The Artist in his Studio

Casts his genetic inheritance on
a girl like a sister to him,
the other actually his sister.
What he got was a lot of canvas-
the length of a room high
or higher if space permitted-
and what he covered
I could tuck under my arm
with the book of sign language
I studied in front of the painting,
inarticulate, and Whistler even quieter,
suggesting the space
between the subjects is now
and then the difference between
favorite and cousin, a retarded
hand movement, or how my sister
learned to cook burning a hand
shaped like e on the stove, not facing me.

Silver Lining

The sex got better
once we fell.
Eve knew best
how tenderness
went dry before
she bit the apple
which was wetter.

Alkaline earth

The fossil
is a bluff.
As far as
alkaline earth
is concerned,
we don’t toughen.

Slough it off,
or not. Scars
stand out as tough
where we are soft.

Two poems for Trae

China Township, Michigan

Trunk full of petals and afterbirth,
antlers stuck in the side door,
you drove into town, worth
your weight in natural resources.
Here fences aren’t for horses
and freight trains trundle by the stores –
miles nearer than the horizon
they ride at home.
You were useful there, in Michigan,
picked up skills that rose, like foam
on beer, from the land where you’d meet
God. Here, a tree can be as distant
from another as far as forty feet,
no matter the roots, however persistent.


Headaches

In all that countryside,
possibly, hid some nuclear waste
that could warp neurons.
You played there, hunted,
not deer, but small animals
with trails of dotted blood
where you picked off the weak one.
Was it the mother pheasant’s curse
that split thoughts into halves
of walnuts? or the orphaned
rodent's, who’d chewed
its leg from a trap to return
to its niche and found his offspring
sprung like convicts and his mate
hung on your mantle?

Old Testament

The Israelites thought
they thought
with their hearts,

their innards, their guts,
like teenagers stuck
at the crux
of which one to kiss,

who rumble down
back roads
to sense in the pits
under their navels

the speed that
will get them
to girls.





"The ancient opinion was that the "heart" was the most important organ in the body -- the "heart" is often referred to by the ancients as the primary organ of the soul that harbored intelligence and feeling. The Bible does not transcend ancient "appearance-based" pre-scientific views in this respect, but agrees with them. The Bible even mentions the "bowels" and "kidneys" leading a man, and being "tested" by God. The Bible even puts much stock in the "blood" and "breath" as well. But no mention of the "brain." Ed Babinski

What it's not

Three poems after Spatial Concept by Lucio Fontana

I

You could stick your hand straight through it
if you were allowed, the blue,

the black behind that’s not no color or a color,
having to do with light:

rips in the hem of a pair of jeans
of a bored man with an army knife,

six skinny wings of the blue birds
he hit with his slingshot.


II

What it’s got is something scratchy,
canvas in the sense that means rough
like irritated skin painted over blue
stitched up and worth the operation
billowing up in cold blood bulging the surface.

Where it hurts is at its point of meeting
between spaces that aren’t sky or water
that are never ever sky or water.



III

The day I saw a mangled body on TV
and rushed back to you to smooth out your face,
bothered that the scratch on your shoulder
would tear you open to a bunch of shreds,
you put down your book, motions safe
as a screen door, a bowl of rice.
That blue canvas? you ask
This isn’t it.

Hip-Hop Talent Show

What we suddenly all saw –
the Humberts, the mothers, her mother,
the guilty men, the three of us,
the panicked stage manager –
was the bare breast popped out
of the shirt like a joey out of its pouch

which only one boy had seen,
a fifteen-year-old named Derek –
herself fifteen since March –
who’d undressed her gently in his bedroom
while his cousins watched football
on a set rigged up in the kitchen.

He’d played this song
move your body like a like a
that guided his fingers around buttons,
and made unfamiliar movements
conform to the badass-ness of the moment
or song, whichever one.

So she’d picked it
for the last act of the talent show,
moving her body in ways
she’d learned through trial and error
moves her hips like a like a
then taught to her skinny friend,

a virgin, too, barely, too,
in some sort of mesh and a tank top
both of them committed to finishing now
seeing as they’re up there now in front
both of them mouthing lyrics
they just about understand.

Hendrix

parks outside
the Samarkand
in a stolen car,
his unsupported
neck and head bent
like a broken guitar
strung like sinews
lolling. Dead
strains evict
the psychedelic
notes squatting
in his brain.

Fourth floor,
his undergrad
rolls with the earth
and space of a place
where they picked
young when God asked.
Real bad, I need
Jimi real bad.

What the wind
doesn’t cry
is any name
she recognizes.
Jimi drives by
in a Cadillac
with no license plates.

Joplin

She hit the good minutes
early and all at once. She’d quit
but lunch, milk and apple,
hadn’t fixed the craving
edging at her lungs.
Even a cigarette at this point
or the calculations of a hand
that held the hem above her
knees –the man who dealt
methamphetamines in Memphis,
where the crowd prayed she’d
make it, at least through Summertime.
They didn’t guess her sexy grit
was got by getting too much
before the inner gem could adjust,
facets gleaming back in her throat,
and had rusted over by the time
she went to sing that slinky
parting shot of a note.




This and the next few posts are all poems I wrote for an ekphrasis class with Professor Wright, who has an awesome blog about ekphrasis.

Wives

We knock to give
the husbands time
to duck. But they
will fuck around
tomorrow and the
day after.

A man bends
backwards when he
wants. A man is low
enough to limbo.
A simple random
sample charts the
undertow: We find
we find disaster
sites familiar.

Trojan War

What takes a toll
will plank the walk home,
will fill the bowl of cherry pits.
We miss our homes
and are wary of Kalypso.

Even gods are
starry-eyed for avenues
they know. They go
from deity to bull
if conversion gets them home,
because Olympus is
a congress and as foggy.

Telemachus is back at home,
fussing with the sitter
less and less, riled
over other things
than us, groggy with
the littler waits and labors.
Now the neighbors muss
his hair. Yes, we miss our home,
have gone through hell,
in fact, to get there.

Third Decade

for e

My friend came from the doctor
looking like a crazy person,
like a heeled tease at her first party.

Doctor says she’ll be in a chair by thirty
and should lay off the cigarettes
the drinking the rough sex all the honey
parts of the hive, if she wants to retire.

The third decade –
the ten good years when American girls
showed their legs for the first time
to boys with the stolen booze to use them –
the third decade, in her century shrunk by a third
and growing dark with the jackets of greasers,
the third decade the kicker:
to save health penny by penny,
a slow squeeze of breath from a sponge,
or to arch the pelvis higher?