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Of
The Snails
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1
1542 B.C., The Year of the Snail. It was
then
they began waking everywhere
like eyes.
From the very beginning they swore the earth
was round, and from slow observatories
studied the bruised breast of the moon.
Later
resting on cabbage leaves, they considered
the stars. "Like barnacles attaching themselves
to the hull of night," they said, and with
little else
to say, moved on. That
year Zen snails
reached their peak of eloquence, uncovering
tankas beneath pebbles and fallen leaves.
With bellied brushstrokes they spelled the
most
delicate poems of grieving, which, of course,
the local peasants dismissed as
scribbles.
It's true: haiku flourished two thousand
years
before Basho, and in memory of his dead
daughter
Issa wrote, "The world of snails/ Is the
world
of snails./ And yet.../ And yet..."
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2
Fast forward: ash-storms, Progress, Industrial
Revolution, quiet eyes clinging to factory
windows
and looking in: men and women and children
undone, contorted by looms. In seasons
of labor what say do snails have, their
protests too tiny
to be heard? Look: in nowhere republics
they crouch
behind the ears of generals sleeping off
the stink
of rum, singing lullabies, nursery rhymes
only mollusks
know, though mere singing cannot pacify
such men.
Mass graves, plagues multiplying their
harsh fish and loaves,
the world's fingers drawn into a fist only
the smallest
singings can slip from-what joy can it possibly
bring them, the vulnerable ones, that they
were
never held in true fear, and were spared?
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3
They who walk painful on grains of salt
and pucker on windshields, believe in them
for they carry the swirl of gospel on their
backs.
Maprooms of hurricanes, word of the tidal
floor,
tiny shells wandering for years, like knuckles
in search of their fist-and when they find
it, and assemble,
who says their knocking won't announce
some great door
all men look for and stand before
always?
Yes, and only snails understand hopelessness,
only they
are allowed to enter the loneliest rooms,
only they
unbutton the shirts of suicides and rest
a while
on the right breast listening to
the heart's slurring down,
pulse dimming to nothing, and then silence.
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4
Listen: even now there are coils glowing,
bare bulbs
swinging in the poorly furnished rooms of
the dead.
Someone's grandmother is waking there, sitting
up
in bed, her hair insatiable and gray and
growing.
It wraps around bedposts, doorknobs, threads
the keyhole; it climbs the walls before
taking root
in the ceiling. All night hair will be
growing, hair
dead as starlight, while the living turn
to each other
and exchange deep
living kisses. And where then
do you think the snails will be? Blessing
errant blades
of grass? No. Dreaming the boot that will
crush them?
No. No. Passing
over the lips of the crucified:
wetting them.
-- Published originally as "Fable
Of The Snails" in Agni
Novena:
From A Young Mystic's Handbook (for the
21st Century)
1.
hairshirt
We practice reverse
transubstantiation
turn blood
into wine, flesh
into bread
so we might eat our fill of one another
freely
and without guilt We
trace our lifelines
like snail tracks on
broad mock-leaves
of eternity
spit into
each other's mouths
sin against
the visible
take one another's names
in vain In
apartments
hotel rooms
in kitchens florescent with midnight
we pamper the little man
made of Always and Is
sit him upright and
pull the string:
listen: the voices of loved ones
alive again
with plagues and virgin births
with corpses changing course
to break bread
with the living
4.
advanced studies
If you wish to break bread with
the living
sound the depths
of the one true shrug Live
behind
your wife's face Wear
many disguises be
it
husband, best friend
or father
When alone throw
all touch from
your fingertips
like feathers from shook pillows Walk
off the world's edge
with eyes closed calmly
fall a full
thousand years
Breathe deep
for the misers of breath are nothing
Know seeing is a subtle
bed that must
be made sincerely
each morning Tuck
the edges in tight smooth
the wrinkles
otherwise it will be anyone's
to sleep on
(the misers themselves
perhaps measuring
yawns, renting rooms
in your pillow)
To break bread sift
the old noise around you
the one that's always there
off
in some dark corner
the finite delivering
devastating head-butts
to the infinite cursing
loud
and spitting blood
But who, you ask
holds the cup
such blood
spits into
10.
history lesson
2003 A.D., Anno Domini;
Adam's
Dust, Anger-Dunced;
All Deaf, All Dumb, All Desiring.
Awe-Driven, Angel-Drunk,
All-Diminished Ashen Duration.
Agnus Dei, Ascetic Daydream.
Agnostic Dollhouse, Abstract Distance
and Animal Diplomacy.
After Doubt. After Dismemberment.
After Death:
Abundant Disrobing.
