NOTES FROM A PILGRIMAGE: LITHUANIA, 1992

VILNIUS--TWO TOWERS

The whole family meets at noon at the Vilnius Cathedral, across the 
street from the building where Sajudis began its movement – Milda, my 
aunt; Dita, her daughter and my cousin; Paulius, her husband; Eglė, their 
daughter; Kostas and Ona, my parents; Rūta, my sister; Brian, her son, 
our nephew; and Arlie, my wife.

Pictures and videos, 
and then the slow procession
past the cathedral (not yet open), 
through the small park
past a utility pole 
with its still bright poster: 
"Red Army Go Home,"
where a gypsy woman 
singles me out of the group
and croons a few words in Russian,
smiling, gold-toothed, and twirling.

Laughing, my cousin Dita tells me the gypsy woman has said something 
about how lucky I'll be in my life, how I'll "always be kissing." I 
should have taken a picture of the woman and given her more rubles.

Our strung out, extended family starts up the winding dirt path to the 
top of Gediminas Tower for the best view of Vilnius.  For some of our 
group, fifty-two years have passed since they last walked together. I'm 
with Milda, at 86 the oldest, and with my father (her brother), all of us 
arm in arm.  Pausing frequently for short rests, we slowly bring up the rear.

At last, the base of red brick and stone, 
Vilnius' old-time stronghold. 
Archduke Gediminas could spy his enemies
approaching from miles away, 
under siege, could roll down 
stones and boiling oil and water.
Boiling oil and water!  
How far we've come
in the grim arts of war.

The family divides at this point; the older generation sits at the base 
of the tower on the small bench or on the shiny, pitted barrel of an 
ancient cannon and waits while the rest of the family climbs to the top 
through the steep spiral staircase to a splendid 360 degree view of the 
city.  Paulius assigns us the task of counting the number of church 
steeples and promises a prize for the one who comes closest, and while we 
count he videotapes us. I count twenty-two and win, though Paulius says 
there are really twenty-nine churches in his city.

At our feet the city 
with its salmon-colored roofs, 
church spires, rises among
a profusion of flourishing trees 
as if with the forest's permission, 
and beyond, on the horizon 
on the distant outskirts, among
the blocks of modernist 
apartments, higher
than us, higher than anything else,
the other famous Vilnius symbol, 
the television broadcasting tower,
needles the grey sky, 

the tower in whose defense twelve people died last year when the army 
brought out the tanks – died not for the tower, of course, but for the 
words emanating like ripples from the tower, the words and the freedom to 
say and broadcast the words into the ether – whether anyone heard or not.  
Crowds of people, in the thousands, showed up in the night, encircled the 
TV tower with their bodies, 

and some of the bodies
– as always –
did not prevail 
against rolling iron and steel, 
though the circle of bodies, 
of humans
desperate with purpose, 
closed again
and did prevail.

Now, on the parapet of this hexagonal medieval tower, above a city 
I never lived in though would claim as my own – city of churches, temples, 
synagogues, of cobblestoned streets, of gypsies, of a famous sixteenth 
century school for pick-pockets, of huge gates, of miraculous Virgin 
Marys, of the language of my parents passed on to me in their exile, 

of two rivers meeting 
beneath a hill, 
of the trees on the banks of those rivers, 
their leaves in a mid-summer afternoon 
rustling like no other leaves 
in no other place 
ever.


AT MY FATHER'S ANCESTRAL FARM
		– near Šunskai

On my father's ancestral farm 
near the village where only the church 
like a bright jewel dropped and lost in a field
remains unchanged,
we find a woman, Birute, and her ancient father,
he the one who bought the place
from my father's father over fifty years ago.
Half the original house still stands,
the other half added over the years
of my father's exile.  
The outbuildings are not the same ones,
the grove the same grove, but not the same 
oaks, birches, and lindens.
The field of half-grown rye barely moves
in the midsummer late morning.
The original well is dry.
We look into it as if into a place
in ourselves long abandoned
and see the round hollow shape, 
the curved stone and earth wall.
Chickens, ducks, and geese
wander around the yard 
(perhaps the 45th generation
of descendants of the ones who provided 
eggs and meat for my father's boyhood body).
The black rooster calls his hens and chicks
to something he's unearthed under a bush,
and they all carry on with their lives, unconcerned
with the humans strolling the property, pilgrims
looking for roots, for the past, for something.
Birute tells us she and her ninety-year old father
work the farm alone, her husband having hanged himself
three years earlier.  She tells us,
as she hand-cranks a bucket of water up
from the new well, that her life is hard. 
She says it in a direct, uncomplaining way, 
simply stating a simple fact.
She is ruddy-cheeked and healthy looking
except for a set of very bad teeth.
My father tries to give her some dollars, but she refuses.
Well, sell us some eggs, he says, 
and against her wishes he insists on paying
three times their market value.
Just before we leave, after wishing each other
good fortune and God's blessings (there's a priest 
in our group), my mother takes a drink
from the bucket with an old tin cup,
and suddenly seems to grow taller
as she praises the water, its taste, its coolness,
and it flashes for me that perhaps this water
she now drinks, drawn up 
from fifty feet below the earth's surface, 
perhaps this same water came down as rain
in my mother's youth – why not even on the same day,
that first day my father brought her home
to meet his parents and his father charmed
and amazed my mother with his fiddle playing
and his fabled story-telling, and that silly trick
he was famous for among the children of the region
where he would laugh uproariously and then,
passing his hand down over his face, stop abruptly,
and freeze his face into stone
for a few seconds until the children started
to get edgy and then alarmed, and then he'd smile 
and tickle their ribs and play them another song or 
tell them another story, perhaps the one about
the time he encountered the devil 
when he was mushrooming in the forest
and had lost his way.


MY MOTHER AND THE WHEEL OF FIRE

If coaxed, my mother will tell the story
of the wheel of fire from her girlhood
on her parent's farm in Lithuania.
But you must coax her
for the telling details, urge her to recall
the sequence of events, and
as in all the best stories, you
must take it on yourself, wear it, fill
it, sacrifice a portion of your
own life for its sake.

One mid-summer day, when my mother
was ten years old, she was left at the farm
while the rest of the family
went off to Sunday mass.
Somehow, she had hurt her foot
with a handsaw, and now it was swathed in bandages.

They left her in charge of a younger boy,
the son of one of the tenants,
a Petrukas or Vincukas –
diminutives for Peter and Vincent – she can't
remember which.  Her stern but loving father
(the grandfather I never knew) told her
not to leave the house, not to go gallivanting
around on her injured foot.

When the family – all the five sisters and one brother
and two parents – and the rest of the household
piled into the wagons and left for church,
my mother soon grew restless.
She decided she and Petrukas or Vincukas
would go pick flowers.

So, off they went to a nearby fallow field
full of waving daisies, she hobbling
on her bandaged foot, urging along the innocent
and now faceless Petrukas or Vincukas.
It was a hot day, and as they wandered farther
and farther from the house, the bouquets
of daisies growing in their hands,
they didn't notice the mushrooming storm clouds
until it was too late.

The wind suddenly picked up,
everything grew dark, and the lightning
began its primeval dance.
My mother looked towards the farmhouse
and saw a haystack catch fire,
apparently struck by lightning.

 She began running to the farmhouse in fright,
her bandages unraveling, the younger
boy trailing behind her.

Then, as she tells it,
there was a tremendous clap of thunder
("Perkūnas" as we say in Lithuanian,
both the word for thunder
and for the pagan god of thunder).
Petrukas or Vincukas cried out,
my mother stopped, turned, and witnessed
what she calls a Wheel of Fire
that rolled furiously along the ground
like a blazing bicycle wheel.
It seemed to run over or through
the boy, knocking him flat
on his back and singeing his hair and clothes.

He lay there, clothes smoking,
as my mother, terrified, ran back to him,
knelt and beat his smoldering shoulders
with her bare hands.

What happened next, she can't
remember exactly, but some farmhands
who had been bathing in the nearby river
ran up and attended the boy, now
conscious but dazed, and carried him
into the garden near the house.
There, they dug a shallow trough,
lay him in it and buried him
up to his neck, his head
sticking out of the sod like some cabbage.
They did this to "draw off" the electricity
or the power of Perkūnas
that had entered him –
all this, of course, in accordance
with the folk customs of that place and time.

The boy recovered, my mother was punished
for having disobeyed her father, and everyone
almost managed to talk
her out of her experience, suggesting
there was no Wheel of Fire, that it was lightning
after all, or something that had fallen
from the burning haystack.

But when my mother tells this story,
she gets what I call her "gypsy face," that expression
half fearful, half knowing
with eyes that are focused on a place
a few light years behind you,
a place you can't see
but have strong reason to suspect is there nonetheless.

So that's the story of my mother,
Petrukas or Vincukas, and the Wheel of Fire.
It happened a long time ago
on my grandfather's farm in Lithuania
right here on Planet Earth.


