CORNUCOPIA
i
My mother urges me to learn the horn.
“You’ll always have a job, no matter where
you find yourself, whatever city, there’s
always
a local.” My mother just wants
to raise good union musicians. Her sons
will
pay their dues, & be card-carrying
trumpet-playing men. I don’t know how to
tell
her I’ve dropped my instrument, my mouth-
piece is stuck, & the odor of the valve
ointment
works my gut. She says I’m holding
the horn wrong, it should rise slightly more than
perpendicular
to the ground, & that’s
why I have trouble handling some notes,
why
I’m slow at fingering my sixteenths.
My mother says, “just try it from the top,
take
it to the coda, then start again.”
ii
At
first the valves stand open, then I close
the
first & the third together, the first
& the second, the first alone, & then
the
way is clear again, again I close
the first & the second, then the second
alone,
& then again the way is clear,
I’m
scaling up a major scale, but as
I
force my air into these close quarters,
trap-doors, dead-ends, I strain to pitch myself
one
half-step higher than I could before,
I
plunge myself into a labyrinth
where
passages slide open & slam shut
without ever delivering the note
to
end all notes, I reach with my last breath
into the dark bell, cornucopia
from
which others pull such unearthly fruit.
iii
I’m buying CDs, all kinds, jazz, swing, ska,
dixieland,
rhythm & blues, soul, & lounge.
I
rotate the top four or five, & then
replace
them with another four or five.
Impulse, Milestone, Reprise — make me turn east
&
face Decca, a subterranean
intensity rears up from the subways,
a
crescendo, & I see the faces
in a flourish, it’s Louie, Freddie, Miles
&
Chet, each one halo’d by a blue spot,
in isolation or in concert, horns
muted
or blatant, the brass taste is back
in my mouth, in my CD player
where
CDs spin in perpetuity,
I
imagine I’m in darkness, playing
audience
to those that turn in the light.
iv
Confectionery
sugar caps your glass
of
arctic vodka. I sip the currant-
red elixir at my lip. The trumpet
soloist,
not two feet away, has clamped
a horn to his kisser, his embouchure,
as
if to drink a horn’s-worth of alpine
ice-water, having scaled a severe cliff-
face.
His face puffs, an old cartographer’s
caricature of the wind god’s bluster —
his
eyes clench shut, blind to the room & its
distractions. He’s putting all of his guff,
his
blood & his bone, into the one riff,
& if he falls, that piercingly high C
he’s
clinging to won’t save him. I’m waiting
for his lip to crack. This idiot, this
jack-in-the-box.
O God. I envy him.
v
Buried
amid toys & appliances
with
warrantees that’ve long since expired,
guns & jewelry of uncertain faith,
bugle,
cornet, trumpet, flugelhorn
stand at attention, up-ended, condemned
souls
in a junk-shop ensemble. Tarnish,
not gold, their finishes, as their coffins
gather
dust under the counter. Empty.
Clarion,
French horn, Baritone. I start
to
quake as I pass by this abandoned
trumpery. Whatever breath of life once
warmed
these metallic chalices long since
split out the spit valve. Still, each one harbors
a
hope of resurrection, & resounds
with hallelujahs in its quiet heart.
To
rise & be played at the final Trump.
[Texas
Review]
DEATH
& THE MAIDEN
Plenty takes his usual
suite at the casino.
Lay him out
the complimentary condiments,
chocolates minted as coin
& wrapped in goldleaf,
the sempiternally
open bar. His maiden
of the evening lolls
on a queen-sized sleeper,
where her eyes glassily mirror
the twenty-four hour adult
channel on closed-circuit
cable. Inexhaustible
exercise, that never reaches
the afterglow of embrace.
Undone to her tie-me-down heels,
she vacantly picks seeds from
between her teeth.
From beside the roulette
table, Plenty winks
at his prize,
&
flips
another chip. Let it ride
on thirteen black,
lucky
thirteen.
[Sensations
Magazine]
THEATER
In my days of childhood programming,
days I memorized a psalter of jingles,
days of compulsory song —
we took the cardboard puppet theater,
cut with holes for curtain rods —
a cost-effective Punch & Judy show.
We stood it upright,
stood inside, & made believe
we stood inside a private television,
& let the backyard stand for the nation.
Rhododendrons hushed
the audience,
as we stuck our hands through,
struck one hand against the other,
& the rioting began.
