The walls are ruined
Pieces of stone fallen
From parapets; cracked concrete,
Rope burns on marble columns, statues
Broken and tipped, the temples stripped,
The altars overgrown with vines,
The heights nested by birds,
(These, at least, were signs of hope,
Before there was no one left to hope)
The aqueducts collapsed, water flows no more.
The stones of the streets torn,
And put to other uses, now useless –
Crumbling hearths of primitive huts,
Defensive walls of family compounds,
An old stone oven,
all gone…


No one imagines even the ghosts
Of the great dead
The generals and emperors
The self-righteous priests and politicians,
the captains of industry,
the self-proclaimed masters of the universe;
Or the small Joe and Josephine
Rotting in their shallow graves,
The little company men with their hobbies,
The giggling children, the starving mothers,
The dirt farmer covered with dust,
The soldiers who kicked the dead peasants into trenches….
The peasants themselves,
Those no one ever wanted to remember.
No one now imagines the great or the small,
Because ants and beetles have no imagination
For the dead of that exalted species.


Once long ago
The barbarian hordes were blamed,
The weather was blamed,
Volcanoes, earthquakes, flood and fire
All took their blame, among those
Who were left to place blame.
“The gods are to blame,” said some,
Those who took their pick among the gods,
While others took their pick
Among the people who picked the wrong gods.
History too, is to blame, of course.
And morality must also be blamed,
The whole great gluttony of life must be blamed,
Along with poverty and scarcity and want
Cruelty, disease, oppression, greed;
Freedom and slavery, dictatorship, democracy,
All these were blamed.


No one blamed themselves.
How could they?
Some blamed their fathers.
In this they were correct.
But so were all the others.

A white cotton and silk angel
levitating above the floor
on a wooden hanger
in her mother’s closet;
I imagine it there still
though the man she
wore it for is absent.
In the photos

She is serious in ritualized passage
a face made of stone, no
cracks for a smile.
(Think of the photographer's
frustration!)

Does she view her
life in diminishing perspective,
a mirror reflected infinitely,
on her waning reasons for wanting
her willfully girly dream of a wedding
sans marriage?

“I married not for him
but for the wedding.”
She said to me
In tears....
(Tears being a fine emblem
for my oh so sublime lust.)

This is the heart’s small treason
confusing, “I am in love”
with “I love him"
(or my lust for compassion...)

She married for the angel
Hovering in the closet
I suppose –
(A thought to deflate desire.)

He was the fair
excuse for domestic delusions.
She remains blind, of course,
to her own power
to make her men enjoy
the possession of her illusions.

Does she know now
What she should have known then?
Her one talent to give
self-deception a place to live
in others
and rid it from herself.

-1-

The chipped bowl in the cabinet,
The cracked mirror above the sink,
The knife's missing handle
stuffed back in the drawer,


The frayed rope, the rusty
razor blade, a loose leg on a wobbly chair,
The rotted, squeaky floorboard, flaking
and falling plaster, and tangled metal


of a broken marriage,
A lifeless body the wreck
on the road faded friends,
burnt books melted music
water drenched journals


all of those lost words,
dangling names, scattered papers,
torn, cut and folded photos,
families disowned, tears spilt, blood shed,
wounds unhealed, bones shattered,
lovers rejected; funerals, births, weddings
avoided, unthorned theories discarded.


-2-

I have seen famine fire flood war
in another country; bullets
lodged in shrapnel pocked walls,
limbless men women children
and I know all is not equal.

But this morning I awake from
dreams of my sub-tropical forest
in a season of rain -- I am afraid lost
pursued; I am tangled and cut
by vines and branches --
and now, to chase memories away,


an emblem of living is made concrete
in this chipped breakfast bowl I set
before me on the old scratched kitchen
table and that rotted floorboard my
bare foot scraped as I rose
from the sagging bed of sweated sleep.

I know my soul is nothing
but a spider and God a Black Widow.
I know the self is projection
on the window and hell is the pane of glass
and the glass is my dream.
I have studied the spider
and its web across the pane and this life will not pass
beyond my bodily scheme.

The spiders float
through the morning air
on their invisible strings
and turn their prey into dust:
Does it sting to be a hollow shell
carcass dangling on a thread?

We are plucked winding from the mote
in the eye
of star-stuff
and cast about making visions of hell
until we die.
Like all dreams hell is just another wish
we want fulfilled...
peculiar desires, phantasms of evil.

The dead
are a nightmare to me.
Their heads strike from the wall.
(Projecting gargoyles of thought.)
Their eyes jell in the plaster.
Darwin, Sartre, Malcolm.
Freud, Goya, Eisenstein.
Rimbaud, Hume, Nietzsche.
Yeats and Faulkner.
Lincoln, Robespierre.
John Brown, Descartes. Mary
Wolstonecraft. Toussaint L'Overture.
William of Ockham.

.................... How
many angels of light stare
at me with discontent?
Ask, Why is your work not complete?
..................... How
many monsters of reason
Must I embrace in troubled sleep?
Should we pity the gargoyles?
The mutations
of thought from which we cannot wake?

Here
the schizophrenics dance in the sun
laugh at pool side.

Here
the mental cases posture in the hotel lobby
compose intricate poses
for the mise en scene of the inner eye:
imaginary cameras
click and shutter.
We are frozen pictures
swollen onto screens
2089 A.D.
(When all are dead, of course.)
These vacationers of our rotting empire
sit stiffly in their chairs
glance into mirrors of fake Versailles.

Surrounding the hotel
mangroves
drop their roots into brackish brown water
stalk through the muck
create a tangle of waterways
to enhance the trade of cocaine.

The luxury hotel crowns the swamp
like a hospital for the criminally insane.
Just as exclusive,
across the East River there's one
that looks the same.

"One asylum is as good as another,"
the architect thought.

(He designed
the two fake bell towers each with a decorative
window like the face of a clock
and two years later committed suicide.)

"To take up residence here or there
depends on what you can afford,
money or torture in kind."

Waiters
wear bow ties, dinner jackets,
above white bermuda shorts.
Put grenadine in screwdrivers
and miniaturized tropical settings
in oversized glass snifters --

arrangements of a Japanese florist
who spent two years interned.
The strange concoctions glitter in the sun
orange, red and impossible blue.
Each to his own poison. The florist thinks
of emblems of lust blooming
from his confiscated farm
harsh hands sinking into fertilized soil
and the desert camp of his internment
where his wife died of rotten food.

At pool side
Wind chimes mingle with the sea.
The mechanical bell of a distant church
sounds. A waiter from El Salvador
carries drinks above his head
stands erect beside a guest
and offers spirits to a monkey-
suited man who recalls his balance.
The waiter remembers more:

his town square at twilight
where ten gallows hung like question marks beneath
the shadows of imported banyan trees
planted by his grandfather a mayor. That night
purple tongues protruded from white lips,
the mountain wind chimed through dangling bodies,
the church bell tolled one sane hour
out of time.

The man in the monkey suit falls
into the pool clutching a glass of scotch.
We all laugh, speculate he'll drown.

Young men,
Masters of Philosophy in bathing suits,
some bearded and stripped to their waists,
bring beach chairs, Bloody Marys and pretzels
to the schizos and bi-polars
on the beach. Others stand guard.
Women in bikinis, some topless,
refugees from Rio,
watch with detached amusement.
(Amusement is not an expression
for their stern faces.)
They are brown and long
and look of sex only from a distance
in Giacometti's eyes.
Skin and bone, all,
withering anorexics, they are walking
shadows in the white light.

When they swim in the sea
they sink like stone.
I float on my New Year's fat.
We are all made nervous
by the iris blue-green
of the undisturbed sea,
the bright retina of the red sun
in the almost empty sky.

The earth moves in degrees
to the angle of the sun.
We sit and wait for the shattering sky,
for the sea to break.