The New Testament

The New Testament

Index to Nature: Spontaneous Generation

There are the ten kinds of rose,
more than seventy bivalves,
thousands of generally speaking,
cacti, in the dictionary of birds.

The order of texts in anxious
catalogues known simply as:

The observations of a few
in the digests called The Many
and is, if you will, a conspicuous gift
to the knowing of the opulent knowledges.

The general plan is, how
do you say it, keen. There is
a sorting of things based on:

color, lingua, juxta-resource
that is absolutely, encyclopaedic.
There are few that make sense
of it and still, a few of those
are on the verges
of looking in and away again
as if to notice a new patch
of grass that somehow escaped
the forces of stone and progress,
then crept out anyway.
It is unique, momentary, revelational
requires the finesse of the ancient,
the timing of snakes.
How unimportant grass is
in terms of parable and scholarship
when it grows. How it is when
it is found on a grave and more
still, how it demands the greatest
of attentions. Now sit still and listen.

BEIRUT ASSASSIN LEAVES MARK

The cocks were storm-crowing that morning
after a real long spell of total
environmental darkness. Two broughams sped by.

(In the land of the prophets
the angels speak out-loud,
people pretend not to notice.
Here it is the status quo.)

All the clocks whirred with quick sighs
and at sunset the clouds were full of the dust
from extinct volcanoes.
On the beach loversbodies were kissing
each other while long lost birds
perched in the Cedars up north
and sang their common song of return.
On the Corniche, people brought
valentines, coffee and cardammon
from every shop on Hamra.
Then everything just stopped.
Windows fell apart one by one
and people ran home, started looking.

Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out.

I felt around for my watch to note the time.
School was letting out and I compared JFK,
that unholy day to this one. Must have been similar,
the way we huddled close and locked
all our doors, turned on our TVs .

Human forms felt their way toward the crater
and the same herd of goats crossed my path twice.
Cars hung in the windows of hotels
for months and years on end.
No more luck, no more money, no more beadsmen.
The predictions are keen to usurp everyone
and the last unlucky man born will keep vigil
near a pitcher of water and a set of lost keys,
a tape recorder will produce the truth.
Airports fell first and then the invasions,
a graveyard was blown into the sky
and the dairies all went dry
but it does take some time, perhaps forever.

The poor remained indifferent.

One man was found two weeks later in the rubble,
pointing in one direction, holding his cell.
No one called out the dogs because it is said
the canines ate the corpses in Sabra and Shatilla.

I wonder.. to whom was he speaking,
where was he pointing?


Bound to Happen

I thought I was just pretending
all along, saying well, that's
bound to happen and it does and I say
well, that's bound to happen.
We all know that when we leave
the room, the room disappears.
We've known it since we were born
and sometimes we talk about it
with strangers knowing full well
that once they leave
all secrets follow
into the ether or the dark,
same thing and who can tell
time as it passes
when you are asleep,
the clocks looking you over?
It is a strange statistic
and one I am fond of until
it comes to the war zones.









Chronilogically

There is a crumpled bed,
two heat seeking cats,
storm clouds and a strange
pastel sea
puncuated by one small white boat


-

like that.


The day begins
over and over
in parenthesis
(containing footnotes)
one just like the other.

The static of a freeway
permeates our glass and stone.
People go to work
returning through the windows,
as they left,
one after another:
blue cars, black cars, big red trucks,
motorbikes and taxis,
city buses lunging next
to the waves of the great Phoenician Sea.

Their cups runneth over
and there is so much pushing.
Sleep becomes the hopeful journey
and ends with another day.











The Buttoning Of The Coats

Listen to this

nothing
outside
not even a dog barking

planes not flying
off the tarmac

some kind of hum
from the freeway

not much really
but so incessant

honk

listless unimportant
as we all are
on the couches
the crematoriums.

Aleutians
where are they again?

Listen
to the buttoning
of the coats.
























In The Locality Of Whimpers

The static of those times was deafening,
transcripts and telegrams bogging
down all the lines, apothecaries
and epistolaries grew quite rich.
They all began to tell their stories,
everyone of them, quite dismal
because of the chatter and negations. We all
hoped for more but came up with so much
less. So many forgotten aftermaths,
so many more to make, we felt quite sad.
Our whimpers grew into infamous
proportions, exponential even,
until we wept with a single growl,
"Enough is enough. We want more."
Lost as strangers in the strangeness
of going home to find the huts burned
to their very interior ashes, those
ashes in the sky or the breath
of our friend Iblis. He was tremendously
hard to find except in the fine print
of lawyers' contracts. He wasn't
what you would call, a good listener.
Iblis produced ashes like whispers,
his spooky action at a distance
and stood to gain more than a few
borrowed souls and heartbroken women,
a real deadbeat dad rounding up his vixen.

