill in those missing from our jigsaw puzzle memories, a box mostly empty but from which we were compelled to use all that’s there. Oh, you God damned Passaic and I mean God damned Passaic we shuffled along your floor, scooping your muck and molding it and squeezing it flat, holding it out in our hands, cutting palms to shreds with these wretched old blades, and carefully—so carefully—carving new puzzle pieces from your bed that fit perfectly—so perfectly—with the old ones.
This thing, this thing, it is the only thing. We will not find, at the end of our days a monument or memory, but instead this thing, floating briefly, just visible in the current, one among so many, dissolving quickly in the sticky film at the ocean’s surface. What has moved? What has moved us, lost, but to the memory which too is lost.
Do not pull us apart, oh,
But here, our present, we’re tossed out to sea and our work, our careful work, is destroyed, ripped apart in a spiral of Passaic and Atlantic, and we somersault out onto the shore, weeping anew our hands are healed but separated from the others and the sea is sleeping a tired mother and we are weeping and hungry and we drag ourselves away from it all only to find we are young and full of energy and so tired and our slates are wiped clean except for all these used puzzle pieces and we strive and strive for the more that we can have the more monuments we can make the rot that will not rot the drivel that will grow into the monument that we can flow through and in and live on and on without the pain of our own birth, shredded and squeezed from the ocean.
To be one—to simply, perfectly, be one, is all we’ve asked, oh
A thousand choruses. Spreading out, a thousand verses. At once, a thousand voices, a thousand more.
An iron bridge stands over the
You want to talk about seeds? How’s this:
