On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths Read Free

shaman,
    tutored by the Indians who live at the base

    of Monte Albán. Tutored also by the heavy bag
    at Sonny’s Gym:
Box like heaven
/
Fight like hell
    his T-shirt says; the graphic shows an angel’s fist

    buried to the wrist in Satan’s brisket, while the prince
    of dark jabs the angel’s kisser. Victor
    has sandpiper legs, his ponytail a mess of webs,

    but he has eaten the ayahuasca vine
    and chanted in the sweat lodge
    and entered the fight-cage in a bar in Tucson,

    Adam’s apple jiggling his Star of David
    when he writes me out a prayer.
    He says he flew here to visit his grandma,

    only she died before the plane touched down—
    the dead leave yard sales to the living,
    who shoot staple guns at telephone poles

    and soothe their eyes with slabs of meat.
    No matter how many rounds you go in practice,
    he says you always come out unprepared

    om ah hum
    vajra siddhi padma hum

    for the mountain of junk inside the house: cedar canoe
    in the rafters and the box of Kotex he found
    from her last menstrual period in the 1950s.

Wheel

    I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake—

    after crawling through the rotting milfoil on the shore.
    At first
    the materials offered me were not much—

    just some cattails where a hidden bullfrog croaked
    and a buckhouse made from corrugated tin—

    at first I thought I’d have to write the poem of its vapors.
    But wait
    long enough and the world caves in,

    sends you something like these damselflies
    prickling your chest. And the great ventriloquist
    insists

    you better study them or else:

    how the liquidmetal blue gleams like a motorcycle helmet,
    how the markings on the thorax wend like a maze,

    their abdomens ringed like polecat tails,
    the tip of his latched
    to the back of her neck

    while his scrawny forelegs wipe his mandible
    that drops and shuts like a berth on a train.

    But when I tallied his legs, he already had six—

    those wiper-legs belonged to a gnat
    he was cramming in his mouth. Which took a long time

    because the gnat struggled, and I tried to imagine
    a gnat-size idea of the darkness
    once the mandible closed.

    Call me bad gnat: see how every other thing strives—
    more life!
    Even with just two neurons firing the urge.

    Then the she-fly’s abdomen swung forward
    to take the sperm packet from his thorax,
    and he finished chewing

    in this position that the field guide calls
The Wheel.

    Call me the empress of the unused bones,
    my thighs fumigated by the rank detritus of the shore

    while the meal
    and The Wheel
    interlocked in a chain

    in the blue mouth of the sky
    in the blacker mouth beyond

    while I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake
    where sixty thousand damselflies

    were being made a half-inch from my heart.

After Reading
The Tibetan Book of the Dead

    The hungry ghosts are ghosts whose throats
    stretch for miles, a pinprick wide,
    so they can drink and drink and are never sated.
    Every grain of sand is gargantuan
    and water goes down thick as bile.

    I don’t know how many births it takes to get
    reborn as not the flower but the scent.
    To be allowed to exist as air (a prayer
    to whom?)— dear whom:
    the weight of being is too much.

    Victor Feguer, for his final meal,
    asked for an olive with a pit
    so that a tree might sprout from him.
    It went down hard, but now the murderer is comfort.
    He is a shady spot in the potter’s field.

    But it must be painful to be a tree,
    to stand so long with your arms up.
    You might prefer to be a rock
    (if you can wear that heavy cloak).
    In Bamiyan, the limestone Buddhas stood

    as tall as minor mountains, each one carved
    in its own alcove. Their heads
    eroded over time, and the swallows
    built nests from their dust,
    even after zealots blew them up.

    Now the swallows wheel in empty alcoves,
    their mouths full of ancient rubble.
    Each hungry ghost hawks up his pebble
    so he can breathe. And the dead
    multiply under the olive tree.

The