signs (a poem for gestures)

disembodied hand
tracing circles
on a disembodied hand
so much
for deconstruction

skin of fingers
peeling 14 ways
toward fingertips
existential dilemna

one hand
pumping the heart
sounds like religion

fingers of light
beckoning

clenched fist
(1985)

Voice Annex

I need a voice willing
to stay here, even in scream
to hang like a beacon
come, see
I am here, do not
hurt me

a name in the book of uncertainty
still grows a deciding voice
circumventing everything

I have a way of shutting up
a frustration
the ambiguous feel of these corridors
going blind
with no one talking

I want to say something pointed
about pointlessness
"when space
is a button you lean on
accidentally" the voice
might rise
flicker a little dusty jazz
eager to stun you
(1981)

Those Who Love the Gods, Maria, Drive Themselves Mad

angular dancer in clumsy shoes
at the pivot of arithmetical distances
akimbo
dance for us on King Street
wave the rain over for a cigarette

there is a ritual for everything, she says
thing going into things
thing that can't be undone
the secret
of iron gates and sewer hatches
the pool player who tried to make
unbreakable circles around her
reading Camus to the courtroom
in her own defense
how it takes forever
to move her few possessions
one irate landlord further

I recall her saying
"there used to be a car here
there was a car!" by the curb
in the evenings
she would walk her path
back and forth
"for 11 years I haven't
killed myself"
and
"maybe I should nap
until I'm tired"

woman observing the war
from distance
dredging blackened images
of arms and legs from her hair
woman fear made
a genius
taken hard into reason

in a closet big as an apartment
a worn white blouse
crumpled on the wooden floor
last note of her dance struck
on a plate metal gong
covert tragedy of fingers touching
no one
there, not even forever

the final hysteria is not ours
I think, Maria
but belongs to those for whom
necessity and fact
are great twined tragedies
with us sinking

the fires are lit
we have have always loved
certain stories
in the red and dying light

legal mornings, marble afternoons
starry nights
running vast circles around us
(1987-88)

The Kind of Time

the kind of time it was
get written about
it was the kind of time years
follow from, years at a time
the mind's injured, going no further
dangled at the edge of speech, possibly
signing off, possibly convulsing

it was the kind of strained place
best suited to war photography's
drab demographic conspiracy
a sad rhetoric, grimacing
indistinct
from a thousand others
that never made headlines

by column inch
thre front lines of your boredom made
candor an evernt. simple and utter
as gunfire, the way you spoke
was fatal. your voice broke
across the schoolyard in the morning
like laughter. there was flame in your mouth
like ice, like
the impossibility of being human
lightly, no hope of disgrace
(1988)

Water Story

ghost ship of horrors on an ocean of space
the captain has shaved his head
he is thinking, perhaps for the last time
of land

deep in the hold, a stowaway plots their course
for the open sea

there is a woman in every harbour
in whose eyes twin ships are drifting
helplessly

there is a bed
where none of them will ever sleep
(1987)

Huron

I kept myself back from you like a wooden hand
stuck deep into autumn's wet pocket
going home among fields

roads have been dragged here to witness
the sky's execution
of one more grey miracle

trees are weeping
for the grain and the stone houses

a prisoner had hidden himself
beside an uncleared swamp that begins to sing
of lakes and forests inside him

night flares
rampant with signals
(1987)

Pacific

the sky fell
from language
the words fell out
from place

ocean's moon has withered
I had waves
I had the world and it slipped
from my hands like shattered women

in the belly of night stark
white masses sing
abandon, dream of escape

pacific's ungoverned desire
to drive us
underground echoes
untold wreckage of existence
(1987)

Hangman

I saw the wood
black rot, square yards of rubbish

steeples race to
the tempest, iron fingers
never chased, forever tempted

I saw the jinxed heart dangling
from its watches

by compulsive thread of sense
we are led
to games of hangman

word guessed
incorrectly was killing us
unsaid

a body now loosed in its cistern
(1987)

Ocean

his mouthful of body pleas
from the sea's trenched throat

dupe of respiration, tricked into breathing
the liquid delusion, his last

through sleep-shot clouds
his iron-necked heart craned
an industrial drain
hauled from the brown basin

came down with something bad
in tow
a disgusted hole
bitten into his foresighted dread

a different ledger drumming all night
statistics into his relentless head

(for Hart Crane, 1987)

allies of a sort

You don't believe it, and I don't believe you. That makes us allies of a sort.

You go through motions. They become you. Walls, furniture, windows, music, people you live with go right through you. It has happended, you say, I have become their small ghost. They go through you and through you. (It is not graceful.)

In a co-ed jail, we comfort each other with the knowledge of the dolefulness of man in all endeavours but one.

Once, talking to you, I felt my body covered with ants, but nice ones. Or was it just the memory of you leaving that time, when the oranges leaves hung close about the white benches in the park, in sweater-time, in the afternoon.

Good-night my tired loves, you say. I'm off. And the plastic wraps, ashes, dirty socks on the floor bed down too. Good night to sleep right through, if you do.

The great fear is what end looms when there is nothing left to say.

I waited also in the quiet excavations while seaward your stone face closed for good. I imagined your imaginary therapist, a kind of wide blue momentum. "Maybe you'll be my new one," you said once, but I knew better.

A good-bye like the stale scent of empty cupboards. Your hands were sweating, but not into mine. Outside, someone was kicking leaves, a kid running, his mother behind. A brown station wagon rolling by. You were like birds already.

A black sack in a dream threw something white into your eyes. The headboard cracked. Had the room always been this canted?

Later, red sunset lava flowing over stone walls and cement walks, grass softening darkly, wind's last moist mouthings, a dated romance heavy in the cells, and fingers on fire from touching.

Old music and coffee, a kind of bookstore perfume. A dress folded over her sleeping figure, like a larkspur collage, warming perceptibly.

To seek understanding - same as - terrified of misunderstanding. The archetypal flood - madness, no control. (I thought this when I visited you, more out of morbid curiosity than compassion, while you were undergoing a course of ECT.)

No posse comitatus will ever find us. They are cold and isolated and could never spot the truly fugitive heart. They think the fugitive heart is a political coup.

This nutty spirit of mortality, or rather morality, humiliates them in their hibernation, mocking them with true stories of themselves. Better to go into the blizzard and find a way just by going.

Half frozen canvas flaps at our approach - smudge of black ink on white paper.