The Singer and Her Dirty Pioneers in the Lyrical Village

Contents

One

Dirty Pioneers, the State of the State, and the Fabulous Woman Who Dances

Fanatics

Her Famous Green Guitar Pics

The Singer's Wife is Also a Singer

Tinder

What Does Music Sound Like

Lyrical Village
Song for The Singer

Two

Stage Presence

Three

The Contest

Four

Resort

Five

Guest Appearances by Neil Young and The Thing with Feathers

Empathy for Fat Elvis and Notes Toward the Impeachment of Dread

Lyrical Village

Life’s a Long, Unspooling Series of Rooms, Very Doomy Rooms,

...but in music

my desolation is my rejoicing.

—Louise Glück

One

Dirty Pioneers, the State of the State, and a Fabulous Woman Who Dances

1.

Looking out in wonder, I imagine, and not unkindly,

at their doofus fans and devotees, through the giant tinted windows of their megalithic bus,

the Singer and her Dirty Pioneers

ramble all over these dirty states, a rolling holy

boulder down the crazed and crumbling lanes

of one sad and scary, scared America. Roadies, I’m sure, are always along,

but in the Pioneers’ roadshow also spouses & kids, sisters & mums,

a funny rock and roll tour

right out of Exodus crossed with Flintstones

plus Patsy Cline if maybe she had married

everyone in Pearl Jam.

And so just the right home for a fabulous woman who dances, goes completely

tornadic, I heard, doing her thing in intimate clubs, sleek civic centers,

grassy heartland festivals smelling of sunblock and beer, and Venue

Security, once, even had to restrain her. One time they roped off a place just for her.

But the band just loves her abandon, I think they love her abandon. They even made a video

of this proverbial wildcat spinning

all over a vast darkened floor, completely alone to "Mainstream Kid,"

lights sparking upward and her hair

flailing upward and the chief thing seems to be

that she doesn't give a damn about anything

you might call external, absolute

authority.

Still, I’m not completely sure that she’s free,

or only feels herself free, or if feeling free

actually does make us

free—am I overthinking this a bit?—

or if she isn’t in fact doing battle, ferocious but hilarious battle

with something monumentally

difficult to dance. I mean say. I mean dance.

2.

It slightly sickened and thrilled me today

to realize the only way to be free

of death is to die.

And yet there she is, the woman who dances. In flesh.

At least I think

she’s made of flesh.

*

I saw her at a concert this year, squished into a nutsoid crowd

that was kind of trying to eat

the stage. It was New Year’s Eve in a country

lately inhospitable, you might say, a little less than welcoming

to the globally homeless. And a city well-known for its colorful (you might say)

criminal history, but also its blues, divine northern blues! a Loop and reverse-

running river.

Anyway, there in the stir, there in the crush

of that godawful crowd, I could see our dancing woman leap, I mean wind

right out of herself, dancing

with the very air itself. And let me tell you this: that’s not even

possible. Or legal, I don’t think. I mean, they outlawed heavenly bliss

on earth

a long time ago now. Clear back at the start.

The bastards.

And yet there she is. ..

*

Meanwhile, the voice that quickens the dancer and all of us,

the Singer’s voice so manifestly

correct for this human strangeness unending, meaning downright gorgeously replete

with error—little yelps and skips and hoarse-sounding, even growl-like stuff, even squeaks—

is not yet illegal like heavenly joy

on earth. Although maybe it should be.

We don’t allow dead men walking

to listen to music, correct? Their agitation

can turn extreme. They won’t be restrained.

Fanatics

1.

I’m talking Row A, dead Center, practically mashed

into the stage. So you watch the concert looking straight up, or nearly.

So you’re just about surgically aligned

with the Truth and the Light and the Way. It’s kinda sweet, isn’t it, the nearness?

the defeat? Still you long for a backstage pass, the ultimate pass, a really kickass VIP ticket.

You don’t know about Truth, Light, and whatever—

but you imagine, at the least, that someone beloved

will shake your hand, pose for a pic, write down their name in amazing letters.

You may even do whisky shooters together.

They’ll tell you everything.

*

Oh, I know; the band in truth is comprised of mere mortals.

I’m ok about that. I already know

that. The human celebrity never quite matches

the luminous dot in your brain

which is always withdrawing

and dragging you along. They’re just guys

who scratch bug bites, tie their shoes crooked,

hiccup like everyone else. That’s ok. That’s good.

Perfect alignment only works for the planets,

and perfection itself, well, is boring.

I’m not even identical to myself.

2.

, a stop-

gap presence

on posters, freshly unrolled like fragile Magna Cartas;

on a used blue ticket, perhaps, still crisp or splotched with rain;

on some odd, ill-focused old personal photo

back when the Singer busked in Seattle.

And ergo of course the big question: record or don’t record

the show? LIVE the moment or KEEP

the moment? Should I try

to live-stream on Facebook for all of us the whole gorgeous wave

of it always too fast, should I leap

on stage if only in my

mind or my camera's

eye,

get as close

as I can, should I try to inhabit

all three of them right

at the moment they make

the sound

and more than the sound,

the Song—

can I?

Afterwards, we all do the long and patient, not-so

patient lingering out by the stage door or bus.

The show may be over, but we are not over

the show. Our longing runneth over. We cannot suffer

enough. We huddle in the cold under a single bulb

or chat off to the side in small groups. Maybe she’ll step out and visit, maybe she won't.

Maybe she will, and we'll press to the front of the line,

take her by the hand and look her in the eye—we are not yet completely

broken, or mute,

or imaginary...

3.

I suppose what I want

are contours

to complicate, colors to thicken,

detail to be detailed, at last.

I want a song that crunches and pops,

turns out to be something you can pound with a shoe

or throw a rock at.

I want to say concrete differences

so minutely and truly you will finally be able to see

identical twin bandmates precisely

apart, the delicate crinkle

at the top of somebody’s ear,

concise clues like the swoop

of a jaw.

Problem is, if I start, say, with tattoos,

I never get much further than bruisey

and the overall flow of forms down their arms.

That is, I don't see each brother's intricate, particular markings

so much as the winding of ink around and around

the arm, so I have to turn my head, or turn the picture,

or turn both my head and the picture

to see it…

Jack over there looks wounded and hunched over

whenever he’s really and truly rocking a solo. It’s like a heart

attack or falling down into, say,

some long lonely vortex

to go deep

to go loud

and public with lead guitar.

Mac, meanwhile,

is wholly unfolded and open, always mugging to the fans, his big grin beaming rock hosannas

as his fingers elsewhere and unnoticed translate

the underground throb of the bass.

Did you catch that? The doubled-up muckimucks? The backwards mirror effect? The spinning

gets fucking numbing, I tell you.

I can’t say the two sides as they need to be said, there’s no word for different and same,

shifting

proximities intoxicating both,

opposite equals advancing

and withdrawing at once…

*

Let’s be clear.

Aside from the Fender and Gretsch or Martin or Collins, Jack

plays to the right of the Singer, Mac

to the left. It’s as simple as that.

Wait! I just found on the web: Mac’s front teeth overlap just a bit.

ID solved! Now I’ve only to figure out, if I spot them some day,

how I’ll ask them to open their mouths

so I can stare at their teeth.

The Singer’s Wife is Also a Singer

The Singer says they’re both buddies and lovers, I think they share all their clothes,

and I guess their take on this wide and scrappy, inscrutable world

is exactly the same. They even dream exactly alike—

bird homicides, something about a shoe.

