Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Born with a slight preference for one hand or the other, the body hangs one up to please father and mother. Into one hand the soul exerts the animal of love. The other, wasted by neglect, hangs on the wrist a glove. I have misplaced my birthday gift on the way to he. I have lost my rights, displaced ambidexterity.

I am working on a series of poems on the body and the soul. One inspiration is Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain , which has me thinking about the relationship between the body and civilization, the body and barbarities like torture and war. The tentative series title, There Is No Safety in Distance , a line in one of these poems, plays on the notion of safety distance, a term an Operationally Ready National Serviceman like me is all too familiar with. The series is divided into four sections. Some Body focuses on the body of an individual's experience. Any Body explores the felt disjuncture between body and identity. Every Body looks at what our bodies have in common, pain. Finally, No Body meditates on death. I experiment with the ballad stanza to see how its narrative capabilities can be used for conceptual thought; we feel our body in and through time, after all. I also think of the form as hymn stanza, in an attempt to re-direct reverential attention to the mortal ...

Work is not love. It does not waltz or swing to the rhythm of blood. It does not probe for signs beneath the skin. It does not conjure metaphors out of an ice cream or a bouquet of roses walking down the street or make promises it cannot keep. It does not sweat through the night to make things last but sees them through to their necessary ends. Work is not pious. It does not cross its chest or raise its hands or kneel to offer incense or a cup of tea. It does not jerk the leash of flesh and blood or collar the soul’s throat. It has no stomach for loyalty. It is not communal like ten-course dinners, faith-healing meetings or mahjong in void-deck funerals. It forms a team to build a house. Work is not art. It cannot entertain or legislate. It cannot pay epiphanies or transmogrification of the mongrel; to work, a dog is a dog is a dog. It cannot imagine "What If" but creates "What Is." It cannot be pop or classical or modern; it cannot be but here. It cannot tilt at wi...

I can’t decide which organic bread to buy, the pumpernickel or the multi-grain. The tents of death still fly on flooded plains and campers pray for drops of food supply. I can’t decide which organic bread to buy. The fucked-up prisoners-of-war complain. The pumpernickel or the multi-grain, I ask the empty counter. No reply but the new pope speaks out against the tie of gay marriage legalized in Spain. The prisoners protest for check-out lanes and campers pray to satellites that fly over their heads while I decide to buy the pumpernickel, or the multi-grain.

What’s on tonight but lips pressed on lips, the neck, the hollow of the collarbone, down on the silver strings from chest to hips, bass guitar counterpointing basement’s groan; and on the stirring cord, lips fawn, and tease, teeth sheathed, to please and worry its backbone: an arctic wolf licking the meat it sees, meat spiked onto a knife, the foam its own. On this white horse, the lancer sits astride. He jerks the bit and bloods its jaws, care thrown to the wind, pain spurring the pleasure-ride, slippery saddle, mounting to one moan— we come together, separate. Tonight blunts hunger’s edge and whets the appetite.

Over lunch, you said you hadn’t written much but nursed your fiancé’s sister whose tumor burst. How could you have done otherwise? Death first, then babies suckle as you get in touch with the Mother archetype. Sure, you’re engaged to a devoted man but he can’t breast feed, can he? Babies are bottles of thirst. Your words at lunch betrayed no sense of grudge. Maybe I was too dense. Maybe too glad I have a dick and not your breasts and clit. I don’t have time and patience for the act of bearing with the world. Never a dad, I’m free to fuck and run and write of it. I’m going to sign up on the job contract. for J. E. P.

I thought being gay saved me from being a man and man’s mistakes: great wall, sacked city, rape and either/or. Victor or also-ran. Pope or poop. Beta-male or top ape. Or, in my mind, Poet (upper case) or not. Last week, before you read, your daughter ran and tied your hand in hers. You loosed the knot for a while and read to strangers, students, friends. I think of the women who lived, loved and wrote, those who still do, as someone’s daughter, wife and mum. I’m that man-poet who to his wife left the children, so he could read and quote Bradstreet, Dickinson, Smith, Browning, Glück, Rossetti, Bishop, Chin, Plath, Dove and Rich. for Marie Howe

Consider this: life is no clinical trial with safety measures and a control group. It may give brief reports but the feedback loop functions, if we’re lucky, once in a while. So we join studies wishing for the denial of suffering, wishing not to be life’s dupes, wishing the trials nourish like chicken soup the nervous heart and make it versatile. But why fear actions and decisions as though they are more real than trials? Is it a sham to say I’ll try my best instead of do? Not all attempts set out to be a scam. Even in trials, some who take the placebo get well. They claim, I try, therefore I am.

Because my mother whispered on the phone so as not to wake my sister from her sleep and face the darkening features of the grown daughter on whom she banks for her upkeep; because your father doesn’t remember you, forgets ten minutes after you tell him, pretends he knows who he is talking to, and you, my love, may share his fate and shame; because we won’t have children of our own, and you or I must be the first to die, and poems are rich outlay but poor loans for dying years, good answers but bad replies; therefore I’ll spend my days paying the cost of work, too poor to gain Paradise Lost.

I dreamed of you last night, my classmate said, the dyke who smokes dope and consults voodoo. I dreamed you were sitting by yourself on a bed and your right leg, man, ended in a club foot. Had she confused me with one of the crew— J who graduated last year and treads on one good leg, one wood? He writes instead of working full-time. Publishing his first book. What does her dream mean? Is it an omen? A curse? A prayer? My wish-fulfillment vibe? I’ve always stood on my two feet, took pride in not relying on family and friends. I’ve never seen J’s stump nor heard him describe gimp’s benefits, so how can I understand?

Honestly, I don’t give a shit for spring poems. Look how alert I am, mince they, how sensitive. I’ve never seen the gray budding to green in brown-toned, -stoned Brooklyn . The leaves appear overnight on the scene. Those tulips look transplanted from some bouquet. They’re not mouths. Call them tongues and still they say nothing. The grass, o green grass, does not sing. The birds are so noisy I cannot think and so down to the promenade I stray, hoping to see Manhattan ’s bright buildings across the East River , bridges and quays. A mist has risen and turned air to spray, distance to sea. I can’t see a damn thing.