(after Li Po)
And the crows
flew out of the storm
and took their places
among the branches;
and the sun
at the world’s edge
broke through the clouds;
and she paused at her loom,
the cawing of the crows reminding her
that she was alone,
the jaundiced light
reminding her how far behind
was her home by Qin River.
The mist-green thread she wove
had neither beginning nor end.
The crows called all night long
while the rain fell like her tears.
Oh,
The future is not like a train
Because if you got caught on the tracks
Because you saw it coming
Because it’s your own damn fault
Oh,
The future is more like a tiger
Because it’s not coming closer it’s waiting
Because only the survivors will ever know
Because it was there all along in the grass
from underneath the footbridge where it passed
over low tide and the muck of low tide
as I passed above with a chatter of tires
of a sudden out clamored a flock of gulls
and their thick feet were tiling the flat sea with ripples
all in a pattern as if they had rehearsed it
and they were identically honking like toys
all in unison as if they had practiced it
as if I were the catastrophe they had been waiting for
(after William Butler Yeats and James Harbeck)
First Gyre
The falcon circled, then flew off; the falconer was pissed.
Well, what did he expect she’d do, with everything so dis
-combobulated?
Second Gyre
There’s a book I read, predicted this: come
the millenium, and things would fall apart, get discom
-bobulated.
Third Gyre
As you see: just look at this rum job:
A riddling monster, shambling through the sand, has discombob
-ulated the indignant birds.
Fourth Gyre
Brother, it’s a bad job—who
can stand to swim? The bloody tide’s so loose and discombobu
-lated.
Fifth Gyre
While the best lack all conviction, haters hate;
No wonder everything’s so fucking discombobulat
-ed.
Sixth Gyre
It’s been more than twenty centuries our end’s been fated:
And now it seems the whole damned world is discombobulated.
By night nurse lamplight and stay close
By day keep your feet to the path
The tigers here are hungry ghosts
And all our hunters gone to grass
Time was, we had to be cautious
since the dead world could quicken
and anything was always inexplicably
about to become an animal:
bare dirt birthed worms,
toads sprang full-blown from muck,
and mice could breed
from a stale loaf kept in a quiet cupboard.
We now know that’s not the way of it:
life’s not spontaneous,
but always it’s the product of
some effortful seed
and some intent or accident of sperm;
life breeds life, and furiously
goes on living.
Not magic but poetry.
Bag of Anything 