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10.
here, navy waves toe the dirty shore,
this is what I remember—the actual beach
is like looking at a postcard through a screen door.
seaweed litters the sand like loosened Yaki weaves—
a rusty bicycle color. any Venus born here swims
from a needle and a Styrofoam plate. myth
is an airbrush. so are hymns.
I want to be god-like. Apollo in a Seville with
the sun in the backseat. this is the poem
that will certainly make the poet famous. I write
at night, looking at the stars through the screen, room
fading into light.
let me tell you who I am. let me write it in pitch,
in slippery shadow. the pages flee from me like fish.
The Poet As Setting
The jolt that comes to bones inside a tumbled streetcar
is what the painter considers as she strokes her-
self into story. There is less to the jolt that
comes as he shuts his eyes before the monitor, save
what he imagines—a lightning bolt, a god tapping
the shoulder. He imagines the sky swelling
with ceiling fans or the guano of extinct birds,
a jolt riding from his shoulder
blades to his eyelids, dropping with roller
coaster clacks to his fingers. Here, he dreams of Frida
Kahlo. Here, he says, let me spread my flesh out like a
table linen, let my bones be silver that touches,
making, again, that clack. My skull will be a glass,
set properly, I have class enough. What jolt is
it to chew over class, his body set before him as
a reader sips (perhaps) a glass of something heady? We give
books spines, we break them. The table will have
its legs, its head. The body is upon us. Does the table have
a stomach? Is it simply there to bear our hunger
without its own, like a eunuch bathing a stripper?
What is the poet without eyes or ears—reading, listening? He is
a platform—a place to set, that to set it with. And if this is
all, what will he do when the reader finishes a glass,
rises from the poet’s head, and passes
into the city? Covered with a linen, he is waiting for
something to spill, perhaps a girl in Mexico rolling
her ankle in a street-
car.
From “John Henry Vs. The City”
5. in a station at the metro
first metrocard you bought
your hammer bent but
your eyes lit near electrical
your funk ain’t wilt wan petals
at station which still felt haunted
big negroes are expected
people pay for them but
tv’s a zoo-keeper this here
natural John once subway
clanged tracks in your grave
you were run through steel
machine devouring the corpse
of some America that natural
blood of yours feel green yellow
get a move on John even you
shouldn’t block the automatic doors
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