Your MRI

Are you ready for your MRI?
Your heart; your blood and pressure seem OK.
Do you have metal shavings in your eye?

Remember, fees and charges do apply.
For your safety, we strap you to the tray.
Are you ready for your MRI?

Ferromagnetic histories can pry
violently forth out of the gray.
Do you have metal shavings in your eye;

shrapnel from an inky day gone by
or unforgiven shards left by the fray?
Are you ready for your MRI?

Slide in. The creamed dome becomes your smooth sky.
Your protons stiff—a manicured array.
Do you have metal shavings in your eye?

Death gives no pause. One heard a buzzing fly
just as a bright disease lit up her day.
Are you ready for your MRI?
Do you have metal shavings in your eye?

January 4, 1643-February 4, 2001

Newton assures me I can't fall forever.
Nearby in my own Milky Way
there are several stellar-mass black holes.
but there is a supermassive one in Sagittarius A*.

Nearby in my own Milky Way
a lucid cricket is sounding,
but there is a supermassive one in Sagittarius A*.
I'm sitting on a couch in a room.

A lucid cricket is sounding,
incongruent and maniacal, atop the wormwood.
I'm sitting on a couch in a room
with Xenakis on the record player.

Incongruent and maniacal, atop the wormwood,
there are several stellar-mass black holes.
With Xenakis on the record player,
Newton assures me I can't fall forever.

Sestina

A tuxedo-clad piano
plays, and somewhere else, a woman
in a red-haired building
earns herself a nickel.
“Tell me you love
me,” a man commands. God

sees her, and God
hears the jazz from the piano,
and God wonders which one made Him cry. He is love,
the stony woman
had heard once, from a nickel
nun in a cathedral building.

The pressure is building.
She gives to God
what is God’s, and to Caesar what is nickel.
The faint wails of the drunken piano
harmonize with the woman
sighing half-desperately in thespian love.

She wasn’t thinking about it. I love
the black costumes of each building;
the blue contacts of a woman
who has become a god.
The action mechanism in the piano
is all alloy, part nickel.

People are all nickel-
smiths. Isaiah knew this. Deaf to love,
we settle for the jazz dribbling from every piano.
Nehemiah took up re-building
the city of the Lord, the God
of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and that other woman,

Hagar. “Get rid of that slave woman
and her son,” Sarah said. “He will never share a nickel
of inheritance.” God
remembers her tone of voice. Love
was shelved. Building
commenced on the piano.

The black-and-blue piano fades with the woman.
Every building is made of nickel.
The Apostle John said love comes from God.

Chang'E

I'm Under the Soup Spoon of Alaska

I’m under the soup spoon of Alaska,
not in the sun. When sky blends into
desert, even clouds melt.

I tried something new, but I don’t know why.
There is something rich about the lilies of the field
and the porpoises of the Pacific,
but my worship often reverts
to calves or crowns of gold, or groundedness,
securities, or past or future ghosts.

The inevitable is harsh; starkly walling,
but undiscovered freedom is a pity.

racism

a maddening scab
and picking at it
does nothing at all.

in the rain and stench
is there nothing left
to try?

shall we dance again
our tactile tango
of dirty guns?

a gun is nothing.
it only changes
the pain.

bullets bleed
and targets quiver
and survivors,
well, they survive,

and souls like blackbirds
and whitebirds
rise in alluring parallel.

Poem for a Friend

I am wetter than the rain.

Clouds and me tearing
up into peaces.

Monsoon Season

The rain is melting the windshield. No wipers.
Streetlights become sparklers, and I become you.

Thirty-Eight Lights

Night. It's the Fifth of July,
but I see fireworks. Barricade light blinks the street orange.
Flashbulbs everywhere like toy lightning.
A police car. The beacon pirouettes,
but no siren. No sound.

Thirty-eight lights live and die each second,
and no one else seems to notice. Oh,
and the pharmacy next door is on fire.

Complex

I can still see you on a white tour bus, nibbling potato chips
and theologizing; your captive audience
sometimes escaping to that shoebox of a bathroom
as Massachusetts blurred by beside us.

But as I pass you in a bakery, offering hello,
you are perturbed. Your eyes head for safety,
and the man in your memory frantically scours
files and microfiche for a clue to this strange stranger.

You have forgotten my face and name,
but I forgive you. It simply squares you in the packing box of humanity;
among a sheepish and oblivious crew, captained
by Oedipus, who forgot even his own mother's face,

making love to her in blissful ignorance;
whole worlds swirling unnoticed about the bed.
He was not blind yet, but he was a man.

lifting waits

I hold still; lifted up
by a pulley. This is not flying,
and there is no breeze. Still, I
wait. I will never know how
to fix a carburetor or raise beans by a pond,
but still snow will fall this January,
and I will take a weighty number
and exotify the wall stucco from an orange chair.

Holy Week

I
Bred in a red birth.
Behind your eyes, our bread's worth.

II
You last, I backlash,
lashing your back with black ash.

III
In black the red dies.
Stillness, and last, the dead rise.

reflection and object

a blackbird careening into
a mirror. a mirror
becoming me, becoming
a blackbird, and lifting
me up to nature.

a blackbird
on an oak branch,
mirror shards for leaves.
The blackbird leaves.

cathedral

there is a horn and a sanctus bell
and an orange and an oak tree
down by the river

oh brothers, let's go down
and shed our sandals like leaves

mud and murk in our toes
vines' branches winding skyward
in warm breath of sunlight

we will whisper prayers and poetry
and discover a dove nest with fledglings

Mesopotamia

cutting up old newspapers
to papier-mâché today's headlines

toenail clipping for a moon
and broken cookie on a plate