From "Anti-Memoir" (6)
Tonight, follow the mute street singer.
Unimpeded by sight, he leads
down passageways you thought deleted,
diction stripped like stolen cars,
barricades of syntax broken by emotion,
sighs of plaster dust, the haze
of white space between words. Don't pause
for punctuation, here, a comma
of indecision elides into a coma,
and, years later, one wakes
to the interminable typing of rain
in a hotel where transients waste
money good for alcohol's blue flame
on sleep. Outside, the homeless
congregate while you continue to rent
all the rooms you've left behind,
addresses one must be lost to find,
knee-deep in flooded storm drains
clogged with crushed revisions,
a shredded blizzard, a ticker tape parade
gusting from the out-turned pockets
of the dead, enough litter
to trash the future, fuel without heat,
and yet, the past combustible enough
to be compressed into a fistful of soot.
From "Anti-Memoir" (7)
Bell at an hour too late for the Angelus,
abandoned shop front with its flaking acronym:
MEAT, boarded shoe store where your foot size
is of interest to the Grand Inquisitor,
intersection where desire crossed
into obsession. To proceed further,
step by step, word by word, requires
a map of where not to go: avoid
the linearity of narrative, its illusion
of cause and effect, the chronology
of retrospect, a synonym for fate,
avoid the viaduct from which dice roll,
ghetto games of shells and shills
the cardsharps cheating at Tarot.
Avoid the past tense of the oracle,
the politics of mediums, reactionary
dictates from their silent majority,
the dead, the current plague of angels,
the collectivization of the unconscious,
the monopoly on memory controlled
by ancestors posting as Poor Souls
who promise as inheritance
the status of a victim.
windy city
The garments worn in flying dreams
were fashioned there—
overcoats that swooped like kites,
scarves streaming like vapor trails,
gowns ballooning into spinnakers.
In a city like that one might sail
through life led by a runaway hat.
The young scattered in whatever directions
their wild hair pointed, and gusting
into one another, they fell in love.
At night, wind rippled saxophones
that hung like wind chimes
in pawnshop windows, hooting through
each horn so that the streets seemed haunted,
not by nighthawks, but by doves.
Pinwheels whirred from steeples
in place of crosses. At the pinnacles
of public buildings, snagged underclothes—
the only flag—flapped majestically.
And when it came time to disappear
one simply chose a thoroughfare
devoid of memories, raised a collar,
and turned one's back on the wind.
I remember closing my eyes
into a swirl of scuttling leaves.