14.
the origin of names
One day there was a name for God The
next day
there were two And
so it went
until there were nations of names like
so many leaves
waiting to fall from
their tree Such
is the history
of the underlife dusted
for fingerprints
our faces like covered mirrors
wrapped
in bedsheets
or old newspapers
sexless reflection peering
out drinking
in
the full floodgates of some
other world
One day
there was a name for God
The next day
there were two
until one morning
you wake and look around you and
wonder
how it is men
and women toil
in the belly
of a miracle, utterly devout
to the hard cycles
their hair
turning white their
teeth
shivering and crawling over themselves
like bees
18.
consumerism
In the supermarket, wear a suit of
ears
for the oranges
for the trees swaying
within them
Throw open
lush lit windows inside apples Note
the sunsets treasure-chested
in watermelons
Bartlett pears
musical with hands
hands that flew up from Mexico
to pick them Hear
cattle breathing
in the meat, Wyoming
opening up a slow-motion ocean
of hills In
the cereal aisle
take down a box, any box hold
it close to your ear
and hear
people there
dressed in regulation
gloves and shower caps
time-clocked, sterilized for the line
Minneapolis maybe or Detroit
hundreds
of them
buried alive
in cereal boxes only
to be shaken
months later and
listened to
22.
daily bread
Know you contain multitudes
that somewhere
in your ascendant brain quiet
millions sit
chained to tables sewing
machines
skulls
filling bright
with fireflies
Know it is their business
to stitch questions
into the slightest gestures
into metaphors spontaneously combusting
Is the
body
a struck match burning slowly towards
the fingers
that hold it
Is all anguish an understudy
to awe
Answer us
How many are out tonight
blowing
sharp squeals on the grass harp of
your name
Feel them lean closer
a million needles crisscrossing
through you stinging
stitching
for an answer
26.
the new realism
Monday morning, all of Chicago riding
in the belly
of the inchworm Dozens
around you radiate
sleep
their jobs already strapped
to their faces like feedbags
It has been your habit
for months now
the struggle
to see them clearly
and not figuratively,
those even rows
the backs of their heads like
locked doors
Because there is this need
to wring radiance
from each moment
try hard
to imagine
each cell they are made of
like a wafer
raised before some unseen
tongue
The Damen stop comes, goes
the rails angle downward
and it's then the
subtle changes
take place
the woman at her window seat changing
shape
paralegally
a young man's legs uncrossing
to reveal
a waiter or accountant some
fresh strain
of Anyone, stunned shaking
its head within him
29.
cross-examination of the angel
"What comes after
there is no 'after'
to speak of?" "A room
stark white, where we will
take off our faces." "And where, then, by
your account
will we lay them?" "On luminous trays,
so they
might be pressed
onto the faces of others." "And who
are these others?" "The unborn."
"You're lying." "Perhaps."
"And what else have you lied about?" "That
the heads
of so many will be kissed before
they're swept into their dustpan
and forgotten." "Horrible. And
what else?" "That what lives
behind the eyes wanders
freely
everywhere." "But that
is common knowledge." "Fine.
Then this: heaven
is a slug salted with stars, shrinking,
shriveling down
to us, and only us." "But this
is merely
a rewording of the last one." "So be it.
Amen."
"No. All men:
all times and places and beasts
and sorrows..."
33.
equation
Will it sing back into the mouth that
sings you
Will it take off its barbed gloves
touch skin
and discern your face with its fingertips
Has it ever
collected visions from the desert and
repotted them
here on your windowsill or
dug towards
those sad hives beneath the earth where
stones, like eggs
are born whole from the mouths
of the dead
Does it match
its teeth to bitemarks
enlanguage subtle awe
does it breastfeed the griefs
of its enemy Throwing
bricks lovingly
at that glass ceiling no mind can
ascend through
does it acquire a
taste for shrugging, knowing full well
one can't live on
shrugs alone Does
it raise
real children, does it say Hold
fast; tear out
your old eyes
and with refreshed blindness behold
everything: the kindling, the fire
O the many
ashes
grown cold in their flight
35.
on memory
Could it be
we are the bees
of the lost
Could it be we carelessly collect
the honey
of loss, and store it in
the great gutted hive
of wholeness For
years you've gathered them
the way a house gathers dust digesting
the real
into bloodless
whisper-hung abstraction
Strangers, strangers co-workers
friends
wraithed and reliquaried
a colony of mneumonic
lepers within, whose limbs rot
and split fat
with forgetting, that odd disease
we all
will one day die from, native
to the human
and contagious, communicable
by touch, by
kiss and talk and
listening
37.
i and thou
Proverb number 89 from
the Bright Louisville Sutras
Every right action is a raising of
the dead
every wrong one a
living burial Burial
exhumation, burial exhumation
between
god-digging and
graverobbing, Young Fool
you make your dead and
undo them
This sentiment
you will later find
reaffirmed in proverb
145, which states
Judging the All in oneself
is like
weighing fire
Better to let burn what
needs burning
Translation: What is a man but
a nursery
of every hard thing he has seen Translation:
memory
is apotropaic, and useful
Whenever you see loss out
in the world
all past losses wake
up and come
to the window Yet
how soon
they grow bored
having seen it all before
and leave you
friendless in the loneliness of
beholding
39.