TRAKAI CASTLE

Come with me to a certain medieval castle,
a short day's horseback ride from 
the city with three names: Vilnius, Wilno, Vilna –
depending on your preferred conqueror.
With our hundred horses, we'll drive it in an hour.
Follow me to one of the castle's vaulted-ceiling rooms,
and please note those two odd-looking chairs and small table.
See how they're huddled in their threesomely intimacy,
as cozy a little menage ` trois  of domestic furniture 
as any you'd see in a modern kitchenette.
It's hard for me to say what you'll notice first, whether
the furniture's intimacy, its style, or form, the sheer facts
of its material composition, its Platonic
ur-chair-ness manifesting from the realm of universal forms.
But surely, by now, whatever your metaphysical orientation,
you've noticed – yes, I can see the look of shock on your face –
that our little intimate dinette is made of animal parts:
the legs of the chairs are not metaphorical but
the taxonomically redone real legs 
of some centuries-dead ox or elk, the cloven hooves splayed out
at the unnatural angle of a ballet dancer's plii.
See, too, how the armrests are made of smooth ox horns,
the back rests from interlocking deer and elk antlers.
Yes, you're right, the table is supported by more antlers,
the tabletop itself a sliced section of oak tree
and on it, two horn goblets for drinking mead.
Let's also note the animal hides covering the seats
and the – is it a bearskin rug? – spread out before it all.

Have you been to the Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum
in St. Augustine, Florida?
Have you seen the vest knitted from human hair,
the little jewelry box made from fingernail clippings? 
Ancient medieval castle, 
20th century pop-culture museum, 
home –
as always, the horrific, the fascinating, the domestic    
inseparably on display together.


THE CEMETERY AT KAUNAS

At the grave of my father's father, mother, and sister in the cemetery on 
the outskirts of Kaunas, the grave visited for the first time by my 
father, my mother, my sister, her son, my wife, and me, I see our family 
name, in its plural form – "Žolynai" in an entirely new context:  on 
stone.  This is the grave of the "Žolynai," what they all came to, what 
my father and mother will come to, what I will come to, a stony, local 
fame here in the most astonishingly beautiful cemetery I've ever visited: 
a cemetery in the middle of a fir and pine forest filled with the 
mid-afternoon songs of birds.

There is no metaphor for the quality of the sound of birds in a forest 
cemetery that I can come up with, except to say it has that depth and 
sense of yearning you sometimes get between sleeping and waking, or that, 
after all, perhaps these birds are quite simply and literally the spirits 
of the dead who sing the double song of a glorious present and a dimly 
remembered other life.  Shafts of light dapple the ground and the stone 
and folk-carved wooden markers; the living quietly tend the grave-sites, 
pulling weeds, watering flowers, lighting candles.

My father, a few weeks short of his seventy-ninth birthday, and his two 
living sisters busy themselves with sprucing up the site, though it 
hardly needs it. Aunt Teresa lives in town and comes here often, she the 
daughter who has taken on the responsibility of grave-tender, while my 
father has been living out his fifty-two years of exile in "Amerika." 

I bring back a bucket of water from the hand pump. We take pictures 
before moving on, especially of the son and daughters gathered around 
their parents' and sister's resting place, and then the son and daughter 
of the son, and finally the son of the daughter of the son. I feel a 
strange grief for my grandparents and the buried aunt, whom I never met, 
whose lives were told to me in stories, and a grief for my parents, old 
now, and for all of us, even my nephew a young, strong man, and in that 
grief there's a sweetness, too, a sense that this is all right, that it 
is the way it is and can only be,  that we're all part of something large 
and mysterious, not to be figured out and controlled.

We move slowly  and quietly on, in the spell of this incredible space, 
remarking softly to each other about this or that grave marker, all the 
while the straight, tall pines and spruces rising from among the dead and 
dropping their fragrances like a blessing and the birds deepening the 
silence with their two-sided song.  


ONE MORE ATTEMPT AT SELF-DEFINITION 

I come from a tribe of nature worshippers,
pantheists, believers in fairies, forest sprites, and wood nymphs,
who heard devils in their windmills,
met them in the woods, cloven-hoofed
and dapper gentlemen of the night,
who named the god of thunder,
who praised and glorified bread, dark rye waving
waist-high out of the earth,
and held it sacred, wasting not a crumb, who
spent afternoons mushrooming in forests of pine,
fir, and birch, who transferred Jesus
from his wooden cross, transformed him
into a wood-carved, worrying peasant,
raised him on a wooden pole above the crossroads
where he sat with infinite patience
in rain and snow, wooden legs apart, 
wooden elbows on wooden knees,
wooden chin in wooden hand, 
worrying and sorrowing for the world....
these people who named their sons and daughters
after amber, rue, fir tree, dawn, storm,
and the only people I know who have a diminutive
form for God Himself – "God-my-little-buddy."

Any wonder I catch myself speaking
to trees, flowers, bushes – these eucalyptus so far
from Eastern Europe – or that I bend down to the earth,
gather pebbles, acorns, leaves, boles, bring
them home, enshrine them on mantelpieces or above
porcelain fixtures in corners, any wonder
I grow nervous in rooms 
and must step outside and touch a tree, 
or sink my toes in the dirt, or watch the birds fly by.


THE SIBERIAN JOURNAL

My father's cousin's husband, V., a man in his seventies, long white 
hair, dignified face, spent almost ten years in Siberia (nine years, ten 
months, and twenty-six days, as he puts it). Now, in his own backyard on 
the outskirts of Kaunas,  a free city once again, on a summer afternoon, 
he reads to us from the pages of his Siberian journal.

The yard, like most in Lithuania, is 80% vegetables and fruit trees.  The 
rest is taken up with V.s experiments in making his own building blocks 
out of various materials: cement and pebbles, clay and bark, cinders, 
ashes and straw. We, the American and the local relatives, sit in chairs 
and benches hand-made by our host.  Not the least of what he learned in 
his long exile was how to make almost anything out of almost anything 
else. He reads to us, his head bent forward, a swathe of long white hair 
obscuring half his face, he reads what I recognize as an old-fashioned 
Lithuanian prose – dignified, resonant cadences, the tone reserved and 
ironic, the irony of one who has suffered so much he knows he can't 
possibly recreate it for us so has to distance himself and bring us in by 
means of indirection and understatement:

"A typical day's bounteous nourishment consisted of Mr. Stalin's famous 
leaf and tree bark soup, occasionally supplemented with a single 
delicious floating mushroom or, perhaps, a thoroughly moisture-free slice 
of aged bread."

On he reads, and it's fascinating, though the language is sometimes 
obscure or difficult, but then I notice my own father beside me – also of 
V.s generation and no slouch himself in the suffering department – is 
nodding off!  I give him a gentle elbow in the side and he starts and 
smiles wryly and elbows me back as if to say, "Yes, the man suffered, no 
doubt about it.  But so did we all.  There can be only so much tolerance 
for the story of another's sufferings.  I'm an old man, have seen and 
done much, and here and now, in this pleasant yard under the dappled 
shadows of the apple tree, the droning of the bees and the hum of this 
man's self-conscious prose is simply too much, and sleep tugs insistently 
at my sleeve."

V. continues in his ironic mode:

"Food was in such abundance, that once we even had a special delicacy for 
our single work horse, a handsomely slim fellow who kept himself that way 
through the exercise of pleasant long hours of work each day. Yes, we 
were able to treat him once with a delicious straw broom, which he 
gratefully ate down to the wooden handle. He might have continued with 
the handle, but enough is enough; indulgence we can live with, 
over-indulgence – never!" 

He has been reading now for fifteen minutes, still about food, to an 
audience of some twelve people: his relatives by marriage, his own son 
who holds his two-year-old son on his lap, his son's wife, his own wife, 
cousins, and the nieces and nephews of those cousins, pilgrims from 
America, met for the first and possibly only time, and the truth is we 
are starting to get bored and restless; the truth is we, sitting in this 
pleasant yard, stomachs full after an abundant and truly memorable meal, 
are suffering – of course, not the suffering of exile, of hunger, of 
unspeakable privations, but suffering nonetheless:  the boards of the 
bench are uncomfortable, the sun on the back of our necks is too much, 
that fly pestering our ear, the belt now too tight around our waist, the 
little two-year-old starting to squirm and complain.  Finally, his own 
wife, A., a survivor of three years of Siberian exile herself, speaks up, 
"V., that's enough already.  I think they get the idea." 
 
With great dignity and with the economical movements of a Zen master, V. 
closes his note book and tells us that he hopes he's been able to at 
least capture for us a small part of what it was like in Siberia as 
comrade Stalin's guests. He has.  I've been moved to tears, and impressed 
by the indomitable human spirit, and glad I've been so-far spared such 
trials – and envious, too, like any writer, always with an eye out for 
material.


BALTIC SUMMER TWILIGHT

The sun sets slow and late here on the amber coast,
flirts with the horizon, moves down on a long, slow glide
like a great sea bird unwilling to touch down.  
The sea waits, as always, with infinite patience.
Everywhere leaves have begun to let go their outlines: 
oaks, maples, lindens, even the sharp pine needles, merging 
now into the lotus-land limbo between day and night. 
The diving swallows settle into mud nests
tucked up under the carved eaves of human houses, 
homes really, places to return to around midnight
when the last light reluctantly and sweetly 
surrenders to the short night.


LIVING WITH OTHERS

			-for Arlie

Yesterday, I discovered my wife
often climbs our stairs on all fours.

In my lonely beastliness,
I thought I was alone,
the only four-legged climber, the forger
of paths through thickets to Kilimanjaro's summit.

In celebration then, side by side,
we went up the stairs on all our fours,
and after a few steps
our self-consciousness slid from us
and I growled low in the throat
and bit with blunt teeth my mate's shoulder and
she laughed low
in her throat,
and rubbed her haunches  on  mine.