The gold-stitched king was deposed,
& princess Barbie, his youngest daughter,
denuded. An armless GI Joe
led legions of Snoopies
to storm the invisible fortress.
We broke open bags of toy plastic
soldiers, all the weaponry of the play-
ground, sticks & stones, stop-
watches & stun-guns, & in some cities
there were demonstrations. Raised voices.
There was hair-pulling, kicking,
names were called.
It was anarchy —
&
once we got
a taste for it, we returned
to the set, the next day & the next,
to play until the inevitable
call to supper, to stumble, fall,
break open our scabs,
exhaust the depths
of our toychests, & sing
the hymns of our sponsors.
[Texas
Observer]
REVEILLE
It is Wednesday, the twentieth of November,
somewhere in the continuum,
a
dark Wednesday.
It
is raining,
as my deranged uncle explains his theory
that someday we will all be able to hear voices
whispering singing calling screaming carrying
all the voices telling us all that has ever
been voiced
that
noise is energy that never dies
that even as he is telling you this he is
adding to the energy field
that
as he plays
his trumpet over the inaudible trumpet
solos of the past in effect he adds himself
like a layer of silt over the previous
deposits
that
somewhere
under
there
there’s
a chorus
of the accumulated reveilles & taps
& charges & scales & all the original
performances & practices, say, of Handel’s
Messiah, or Satchmo reigning in the Quarter,
& the trumpet flourish that brought down
Jericho,
so cacophonously packed into the background
of the air that our ears become insensitive
to all but the freshest additions
it
survives
in a way that only an archeologist
of silence would be able to appreciate
& yet it survives
&
someday a recording
device will be devised to isolate & playback
Shakespeare’s Macbeth its opening night
Whitman composing his leaves out loud or even
Washington cursing Cornwallis for a bastard
son of a navy whore at word
of
a British
advance
it
would edit out the birth cries
& the death cries, explosions & long, long
intervals of suffering
it
would revise
our understanding of history
my
uncle
sees no reason he should bother to age & die
he pulls his trumpet out of its case
&
makes his
deranged contribution
[American
Poetry Monthly]
CANTICLE OF THE
SEVENTH MONTH
There was a
great obsession with water
in those days.
Mosquitoes monitored
the local pool. Hyperglycemic kids
cannonballed in, two at a time.
A chunk-white
cherub swooned into
chlorinated blue, after a two-toned
Venus in pigtails rose from the deep end.
What
vigilance. Disposable youths in cut-offs
& clogs
parade through arcades to murder
one another, & quench bloodthirst
with Dr. Pepper.
No one cared about
anything
less than the repair of the air conditioning.
We burned Freon in the pitch of those afternoons,
& what
peculiar girl stepped out in her
nightgown to check thermostats?
It is said:
a man died on the east beach,
carried off by a sunspot of naked valkyries,
& children buried him under sand castles.
He wasn’t found until the third day.
A day of rain
&
who doesn’t
dream of resurrection in July?
[American
Poetry Monthly]
ARIES
the fire of the moon neither eats nor
drinks
—
Shahrazad
He checks his matchbook,
counts thirteen, selecting
one to strike against the dark.
It flares at his fingers
& the room acquires a halo
he then touches to three candles
in a bowl brimmed with water.
A prayer warms in his mouth,
warms into song.
At the first word, a star
opens its eyes on the altar.
It shakes its horns. Flint
vocables drill the air,
to magnetize his blood.
Consonants clash, vowels
sputter — as flame puts
its mercurial hooves
to earth to ignite hilltops.
The candles dance.
He hears an echo answer,
in copperplate night,
& enters into the symbol,
still singing.
The key changes.
His filament coagulates
& dissolves to make
the purest possible sounds,
from the leaden to the angelic
— all metallic color.
Overhead, gold dawning.
[Sisyphus]
HELLESPONT
Some do not
survive the crossing.
Perhaps
a fascination
with the momentary
compels one dreamer in every
dozen to lean out too far,
to lose balance & give
everything over
to gravity.
Loss
is part of the process.
Sometimes, a celebrant
commemorates lost ones
by casting straw figures into
the sea that is Memory.
These figures are a falling
light over infamous
water,
a reminder
that the danger is
significant.
[Heavenbone]
TAURUS
Turning next to me in bed,
you groan the beginnings of a word
& the room caves in around us.
How long have you known
& pretended sleep beside me,
a facsimile of stone?
How long have you lain unknown,
under this plausible body of land,
& prolonged my ignorant labor?
How long have you known unspoken,
wanting only the plow to unearth you?