sermon under the mount
Blessed are the ones who unpack their tongues
each morning, who separate the
words that fit
from those words grown
too small to fit them
Sad but blessed are
the meth addicts
outside Madisonville, conjugating themselves
to smoke
They burrow deep into their brains
but for reasons
Dead tired but blessed
is the woman in the back
of the bus, slumped over, with headphones
on The whole
city
fogs with her breath Blessed
are the humble, for they walk
beyond the worst delusion
Blessed are the clumsy
for they shall know grace when they see
it
What else? The
knuckle and its knock, and the
door that dreams them
The tender, who shall never
shovel coal
into the mouths of loved ones
The mindful who
manna the world with their listening
Blessed is the day when all names will
be struck blind
by what they signify
May it come soon
Blessed are they who
behold the left hand slapping
what the right hand caresses A
few more: blessed
are the pure of heart
for they shall see God
and blessed are the somewhat pure
for they shall see
themselves taking shape in the mirror Blessed
is the dung beetle, who rolls
shit into the pure form
according to some old itch inside him
Watch him
he is the most earnest
of creatures
45.
evening prayer
It has been years now
since your dream of unity
genuflected
into fragmentation, since you beheld
your father's God
sitting on a rooftop hacking off
His right hand, just so He might watch it
grow back again. Yet, be truthful,
hasn't it moved you
ever since--that spent pile of right hands
in the back yard among deck furniture and
holly bushes,
each crawling over itself, sniffing blindly
towards the wrist of its maker?
50. young mystic's elegy
Martyred
monotonously,
the hours
were
his stones.
And who was it
that cast
the first
one
that called forth
so much?
His mother,
yes, stoning
him into
this world.
Ghost
Ode: For Ramon Gomez de la Serna
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1
Here in the cheap hotel of the right hand,
in a small room in the third knuckle you
sit
on an aphid-sized bed, wondering how you
made it
here, to a place so strange no amount of
language
could touch it. North Louisville, middle
of winter, snow
photosynthesizing a brilliance into anything
burdened with eyes. In the next room, one
knuckle over,
you hear loud singing, detonations of red
wine
into laughter, Neruda and his many selves
throwing a party for yet another day lived,
and relinquished.
And in the knuckle beyond that: Vallejo,
terminally somber,
curtains drawn, his room darkening into
some eternal
Thursday all deaths must bend to. Visitors
arrive,
knock, slip folded odes under their doors,
but nothing
under yours. Now you're in bed. Now you're
bored
beyond sadness, practicing your signature
on the ceiling.
___
2
It's official: today another
one was forgotten.
Every sentence he ever wrote was handed
its street clothes
and set free. He
should be relieved
by this, that he's no longer the world's
chew toy,
its pet bone found in Madrid, and buried
in backyard
Argentina. Goodbye
to all that...
To mark the occasion he packs his pipe
with nonsense
one last time, lights it, draws a
long puff.
Soon the peacocks in the courtyard will
splay wide
their fans, so night might dance behind
them.
What is this life, this body but
a holding cell
between two nowheres? What is any metaphor
but a magnification and
distortion of the hand
that feeds it: a shadow-thing leaping
from hand
to wall to
graze there?
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3
Buenos Aires, then,
is a metaphor engorged
and you are the thing itself.
That's why, come nightfall,
streetlights sizzle with
the masochistic
ambitions of
moths: the metaphor's way
of coughing up the greater confusions of
the man.
You stand at the hotel window, hunt for
some sign
of yourself
(Isn't this the very beginning
of creation, the voyeurism of
spying one's images
undressing and
bedding each other, and doing so
from a safe distance behind
the curtains?)
You notice
a boy and girl in the doorway of
the Palace Armand,
her hand in his coat pocket.
This means your books
must still love you. But wait both
their collars
are turned up, and they shiver from
a cold you don't quite
notice. This you take as
a warning: cirrhosis, cancer,
you don't have long; so that when, at
last, they kiss
it's almost too late for
their mouths to meet
and release you.
___
4
Tonight someone holds his hand before a
lamp
to cast and knead its shadow on
the wall.
Only minutes ago it copied aphorisms in
a notebook,
yawned alone by the stapler. Now, to pass
the time,
it reaches into the belly of
its shadow, to make you
speak again. It's an image worthy of
your own mind:
The Author As Puppet,
his whole life spent
with a hand inside the world, making it
speak; and then
death, and to his great embarrassment the
discovery
that an even subtler hand had been inside
him
all along, doling out the eloquence-hand
within hand within hand,
each writing his thoughts,
each clawing towards the light to
be free of him.
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