you're not listening

I have been an example, an excuse
something is proved through
me

you're not listening if
- you miss the point of their screams
- you don't know what configuration
has made their statements possible

the world is further
and deeper than we thought
and what we know of it unravels
from our hands like fallen banners

the moon disappears
behind the schoolyard trees
boys playing games
that kill them, eventually

beyond the horizon, lightning cracked
its white sheets
the migraine of potential
wrong stormed toward us
frenzied with stars

D writes

I know what teeth
what hands
I know the location
of every hair on my head

I know the smallness of a soul
and what panning a lifetime
finds, instead
of finding it

I know the fragile chemistry
the cost of its maintenance

I know the blackest eyes of night
and the brightest star of silence

I wanted to drive you

a reality like that
silences

I was scared to death
just talking to her
I kept thinking the war
would break out of her

(something like a camp
sguatting on the ground
quantum history)

voice that crossed ocean
in desperation
boat that came in
to drown in this people
like black water

without history, without medicine
without helicopters
one desperate, insane
reluctance looks pretty much like any other
and the asylums of this world rest
on the brink of deep
discoveries for good
lucky

I wanted to break you
out from the compact white headache
of territory
like a bitter almond

I wanted to drive you
between the eyes
of a city waking up the morning
after nothing

and did I see them one night
flying
the irresistable colours of their exile?
(when the earth was a cold, wet cloth
and the sky was made of iron)

I am haunted

I am haunted by the vacancies
her eyes made
the silent "O" in hung
mouth ringing
unspeakable gestures

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)