That is what they say about him anyway.

She said to him early on, "Come and get me,
if you can. I hide quite near the tan area
called the gray matter. It isn't easy to find
but try anyway. I've got nerves of steel."










Sea of Change

When the Syrians disengaged from our area a few months ago, I took it upon myself to visit a few of their installations I was so used to walking by with my eyes cast down. One in particular which sits next door to the lovely Mrs. Amar's house (she is a widow with 27 cats, two dogs (one, a gigantic Russian breed and very kind), some fowl and one Bengali male helper) is worth noting. It is the place I realized the idea that there is more than one way of seeing things. Of course, I was convinced of this before that fateful day but I didn't really believe it myself. My senses proved otherwise. We must trust those senses. And then we turn our head or stand on a different knoll, the sun is low on the horizon casting certain shadows, or it is noon and there are none at all. So we change our minds and realize our senses can't even be trusted! Nothing is as it seems yet it is, as it is, when we are there.

I usually view Beirut proper from a southerly direction with the northern line of sight ending in a steamy metropolis, full of human activity that I somehow know is there even though I can't see it from such a great distance. Between that view and myself is the giant sandy looking tarmac of modern Phoenician departure. It is new and within it is the memory of the old, the airport in which every corner praised Hafaz Assad and where I once spent one interminable day waiting for a flight back home. Home was something far more foreign than even this place. Home was Riyadh, a dizzy semi-circular void of streets without names and people who dressed uncannily the same, day after day after day. They dressed in reference to the Bible and all the other ancient things that we sometimes abhor and sometimes revere.
To the south of course, is the south. It appears to be a straight line from the metropolis, completely 180 degrees in the other direction, a direction that I often go when seeking peace in the form of a house in a rural area with a view into modern Israel and back into a Medieval castle. I'm almost certain sometimes, that there I can see serfs burning their garbage and the jackals carrying off bones and refuse from the day into their sullied dens.

Behind me is nothing in particular, just a bunch of hills and somewhere even behind that is Syria and behind that, something else too. I don't really know and like the old cave, I only contemplate my shadow not what actually makes it.

In front of me is the sea. Always the sea, always changing.

At the deserted Syrian installation near Mrs. Amar's house however, I realize that everything is generally in a different order. Roads that aren't parallel when they are driven on become twins with roads that ought not to be paired with the others because they course by entirely different realities. The freeway with its locked-in walls where one is isolated in a steady stream of coming and going. It runs alongside a brutal and poorly kept street that harbors fruit vendors and adolescent boys standing about and looking for something to do. The tarmac is far less significant in comparison and in that view.

The southern direction from the top of that knoll, standing just on the edge of a empty foxhole (which is held together by an old tire from a car) is no longer "to the south" and is no longer straight at all. It curves around behind me there, like a lengthy arm on the shoulder of a friend or a lover's around the waist of a lover. So it is, beside me and behind me.

In this orientation, the world is quite circular and the sea, although not directly in front of me is still the sea. The sea without direction, the sea of all changes. The sea which casts no shadow on anything at all but remains forever as it is without us knowing.









THE WEATHER REPORT

Israel says it will rain Tuesday so it will.
Here, the weather-girls are more about glamour,
because in Lebanon, we know it will rain
sooner or later, just don't know when
and want to look good when it does.
But Israel knows! They have balloons
up in the sky and yesterday, at the school
for retarded kids in Tyre, an F-15 signed
the bright, blue warm-front sky.
The surf was still a pretty mirror;
the waves hadn't conducted a weather report
of lapping generously at the kilny rocks,
the ones placed there without reason –
the disjointed buildings still disrepairing
to the sea and the sea wrecks that must be there.
The rebar girders jut out of ocean-fronts of lichen-
splotched war rubble, the smooth stones and trash,
all the salty modern shrapnel.
All of it there in a calm loaminess.
Tuesday, it will rain. We all agree on that one.



Morning Has Broken

In the opening frames
the actress addresses
the entire Syrian army
privately with a speech
holding a stick
and then retreating
after being hit
by one of them
with an ammo belt.
As she walks away
she strikes the stick
against a pole
and parts of it fly
high into the air.
It's just another day
in the suburbs of Beirut.
She comes from a lower
middle class working family
in the southern United States.

She is filmed as she wanders
through the third floor
of the abandoned building
where the Syrians
shave and bathe,
make catcalls at her
from the window sills
as she walks to the dekhena.
Dogs drift in and out
of the building
and lose their skin
from the mange.
She tries to save them
but they all eventually die.