At the top of the stairs
we rose on our human feet
and it was fine and fitting somehow;
it was Adam and Eve rising
out of themselves before the Fall –
or after; it was survivors on a raft
mad-eyed with joy
rising to the hum of a distant rescue.

I live for such moments.


ROOTED AND WAVERING

The seed I planted
has sprung into a sunflower
taller than myself.

We stand in the morning light
facing each other.
I am between
the sun and the sunflower.

Already the large head
is home for bejeweled insects and mites
whose names I'll never learn.

A small breeze comes by
and the yellow head
nods a few times on its springy stalk.
Yes, yes it says.

The breeze pivots above the garden,
swirls away part of the morning.
No, no says the sunflower.

I am the sunflower, rooted
and wavering through a long day's
affirmations and denials,
dragging the sun
by its gold chain behind me.


DREAM OF THE SPLIT MAN

A child-woman
with fine black hair on her arms
operates in your split chest.
Open-heart surgery.
For some reason, she inspires
total confidence.

She reaches in with both hands,
lifts your heart gently.
"Look behind," she whispers.
"There's a blocked vein,
the vein that leads to your right arm."

Immediately, your sword arm
goes numb.
Your trigger finger,
your writing hand, your
hiking thumb, your palm
with its diagram of what you've made
of your life,
your fingers that play
the piano's high notes
(and a woman's)
go numb.
The hand you shake with,
stifle yawns with, serve with, comb
your hair with, shave,
pick, manipulate the world with,
stiffens by your side.

But it's all right, somehow.
All these years, your left hand, modest
but sinister accompanist,
has seen itself in the mirror
grown stronger.
Even now, clenching
and unclenching, it is learning
the ways of a fist.


TWO CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

I remember my first gun
and my first tangerine.
My father said never
point a gun at a live thing.
I was five and it was my first
gun and besides it was a toy.
I was five and I knew that.
So, I pointed the gun
at my father, at my mother.
It was a big black gun
and it wobbled a lot.
When I pulled the trigger
it went "click,"
and I think my father died.
What I remember about the tangerine
is how easily the skin came off.


THE HOMECOMING

After years away from the city
you return and find your father
in a family album suddenly grown
younger, grown younger like the cops
in squad cars patrolling the streets,
licensed teenagers, the faint
figure-eight imprints of prophylactics
still in their bulky wallets.
He is younger than you now,
knows less than you, though he tries
to hide it with a cocked head
and arched eyebrows.  Your mother
a virgin beside him with a virgin's
smile.  You are in that smile
the way the sun is in a coffee bean
or a good cigar, waiting
for the magic to release you.
And you are in your father's house now,
years later, somehow still a child,
but strangely father to the man at last,
waiting for the magic to release you.


UNSEASONABLE BIRTHS

You see them occasionally,
the flies hatched in a warm
pocket of winter, the dull ones.
They lack something,
as if they knew their lives were all wrong.
They lack the fine maneuvers,
the athletic dodges of their summer cousins.
They fly in slow, wide circles,
buzzing in puzzled surprise.
You can almost pick them out of the air
with your thumb and forefinger.
They come from the last eggs of summer,
the last desperate deposits in the bank of the future.
Here they are, then, tricked into existence
by the central heating in a January house.
And so they have no choice
but to rise on warm air currents
and circle the huge, warm lamps
that float beneath ceilings like benign suns;
and when the suns get too hot,
the flies end up against the clean glass
of windows, buzzing in sporadic anger now,
a universe of white snow
just beyond their insect sight.


THE WALK AT DUSK

The hour of repose.
The steaks and potatoes, the chicken
noodle soups, the pizzas
and cold glasses of milks
quietly turning into my neighbors.

The quiet streets.
The Fords and Chevys, the Buicks
and v.w.'s nuzzling the curbs
and winding down-like the suddenly
abandoned toys of children.
They wind down.
The ping of metal cooling,
the winding down.

The retirement home.
The golden light spilling
out of the aquarium windows
of the retirement home.
A golden light for the golden years.
The retiring, the golden retiring.


THOSE WHO DISAPPEAR

		– for Sigitas Skrinska, boyhood friend

Sigitas, a name like my own,
alien – a name to be mocked
by the Ians and Trevors, the Brians and Malcolms,
the Australian descendants
of English and Irish petty-thieves.
And they did mock us,
but you were tall and blond
and at the age of sixteen
could jump your own height.

You're  the  only  genuine
Missing Person I know.
Of all the thousands who disappear
out of the middle of their lives –
never come back from work one day, never
return from an errand – you're
the only one whose absence
ever touched me.

At eighteen you went Outback
and we never heard from you again.

You left a hole in our lives, left
your mother trapped in the Never-Never
between hope and loss,
unable for years to give herself wholly
to one or the other.

There were rumors of Foul Play.
Even violence or murder
we would accept better
than this vanishing into thin air,
this disappearing without a trace
(the cliches appropriate for once).

Now, years later and from half-way round the world,
I can still see you dimly
through the window of my own
gradual disappearance,
performing some mundane ritual –
eating, washing your hands, perhaps
combing your thin blond hair –
in your middle-age now
but still able, somehow,
to leap your own height.


BEATING FATHER FINALLY

On guard, check,
checkmate.
The game concludes
like the last inevitable notes
of a Beethoven symphony.
Bishop, knight, and rook
have left father's king
nowhere to go.
He sits in the corner
trapped, humbled.

The board dissolves
leaving a kitchen table by a window,
noises of chairs squeaking,
and the snow outside
suddenly falling faster.


A MAN WITH HIS WIFE

A man with his wife
away does the alone things
without guilt; perhaps
he walks about the town
for hours or lies
in the sun all afternoon;
perhaps he releases
a few million sperm,
like lemmings, to the sea.

True, the man feels
lost some of the time
not knowing where
to put his hands, but
he finds his pockets finally
and the obedient world
jumps back into place.

At night, the man still sleeps
on his own side.  Perhaps
he dreams he makes
love to his wife
who becomes pregnant
and has a child – all
in that same night, all
in the space of a lifetime.


FOUR A.M. ON A FARM

No cars have gone by for hours.
Our white cat wears the fog

easily.  In the barn eggs grow
into chickens, chickens into eggs.

Everywhere green fields slowly turn
to milk.  From five miles up

the sound of a jet floats down
softly . . . inside,

men from Tokyo
dream of the strange farms below.

For them it is noon.  They sleep
against the quiet argument of their bodies.

In two hours they will land
in New York with the sun.  For myself,

I wish them well.  I will be
in bed soon.  A box-elder bug

walks into the house through an entrance
that has nothing to do with me.


* * *

Seven hawks hang above the farm
like some immense, slowly turning mobile.
They glide silently as blood, the sun
warm in their wings.
Beneath them, the rooster, his eye
cocked heavenward,
struts around his hens.


TOWARDS THE END OF SUMMER

Late at night I look out the window
at the geese sleeping in the grass,
their heads thrust deep into their wing-pits.
They ask nothing of me.
They lie washed by rain
dreaming of tall grass and wide marshes,
the migrations of dim ancestors.


EARLY SPRING MORNING

I sit in the backyard,
my hand around a cup of coffee,
the morning with its hand
around my shoulder.

Above me in the pine tree,
the blackbirds don't know
it's Sunday; their knees bend
the wrong way.

I sit on my land-
lady's garden chair
by her wooden picnic table.

The morning is a waitress who
wipes the dew away.
"ScrambIe two, honey,
and I'll take
a side order of bliss."

Easier done than said.

To my left
the alley tries to shock
me with its shamefaced
garbage. Just down
the street I can hear
the turkey plant boasting:

"I change turkeys into T.V. dinners:
I employ a thousand townswomen."

As always, I am impressed.
But not overly so, for here

it is the miracle
of backyard, the lost
garden found, the rare
benediction of being

where you want to be.

I look down at my feet.
My toes have split
my slippers and are growing
into the ground.
There are leaves sprouting on my knuckles.

A blackbird lands on my nose
(now a branch), its emerald head
cocked expectantly.

Just before my eyes turn
to knots, they catch
the pale moon rising
like a spirit face
in the fathomless well
of my coffee cup.


THE PACIFIC SLIDES UP THE BEACHES OF THE WEST COAST

You can hear it in these treetops
sheltering a farmhouse
in the middle of Minnesota.

You can hear the whale-song
in the bellow of the cows beyond the corn
and the crickets in the grass.

The swallow-rays dive and pivot
on air currents
and swim smoothly about the barn.

You know that if you dig straight down
you'll find a bright twisted shell and
you only have to pull out the earth-plug
to hear the sea there too.

As you walk back into the house,
you finger the side of your neck
searching for gill-slits and you know
some day there'll be a larger tide
than usual and things will
get back to normal.


GROWINGS

Remembering my father's hands
and the way they played
with moist earth
I too tried to raise vegetables.
From a garden patch
the size of a city
parking space
and with the help
of the municipality's water
I created twelve pea pods-or
fifty-two peas.

I ate those peas
one by one as sadly as an ancient
chinaman
adding up the score
on his smooth abacus
and decided I was
not my father.


