Early Morning Meditation

Let no gesture be mistaken
for who I was, not the mind
with its drafty windows & sagging
joints, no soldered pipes
or streetlights through the grungy
stained-glass in the corner,
wood railings or the carpet
gone threadbare. All our ideals
like tartar around the self,
enamel & porcelain
Ukrainian nesting dolls
where each gets smaller & smaller
until the last reveals nothing,
half shells rolling empty
across the table. Night after night,
I descend the stairs, the house
half formed in the darkness, stumble
naked to the bathroom, stop inevitably
at the mirror and stare
at my bald head glistening
with summer’s sweat. Crickets
chirp their redundant chorus
in the still air. Give me the dead body,
give me the smoking gun,
the beautiful lover drinking gin
at the kitchen table. So big boy,
What’s it all mean? But nothing
leads so clearly to conclusion:
at dawn, I call the cat
to breakfast, only to find the flurry
of soft feathers on the sidewalk,
a few bones perhaps, or once,
the single solid bite of a still warm
heart, a few wasps circling as if
maybe they knew what to do with it.

After a Hippie Wedding on the East Texas Plains

Sunset diffuses as a brush lifts from the canvas,
each strand laid on top of the day’s
blue until the day vanishes.
Candles still burn beneath an oak on the plains.
A makeshift altar, a few mobile homes, windows streaked
with autumn dust and slowly we’re gone,
scattering, the rituals, bubbles & tambourines,
all swallowed like candlelight by the dark, prayers & songs
now silent. And what remains? What is it a flame
leaves behind? Twilight through the car’s dirty windows:
on this stretch of vast earth without name,
on these open, brown palms, a ring of candles goes
on burning: first, they melt into the dusk,
then slowly take over, flickering in the night, with or without us.

Memory as Method

The fragments are constellations.
Some assembly will be required.
Imagine you without yourself in it:
the rush of air from a balloon,
the first snow on the fields of November:
are you feeling like yourself?
Turn, says Stanislavski,
to the body. Is this pain
or the mere spark of electricity
flooding through neurons? tears
or rivers flooding from some deep river
we can never find? You are a verb
and the verb is forgetting.
The contents
of your house, the street
it’s on. A child, lost
and trying to explain
to the officer where
he lives when the mind
has absorbed everything
else, the clutter
of a life without
intention. Look for me
somewhere else. The smoke,
the fire, the mist. I am always
leaving, remembering
what I’ve left behind: a rake,
a house, a love. The morning glories
of memory, tangled in the shadows.
There is so little to us:
a few nouns, or a sentence
we started long ago.
Subject. Verb.
The sentence is your own.

The Perfect Tense

I leave. . .
No, you have already left. The continent, your home
has already drifted away. Today, after class,

you will leave. The simple and the perfect.
I arrive.
No, you have arrived. I have; I am; I will…

Snow whirls & spins outside the window, traffic
stuck for miles on the ice.
Where do you come here from?

Cambodia?
No, where do you live? How do you drive here?
Day after day,

we talk, struggle, wait
for the words to spill out
and say what she means.

But these are my words, my language,
as if it doesn’t count in her own,
as if the dark eyes that stare past me

don’t say enough.
Advice, advise. Oh yes,
one means what you give;

one means what you take.
The subtle shift of meaning
like tense, the perfect verbs to bear

witness to what happened, what has
happened. I am leaving;
I have left.

Very good.
Outside the snow swirls like smoke.
I am disappearing; I have disappeared.

The Buddhist Contemplates The Dead Man
                                                 for Marvin Bell

The dead man rises before dawn.
He makes his coffee strong and drinks it
in the dark. The dead man imagines himself
invisible but no one believes him, his presence
always among us like the cousin whose name
we forget, the car we left in the junkyard to rust,
a photo lying faded in the dust
behind the dresser. The dead man wants to believe
no one knows his name, but he wants us to acknowledge
his superior taste, exotic drink & sublime jazz
on scratchy vinyl, skipping across the grooves.
It’s good, I suppose, to be haunted, to allow the dead man
freedom to walk where he will,
the rattling and creaking of his presence among us
like a voice of the past splashed
across an empty page where you
& the dead man continue
like motes in the morning’s beam, traveling
light, always light.