Sometimes their daughter comes toddlering onstage as well.

She rides either mother’s shoulders like a very large hat

that laughs.

Honestly, if you can’t fall in love with a family like that

something’s fucked in your heart. You’re out of whack with the world.

Or you’re so in whack with yourself

there’s absolutely no whack left over for anyone else. You’re alone

and perfectly aligned

with you.

How does it feel.

*

In Buddhism, nothing has inherent existence. If “I” were a solid something,

with sealed up edges, as it were, I’d basically be inert. There would be no

flux or birth. I wouldn’t in fact exist.

But being empty means

being open and

in relation to all the other, incredible, whackjob forms of life, equally empty.

Having no inherent existence

means I am in fact here.

Sometimes I understand this shit, and sometimes I don’t.

*

One time they came out and did a killer “Fields of Gold.” It was genuinely

something.

I could tell because

it obliterated

us.

Our hearts, I mean.

when the west wind moves

feel her body rise

*

Because the Singer and the Singer’s wife

are not exactly alike. Don’t believe it. They wouldn’t sound so beautiful

together if they were. They wouldn't have that giggling

Hat.

Her Famous Green Guitar Picks

1.

She tosses them out to the crowd like after-dinner mints

at the end of her most devastating performances. She’s a little bit

funny like that.

One went streaking over my head like a drone

gone AWOL on Adderall.

She otherwise lines them up on the neck of the mike

like rounds of ammunition,

or even the worrisome serpent of old.

A lot of people, by the way, don’t believe

in the mystical hoodoo I’m helpless

not to ponder. I don’t either. It’s not a matter of belief.

It’s a matter of frequent

flyer miles, yeah, and listening, and pining,

and like. Which can apparently go on forever.

like the worrisome serpent of old

*

I imagine a boomer couple just retired, maybe,

local hipsters geeking out on a scene,

or more likely some good and kind kid from two states away

(she came wearing the exact floppy fedora

her favorite singer wears), amazed now to snag the prize from the air

and hold it gingerly in the palm of her hand

like the final word, or a key.

Then remembering she can’t remember

what it’s supposed to unlock.

*

And green. Green. I have to keep saying it, I want to hug the damned thing,

I suppose so I do not forget. I mean verdigris, verdant,

viridescent. Maybe punky? Maybe park? Like little pieces of Eden

we managed to smuggle out.

Like and unlike

the way people saved bricks and even pieces of bricks,

even pieces of pieces you get the idea,

from the Berlin wall.

Maybe good?

2.

Sometimes, when they flash like tiny green birds

above our heavy hominoid brains,

so freely,

so easily,

at the end of a show,

we can’t even.

Why we long to see her live and on stage

in Charleston, in October, at the height of a flood.

In Fort Lauderdale spring, just before hoards

of college marauders erect the kitschiest

golden calf ever. And Atlantic City in lights. The lights.

Just the lights.

Because we crave that feeling of the moment going.

The heart-twist of not keeping it.

The heart-sink of no

such luck.

No story; no grand story, certainly.

Just a skip in a voice

making sadness absurdly luminous.

3.

She will of course glance down, now and again,

at a chord she is making or about to make

on the neck of the guitar, like touching a foot to the earth for balance

or buoyancy before launching away yet again.

While actual silence itself

she works like a pro, a very maestro of light, prolonging

one unexpectedly there, and again further there—

in “Follow,” perhaps, then “Hard Way Home,” then “Blood Muscle Skin

and Bone”—

zeroing in on “The Eye”—

for encore the famous “Hallelujah,” practically blistering with irony…

Tinder

The Singer is crying, crying, and no,

she is not crying while singing, she is just

singing. You might even hear it as laughing.

Is isn’t is,

which isn’t to say that it’s not. That’s what I think.

And she is not crying. Oh

my god the pain when she cries. We cannot

bear to stop listening.

*

In one scene, in the tour documentary,

the band makes the driver pull over. They’ve had it, I guess,

with the bus. They spill out and over a nearby beach, freezing and windy, cloudy,

a grand soul- or psyche-beach right out of Bergman

or something. They are all bundled clear to their necks, they scatter

in groups, a mother with baby

splits from the group near the back and

slows down to be wholly alone. She feels completely alone

to me. And that's ok. That's good. The way she's drifting

away into mist, the far edge of the frame, the way she seems to be looking

in, just in all the time, just lost in herself, as we say,
until all, as they say, but gone.

Funny that I keep on watching.

*

Meanwhile, the beloved Singer is walking and chatting

with someone who is walking and filming,

the wind sort of making her lean

forward against

the wind. But she’s relaxed. Her voice is relaxed. She knows what it is to be looked at

a lot and now feels perfectly easy, perfectly present,

as though no one at all

is looking.

*

She talks about bonfires—everyone knows she loves bonfires.

On a windy beach, she explains, they can really take off. Whereupon,

she motions to describe what a very large wind

likes to do to a spark. Whoooooshholyshit!

She is the Singer.

Fire is.

*

Her voice cracks, there's a country western tang—

No not twang; I do mean tang.

You know, like what the astronauts drank. Bahahahaha!

Like, I mean, she hits

a sharp note in “Hallelujah” and holds it right there till my god we're all flung

way clear of the earth

that we love like we love

coming back down to the next

strike of the match.

How to explain

that something so glorious

can be tangy? Alright then twangy too. And funny. I think funny

is bound up in glory, some alchemy inside the Big Bang

when it banged.

Damn, that singer’s so good, it’s funny.

Like that.

*

Is isn’t is

just like it wasn’t when it was

and won’t be when it will be.

I only said that to be funny.

I know it probably isn’t.

Derrida talked a lot

about probability. But he wasn’t that Derrida.

*

Meanwhile, their unplugged national tour

requires that they more or less sing

their living guts out, naked voices in a naked theater.

Requires that they find

that crazily evasive needle of air, what will hurt

the most to reach people through.

And yeah, they found it. They find it again and again.

The weeping, the needle, the laughter not optional.

What kills us alive.

What Does Music Sound Like

It sounds like music. Of course.

Well, sometimes. Sometimes it sounds

like something else—horses galloping, or rain, maybe.

Or some kind of hulking, impending

disaster, or something big that already happened

and flopped. WAH-wah.

But the really good music

sounds like nothing but music. I will never understand

how people can be vocal

right in the middle of orgasm.

Me, I'm too busy

having an orgasm.

Lyrical Village

The Singer's like the adopted little sister

of her older bandmates known as the Twins.

One of the Twins

is married to the Singer's sister,

and the Singer's wife's sister

is married to the cellist.

Songs are named for the bandmembers' kids, the kids

are named after grandparents and one or more cherished aunts, cherished towns.

The Twins' beloved mom is friends

with everyone— even, on Facebook, with the band's berserk fans—

and the Singer’s mom was a beautiful, professional

crooner herself on the country western stage.

And then there's... well. Angelina.
I'll call her Angelina.

Hysterical

wee little angel,

the Singer's little daughter. She's two.

She may or may not be able to sing.

She may

or may not wish to.

She bursts giggling straight for the open ocean

on the beach at Quintana Roo.

*

It’s funny; I imagine the tired crew, maybe some of the family

inside the tour bus, outside the theater, after the show,

watching fans by the stage door flock.