In the previews, Julia Roberts
walks into the rooms
of an unoccupied building
in the Levant, near the sea
where the Syrian troops
launch their evil plots
from hand-me-down fox holes.
It cuts to a montage
of tracer bullets and
embassy dialogue:
important people
whisper important things
to other important people,
there is more than enough
of the requisite drama,
katuyshas, Mercedes
and hidden faces.

On one of the rubble strewn
balconies, there are wine bottles
and a flak jacket
and pictures of half dressed
women from magazines
with hand drawn breasts,
nipples in red ink.
Some of them
are pasted onto the wall,
most likely with ejaculate.
The harmless literature
of soldiers is everywhere.

Other rooms have sundry items,
clumps of old flat bread
still in the bag where sometimes
a bird is found trapped
and freed if they're lucky enough
to be found as they flutter
and fight the inevitable.
There are boots hardened
by sun and rain,
and cigarette butts,
and the putrefying entrails of sheep
from an impromtptu feast the soldiers
enjoyed several days before,
there's empty corned beef cans or tuna.

In the quiet scenes of Act II
Julia Roberts finds certitude
in the Creator and Sustainer
of the entire universe,
just in time. The book
is written and closed,
the script mysteriously disappears.
The timeline is abridged later
when the captives are traded
by the opponents,
victory belongs to one
side not the other.
Syria moves their forces
into the Bekka Valley
several weeks before
the first bridge
is taken out by the IDF
although this is said to be
the pretext for the war,

it is a lie.

The audience applauds
at certain times,
the moments of liberation,
ticker tape parades,
where not a single corpse is used.
Not a single child is wasted,
not one of them can steal
a scene anymore,
their eyes caked
with the mud of C'anaa.
Death to the Great Satan
they said, it was their only crime.
Dancing in the streets on September 11th,
who cares about some much deserved
Shadenfraude. Shadenfraude
is not a punishable offense.
Finally,
Julia rises
into the air
suspended by thin
flesh-colored bungee cords.
American soldiers advance
dressed as dancers in full regalia
lifting her vigorously,
outrageously erotic-
from the refuse of her occupation.
It is a monumental scene,
the crowning glory, years in the making.

As she moves across the sands
of the beach a black soldier
leans over to help her
onto the amphibious
he is thinking Normandy
and Julia looks into his South
Carolina good intentions
and whispers to him

this is a war crime you're involved in

but there is a woman
succumbing to hysteria
on the ramp. They all have
to move on, they all
have somewhere to go.
The USS Trenton has pirates
in the hold, docks in the port
of Cyprus, the lines
are quite long.
The sea undulates and is a terrible green
as it fills with the oil
that pours in from
the fuel depot of a civilian hub.
Julia asks one of the sailors
with whom she is standing,
smoking a menthol cigarette
asks if this is normal
and he shakes his head
after looking at it again,
no ma'am. It's not.

As the credits roll:

The hold of the Cargo jet
opens and the airman
gather everyone for one
last photo. This is clearly
an intelligence maneuver.
The faces will be studied
and the bird takes it's last breath
and she releases it
from the bag,
she saves only one
very important bird.

Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix
boarding now,
the more or less catatonic
actress drags
her few things behind her
through Newark International.
Yusef Islam strums
a tune but she cannot see him.










Nude Descending

Godiva of the farmlands
of the peach,
Godiva of the Gift Shop
of the thrill seeker,
Godiva of parched lips
of crippled hips,
Godiva of sitting Shiva
of hands folded,
Godiva of perpetual collision
of happy turmoil,
Godiva of pathologie
of eternal blackouts,
Godiva of waste
of long dead people,
Godiva of Whow-wee
of fox, bat and wolf,
Godiva of bangle bracelets
of shortness in breath,
Godiva of sons' sleeping
of the silence before dawn,
Godiva of musical chairs
of poorly tended zoos,
Godiva of the Apache
of Globe and San Carlos,
Godiva of handmade paper
of full ashtrays,
Godiva of the coin-fed horse
of El Rancho and sawdust,
Godiva of the Grapes of Wrath
of invasions and launchers,
Godiva of typhoid
of summers in tuberculosis,
Godiva of seasonal illness
of cold and wet, hot and dry,
Godiva of foreign hospitals
of fascist gendarmes...

Godiva, Godiva, Godiva
That's all I ever hear.