AT THE MOVIES IN A SMALL TOWN

I sit down inside,
absolutely alone –
sloping concrete floor;
smudged screen, as if
by huge thumb-prints;
the seat hard as a school desk.
I feel anxious
like a child kept after class.

Somewhere near the front row
a cricket plays his leg.

I realize suddenly
I can laugh or cry with total abandon
– what an opportunity!

I wish I could sit
in all two hundred seats at once.


A MAN AND HIS LIFE

At night a man asleep turns to his life.
He tries to embrace it.
As always, it skips just out of his reach
and laughs at him.
He chases it frantically, his feet
heavy as unexploded bombs.
Effortlessly, his life dances before him.
He wants to grab it, to run
it through some complicated steps –
a tango, a fox-trot, perhaps a mazurka.
He wants to love his life,
but it will have nothing of that
and only giggles at him, rolling
its hips at a safe distance.


THE WAY HE'D LIKE IT

Let me be the man who
walking among tall trees
is struck by lightning,
but is not killed;
who somersaults in a cloud
fizzing with burnt hair
and lands on his feet, shoes smoking,
and shakes his head saying,
"Jesus, that smarts!"

Let me be the man
hit by the last ash
of a dissolving meteorite.
Let it light on my head
like a benediction.

Let me be the man who walks
away from shipwrecks.

In a leveled city,
let me be the man found
17 days later under a former
insurance building sucking
air through the plumbing saying
"I never really thought of giving up."

From all disasters let me rise
wholly.  On my face,
let me have beautiful dueling scars.


RESPITE

In the middle of February in Minnesota,
unaccountably, the Bahamas show up
making fools of the rich
who have flown winter seeking them.

Throughout the city
the unemployed sit on their porches
in deck-chairs like retired fat-cats
on a luxury liner.
Steam rises out of warped planks;
cars chase each other down
the street like dolphins.

No matter a blizzard up north
is quietly mustering his men.
Today the sun is for the poor.

Somewhere, the first insect shows up,
proud and penitent
like a prodigal son, home
too early for his inheritance.


TO A FRIEND WHO HAS BEEN AN AMBULANCE DRIVER,
A FIREMAN, AND A MORTICIAN, 
AND WHO IS NOW A TEACHER AND A POET

			– for Laurence Milbourn

You deliberately sought the accidents
of others: the cars overturned in ditches
along quiet Wyoming highways,
the houses in your small town
that suddenly bloomed into flame –
these things drew you irresistibly.

What most of us couldn't look at
you looked a – steadily?
What did you see in the broken
faces of strangers?

Later, you learned to fix these faces,
to return them to relatives
as they remembered them, reconstructed
from favorite photographs.
Those who died violently
looked calm in death, sometimes
even proud, as if they had
just graduated from high school.

Now you teach and write.
Sometimes, in the middle of a sentence,
one of your student's eyes will fall out.
You are the only one who notices.
You know how to deal with this,
how to record the precise texture of it,
how to finish your sentence
with just the slightest suggestion of a pause.


THE MYOPIC

is usually most comfortable with books.
He likes to climb around words,
up and down letters like a child
in a jungle-gym.  He is familiar
with small things, and can tell you
if a spider has thumbs, and how many.

He wears glasses in his public
life to share in public visions, but
his real life is at home, at night, after
the wife and kids have gone to bed.
He folds his glasses away and draws
the world in around him like a shawl.

He will sit for hours, legs outstretched,
feet stuck in the fog around him,
and examine very closely the latest
detailed maps of the moon.
Outside, for all he knows, a caravan
of dinosaurs might be rolling on by.


UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION

On a Wednesday afternoon in late summer
the unemployed man wakes from his nap
on the dining room floor
between the piano and dining room table.

He is surrounded by wooden legs.

He feels like the victim of a catastrophe,
coming 'round now
to the distantly concerned stares of strangers.

"Lie still, buddy.
We've called for help.
You'll make it."

At such a moment
it is permitted for a man without a job
and with no prospects
to see his life clearly
in the underside of a wooden table,
unfinished, and full of beautiful knots.


ONE MAN'S POISON

In the men's room in the basement
of the Saint Paul Public Library
a man hands me a pint of whiskey
and asks me to open
the son of a bitch it's on too tight.
I do and am embarrassed
that I can so easily:
my mother's jars, my wife's jars
are tougher than this.
By a perverse alchemy
this man's wrists have turned to milk.
He's an alcoholic he says
and knows he may die any day now
but adds proudly
I ain't hurting no one but myself.
He thanks me and offers me a drink
as I stand in front of the urinal
trying to piss.  I, standing in front
of a urinal in the basement of the Saint Paul
Public Library, politely decline – somehow
not much in my life
has prepared me for this.
Upstairs, I don't check out any books.


PASTORALE FOR SPRING

The new grass, the new lambs
eating the grass, the new calves
butting heads under the slow gaze
of bull-fathers beyond wire fences,
the sparrows flying with pieces of straw
in their beaks, the seagulls a thousand
miles from salt water eating worms
turned up by the plow,
the earth itself. . . .

                     		It is not enough.
I go into the house and put on
Beethoven's 6th symphony, the Pastorale.
I listen to violins and oboes,
former trees, pretending to be winds,
birds and brooks.  I listen to drums,
the hides of animals, trying to be
thunder.
It all works, somehow:

the thunder, controllable – a living" room
thunder, and yet the living" room a world, too.
Outside, the earth is being lifted
by the music, it is rising
out of itself, trees wave their arms
like mad conductors, the sky is breaking
into applause.


TRAVELING INTO THE BODY

(A National Geographic television special)

Finally we grow tired of the world's body,
the countless tribes, the alien
rituals of the dwellers of Katmandu
recorded by Somebody Somebody, Ph.D.,
the fertility dances frozen on impossible Ektachromes.

We return to the source of all journeys,
all documentaries: our own bodies,
our own illusive selves.
With the help of a technology
that coils all the way back to Adam and Eve,
we roll our eyes inward.

We float behind the eye of a camera,
wavering like a kiss, toward
the face of a human being.
We enter through parted lips, past
the gate of the teeth, through
the cavern of the mouth.

We gasp as the camera slips down the gullet
like a bucket down a well.
Suddenly we're where we've never been before
and it has the strange familiarity
of a dream.  We're the snake
swallowing its own tail;
we're playing the old game
of hide-and-seek with the self.

We move through the close,
illuminated tunnel of a bronchial tube.
The camera seems to jiggle a little,
as if the cameraman were drunk with his discovery.
And who can blame him?

We are on the edge of claustrophobia,
but the director, a wise man with a sense of humor,
has provided a symphony to take along.
The music swells and keeps us brave
as the tube narrows.

Every few paces (or so it seems)
there is a fork-two dark holes.
(Two tubes diverged in a lung.)
We take the left, then the right
and then the right again.
The choices mount upon each other.
We feel cramped and suffocated as we draw
nearer to where air becomes blood.

A jump-cut: we are outside the body now
outside ourselves again,
looking at the lungs through an x-ray.
The film is speeded up;
the thousands of small branches of the bronchial tree
wave back and forth as if in a wind.
Look, it is the Burning Bush!
Behind it squats a plump Buddha
pulsing, pulsing, pulsing.


HOW TO READ A POEM

Come at it
the way you would
a pile of clothes on an empty beach at dawn.
Circle it slowly.
Hold the pieces up one by one.
Be a cop; ask questions.

If there are pockets, go through them.
The owner won't notice.
He is probably dead.
Are there any jewels? Fake? Real?
If there are footprints in the sand, where
do they lead? If to water,
don't jump to conclusions.
Have your men walk both ways
down the beach to check for prints leading out.

Is there underwear?
A pile of clothes on a beach
with no underwear is immediately suspect.
It could well be an inauthentic pile.

If there is underwear
examine it closely.  Be neither
embarrassed nor disgusted
by the stains.  If you find
a pair of jockeys and a brassiere,
be on guard, be suspicious.
It could be a false lead.  Remember
there is more here than meets the eye.

Pay close attention to labels,
but draw your conclusions
shrewdly, tentatively.  Be on the lookout
for patterns and combinations
out of the ordinary: Robert Hall
and Florsheim, pleated trousers
and cowboy boots, neckties and baseball caps.
These all point to a mind capable of great whimsy.

Always remember your basic assumption:
You can tell a man from the clothes he wears,
but only while he wears them.
While you are examining his clothes,
the owner may be riding in
on the crest of a wave
twenty miles down the coast, smiling
and mouthing the sound of his new name.


COMPOST

The foods decay, the foods decay.
          Beneath
the roof of snow in dirt rooms the worms work,
mixing molecules, firing the slow burn,
the silent oven kindled against the teeth
of Winter gnawing above.
            Below, weavers
shuttle and loom organic fabrics like words
woven in crossword puzzles.
				      The secret churning
goes on unseen as the cold wind sweeps
the cold land clean.
			  In winter's womb
Spring grows in an architecture of breakings:
As the cellar crumbles the house grows; the rooms
burst above ground into flowers waving
their heads in the new light.
     				   Everywhere tombs
explode and the sweet sap climbs from the grave.


AN OLD MAN'S DESIRE

Tongue of mine,
night bird, fly
to the day's almost-women,
the saplings of womanhood,
the ones alone now, sleeping
barely in dreams.
Rest finally
in the warm nests
of your beginnings; leave me now
at my best,
speechless.


