Elegies
for Slaughter
I
If you were to bitch,
who among the latent antepasados
would listen
& if one were to startle
by visitation, in flesh,
would the mesh that holds you
to this surface give,
would you live for act II
or smash the mirror?
Beauty is the first gasp
we try to dash from
with everything a tremble
to recover the flow cottonwood seeds model
in the late May of afternoon Slaughter.
Every terrible angel blinds us
with its beauty, each wild pink Stuckside rose
holds the promise of one last thorn
Thor knows is pain one day
protection the next.
The morning trucks growl
mimic your own desperate hunger
your blood song gone awry
in the lie of the family nuclear
and whom besides the cat
is there in your hour of need
always in search of the edge?
The memory of Stuckside bluffs
(where
is always within the range of a Tuesday
daydream like the last
lost ancestor, inside us like that song we ignore
that we bolt from to muck it all up
with the wrong kind of grease.
Lilac blossoms give way to scotch broom
to wild pink roses, dogwood, cottonwood
& you invent new sneezes,
take a new lover to teach you
how to comb your hair.
If you don’t see that flying down,
seeds dreaming of giants
does the event happen?
No. Springtime’s an event
sets the table for your senses alone.
The neon sunset colored
arson orange and purple haze
waits all day
for your gaze before it ripens
while Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Riviera Paradise
elicits 3AM jazz radio memories.
The eagle feather falls
onto your beadless summer hat
only when you halt
your desperate lunges.
Ancient constellations wait
for your cue
to slip into formation
send off a comet you can see
when the tv’s off and your head rests
in your lover’s lap.
The green wheel inside your chest
is where the universe
rests its brand of spin
even as a Chinook wind
tries to tear the skin off your face
and the race of machines grinds down
to a certain future of rust
and blackberries
and we marry a harmony angled
by Monk and Klook
unaware the urge to control
and the jewel in Indra’s net
are yet a semitone apart.
II
Allen’s voice in my head
down by the river
one branch made of skin
one bird drops too easy
from the cloud-tops
of this particular Big S
Slaughter.
& you like an ancestor
of Levertov want to learn
the birdsong Yardbird
couldn’t scratch out of a pawned alto.
And yet the utter loneliness
a mountain of lost sperm
slippt through your greasy fingers
an itch no edge could stop.
The brown hills are muscles
blossoming out of Tahoma’s wild
imagination
and we
watch every last glacier take
And they thought they patented Slaughter.
You reached for joy
settled for drama
and skin and velocity
dark pink stabs at intimacy
gropes at your lost innocence
and only dead poets and thunderbeings
crack the tinittus
that burns new neural grooves
when you ordered the poetic equivalent
of Epistrophy
an ignored neon sunset
closer to your grave.
One, a lover with little ones
behind curtains: don’t peak!
Two, Czernina who’d spit
rather than swallow, or take
a chaser, who
didn’t even look at the fetus.
Three, lonely, in
there’s a branding for you
teaching the secret
language of lust
and you’re unsure what’s skin
and what’s rust, but know
life of the breathing dead
gets old after a decade
or two.
The rust flakes off
into irises and monkey
puzzle trees, while flecks
of old skin
find their twin, become
parts of constellations that light
the new way home.
III
The guilty river god of the blood
looks up from the white waves
of the Stuck to spy
an accident carved out of the starfield
you called
a thunderbeing’s lightning bolt
carrier whose feather festoons
the last lust hat you’d burn
on an island named for an ancient chief.
And time may stop
but the stars do not, nor the churning
finite inside lightning
that begins as black plasma and imagination
which you in your youth thought infinite.
The lunge
the grunt
the bolts shot out
in a primordial white fire/magnesium flash
delirious juice you only now don’t take
for granted
like the way your palm stroke
made her eyes shudder
or her nails on your summer back
or her bent before you
or you her, delirious.
In the night in the shadow
below the white of the July starfield
you wonder if this is the product
of your own slaughter.
How many breaths left?
How many thunderbolts
in your quiver
in your early A.M. tremble?
The rose petals rightly hers
now deferred to a bust
of Kuan Yin
and urges inside are the wars
of the bloodline
the hungry ghosts
or wolves
you haven’t yet learned to starve
or feed.
