Away Like Within
Buffalo – New York, 1998–2001

* * *

Across the Bering strait
all winters come
in crossing light
with particles of powder
too stark to see
and little in the way
of localizing any higher power.

Through the blank language
of Manhattan snow
with quicklime-speckled
faces in the clear,
each day,
like a mass transit passenger,
starts in the front,
progressing to the rear.

Thus goes the tune
that someone else records
among brick college buildings
and impasses,
contrived designs,
unevenly lit words,
white nights,
black mountains,
everything that passes.

* * *

I have lived on a diet of vodka for seven days.
Medical annals found no use
for my jaded confessions.
Tree-climbing animals looked at me
through the cage-bars in utter dismay,
then tugged at their parents' sleeves
and asked for some ice-cream.

I have gone from one intellectual tete-a-tete
to a drum circle session
with extraterrestrial beings;
the latter proved capable
of melancholic homicide,
while the former knew
the anthems of fifty-three countries.

On the morning of Tuesday the
something-or-other, a friend
came to my door demanding
I make him supper.
What we feasted on
is a delightful chemistry problem
with five solutions
and none that gives the right answer.

On the seventh day
of my strictly-adhered-to diet,
I entertained a host of distinguished guests
at a Jewish Community Center
in Southern Brooklyn.
I recited them poetry in a taciturn mode
then flipped the page
and recited some more with elation.

And, though most of them
had come there for a game of Bingo,
they served me gefilte fish
and called me a genius.

HESIOD

Hesiod was a son to the gods –
you must never forget it, they said,
one night when he worked late in the office.

And he put away his account records
and blew out the light
with a single pre-packaged breath,
then got up to exit the room,
in which he had died.

Inside the drawers of his desk
were jewelry boxes,
and he wore some crowns
and looked farther into the stacks
of papers and diamonds,
finding his Works and Days
in a separate folder,
not to be discovered
by security guards or janitors.

He headed for the exit.

Closed all the windows
and locked the hidden liquor cabinet,
taking a swig for good measure,
put away wallet-sized pictures
(of himself)
and got up to exit the room.

The coat rack was empty,
so he must not have worn a coat,
and the papers in his desk were in order:
canceled engagements
and cover letters to publishers,
all of these bequeathed
to the grateful posterity.

At the end of the day,
Hesiod was a son to the gods.
As such, he could never succeed
in finding the exit.

BUFFALONIAN ELEGY

One-way memories crowded
into three-story shelters;
lanterns procure
blind-spots on the pavement,
putting my sleep on probation.

Pour, pour the libation,
moistening my lips with solitude.
Only the poor man's windows
taste the Buffalo rain.

And, yet, it's a gentle city,
no need to fear, my dear:
when the water foams in its throat,
you'll be the first to know:

One can begin as simply as
"when I was young";
one can end as discreetly as
"ever-after",
but it all comes to pass
and I can still recognize you,
as the slow evening cars
drip down the long asphalt tongues,
and the lights come up
like eyes that are looking away.

A PORTRAIT

Like a cloud of turbine smoke
about to produce a Jinni
out of Niagara River;
like a cherry orchard,
changing its hue on demand,
never quite resurrected;
like the Groundhog Day
when other animals jeer
and spit on the sidewalk;
like a judo throw
or a phantom turn on a road,
when the car is tossed like a pancake;
then again like a Tzara hat
full of random words
but wise like a fortune cookie;

like the squeaky-clean of the parquetry
and the wing-flapping of partridges
and Bob Creeley's hat at a country-fair
and a subway train headlight glare
every insomniac coal miner's dream
of a Northern light, tearing at every seem
to expose the darkness of liturgy;

like the face on an unused Polaroid
like a snail or a homesick asteroid,
wiggling its fox-tail of comet dust,
speaking the language of vanishing;

like the solitude in the menthol taste
of Newports, old ports, and other points of departure,
like the Granny Smith apple on Newton's head
that was missed by the royal archer,
and like everything else...

but not like the afterthought,
which is always larger.

CANZONE

Ostensible for now, the layered nocturne
soaks up the shifted water on the pavement
with window-skies and all the doors I've knocked on
calmed into slumber as a scheduled payment

for life among those monuments and legends
that settle down in my abandoned city
where what is not myself exacts a vengeance
upon all things forgotten in one sitting.