AN HISTORICAL FACT AND A MEMORABLE FANCY

When Kant was composing
his Critique of Pure Reason
he would look up from his manuscript
at the tower in the center of town.
He gazed so long the trees grew up
and obscured his vision.
He informed the city fathers of Konigsberg
and they gladly chopped down the trees.
Thus he was able to finish his work.

Here in the country outside my window
the trees tower and wave their arms mockingly.
I work anyway, here a word, there a line.

Always when I awake in the morning
I run to the window to see if this is the day
my three hundred farmers have arrived,
morning chores all done, murmuring
quietly, axes on their shoulders.


THE SCAR

I touch your belly half asleep.
It is still there.
I dream: A railroad track
on a green field, workmen dismantling it,
tie by tie, loading the long rusted iron
onto trucks. it is hot, the men sweat.
Suddenly, grass pushes up through the gravel,
fast, like a speeded-up movie.
The workmen grow smaller, their clothes
slip off their bodies
and fall like shadows at their feet.
The sun turns green.
The naked children join hands
and run in a circle, grass
up to their hips.
They break the circle and begin to leapfrog,
one over the other, one over the other.
Where they have been,
the grass waves and closes.


DOODLES

We find them around
'the leavings of telephone
conversations clinging
to addresses, appointments;

around the notes
of committee members,
judges; in the margins
of grocery lists and aborted

poems.  They are always
on the edges, sliding
away like vitreous floaters
when we try to see

them clearly.  For all their ubiquity,
they are humble and basic:
flowers, stars, stick-men,
uncomplicated by the rules of

perspective and modeling.
They leave the loud shout
of the third dimension to Art.

They are content to whisper.


A POLITICAL POEM

At the corner cafe
where I sometimes eat
I ordered a raw egg
broken into a cup
no toast no coffee.
I tossed that egg down
my throat like a Cossack
taking vodka.
I did it for shock
value, for the value of the shock.
I did it for the waitress
for my mother for the sunny siders
and hard boilers the over easys.
I did it for those hopelessly
scrambled by America.


THE MAP OF THE HAND

What territory is this?
What rivers, what boundaries?
Whose bones beneath the ancient mounds?

Life, head, heart, fate –
the lines that hold us up,
that cradle us in the deep,
rocking wind of our lives.

I stare down at my own hand
like a man awake in a dream,
flying above the earth.


WAKING

You wake one morning
and find the world is strange –
"Nay, 'tis ten times strange."
Just like that.

You become obsessed
with the thingness of things,
the ecstasy of the possibility of things.
Furniture begins to glow,
to say nothing of the heads of your friends.

You've dreamed of basements,
of cellars beneath the basements,
tunnels beneath the cellars, and caves
at the ends of the tunnels
filled with white light so intense
it made you weep with joy.

In your life
surfaces keep slipping away.
You fall into the warm ocean of nothing
you can fully understand.
You are a drowning man
waving at the stars.  Your lungs explode
into gills.


THE NEW PHYSICS
					– for Fritjof  Capra

And so, the closer he looks at things, the farther away they seem.
At dinner, after a hard day at the universe, he finds himself slipping
through his food.  His own hands wave at him from beyond a mountain
of peas.  Stars and planets dance with molecules on his fingertips.  
After a hard day with the universe, he tumbles through himself, flies 
through  the dream galaxies of his own heart.  In the very presence of 
his family he feels he is descending through an infinite series of 
Chinese boxes.

This morning, when he entered the little broom-closet of the electron 
looking for quarks and neutrinos, it opened into an immense hall, the 
hall into a plain - the Steppes of Mother Russia! He could see men 
hauling barges up the river, chanting faintly for their daily bread.  
It's 
not that he longs for the old Newtonian Days, although something of 
plain matter and simple gravity might be reassuring, something of the 
good old equal-but-opposite forces.  And it's not that he hasn't learned 
to balance comfortably on the see-saw of paradox.  It's what he sees in 
the eyes of his children  – the infinite black holes, the ransomed light 
at the center.


A MEDICAL FACT

At the precise moment of death
the pupil of the eye
opens its widest.

The white lights in ceilings,
the moon, sun
stars, comets, nebulae,
the great band of the Milky Way –
all fall into the brain.

There are no lights
too bright for the dying.


BURNING THE RAT

I find him lying by the door,
legs outstretched as if he died in mid-leap.
I pick him up by the tail.
He feels loose, beyond the first stiffness of death.
His molecules have realized the futility of hanging on;
they know the party's over, it's time to head home.

Suddenly, I want to burn this rat.
I surprise myself at how much I want this.
I want to save him from the slow
decay, the fetid rearrangement
of his parts – or so I tell myself.
But mostly, I want to see him burn.

I drop him on the wire screen
that covers the forty-gallon drum
I use for burning garbage.
I light the fire.
I am strangely satisfied.
As I expected, his whiskers furl
into quick question marks and are gone;
his fur bubbles, then turns black and dry.

The tail, the long nightmare of a tail,
holds on longer than I thought.

Hours later, it is the only thing left,
a white length of ash
like the backbone of something prehistoric
seen from a great distance.


OPENING DAY. DEER HUNTING SEASON

The lead bullets
From the steel barrels
Attached to the wooden stocks
Of the rifles
Kicking against the shoulders
Of the hunters
Return

(Slightly diverted
By the buck's head)

To the mountain.


GETTING READY

I'm the racer poised,
tense in his blocks.
It's been this way for years.
The cramps in my hamstrings
are beyond belief;
my eyes fixed on the finish line
focus into tears;
the bridges of my hands tremble.
I'm waiting for the gun,
the starter's gun.
He has been lifting it into position
for ages; generations
of sparrows come and go,
lining up along his outstretched arm.


THE INSTANT REPLAY

We can have it again
and again – speeded up, slowed down, stopped
at the crucial point:
the knockout punch,
the rare triple play, the race-car
exploding against the wall,
the suicide stepping off the ledge.
We can play it again and again Sam
to our heart's horrible content.
We can even have it reversed:
the diver sucked feet first out of the water,
landing on the board perfectly dry.
At night we dream with the help
of camera techniques:
jump-cuts, fade-outs, slow-mo.
The same old dreams: the snake pits,
the flying over vast cities,
the appointment we have with someone
somewhere, but have yet to keep.


MIDNIGHT CAVE, TEXAS: THE EXPERIMENT

                          – for Michel Siffre

A man descends into a cave
long abandoned by bats.  For six months
the electrodes and wires of science
bristle from his head.

in the dark chest of the earth,
a  hundred feet beneath the seasons
and with no clock but
the wound timepiece of himself,

he seeks his own rhythms.
Above him colleagues monitor
his vital functions
and turn the lights on

and off at his request.
His dreams,  of course,  are his own,
part of the self's  short-circuit,
not to be monitored by the surface crew.

After the 130th cycle
(there are no days), after waking
in panic in absolute darkness,
he writes, "When you find yourself

alone, isolated
in a world totally without time,
face-to-face with yourself, all
the  masks  that  you  hide behind –
those that preserve your own illusions,
those that protect them before others –
finally fall, sometimes brutally."
The man sits on a rock

in the circle of light
around his pale-blue tent
for a succession of eternities
swaying mindlessly.  He daydreams

of the dense jungles of Guatemala,
the sunlight filtering
through wet leaves.  His boyhood
fantasy of finding Mayan relics

somehow sustains him:
"I will go to Central America
and I will regain control of my soul."
On the floor of the cave

the dust of ancient bat guano
filters, particle by fine particle,
through itself.


WAXING THE CAR

Seeing yourself suddenly
in the convex, flying-away-world
of the polished
hubcap, your hand
the largest part of you,
you stretched behind it, diminished
like the past –
like History itself
moving this huge appendage
back and forth against itself
across the invisible, chrome present.


SAILING

After years by the ocean
a man finds he learns to sail
in the middle of the country,
on the surface of a small lake with a woman's name
in a small boat with one sail.

All summer he skims back and forth
across the open, blue eye of the midwest.
The wind comes in from the northeast
most days and the man learns
how to seem to go against it, learns
of the natural always crouched
in the shadow of the unnatural.

Sometimes the wind stops
and the man is becalmed –
just like the old traders who sat for days
in the doldrums on the thin skin of the ocean,
nursing their scurvys
and grumbling over short grog rations.

And the man learns a certain language:
he watches the luff, beats windward, comes
hard-about, finally gets
port and starboard straight.

All summer, between the soft, silt bottom
and the blue sheath of the sky, he glides
back and forth across the modest lake
with the woman's name.

And at night
he dreams of infinite flat surfaces,
of flying at incredible speed,
one hand on the tiller, one on the mainsheet, leaning
far out over the sparkling surface, the sail
a transparent membrane, the wind
with its silent howl, a force
moving him from his own heart.


* * *

I picked up some seaweed
and felt the despair
of its collapse on the sand,
the change in its being, how
it lacked feathers for its new life
in the air, how it shrank
from its sudden acquaintance with dust.

I watch you comb your hair,
the part down the middle.

I grow small.  I climb
onto your head and lie
down in the part.

Your hair becomes water,
the Pacific Ocean.  I lie
on the invisible seam, the waves
rising under me, parting
and flowing off to America and Asia.
They fall on the ears of those places
like hair.

I am happy
lying on my back in my hair-ocean.