One angel kneeling angel cocksucker wiping it off the chin angel fixing a south side flat tire angel punching out a bully angel offering a hand for ash angel w/a greasy back door angel who takes it all angel wants to learn to swallow angel who says no and means it angel feigns an abortion angel w/ an endless backscratch angel in the morning in the afternoon bedroom angel who calls it a nap angel who takes time undressing angel of undetermined gender angel craves it in five star hotel rooms angel who makes it go faster angel who needs a nip to elicit the wet reaction angel who makes sure all the food is different colors who warms the sake who delivers who’s wide open after 5 years who resumes the ancient play of tides and smells like the sea and craves your scent angel who makes a puddle under you angel who chokes on it angel makes your feet spin angel who makes you throw your hat in the fire to combat lust angel with a Cuban cigar and a wisecrack at any given moment angel who rescues your migrained head with Canadian cranial sacral hands angel on the telephone angel of email angel who heals your body from above tough love angel who slaps you angel who wakes you from your deep psychic slumber angel in pussy fur angel who dives endlessly from the Stuck bluff angel vegetarian angel who started it all and has earned her wings and keeps on giving and giving and giving in the ancient primordial silence who rescues you with a spirit song of your own making whose ingredients are blood and trust and some kind of unnamable juju Lorca calls Duende and Yuan Mei calls Xingling and Rilke calls angels and each tries to put wings and human attributes on a force that lies just beyond the grasp of poems where glaciers’ dreams of muscles become mountains, verdant stomping grounds for limitless unseen angels.
IV
For an hour
still learning to navigate Slaughter
and hear the antepasados’ low murmur
the giant cedar tree’s solace -
a muscle man flext,
trapped in bark.
Or discovery of madrones
how they like to be scratched
how they, like you, gnarl out
their own twisted path to the last star.
Over the centuries the heart
in your line
made the wrong kind of muscle.
Let diphtheria slaughter the angels
you might’ve called uncles.
Let the bloodline scatter
under excuse of war.
Let your own personal winter
stretch on, ignore woodfrogs daffodils
lilacs scotch broom is this not
the unknown substrate of Slaughter?
Why does drama still
push out joy for you?
What’s the charm in complexity?
Remember the masquerade? SAM
those ancient Igbo masks, why not
try one on, find resonance
in different roles don’t forget
libations,
maybe
who underpin this activity.
Maybe you’ll begin to see
in the blackness in which all this got started.
Maybe the cat will make
you remember how to play
the need for a little hit
now and then.
And you dear woman? Sorry
I could not trust my skin. Sorry I trusted
the low murmur of the ancestral urge
more than the lunge into your moist
curves.
Maybe I was afraid
I would disappear
many years after I created an I
that would not be lost to Slaughter,
an I that could survive
for a time.
And still you see signs
backyard kale that bolts
like you do.
Hungry voodoo
springs up and manifests helicopters
in wilderness, wine bottle
weapon memories
and weiss bier-fueled drives
and you survive w/o a scratch
every time. Did you think
it was YOU all this time?
Was it a would-be sister
one day stopped
kicking, or would-be angels
who know when to give up
become ghosts
push the car away
from speeding trees?
Each day stars
are new measured
according to their relative positions
the hungry dead doctor sings again,
again. Look up
you see how your new skin fits
like
growing from one nut
didn’t slip out your greasy mitt
while stars continue beam
their ancient rays
upon the ways of Slaughter.
V
For Amalio Madueño
¿Quién son esos chulos del cielo?
The cross over.
The take-off.
A game above the rim.
ETA showtime
or the open J for three.
Now when we lose a step
develop guile, admire
creativity of the juke
& deuce
off the glass.
The gray beard of Bill Russell
and a memory of Red’s cigar
or Wilt’s women,
all with widowed skin.
Out of our quarrels with others
we make
rhetoric Yeats said, but out
of those conflicts with ourselves
Slaughter will never know.
One day she just stopped kicking
and a fetus dies
w/ angel wings or whatever
they’re giving ‘em these days.