They know the fans long to speak with the Singer

who, earlier that night, from the bright stage itself,

in the other inside,

called out the Fabulous Woman Who Dances—someone Angelin

I think is destined to be.

Or not.

*

Yes, the Fabulous Woman Who Dances

was there in the molten crowd like a breach, a distinction

ongoing but mending itself

always as the crowd flowed instantly back

around her, so the dancer’s dance

if you think

about it, if you follow where I’m looking

exactly,

is a violence

and a bliss

you can’t exactly

locate

anywhere. It’s everywhere.

Song for the Singer

I saw some photos of your wife; self-portraits, I think? They’re beautiful

and melancholy, and I love how her gaze is turned inward.

It means she’s a world. Not something solid and sealed, ok; more like a celestial

event—quasiconjunctions, lunar occultations!—or just a very great number of large

and elegant wheels, the ever-

spinning Everything itself

all in herself.

And I thank her for teaching me that

with her eyes.

I wish I could make you both cookies

or lasagna

one of these days.

*

Because all of you real-thing, heart-hacking, positively luminous crooners

can’t not let us answer.

I’m sorry for that last sentence. What a clunker.

But I’m going to leave it be: You Can’t

Not Let Us Answer. I know; the more brilliant your light, the truer your song, the further

away you must go

to survive your own fans. But at such enormous distances, fans are rendered baffoonish

as well as mute, our hearts won’t operate

quite right, we’re ready to positively bust

with stuff to tell you, we feel the import of all those subjects

the dingdong interviewers always overlook.

We can’t make you lasagna.

We can’t answer.

And we have songs to request, so many damned songs, songs we can’t live

without, songs we wrote for you.

Two

Stage Presence

Who is @roamingknitter and how’d she get that picture??!! Was she sitting on the edge of the stage?!

—Facebook fan site

These Facebook threads are like roots. You never know how far or where they go.

—Facebook fan site

They wanted to unplug and I wanted to plug in and we met in that contradiction.

—Interview

I.

Mind

you she leaned

into it, busked and hustled like hell

even before graduating high school, dropped out to outwit

and outwork the Nothing that haunts all the land (so says her favorite

unending yarn) (which is a very good yarn), or more likely had to stay even

with the inevitable

simply because the inevitable

in her case was a stir, a wow, a wonder. O her voice. You don’t want

to send back a package like that. She offered to haul their equipment, maybe nagged

at the Twins such a wiseass young kid, total tomboy, who is this person

what planet is she from

with a sound that could turn you to goo or at least inside-out.

And the famous Auryn on both upper arms, sort of ouroborus

crossed with mandala, because I hear she really digs the symmetrical.

It looks like eternity

is trying to hug her.

Or maybe the cosmos turning

around to look for

itself,

and keeps on turning...

*

Eventually the Twins (Seattle metal heads, also bald heads, kind of punk too and

really good guys, long-legged and kind, very song

writers)

could not resist

her agitated

mind and generous heart, startling beauty—

all encased in so slight a shape, one that now and then sways

and yaws, sways and jimmys, even jogs around the whole stage, even flat-out hops.

Yeah. Straight up and down. Photos of her everywhere, bashing out a chord,

both legs sharply bent at the knees, suspended and basically

levitating

off the stage.

*

I wish I could name what anyone’s chasing, what anyone’s leaping

to catch. What im- or pro-

pels The Singer? Sheer naked nerves? Gargantuan ego? Worrisome blood

sugar? The maddening hum

of time-to-come, the moment not-yet, a musical note

that is always and ever just taking shape

but not yet clear of her lips—deliciousness

always almost?

Something down among the roots, perhaps. Something @roamingknitter

might know.

*

Whatever precisely

she pursued, whatever precisely

pursued her,

it all just finally collided, a Big Bang of angst

from the sound of those early recordings—

Fall and Temporary Time, When Angels Touch

the Ground, certainly Last One to Know—

her sparkling oddness and sweetness, way androgynous,

basically a brilliant queer angel who could actually yodel. Yeah, yodel.

And write songs in any genre to save your life

because…because they compel you to feel it. Feel your heart beating feel

the ungainly radiance, fact

that someone or something created

us to kill us. You have to admit, that’s a little bit

funny. One could damn-near choke

on the fucking silliness. Fuck.

II.

And so the Twins now are constant companions

who guide the winding string of her sound, winding it out and out and back again, in and all

the way in,

then back out again over and over in the crazy big lights

of the stage—

where sometimes she stands, just stands if she wants, circle of still

light. But even then I believe she is spinning

too fast to see, a glorious mad ballet, pure rock and roll groove—

ah God I love winding circles like Roethke’s winding circles—

you know, his dancing idealized Woman—or,

no, forget that, her moves are more Pollack, all fluid and all over. Or,

no, forget that too. Her dance is her dance is her dance. Can you imagine

that: to be like nothing

but yourself, aligned but a line

of movement defined by

no man, although, like a line,

and as we know from

Geometry,

theoretical. An idea made of

language, in fact—just ask Derri Da Da and Saw Sewer and all of those

guys, whom I love, by the way—

Hell, even ideas

fail to synch up

with themselves

… Meaning, my friends, a dark whisper

of difference, always, between you and me, you and you,

me and me, the thing and the idea

of the thing, some say even thing and thing source of vast

human heartbreak endless struggle and wailing maybe even

yodeling

*

. And always the damned end-point of all

cogitation’s one tiny and writhing

dot of paradox.

Most utterly utterly utterly utterly

impossible singularity no brain

can stay sane

entertaining.

Only the Singer, or the Singer’s song,

seems to unwind it

, as she herself is unwound

by the Twins

into form.

III.

It’s troubling. Form isn’t form

until it's over.

What I mean is, it can be pretty bad

for those of us who have traveled

very great distances and drained our accounts and separated

ourselves from loved ones

to be there. The show stops, the encore or encores are demanded and played, and we sit there, finally, like stunned

fucking puppies and stupid as clams

as the house lights come on, on everyone, on everyone’s lone

countenance BAM.

*

Meanwhile, her own earliest, kind of primeval "photo-shoot face"

is so

casual. Retro sneakers and hip-hugger jeans, all Pacific

Northwest teen or pre-teen even, a mere t-shirt in fact, silkscreened with popular

green-lovers’ redwoods and wolves, one large

canine face staring dead-straight ahead and

endangered (not really casual, LOL, whatsoever),

and someone has done up her eyes they are very

densely and darkly circled.

While in the very early promo of What Can I Say, a song about time,

she sort of bounces a bit up and down

with an emotion or spirit that is also scrunching her face

almost comically. I can’t tell if she’s trying to shake what she’s feeling

like ancient wounds and ancient transgressions out, or is hauling

it all up from below like

some fisherman’s net,

brimful of longings to-be.

And all in the presence of thousands, eventually millions of eyes. Because as you, too,

may have noticed, my friends, she likes or needs to be

seen. She has to hold

herself back when

she’s singing on-stage with a guest. She actually mouths the words of the guest singer’s part

standing right beside them

distractingly, she practically nudges them like a jealous kid right off the stage. But it’s

not rude. It’s fine. It’s ok. Endearing, in fact. I think our poor girl’s afraid

of disappearing

*

—while at the same moment wants

to be fully gone, or at least fully with.

dying in the light of the room,

blind side please

. Look how she wades into the sold-out mob in Chicago, at Christmas,

warm in her huge Santa hat.

Look how she smiles when hundreds of viewers join in

impromptu for Amazing Grace, how her face bursts

on like a sun

IV.