A NIGHTMARE CONCERNING PRIESTS

They whirl down the aisles;
the congregation applauds.
Frankly, I'm frightened.
From the pulpit the bishop
shows us his armpits.
They are hairless
like a female trapeze artist's.
When he speaks, his teeth
click like dice and white hosts
tumble from his mouth.
The people don't mind;
they count it a blessing.
From up on the cross,
high above the altar, Christ
calls to the multitude
for someone to please,
please scratch his nose.
Twelve nuns in the front row
gaze at him sweetly.
One polishes
a wedding band against her habit.


THE ZEN OF HOUSEWORK

I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.

My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.

Full of the gray wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches,
is setting in Western America.

I can see thousands of droplets
of steam – each a tiny spectrum – rising
from my goblet of gray wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly – like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.

Ah, gray sacrament of the mundane!


IT MAY BE SOMETHING LIKE THIS

inside my head
a bird.
Inside the bird's head
an elephant.
Inside the head of the elephant
the vast Serengeti Plain stretches for miles.
Perhaps it is noon.
The heat vibrates the trees
and the worms dig a few inches deeper.
 Around the world
the sun is always rising always setting.
Perhaps the distant stars
are white holes inside my head.


SEEING, TASTING

Sitting on the porch,
leaves falling aslant the frame
I have created,
I feel like that nameless tribe
deep in some walled jungle
who anthropologists found had never
discovered perspective,
who when finding some deep clearing
and the distant beast on the other edge, see
it as a small animal close,
who see all large things far
as small things near.

At a time like this,
on the porch on a fine fall day, I see
the neighbor's house across the street
as a doll's house, my neighbors
intricate, wonderful dolls.
I taste the shape and texture
of that house with my tongue: the cracked
weather-board, the emptiness of open windows,
the sudden tickle of a flight of sparrows.

I can't stop there.  I shove
my tongue down the street, over parked
cars – the lovely rust, the warm metal.
My tongue absorbs accidents at intersections;
no one is injured, only inconvenienced.
My tongue grows larger from the richness
of its experience.  It covers a neighborhood,
it covers the entire city, it moves out
over the vast heartland.
I can taste the Salt of the Earth,
the ocean that used to be there.
Everywhere, I feel the little raised bumps
of barns and farmhouses,
their desperate Braille messages.


ECZEMA: A LOVE POEM

My skin itches
and after a while of trying
to transcend the itch,
I scratch – the slow climb to ecstasy;
perhaps my skin will orgasm.

No one thing touches another.

If we eliminated the space
between our molecules we – each of us – would fit
in a thimble:
tiny buckets of ash.

One plane of skin
seems to rub another.
Out of the space between
something nothing is touching festers.


SLEEP POEM

In sleep we reach into our Selves
like hands taking food from ovens.
Our Selves eat our Selves to save our Selves.
In the great kitchen of the night
we are both bread and knife.

In the city of the great kitchen of the night
we are the huge trucks that enter
purposefully as sperm
bringing ripe apricots from California.

In the universe of the city of the great kitchen of the night
we are the light from the star a billion years
behind our eyelids.

From the universe of the city of the great kitchen of the night
we awake into the suburbs of morning.
All day our Selves run from our Selves.
Like circles, we are on our own edges.


RUNNING DOWN SUMMIT AVENUE IN SAINT PAUL IN A HEAVY SNOWFALL

Fat flakes of snow explode in my eyes.
Zero visibility,
the airport or weather bureau would say.

The world is a block long
and I am running in that world
past the ghostly houses of the rich.

Traffic lights appear,
catching and releasing phantom traffic.
I violate a red light.

Above me, the trees make a cathedral.
The altar is miles away.

I could run forever.


THE BLESSING

Lying on my stomach
in the backyard, my eyes
leave War and Peace, skip away
from lives more beautifully broken
than mine, fall on a dewdrop
hung in the shade of a blade of grass in the summer sun.
An insect – a kind of caterpillar--
no larger than a comma approaches,
his body folding and unfolding.
Under my nose, all of Mother Russia
and the drama of an insect and a drop of water.
My insect enters the dewdrop –
simply walks into it,
for a few seconds a timeless bug in amber.
He comes out, glistening in the summer air.
The dewdrop remains as before,
pure and clear, a collector of light,
self-contained in its miraculous simplicity. . . .
As if in the old gypsy woman's tent,
after a few predictable cliches
about the future, after
you've paid her a handful of coins
and are rising to leave, she smiles
and passes her hand through the crystal ball.
Lying on my stomach in the grass,
I seem to be looking over my own shoulder,
watching myself watch myself
pass in and out of solid domes
of light, impossibly clear demi-worlds.


OUR CAT'S FASCINATION WITH WATER

I wake to his weight on my chest, his half-closed eyes saying it's
time to get up, human. in the bathroom, I turn on the faucet in the
tub for him, the way I have most mornings the last two years.  He
jumps in.  The black flames of his eyes widen.  Again, he can't
believe it, can't believe the silver chord hanging from the silver
faucet, can't believe he lives in a world that gives him the same,
new gift each morning; can't believe it, so he has to touch it, and
then can't believe his paw goes right through it, and has to touch it
again and again; and 1, looking at his lost eyes, the wet paw,
the tail flicking on the white porcelain, my untouchable other self
on the silver surface of the mirror, can't believe it either.


THE NEW LAND

And so, I come to the new land, dragging the baggage of the
old land with me.  I impose the old maps on the new places.
The old vegetation springs newly named in the new land.

I have traveled a great distance and still my arrival is a dream.
The old land is under everything - like the old landscapes found
glowing faintly under the skins of forgotten portraits.

My life is becoming like the kneading of bread, an endless turning
in on itself; the dailiness alone sustains me.

My life is like the transitions of the language: I find myself
in the translucent streets of the new land, shouting in a voice
no one seems to hear: however, moreover, nonetheless,
furthermore, . . .


A MAN JOURNEYS TO THE CENTER OF HIMSELF

					– for Russell  Edson

A man begins the long countdown that will bring him to his center . . .
100 ... 99 ... 98 ... He goes through the rainbow of colors, meditating 
on 
each and absorbing its special gift.

Now he is in an elevator going down to the bottom of things.  The
floors slip by and the lit numbers above the door blink one by one 
indicating the slipping by of the floors which in turn represent
the subterranean levels of this man.

Soon the man arrives at "B" - the basement, where all the pipes are, 
where it's hot and humming.  The doors slide open and the man steps out 
into a dim passageway.  He can feel moss on the walls and from 
somewhere the sound of dripping . . .

Now he is on a spiral, stone staircase; some torches sputter on the 
wall.

And now he arrives at a large subterranean lake and he is diving in 
naked and swimming past fish who with their wide eyes only seem 
curious.  On the bottom of the lake he finds the rusty iron ring that 
opens the trapdoor.

He climbs into the waiting arms of a tree and slithers down its soft 
bark and lands on a vast, still plain wrapped in its night.  The man 
pauses to reconnoiter . . .  Ah yes, he remembers now.

He goes to the rim of the well and peers over the edge.  Under the 
water's black surface floats the man's North Star looking like a 
common silver coin of the realm.

He looks up.  Yes, there is the North Star's North Star! Suddenly he is 
confused; why is he here? Ah, the journey to the center of himself,  he 
says.    He focuses on the bottomless star and begins the long 
countdown . . .


UNDER IDEAL CONDITIONS

say in the flattest part of North Dakota
on a starless moonless night
no breath of wind

a man could light a candle
then walk away
every now and then
he could turn and see
the candle burning

seventeen miles later
provided conditions remained ideal
he could still see the flame

somewhere between the seventeenth and eighteenth mile
he would lose the light

if he were walking backwards
he would know the exact moment
when he lost the flame

he could step forward and find it again
back and forth
dark to light light to dark

what's the place where the light disappears?
where the light reappears?
don't tell me about photons
and eyeballs
reflection and refraction
don't tell me about one hundred and eighty-six thousand
miles per second and the theory of relativity

all I know is that place
where the light appears and disappears
that's the place where we live


LEARNING TO DANCE: MAINTAINING A FRAME

In the traditional ballroom dances,
maintaining a frame
of right firmness is paramount.
The man will be unable to lead

and the woman unable to follow
unless a firm frame of the upper body
(including arms) is maintained.
If the woman's frame is too loose

the man will feel he is driving
a car with a steering wheel fashioned out of cooked pasta;
if too firm, he will feel he is in a contest
of strength and will, and he may try to overpower

the woman, thus ruining the dance.
The woman, on her part, despite the progress
of our uncertain age, must surrender to the man's lead
by remaining firm and following him as always

just before he leads.


LEARNING TO DANCE: STEPPING FORWARD

The man steps
straight forward
on his heel just as in walking.
He steps into the body of the woman
as into a doorway
as she steps straight back.

For the man, this is not
as easy as it sounds.
He, in his consideration
of the woman, may tend
to step obliquely
or, worse yet, slide
his foot forward along the floor
into the woman
stubbing her toes
thus causing the very effect
he wishes to avoid.

We cannot overstress
the importance of stepping straight forward
on the heel
just as in walking:
that first step into
the space made by the woman's body
leaving.


LOVE IN THE CLASSROOM

                     – for my students

Afternoon.  Across the garden, in Green Hall,
someone begins playing the old piano –
a spontaneous piece, amateurish and alive,
full of a simple, joyful melody.
The music floats among us in the classroom.