We wildcraft, bushwhack
through realms indigenous
someone back in the bloodline knows
& shows us in that green doctor
the Scotsman knew about.
In those 14 foot high sunflowers
couldn’t save your marriage.
Acrobats indeed
with speed off the dribble
and a timely pick
& pop.
Beauty’s the first gasp
we dash from, then the defender’s
nature & you paint
your hair expectation yellow
w/ a side of botox.
Try to hold off
the arson orange West Hill
sunset, no use. June clouds
can only hold up so long.
Los chulos
burn bright for a time
hunger for another rainbow
J in limelight
pick a fight w/ nature
always lose
but look good doin’ it.
We think we know them
but what we know’s
apparition
and what’s an apparition
scares us shitless.
Estimados antepasados
sacar (please) el hambre
del muchacho en
mí, leave
the old man’s hunger, leave
all the earned gray, favor
the look inside, por favor.
Stave off the divine
fist against righteous
fist after rock rips
twine, it’s only June
in Slaughter and the blueberries
not nearly ripe.
VI
The cedars above
the base of the cliff
in the shadow of Tahoma
are that much more impressive
when the fog lifts
in June but June
is still mountain winter
and winter forever for unlucky
hikers.
Some will never airport rendezvous
w/ seven yr old daughters
eyes fixed on ancient cedars,
while f a l l i n g.
One muscular cedar
a model for you
in your flight from Slaughter
flexed, three points curled toward
Jupiter.
In our own weak way
we hang on
so concerned with survival
we don’t recognize each struggle
conquered, each shadow bit
part played
IS the blossoming
until we wonder why
those petals are falling
wonder how the wrinkles
the gray and how large are
those things yesterday were just
tiny cedar cones
or little girls waiting for reunion with Daddy.
Fate’s bent away from heroes
sometimes as much as an out
stretched hand
in summer that suddenly becomes winter
in the shadow of Tahoma.
¡Mi dios me ahorra!
¡No estoy listo para morir!
¡Dejarme por favor
ver a mi hija
una más vez!
We all smile at the flash
all who began in ecstasy
all who recognize a real hero
until winter makes it moot.
Burn a snip of cedar
petition antepasados
but who turns
back time?
How soon after
one large fall
does a heart stop beating?
Blossom at her feet
or in her memory.
Blossom at the bottom
of the cliff
or at the top of the Olympic
edge, still holding
foot hold, hand hold, or the view
of evening constellations. Sure, Saturn
in the sky this week
but at one time you held on
to that night swan
and no one hears the little detonations
like no one heard the fog-muffled
cry from the edge of the cliff
where Jeff Graves hiked the Eagle Peak Trail
in the shadow of Tahoma
not trying to become the newest blur
in the oldest constellation
that could have been you.
VII
Only thing wrong with love poems
is that the poem outlasts the love.
And the love poems never return.
And never’s not a long time.
And the invisible
calls up to uproot
the springtime of the bloodline.
Oh, so erotic and shapely
enticing
as the parade of Succubi
with whom you still wrestle.
And your hungry inner ghosts dance
with my hungry inner ghosts.
This is as close as they come
striking the appropriate voodoo
bloodline mambo
and your Indian softball
body reminds you
it’s not fast
as your mind
no more.
Yet there are highways
for which the yellow stripes
are nebulae
made from the wandering lost syllables
of all those dead poets
whose resonance slip into your dreams
when she’s not making plans to suck
the essence from you, one
OH GOD! at a time.
You look over your shoulder
let dream snow cover your footprints
maybe Rexroth has some clues, maybe
your veins can still throb
and burst with the blossoming
just as you firedance the solstice
respond to the raised ante of our age
where everyone’s cruel drug
is velocity.
And
shedding their blood tint.
Erun mole.
Turn chicken sausage
apricots
y jugo de mango
into 7 cupped hands of blood
45 important muscles
500 fistfuls of flesh
23 different sizes and shapes of bones
28 vertebrae
24 ribs
32 teeth
900 ligaments and tendons
8 lymph nodes
shit, piss and sweat
wind, water, earth, fire, metal
three channels
six basic shapes of consciousness
30 daily emails
typed out in the dry heat
of Mercury-in-Retrograde
seven unkind words
blurted hastily in a weak moment
and one moment
where you can stop to watch the clouds
darken, and Saturn emerge
the distant thunderheads are for a moment confused
with
the outline of the
whose their gentle prodding
allows the heart-king reign
over all space
& time is not the wily presence
who steals our mobility, no.
