Lake Michigan

Aye — ‘twere a sea-hag

made me young,

who put these

eels in my thoughts,

stitched her tooth down

my groin and gave

seagulls supremacy to hold

hatch and flap their

pokeys over me.

Shore foreshortened

and so it takes the lengths

of three me’s for waves

the height of one to scale

down ‘til they’re barely

big enough to stub

a sandalled toe.

If I cared to, I could

go breaststroke out past

the runoff to swallow

my fill of freshwater

or just stay eastward stroking

to Michigan — entirely

safe in knowing

the lake in question

at bottom is but

something like

forty-one deep.

From the Archives : Verdun (June 2007)

Initially written on a roadtrip to France in June 2007, revised in August 2016. Pictured above: unexploded stick grenade found in old trenchline at Verdun.

Here — where magpies pant and yawn

and newborn calves are clodden tropes licked into form

as worms writhe scalded

                    in simmering lymecrush of gravel roads —

the Argonne remains like a Titan primordial

                    and without legend

                                        turned to earth in its sleep,

                    having let man thrash on chest, lip and tooth

then clutched him, ground his bonepulp,

                                                       never spat him back out. 

To stand on the grass is like being  

                    abovedeck on a channel ferry

rocking over what endless weaving and digesting below,  

undulation of the forest’s slowdrawn breaths —

here it feels like the earth might rise

                    and hillocks as waves crest and barrel you down,

the branches and stonefists frozen midattack

until a hiker trips the trapwire —

                    a word said to themselves

                                                            under their breath

as incantation sudden sparks the doomfed thresh

                    that looms beneath bark and leaf — folded in air.

Like bogwheat bodies the windfall and foliage

discourses its cause,

                    lichenchar branch and moss too welcome take

                                                            the lives of those

who’ve passed through them, fallen

                    down this stripnet, thorn and soil

searching the laven fallow matter of each human fate

its few memories whose cells roots take

                    and all else exhaled — let go to soil and sky.

Here is nothing that abides knowing, no genera but like faces

                    of the killed the forest took to wearing,

gazing through their skinless looks like

curtainfall and seeming leaves (all masks being one in rot)

and kept only the eyes. Sprigpierced, they blossom

to flesh the Spring’s revision

                    slurred, swollen and pollensweet.

These vales and ridges of fleshfed verdure, sown over

                                                            with mossy reaving birches

rendered in shades of cypress, groves as hem the yesteryear sun —

no cairn for the battalions, the boys stamped out

                                        and cooked alive in bunker hearths

with the happenings of years come after

                                        slaved in the underbrush.

                    The trunks of the eldest trees split in shell burst

suffuse with mustard gas (that purest flowering

bud of our artifice, its petals that pick apart the lovelorn instead)

                    the heartwood decaying, the marrow rings

exposed to weathering time and the humane age declared

stillborn, a gruesomest curio for the cabinet, as the tags are reaped

                                        in the scansion of battle

and other spoils as moles mutely

                    traduce to oilsledge of dirt.

Not a word staked but the grain to which a soldier

given to the battlefield rounds off

                                        and breaths expelled

of so many yelling weeping no — no line could engirdle

                    the exploded ribcage, the violence men thought holy

of triggers pulled

                                        with no period retaining the fatality’s

number finite as air — no where to begin the count.

Though how can I claim I saw anything

                    not imagined solely in the saying —

sloping hills terminating above

at valley’s rim, the far ridges whirring leaflush and yawning

with pale trunks, bursts of slurred green

                                        strafing nightlike recesses

beneath so much canopy — roaming this speeding vantage

that blurs my sight running out of itself

leaving but grass the same as everywhere to rush its sawtooth

                    against the sky as I go on with my forehead

hampressed on the booming glass — passenger

window of a rented car.