I stand in front of my students
telling them about sentence fragments.
I ask them to find the ten fragments
in the twenty-one-sentence paragraph on page forty-five.
They've come from all parts
of the world – Iran, Micronesia, Africa,
Japan, China, even Los Angeles – and they're still
eager to please me.  It's less than half
way through the quarter.

They bend over their books and begin.
Hamid's lips move as he follows
the tortuous labyrinth of English syntax.
Yoshie sits erect, perfect in her pale make-up,
legs crossed, quick pulse minutely
jerking her right foot.  Tony,
from an island in the South Pacific, sprawls
limp and relaxed in his desk.

The melody floats around and through us
in the room, broken here and there, fragmented,
re-started.  It feels Mideastern, but
it could be jazz, or the blues – it could be
anything from anywhere.
I sit down on my desk to wait,
and it hits me from nowhere – a sudden,
sweet, almost painful love for my students.

"Nevermind," I want to cry out.
"It doesn't matter about fragments.
Finding them or not.  Everything's
a fragment and everything's not a fragment.
Listen to the music, how fragmented,
how whole, how we can't separate the music
from the sun falling on its knees on all the greenness,
from this moment, how this moment
contains all the fragments of yesterday
and everything we'll ever know of tomorrow!"

Instead, I keep a coward's silence.
The music stops abruptly;
they finish their work,
and we go through the right answers,
which is to say
we separate the fragments from the whole.


WAITING FOR THE PRESENT

I would sit in the dimness
of my father's wooden toolshed
waiting for the mice
to come out and feed
on the wheat we kept
in a hundred-pound sack for the chickens.

I kept silence, refusing
even to swallow, hoping the thud
of my heart wouldn't betray me.
The only way to the sack
was over my still body.

Outside, it was Australia,
Christmas, summer holidays –
the heat unbearable to all but reptiles
and schoolboys, and the mice
who lived their small, secret lives.

When the first mouse
nosed up the unfamiliar landscape
of my body, motes of dust
floating in the beams of light
that streamed in from the cracks in the wall
exploded minutely.

After hours of sitting
through the long summer, motionless,
alert, though my limbs were asleep,
the mice accepted me.
I simply became the way to their food.
Once, as many as a dozen were on me,
each carrying a single, precious grain.

Now, years later, I find myself still
sitting in the dim light,
legs locked in meditation, monkey-mind
swinging between imagined past and imagined future,
waiting for that most obvious of hiddens,
the ungraspable present.


DESK STILL LIFE LATE AT NIGHT

Under the lamp's glow everything seems
edged with a benign fuzz or moss,
as if something had grown on all objects:
a green pen sprouting pale green fur;
a row of soft books tilted to one side;
manila folders, their velvety skin
like a girl's back;
from the familiar photos on the wall, a memory
of friendly eyes gazing across the short space at me;
a blue book of poems
with a title I can't see clearly.
With words, even at this distance,
I'm like an illiterate, I can't read most of them.
Everything I see
looks like it wants to be touched.


AT FOUR A.M.

in a loud ringing voice,
a voice completely untouched by personality,
a voice straight
from the heart of the universe,
a coyote lets out two cries
through the pre-dawn mist.

The neighborhood dogs
respond with woofs, growls and howls,
the familiar voices
of disgruntled pets,
almost human
in their overlay of bravado,
their undertone of fear.


THE HAT IN THE SKY

After the war,
my father's hobby
was photography.
New fathers often become
photographers, it seems.
But he took pictures of many things
besides me,
as if he suddenly felt it all
slipping away
and wanted to hold it forever.
In one of the many shoe boxes
full of photographs
in my father's house,
one photo sticks in my mind,
a snapshot
of a black hat
in mid-air,
the kind of hat fashionable in the forties,
a fedora – something
Bogie would wear.
Someone has thrown it
into the air –
my father himself or
someone else
in an exuberant moment
at a rally or gathering.
It's still there,
hanging in the sky
as ordinary and impossible
as a painting by Magrite,
and it's impossible how it wrenches my heart, somehow.
At odd moments in my life,
that hat appears to me
for no discernible reason.


CONSIDERING THE ACCORDION

The idea of it is distasteful at best.  Awkward box of wind, diminutive,
misplaced piano on one side, raised Braille buttons on the other.  The
bellows, like some parody of breathing, like some medical apparatus from a
Victorian sick-ward.  A grotesque poem in three dimensions, a rococo
thing-a-me-bob.  I once strapped an accordion on my chest and right away I
had to lean back on my heels, my chin in the air, my back arched like a
bullfighter or flamenco dancer.  I became an unheard of contradiction:  a
gypsy in graduate school.  Ah, but for all that, we find evidence of the
soul in the most unlikely places.  Once in a Czech restaurant in Long
Beach, an ancient accordionist came to our table and played the old
favorites:  "Lady of Spain," " The Saber Dance," "Dark Eyes," and through
all the clichis his spirit sang clearly.  It seemed like the accordion
floated in air, and he swayed weightlessly behind it, eyes closed, back in
Prague or some lost village of his childhood.  For a moment we all
floated – the whole restaurant:  the patrons, the knives and forks, the
wine, the sacrificed fish on plates.  Everything was pure and eternal,
fragiley suspended like a stained-glass window in the one remaining wall of
a bombed out church.


EYE GAZING, SESSHIN

Every morning we pair off randomly
for thirty minutes of eye gazing,
sit in front of a partner,
knees touching, choose one eye
and sustain eye contact for the duration,
no attempt to dominate, no fierce staring,
just gaze, blinking naturally, easily,
just seeing what comes up,
what simply happens.

No big deal, right?
After all, you're only looking into the eye
of another human being.
Wrong!  Everything comes up,
especially fear –
fear of being judged, fear of being discovered
for the worthless turd you think you really are,
to say nothing of the deeper fears,
like disappearing or dying
or losing yourself in the abysmal pupil
of the dreaded "Other."

Sometimes someone starts laughing
and it spreads like contagion,
the whole zendo – fifteen pairs of locked eyebrows –
thirty people sputtering, giggling, guffawing,
no stopping the nervous energy
until it plays itself out through rising and falling swells.

Eros and the desire to merge also, and
sometimes the restfulness and peace of some kind
of contact with another, the calm
of seeing compassion and acceptance in that other eye.

Sometimes the hallucinations,
the face changing form right in front of you,
black hair turning gray,
beards sprouting, eyes changing color,
flickering electric auras,
men's faces becoming women's,
women's men's.
Once, I swear, looking calmly back at me
I saw my own face.


SEEN FROM A BUS, JAIPUR

Stopped in early morning traffic,
about to leave the City of Jewels,
amidst the stirring market life, I see
by the side of the road in the dirt
a naked man lying on his back –
sadhu or beggar, or both – one knee up, one arm
flung over his eyes, slowly waking,
careless of the shoppers and workers moving past him.
He is wearing nothing, has
neither blanket nor pillow.
He is naked in the street – and asleep! –
and pointing into the new day
with a partial erection, counter-balanced
by heavy testicles, totally
unprotected in a world of moving objects.
Is this madness, ultimate trust?
There it is, my other life, that life
without pockets, without appointments,
without aerobics,
that life that says simply, "I am what I am,
and what I am is all of it."
Still, sitting inside my clothes inside the bus
I reassure myself:
In a little while, he'll have to get up
and start looking for food,
or, at the very least, if he's fasting, water.
Yes, he'll definitely
have to start looking for water.


CAT PUKE AND FLIES POEM

I feed Marcello a can of Liver and Chicken.
He bolts it down too fast, as usual.
Two minutes later he throws up
on the back patio.
The first fly shows up within seconds,
ecstatic over life's bounty.
Within minutes, the word's out
somehow, the brothers and sisters
coming in fast.

The sun creeps along the cement floor.
Pretty soon, half the cat puke is in light,
the other in shadow, like sunrise
on a volcanic island.
At least thirty flies have gathered by now,
walking around and eating
what they're walking around on.

I move in closer.
Such organization and grace –
no fuss, no fighting.  There's obviously always
enough for everyone in the fly world.
And plenty of time to get off a quickie
with your neighbor.

I'm now on my hands and knees,
my face within inches
of the calm feeding of at least fifty flies
(give or take arrivals and departures).
None seem to notice me,
the sun glinting off their emerald thoraxes
and through their purple wings.


REARRANGING THE LANDSCAPE

Three men in three baseball caps
are laboring in the back yard,
re-doing the landscape:  one scrapes off

the weedy topsoil with heavy mattock, swinging
it slowly like an elephant swinging its trunk;  another
plants new roses along the fence, tamping

them in with his bare palms into the new
loamy soil they've brought in large plastic bags;
the third works on the sprinkler system, laying

in the long white plastic piping so like
sun-bleached bones exposed in shallow graves.
I look on from behind glass, a man too busy, too

unwilling to do this kind of work, instead
reading students' essays at the dining-room table.
On the TV screen, CNN "updates"

"THE WAR IN THE GULF" with maps, disembodied voice-overs,
epauletted field correspondents, neat anchor persons,
grainy-gray videos shot from F-15s of pin-point

missile hits, vague buildings, bridges instantly, sound-
lessly disintegrating – no blood, no guts,
no horror, a clean war. . . .  Outside, the landscape

is slowly being rearranged:  what was a yard of weeds is now
a yard of dry dirt and small rocks.  To honor this
and the work of the three men, I get up, make tea

and take the pot, three cups, milk sugar, spoons
outside on a tray, and invite them to drink.
Van, the leader, the English speaking one, thanks me,

and we exchange comments on how the work is going:
"It looks good," I say.
"Yes, not too hot today.  Easy to work," he says. . . .