It redefines the heart’s architecture
translates for the seeker
una lengua nueva.
This mracle of angels
antepasados latentes
who carry off
wheelbarrow
after wheelbarrow of skulls
from between the legs of the succubus.
But you and I dear reader
we’ve danced this two-step
eons ago, we
learned this salty mambo
a few poleshifts back.
How’s that for ‘glistening with creation’?
the canuck said
while chanting his song
to reach that highway between stars.
For they are not as far as we’ve been told.
They light the sanctum
of cathedrals we’ve
only dreamed of.
They give the Queen all the fire
she’ll ever need.
She who keeps hearing
all those love poems
you keep writing
to other lovers
while she waits, patient
watching the waters
plotting your star
guided return
home.
VIII
For George Bowering
The rez dog looks
w/ hungry eyes the night
of the first salmon feast
he will eat good tonight
but for him the world’s
a feast of big flavored scents.
Beauty is the first gasp we try to dash from
but for Slaughter sight’s
become blindness.
He won’t stop for any forehead kiss
lost in the closed of his m.o.
If he did he’d
be lost in that
continuous stream of faces
fish face, first springer face
face of many lovers lost in O face
face of man with bleeding head face
fist through the angry window face
of 6th grade and sliding home safe face
face of the angry man swinging the red wine bottle
face of the governor plotting land swindle
face of Quan Yin forgiving all face of
Ganesh lifting another elephantine
obstacle face
otter face eagle face redtailed hawk face
face of first stellar jay face of mountain
cougar face, snake face, face of lover
on the run, daughter’s sleep face or first check face
or straddling Noguchi’s Black Sun face
before the setting NW arson orange sun
set
No longer afraid of death
for the little deaths become easier after
we dissolve into our hungers
like the rez dog on feast night, like
the seagull pecks out the first salmon’s
black eyes on the stuckside beach
reach eternity without naming it
settling for the word be.
Study the cat’s eyes
when the magic shoestring
springs to life again
and the hunter’s nerves remain
kitten-sharp.
You, dear one, in her and her and her
never stopping to be,
goal-oriented as the rez dog
with meat on his mind.
How you’ve perfected
the spectator’s glance
when every now and then
the velocity cools to manageable
no longer a blur
somehow you see how starlings cohere
start over the bay
swerve chaotic in their order
toward skyscrapers
festoon the Olympic
sculpture park
view
as the last neon orange arson sunset
reflects off Teresita’s dream
become real
and you realize
the old you, cracked
can’t be patched up.
And children indigenous carry in
the first salmon
under the hunter’s
dream song
under an old cloud memory
which mimics your heartbeat.
Sight’s become blindness
but some long looks
linger
and until starlings are banished
from Slaughter you track
in your own rez dog hunger
their wild flight home.
IX
Stars are what we are and will return to
after this lucid dream we burn through.
Not yet counting breaths
no longer young
linger now
like the May lilac
now coming in April
tracking every murmur
only now that lightness
has been discovered.
One shot
and then no more.
No fouling another off, no
overtime periods, no
more bleaching away
your footsteps tracking all over
the wily paths of Slaughter.
Then loved ones start dropping
and you didn’t call, lost
in your own story of meat.
Lost chasing a bloodline murmur
you confused with intuition.
Who cares now what the score is
when you start counting breaths
all but the few steps seem like diversion
and the sky no longer pities our fathers.
Take THAT past the next pole shift
and see if your new language
of sneezes punctuated by Stuck
River gurgles makes any more sense.
Or the religion made of dreams
of Grandfathers thirsting for their lost
star muscles
replaced by skyscrapers
and tanker cars filled with flammables
rusty cars in the front yard
feeding brambles, making
new fruit. Glass shards
in the median reflecting light
from July’s Mead Moon.
Candy wrappers in the flower beds
and gravel lots filled
with the remnants of explosives.