The Dark Pages of Time

It was half dark then.
We walked when we were awake,
hoping to find the everlasting
day, warm and bright.
The moon our lamp and we
did not know why or how
it got there nor why
it was so stingy with us.
Was a long time before
the first fires, still longer
until we took the leaves and branches
and lit them up, threw our heavy coats off and still longer
until we stored the dried up brew
from the massive cups of water
we had to drink against our wills,
our platforms sloshing, animals rutting
and most of the draught too bitter to swallow.
Still it was even longer
before we said our graces
so intent we were, on survival,
our eyes glazed over at the flickers,
no need for memory or prediction,
which came next. Our pictures
made of blood and boiled roots
splayed lonely in the sooted caves
once we left them but we hoped,
we did hope for a companion
who would search us out on our trek
which we called with our tongue
the bitter enemy or simply,
the deliverance. Idiosyncratic stories
cropped up and helped us to settle
the places of reap and sow. Fighting
began slowly over putrefying fats,
black pools of no return that lit the way.
Cess pools of death and destruction
where each fire was a tiny star
between fantastic distances,
each star a little soul or a village.
The fuel of the fire, man
it said. Some of us listened
and some of us were instructed
by the melting stones appearing
from the sky in strange, indefinite interims.
We hoped to catch the brittle cracks
between the smokes above our heads
to no avail. We named the hopeless condition
war and the fullness of our caves peace.
Language a weak reminder
for the darkness we thought to leave behind.

The Windsea

Sometimes the winter is fierce
and moreso lately with winds
tossing the sea in the air.
A combination of pressures.
I'm alone again in the windsea,
that connects violent force
in that sort of night called lonely,
listening to the earth's big voice.
I repeat, I am alone with it.
It isn't easy.
The clock ticking on the wall,
the angry tirades we've been through
today, the taxi I had to take home,
the unchanging force of that
as pure as the tumult of the building
as it bends imperceptibly
to the will of the windsea outside.
And we're not shaking, not really
on speaking terms but the windsea
tells the walls otherwise,
tells the screens to creak
and the windows to open
just enough to feel that one
cool stream of air, like water
that erodes the sturdiest
of mortars and leaves tracks
of moss to map the cracks
and shiney lines of snails after it rains.
All of it trying to get in or out,
what is the difference really?
And we're not shaking in separate beds.
Not crying or apologizing, just not shaking
nor really asking except for a bit of sleep
and some relief from the togetherness
of the windsea outside and the badgering.
If only buildings were bodies
and souls had windows, I'd let you in and it'd be quiet.





In every time zone

a soldier patrols the perimeter of the site
in a certain kind of loneliness.
He persists but I do not.

A prayerful moth, rather large,
finds sanctuary on top of the blinds
but we do not.

Momentary gladness fills the room,
grace ends with a smile.
Your presence fills nothing but the void
as a car loading explosives at dawn
shuts prophecy down for the day.
It is grown here and exported, how?

Radishes grow into melons.
Dogs scattered in various poses
at the road side, mangled and all
quite dead. How can this be?
Who is painting the roads red?

A minaret is climbing through the arcadia door
it is almost beautiful, a knick knack.
The men in clusters near the bottom
count several angles. Another balances
high on the scaffold with bare chest.
A slaughter in the dust one year ago
and next year my decorations will
sing everything is loved once
before building a reputation, wherever that is.






That War Begins Again Anyway


Schadenfreude in the City

Where did this problem start,
this stuff about wondering where
a siren goes in the dark
or during the rain, the curtains
pulled aside and you want to see
mainstreet, hope to see a fire
or the headlight of someone's car
dangling like an eye out
of its socket, all hay-wires.
Here, it is night and a plane
ascends, banks then disappears.
A siren peals through the almost silent
predawn cold and continues on.
Then another. It is always
the second one that gets you going.


In the Ides of March

Descended from the long line of Tombstone prophets,
the Doc Holidays sic Veras of the Dragoons,
yet separated by one lonesome day, seventeen years
in advance adjusted for the noons and the copper blasts,
we were born you and I in the alleyways.
Early on you called through the mouth of St. John without his hands
via new Byzantium to annoint the death of Marilyn, JFK
a few months later, that familiar iconography of happenstance.
To lose a few of the trails in the rain part of consequence.
Who finds the wooly mammoths out in the desert covered
in the long shadow of their probable Ice Ages
separates them fork-wise from the progeny of Appaloosa
through to the Pinto, a bean colored rag pony
of the Injuns we used to catch like butterflies; the US gov
gives them grants to buy Remington’s but not the ones
Pegar used to paint down over the flash floods
where we were all born one after the other in Doc's hands.
The horses' feet buried in the flame-like grasses of a hundred
Hopi Mesas. All of the divorces final and worthy
of great canyons of excommunication. The articles of faith
too vast to approach even the expontential. A real long way.
There'll be some splainin' to do.



"I remember my ancient dream,
in which a woman tells me,
"Your house only burns inside, it's
still standing..." Some consolation,"
Alice Notley, some consolation.