You would not stir for me.
Now archaeologists have come
to take you to the sea &
from there to a university.
May it be your fortune to be
granted a pedestal in the labyrinth
of your choice. May you be kept
clean, drawn with chalk,
displayed alongside accredited
text, & left otherwise to storage.
By night, may you breathe
yourself the ends of a word, & dream
my face, my hands, my bedclothes.
[Yeats
Club]
CITY LIFE
If asked to relocate,
you could set up shop
in the city of Ur,
teach yourself
to read & write
cuneiform,
apply to bureaucrats
housed in the sky
for work,
match jars
of jasmine oil
to a bill of lading,
ignore the roar
of restless camels
at night,
drink grain
with gods
on holy days,
follow the adventures
of Gilgamesh in weekly
installments,
tell daily lies
to the carpetseller’s
daughter,
blame nomadic
tribes for cutbacks
at the temple,
covet the new
metals, Cretean
axeheads, saffron,
sleepwalk the long
shadows between
sandstone giants,
an abacus your palm
pilot, a clay tablet
your laptop,
the sky
turning above you
your cable,
a hundred thousand
stars, nothing
to watch.
[Alabama
Literary Review]
GORDIUM
We knew his greatness
lived
more in his sword
than
in expertise
—
what could we say?
His
legions on either
leg
of our harbor let
neither legend nor fact
travel
inward or out.
So
when Alexander said,
surrender
up your mysteries,
this, we said, Lord, is our
holiest
of treasures.
We
told him
an
ox-yoke our first king
knotted
in a strap of hide
held our city's luck.
We
bade him
undo
the knot, knowing
in our antiquity,
it
could not be undone.
It
was all of one piece,
wound
taut unto itself
All
ages had confirmed
its
integral adhesion.
We challenged, then
stepped
back, expectant,
together
we chanted
a
tuneless lyric.
All
that is atom,
or
water, or fire,
All that is twine is tied
into
the knot.
He
stood & studied
the puzzle we'd presented him,
&
we knew he'd
soon
kneel down to begin.
Other
men had
worked their fingers into its
strands
& counter-strands
for
hours, or days.
Not
Alexander.
His
philosophic pose
unsheathed into
an
arc of light;
his sword, his hideous —
his sun-forged sword.
One
stroke & the known world
dropped
to the floor
like
a serpent, slain.
He
stepped over
the several pieces &
left
us to our ruins.
What
could we then say,
when,
as old men,
we
saw murderous new
words in the face of a new man?
[Alabama
Literary Review]
LEO
1: Dumuzi
The sun-child in his season
casts his height across a field
to calculate its weight by bushel.
He shifts. Distended claws & lordly
mane & musculature prowl the length
of his firmament. The sun freezes.
His prey, indistinguishable as a snag
in the tangled grass, turns back
& attacks, & again he shifts.
He gnaws dry root & seedling,
senses an unquiet in the dust
& levels antlers at the sun.
He shifts, writhes through the shade —
no undergrowth thick enough — as
a taloned eye above him watches.
2:
Adonis
Statuary / lion.
The
desert river overruns
his hearth-stone, dousing the sacred
fire of his name.
His
pledge
cup is broken — never again to
explain away the fallacy of thirst.
Nothing remains of the lost year's
worship.
Disparate
voices divide the valley.
The red river continues its rise.
The women shave their heads, surrender
their hair to their fallen lord.
Exposing their scalps to the midsummer
passion, they hug to their breasts
shallow bowls of dirt, seeded with
customary crop.
Wheat-stalk
& hops
erupt at their attentions, only to
dry in an hour & die.
Every woman cries for the lion,
calls him to siege & triumph.
Every woman
save
she whose color
is most like the river's rising.
3:
Dionysus
Before the rites at Harvest Tide,
an acolyte exalts above his head
the huge head of the god.
Lowered, it blanks out his eyes,
blank as the sun itself is.
It ages & elevates his voice.
Nine women in chorus encircle him
to wring ecstatic moans free from
his mouthpiece, a dark igneous name.
Clusters, grapes, leaves latched to thick
vines, abundance at the table — like
these, his soliloquies, his disembodied talk.
After this, his sated listeners devote
their days to harvesting the Goat-
songs that have torn his throat.
4:
Riddle
Who fasts? Let the flesh be
torn from his limbs & turned
over a fire. Who here refuses?
Who doesn't choose
to be one of our number?
[New
Orleans Review]