. I’m almost inclined to believe she’s divinely empowered. Though of course I well know

that it’s all just performance, a habit of performing, she’s grown accustomed

to considering walls. She practices.

As a kid, I guess, she’d wait till family were gone, the house was her own, to entertain volume. She’d really belt it out. She talks about this in interviews. She’d listen to popular singers

with the really big voices—Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison, Freddy Mercury, k.d. lang—

and study the way to fill space with a sound till it stops or is stopped, rebounds or absorbs,

but also has plenty of strength left to break

free of the singer

… [I’m always imagining

such things. Do I imagine such things?

The free part, I mean.]

And I think she practiced how a sentence when sung

might stop and start, the zillion deliveries, overtones and undertones, easy

or abrupt, prolonged or postponed

moment between sounds

, because the singing voice can do that, can flow and stretch,

fade, evade and

silkymerge , CRASH in several thousand ways

, punctuate in infinitely variable, visceral ways. Even bend sounds

into circles. Longings too. How I envy

the Singer.

V.

Which brings us to the phenomenal, courageous and outrageous

PIN DROP TOUR

wherein her voice

and band completely unplug. I mean they completely

strip away all gadgets and amps and electrical

enhancement and sing directly into raw

space, straight into people’s ears. Nothing, apparently,

in the way

, though of course our bodies and brains and all of our cultural

gunk gunk everything up, we are absolutely

axiomatically

in the way (see page and part and chapter above)

*

. SO LET US SING

whatever’s IN THE WAY, shall we?

Let us sing BODIES, raw bodies of all the old venues themselves—these rooms have

something to say

, which is something that she

would say

, because she’s wonderful like that

—with their crusty plaster ornaments, stately deco radiations. Also the smell, the temp,

the depth and height and shape of a place, the mustiness or not, the ghosts or not;

grunged-out peeling walls at Chicago’s old Thalia; imaginary night sky and “almost disturbing

grandeur” of the fabulous Fox in Atlanta; sweetness

of Bluestem on the far away Plains…

What’s it like to sing, even, according to the stage itself? The elevation above the crowd,

and the crowd? The actual human bodies in a vast room all together, their damp sadnesses,

crackling moodiness, their craziness whirling and tilting on an axis made of lust,

or something kind of like lust, and their

joy?

*

Sometimes something genuinely ugly. People holler from the audience, usually light,

usually funny, but I’ve also heard them scream

at the staff, probably minimum wage, who appear at the end

to clear the place out. Fans mildly

deranged who seem to think encores heretofore, anymore,

shall be ever-more

and wait to mob her at the studio door they just want we just want

to be with her.

*

. So I think, now, of the Singer

with her solitary

body on any given night. I want to ask about headaches, profound

weariness. What if you’re still feeling rattled, darling Singer,

by a random weird dream from an afternoon nap? What if you just had a tense

misunderstanding with the wife not moments before,

felt her interest suddenly and dramatically

collapse, or what if you heard

something new in her voice, a small lie, let us say, or even

her ability

to lie

… What’s it’s like to come suddenly out of the world and onto

the dais? Does the world kind of stop? Or does it actually

enlarge, does the stage hold more life, does it feel vast

as time itself when you sing? Making you free but

inconsequential ?

*

And what about thorns I mean facts: when the show is scheduled, the show is scheduled.

People from hundreds, even thousands of miles all around come to see you, we’re talking fans and roadies and band managers theater managers merch managers all kind of fucking managers I mean damn. And PR to be accomplished,

the venue set up, the bar help hired and on and on. Certain nights,

at least, you must surely feel that you can’t, absolutely can’t

not sing.

The moment is nailed into place. You are nailed

to the moment.

What do the walls say then?

*

In the documentary, she talks with the Twins about how,

without amps, without flash,

you can't actually do it

until you're actually doing it. You absolutely must

negotiate

each particular

configuration

of boundaries,

and each moment’s boundaries

are minutely

and fleetingly distinct.

You’d better hurry. You’d better seize

this infinitesimal space and this infinitesimal moment

with a word

you cannot

fake

I know I, for one,

am inclined

to avoid

such words.

God.

I can’t even

look

in a mirror,

especially in public.

I deny everything

right to my own face.

How I envy

the Singer.

VI.

In what strange theaters, friends, do you house and perform

and offer up your own endless woes? Are you able to gracefully manage

the arbitrary harnessed to

the inevitable? Harnessed to

unending

change? After all, we all go

to work.

We all say, Good day.

We try to make the lies

as honest

as possible

, even while saying the truth

so shyly, so faithlessly,

you’d think we were making it up.

Three

The Contest

I don’t want to be part of the war. —BC

I.

I think of you waving something away,

or waving to it,

just before you died, stoned on some hospice medication or other,

and curled up uncannily frail, almost vaporous on the couch.

Or you might have been gesturing, in fact, to us

as we passed through the room, not knowing

how to talk to you now, each of us clenched

like a fist

in the past, no one holding your hand.

(When Mom died, we gathered around her hospital bed;

we all held her hand.

My wonderful family, she whispered to no one,

to everyone.)

You kept pointing to something in the air,

and you kept pointing strangely at your feet.

You kept pointing to your feet.

You had groused loudly, just days before, in your delirium,

probably your last trip on your feet with the walker:

I have to get to the post

office. I have put in a change

of address.

Then you were talking to the air with your hand

which no one held as you died.

*

Late in his life he was pissed about everything,

a goddamned bitter heap

of pissiness and ego. I don’t know what it adds

up to. I’m holding still in a stillness. Always have.

One day a great performer, Beloved Artist,

asks the world to write

a story of forgiveness. Something real and hard as shit.

Damn. For weeks, fans across the globe

withdraw to their remote and frightening solitudes, trying to forgive the assholes

in their lives. It’s a

contest. Or a commandment. She doesn’t mean it

that way, but everyone is strangely

aching for the task.

II.

His workbench in the dark of the greasy, dank garage

the tools all gleaming

in the gloaming, to build, bust up, or fix

all things of the home.

The time he stopped me there in secret

to say Mom’s doctor had diagnosed emphysema.

She was going to be ok, but she had to quit smoking.

She would be ok

if she would just quit smoking

But she wasn’t

quitting. She hadn’t quit.

I didn’t know why he was telling me this.

I was just a kid. What could I do?

I guess he needed to tell

somebody.

*

They were both pretty good, actually,

at hiding things. Hiding from things. We hid ourselves, meanwhile,

crouching at the head of the stairs,

and I remember him saying, down there in the living

room, out of view,

This is my

house.

Quietly, like chimes

on the hot Santa Anas,

too far away to hear,

too close

not to hear,

we heard the degradation.

III.

I had always heard that, as a young man,

he liked to do sketches. But his art, later in life,

appears to have been all in trees, shrubs, real Christmas holly

banked along the back fence, an unfinished stone path

around the big center oak.

He installed an enormous patio too,

out back with Ray, a just-married boy who took off his shirt.

I watched and watched as the big cement mixer

groaned out its crud, a kind of white

powder settling over the scene as they labored

like two sweaty snowmen, two dusty angels,

Chalk and Cement.

Susan, Kellie: remember the time he hosed down the nests

that lined the eves of the house to the north? They were excessive, they were deemed

excessive,

mud nests packed in a line up there, giddy new life, little mouth-heads

poking up all over the place.