Labelling the pages as if they are a personal outline of filth.
At first, standing naked and brushed, reflected in the outlaw
tub which turned my pale skin into a tempting middle aged struggle
of coded names numbered in sevens, beginning and ending
with the same letters O to O and M to M.
The Tropics, Henry, have changed
and Paris is no more than a gesture
taken before a hard right into the police states, and for good.
In those washes the bedouin camped and walked towards finding
me and all the others wishing they had their passports and visas
in order. Hoping for the pope to come in and make it all final.
At last, standing naked and brushed, feet buried
in the flame-like grasses of a hundred Hopi Mesas, one left turn after
the Phoenicia, a valentine ends a seven lettered cycle,
the fields all go fallow.
Everyone in this particular city stomping
towards one aftermath after another aftermath,
after another mammoth sound from the pvc
aquaducts just shy of the Roman, plus,
the sound of their digging. The future fossil record unable
to record anything at all and it seems, the five thousand miles
to sic Vera in the Dragoons is a meaningless equation of the siesmic.
I remember my ancient dream, the fire pattern, the wooly mammoths. I remember this too, a double reactive incindiary device,
twenty eight dominoes to a pack, falling in two directions.
Old Wallace's Smoke Shop, a tropical shirt
borrowed and in the mirror my reflection caught on tape
a burning flowering rose towards the journey seven letters, seven
fallow, seven aftermaths, seven saints
and all the seven popes of the seventh centuries
gone mad, gone straight to mad puffy hells
with the fury of the OK Corral.
Telemachus reads while the women are still at the river,
pounding dry the linens.
Home is where the heart is, it's still standing and the others
buried at the rest stops, flagging each other down.
Today In The Real Third World

The city on fire
was traffically jammed,
cross circuits of humbled wires
over the intersections of
'used to be a war here'
and
'used to be a war here'.
Struggling their beefy little hearts
out to go on home to their steamy kitchens,
their lousy children and fat wives.
No one any more decent for the excuse
of it all including the rickety
rattan furniture on the balcons
to the beautiful sea on the right
or the left or the center.
Somewhere out there a prostitute wailed
and somewhere else a man spit into a urinal
and still somewhere else out there
was I. In the middle of it all,
chest nearly bleeding from contaminations
fresh from the instructor who hates funerals
(his wife dying in Britain now).
We all hate funerals and burying.
Everyone hates to be in a scene.
Cops are cartoons and stand there
waving this way and that way
so it looks like there are some.
They even wear white gloves!
Life is an illusion, can't you see it?
The real authorities are spies and run
around all day chasing the generalissimos
who aren't all that real either.
The army is a lot younger and unhappier now
in the beds of their jiggling trucks.
I love their smiles. So young. So fresh.
So out there it hurts. So very, very real.








The Twisting Sleeps

Edna stated once as she sat
in the semicircular booth
at Sambo's drinking a cup of tea:
you don't want to dream anymore.
She meant, when you are old or wise
or like me, you get to that point.

After the hounds of Ha'wab they sent
a small envoy and then a second, how
many more would come into the fray,
how many more loose ends to tie up?
There are no reasons for these recurrent
troubles, recurrent themes. There
is no reason to be forced into para-
trooping fresh out of the boot camp
of dreams where the mess is
full of ice cream machines bowling alleys
and - Las Vegas lighting.
There is no reason for the envoy
to be buying trinkets to take home
(standing there as they did once before)
and certainly no reason the bus
accelerated like an F-15 but mostly,
there was no reason for the envoy
to pay a second visit at the end
to remind the dreamer there would be
no helmut nor any special lace-ups
for one of the jumpers. Sri Lanka
or wherever we would be landing
is certainly a jungle of the worst type
and we drove by the best forests on our way,
green and dry, beds of needles, familiar.
One last look before you head off.
It is the woman from Liberia who keeps
everything from descending. It is her lost
son and the memory of her slavery
which saves. Blink, wake up, get out.
Avoid the fall by missing the jump.






The Ark

It was certainly
a very dark day to leave
it all behind: the illusions
of trees, country and a son,
as the youth was swallowed
by the hungry waves
full of devils and soul assassins.
No Calypso or friend,
not even a father to save the day
from the notorious tragedies
of the sea, the lesser
known depths where the eyes
of fish gradually disappear.

Streetlights At Six

In the long haul, the misery of waiting
the shade of trees in circumference
grown under me, an acre of years.
There will be flags of constance,
stories to tell, receipts and neighbors
to bicker over parking space.
I am the homeless I'll say. A good excuse.

These five caravans of Atlantics,
the same way only different because
that was then and this is now,
the road has changed. We have
declared new things. flipped a page. A new poem.
The drowning man in Canyon Lake waved, then sunk.
The others thought he was having fun,
an honest choice. A newspaper headline.

