House of Fact, House of Ruin

You’ve got to put your pants on in the house of fact.

And in the house of fact, when you take off your shirt,

you can hear your shirt cry out, Facts are the floor, facts

I’m washing my naked belly clean, and doing it with dignity.

I’m turning around, trying to see the filthiness

that keeps making me filthy. I’ve scraped away

my molecules right down to the atoms’ emptiness

and arranged the map’s folds so that nobody

can see it breaking into fits of weeping.

Now that even our eyes have their dedicated poverties,

now that even our eyes are chained to their slavish occupations,

whatever the soul lacks drains the soul to nothing.

I hate to admit it, but even the house of fact is a house of ruin.

2. rest

The strange is done with, over,

the strange that late at night you returned

to chat with again and again. No longer will anyone

wait for me in my corner where

good is bad, where that tight-lipped morning

of tears by the bay means nothing anymore

to anyone. To be cleared of the inks that stain

my ankles while watching my eyes go blind in the mirror

is the kind of rest that the seventh day promises

but never brings. Instead, the species

climbs aboard the ark of copulation

and ignores the forty days and nights of rain.

And the much-talked-of soul that the rain denies

burrows deep into the mud of so much pain.

3. spider

Look at the spider with the enormous body and tiny head,

a spider of no color: today, when I kneel

down to look at it more closely, its many arms nailed

to a many-armed cross are a prayer in a code that only God,

who’s forgotten it, can decipher. And its eyes

invisible to my eyes, which guided it like a pilot

through the wilderness of space,

no longer steer its legs across the intricate,

almost-not-thereness of its web. Each thread

it spins with the finality of fate divides its head

from its body. And the poor thing,

even with so many legs, doesn’t know which way to run.

Just look at its abdomen, huge as the stone blocking

what’s-his-name’s tomb, that the head’s condemned to drag around.

4. if the sun should blacken to an asterisk

Honestly, when I look at life straight,

I’m just another blind Brooklynite — not because

I can’t see that Jean-Jacques was an idiot,

or that Saint Peter being nailed to the cross

upside down isn’t the purest measure

of my humanity, but because my eyes

can’t see my illiterate skeleton and the razor

and cigar that will outlive me. So try to save a day

for when there are no days, reason with the lens

inside every healing wound, witness how your

own inner grace, gnawing at itself, gets baptized

in phosphates of hemlock and error.

And so what if the sunset arrives from Athens?

So what if no trace of anyone survives?

5. the last to be excused

Remember the old aunts, sarcastic,

chain-smoking, gesturing with their canes,

scoring point after point with their widowed lungs?

How was I to eat with them as they pushed

around their plates not peas and carrots

but distance and disdain for their silly nephew

still trying, at his age, to forget

how being old is as new to the old

as being just born is to the just born —

even their glued-together, half-cracked

china radiates impatience for the pity

that the young want them to want.

The way they kept saying mother —

like it was all in caps — saying it like that

as if they still felt her eyes on how

they handled their knives, forks, spoons,

making each bite harder to swallow.

The day is coming when there’ll be no water

in the pitcher, no eternally dying father

served up like canned spinach and corn,

no brooches of affection their absent lips

pin to the air. And as that silence

slowly breaks the hours in two, I’ll be

left alone to dine with the nothingness

that, just for form’s sake, says grace.

The table will be set with shadows,

the phantom food served up by shadows —

and all the dead mothers come to this repast

will sit down on chairs of dust

in the wake of that last supper

in the kitchen gone cold where I’ll hear the last

maternal “Serve yourself, Tom”

smothered by that dark where no one can tell

the knife blade from the handle,

or the food from the plate, or the plate

from the table, or if there’s a table at all.

6. the eternal dice

omg, it makes me cry to admit that I am human;

to feel the heaviness of all your bread I’ve eaten.

Oh sure, you claimed you raised me from the dust,

but where’s the wound fermenting in your side?

You know nothing of those Marias who split for good.

omg, if you’d been born a human being

today you’d know how to behave like God.

But in your always everywhere hard partying with perfection

you feel nothing of the pain of your creation.

And so it’s us, the poor fuckers who suffer, who must be god.

Today, in my middle-aged pupils, I see the glare of candles

lit for my death-row vigil. omg, old gambler, take up

your crooked tricks again, and let’s throw your cooked pair of dice —

in the fated luck you dole out to the universe

maybe we’ll roll snake eyes staring back at us like death,

maybe you’ll deal two aces black as the grave’s mud.

omg, in this night gone deaf and blind,

you won’t be able to play because the poor Earth itself

is just a single die whose edges have grown rounded

by rolling too many eons through the battering sky

and nobody now can stop it until it rolls into a hole,

the vast hole, omg, inside a single molecule.

7. the other garden

In the Garden there was a spider.

And because the man knelt beside him, the spider

overheard him, the agony of his prayer

like the fear of a fly who can’t steer

any other direction than into the web stretching out

no matter which way the fly veers. The spider

felt the threads of all being vibrate

through him — and so it vowed to be the answer

to the prayer of the man praying to his father

to let this cup pass. But on the cross, when the man cried out

to his father not to abandon him, his father

did abandon him. And so the spider

vowed to weave a web so tightly around the father that the harder

he’d struggle the more he’d be caught.

8. what hasn’t yet come is already over

If it rains tonight, will a raindrop be my cell?

Will the bars the sky lets down

take one look at me and turn to steel?

Now that the hot afternoon is finally done,

done the cups of tea we drank with your mother,

I want to ask the rain to yank my strings

back a thousand years. But even back that far,

will the rain still be my prison?

To be lost in the minutiae

of our vacations from the soul, to forget

the Vedic threads spun out beyond my end,

to press against your breasts obedient

to the purest pulses. Yeah, sure. Make the story

of my life the story of my never having been.