A trolley runs the course of seven corners,
feeds through the loops of district-wide seclusion:
three pharmacies, two grocers to escort us
down to the ghetto-fabulous "St. Lucien"

and onward still through the sedated lanterns
and concrete blocks and criminal intentions,
I count my steps I reinvent the patterns
of birth and death and limitless ascensions

and that without disguise but not discovered,
a spying game like watching through the mirror
one seven-year old, the local coward,
kick in the sand as timelessness draws nearer.

* * *

I hid my apartment key
in the pocket of a Black Hole.
It is a place where others dwell
and no music awakens.
Through the dazed urban morning
that occupies its wide vestibule
one grows accustomed to the scenes
of daily oblivion,
a street busy with housemaids
and acetone smells,
circus wheels
and peripheral magic
at clearance prices,
a house where the absent walls
are the only features.

German poets visit it in the off-season.
One of them writes his impressions
in the filled guest-book:

Ich mich meiner Mutter
Gesicht vorstelle,
wie die elementare
Zartlichkeit,
das mich beruhigt
in dem korallenfarbigen
Spiegel
der Quellen und Traume.

It is a familiar maudlin tune
with a toy-store chime.
In the background one hears
a procession with all its attributes:
trumpets and cheers
follow a tribune's speech;
a colossus towers
on the canvas of Baroque sunsets.

Rise, rise
Rise, rise
Raise your faces
from your bowls of rice.
Start the parade, start the parade,
real men are getting laid!

* * *

The span of transience is manifest in our footsteps,
each breath taken to sleep above the deep
and clear of lilac planes – a rare conscience
that only comes when there is nothing to forebode
or else to scatter the remains
of similar terrain.

To live this picture, frame by frame,
is to reflect the blue of every skyline,
only a glimpse of that part of light's spectrum,
which is absorbed in haste by flocks of geese,
merging with autumn air
in distant radiance.

I gather these dried leaves and hold the stems
not in Ophelia's madness, but in one,
that drives unspoken yearnings
and is betrothed to me, like love's last origin,
wings beating in my hands and throat,
an end,
escaped fragility's eternal shiver.

LULLABY

When Juliet blows out her paraffin candle,
thick caramel scent draws nearer to the bed,
sleep's neon halo circling round the head,
and – off the side– on top of velvet sandals.

The wall-eyed darkness pacifies the city,
night's curdled milk that feeds the withered light,
where two opponent colors may collide,
disguising the insipid nitty-gritty.

Two lovers whirl around like Spanish dancers,
insouciantly – through the Second Street,
all melodies of Andalusian breed –
a twelve-string and a snake-flute that entrances.

So dream you then of tales unsung by Ovid,
as some that do continue their flight,
like moths, who drift to feel the living night,
escaping all the "Dearly Beloved..."

* * *

To Charles Bernstein

The lightness of being is a familiar burial ground –
not at all disposed to early detection by
our much improved apparatus, the end-product
of toil and sweat, the ultimate testimony
to the eternal youth of collective talent.

An art form transpires (perspires) in the uninhabited corners
of an old-time bar, where songs of clanging beer mugs
(one more whiskey for Herr Brecht!)
incorporate tradition into perceptible voids of understanding.

I have passed through this city before, always similar modes
of transition (transit authority instructs passengers to take any
luggage, even "cultural baggage from the old country");
twisting it like a Rubik's cube, I have found all sides
to be in perfect symmetry for a color-blind observer,
though, perhaps, too reminiscent of a classic Manhattan
high-rise to elicit the appropriate question of
"What's inside?"

Earlier this morning, when my neighbor reportedly stepped
out of his apartment onto the river of the sidewalk,
I suddenly understood that he would catch no fish;
thus, proceeding with my silent routine day-to-day,
I felt no more need to look out my kaleidoscope window;
for is it not better to approach immediacy from underneath
a different veil of non-descriptive concern?

In accordance with the above, I have bought and sold
three formulae for the detonation of make-believe.

* * *

To Susan Howe

The green cloth of lingering planes
puffs out like a lunar reflection
over earth's silent wards.

