for T.G.

In this version of the story the boy does not
learn to fly: a rapid cut of arms
through air—sarcoline stained
glass wings, the breath in his rib cage
caged as any wild animal. It is not my place to say
whether his eyes were closed or open, whether
what he thought of in those moments licked
by gravity was his father asleep
in an upholstered chair—Tony Soprano,
his drive past any number of suspension bridges
into the city, on the television—his mother
herding herself with worry
for this batch of begonias unsettled
in their lack of light. How many times—
lying down on the cool tar of the roof—
I felt the wavering bur-reed
of a boy’s finger going to unhook my bra,
before I stopped it. Amo le mie proprie
cellule. How many times my feet
bound in strap-upper sandals, the metal banister
freckled with this morning’s rain, the shingles
each a slanted prism-lake, I cupped my hand
to a friend’s shoulder in order to stand upright.
Before the mid-fourteenth century,
to slip meant to escape. As if in the loss
of our footing, the earth would open up
into elsewhere—grass, rather than a hard plane:
a sea the color of milk or vernix.
The pattern in which your body lands: tessellated
as houndstooth. This and unforgiving, forever.

                    After the Da Milano Purse Ad

          I.

An archipelago
               of women, grey-scaled
          their faces:
          black blush, teeth
     a niveous white.

Around the couch, their knees
          gather as twigs bent ready

to kindle
          a pearlish stalk of fire.

     They remember little
     of their childhoods:
          piano lessons,
     cleaning a mother’s
          pastry brush.
     Dormer windows sufficient only
          for a dollhouse.

          II.

     Instead of the fellow’s head:
a purse, turquoise as a rose
          that can’t exist,

                    the range of a leather
                         strip in place
                         of thread,
                    tied and two
                         tassels weighty enough
                    with buds of this.

The handle makes a pair
     of haloes. They could be instead:
          his ears, nostrils,
          twin sclera or choroid⎯
               the little pieces
                of his eyes.

          III.

          But the suit of him
          beneath: it’s what’s
     the psychiatrist
          for whispering
          girls.

Tell me your name, the topcoat asks.
Tell me about your childhood.

     As if charm were a matter of matching
          cufflinks, a matter of how big
          the long dark
     space is in the cavern
          of your head.

In a grainy photo: a blot, a figure hovering
above clumsy shtetl roofs. The only evidence
of the flying man’s existence: this photo

& a collection of stories. In the camp, a young
doctor, fascinated by the flying man, unwittingly
removes his iron shackles. The story ends—

the flying man of Treblinka drifts away, over
the camp’s sallow walls, lost in the sun. But,
regarding the moment before, the story is muddled.

In one version, he speaks a droshe first.
In another, a great stone is carried into the air,
the young doctor’s skull crushed & the Treblinka

rebellion spurred. Variations speak of the flying
man’s family, his wife & son. Before he is caught
by the wind guttering above the camp,

the flying man is forced to choose: his son or his wife,
only strong enough to carry one. Sometimes he is able
to save both. Sometimes he comes away only

with bloody palms. Among the variations
there is considerable disagreement over the nature
of the flying man: good or evil, gadol or makhashef.

In the box with the picture of the flying man
there are several other photos: A man & woman
with crooked smiles standing before a sagging

hovel of brick; a German beside a ditch
filled with tin soldiers—the shot taken in such
sharp focus, such exacting detail it hurts the eyes

when studied too long; a child’s puzzle, missing
several pieces; a young doctor beside a table
of dying starlings, wings all severed.

     — for Kevin Boyle

Tell us some Irish phrases, one French girl says
to the bartender hitting on her French friend,
and being the womanizer and bartender he is,
he replies, I don’t know if it’s Irish, but we use it
none the less…—now a wink at the friend,
as he pours them another round—Keep up
like this and you’ll be after ‘The Hair of the Dog’
tomorrow.  The one who asked, pencils this
into her notebook, trying to grasp
what was meant, the bartender asking them
both back to his flat for morning drinks,
apologizing and winking more, explaining
the Galway Hooker was named for boats
native to the bay, rather than loose women—
Wink, wink—but the French girls leave quietly
after the traditional music ends, the bartender
busy closing tabs, setting up for the lock-in.