Leaving is always the same,
goodbye to the fog and a hundred shapes of bread
in foreign markets, illogical kitchens.
Hello to the usual rain, the typical bravery
of fire departments, every single white stone
a planned community, in and out of arcadian doors.
Certain kinds of things in storage. A sacred dementia.

To lie down in a new bed all alone, the waking
dreams of a family of girls over there,
where are they and the boy with a missing finger?
All moving along, grown up, some of them dead and perhaps.
The widow with the sick child,
a disordered inheritance, what's her name?
There was a cop next door,
a wife beater. A closet full of guns.
Marina's blue eyes were the sea,
she sold life insurance
below the irony of borrowed sugar. I could see her.

A dock to which I could return.
The Tigris and Euphrates.


That's how it goes, you come and you go,
everyone comes and they go, burning and drowning.
A new world order, a simple peace plan.
A second marriage and a third, beer with friends.
Year after year labelled first to thirty first
in Gregorian. Everyone is bringing 1980
to the pot luck. Streetlights at six.

Xeroscaping. Lawnmowing. Post offices.
Little Debbie cakes, homes and gardens
up the yingyang. A certain kind of heaven
but no where like home, clicking my heels
and they don't know where to go:
Witch of the East, Witch of the North,
one shiney the other vindictive.
It was always about them. Then someplace else.

The Song of Bob


The love affair with stangers began
with morning glories between us, Bob
went to work at the prison at 6:30
as the birds performed their last songs.
He quieted Sarge, Berry and Coco with biscuits
before he left with his radio
on, yet they started barking before
he reached the first stop sign.
I want to be his wife forever they thought,
I thought and we kept barking,
as we chased his car for all time in our minds.
Bob talks to his ex 1500 minutes a month,
he doesn't seem to mind the cost of his past tense.
Why didn't you just stay married? I am
pretty too behind this fence made of chain-mail.
Twenty-one years is all he says
from the screened-in back porch where he keeps
his old partners, ex-police dogs, his detritus.
It is as if 21 years is the official
Americana. There must be one
hundred morning glories from me
to Bob, outflanking the trees
choking them slowly. Bob wants me
to be his wife forever, waiting in my war
torn house next door so he can get home
from prison to say goodnight and wake up
again to say good morning all over.
I am the last sweetheart in town.

View From 16th

"Nothing in Clouds Hill is to be a care upon the world. While I have it there shall be nothing exquiste or unique in it. Nothing to anchor me." T.E. Lawrence

There is a sense of not wanting to be here on 16th and Center, address 319 North, some awful transposition of 19 squared there, in the Masonic house. Two small, concrete obelisks are on either side of the driveway and it ought to be pleasant to look out onto the hills from the large, clean windows of this house, the natural hills and those which are man-made and called slag; the way the sun and the iron play off of each other to create lavender vistas all around is very lovely. There isn't though any solace in the view or on the roofs of so many quaint houses staggered around the smallish valley nor any charm in the massive structure sitting directly across from here just under a natural incline where the cliffs contain whole dynasties of evolution in fossils. It is right at the base of dump number seven. That would be the old hospital which is now a boarding house for the indigent and elderly. It is a handsome building, particularly in the afternoon when the light sculpts the art deco facades into crisp shapes. The place is charming the way things like that are, irresistable to people overly accustomed to the less than Byzantine. It is mostly brick and wood laid against timber, all quite flammable and impermanent. The only solid structures in sight are the several frames of shaft elevators that dot the hills in seemingly arbitrary places that mark areas where minerals are easy to find and extract by those who, in the past descended to mine the rock walls for a variety of things like copper and silver and sometimes, a bit of gold. It ought to be pleasant, but it isn't.

The best part of being in a catastrophe is actually being in one. There is nothing anyone can really say about that sort of thing, there is no choice within the boundaries of it, no conclusions and nothing which resembles remorse. It just is. It is a case that one does what one is compelled to do and that would be, to move along with it as if in a river, just glide along and look at things as they pass by or remain motionless at various points along the way.

Waking up in a large hall prepared in advance for the arrival of so many souls (on the run) after one has slept what seemed like several lifetimes contained in a few seconds, is the material of which epiphanies are made, the kind of thing a person only gets to do once, like everything else in the scheme of things. Ship load after ship load, ours was the fourteenth wave. When a person arrives in such a hall, the rest have already disappeared to wherever it is they ship people like us, refugees. There are lines and lines of open cots with one blanket each and a brand new pillow depending on the invasion and the invader. In this particular case, it could be said of it, "it was well appointed". There are boxes full of food and the essentials, foot powder and sanitary napkins and one bathroom with three stalls and three sinks for the women and probably, about the same for the men. It is an exhibition hall on the Turkish side of the island. It is prearranged for cataclysm.