Young stones grow here.

Old stones end here.

And it is a better day
when nothing glistens.

Glazed circumference of time:
impossible to stretch
into an oval.

Undesirable to perceive.

Only then will you know
how I felt it.

No more will Anubis summon.

But it is to you
that his inward shadow goes
in its final splendor.

* * *

On a Buffalo weekday, like this,
I will come to the silver-laced sleep,
summer at the foundation of my wing,
no regrets from either side of memory.

On a Buffalo weekday, like this,
even non-animate souls will experience hardship.

In those cluttered rooms, that knew me,
narcolepsy will burn like incense,
and the smoke of forgotten poems
will fill the embellished space
between air & gliding.

Catechisms of visiting saints
or the rolling rocks of kitchen talk
will pass through my porous walls
turning into endangered birds.

I chatter with the teeth of solitude,
wander behind seasonal drapes,
and remain forever,
as life made of newspaper-clippings.

Buffalo weekdays materialize
into rusted beginnings.
I extend myself over them
as a gesture of parting,
like the countless skies
from a train outside of childhood.

An evening sun-beam
parts the snow in the field;
telephone poles
mark the recovered distance;

this is a monolith image,
a relapse, this is
the only true love I know
away like within,
a place, from which
there is nowhere to head
but homeward.

ODE TO FLORENCE

The soul of Italy – a sparsely peopled town
with southern greens, unlike verdure of France,
to garnish the immaculate Renaissance gowns
of white Leviathans, frozen in the trance
of time, carved out of stone by rival masters,
who also shopped in pigeon-haven stores
for boundless spaces and for alabaster,
a sparsely peopled relic one restores.

Mushroom-capped churches, freed from Gothic pomp,
what bluish salty light to soak them through?
Would it were true that art can hold the lamp
of sunsets on a hill, dropping maroon
oil paint, anointing busts of sleeping thinkers,
like every other object, it remains
in car-shops, where an old mechanic tinkers
with chariots, forced to stay in when it rains.

Reflection of the past, a shield so loyal
from Latin tribes, which grow extinct with dusk,
to the apprentice, to that dripping oil,
to history's intoxicating musk...

for one that dies in the balsamic age of genius
with that all-worldly sense that days create
today it rains in Florence. Life continues.
The blue hills thicken and the tides abate.

WINTER

Outside my immediate mortality
sinking snow
landscapes at large
a Bruegel-style intimation

when it falls
the flowers on my window-sill
move in closer

and I breathe in the crystals
the fractals of frozen air

we are sitting across from each other –
across an epoch

what exists in the vastness between us:
eyelids half-turned

and the white, that explodes with each blink
in all primary colors
and the samovar on the table
to add authenticity

know that winter is only a widow
with her soft hand across my face;
when the masquerade colors transpire,
how much will she erase?

there are cobwebs and streets
a street-car spits out companions

there is childhood repainted
in a white bed-sheet hue

when there's nothing,
there's still a voice in my hundred years
but the face is beyond the divide
and hidden from view.

* * *

I have made the trip that lasted exactly a month
on the purple metro line with five stops in between
the fuming vertical trunks of industrial growth
and the springtime that bore me a monolinguistic twin.

Rustling sheets of cement would betray me at dawn.
Julie's mascara ran thick in the Gorky Park archway.
The acacias were named by one harridan, who bent down
and picked up a few flowers, for cooking purposes largely.

We would walk the full circle of freedom in central squares
in back-alleys with casket wine in paint-chipped gazebos
all the way to that coral stripe, if one really squints,
of one-sided air-flight sunrise behind a gazette-leaf.

By the folk-tale ideals of Saturday matinees,
spring-time cleanings, new age, a canon of celebrations,
and an orchestra seat for some regional mutinies,
I grew up to the cut-off mark, the last laceration.

Older boys from the yard served tables, before they served time,
in a tinfoil diner with cabbage-sour discussions.
The beginning of April smelled freshly of turpentine.
Nature is treacherous here, so one must be cautious.

I got off at my stop, and I ended after a month
for a life entangled from birth in a steel-rope placenta.