From the Archives : On Böcklin's Isle of Death (2011)

The path ahead that threads

          through the black ground

                         lighter layered than the dark

               shadow grove of the cypress

path that leads past the island

                    shades of saltbush and bone

          spireal as cypresses brush

                            away each fold of canvas

                                   dark into which you are reborn

                         the dark of eyelids

                                                                                closed

          as all thirst was prophecy

                    silver-gray for this cool island cell

fared over waters that will have washed

                                   all shores to one

                         as you were always shown this way

                                   approaching

                                                  never on any map

          and how beautiful the colors of sky

                enough for every

                                                       one of us

From the Archives : Directives for a New Century (2015)

Now that the spells cast are echoed out

                                        just toggle the switch to reset.

Record over the master tapes, enclose yourself in a metrics

of stubble. Now cue

                                         the apocolocyntotic gnomes, wraiths of flame invisibly

                                         blue to colonize the Idea

of Tongue — who’ll ply their little mallets, play a game of boulet

                                         with your words taking place

of marbles spilt — there, there — specifically. To think the mouth the ear

at once fraught with listening though wanting to

                                         talk over what it hears. Now mark

                                         our arrival in a far-off advent — have the heavenly

houselights been left on, curtains vindictively raised on all the rut

                                         of rarefied realms? Who is it

                                         that hates us so?

Does the Sublime look like so much backdrop, its clammy malapropa exposed

to biographical daylight and other postcoital embarrassments

                                         on clay cylinders glumly styled? Jouissance — now that’s a text

                                         glumlier read! Well — best you go toss off

that age-olde curséd backjaw of a penning sentence,

that rape knot of a slaphappy

                                         tongue. As after the delves and dives and wheeze afflatus

we are to punctuation overgiven, so we must

spit out the gumwad and take a meter of popsicle stick — with no more

                                         turns to make recrudesce

our happy office but just go

respire throat-deep in the reeds — saying Ahhh, Ahhh, specifically — there.

Cold Genius

One has to be inside

Winter to write

about it — or not —

as the ink inside

my pen congeals

and won’t come out

and my frozen iPhone

doesn’t even sense

my index finger

tapping in the pin.

I can feel the tendons

creak in my hand

as if cold made

flesh real by

feeling it

self so.

The Burden

We haunt ourselves —

smiling in pictures clearly

sharper than the eye

can pinch the screen to see

that smile’s a scowl.

They are stronger than us

and more themselves, and free 

in that they are unburdened 

with having to live, no —

they already were.

It’s over. They cannot be

argued with, undone.

Worst of all, they know this

about themselves.

What are they looking at —

the dark of the lens.

Why should they smile

standing in a wilderness

without provision —

to say, I am content

in this moment belonging

to no one not me.

The burden isn’t

what we know 

they didn’t — no,

it’s all they won’t

let us forget.

Group Photo

They’ve rounded us up

on the gazebo stairs

for a group photo.

Smile now! the lady says

and I realize I’m not

exactly sure where it is

we should look — her face

in front of the cordgrass

or sky all around us turning

sepiatone with afternoon

light. Panic. Thank you!

and the rows of us

disperse at her signal.

She already took it.

Letzte Ausfahrt Bayreuth (Juli 2008)

Hühnerdrahtähnliches verhält

den Steinbruch am fernen

Autobahnrand — doch schießt

der Schössling zaundurch — seine

holzungsgeweihte zwei Meter

stochernd in die für den Himmel

unreife Luft eines Julimittags.

Eine braunweiße Unterrichtungstafel,

wie man so kennt. Wir stachen

am Ausfahrt zur Eremitage

im letzten Moment ab. Es war

ein gefährliches Manöver

zum Glück gelungen. Die Stadt

war uns uninteressant, mein Vater

und ich. Wir wollten uns eher

das ziellose Herumlatschen

ersparen, wie unlängst unsere

Erfahrung im Weimarer Zentrum.

Auf ein vor dem Dichterpaar

aufgenommenes Foto begreife ich

endlich wie peinlich eng

meine T-Shirts damals waren.

Im Passagiersitz notierte ich Anfänge

eines Gedichtes, das mehr als

ein Jahrzehnt später (und nach dem

Tod meines Vaters) dieses wurde —

entschlüpfte sogar die Sprache,

wie erst dem Stift wackelig

schreibend während der Fahrt,

übersetzt ins Deutsche.