I think now how

could he. God. The mess, the shattered shells,

life in all of its mute stages of growth,

and then the tiny riotous mouths.

I remember one miniscule gray thing there on the ground, featherless, a gigantic single eye

closed over and not looking up

at me.

A frail thing mangled and worked over

by the force of the hose, like a child’s gagged-on gum.

*

I honestly don’t know

whether I love or hate

him.

No wonder

I can’t move.

IV.

He kept clicking his dentures.

He sort of played with his teeth.

I wanted to claw his face off.

Mothers and daughters were the negative spaces

that made fathers and brothers solid.

It's pretty messed up

when your primary role

in a story

is not to be there.

The way he dragged my mother

to the beach

so he could stare at other women.

*

One morning we came down

to find him passed out

in his own vomit.

He was hanging half-off

the sofa, it felt like

a painting. A stillness.

It was like the house itself had been drunk

the whole night before

while the kids tried to sleep upstairs. My dad’s crazy

holiday work parties.

My mom would come up to check us,

tuck us freshly in,

but it was all feverish and strange. Drunk adults squealing,

banging on my brother’s drums down in the den. No one

was allowed to touch my brother’s drums. And someone,

my dad’s secretary, banging on the drums and squealing,

somebody my mother accused

him of cheating

with. Don’t think I don’t know.

You’ve always had a bed, her voice weirdly slow

and baritone with bitterness,

of roses.

V.

I think I forgave myself, at least, long ago.

It’s my religion that tells me to.

Forgive everyone, don’t be a jackass

to anyone, and that includes yourself.

I’ve more or less got it down. Maybe. Sometimes.

Because I do believe forgiveness is possible.

It just takes, literally, forever.

VI.

One time I saved three dollars in quarters

and he took me to the TG&Y. I picked out a drum.

It was red, I think, and I can still see it

up there, on a really high shelf, much higher even than him.

He had to ask somebody for help.

Tom-tom mirage, a daemon companion,

positively dizzying.

Later we’d backpack together all over the Sierras.

We’d only ever hike

to the highest possible point, we’d cross ridiculous snow fields,

massively steep, twelve or thirteen thousand feet,

places like the Minarets,

in work boots and sneakers from Sears.

We didn’t know any better. We just kept climbing.

*

The air above treeline was crisp and tasteless.

The sky got deeper and deeper blue.

I suppose we wanted to walk right off the planet.

I supposed we were hoping

for that one, killer view.

Meanwhile, getting back was substantially harder. Maybe because

we’d been over the same ground before,

the switchbacks down were always grindingly slow,

absolutely endless.

VII.

One year he promised

we could open our usual morning gifts

at four am. It totally irked my mom,

but he was such a sweetheart

about it. We crept in, my sisters and I,

we shook his shoulder gently Dad you promised.

Four a.m., it felt like the middle

of the night, the middle of a century, tearing into our middle-class booty

like animals in the dark,

the Tree of course just standing there, aromatic and iconic, in lights.

*

My mom put on music,

Ray Charles’ Country-Western on vinyl,

full-blast into the backyard all summer long.

Your chee-eeeting heart

will tell on

you.

Waiting

for her to finish

hemming my skirt,

I couldn’t stand to just

stand there, over and over,

every little second,

till she was done,

cutting and sticking, pinning

my new clothes into place.

*

My heart understands, I think.

Forgiveness is when the mind

goes around and around

the problem of wrong

behavior, and cruelty. It just keeps going

around, but as it spins it all gets smaller and smaller

until forgiveness is like standing, finally,

in the heart of a fire.

Where it seems to be very still,

but isn’t.

*

Father, how dare you base your self-esteem

on my mother’s lack? On my sisters’ lack? That’s fucked up,

man. I hate

your guts.

You and your

Party.

At least we know that 45

is almost pure monster, not too many

arguments about that. The guy such a mess, I actually

almost

feel sorry for the narcissistic man-baby

carnival thug.

And yes, I could see kindness in you. And fear. And gentleness. Imagine that.

You made my friends laugh, you were actually a very funny guy.

And if someone cried

it completely tore you up.

You’d even break down and cry with them. You didn’t like to see

anyone hurt. You beat

our new basset puppy out back

so badly the whole neighborhood

could hear her screams in the sky.

I was standing with Lauren out by the gate

and the cries filled the sky and

you beat her because she kept pawing

and digging in your yard. Your landscaped yard. What kind of fucker.

VIII.

A single, dark bird, probably a crow, almost a speck, really,

in the far distant sky in his painting.

This was after he retired.

It intrigued the whole family,

but no one could explain it. Just something

there, both the focus

and flaw of the whole composition.

IX.

Christ said that loving God

is the first new commandment, and loving our neighbor

is the second.

But later on John of the Gospels

says that God is love. So the two commandments

are kind of mixed up and mixed together.

It doesn’t matter how you think

about it;

you have to love both

to love either.

*

No wonder

it’s hard

to move.

X.

I could write my whole childhood, I think, if I tried,

with lots of hard, physical, sensory

detail.

Random

violence, this is my

house.

—said almost lyrically, laughing. That was the worse. A jolt

went through my mother’s

body, I saw it, when he suddenly erupted, that evening in the kitchen,

upon arriving home. I wouldn’t be surprise

if the whole neighborhood heard.

I look back now and yes, I can see

the terrible stresses of the job, extra kids

in the house, trouble at work.

We had to let him

unwind,

my mother said.

Which meant

do not utter a sound.

Unlike Superman, Santa,

and other great chieftains of the sky, guys down on Earth

have to slow the spinning

down, slowly, in their own unique ways,

in silence, alone.

This was something called life on Earth

for a man.

*

His last word

on the sofa, before he died,

was Mama.

XI.

I wish I could talk to him now.

I think he’d hear my arguments at last. My arguments

are strong, he’d have to. I think I’d maybe even liberate

World War II and all of that stupid fifties gender shit

right out of him, along with his vile Oklahoma racism.

This damn life is so

counter-

intuitive, right,

Dad?

Why live

just to die?

Love, Dad,

is the only

commandment.

My mom taught us that families

take care of each other

religiously, but she was racist too.

She knew better. She struggled with it.

But she was unarguably racist too.

Mother: it's simple. We are all

Family.

And yes, even his Party, that shithead 45, and Mitchell, and Ryan,

and Pruitt, and Sessions? Oh God Sessions. I can’t find it in myself

to forgive them, exactly, but I get it. I know

that serious jerks inhabit the world. I know

they could be

me.

They are in

and of.

I accept

that.

Yeah. For real. If I had grown up

a different way, a different place, with differently

fucked-up parents,

I could actually be

Mitch Fucking McConnell. Moscow Mitch. The Turtle.

That’s what they call him on the web

because it looks like a truck

drove over his face,

a little.

But it’s his power, its absoluteness,

that pisses me off. These asshats have gerrymandered

America so that no

one can get around

them.

God are they

Satan? The Beast? No. No, I don’t

believe in that.

In

and of.

Meanwhile, those loony, right-wing Dominionist nuts

think it’s a Holy

War. Two great enemies, a great unarguable chasm, they’re gonna get

this whole damned place blown up.

I should have taken his hand.

We should have taken his hand.

Who else

is gonna cross over, or try?

Right through the fire.

Why we’ve entered

The Contest.

Love is the only

commandment.

*

Wouldn’t it be astonishing

if love

were greater even than God?

Dear God, do not

abandon us.

