In downtown Madison the students
buy ice cream at the union –
watch them drip blue moon
on their shoes from an orange chair,
among all the colored chairs –
yellow and blue from Mexico,
green like glass –
set against the sunlit lake
where sailboats flap their blanched wings
and the water smells like deep
sunken things that do not breathe, that move
like awakening cranes –
like the sandhill cranes you see
from highway 51, leaping up, red-eyed,
as you drive to the farm
where your mother grew up,
taking every chance she could to join her brothers
in the waving fields, in the looming barns.
Your grandfather now in the hospital
still dreams of birthing calves in the cold –
his knuckles bled, his nose ran.
And you find yourself,
anywhere,
searching for it –
for boats and the hot smell of hay,
for lake flies collecting against
a window screen,
for brats grilling in a backyard,
and dogs that bark
in the open nights of summer.
It is a wooden ship, a union
of parts, equaled and varied
in beginnings.
I think of my grandmother,
sowing my mother, gentle in the tall grass
somewhere on Long Island.
And of Ida, her mother – new root planted
in the concrete of America –
Coke in hand, flapper at eighteen
with a hard syllabic gait.
Of her husband who became
her earth through letters; sheaths
of bark, Russian epithets, a family
clustered as brambles around
the hearth. And my father, the German,
speaking his black forest tongue,
hard crosses in the Pennsylvania dirt.
And my grandfather, always behind screens
of Polish newspapers, both eyes closed.
A down-turned face
spreading ash on dog-eared telegrams
in the front room. The roots of him
go deep.
They lie apart, separate
as dead leaves. They were burned –
a great bonfire scattered their ashes
as seeds
across a continent,
reaching out to touch both seas.
I was planted some other place,
swift
and safe
as a twig in a birds mouth.
Duck down her half-clothed alleys,
narrow boulevards laced with bricks
branded in tattoos of 1892.
She’ll toss you around the mouth
of her Victorian districts, your body
clanking against her teeth like oil lanterns
on the poles that hang through her nights of tar,
twilights of rope and Spanish moss.
She only knows the shadows that spill
underneath her chin, where paper mill pulp,
that toxic perfume, casts through every window
whether closed or open.
Distasteful, sometimes, but still I crave the moon,
breasts that pour into corsets
like the fountains in her atrium gardens.
Attempt a glance under bustles and cage
crinoline for a thigh, the off-white
hue of altar boy carried candles.
And below, long legs like histories
of bodies buried with the strange
spice of Yellow Fever always lingering
in an air of brine and sickness.
Her feet track through floors of grave robbing
and voodoo, but both are mine now.
After being taken into these arms of dirt
you learn exact change in the coinage of souls
and why the Devil’s shop is always open
in the South.
I am a travelers check, but
there are no exchanges, no refunds,
no cash back.
Stamps, inked up and down my spine.
Pay to the order of:
cast bronze, tick-tock-tick,
greener hands, accountant grins,
to calloused-dish-soap grandma skin.
Pay to the order of:
polite slobs, delicate snobs,
to caravans, that flawless blight,
to chestnut trees, to patina copper pipes.
Pay to the order of: the forum, for dogs,
for a black worn leather chaise,
for potent potions, for evolution,
for gapped toothed lawyers and panting
doctors. Pay for insurance, for homage,
and for tax.
You see her
silent;
radiant.
Try to understand –
her steely beauty.
Next to an open window,
shoulders to hips framed in,
covered by
supply closet darkness.
Meeting shifting-saintly oven light
cast, passing through sheer lined linen curtains -
imprinting gradating arcs and rippulating vaults: gyring shadows,
on her stiff and supple breast. two superb. flawless. bulls-eyes
drawing you in, but mystifying.
A perfect collarbone,
a clavicle masterpiece, allures;
calls out to Your tongue.
She takes You in,
a gentle rapping on Your shoulder.
And standing close, close
to her elbow, reaching back,
You see the Poughkeepsie railway platform through her window.
You never see Her face.
Yet You know it’s beautiful,
just as You know the bleating cold wind
at Your cheek on the platform, standing,
looking back at her.
& in time,
perhaps
You forget that She doesn’t have a face.
The train whistle blows,
Waterloo calls, & Napoleon dreams the wreckage of ABBA,
but You only hear the breeze from Elba.
& You too left France long ago & died at the rise of Swedish pop.
Whistle blows once more, forest moves in with train
& Rip Van Winkle raps on your neck.
You succumb to the catacombs of Montparnasse.
& pretty soon, You too are encased in glass.
in a small southern town. Abused by light.
Screaming in grace.
but You too, don’t have any head to scream with.
