Letter to Ray from Livermore

Hey Ray.  There are likely only two Surrealistsleft

who still read Hugo with any depth.  Got a guess?

We know Breton and Desnos are dead,

though not in our poems.  I was thinking today

how we love the West.  The realWest where railroads speak.

Everything now is air.  Rush here, fast there.

Our molecules jiggle enoughas it is

when we microwave our food.  That baked potato

I ate last night stillstriving inside me to survive.

Of course you’ll visit inJuly and sleep

with your head to the north, aligning yourself

with the pines. You remember growing up

on the border with scorpions, the desert

and its sting. I recall Indiana fire ants

in the pump-house ivy.  My boyhood

bites.  Johnsays they’re in my wrist.

And I believe him, standingsome nights as I do

like the guy in Un Chien Andalou, staring

at my hand. I know.  The wrist is not myhand,

but like those railroad tracks, our veins keep wendingWest.

Each yearfor me from Fort Wayne to Livermore.

I don’t know, sometimes, howwe’ve survived this long

with a moth wing for a mouth.  Something is beating me

back, and I’m sure it’s me.  Part fly, part sky. You named it

Luna, andstarted a magazine.  You got thenight

just right. I’ve gone inside, my eye open to the spiritual

fly.  Buzzhere.  Land there.  Let the breath

and with it the jittery monkey-mind release.

It’s surprising we still havewives, the way our parents left

one another with pain.  We’re not unique. Someone

is always throwing someone out, even with a word

or curve of earth. Someone is always throwing

a bone to the dog.  In your case, cats.  Remember

when Punk and Whitey loved to eat cantaloupe,

as far back as Arvada?  God, we’ve known each other

a long time, even before them, in Denver,

knowing what makes our secret strain

exact.  When Desnos sleep-talked, he threw a thread

of speak that wound from the cosmic now into the lives

of human dread. That’s why they were scared

and barred him from the group.  So there are strains

of purpose and strains of pain.  Which brings me

to how you and I do.  Which brings me back

to those two rails running West

and all the courage of the plains.  Of course, Hugo

could be a sap. And he knew it.  But hestands naked,

letting the wind. Like blood into a cup,

it pours out his mouth.  And the trees

speak.  Notonly booze, dark bars, and shame,

but the hope of how to survive in Red Lodge,

Missoula, or Butte.  Desnos knewthis

too, stumbling back from the camp, typhus

so tight in his spine, the Second World War

pouring out through his teeth.  As did Breton, by the time

he got to his third wife.  I love them most

for their blurring and slurring of word.  The how and why

my life.  Aswe love Hugo too, perhaps most

for his shame in how the West was won

and keeps losing itself in the lost.  Because living here

is pine-dead hard. The how and why we cry.

 MeetingHer at the Plains Hotel, Est. 1911

Cheyenne, Wyoming

It had rained hard for overan hour,

as if from some cave inside.

Caught in the Western Wearstore, you tried

to convince yourself a sale was a sale,

as the petite twenty-something women

flirted on about the merits of fabric

that could stand fierce against fence.

Twenty-nine ninety-five wasstill twenty-nine ninety-five

you could shuttle toward books, you thought.

You window-watched the flood,

the street disappearing in a den of dark water.

Where’s the best coffee in town?

you and your wife had asked, when it calmed a bit.

The Plains Hotel was justaround the corner.

The distance between here andthere

is always across some swirling pond

or other, offering to drag you down.

Something is always floodingyour life,

clogging the drain. Built in 1911, across the street

from the Union Pacific, the hotel

had somehow brought Denver closer

to buffalo grass and pain.  You could still hear cattle

shuffle inside the tile floor and elegant wood,

the mahogany moan, smell the thin

cigar-thread of cattle barons

staling down oil men from 100 years back.

She looked up from herhostess stand

at the hotel’s Frontier Restaurant

like caught-in-the-wind.  You or her or both.

Certainlynot twenty and perky.

Certainlynot young.  But deep

coffee-brown eyes from living hard.

Could it be the rain floodingback

through you her strand of loose hair?  The bad

tattoo saddling her shoulder?  The gorgeous sore

of her voice? The round child-or-two

tummy tucked in her jeans?  The way

her arm hair lay there, beautifully exposed

as a new-born calf among the smell

of broccoli and soup and rib eye

medium rare? How could you eroticize

this chance glance over the eating of meat?

