When to the desert, the dirt
comes water

comes money

to get off the shitdirt
land and move to the city

whence you

direct the work of those who now
work the land you still own

My grandparents left home for the American 

desert to escape
poverty, or the family who said You are the son who shall

become a priest

After Spain became
Franco’s, at last

rich enough

to return you
refused to return

The West you made

was never unstirred, never
artless

Excrement of the sky our rage inherits

there was no gift
outright          we were never the land’s

The trick was to give yourself only to what
could not receive what you had to give,

leaving you as you wished, free.
Still you court the world by enacting yet once

more the ecstatic rituals of enthrallment.
You cannot rest. The great grounding

events in your life (weight lodged past
change, like the sweetest, most fantastical myth

enshrining yet enslaving promise), the great
grounding events that left you so changed

you cannot conceive your face without their
happening, happened when someone

could receive. Just as she once did, he did—past
judgment of pain or cost. Could receive. Did.

don’t worry      I know you’re dead
but tonight

turn your face again
toward me

when I hear your voice there is now
no direction in which to turn

I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and

but tonight
turn your face again

toward me

see      upon my shoulders is the yoke
that is not a yoke 

don’t worry      I know you’re dead
but tonight

turn your face again

Like the invisible seasons

Which dye then bury all the eye
sees, but themselves cannot be seen

Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space

Inside whatever muck makes words in
lines leap into being is the intimation of

Like the invisible seasons

Process, inside chaos you follow the thread
of just one phrase instinct with cycle, archaic

Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space

Promise that you will at last see the buried
snake that swallows its own tail

Like the invisible seasons

You believe not in words but in words in
lines, which disdaining the right margin

Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space

Inside time make the snake made out of
time pulse without cease electric in space

Like the invisible seasons

Though the body is its
genesis, a poem is the vision of a process

Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space

Carved in space, vision your poor eye’s single
armor against winter spring summer fall

[This poem pays tribute to a 15th century poet William Dunbar (1465-1520)]

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek

within itself what to make

My father’s ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.

I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.

Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.

Many creatures must

make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

                   •

Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.

Woe is blunted not erased
by like. Your hands were too full, then

empty. At the grave’s

lip, secretly you imagine
then refuse to imagine

a spectre

so like what you watched die, the unique
soul you loved endures a second death.

The dead hate like, bitter

when the living with too-small
grief replace them. You dread

loving again, exhausted by the hungers

ineradicable in his presence. You resist
strangers until a stranger makes the old hungers

brutally wake. We live by symbolic

substitution. At the grave’s lip, what is
but is not is what

returns you to what is not.

What I hope (when I hope) is that we’ll
see each other again,—

… and again reach the VEIN

in which we loved each other . .
It existed. It existed.

There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,—

… for, like the detectives (the Ritz Brothers)
in The Gorilla,

once we’d been battered by the gorilla

we searched the walls, the intricately carved
impenetrable paneling

for a button, lever, latch

that unlocks a secret door that
reveals at last the secret chambers,

CORRIDORS within WALLS,

(the disenthralling, necessary, dreamed structure
beneath the structure we see,)

that is the HOUSE within the HOUSE …

There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,—

… there were (for example) months when I seemed only
to displease, frustrate,

disappoint you—; then, something triggered

a drunk lasting for days, and as you
slowly and shakily sobered up,

sick, throbbing with remorse and self-loathing,

insight like ashes: clung
to; useless; hated …

This was the viewing of the power of the waters

while the waters were asleep:—
secrets, histories of loves, betrayals, double-binds

not fit (you thought) for the light of day …

There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,—

… for, there at times at night, still we
inhabit the secret place together …

Is this wisdom, or self-pity?—

The love I’ve known is the love of
two people staring

not at each other, but in the same direction.

…telling those who swarm around him his desire
is that an appendage from each of them
fill, invade each of his orifices,—

repeating, chanting
Oh yeahOh yeahOh yeahOh yeahOh yeah

until, as if in darkness he craved the sun, at last he reached
consummation.

Until telling those who swarm around him begins again

(we are the wheel to which we are bound).

(Source: poemhunter.com)

for Desmond Dekker

I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary
bed it said But he loves me which broke my will.

music like dirt

That you did but willed and continued to will refusal you
confirmed seventeen years later saying I was not wrong.

music like dirt

When you said I was not wrong with gravity and weird
sweetness I felt not anger not woe but weird calm sweetness.

music like dirt

I like sentences like He especially dug doing it in
houses being built or at the steering wheel.

music like dirt

I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary
bed it said But he loves me which broke my will.

[From STAR DUST (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)]

up or down from the infinite C E N T E R
B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time

the voice in my head said

LOVE IS THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

           *

then I saw the parade of my loves

those PERFORMERS comics actors singers

forgetful of my very self so often I
desired to die to myself to live in them

then my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained
SPECTRES once filled with my baffled infatuations

love and guilt and fury and
sweetness for whom

nail spirit yearning to the earth

           *

then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

                            1984

Above the dazzling city lies starless
night. Ruthless, you are pleased the price of one

is the other. That night

dense with date palms, crazy with the breath-
less aromas of fresh-cut earth,

black sky thronging with light so thick the fixed

unbruised stars bewildered
sight, I wanted you dazzled, wanted you drunk.

As we lie on our backs in close dark parallel furrows newly

dug, staring up at the consuming sky, light
falling does not stop at flesh: each thing hidden, buried

between us now burns and surrounds us,

visible, like breath in freezing air. What you ignore or refuse
or cannot bear. What I hide that I ask, but

ask. The shimmering improvisations designed to save us

fire melts to law. I touched the hem of your garment. You opened
your side, feeding me briefly just enough to show me why I ask.

Melancholy, as if shorn, you cover each glowing pyre

with dirt. In this light is our grave. Obdurate, you say: We
are darkness. We are the city

whose brightness blots the stars from night.

—from Star Dust, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

(Source: wellesley.edu)

COIN

chip of the closed, —L O S T world, toward whose unseen grasses

this long-necked emissary horse

eagerly still
stretches, to graze

.


World; Grass;

stretching Horse;—ripe with hunger, bright circle
of appetite, risen to feed and famish us, from exile underground … for

you chip of the incommensurate
closed world Angel

—from Desire, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997

Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.

Everybody already knows everything

so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.

But lie to yourself, what you will

lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.

                 *

For each gay kid whose adolescence

was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial

scenario

forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.

                 *

Involuted velleities of self-erasure.

                 *

Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative

designed to confer existence.

If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not

me, but herself.

The door through which you were shoved out
into the light

was self-loathing and terror.

                 *

Thank you, terror!

You learned early that adults’ genteel
fantasies about human life

were not, for you, life.  You think sex

is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.