This Morning Read online

  that unglue from my pots their antediluvian pot-crud

  but must have felt like burning hurricanes

  to my pint-size off-white faux-porcelain darling.

  How could I have blithely slept

  while she was being buffeted on the top rack

  amid thick glass tumblers and impervious Tupperware?

  How could I be so blind to put her

  through this recurring Armageddon nightmare

  when all she needed was a warm hand-wash

  and cool air-dry upside-down on a dishtowel?

  Delicate, in truth, she wasn’t. MADE IN CHINA

  tattooed on her bottom, she was always cheap

  and probably dangerous: her black underlayer

  now showing through the crazed glaze like varicose veins

  no doubt leached into my blood the thousand times

  I filled her to the utmost with dark roast

  and took her hot lip between my lips.

  At such moments, who thinks what’s underneath:

  lead or cadmium or reprocessed industrial waste?

  Mornings before the house was awake,

  in exquisite quiet and not-yet-light,

  I’d cup her tenderly in both hands,

  breathing her heat, not needing to speak.

  I felt so happily posthumous,

  just this side of nothingness, alone but not.

  I didn’t need to be anything for her

  but an eager mouth—not a nice husband

  or good son or even a man—only the unregenerate

  consumer that I am. I savored every dram.

  Everything later was decaf,

  dull paper cups in mousy brown sleeves

  served by contractually cheery Starbucks drones

  amid chatter and laptops and cell phones.

  But I knew tomorrow morning she’d be sparkling,

  ready to give back whatever I put in,

  and we’d have our time together again,

  respite with no pretense of nourishment,

  her first bitter droplet on my tongue tip.

  How sad that it may have been toxic.

  I’d bury her in the backyard like a pet,

  except she could pollute the aquifer.

  Goodbye, beloved mug. No recrimination. No regret.

  (At least until my next blood test.)

  I had not one unpleasant moment with you.

  Who in the world can anyone say that about?

  I’d like to think I somehow gave you pleasure too.

  Maybe we’ll meet again in another life,

  me the mug next time, you the mouth.

  Garbage Truck

  Once I had two strong young men hanging off my butt

  and a distinctive stink that announced

  when I was inching down your street

  at the regal, elephantine pace

  that let my men step down from me running

  to heave your garbage into my gut

  then fling the clanging metal cans

  to tumble and rumble, crash and leap

  back to sort-of-where you’d lugged them to the curb

  before another oblivious night of sleep.

  Did you think life was tough?

  I reveled in it, all the stuff

  you threw out, used up, let rot,

  the pretty packaging, the scum, the snot,

  vomit and filth, everything you thought

  useless, dangerous, or repugnant:

  I ate it for breakfast. I hauled it

  out of sight. And what did I get?

  You were annoyed by my noise.

  You coughed at my exhaust.

  Your kids stopped playing in the street

  to pinch their noses and gag theatrically

  with no clue how sick they’d be without me.

  I was the lowest of the low, an untouchable,

  yet I did what I did and did it well.

  Now I am not laughable: a “waste management vehicle”

  denatured robotic sanitized presentable.

  My strong young men are gone. I have no smell.

  I’m painted deep green to look organic and clean.

  Your “residential trash carts” are matching green

  injection-molded high-density polyethylene

  that barely thuds when I lower them to the ground

  after I’ve stabbed and lifted and upended them

  with twin prongs that retract into my side

  so not to scratch anything or scare anyone.

  Who can complain? Right there on your street

  I mash and compact and obliterate your waste.

  You need never give it a second thought.

  It’s safe it’s easy nobody gets dirty.

  It’s how you want your life to be.

  But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life.

  Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.

  The Daily News

  I needed to be made to feel that there was real,

  permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation.

  Wordsworth taught me this, not only without

  turning away from, but with a greatly increased

  interest in the common feelings and common

  destiny of human beings.

  —J. S. Mill

  Out walking in my nature-or-nurture,

  culture-or-creature, we-are-all-fucked

  funk, I wandered like great-browed Wordsworth

  lonely as a cloud upon his daffodils,

  ruined abbeys, and sagacious peasant workers

  eager to engage in earnest dialogue with

  and spark a personal-but-socially-useful meditation for

  a happening-to-be-strolling-by major British poet

  and happened myself upon

  a wackily painted California-beach-town clunker

  with a strikingly somber

  NEVER FORGET GOD white-on-black bumper sticker

  precisely centered on its back bumper.

  I thought, “That’s straight out of Flannery O’Connor,”

  only she’d have the car hurtling through,

  packed with a family masterfully

  tormenting one another,

  or loaded with murderers

  on their way to a murder, or idling

  while its owner (an itinerant preacher—

  half Christ, half con man, all heartbreaker)

  performs some grace-provoking mischief

  on a spinster. I don’t know who

  owns this car and I certainly don’t want to know,

  but were he a guest on Wordsworth’s call-in show,

  I’d ask him from anonymous distance, “Never forget God?

  How do you do that? My faith comes and goes.

  I can’t even speak about it without distortion.

  Never forget: is that the same as always remember?

