Blood
Marrow-sprung,
eucharistic fount, black
pudding beaten in a
bucket, kept
from coagulating,
final taboo sopped
in a tampon or
gargling from a slit
carotid artery,
left to darken in air
like sunset stored
in citrated vials
for transfusion, thimblefuls
of grape
juice, wedding ring
on a leach finger,
brackish foodstuff
for the undead,
not wrung from
turnips, no denser
than porter, it
flows filtered forward,
pumps from valves
until it clumps.
Bumblebee
How a well-machined
hairy orb bobs yellow-
breeched
philosophy: foraging optimally,
visiting the
vertical inflorescences of foxglove
from bottom up,
pumping palp and maxilla
with the precision
of pistons, no wasted motion,
searching under the
sepals of monkshood
like a furtive lover,
or like a German engineer
in the
heliotrope, loading full corbiculas
with sticky pollen,
moving bloom to bloom,
then back to a comb
lodged between springs
of a truck cab seat
rusting in green rushes.
Back to dance an
alphabet of honey and wax.
Lunch
hour. The time it takes
to
meet in anonymity leaves
no
more than forty minutes.
All
preamble be damned:
hike
up, hunker down, flush
the
color of bruised peaches,
fall
against casements in knots
of
garment, tilt towards me,
so
I’m exposed while you rove
a
grove that grows in plums
with
each sucked-in breath,
while
wordless communiqués
flash
between us, rapt to be
here,
so roused beyond
the
mere scope of skin,
only
skin can suffice to hold
the
charge of the rash
dance
that fits the wan light
upon
these chalky walls—
perfectly.
A
Woman and Ennui
Somewhere a rag of
sound waves though when she stops to listen,
not a floorboard
trembles louder than her heart’s tintinnabulation.
She could sleep but
whenever she does, the dreams that hesitate
upon the threshold
of wakening seem to belong to someone else,
some ghost of
passed flesh to swallow dead when the alarm pulses.
Yesterday, alone,
one hand leaned against the corrugated tin door
that leads to the tar
roof, she squinted at the tops of buildings
receding into
midtown, wondering if sorrow had a particular shape,
how she might
distinguish it from her own sense of entitlement.
On a pitched
aerial, a knurled pigeon nodded, appeared to size
her up, though that
view, like the way occasional passersby,
striding below,
looked up to whisper something slanderous
was simply
projection, persuasive enough nonetheless to make
her forget about
the rigatoni growing cold and limp downstairs
and peer feverishly
into middle afternoon, too dizzy to deliberate.
Above her
neighbors, quivering in a cordon of sun, she was aware
that beneath
awareness, permeating, permanent, a nameless pang
hummed a tune no
gimlet could blot out, no hoard of sleep submerge.
Yesterday, alone on
the roof, when she tried to memorize the web
of cracks spreading
into cement slabs that formed the ledge
over which a river
of traffic flowed some thirty stories below,
she felt that all
her successes, her job at the advertising agency,
her boyfriend who
wielded a tongue he could tie cherry stems
into knots with,
her Hell’s Kitchen loft redone with track lighting
and marble
countertops, were hollow, were in fact keeping her
from achieving true
happiness, but how and why and really?
Hand on the tin
door, peering, she saw her reflection unhinged,
distorted into
fragments that took a momentous act of concentration
to reassemble into
something she could point to and say: that’s
me.
She waited. When
the pigeon took off, she went down to eat pasta.
In the humid space
of the dining room,
I can scarcely meet
your eyes for fear
of trembling or
worse, of betraying
a memory of what
noises we channeled
last night, of how you
shuddered in afterglow,
barely perceptible,
spine-curling currents
rippling a wad of
sheets, my fingers in yours,
your thighs on
mine, the curtains drawn.
I drag a fork
through eggs, shift in my seat,
blow on my coffee,
so as not to remember
too fully what
rapture we conjured,
how you gasped piano when I took you
too greedily into
my mouth, how I groaned
against your
arched, woolen instep,
no, these thoughts
will not do, not now,
not when I sit next
to someone creasing
open the New York Times while someone
else asks me if I
saw Mars last night.
Why yes, I don’t
say, I visited the red planet,
plus a few other
galaxies besides.
“Shapes
have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them
one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms.”
-Mark Rothko
The
proposal: luminous drama.
Ensconced
pallor meets an edge
of
burnished orange for a shotgun
romance.
Share a moment
of
horizontal bliss. Then watch
as
doubts arise. Ardor turns nasty
Recriminations
grow ever nastier,
spiraling
into black, burning coals
of
depression, continually brooding
on
death. Timelessness passes.
The
whole spectrum gets absorbed.
Somehow
the couple emerges aglow,
slightly
altered, happily lanced
in
yellow, each a part of the other
expecting,
miraculously to give birth
When
harangued by hue and cry,
they
admit to eloping. Step away
from
domestic light’s embrace
to
tally the gradations that hint
at
perspective abstracted:
romance,
pain, renewal, failure,
the
ecstasy of later years, happening
all
at once. Step to the surface.
Look
there, dead center: the secret
wedding.
An exchange of vows
in
an effulgent chapel where color
gathers
to praise us in our plight.
Bark of the birch,
aria of the oriole, grit of the sand-grain,
In the first stanza
I shall attempt to confiscate your essence
And each time, you
will slip through the noose of language,
Having no owner.
Your brief appearance, though, is enough
For the covetous
page, conferring the illusion of presence.
Even the breaths
heaving in my chest do not belong to me,
These wires of
muscles tapping the hand’s opposable thumb
Upon the spacebar,
and the precise machinery of two pupils
Taking it in are
not mine, though convenient to think so.
In the second
stanza, I shall feel like an outsider in my body.
Emptied of the need
to own, I become the pit of a plum.
We color our
language, Wallace Stevens wrote to Elsie Moll,
And Truth, being
white, becomes blotched in transmission.
In the third, final
stanza, I will understand what he meant
For a moment,
before the old words come flooding back.
From Instrumentality, (Cherry Grove, 2004)
http://www.cherry-grove.com/shankar.html
There’s nowhere
else I’d rather not be than here,
But here I am
nonetheless, dispossessed,
Though not quite,
because I never owned
What’s been taken
from me, never have belonged
In and to a place,
a people, a common history.
Even as a child
when I was slurred in school –
Towel head, dot boy, camel jockey –
None of the abuse
was precise: only Sikhs
Wear turbans,
widows and young girls bindis,
Not one species of
camel is indigenous to India…
If, as Simone Weil
writes, to be rooted
Is the most
important and least recognized need
Of the human soul,
behold: I am an epiphyte.
I conjure
sustenance from thin air and the smell
Of both camphor and
meatloaf equally repel me.
I’ve worn a lungi pulled between my legs,
Done designer drugs
while subwoofers throbbed,
Sipped masala chai steaming from a tin
cup,
Driven a Dodge
across the Verrazano in rush hour,
And always to some
degree felt extraneous,
Like a meteorite
happened upon bingo night.
This alien feeling,
honed in aloneness to an edge,
Uses me to carve an
appropriate mask each morning.
I’m still unsure
what effect it has on my soul.
From Instrumentality, (Cherry Grove, 2004)
http://www.cherry-grove.com/shankar.html