Keep the children

on both sides

safe.

God we forgive

you.

Four

Resort

People with guitars were singing,

the sky was turning creamy colors,

an "embryo monsoon" a half hour before

had drenched everything spectacularly,

and everything now was breathing deeply in.

Well, I was breathing in. In and out. Of that I’m pretty sure.

My flight had been rescheduled, twice in twenty-four hours,

because hellacious winter weather on the Northern Plains.

So I only had a day. Mere hours, in fact.

I wondered how I would decide

what to do with a day.

John was signed out of the hospital, just days before,

yet insisted I still pack, weather and madness not withstanding.

You’d think the more there is to worry

about, the easier it would be

to let it all just go. But no;

I felt shitty going, I felt shitting staying.

Then went, notwithstanding.

*

My roommate, a friend who’d gifted me the trip,

was funny and and kind. Now and then she’d step outside

for a minute to herself,

looking across at the other balconies, other balconies

looking across at her.

She told me she had spotted

some amazing native birds

there on the courtyard in the center, but I never witnessed

any myself. I’d hoped at least to hear their famous squawks

and cries around our building, around all the buildings, around the great green selva further

out.

But no. There I sat, three thousand miles

smack in the middle of the Yucatan,

trying to imagine

where I was.

*

Later, from a nearby patio with open bar,

I had a view, more like a view of a view,

across the lagoon (maybe natural, maybe not),

across the distant ocean (weirdly smooth and blank),

in the general direction of Cuba.

Funny to think how, if I were to find

myself out there, in my own little boat, the sun full-on, according to pure

reason, I

would be but a point

on a line,

and thus imaginary.

Like any

body.

Meanwhile, the staggering

fact of my friend's

unimaginable suffering.

Her back was damaged, see,

by some infection long ago,

and now her spine is arrondi, a brutally swooping, frozen question

mark. Matter

never not matter.

But who knows. Maybe it's the soul's own highjinks, after all, responsible

for the dark experiment

of the body. Or the mind, the punk human mind,

now and forever stuck in the middle

of a sharp u-turn: I was only kidding. Turn around.

Get me out of here.

God’s creatures

send up all kinds of cries.

*

So. Por favor?

Forgive this tropical breeze of a beginning, friends.

The story itself is trim

as a bone, even slight, but language should let us breathe,

no?

2.

I don’t know if it’s rude or fantastic or simply truth

to speak of others’ private hardships. When should a person shut up, already?

How much before they call you asshole or even

post-confessional? Should truths rain down hard

when in season, or is any single truth, however minor, however fleeting,

itself all the truth? I mean evidence of Truth? Or already more

than anyone can stand?

In the end, maybe we just want some beautiful Art, now am I right?

Beauty seasons and leavens us. Calms us. I keep hearing a lovely villanelle

in this poem. Does it want to be a villanelle?

Should I have begun with a villanelle?

I do, after all, repeat myself a lot. And I always want to get

somewhere

as much as I want to just keep going.

Let’s review. Truth is iffy if positioned at the start

because it won’t be earned, no one will believe it, and, even if they did,

we’d have nowhere left to go

in search of it.

Introducing truth

in the middle will only smother it.

And the end, well, the end is too much like a nuclear

burp or the damned Rapture in miniature or something.

What is revelation anyway

in a time of massive, historical, geopolitical gaslighting?

When you hear or think you hear a truth coming in

do you guide or let it freely drift

into place? And if it’s false,

will it go of its own volition (it won’t go

of its own volition) to some great ancient peak

where all the abominable, failed lines and stanzas

and overblown endings congregate?

A club of flubs, monumental drags,

Christmas trees in summer?

Think by now how many. Parings, Fizzlings.

Some still maybe jabbering and slobbering with possibilities,

if not banging their wee little heads against windows

or mirrors. Are they plotting something?

Aren’t they in fact beautiful because

their sacrifice, after all, once made a poem or a book or a mere

morsel of wit

work?

On the other hand,

what if a poem held close and did its best to use, make space for,

shrink to fit

most of its own scraps? Bonus tracks, haha.

I know; one could argue that a poem

should be clean and spare; stringent for the sake

of fuller joys. It should compel the reader

to feel the most, intuit the most, in every sliver, every shard—

yea, even so the holy

unshardness containing

and contained by every

shard. The chiseled bits say more and yield us more surprise,

heart, and truth than discursive bloviations ever could. Let excess

sink. Into body. Into memory.

Let it enrich the poem that follows

in ways we cannot guess.

On the other hand, how do you tell the muse-meister, I love your donation, dude,

but I’m throwing fully half

of it out? I mean, we have no time to edit

our lives much less our scribblings, because the world’s

more full of weeping

than we can possibly save-as,

auto-check, or delete, because the Earth is moaning

inside us at a particle

level because America's a corporate snuff film featuring the planet—

and children in cages.

Hence, should I leave in or out

a few excess images and textures, gestures, a seemingly immediate

pop in pulse? a lounge? a lagoon? Re-

presented always, of course, but at least presented? This isn’t consumer

extravagance. It’s joy. Ok joy

tinged with panic. Ok panic

approaching despair

soaked to its eyeballs in grief. (Is there a word for grieving

a future

we’ve already passed?)

Even. Flowers.

May be

gone.

Soon.

At.

the rate we’re going.

Write “creamy colors” and “monsoon.”

Write “fizzlings” and “bloviations.”

Imagine a horizontal Tower of Babble, long-crashed, long trash,

and beautiful. Down to raw material. Soil.

Ah, in a dream of forms, let us now scramble

pagination. Let us re-say, unsay, or otherwise gerrywander

every finale…

Like,

what if the end of a book doesn’t actually occur

until the third reading or more,

and even then in the middle?

The reader won’t get it till they get there.

They won’t get there till they get it.

At which point they may want

to blow their brains out. LOL But seriously.

Couldn’t Borges meet up with Einstein

and imagine a space-time fabric

of poetry? Something

to jubilantly and usefully screw

with our heads once again?

Maybe any arrival is illusory, never there.

Or forever not there yet.

Or just keeps moving

around between drafts, driving you crazy.

Maybe it’s a relief to have no ending.

There’s no confusion, then,

about how to get there honestly.

No discomfort when it’s an ending

nobody wants.

*

Maybe any idea, or body, or world

simply stops.

Because all things stop.

Let what else there is to say

continue on, somehow.

After Serious Consideration, I Have Decided

that my own demise must be creatively

closed and open at once, meanings both desperately asserted

and held up to be

laughed at too. A frame, a definition, who I was

with giddy rips and gaps and all manner of life

and incomplete answers slipping through.

I want to leave my grandnieces and grandnephews

my vinyl LPs and awesome etsy quilt and midcentury

furniture and show kites ukuleles letters random notes and books

a humongous ridiculous library in fact and yes my poems.

Who knows if they’ll read them, but at least some darling kids will know

this odd person

was connected to them. It's theirs to say what else.

As for that larger, impending desecration, the one we either secretly

desire or have completely and unconscionably

blotto-ed out: do not think twice. Do not

WE MUST NOT LET THE PLANET DIE.

SOMETHING

has to be here, real and immanent,

to receive our strange estates.

Something has to bestow

to us its glorious,

barbaric succor.

No whining.

No "please" as interrogative.

DO. NOT. LET.

3.

The shuttle drivers down there will mess with you

if you're female and alone. Not that I blame them, exactly. Americans

are ignorant and funny, at best.