Gestörte Züge — Staben, Ziffern —

Seismograf — ein Versuch kenntlich

Wörter zu bilden, wie Lenker in hand

mein Vater die A9 hochjagte.

Weiterblättern. Ein englisches Zitat

scheinbar aus dem Brochure

niedergeschrieben — A gem of rococo

pleasure gardens, diversely outfitted

with grottoes, a ruined theater, ancient tomb

and false cliff dubbed Parnassus.

It was here the prince played at living

a hermit’s life. Wir tauchten ein

in das lapsarische Bildnis

nur um etliche Prinzipien des Neo-

klassicismus zu kennzeichnen.

Schau wie diese nur grobe

Pompeijbrocken sind.

Unfertigkeit als Leitmotiv.

Die Büsten des bayerischen

Olymps bestrichen mit Blattgold.

Ihre Gesichter — berühmt —

und Brauen — krumgehauen.

Wir verbrachten nichtmal

30 Minuten vor dem Entschluss

Hey dad — let’s get out of here.

From the Archives : Action Flick (2015)

I'm feeling capable again. No, it's not that

the scales have fallen from my eyes

but that they themselves are as bricks

making the house a solid thing and not

just an alliance of the air with itself.

How seeing proves more lid than iris, 

more curtainfall than proscenium. 

How like the messiest butterknife known

to man the pathetic fallacy spreads

the preserves on toast and hand, equally.

How the weight of a jug of Tropicana

is nothing without the almost hairless arm

that will either succeed or fail in lifting it,

too puny to move most of the world

into and out of place. And so who's to say

a rampart is not foam, your body not pumice

or the billionaire nobody they want to be.

Let go and whether it’s you or the makings

of breakfast that float unmoored away —

like Morpheus does Neo in The Matrix

I want to ask you where you think

you are, where this is happening.

And then — does it matter?

De Flumina

Narrows where light

was slit above

and water sang

to itself carving way

down to floodplain

basins as long-necked

birds gathered to pluck

fish from the water

who never knew guilt

flushed to the deltas

with ditches leading off

to fields and other places

where maize grew

and mud hazardous

as mouths now leash

currents to the end

of land coursed through

out of sand opening

its sterility of lips

words spoken

At Whitman's Tomb (I)

This is a draft of the first part of a sequence I’m currently working on about Walt Whitman’s tomb in Camden - that is, the conditions of its conception and creation (present poem), his death and funeral, ending with my own experience visiting it in April 2015.

It was in a letter dated Sept. 29th, 1890

and addressed to your dear friend

and executor, Mr. Bucke: a drawing

done in blue crayon on a loose scrap

of paper fingertipped off the carpet

next to your rocking chair, folded

haphazardly and tapped down into

the envelope right after drawing it.

Like a house pictured in the mind

of a child, your dwelling reduced

here to its most basic form. A roof

and two supporting walls, a door

to enter with your name above

saw-toothed tidings of the ground —

the famous signature that betrays

the surrounding text as written

by your hand, the ink having run

on the too soft and porous paper.

From the Archives : Marlboro Men (2009)

Smile and see

the parenthetic creases

exhaled through, deep and cool —

this cowboy’s shadow-buried eyes

and rough noose that rounds the steer’s

gape and gleaming neck.

Wincing in leather, jeans and flannel,

the first guy is under a road sign

(one cigarette of the mind

against the flow)

as golden roasted bald

eagles flame out and the wind

is made ensign, hot and pregnant

with tumbleweed blown down

desert smokey

to the snake’s den.

Another dude just chills, leans

and ashes on the canyon’s tongue,

spits into its pitted ribbing.

To thread the grain of it, the dead

desert hand (a photographer’s) bows

the plates simmer violet and horizon.

High noon all-the-prettier for its negative.

The last one is out there lassoing

from atop his saddle-stacked stallion

with severe frontier thumb

all that fallow dreamage, riding down

dust roads from corral and ranch

to kneel and knead some clods of loam

cool to the touch after sundown,

stuck in a compadre’s pockets.

