***
Relative Certainty
I am almost sure that in a past life I was an animal
I know it
By my snout
By the fur that wraps around me
By my love
My Wolf my Wolf
I love you
All my hormones
The naked body
And the corpse
The days, sweet and long
And suddenly, nothingness
The absolute space
With which to strike a deal
I am almost sure
That what mattered was the fur
Before being trapped in this body
I know just before the planets swallowed me
I looked at people and tried to speak
And it was my vocabulary, my tone
That did me in
***
The Animal
The man of the pigeons ate my heart
I saw him sitting, feeding the pigeons
But he didn’t see me
Three pigeons on each leg and one on the shoulder
My father sleeps, a head peeks through the window
I can’t hear the sound of thunder in this wind tunnel
I can’t count
The things I saw while I let fly
A love that was undervalued
My heart belongs to a lion
I love its fur and I desire its heart
Oh animal, your heart is wiser than your years
I cut your claws and you whisper to tell me
That I must never leave this place
So I heed you
Although I’d like to know
If you’ll really bet on my heart
If you’ll give me something worth saving
Something like the gospel of lions, or worse, of gazelles
That speak elegantly from the wind
I touch the gazelle’s word and it is pink like the day
I lay it on the ocean, this pink bird that speaks to me
I let it fly over the palm trees, Oh let it fly
Once I lost my pink discourse but now I know
That it will always be part of me if I pause to listen
***
My Breasts Are Real
They stole my tires
They demolished my house
They killed my father
They amputated my fingers
And I thought, “I really liked those fingers.”
They punctured my eyelids. They removed my brain.
They crept across my sweaty back with their sweaty fingers.
They played music for me but it wasn’t music.
They loved me and then they didn’t.
At a vague moment these enormous breasts grew on me.
It felt as if everything they took away
Was given back to me
In the form of breasts.
Everything they took from me
Was returned to me
Just as Lydia Davis says,
When you cross a certain line
All that is real but unnecessary
Disappears forever and is replaced by the unreal.
The difference is: these breasts are real.
***
Death and Sylvia Plath
To my City College student
She adores Sylvia Plath’s poems
She’s writing a monograph about
Lady Lazarus
I quite like this student
Who spends part of her time
Sitting opposite me, telling me
How in the poem Plath moves from object
To cheerleader
And finally to demon
Yes, you’re right, I tell her
We’re satisfied
Then I wonder
Why do young women like Sylvia Plath?
Why not everyone?
The student tells me that when she was young
She liked Plath
Me too
I didn’t ride horses
Sylvia Plath rode horses
I don’t have a thesis
I don’t have a structure
I’m a demon
There are blue veins in the sky
It’s spring
I’m not you
Nor do I want to be
It is 21:02 on 21/02/2010
I am not alive
No, I’m not breathing anymore
I do not live in this world
I already live in the other
***
Dog
To Lucy
When my father was nothing more than a corpse
The man came and placed him in a mortuary bag
There was another elderly man
With whom I shared the room
The man recognized the black bag and got frightened
I held him while they carried my father away
Now I sit on the sidewalk with my dog
I tell her that nothing lasts forever
So we must sit here and enjoy the fresh air
Which smells like other mammals
She sniffs and looks at me
I wrap my arm around her and begin to cry
A neighbor appears with her son
Who hides around the corner
She’s afraid of dogs
I bring my dog inside
We climb the stairs by leaping
We are just two things in the air
***
Zombies
Some people are zombies
Some people live with zombies
I live with a zombie
Zombies have flat affections
They are so frustrating
I turn into a demon
When I meet
A blue-eyed nightmare
I tilt my smile toward theirs
What level of water does the eye without an eye make
Oh, yes, we are thrown away like trash
When we die
Oh yes, there is no elevation
And I fling myself in front of a train car
And again in front of the vehicle
Then in front of a plane
A boat, an endless thing
The sun burns a corpse that is black and blue
And I keep living without my own being
And I become lyric when I see that zombie
And I grow fierce when I meet that zombie because
That zombie looks a lot like me
But also like the ugly parts of me
Because it has no style
It has no operatic green hat
And because it carries brown lumps of dirt in its pockets
When in my own pockets I carry the flowers
That I took from the zombie’s pockets
To give to you
***
What Poets Should Do
Poets should start saying anything at all
All the time
I’m tired of scholars or businessmen telling poets
What we should do
A poet is a scientist
Who works for poetry
Or for science
Because both relate to Buddhism
Yet both things merge
A purple fog or the dawn
That sinks
Always a shifting mood,
But it’s true, I love you wood-and-word kids
Let us say whatever comes to us
We don’t have to defend anything
Declaring is a right given to us by God
No, let me begin again
Speaking is our universal law
Without notaries measuring whether the arguments of our
Verses are thinner or thicker
Without being ordered to make a treaty about language, no
No, we continue to live and live and live
That is beautiful, and poetry is beautiful too
Poems and shells
Those little nothingnesses I collect
All day long
They are signs of a possible consolation
That eases the jagged edges
Of this worried traveler
That is what poets should do
And that is what poets actually do
Damn light
Always hitting me in the face
I only want one poem to talk about
So I go on and on
Until night
And the town people tell you
That perhaps they saw
A monster
But no, no, I was only the dawn