I lay down after spending several hours settling in to the camp by organizing and reorganizing my few possessions but could not sleep because I was still bleeding and felt unclean. I didn't want to shower out in the open with the other women. The children were sleeping on and off and our traveling companions with whom we had left the city two days before were actively moving about and making phone calls to Kabul and Boston. They seemed very busy. Jessica, the mother, was worried about her diet, she could not be around people who had eaten carbohydrates within the previous 24 hours, it was very important to her that we respect this. We had no phone though and there wasn't really anything any of us wanted to say, my children and I, to anyone we knew. We felt very far away, so far that no phone could ever span the distance we felt.

Night began to fall and the hall was still empty. The few stragglers from the boat before ours had departed at one, just after we arrived. We were absolutely alone with thousands of empty cots and all sorts of personal expectations that we knew could never be fufilled. We did not know how we felt yet, not really and somehow, I knew we wouldn't really know how we would feel for a very long time to come. Perhaps forever. We might never recover, I knew that much but also knew that recovery isn't always the best thing if it means there isn't a lesson learned or a price paid. We were paying dearly for something but didn't quite understand what or when the debt we had incurred would finally be paid in full. The numbness was profound.

I spent a few hours walking around the fairgrounds looking for others like myself or those even worse off, those in shock or perhaps even ill. I looked for tears and slouching and found a woman on a bench sitting all alone. I tried to comfort her with talk of God and she appreciated it even though we were of different sects entirely, whole different ballparks of understanding about our status and the cause of the invasion. The woman sobbed as we compared what we'd seen so far and how we feared what else it might be that we would see. She spoke of the sister she'd left behind. It was a kind of sad excitement that allowed the closeness to exist between us for nearly a half hour. I finally got up, held her her for a moment and said goodbye to her. I can remember her face as one of average intellect, average sadness and a complete sense of loss and frustration that aggravated the tiny lines around her eyes. Her face was already anemic from several days living under seige in the south of our country. She could have been a woman in a painting.

When I returned to the hall, everyone in my group, my children and my friend and her two daughters were already asleep or resting with their eyes half closed. No one seemed to have anything left to say even though we'd not spoken more than a few words to each other since the early afternoon. I hadn't slept for nearly a week. The last time I had slept I awoke to a thunderous explosion above our building which lit the sky like a match suddenly lights a dark room. No one moved or said anything as I prepared to lay down, not even a goodnight let alone, an I love you. Then I fell without even a pause to observe my last deep sigh into a dark and immense sleep.

I woke up suddenly but without being startled or disoriented. I had no idea how much time had passed but if time were to be measured as change it must have been years that I had slept because what I saw as I opened my eyes was a world which had completely changed.

The cavernous hall which had been so empty was now filled, every cot in it had a sleeping body there and some held two. None of them moved. I cannot imagine how they settled so close to us in such silence, the way an army of butterflies must arrive in a tree. Thousands more had arrived in those hours or moments of sleep of which I have no real record to refer to. They appeared to be dead rather than exhausted. There was only one soldier walking out of the hall who looked back over his shoulder briefly before disappearing and I sat alone looking over the great event horizon. I sat and waited for things to begin moving again, I was frozen in pain and wonder at the company of souls in which I was immersed as if in the clearest water on the highest mountain, a place where no one had ever been before or would ever go again. Here it was at last, Nirvana, wildly unstable and utterly somnolent. The darkest star on the brink of radiation over a graveyard of the living.

The two obelisks mark the driveway but I do not want to know what they mean. I only know that I exist on the corner of 16th and Central, 319 North.

To Beirut

ONWARD BISBEE, ONWARD BISBEE, FIGHT FOR THE RED AND GRAY. FIGHT FOR BISBEE, FIGHT FOR BISBEE, FIGHT AND WIN THIS GAME, RAH, RAH, RAH. ONWARD BISBEE, ONWARD BISBEE, LOYAL TO YOU'RE YOUR NAME, FIGHT BISBEE, FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT, AND WIN THIS GAME - Bisbee High School Fight Song

The night is all I have anymore
to remind me of the place before
and the one before that, these
crickets and last chirps,
the bold lighting at the field
down the street where people clutch
helmets and grist is gut-wrenched.
All my houses are darker than the wanton
feeling of known people doing lost things
forever in a web of light and then, frustration.
They are the strange recollections,
the healthy chorus of jobs and kinships,
so many who know their way home
in the dark and those they pass by.
The dimpled lights are buttons
in the hills, treacherous old-ghosts
in line drawings pinned tightly
to these walls of solemn grace,
this worldly prison and escape hatch.
It's a friendly nightmare with open lips
and adjacent stares, dressed-up windows
with faint botherings and flies,
mine are as bare as the shores.
There are no muezzin here, no handicaps
and the rest is a barren spree
without the differentiation
of the late purple sky of home
as she hangs her head down & cries.
The satellites blink slightly,
survey us down below and the moon
shows the daylight of the other side
where people sit closer together
under the fig trees and miss me
while I think of them until
the mountains turn into night once
more and the field goes dark. I leave
these lights off as if to say
I protest all of this, I protest
this absence and the recovery.
I cannot buy or sell anything,
I just accept and take and carry.
This is the hardest poverty I've ever known.