Smoke-rise and a day’s slow drone out.

Cactus hands reach for the sky.

From the Archives : Les Miz (2016)

Everybody’s a critic when it comes

to the Revolution — some sing

the chorus upon barricades

while others take aim

to please make them stop —

that’s when the shot of the very

first shot they shot is shot

and the day’s wrap for those

who were lucky to have died.

Things will have quieted down by now

for the friends we’ll never meet.

Friends — no matter what they will

have pointed at us, done with us, to us,

what now we feel shall be revealed

les affaires immatérielles d'antan

and the times will recast us, rolled over

in their greater sleep — to fashion

of our lives history, to reboot

our homes into glamorous flats

of pilots — ace debonaires

with prudence enough

to know when to quit

the hopeless conflict

and go nurse those 

dry martinis they

left sweating

at the bar.

Ars Poetica

You never did want

for words. Like flintstones

strike them together. Like this.

Like bright bowls invaded

by flies too soon before

we could enjoy the apples

as anything more than

decoration. Missed a spot

where it began — white mouth

of the mush. It is forbidden.

Pick it all up and flies alight

for the mash of garlic

and breadcrumbs clogging

the drain. Take Windex

and spray it into the trash

just to be safe. Here, like this.

De Usu

Picture a garden shed

full of rakes and shovels —

rusted steel, wooden hilts

cracked along the grain.

Broken, stupid things.

It’s hard to believe that

these were once of use

in men’s hands. But look —

their nobs are smooth.

There’s no need to.

Woodlawn

As I sit at my grandmother’s grave,

my mother pulling weeds from the lavender

and my grandfather in the collapsible

Coleman chair next to me, his liver failing,

I watch as an ant struggles to climb

the polished granite of the headstone.

It keeps falling off, then tirelessly

tries to climb right back up

as though its life depended

on reaching the top.

The Oak Tree (July 2018)

Two years are etched on arrows

pointing to rings in the cross-section

of a 100-year-old oak. An arrow bearing

the year 2011 gestures towards the bark

at the trunk’s edge where the year

2000 is nailed about two inches away.

The years don’t proceed evenly

down to a center, as one might think

they would. Rather, the rings distort

as they circle the trunk, evening

as they near the bark and take on

the tree’s outer shape. Dark patches,

black welters mark the marrow

of the wood, where sap still bleeds

from cracks six years after it was felled.

Judging by how much space is left

between the years and the center

where the rings are so dense I can

no longer discern one from the other

it seems inescapable, that I imagine

the wood as a kind of map of time

contracting towards its center

as bathwater rounds a drain.

I scratch at a spot roughly where

I was born, then trace further inward

the births of my mother, my father.

There aren’t enough rings to hold

the births of their own parents

but that are compacted in the dark

of the heartwood, smooth and hard

as stone. It’s unclear why the oak was

cut down — whether it was diseased

or too old, or even if it could still be

standing, growing with our lives below

the bark. Or am I only able to know

myself apart — the tree as being

there, its rotting cross-section

propped-up in front of me

that I might see when

we were once alive. 

From the Archives : Whitmania (2014)

First edition of Leaves of Grass, self-published by Walt Whitman in 1855. I originally wrote this poem in German sometime around 2010 or '11 as part of a larger series, and then translated it into English in 2014. The series in question was a kind of exercise in playing with language, and that can still be seen at some places in the English translation. Beyond that, the original poem was inspired by reading about a legend of sorts that Walt Whitman, pacing on the sand of Wallabout Bay in his youth, once found a femur bone sticking out of the sand (I have not been able to find any mention of this "legend" anywhere since). Nevertheless, Wallabout Bay (which is now occupied by the Brooklyn Naval Yard) was where several British prison ships had laid anchor during the Revolutionary War after their occupation of the region around New York City. The conditions on the ships were brutal, and up to over 10,000 Revolutionary soldiers are thought to have perished in captivity on the ships. Their bodies were simply thrown overboard, and it was a common occurrence to find human remains washed ashore on the lower banks of the East River well up until the end of the 19th Century. These remains are kept in an ossuary housed beneath the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn. Since I could not establish the veracity of the legend as it stuck in my memory, I decided to make the reference in the first line a little more ambiguous, but it seems to me now that I've made a composite figure of Hart Crane and Walt Whitman. Currently, I'm contemplating whether this poem should be expanded, or form the motivating crux of a new poem sequence regarding those two figures. 