...when you run in the woods long enough,
                                    you breath through your mouth,
and the frost-bitten birches spin and fall out from the center...

* * *

The war, my friend, is over,
now the spring
is pink and heavy
with too much redundancy.

And we, the brave ones,
can no longer stand
at points of highest density,
for one,
because we still
mourn for the Northern Years.

A face, that comes
into this script,
is blank, no more
expressive than the loss
of slumbering Northern color,
which was left
back in the Northern Years.

Dimensions grow impalpable
with wind.
The pages of the script
dispersed, the war
at last is over,
images
are fixed.

And I depart
abruptly, like the thought

of Northern Years.

* * *

1.

Surfaces, on which I walk,
are cuneiform tablets. Images
of servile elephants and women,
who carry water
on the egg-tops of their profiles.

Water squeezed from your voice.
Water squeezed but not collected.

The metal edge of a flowing stream
carving names in the red clay of my palate.

Here is the tongue of a burning glacier, here,
an evening wand turned to obscurity.

Now that the magician is gone,
you'll be taken care of
by the concierge.

2.

Long nights I walked through the lanterns
to be the sleep of an owl
or a simple eyebrow of faith.

Long nights my shadows were on par
with the feminine side of distance.

Balloon-heads of buildings
moved in a row, perhaps,
to keep tally of borrowed moons.

Long nights I played with this glowing abacus,
and the closer I got to the end,
the longer that dimly lit humming
of abandoned lullabies.

* * *

Pirouette for the reach of autumn,
turn around,
look back through the veil.

Life eternal retracts in totem,
a magician
to no avail
marks the tricks in front of the parish,
chambered cities,
where once upon...

But the landscapes
grow dense and bearish,
shedding quagmires or dried up ponds.

On to warm some sleep on the burner;
in the morning
I'll be away,
as an underpaid late sojourner
always should,
so easily swayed
by the subway salvation leaflets,
by the dapple-gray
stepping stones.

This October will leave me sleepless
with the laurels that age bestows.

This October is full of raincoats
marching out
of peripheral view
to the brink,
to the blinded rain coast
where I long
to be back with you.

Back through dusk,
through the etchings of pine trees.
I'm away,
I've never been back!

And the fingers press through the time-freeze,
as they reach for a cigarette pack.

OPHELIA'S MADNESS

(She climbed the gray-haired willow.
She looked into the glass.)
My father, slayer, lover,
You're all the same, alas.

(She looked into the mirror,
into the rippled space...)
If only in my visions
I could recall your face!

But, powerless to end it,
I referee this game,
where always to one's features
I put the other's name.

And when the spirits told me
that you, my lord, were dead,
I mourned but for the face
of the name in my head.

No more! It must be over!
Consistency is all.
This much a nun remembers
before the curtains fall...

(She jumped into the river.
The curtain fell. Applause.
And there, behind the drapery,
Death took her in its paws.)

FROM ALEXANDER BLOK

No sleep, no trade, no reminiscence
above the black town, a cry in time,
it stands, paining the deaf night's essence,
the festive Easter chime.

Above the human incarnation
He'd long since nailed into the ground,
above death's thick contamination
they ring until no strength is found.

Above the lot of worldly woes,
above all drawn too long in plight
they ring, just as above that coat,
the one you wore that night.

BLUE PERIOD

Blue, period.
How many millions
of nervous impulses
are in this "Iliad"?
Blue, period.
How many colors?
Chronos hollers –
another time period.
Blue, period.
Human is boredom.
Took 'em and bored 'em
right into the ground
Feelings – uncertainty
Thoughts – impropriety
Lack of sobriety
easily found
easily ground
portentous as sound
words by the pound –
another game.
Wanted: a stimulus
Wasted: a Romulus
Needs to be found:
another name.
Blue, period.
How many millions
of resolutions
are packed in this frame?

* * *

After the rain is gone
I will remain in the familiar space.

How will you call me?
How will the sounds chase
the recognition of a hazy dawn,
the mist of solace, and a meadow scent?

Time is a bird that's always in descent.

How will it end? Perhaps, in a charade?
Monosyllabic streets, three-word cascades,
just like
            the staircase
                                from an old-time attic,
where every living moment is homemade.