  Who remembers anything always?” At that point,

  he’d probably answer, “Just a minute,”

  and, switching the control dial back to Flannery O’Connor,

  he’d reach into the glove compartment

  for the gleaming, silver, startlingly high-tech

  automatic pistol and the pack of evangelical pamphlets

  from which he slips one with a rubber-band snap

  that makes me jump as if he’d clicked the gun,

  a pamphlet that on my walk home I would curl into

  a little glossy telescope, focus on a flower,

  and toss into the next garbage can

  after this unwordsworthy contemplation of nature

  reminded me to retune and retune

  and retune my attention,

  which the car had already done,

  it being

  adorned, as I have not yet said, with multicolor

  lightning bolts, asterisks, question marks,

  and squiggles, a ’74 Dodge Dart Swinger (I think)

  that no doubt in previous incarnations


  served emotionally less expressive owners

  ferrying children to soccer practice and doctors

  and all the-world-is-too-much-with-us getting-and-spending

  required of us to earn moments of private life and quiet pleasure

  (its dead shocks perhaps once cushioning

  the hurried rhythms of backseat lovers)—

  whose paint job (whatever muted colors it had been then)

  now features a purple trunk-spanning skull and crossbones

  above the NEVER FORGET GOD bumper sticker,

  and one modestly trussed mermaid in red-polka-dot halter

  reclining along the entire length of the passenger side

  from rear to front fender, with what little space

  left in the negative space around her

  maniacally scratched in with tiny druidic glyphs,

  which, could we read them, would rebuke us

  for our idolatrous, splintered common life.

  Splitsville

  If you get yours I get mine.

  How does never sound to you?

  As long as I can laugh I’m fine.

  I can’t believe this all is true.

  If I were gone you’d be all right.

  What is that supposed to mean?

  I see you’re looking for a fight.

  You are such the drama queen.

  Let’s get the hell out of here.

  I’m simply not leaving yet.

  Everything you say is fear.

  Maybe you ought to buy a pet.

  What do you want if I’m not it?

  If you don’t shut up, I will scream.

  I feel like such a piece of shit.

  I thought you were a living dream.

  Melanoma Clinic Infusion Center Waiting Area

  This ravaged man, this human specimen:

  extra-high black nylon windbreaker collar

  zipped up, extra-wide soft floppy hat brim

  yanked down—to spare beginners here his creature

  face and spare him being seen:

  eyebrowless and -lashless, chemical-

  burned inside-out and outside-in:

  irradiated, interferoned, Dacarbazined, his skull

  a scar he looks out from through the Gitmo slit

  between upturned collar and downturned hat brim

  at the doings of what must seem another planet

  than the one he’s on inside his body killing him.

  How he bears it he’s not telling. Not telling

  may be part of the how. Maybe he’s been given

  access now to such unencumbered clarity of feeling

  it makes what can be spoken sound like pidgin,

  and so he rests in articulate silence,

  communing like Buddha with his own spirit.

  But probably not. Probably the malignance

  eating his being, minute by minute,

  has beaten him into its mute instrument

  of pain and loneliness and fear.

  There may be sweet freedom in the firmament.

  Not here.

  Open Window Truck Noise 3 A.M.

  Gear-grinding, sure, but the woman dreaming in 4F

  sees the monster spawned by her boss’s daily belittlements

  devour in one roaring gulp both the Smith Barney courier

  in the apartment across the air shaft who comes home from work and strips

  to the black Brazilian thong he likes to parade around in

  and his insomniac schnauzer that yaps at fire-escape cats.

  What monster is this? There’s no name for it,

  nor for the rancor that forms it

  nightly inside her brain, and it is merely a chimera

  safely encased in thick skull bone,

  but on the morning she spies the suddenly kimono-clad courier

  feeding his schnauzer a croissant, she remembers

  what woke her was her boss drilling her skull a borehole

  for the monster to fly out like a cockroach

  that owns her and walks her to work on a leash.

  Daredevil

  Although he’s only seven, you can pick him out

  from other first-graders: he’s the one wearing

  a smirk that says, “What are you afraid of?”

  maybe also to himself, if he already suspects his fear

  won’t ever be crushed no matter what he does.

  But he’s got to try. He snatches spiders bare-fingered

  to wave in girls’ faces, bites a worm in half

  dangling the two ends from his mouth like fangs,

  somersault-dismounts from the jungle gym

  the other kids climb off of when he climbs on,

  and when he lands unhurt there’s that smirk again

  that mocks us for our cowardice.

  Don’t hate him for it. It is his only happiness.

  Here I Am

  on a subway station bench

  next to two teens, one pretty, one not:

  the pretty one keeps saying how much

  she’ll miss the unpretty one, kissing her cheeks,

  while the unpretty one looks down at her lap

  saying no you won’t no you won’t until the train comes

  and on goes the pretty one still smiling,

  twirling her red plastic clutch, singing goodbye

  I’ll call you, and the unpretty one just sits here

  like a stone, even after the train is gone,

  even after I write this down.

  Sabbatical

  I’m full of feelings, all of them boring,

  so today I let my poem take me

  where it wants to go, as if the where

  were a patio overlooking Lake Como

  where Bellagio Fellows discuss the quattrocento

  over a rare Barolo and my poem

  were a complimentary airport minivan

  driven by a spiky Iraqi

  bursting with bitterness that pops

  his English inflections like an M-16

  which for all I know he wore over his shoulder

  day after day in sucking desert heat and fitted

  with a nightscope and slammed the butt of

  into whatever wasn’t moving fast enough.

  A Round

  Where am I going? The grave.

  Who am I being? The slave.

  What am I leaving? The fun.

  Who will be grieving? No one.

  How can I touch you? No way.

  Will I ever reach you? Someday.

  Why do I need you? Ho ho.

  Where will I meet you? You know.