Bones of mates gone overboard he found youthlong

woven at surf's end, sown and sticking out of the sand

like barnacled rods, the clefs of songs as yet unsung

Wallabout Bayside of the holy ship-broken East River.

Grass pokes and earth spills from the words of the title

pressed into the binding, spared the poet's name

with nothing but the creased rot of leather to cover

the pages that sadly touch each other, unable to sleep.

Our reading is a yellowing no campanion will comfort

as we dig our way down. As we bury and tuck ourselves in.

From the Archives : Homo Heidelbergensis (2008)

Heidelberger Schloss, Carl Rottmann (1815). This poem is an outtake from my book - it was once part of a trio of poems that explored growing up in and around Heidelberg that I've since broken up into individual pieces. This is the weakest and most embarrassing of those three (though I tend to find the majority of my poems embarrassing) - the focus on the 'I' of the speaker strikes my ear as a little too cloying, the phrasing too treacly. First written in April 2008, I rewrote the poem extensively in 2017. See multiple versions below.

Years I slept, wound and fused at the core of the nautilus. I dreamt

of the soil. My breath was methane, exhaled from cracks and cuffed

upon the Jura. Years split stone and shell. I woke up. I remember only

to forget. The ferns petrified in the cliff, the oak groves long axe-felled.

Columns of spotlight that spilled downward through the beechwood

ocean-heavy. Cloud knights and movies never made, spied in the sky.

Gaiberg : a village between forest and field, where the mountain slopes

down to the loamlands and ridge-hemmed fringes of what would prove 

Memory with its grey-blue of distance. Growing up, I could see no end

to that haze expanse, but barely make out the ruined citadel of Dilsberg

and glean a truth of distant places home becomes. To expect no return

for the endlessness of youth's quest. Home : besieged in your absence,

burned down, built over. Part of a new empire. And whatever remains

familiar is just cloyingly still there, trim like some pensioner’s garden plot

stuffed between the bypass soundbarriers and the fenced-off railyards

that, like the Neckar, would kidnap me in their current — take me away

across the plain. Years planted in the Rhinebed, running the rift country

yet another valley reeking of onion and gasworks, the other side fading

like a range of cloudbank. Mirage or mirror, never there to begin with.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Years you slept — wound fused at the core of the nautilus. Of the soil

you dreamt. Your breath was methane, exhaled from cracks and cuffed

on the Jura. Years split stone and shell awake to forget. Whisper ferns

in the cliff, groves long axe-felled. Clothes the child you’re told you are

wears in pictures, folded in landfills to dress you again. Spotlights drown

the canopy, spill columns ocean-heavy. Beams of movies never made

in the sky. Cloud knights, sagas of defeat. Gaiberg — its ridge sloping

down to the loamlands. A view proving memory in grey-blue of distance

the childe mistook for haze. There’s no end to where roads go defining

borderlands of shining meadows where squires kneel to pick dandelions.

Dilsberg — ruined citadel, distant as home becomes expecting no return

from quest of youth. Besieged in your errance, scorched earth overbuilt

as the provincial seat to another, a new empire. And whatever remains

familiar is just cloyingly still there. Trim like some pensioner’s garden plot

sanely tucked between the bypass soundbarriers and fenced-off railyards

that, like the Neckar, would kidnap with their current — take you away

across the plain. Years planted in the Rhinebed, running this rift country

yet another valley reeking of onion and gasworks, the other side fading

like a range of cloudbank. Mirage or mirror — never there to begin with.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Years you slept — wound fused at the core of the nautilus. Of the soil

you dreamt your breath was methane — exhaled from cracks and cuffed

on the Jura. Years split stone and shell awake to forget — whisperferns

in the cliff, groves long axe-felled. Clothes the child you’re told you are

wears in pictures, folded in landfills to dress you again. Spotlights drown

the canopy, spill columns ocean-heavy — beams of movies never made,

sagas of defeat starring knights of cloud. Gaiberg — its playground sloping

down to the loamlands. A view proving memory in grey-blue of distance

the childe mistook for haze. There’s no end to where roads go on defining

borderlands of shining meadows where squires kneel to pick dandelions.