One guy drove me into the jungle

at midnight and pretended he couldn’t find the resort.

He was getting handsy too.

Stupidly, and incredibly, I couldn't find the address

for the place in my bag. I didn’t even have the number

of the resort to call the resort, nor anybody there.

God, I thought, is this how (cut up and buried in a jungle)

and where (I already said a jungle)

I will die (not breathing, of that I’m pretty sure)?

Also, I tried but couldn’t dial

out of country so that someone

might snag the address off the desk at home,

or so that anybody anywhere would know

my whereabouts.

My students, after all, hadn't heard that I'd be gone.

No one at work knew that I was headed

into the steamy lower coils of the heart

in a time of blizzards. I don’t think my local friends even knew.

I wasn’t sure what to tell them on behalf

of myself

and someone dearest locked away, unable to speak at all.

Then we were driving up the highway in the wrong direction,

back towards the airport an hour and or more distant.

Finally, out of nowhere, he swung a gigantic U

right there on the highway of resorts, kind of grinning, I think, the jerk,

and got me to the place at last.

There it was, all ugly stone compound from the front,

lit up in the dark and draped with climbing vines and complete with uniformed guard

flipping through a list of legal guests.

Strangely, that included me.

I who have forgotten all

and I do mean all

of my ninth-grade Spanish

—except, apparently, for Señor,

and por favor? Pathetic

tourist. Tragic whisper

of a cry.

Sure, someone will turn abruptly, by instinct, to say “huh?"—

but then never stop driving

you nowhere as a joke.

4.

It's getting hot

here on Earth.

Somebody think

of something.

5.

Walk alone on a beach.	Partial Check
Feel the cleansing surf around your damaged knees.	No Check
Sit quietly among the ruins of Chechen Itze.	No Check
Drink some green mojitos, hear a certain marvelous crooner on a liquid winter night beneath the alien stars.	Check

6.

The show would start in several hours

in a big outdoor plaza not far I think to the west.

Older people were hanging out in the lagoon

on immensely dumb-looking, inflatable animals—which is fine,

I’m not judging—

while young people, as early as that morning, I heard,

had already claimed their spaces

in the pit at the very forward edge of the stage.

Other young people were ready to hold their places

if they had to pee or go get something to eat,

and they piled water bottles and daypacks so no mistaking

whose two-foot square was whose. I’ve been there; I was pretty sure

there'd be actual bloody carnage

if anyone were to cheat and cut in front

to see the star performer, a famous advocate of peace.

My own spot would be a chair and a lot further back.

I have arthritis all over and numerous other failments.

I couldn’t stand up front

because I feared that, in a crowd so seethingly tight, I would die

and no one would even know it until the show

was done and everyone was gone and I fell over.

No, I didn’t mind further back;

or, at least, I was actually ok with it for once,

with all of it—

pain,

age…

Sunsets down there

seem especially soft and so

incremental. I don’t believe in epiphanies

anymore than I believe

that driving in circles

forever is a way to end something.

Bonus Tracks

ET, A Flower, and a Supreme Being

each sit around in a bar watching humans

on TV blow the whole thing up,

muttering shocked. I’m utterly shocked.

Form

Up to

and including.

Form

Exactly delerious

till liquidly sufficient.

Form

Press Go and go. When it’s over catch

your breath.

Form

Press Go and go. Wander around. Do not get killed.

scrap

Lord, let me stop breathing,

when I stop breathing,

without decrepit body or damaged brains.

I want to be here when I go.

scrap

End. Begin!

Relax. Move!

Feel. Think!

Poem. Spend!

Release. Redact!

Quit. Prolong!

Beauty. Minutes!

Minutes. Feel!

Bouillabaisse. Mayonnaise!

Naught. Nonce!

Drought. Now!

Flood. Now!

Fire. Now!

Tree. Breathe.

End. When.

Gone. Song.

Tongue. Stone.

scrap

From my small patio table, late in the afternoon, I might have heard

but couldn't see

stunningly colored birds all around us.

scrap

Endings

are perhaps the real

story. They making the weeping real.

scrap

Endings

make the weeping now.

Five

Here you are says a voice in the light, the trapped light. Be happy.

—Teacher

Guest Appearances by Neil Young and The Thing with Feathers

Bashing out retarded simple chords

and obsolete, grinning-idiot MELODY

there in his

gigantic furry hippie-boots, he’s some iconic, bionic, and ironic

Canadian Sasquatch

Punk o’Planet Earth.

Music heart-

thwacking fully amped-up feedback-

stinging religion. The Romantic re-emerging

or staying, despite everything,

a scary old century of, well, you-name-it—

corporation-as-legal-person circa 1893

to the start of never-ending war circa September, 2001—

not to mention the sensible-logical specu-lattes

of Grand Thinkers et al re: presence construction culture and all the rust—the

Romantic I guess still viable circa now, albeit stunned,

lopsided, and leaking

blood from every

thought, cough, pore and

high-pitched whine of

I-can-hardly-force-

myself-to-say-it but I will,

I’ll say it circa here

and now as

hard as

I can’t to

the

nth:

h©pE.

Empathy for Fat Elvis and Notes Toward the Impeachment of Dread

1.

Thing is, you absolutely have to conjure

the dirt-poor kid from Mississippi

who sucked up gospel, country and blues

till he bled them, a bruisy-eyed boy

with blistering talent and near-giddy energy,

and certainly not the sad man

of bizarrely elongated collars, peanut butter and bacon sandwiches,

and don't even get me started

on the cape.

Of course he had no idea he'd usher in

one of the goofiest eras of human god worship

ever known to our species. He couldn’t see ahead to the look-alikes,

no inkling he’d be studied

in university courses

as a Distantly Emergent

Posthuman Cultural Artifact.

(In death, of course, he's all proto-metamodern

Jesus

coming soon

to a dying planet near you).

Anyway.

When the King sings the Dixie trilogy, very very late,

when he's the Elvis no one voted for,

the Elvis who never made it onto a stamp—

you believe him. That song is way

too sad as he intermittently and obliquely

apologizes for his bloated drugginess,

unseemly giggling when he forgets the lines.

He is mourning his own

and everyone's golden beginnings,

even as he sees his own ignominious

and nightmarish end

clearly coming down the pike.

You can hear it in his voice, those final shows.

He was preparing.

2.

I've heard it said that to live a good life

you must be ready to die a good death;

in fact your life should be spent

getting ready to die.

Sounds pretty godawful, yes?

My own dread shoots through the roof.

But I know that Tibetan adepts, for one, flat-out practice.

Right down to the instant

of letting go. They are always letting go. They spend half the day unclasping.

They are completely aligned in life

with death, and yet more alive than the rest of us

because focused and clear and still.

In meditation they feel cool air quickly warm

in the mouth, all the way down the throat and into the lungs,

and back out. They observe every thought

precisely when a thought

emerges like a slow liquid arrow and crosses through

and out of the mind, and they do not cling

to a self. To a story. Certainly not

to some retrievable, gold-plated past.

(Please do not cry to go there.

It is both a sentimental

and fascist delusion.)

And some adepts die sitting up. Cessation

is ambiguous; the flesh does not even degrade. Tap

a monk’s corpse and it bursts into—what? Conceptionless

nonpermanence. Rigpa shunyata dharmadatu, so many damned

formulations, so many words

for wordlessness—

or just the next hungry body.

3.