They’ll never know you walked
the greasy sidewalks of Slaughter.
Never know the small neighbor
favors, won’t remember
your stand on abortion, but festoon
with flowers
the tombstones of the scholars
of war. Your old garden
will be a strip mall and your essence?
Maybe a poet will discover
some lost alliteration and write a new book
on juju. Maybe a son of Abraham
will plan some wily duende maneuver
and have an east breeze blow in
a line right when he needs it
burning with post-romantic bloodfire
and one of the last of Thor’s thunderbolts.
She said we are the people
of the parenthesis
and the death of the old gods
plods on
we lose patience for the birth
of the new.
Moth-eaten English Heather
we only recognize when it eats
our overthrown softball
or scratches our trunk
backing up in haste.
And what can you show
the
angels they ain’t seen before? The dead
are notoriously hard to please Spicer said, or was it Lorca?
What do the angels want
besides Indian beads
on your summer hat, besides
cedar
wrapped into a cap
with a tail of her late son’s hair
hanging from the back?
They demand ceaseless your construction
of a heart of fire, postcards,
appetite.
They demand ceaseless
arson orange sunsets
and the occasional offering of tobacco
and spilt blood.
They want to live vicarious
through your heart-attack-serious
burn revel in each thrust and mambo
get stuck in your throat in the fetal position
and force your tongue
to twist out new sounds
that chart the heart of
Slaughter’s every gimmick
every last dance step.
Track it down.
Get it
on the record.
Tell it slant like the new song
of the old blowed up river.
Or red paint power
underneath a dying sun
or a lost Mead Moon sister
moment
where each of us chooses
Slaughter or plum trees
and the angel smiles
when the first flicker
from that new heart of fire rises
and stays steady in that next
Chinook wind.
X
After summer rain
angels would trample
the wet grounds outside
the carnival of glands
and yet dead poets
always get the last word.
Perhaps time sweetens
with each deeply-felt elegy.
We see their picture
as if they’d live forever
the day before the Times
writes their obit.
It is the rare July
angled rain can eat NW faces, shudder
what’s left of the white blossoms
who refuse to complain
about their well-timed descent.
Unlike Slaughter the trees
the Nootka Rose
Wild Ginger
Dogwood, Indian Paintbrush, the Fireweed
remain neutral, hold
like Tahoma does
the resonance of every step
and waits patient
for us to honor our greed.
Inside in silence
except for Friday night car tires
humming on wet road
below the sound waves
of earth cutting through space
underneath the dimmest constellation
and the sound of the lonely night’s last freight train horn
dead poets pose as angels
send metaphors for your verse
remind you the whole world’s alive
inside that green wheel spinning
in your chest. Making a mandala
of spent matches from lit prayer candles
& pink rose blossoms offered to the Lady.
You are only a reflection
of a reflection
of the skill your parents had
in the lightning flash
that became you and for which you yearn
to return
endlessly checking the weather forecast
while
the
You get a hernia as your marriage falls apart.
Or your nose bleeds for recognition
but the grace saving you’s
the extraordinary patience
of dead poets.
Dead poets in the garden
scaring raccoons.
Dead poets animating the cat’s eyes
for a moment
moving molecules
to drop white blossoms for your amusement.
Dead poets caught in your throat
in the fetal position
like latent antepasados
turning the last bloodfire burn
into your richest, deepest song.
Sunlight’s headed south now
faster than the cat can comprehend.
Makes the tips of Stuck waves
more white. Animates Coyote’s smile.
Lubricates the stunts of Stellar Jays.
Keeps light shining on Slaughter
not waiting for better weather.
And a poet you knew
will become that light
or that latent angel
or that force moving molecules
to amuse your evening walk
faster than your aging synapses
can flash across their gap.
He who could live beyond the last parenthesis.
She who could hold fire in her hand.
He who makes better weather for those who honor
their ancestral land.
She who marks the Northwest July sun’s
closing arson orange and apricot rays
in skin, bloodfire and melted wax.
She who taps the never-ending flow
can withstand every
parlor trick Slaughter
could ever conjure
with the rare commitment to every
blossoming every species
has ever known.
11:21P – 7.20.07