In an alley off Mainguard and Shop street,
there are ruins—like every other corner
or county, ruins upon ruins—of the Hall
of the Red Earl and the roots of Galway
interred under the Irish Revenue house,
Anglo-Normans having pinned this port’s
tongue to Old French and hosted banquets,
dispensed justice, collected taxes—
Appropriate, don’t you think?—years ago.
In fact, because this has always been
a tourist town, many falsely believe Galway
was named for Anglo-Norman invaders,
foreigners, the Old French and new,
Americans, Brits, womanizers from every
morally-ruined country in the world
storming upon this seaside town—FALSE—
it’s actually named after Gaillimh inion
Breasail, the daughter of an Irish chieftain
who drowned in the quick river current.

So the girl’s name is pinned to the tip
of everyone’s tongue when they say Galway,
though she sank into the Corrib’s flow
like the pint glasses and road cones
drunk Americans toss into the Middle
river’s canal—Galway, the town flourishing
at the edge of the water, the bay
with its hookers cutting the quick current,
with its modern day hookers hooking up
with womanizers in the chilly night.
Two Irishmen look over the Salmon
Weir bridge across the river, watching
two crew boats darting for each other.
A quick turn, smart rowing to get them out
of trouble, and one Irishman—between
penciling numbers in the paper’s crossword—
comments to the other how the space
between those boats was As tight
as a fish’s ass…, at the exact same moment
as the French girls walk on the other side
of the bridge, commenting that the man
at the pub last night was Beautiful
like a Lorrie, you know?  Wink, wink.

Even today, the maiden’s drowning
is a tragic one—tragedy, the easiest thing
to translate into any language, compared to
the Natalie Wood joke I could make
or the comment about how the chieftain
must have drank like a fish after that loss
and got the whole island started, because
What American knows who Natalie Wood is
today? And What American doesn’t know
that Irishmen drink like a fish? I know,
I am a tourist in a tourist’s city.
These comments would have fallen
on the clueless ears of the French girls,
if I had made them.  The only colloquialisms
or ideas they could have thought of
or gathered from my joking and inappropriate
winking would have been that, in French,
you say My mouth is like wood to mean
you have a hangover, or I drink like
a hole for a common-day drunk.  It is fairly
selfish, but I don’t think there is anything
wrong with learning the language
of a new city, a good place to find some
friction, to looking into your own soul
and—if lucky—breaking the skin on the pool
of the self wallowing in a turn of phrase.

Blades of sawgrass bend beneath the golden
weight of the setting sun, thick as honey,

until their pointed edges meet with the river
and cut V’s into the black, rolling surface.

Salty, ancient mud weighs at the edges,
pulling down, deep into the wealth of

ongoing life and progress, so small as
to seem unimportant- but in the falling

daylight, a beauty so subtle and so complete
renders all things equal, great, and whole.

A heron arises suddenly from the tide,
from another sky beneath the marsh

nearly as endless as the one above.

Our boxing gloves were tube-socks.
wrapped round our knuckles;
cotton cushions we slapped and bumped
like professionals. My sister and I marched,
locking eyes with our corner men.

Our brothers smeared Vaseline
across our faces, shoved mouth-guards
in our mouths. They built us up,
saying things like, Slip the jab. No fear.

She kept her arms tucked against her ribs.
Gloves up. Chin down.
Eyes fixed to spot an opening.
Silently, her fist cut the air.

A snapping inside my body,
a subtle shifting of weight.
And I rode the punch.
Limbs and tendons: A calculation
of force absorption.

Our bodies: one giant muscle
contracting, then expanding,
hammering a war inside our ring,
amongst the twin beds we slept in,
matching floral comforters,
Bob Marley and Jackson posters,
the giant red reading chair.

We punched out of that animal clinch,
craving our one minute sanctuaries.
Then the dance began again, and I remembered
a cockfight we’d watched in horror.
They never end until one rooster quits.