One body biting into another,so brief,

through all the possible strangers in time?

Surely her name must be Lynnanne or Lynette

or some form of Lynnethat rhymes with sin.

Your sin, ofcourse, of perpetual

hope.  This thigh or that. Your wife’s

gorgeous ass as she unzips

her purse to cover the coffee to go.

How could those dark circles

staring back at you from the greeting stand

possibly compete with thirty-four years

together and the roundness of now?

She can’t be more thanthirty, you think.

Could be your daughter, infact, though life for her

was surely hard. And you get hard, with the thought of it,

reaching out, a moment, to her pain,

or all the years of loss you imagine

you could belly-kiss away.

It must be the rain, you tellyourself,

that today is reaching the ground.

The street, the flood, thepouring back

from the animal den inside.  All the unwept fears

you’ve kept hidden, building up silt

against beaver lodge, snow-weight

bending good horse fence.  Maybe the fabric in the store

could  havehelped, though the perky slim-hipped women

there left you bland as a mis-sizedshirt on the rack,

the sleeve, the youthful fashion, somehow incomplete.

If only it hadn’t rained youcould have remained

faithful at the stand, even in thought, the denim

of your pants tightening still against all good intent,

reaching out into the lovely loss of touch.

But Lynnanneor Lynnette or any part

of her dark-circled self continues

to swirl out to you her pain—the give and dust

of serving never-enough-dollars

at the hostess stand of the fancy hotel,

of two children, perhaps, at home,

and a likely divorce, and an unclothed

ring finger calling to you your own great unclothing

in body, mind, and evenpoem, in which you

stand naked as any man.

You stare into the darkbeautiful curves

of honorable work and the certainty

of a great exchange you know will never be

more than you can imagine, more

than the longing of four coffee-drowned eyes

this sudden wet July

pouring a pain-soaked day through one another.

I Am the Unmistakable Verb Tense

This is how I conjugate mygrief.

If I loved you, a great voiceof trees would crack.

In my chest, only this : two Chinese poets’ competing chi lu verse.

Hangingblinds.  A vexedcup.  Eventhe melancholy of private bamboo.

The collective unconscious ofmy voice could never eroticize one of Hans

Bellmer’s dolls.

They do more than celebrate aperformed acrobatics.

Abracadabra.  What sexy Surrealist puts on anostrich-feathered coat and even

after allthese years still has a remarkable ass?

I am her unmistakable verb tense, always unsettling the nouns encamped in

my chest.

And now, all I can recall areTao Kan’s willows and the handsome stance of a

bulrushreed.

I’ve thrown the yarrow andkeep emerging in Vallejo-time, stalk after stalk.

If I loved her fur-lined cup,if I loved a great voice of trees, my own dark

watermight llama-root and shift.

Thisis my how, this is my when, where, why. And how come.                                         

Tongues : 18

 I shouldlove the apple

with which I bite

that part of me

I thought hidden.

In the salt shaker,

there are remnants of dying

white crows.  From Australia,

the ground of aboriginaldrumming

bays back all the way, here,

to that part of the moon

hidden in eclipse.  I should

love your any and your all,

your completely with and your

most moist.  Mouth

upon mouth, we invert

The Book ofTongues.  We enter

one another, layer within

layer, from inside

out, as bits of star-scrape

flake out upon the plates

beneath us.  We should eat

one another, eat one another’s

qualms, with the calm intensity

of those dead who, startlinglyalive,

have displaced the peculiar

rib by which they blame.

Anything different in touch shames

no one and nothing.  And I should

love, over and over, that scar

given me in your kiss, in theaboriginal

musk, in the apple’s secretcollusion

with the way the worm

of our drumming

breath works heat from the sun

to mimic spoilings

of war.  We should feast one another

dry as any dying crow, or

the porous salt of forgiving

our bodies for giving

in, as any river bend

about to embrace the sunken

wood of a late burning

summer.  Elm-bone, antler-like,

floats downstream, bleached

barely visible as pliant tongues

or solidified tones we might eat,

might sound through one another

with our entire mouths and hands,

might touch, even, with theuncertainty

of a first forgivableintimacy.

_____________________________________

 your any and your all