Sample Poems From Vernal
Calibrations, 1992
OKLAHOMA 1934
At the border of the south forty,
where the wobbly
fence, barbs festering
with rust, hold back the pasture before it falls
into a bottom of Osage orange and thistle,
he leads her to the weathered stile
and whistles between blunt thumb
and little finger
until the horses
come
lightly through
the burnished haze of seared
grass in a rose-gold twilight,
the
matched bays,
flesh jittery
beneath ruby breasts,
the Indian pony
and her foal mottled brown and pink
against the rising tide of amethyst.
To his worldly goods he introduces her in turn,
Lady, Queen, and Paint,
his thick, cracked fingers,
the one with the new band catching the last light,
touch the velvet noses one by one,
and she can name the colt.
She ignores the gritty wind that presses
the second-hand thinness of her dress
between her thighs
and a dust that swirls.
GREEN EXTRAVAGANCE
I envy the silence
of stones, the perfect
inwardness of obsidian,
sandstone’s savory patience.
Here on the summer porch,
overcome by your economies
of love and corn,
I close
against the green extravagance
of root and silk and stalk.
Down the hill the silt-black
bottom
swells with Johnson grass
and lovers’ vine—in the rank
tangle you luxuriate, climb
like columbine
the trellis
of your bones, yourself in bloom
with dreams I cannot share.
I lean toward the attitude
of shale, turn
to the stillness of basalt.
I have tired of growing things.
NIGHTMARE COMFORTS
This morning,
in perfect Ukrainian,
I cough up phlegm
into my sink
where it hangs
like a black slug
against the white.
After breakfast,
I wrap the charred
corpse of a small child
in pages of The Times,
but its dark screams
leak through and stain
my
summer suit.
At
lunch,
the dead of Bangladesh
float like croutons
in my vichyssoise,
the white
Bordeaux
blushed by the blood
of Kurdish rebels.
During my commute,
Serbs and
Croats
skewer me by turns
with pitchforks
and hay hooks
until my wounds
run green with Astrotruf.
After supper, over-
full
of undigested news,
bloated from feasting
on the raw homeless,
I wash in Peru’s
left over
cholera and scrub
myself with a strong
soap made from the fat
and burned out waste
of South
Africa.
At
last, I slip
into the queasiness
of blood soaked
sheets, look forward
to the comforts
of my own nightmares.
Sample Poems From
A Darkness Defined, 1994
NEUENGAMME
Just across the Elbe
among green-houses
and neat rows of radiccio
its dark flower blooms
yet, surrounded by hot-
house tomatoes
and tulips,
denial and endive.
Just a work camp, they
say, but Arbeit didn’t
macht frei,
simply dead,
done to ashes of less
substance than the clay
of bricks, an ersatz
fertilizer for the garden
of the Wachmannschaft.
Now it’s all so neat,
the clinker works so
well preserved, the
almost perfect bricks,
the monument thrusting sky-
ward as it should, even
the Frenchman’s twisted
body off to the side,
disturbing, but removed.
At
night the residents
may whiten glass panels
and clip the grass,
but at the back of my
throat petals of
ash
collect, air heavy
with the fragrance
of the oven’s work.
GEOLOGICAL DREAMS
He watches the broken ribs
of the
raw earth lift
by infinitesimal degrees,
time stripped of mind
and sense, sun the only
measure of any
consequence,
and that feeble weighed
against the list of hemispheres.
For days his body emulates
the stone and rock he waits
upon, at home
in a cosmos
free from seismographics
of the heart or annals of the blood.
And even though he knows
the slow dance of rift
and plate, the slip
of
faults and drift of continents,
still he dreams his world
unmoved and motionless.
NO LOVING BEYOND
There is no loving beyond
the earth, no ethereal
light to love that
does
not emanate from flesh,
no gilded heaven rooted
in an alchemy beyond
the bone and cell, no
love
of body free from
a passion for the rank
tangle of river bottoms,
the waist-high whisper
of grassy plains,
no sex
except it share the puffed
lips of lupine and the deep
honeyed through of hibiscus,
no musk free
of leaf-mold
and the slow, hushed rot
of wood in ancient forests.