Back inside, I labor through a few more essays, scribbling
comments and letter grades at the end, my heart
not in it.  Outside, the three Vietnamese work.

I want to go out and say, "Look, I think the tea
was really meant to tell you
that I opposed the war, even marched against it. . . ."

For the first time I notice it:  a small olive-drab metal
ammunition box, stenciled clearly on the side:
 "200 Cartridges

7. 62 mm – M13,"
sitting there on my back patio
as ordinary and real as the red and silver

can of Coca Cola, the cut branches, a pile of leaves,
the mechanical leaf-blower,
three empty ceramic tea cups on a wooden tray.


THE ALGEBRA NIGHTMARE

I must solve a complex mathematical problem,
an immense algebraic equation
full of fractions, parentheses,
the square roots of square roots, to say nothing
of an ancient, cryptic hieroglyphics.

The equation spreads across the board
written by a teacher with miserable handwriting.
Her chalk keeps breaking and falling
to the floor where she tramples it underfoot
and grinds it into a fine powder.

I sit and stare at my test paper.
I copy down a few fractions.
For a moment I'm on the edge of finding
a way out of the labyrinthine equation, but
I've forgotten the manipulations,
forgotten how to add and subtract,
how to factor out, how to cancel out
one thing with another.

I look at the teacher and cry,
"How do you divide the square root
of seven with the ankh-fish-bird?!
What is twelve times alpha-omega minus
the four cardinal points of the compass?!"

She casts an impatient, sad glance in my direction
and continues the equation off the blackboard,
onto the wall, out the window,
drops the chalk – now a feather –
gestures and signs, using a system
current twenty-five thousand years ago
among shamans on the North American continent,
and at last I understand:

all systems begin and end in silence, nothing
needs solving, nothing is a problem....
her face composed as a Madonna's,
mysterious as a flight of birds.


TROMPE L'OEIL

Perhaps because my near vision is so good,
I could take up painting miniatures
and see how much of the world
I could capture on the smallest canvas.
Begin, say, by managing a midwestern cornfield with its farmhouse, barn and
silo
onto a postage stamp.
Eventually get the scene from the north rim of the Grand Canyon down
onto a polished grain of rice, or maybe
render Notre Dame Cathedral
with particular attention paid to the famous stained glass windows
onto the secondary wing of a baby gnat.

And thus could I trick my eyes
into seeing great distances again, those distant stars I remember from
childhood days,
galaxies really, untold light years away.
They could show up again as pulsing points of light,
charming details
in my vastly important life.


THINGS & CREATURES


FLOOR

I support your walls
with their stained,
translucent windows,
your filigreed ceilings
with their busy chandeliers.
I'm the bottom of the box
you built
for yourself to live in.


BED

It all happens on me –
birth, love, death,
sleeping and waking.

Your passionate dreams,
full of violence and hope,
are nothing to me.
Through all the changes
I remain the same.


TABLE

I'm made to be put upon,
to be sat at.
Round or square,
my numbers are millions.
I stand solidly
on my many legs.
Where you find me,
you find the ungainly two-leggeds,
moving, always on the verge
of losing their balance,
of falling down


PLATE

I receive only to give away.
My life is simple
and full of surrender:
I'm picked up, put down.
In the end, I'm always made clean
or broken.


FORK

I mock the hand
that feeds with me,
that made me in its own image.
Handle and tines,
wrist and fingers.
I'm metal and will live
almost forever.


KNIFE

What, after all, is cutting?
One thing moving through another.
What about pain, you say?
What's pain?


HAMMOCK

I'm a bed of wind,
a pendulum of quiet ecstasy,
an ocean wave of bliss.

Lie in me,
forget your troubles,
remember who you are.


BELL

You use me to call
and warn each other,
to remind yourselves
of beginnings and endings.
But it's just another
of your wonderful games
wrought out of metal.
If you ever heard me once –
truly heard me –
the universe would be yours again.


CANDLE

I live in two realms:
by daylight, the catatonia of stiff wax.
Under the sun
I can only sleep.
At night, in dark emergencies,
I go into an ecstasy
of broadcasting my small light,
everywhere blessing the shoulders
of furniture.
I burn!  I melt!
The more I'm awake,
the more I disappear.


SHADOW

Clearly, I'm what's real.
Don't be fooled
by those twin ephemera,
substance and light.


CATERPILLAR

What hope do I have
with so many hands
to hold on with?
At night, when the leaves blow,
I feel a fluttering inside.
I want to let go into the wind.


FROG

You could learn much
from how I sit
motionless
on my lily pad,
awake,
and ready for everything.


WORM

eating the earth
passing it through
passing through


ECHO

I'm what happens
after what happens.
And what's that, you say?
What's that you say?


THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE

What is it,
this pearl of great price?
this thing made from accident and irritation?
the grit that floats in
and lodges under the tender flesh
and can't be thrown out, will not
go away and so must be taken in
and worked on and worked with,
made of the very minerals and juices of the body,
the accretions of worry and suffering,
rounded off and smoothed finally,
seen as a gift at last to ourselves
and therefore to the world.


SHIRT

Perhaps you've noticed me hanging 
in the closet, lifeless, 
sleeves empty of arms,
unbuttoned, slack, inert –
or perhaps you've seen me
(not so often these days)
dancing in the wind
on a clothesline, dancing like
a village idiot, billowing and filling
like a sail going nowhere.
More likely you've picked me up
from the laundry (medium starch) pressed
in among my fellows ready for wearing again,
fresh, renewed.
And I know you've worn me
and admired my colors, my tailoring,
the way my pockets slanted just so,
the texture of my textiles,
the feel of me on your back,
the reminder I give you of your body,
the bright, warm shell of it.


IN THE BACKGROUND

It happened again, today:
I looked up and found myself in the corner 
of a tourist's camera lens, another 
piece of my soul caught momentarily,
hung in the background like a painting within
a painting, a little blurred, indistinct,
the shadow of something important,
to be carried back to – this time – Japan,
developed and pored over by the family
reviewing their visit to America:
there's Akiko, sunglasses and all, next to Koji
all his doubts hidden behind a fixed expression.
Perhaps by now, as the family of voyeurs
gobble up the images, Akiko and Koji
have worked it all out.  How could they have not,
what with seagulls and battleships 
and that small figure in the background
like an angel on their shoulder.


INCIDENT

As I sat at my desk one early morning,
a dove flew full force into the plate-glass door.
The thump, like a small bomb exploding,
shocked me and round I spun
to see her on the ground outside,
neck twisted, beak apart, eyelid slowly lowering,
in her death throes, a delicate
shudder, beak closing one last time,
and then a stillness of feathers,
beautiful feathers,
one-of-a-kind,
never-to-be-grown-again
feathers.


MADONNA AND CHILD

They'll never be the same for me again,
not since that art class
in the local museum, when the teacher
took us through the gallery and 
we paused at a renaissance painting,
and we really looked at it,
describing it among ourselves
the foreground and background, the rich
brocaded cloth of the Madonna's gown, the crinkled
cotton of the child's white garment.
In the lower corner of the open window,
someone was plowing a field
and beyond him, the distant, bluing hills.
Then the teacher asked us if we noticed
anything about the mother and child,
and finally one of us observed
the child was looking away from the mother,
Jesus already looking past the world, his gaze
fixed on something distant, otherworldly.
Mary was looking to the side and down, modestly,
a little sad – not depressed, not a psychological state –
but pure dignified sadness, the human condition, her face
reflecting the knowledge that despite
grace, despite being the vehicle
for the birth of a god, life
is still sad, sad because you give birth
to a Christ who is also a human being,
who will suffer the pain
a mother can neither prevent nor tolerate.
Mother holding child, child in two worlds,
both of them on a holy mission from God,
the painter having succeeded at getting that down,
in her face the sheer humanity of the mother, her
sixteenth-century Italian teenage beauty and innocence and
the wisdom of the ages and love, the little infant
with the big unwieldy body and
the expression already full of knowing and compassion
and just that little human edge, too
of why me, Lord, why me? 

Algirdas Žolynas was born in Austria of Lithuanian parents, and since then has moved twenty three times. After growing up in Sydney, Australia and Chicago, he has lived in Salt Lake City, and in Marshall and St. Paul, Minnesota. At various times Žolynas has been a kitchen helper, lifeguard, worker in a felt factory, cab driver, road construction worker, poetry editor, resident poet in the schools, Minnesota Out Loud Traveling Poet, volunteer for the Hunger Project, and Fulbright-Hays Fellow to India. He now teaches writing and literature at the United States International University in San Diego, and resides with his wife in Escondido. He is also a student of Zen. Žolynas' poetry has appeared widely in American journals and anthologies, and he is the author of two collections of poetry. Recently he co-edited an anthology titled Men of Our Time: An Anthology of Male Poetry in Contemporary America. Žolynas' poetry has been translated into Lithuanian, Spanish, and Polish – the last by Czeslaw Milosz.