There’s the un-orchestrated, the bits that happened
to us instead of the other way around
as we found the ho-hum hollow in the middle
of everywhere, the abandoned farmhouse

on the not-abandoned farm at just the right bend
in the road, with just the right slope of hill
so that we would notice. We couldn’t have planned
how the grass would cushion our heads just so,

how the ground would keep us as the night sky awoke
and the meteor shower began and we giggled
at our involuntary ooohs and aahs. I don’t think
we were capable of imagining how quiet

it could become and how the sound of chickens
would be as soft as the blankets we arranged
so carefully as dawn nudged at the purple tree line.
In those wee hours, we fought off sleep

when it all came together – the earth
became a living thing and we were
swallowed, digested – seeing the world
still and inside that sloping hill.

But no, we didn’t sink as the sky fell
closer. Instead, something was growing
out of the chill, a sky of streaking meteorites.
And it had been forever in its coming.

How far does your expertise reach,
the panel is asked. Sparrows and finches
dive bomb the rafters in the mead hall, and
someone spoons honey into their tea.
The general ambiance of lemon peel cracks
open the beady eyes of this gang of
careful anticipation. Poetry knocks on the
door with its paint rollers… no, poetry aches
like a damp bruise behind the plaster… no,
poesy is the Beowulf eyeing the bones of
their cheeks from ti trees beyond the bunker
windows. No. Poetry asks, how far does your
expertise reach. And one of the panel replies,
the biggest replies, the least sure of himself
replies, that, he replies, is a good question, and
we will be asking such questions over the
next twelve weeks of this course. And adjusts
his bunker slit glasses, pursing his eyes like a
tree snake, as green as deep Dandenong moss.
One finch receives surgery on its brain, broth
made of the pea brain by two sparrows grimacing,
locked eye to eye during the deed of drilling.
The children will remember their futures by this
wallowing reek of citrus and bird.

The incredible thing about jellyfish
              About all jellyfish       is:

The incredible thing about jellyfish organizing
themselves into stacks and becoming geometrical.
       The idea of a bell arrived at by consensus,
billions and billions of times, in a saline solution
without a brain or a quivering jellylip.

Reading books about the principles of sea jelly—
the ontology of—
(the achieve of— the mastery of—)
as a brain       reconstitutes
       as a brain
       an organizing principle
(a song played from beneath the engine,
on a brass plate. A Camaro dripping with marrow,
ha ha ha)

The longest jellyfish is the longest thing alive,
it wraps its coils around the your wrists and tugs.
The sea.       Or at the fracture of.
The jellyfish that lives forever
wavers between innocence and experience.
It reads Blake to itself before bed.
It sits there sobbing for several reasons. It’s almost born now.

The jellyfish that makes itself at home
underneath your fingernail is a quick study at a dead language.
It hands itself itself in small stings.
       What you think, in error, is its name,
                     is its primary wounding apparatus.
       It tells you the story of the Aurelia aurita, which is common
       but moves silently without lungs or gills.
       It tells you about polyps like thumbs with mouths, like mouths
       with thousands of fingers.
It says:
       Your body is a crushed tin can at the bottom of the ocean.
       Your body is one of four horseshoe-shaped gonads
       Easily seen through the top of the bell.

The moon jelly came from far away to tentacle
the top of every uncertain urban roof.
It pulses in your sleep. It slides along the pursed lip of gravity.
It savors the pits, it swallows. A
Drink!

It says:
       We breathe in salt-water in the membrane under bloom.
       We turn and we drift. We get around too.

     He says
they all are born
with a kind of cancer,
ones and zeroes dropped
from the garlands of their code,
each replication minutely
misremembered.

     Dialing
small screws
with a jeweler’s held breath,
he pries off the plate
and beholds the slots,
imperfect mouths made ready
for his wafers.

     The gray box,
he knows, is the flesh
but not the soul, a house
radiant with worries,
dimming even now,
its voice a disconsolate choir
that doesn’t like
new songs. He sets it
to rights, patches its raiments,
blows dust
from its fan.

     In the end,
even he will be forgotten,
his small tool box
packed and loaded in the car,
driving home to see his wife
who sometimes wonders
who she is, who marvels
at his graceful hands
setting the dishes on the shelf,
pouring tea from the kettle
he just now stopped from screaming.