Elvis’s long-heralded return

in ’68, I think, after all of the hideous movies,

was a moderate shock. I don’t know, I guess I thought

his hair and clothes

would be mildly hippified, at the least,

what with the Summer of Love and all that.

But he dressed like a retro cartoon teddy boy, a fifties rocker

shellacked in black leather, a superhero whose superhero brothers

wore tight outfits too but could fly.

Elvis couldn’t fly. He had to manage on the ground in secret.

For all of his ironic self-inflation,

they say he was a humble and kind man, always.

He would never hurt a soul

down here.

And he had such a time singing

his self-spangled comeback. For some of it, the band was seated

in a casual circle on a very small stage, an intimate live audience,

and he kept grinning at his bandmates

like they all knew the world’s

most acutely sweet secret. They all knew the world's most acutely sweet secret,

and were letting us have it,

one quarter teaspoon at a time.

Like there wasn’t a single note

he wouldn’t die alive for.

4.

2019. People are walking around in near-cryonic

states of the soul,

when not boiling over with anger and stress.

It’s this other king, a tabloid celebrity ratcheted up

to hugely puke-worthy, banana-republic con.

Might as well say it again. Fascist.

Donald, if you really want to bully us

with your ongoing freaky, petty, and vindictive tweets,

if you want the media scandal of all scandals,

just remind us in your daily belches

that we are all going to die. Think of it!

You can get back at anyone

who has ever called you a goon or a fool

or pure moral slime on MSNBC.

Just tweet out to everyone DEATH

DEATH DEATH DEATH just whisper it

in one-hundred and thirty-nine characters

plus a tiny emoji skull.

But you won't. I know you won't.

BTW, you are too stupid to breathe.

*

BTW, I'm not intimidated by any of your tweets.

I'm strong. I can talk about all

that I don't have in this life

and I can talk about all

that I will someday not be. I've been preparing

for awhile, ok? Even today, right here.

*

Maybe we should turn the whole ugly thing

back on you. Maybe we should march in the thousands or millions

to the White House and erupt

in one glorious voice Donald Trump you are going to die!

Someday, Donald Trump, you really are going to die!

Fool yer already dead and don't know it!

Think about it, Cheeto!

At which point they'll arrest me and put me in Gitmo,

where they'll torture me till I talk.

I won’t know what to say, except Viva, viva

Las Vegas! and of course they will kill me.

That's ok. I'm prepared.

*

Well, I'm preparing. I'm trying.

Friend, if you’re there, it would help

if you could whisper any tender,

mad truth you hold close to your life.

What I mean is, let’s collaborate.

I’ll tell you my nightmares

If you’ll tell me yours.

Lyrical Village

1.

The Lyrical Village

is the famous Sahara Desert, where grains of sand rub together in the wind

and sing. Did you know that? Sand sings. Planets too.

Icebergs and whales,

wolves, a young vocalist raised on country western

and pop just outside of the City that Rains,

two guitarists who loved the Beatles and Ramones,

a quiet cello player whose past is uncelebrated, quiet.

I mean it's his cello that speaks.

I mean it articulates silence.

You probably don’t believe me. I'm just trying to say

that equal in mystery to any

thing—grain of sand or planet, beloved Creation, beloved breath

itself—anything

we can lose —forever— now—

is the Lyrical Village.

*

I think I just articulated

the opposite

of what I meant. And yet I also said the opposite of that. All

of which is the Lyrical

Village too, “meaning”
no, I'm knowing knowing now. Plus awe. Oh never

Mind.

2.

The Lyrical Village

is the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London.

It’s Edmonton's festival out on the Canadian plains,

Cayamo on the sea, stops in New Orleans, Cozumel, and Harvest Caye.

Even the Singer's tour bus is the Lyrical Village. The grit on the tour bus wheels.

The desire to sing and singing per se. The throat of the singer, the tongue, the wind,

the nothing. The alignments of identical twins

and the hilarious deflectometrics. Everything Walt Whitman ever said

is the Lyrical Village. And sex sex sex sex—

grief,

the Milky Way in a dream about hammers and looms,

things that crawl the ocean floor, the forest no more, the ice caps

gone, never to return, these are the Lyrical Village

where I must stop now in order to breathe.

*

The Singer often hums a quick blues

or gospel riff seconds before starting

her song. It’s how she warms up.

Blues and gospel, back in the day,

were the pure pain and moaning

(of people who were voiceless), see?

without which beauty

is voiceless.

Life's a Long, Unspooling Series of Rooms, Very Doomy Rooms,

you stumble, you race, you clomp through forever and cannot reach.

And always you find yourself missing.

In fact you only know you’re alive

in here because you feel something twist, some kind of torque,

a spiraling energy in place of an I, and as onely.

This year be a groupie at nearly sixty. A kind of project

that stumbled upon you and stuck. You call it incandescence.

You follow the darling artist, schedules taxis and tickets, you get on a plane

and off a plane and dance with the other sweet angel crazies

when the artist encourages such, when she cues

you to rock the place clear to the ground.

You love to rock the place clear to the ground, an epically

awesome remodeling, your face fully melty, truly you do, but lately

long to sit very still and be quiet.

Sit very still and be quiet. The Singer is going away—

in certain songs, please, if you listen—

into her emptiness, her solitude.

She may look eternally young,

but her soul we know is ancient,

and sad, and sore.

*

Her tour bus is long and dark, you can't see in.

Understandable; the more a star is pursued

the further they must go

away.

love—

withdraw

love—

withdraw

*

She’s doping us up on her voice real good, she's ridiculously good.

And if we’d only shut up, if we’d only stay put,

she may actually deliver us there, way down there at the heart

of the song unsingable

and we are all of us no one together.

Notes & Acknowledgments

“Dirty Pioneers, The State of the State, and The Fabulous Woman Who Dances”

“a rolling holy/boulder down the crazed and crumbling lanes”: adapted from Brandi Carlile’s “Things I Regret.”

“Fanatics”

"opposite equals advancing": Whitman, Song of Myself

"The Singer's Wife is Also a Singer"

This poem appeared in Isthmus Review, Spring/Summer 2016.

“How does it feel”: Dylan.

“Fields of Gold," the song and italicized lines: Sting

“Stage Presence”

The second-to-last epigram: BBC.com, Entertainment & Arts, “Brandi Carlile finds her rock and roll voice”: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-31310552

The lines “who is this person/what planet is she from”: adapted from a statement made by Phil Hanserof on CBC Radio Canada: www.cbc.ca/player/play/2669832744

Auryn and “unending story”: Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

“[T]hese rooms have something to say”: Brandi Carlile, The Pin Drop Documentary, Chapter 1: http://www.brandicarlile.com/media-items/2016/6/14/brandi-carlile-pin-drop-tour-documentary-chapter-13

“[D]ying in the light of the room,/blind side please": Brandi Carlile, “In My Own Eyes.”

Part Five

Line attributed to Teacher: Jorie Graham, Fast.

“Bonus Tracks”

St. Thomas, Logion 42: Come into being as you pass away.

“Guest Appearances by Neil Young and The Thing with Feathers”

Image is from SBS News on Twitter, Dec. 31, 2019, in Malacoota, Victoria, Facebook @cubanclothi.

“Life's a Long, Unspooling Series of Rooms, Very Doomy Rooms”

“you only know you’re alive/in here because you feel something twist”: an adaptation from Brandi Carlile's “Eye of the Needle.”