What About Mars?

No more problems says the package
the cure came in, no more
warning labels and the price tag
no longer legible. It began
with flashy children and fast cars
then people started talking
about the leftover stuff
after the move out,
wondered what would happen
to the crystal ball and Japanese flag.
Where to put Mars now?
Whose house next?




















The Dove's Midrash

birth--
there are a thousand
metaphors for newness - Tim Martin, Native American Poet from Approaching the Hunt

Prologue

"What fetus wants to leave the womb of the mother? There is food and comfort there, as there is in this life, al dun'ya, but this life is deceptive. Who prefers the comfort of death without knowing the landscape?" - Yusef the Shi'a of Kafra on the writings of Khalifa Ali bin Taleb.

I, the clot in the wound of an animal,
in stages became something else, then
something else again. I learned to eat
and then, to see the letters and call
to things by their names. My eyes
a healthy list of interpretations.
My legs grew long, the road
narrow became wider. Those who spoke
of distant lands, migrations
over lakes in the east,
came near. They saved me and coaxed
me away. This is the story of wings.

First

There were times before
when destination was
understood and like morning,
it was accepted,
a rigor mortis of the living
twitched and set-in.
Adventure along the way
is a gift, solid in the pocket:
rubbed gully stones,
and softer like tadpoles,
the pretty concoctions of the created,
the family of djinn and men.

All that sweet season,
a grub in the brew of God
I clambered through moss and mud
with bees in the melted frost
of erosions called spring.
I, of the blessed unwashed things
in tribes when three angels
mistook me, wore no shoes.
It was an accident of watching, a kind of trust.
Their eucharist was pleasant tasting,
seems a long time ago now.


Secondly,

adolescence is a case of yearning
where the Paris of adults,
is the commonality of details
in the zohar of all things.
Time doesn't wait for any of it,
it simply moves things
into the entropy of location,
womb to cradle to grave,
a perpetual beast with internal clocks
and only one possible demise
of variables, the ground on which you die,
a definite characteristic
with constant proof but no maps
and one history.


The Quest

Starting at once! like that!
walking became a flying,
legs turned to wing,
out the door! on the fly! off the nest!
an instinct befell me.
My parents, infected with loss so suddenly
vanished from sight, earthbound and gray,
their own wings tucked
into the Books of Ruth.
I was more than all the birds
in the world flocking out.
Aiming far, a phoenix
towards the Gulfs of Persia,
to continue a metamorphic dream,
beyond the fences
and traps of our own
and our communions.
The elders felt a treason turn
into knots of tortured eyes
as those of one's own kind do
when a lover of distinct color makes
the guttural sounds of other places.

There

through a dizzying eon of chapters,
and punishing weathers,
toward a land of slaves who wrote
Berber tunes and spewed
pungent melodies into their dark tunics,
were jackals and feral pigs
living eye to eye, yet the hymns copied
in a cloister of cages during the partial
ablutions of the tender age, held little sway.
The distance of desire is an evolution
between appendage and need,
an adjunct to the separation
observed where age is not
a decline, but a seeking.

Gliding above the sound of barter
in parrot-filled markets below,
caught in that net of foreign echoes,
I fell as a pelting of stones
in a miracle of war, the yoked ox
with ready wings, a foreigner's chattel.
The brittle guess called choice serves
only the lucky and sometimes, the brave.
Never the damned or ungrateful.
I settled in the sand on Shebbat
not cursing the red ants or bound feet,
more lame than Noah and quite exhausted.
Ready to live the rest of more days
in the results of my voyage,
all that memory provides evaporated,
never going away, never coming back,
humming a sad, realistic tune:

we're all caught
angels gone
up in this chorus,
mysteries stolen,
books hidden,
hopes fading.

For The Universe As It Begins Again

Through the pleasantries unsuccessful,
the two seas lay on either side:
Eternal Bliss and the other Eternal Misery,
the event horizon quite visible between,
I folded my wings in a shuffle of papers
and the constant sleep of the first bride
until the stanza of a single dove
wandered about in the quiet,
to please the dusk and the red-fingered dawn
with the sudden flush of wing
and the sound as it vanished.