Flying at dawn on the Eastern Seaboard

Some want from lovers what I want from big machines
violent ones, loud enough to kill me, during takeoff
“fuck me up,” then “not really,” then
“just scare me”—

The white barn in the field
looking rural, out-of-place
holds tractors for the airport, I guess
but looking at it, rising from the runway, I think
of myself approaching it, grass dew on my boots
beginning a dirt-scented day filled with sky

I awake and the clouds are a soft floor just beneath us even though it might be hundreds of feet and then it drops away to endless empty space and rumpled ground twenty thousand feet below us and even though it was only my gaze that screaming plummeted to its death in that moment, I am suddenly and viscerally aware of this frail curtain between myself and death: a cloth so thin I can peer through it.

I awake and the sun is slipping over mountains and winking back at me very brightly from some large flat object in the distance that can only be a cliff: the buildings everywhere else are dwarfed by its huge reflecting surface. Later I see cliffs in a snaking string along the path of some river whose name I’ll never know, every one bursting with sunlight.

I am awake and the sun has risen almost everywhere now except for the western sides of mountains, where it is still early dawn and the light has not made it over that nearby steep horizon. It is beautiful and it happens every day, it has been happening and will for thousands of years, long after the ground has forgotten these little farmhouses still waiting in delay for sunrise.

I am awake and the sun is inflaming towering columns of smoke from factories, four fetuses in a row rising from the floor to spread out and dissipate and never even approach their grand sky brothers drifting past. I see this from above them all, looking down, and then I look up and there are more clouds above us too.

I am awake and suddenly aware again that every wave of light to meet my eye does so to complete a journey unimaginable in length: from the depths of space to that brilliant shining lake and then—as nothing, as if it were nothing at all—back up through lethal empty atmosphere, piercing airplane glass to find me. Any part of which would kill me; would kill any of us; all beyond our frail and mortal shells, is light.

Sometimes I push forward with a terrific roar
slipping from my seat, held back
only by a belt or grip I keep:
invisible forces thrusting me onward.
We try not to ask
what if this life slipping behind me
runs out of room to land?

There are secret paths amid the trees
patterns in the field you only see from air
idly I wonder where they lead
what caused them, was something there
but once aground they vanish from my mind.



10/27/23

Reflection on Aliens over Luxembourg

I’m soft inside: it is a flaccid soul day

One day i killed a silverfish over Luxembourg, circa 2007

“The adulterous husband ponders infidelity:” a still life once painted for him by a lover. He imagines it is about her pursuit of other men but actually it is about freedom

here is the blank stare of a powerless lust, I say. Keep the change (they don’t)

I find it difficult to describe how words become meaningless

“Luxembourg?” He went there with his fiancée 

• twelve years before the affair
• two days after they mutually lost their virginity in a beautifully drunk Brussels night (neither of them finished; he slept on the floor)
• light contemplation of suicide in marriage years 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, and 14

“why does my body react this way” he mulls, fucking his wife, absent-minded, getting soft, imagining another man ejaculating onto an old lover

at the concert, a recorded woman’s voice played: “I can say I did it all with love.” faithless eyes fill with tears as if

selfish pig, I try to call myself, without caveats

the picture of Luxembourg stares me down, alien silverfish eternally descending from space, every time I stand to piss

I can say I am what I am but the chatter in the waiting room tells me I’m full of shit

10/20/23

Witches

rustling about in the hedges and the roots
the witches do not know they yearn for god:

not the gods of churches who molest them, but
the god of prostitutes and mothers, the god

who wept with bereaved sisters, who rescued
the adulterer and the widow, who dined

laughing with the whores and their clientele
whose feet, perfumed by an unrequited lover

tread dark paths toward a tortured end:
hate men, perhaps, or the evil in their loins

but children of the earth cannot but help
to long for their heartbroken creator.


9/24/23

the boatman

“you must suffer,” quoth the boatman

poling the dead black waters

“have you not met those who never hurt?”

boards creak on dark waters

i stare into the inky murk but do not dive

not yet, not yet, not yet, but

“you must,” he intones, impassionate as moonlight

so i carefully unbutton, remove, fold

standing on the deck, on the edge, nude

colder now; afraid now; “you cannot want it,”

he drones on, all coffin velvet and pyre heat

and i know he speaks the truth but i reject it—

“you must suffer,” again, and again, and

i cannot force my body down.

naked; weeping on the wooden boards,

ripples lapping underneath with rotten teeth

infuriated by my weakness; ashamed of comfort;

he is not watching. i break the neck of hesitance

and before i hear it snap i dive.




well, now: the shock of frigid water slapping me

the bite of fangs, the rip of fingernails

crush of the boat’s heel against my skin, my ribs,

my strong bones buckle in the press: the ichor

choking out my life from lungs—reel and thrash

and gasp for air: but suck in only thick liquid death;

eyes wide, battered legs kicking out, heaving

but every intake only forces water deeper in—

i will die, i realize; perhaps i am already dead,

mind darkening in a fogging glass. then

air—a gasp—before fierce currents pull me down again.

i cannot hear him now but i hear him anyway

“there is no relief; to hope is not to suffer—“

a sharpness in my calves; a puncture in my chest;

another choke, another gasp, another death—until

the skin of water overhead lies still and black and foul.




coughing, sputtering, vomiting: my frail hands on wood

dragging me dripping back, to exhausted roll and pant

and gag, and spit, and wheeze, and lie, and sit.

“you must suffer,” quoth the boatman, “to see—“

and i do, i do, i see it all from dying eyes, edges dim:

everything the same. the world goes on its way.

stars arc in their holy indifference; wind howls lonely

and eyes growl from human masks scarred and fierce.

strength unwilling seeps back into my crooked bones

as i wrap my body in discarded clothes, now

heading back, now at the dock, now inside somewhere

now in a warm shower, now in a soft bed, now in

someone’s arms, now holding children, now victorious,

now wealthy, now achieved, now admired, now

old, now in a gentle sunset, now at a kitchen counter,

now in a quiet room, now in soft chairs, now asleep.

but the eyes that screamed in that black pool

are the eyes that stare at all these things,

eyes unchanging, only more tender for having wept:

more merciful and hesitant—but wide no more,

afraid no more, though the dark edge fog never fades:

they gaze from a boatman’s face, and i grimly quoth—







july 2023

heat

heat lightning over the miniskirts

all of us downtown in our suits

horizons of marble dome buildings

one guy with sunglasses and a folded umbrella

Here it is, we say—here’s power

91 degrees outside and sweaty:

the universe watches, amused—

scars of light flashing grim and silent overhead

july 2023