They Kill You in Ugly Ways

They kill you in such ugly ways

when they take and twist you in the paper or

on television.

Some would rush you out of womb and into life,

rush you through and through and through it.

And what remains?

 

“Rushed to hospital,” where was “pronounced dead.”

 

They kill you in ugly ways with

ugly photos and the ugly details (and these they

pick like nits with the fine-tooth as glossed simians would)

and at the end of the long day,

you die when they tell you and are

buried

on a shrivelled third of the third page

of the papers. At the end of the long day,

 

they kill you in ugly ways.

Far Along, He’s Gone

 

 And the long-dead boy sings

sweet, sad songs

against the choir.

 

I.

 

In the shadow of a café,

he whistled tunelessly like an overblown flute,

catching along the grain of the air;

whistled tunelessly the first few bars of

‘Bring it on Home to Me’

greybeardedly through creased lips.

 

A twist wrenched him stasis-free from

his shadowed spot

and poured him out into the bluedusked street where,

louder then,

he testified in waxing breaths: the sharp wind of winter shifting

snow down sidestreets boldly.

 

And it soothed his soul.

 

II.

 

Tragedy is the quadriplege

of emotive thought: static and un-

moving; you are brought

to it.

 

Tragedy, which pales

blood from the face, draws colour

from the hairs of the face, and calls

quiet unto brazenness,

brings beauty

unto music.

(Ode to) Alp Arslan,

Who ruined the throne of Rome with a pardon

and, in the gooseflesh of their East,

dug his spurs;

 

Who signed his life and name to the letter for a shot–

one shot–

of pride, and pegged it upon the glanced path of

that one thirsty arrow.

There buckling with it in the clear Turkic wind,

his bet was lost unto the steppe

and in paining throes by the Oxus’ bank he cried,

“I’ve been killed

by pride!”

 

A pierced lion who in blood lay drowned;

a cub asleep in the black soil now.

A Naked Song

I cannot sing a naked song!

 

These limbs thinly bred of bone; this odd skin soft and

weak as yeast blanched white in the ovens of old homes!

These eyes tiring red in pale roomlight; this taught-drawn

sluice mouth pinned soundless-shut like the night!

 

Famined I will not sing a naked song, being of no such shape

and with no rhythm heartbold striding through my step

or lily-jaw infantile, stunted.

 

But the Kashmir poet proper sang it

when was said “let your worship song be silence,” as

she moved surely with the engine of her praying song.

 

And so,

It is bare and planted there, in mind, such that

 

when I pray

my mouth is shut.

They come down high from the

mountains with the sprung thawstream,

these light days whose air

I thinly breathe.

7th of June

Fumbling darkways home in the damp through

junebugs baiting lights out from their

fixtures that night,

the clear black street was quiet but for

feet and

little breaths and

the creaking of toads through the treeline

faintly.

 

When the day hangs down around

a struck noon, the

sense of woken motion

is unshakeable.

But in the black I shift quick-through, there are

no things but the toads, and they are

louder in the quiet than the whole encompassed mass

of bedward life.

 

I slip into a run of redcheeked strides and pass through

cleanly, reluctantly,

to the noise, the humming noise,

of this greyed house on the granite cuff,

the cusp,

of the newest summer.

Spit and Lightning

I.

 

Remember then

the day of spit and lightning spun like

lace between the stars or clouds or ever else that

sat at night straight-up there.

 

How we poured liquidly like notes graced straight off of

necks, warmwinded into autumns:

arpeggiated grace, all grace,

treble and bass brought

brashly to the bottom of our Wounded Year.

 

And how we fell downward downward

patpatpat on the cobblestones and,

having not once mistoned or touched together in the air,

could gleefully break like the silences of stormless

winters upon rough kissing of those stones.

 

And how we, never out of the eyes of

moons for long,

were then called to dance as daisies in the wind:

beautifully,

in a helpless sort of way.

 

II.

 

And now, the naming of sounds.

 

The plucked or strummed notes,

drowned or hammered-dumb ones dangling like

dew-fume moisture in the everdark. Call it

rain dissolved by spark. Name it

spit.

 

And the one off loft of kettle drums off-kilt and

beatless in bearded night times; shock and cough of

godlight ragged-craning like a damaged throat. Call it

sound dissolved in heat. Name it

lightning

 

or anything.

Name it needlessly or freely as you

see these things.

Our naming of sounds: the

visceral dissolved

in the cerebral.

Whole Cities

Like the first sighting of whole cities from atop

grey mountains,

I will know the shape and compass of my route

(today taken)

when I am far and nowhere

near it.

 

In the examination of towns or paths

in their immediacy, the

details

are blinding.

 

(Lights through a myopic lens:

A grey city

lit

with ghastly beauty.)

Water

Seeing from the banks

or buttressed highway the churn

and throb

of this river, it is hard not to think that

should I fall or jump into

its motion it would never know that

I would die

 

because beneath the rushing glass

it is quiet.

 

In this

there is some unsettling thing

that urges me to speak and be

spoken to. I turn

away.

Three O’Clock in the Black Morning

Three o’clock in the black morning

and all I do

is mill

the cool light for poetry

The grey moon approaches me the

gravity beckoning

and all I do

is trace

this thing I see

 

It scarcely seems

enough