Nighttime Sun

Our father still hears you sing
He still needs that vacation
He still needs you more than wants you
I know that he does
I have sensed something of you in the tension of his shoulders
In the smell of the day's sweat
When the world sleeps
And he is alone in his kitchen
A bulb for his company
And a drink for his meal

I have wondered
As he drives under that baking sun,
Tracing the cables with his eyes
Dark lines darting between the rays of the light

And in this city night of perpetual gloam
In the crash of storms brewing
Moisture kissing the skin of his arms
Working beneath his heavy gloves
Born upon cool air lashing out into the night
Like waves from an unseen sea
In which he is forever lost
...I have wondered

Did you ever exist?

At three-thirty-two a.m.
He says he heard you singing
A girl and a boy and a mother of three
Were pulled from a fire
By axe and frenzy
By men in heavy coats
He says they heard you too.
That he was there to keep the line clear.

I have never seen a photograph
I have never heard your name
Yet I think I know you
From the hollow, haunted emptiness in his eyes.
You live out there somewhere
Somewhere that can't be touched by fingertip.

I have told him stories,
News of the world
Tales of satellites and radio towers
Of cold science fiction
And phones that talk to the sky
He dismisses me and my world of the now

I know
He will never come back.
He hears only you
In the soft whispered words
Of one tin can tied to the next.

For Father de Carli

P

I am lost at sea, father please
remember me
in 1648 we drove our stakes into her soil
we built her from the untilled earth
shaping her with hands and mud and human toil
we toasted our coffea
we built her walls in pine
we rested to drink our chá mate as the slow tug of time drew us each out
as her coffee, paper, timber and hide is siphoned off by the sea
I became the father, a shepard to my brothers, shepards and sons
But now -
I have been called to heaven before my body is done

Do you see me my father?
untethered from my mother home
an Icarus on rainbow wing of latex tree
watch the bright petals wash against her shore
like flowers upon my funeral bones
I can see my country, her beauty laid before me as clear as my regret
I ask of you  - do I appear this perfect yet?

I say now
all of it I would trade
for the feel of her soil in my hands,
for the coldest winter of my youth
Recalled under jequitiba shade
For Jose, as we laughed at him in the mornings - at his quaint cabaça,
the bomba poking at his sleepy eyes.
Does he watch the shores I wonder?
Or does he watch the skies?
They say that you know what is best.
I believe this,
For when you called me
    you never told me the work you needed done was death.

You hate the jews, you hate the jews
And the gays, and blacks too
You shot and snorted and smoked your life
For forty-two years, poor and white,
Until you said it all with a tattoo.

Übermensch, I have had to fire you.
You were excised before I had time---
Mind-boggling, your treatise of bile,
Wrapped in, "pleases" and, "thank you's"
Sweet as apfelkuchen pie

With your head shaved clean and helmet smooth
Where it houses logic black and blue
Twisted and bent as a triskelion's shoe.
How I struggled to comprehend you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in this rainbow town
Made Fabulouuus by the beat
Of Oonsht, Oonsht, Oonsht!
Though the sounds of the clubs are common
My Gay friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I could never tell where you
Lost your mind, met your kind,
I could never talk to you.
The rage stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in your insect stare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every Racist was you.
And your ideology obscene.

Bitter lumpenproletariat, 14/88 fool
Take your vile beliefs and go - you're through.


(apologies to Sylvia Plath)

Gnashing tooth in terrible fury upon knuckle and jaw
The wives watched, drinks in hand

And I wondered everything one wonders when one watches

Why Hercules?
Why not the Lion of Neme, mane wild and prideful?
Shoulders rude and wide, breath a hushed, whiskered noise,
coarse and rumbling low.