Dilsberg — ruined citadel, distant as home becomes expecting no return

from quest of youth. Besieged in your errance, scorched earth overbuilt

as the provincial seat to another — a new empire. And whatever remains

familiar is just cloyingly still there. Trim like some pensioner’s garden plot

sanely tucked between the bypass soundbarriers and fenced-off railyards

that, like the Neckar, would kidnap with their current — take you away

across the plain. Years planted in the Rhinebed, running this rift country

yet another valley reeking of onion and gasworks, the other side fading

like a range of cloudbank. Mirage or mirror — never there to begin with.

Fernando Pessoa's "35 Sonnets" (1918)

One of two works self-published in 1918, Pessoa wrote these sonnets in English very much under the influence of Shakespeare (and Hopkins, by the looks of it). He sent his collection to several British journals to be reviewed, where one critic in the Times Literary Supplement noted that Pessoa's "command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English." As I first encountered a PDF of the book in 2012, I was left a little bewildered. How was this, and Pessoa's other verso inglês, not more widely known and read? These poems are right up there with his major work - and even within an oeuvre defined by its strangeness, its otherness, these poems are doing something really quite weird.

It's also the admittedly amateurish or "outsider" quality of some of the poems that renders those sharp turns of phrase all the more cutting, as what's profound becomes uncanny. Much like when I read the Book of Disquiet, I can never not imagine my reading as if I were picking loose leaf pages at random out of a discarded steamer trunk, the paper as sallow as those of the book scanned here below - reading words that, even though they are passing through my mind as I read them, and even though I and many others are aware of Fernando Pessoa and Alberto Caeiro and Alvero de Campos and his other personas, that the oblivion these words issue from outweighs my awareness, that pushes back and struggles against my reading as a kind of magnetic pull towards wanting to be forgotten. I mean, I can admit it - I often forget about Pessoa and his work, he slips my mind. I rediscover him on my book shelf. Here is the oblivion that everything which is past is part of, that it all becomes, to put the body in nobody - that we will never know how these words came to us, they just are. Closed between the covers of a book, or suspended in code that is only rendered as text whenever our browsing calls it into being. Or they are found, these words and works, a bizarre and random instantiation of what was only previously imaginable - not imagined, but what was possible to have been imagined. One can easily invoke the legend of Kafka here, too, though what's so uniquely troubling with Pessoa is how we get the inner life of a man who not only has disappeared, but who never was in the first place. There's a certain sensation that emanates from Pessoa's writing, an aversion at its subtlest and a horror at its most acute, which is felt in relation to the givenness of what others always seem to point to as the "facts of life" - the things and ways of the world, the world as a world itself, and our being in it, a part of it. That things are real, that they are - an absurdity, the knowledge of which goads from the page and infects and corrodes the knower. Not to go too much further on this silly tangent, but reading Pessoa reminds me of how literally everything that's everything is made up - which does not mean the same as make believe. For what point do we inhabit, from which we can believe? It is as though I often graze some infinitely unsettling realization that I just barely, luckily, avoid having. This is particularly the case with the Book of Disquiet, but I get the same vague sense of vertigo reading these sonnets - which in their own way enhance this uneasiness precisely because they themselves, the poems, are so rarely read.

At any rate, to me this slender chapbook is a kind of conservatory greenhouse full of overgrown ferns, orchids and corpse flowers stuck somewhere on a run-down East Midlands country estate. Pessoa practices upon English what was so often exacted upon the spoils of British colonialism: he exoticizes it. Moreover, the effect these sonnets achieve is one of rendering English - or, more narrowly, the idiom of the Elizabethan sonnet - foreign to (and yet more strangely) itself.