But no.
That golden mane, trampled under trash and mired in the blood of martyrdom
rests under the footsteps of small men,
the sputtering of their small thoughts a mockery
to the memory of his rich pulse, a thundering pride of coarsing blood that shall move no more
except to drain, bubble and pop
as that grand beast's body is strewn upon the flames like so much refuse
to swaddle their tiny hearts in the comforts of complacency
breasts and minds never to overflow with the swelling of what was lost
too ignorant to comprehend that they should cry
glasses tink and eyes wink and shoulders are clapped beneath cupped hands
from the glare of flashbulb and colored paper ribbons twirling like snakes through the air
not one amongst them has the decency to shy.
Not one amongst them cares.

And he
That rippling errand boy wearing his skin as a badge
ignorant to the stench of blood which marks him as murderer
that craftsmen of orphans
that pathmaker of progress,
where all the knives they did muster proved dull
where arrows bent and broke
He showed it takes no more skill to wring out life from a throat
than to twist water from a rag.
Shall he think of what has passed or why?
How shall he recall the cause for which was fought, or what for which has died?
In drink, and gamble and oblivion
with blind excess
welcoming the noise of oncomming steam and falling tree
in this, the early spring of his career
I, if only could, would witness the moment when his eyes clear
to watch him realize that his bones too shall be ground as grist
that one day his shall be the love scoured clean from the surface of things
by ambition's pathetic, lamentable fist.

Having had part of herself removed, my sister has acknowledged the inverse relationship between discomfort of philosophy vs. discomfort of chest stitches.
She took the drugs.

Drug Dreams

She says she has pretty good dreams by herself. This time she dreamed Mom had called and was hung up on while I had to go out to my car to check on my two dogs - one looked like a mix of our first dog (a greyhound dalmation mix) that had been bred with some other breed, and the other I think was a terrier of some type. She said she would take one and I said no, because they were mine, which made her respond "why do you need two dogs?"

She was later thinking about how bizarre it was that I had even hidden them in my car because I didn't want to trouble her when she realized I don't actually have dogs and that she was really, really well medicated. To which I thought "Well yeah - obviously... if that had happened I would totally have given you the dog."

This all makes me question if the drugs had actually mundaned-down her dreams... I mean I hardly take asprin and my last dream that I remember consisted of driving down a thin ocean-spanning highway with sloping shoulders in a car that alternately had front and rear wheel drive which meant you had to drive it sideways like a very fast crab. My cousin made me stop because they knew someone we saw by a cement support column which held the roadspan above and below us.
When we talked to them we found out that they and two friends were all harvesting giant bugs that lived in the dark damp interior of the support columns. They'd busted out a crawlspace with a large sledgehammer and I was amazed at how thin the concrete actually was. Inside I saw mostly darkness but a few metal ladders riveted inside the walls. An angry woman came out of the hole. Her skin was a dark, leathery tan and she had rugged, wide cheek bones - her face was scarred by some accident that nearly took her left eye under black and gray hair. She was yelling in a language I didn't understand and threatening us, holding a brown skinned bug in her workgloves the size of a full grown cat.
Our friend translated to her that we weren't there to steal the bugs for ourselves because we had no interest in them. When she heard that she looked at us like we were the most ignorant and ridiculous people she'd ever met if we couldn't realize the value of such really great bugs. As my cousin asked what they did with them I noticed he'd taken out a microphone and recording kit, knowing already he was tapping the interview for the WPA or the Library of Congress. The friend explained they took the bugs to market to sell as food, and they'd take some home to butcher and grill for their families. He said they had to be quick and careful because the road service crews would report them for poaching and destruction of public property and then the state police would come arrest them.
The woman smiled and held the bug to her chest proudly, stroking one hand back across it's head and antennae, turning it to show the number of segments on its stomach. She went back inside the tunnel whispering a low noise like "chut-chut-chut," which made the tunnel fill with the sound of millions of sheets of parchment ruffling as cat-sized bugs swarmed up and fluttered delicately on her. She turned them over to make sure none were pregnant before she put them in one of her large bags...

So anyway from there it got weird. But that's my point.

I guess when we're on painkillers we dream of doing normal things.