Six Studies of Francis Bacon 

 

 

Prologue

 

My grandfather was a butcher. In death, my mother took on the color and countenance of meat. One week earlier I’d studied these paintings, trying to decipher screams from the kill on its hooks. I did not want to look is why I looked. Then I wished I’d turned away.

 

 

1.

 

Around him bones are scattered in a railing. Staircases run through the sections of meat. If the room lifted into light, her bed was a sunken confluence of red. The way her face contained its own absence. And still I could not understand how a man could disappear into his umbrella, become nothing inside his own clothes.

 

 

2.

 

Distorted, of themselves and other, I wrote. Humans absolved into clay. As now her face appears in the painting: distorted of themselves, distorted other— While behind her, letters overwritten: an unseen language, muttering.

 

 

3.

 

Like advisors, like parents, these two halves of animal. Seen next to the dusk hollowing out the room, the painting wears the hue of a flower, of a darkening bruise. His face dissolving, the meat looming open to swallow him, the mouth of each hip split wide and gleaming…

 

 

4.

 

Nested together, two figures cottoned in light. When we are dead, memories appear this way. In the mirror, I saw my mother’s frame, her father’s before it. And I had written: You cannot tell where one figure ends and the other begins.

 

 

5.

 

A room disappearing into itself. Out of such blackness a box appears, and from inside a man wavers, ghost-lined in chalk. He cringes, for the box is also a railing barbed with figures perched atop a curved line like the side of a grand piano. The box, the figures, piano, all gold, transparent as if imagined, as if the blackness of the room were all that was real.

 

 

6.

 

And underneath where the dark had peeled away, raw strips of light, flesh beneath flesh. And her face was not her face, though her body was all her body… And the black straps of air, shredded, hardened into tendons— And the day was not the day, but something the mind brands on the mind… Something in the mouth and clenched eyes tells how this light enters the brain. Something in the face tells how the tendons find the bone. They find it, and they pull—

 

 

Epilogue

 

Having never returned to that room, having never again entered that museum, having only words to go back to what was true— But words distort, memories change, paint beneath paint, paint covered and mired in paint. And now what never existed wears a name and a halo of frames. Held to the wall, as to any barrier, with a nail.

 

 

This poem first appeared in Tupelo Quarterly 2

 

 

 

Passenger

 

 

Will rain fall we don’t know

only a few drops seem willing to answer.

 

High clouds the hulls of unseen ships

parked their dented blue enamel over our heads

 

each rib of cloud an arched gunnel

longer than the highway we drove on

 

the family car no larger beneath

than a splinter of steel. Will it rain we don’t know

 

why this dark lowering its metal around us

brightens suddenly the veins of leaves almost

 

lifting into air. Ten years old from the passenger seat

I watch fields darkening low trunks and leaves

 

rinsed in a chemical glow as my mother

explains Purkinje Shift the loss of light the eye

 

finding brightness in the lowering storm. Will it rain

we’re not sure are there even ships above those hulls

 

can we ever know their rigging how their sails fill

with the breath of the dead? As she

 

who has long been a passenger on that voyage

continues to coast down the same highway

 

across years she names what I cannot each tree

glowing in the encroaching dark each leaf

 

a memory lifting in silence to speak to me—

maple tulip hemlock cypress ash.

 

 

This poem first appeared in Vinyl Poetry 9

 

 

 

 

Valentine's Day

 

 

This Sunday evening at 7:30pm, Mike O’Malley
Will drive his twenty-foot cherry-red monster truck
Over the blue discarded shells of 1980s Fords
From one end of a pitted sandy arena
To the other, each car beneath his ten-foot rubber wheels
Emptying like the failed hope of a former love
In a spray of glass and sand
As the polished scrim of each flat roof
Folds to meet the stacked grid
Of chassis, axle, blown tires and frames beneath.
 
And we will watch together as Tim O’Sullivan
Lifts a giant black Toyota Fire-Demon
Over a pyramid of motorcycles once designed
So that people could leave one road of their lives
And emerge onto another at blinding speeds, just
A blur of metal, abandoned now, it will be like
They never existed, he won’t even touch them.
 
Then finally Steve Spitzer will crush smaller monster-trucks
With his monster-sized monster truck, and I will turn and kiss you
As you have never been kissed in the Worcester Centrum before,
The wash of the crowd drowning to a dim simmer,
The warm parts of our bodies beginning to boil—
 
Love, we should be so lucky to leave
Before the show is over: me trying again
To set my hands to that part of you
That swings so invitingly, you
Pushing me off like the tailgater I am—
 
To coast out the wide gates of the amphitheatre
Of the wreckers and the wrecked
Into the night’s black upholstery, where we will sit
And lock parts slowly, the way lovers were meant to,
While the sounds of the crowd, celebrating one
Last destruction, roar and cheer us on.

 

 

This poem first appeared in The Collagist, Issue 41 

 

 

 

 

Ruskin in Venice

 

 

1.

 

City of rivers

 

Witnessing its dissolution

Years later he would say

           

Among buried fragments

Pieces of sculpture              

Lost melancholy clearness of space

 

A bed. Washbasin. Desk and chair.

His room that winter, drafts

Piled in drifts, sounds of the stones

Settling into their own traces.

 

There is an emptiness now

That touches all things. If you are quiet

You can almost hear it

 

The barn, alone in the ploughed fields.

First winter snow sifting down.

 

 

2.

 

Not to illustrate

The thing itself, but to illustrate

The impossibility of illustration

 

Husks of flame on the water

Reflections of arches at night

The statue of the lion

Lifted over the square, St. Theodore

Said to have stood there

 

Staring across the Lido

When the piazza was just a scrub

Of grassy plain

Lapped by water, unable to support a rafter, a stone—

 

Now lavished upon walls

Whose foundations are beaten by the sea

 

This morning

It is the furthest thing away.

 

 

3.

 

At night, from smoking ruins

Of the city, on rafts

 

No one would miss them

If they drowned

 

Tonight, each house

Becomes an island. The snow outside

Its sea. The lamplit

 

And the darkened square, the port

With its empty ships

 

 

4.

 

In Room 42 at The Grand Hotel

He wrote the opening

To his life’s work

 

The greatest thing

Is to see something, and to tell

What one saw

 

And to see clearly

Is poetry

 

White lines

Stenciled against

The black bark of trees, sun

 

Falling in patches, gleams

Over the dusty snow.

 

So the world

For a moment, mirrors

My grief.

 

It does not make anything easier.

 

 

5.

 

Simple and tender

Effort to recover

 

Voice bent on saving

Something it is unable to save

 

Pathless, comfortless, infirm

 

Voice unwilling to accept

What rises beneath its own utterance

 

Silence

 

Can I say it now,

That she did not always

Lead a happy life?

 

       O world,

Canals of light rivering

Through the broken arms of trees,

 

There is a spot

On the other side of darkness

That will not wash away

 

 

This poem first appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Vol. 63 No.1

 

 

 

 

21st Century

 

 

What strange beasts
they will say of us
who gave away the tasks
of four-legged creatures
abandoned the touch of wood
salt on a horse’s mane
for plastic rubber who rejected
typewriters the smoothed brow
of an envelope’s fold blocked
rivers built sidewalks over
open streams for mattresses
cups Transatlantic flight
Yes they turned from candles flame
Yes they let the great hulls of steamships
collapse into wheel-spokes of dust
But who were they
the historians will ask
these people who chose concrete
steel threads of electricity who
sent anger fear through
vast vaults of wire traded
paper glued bindings
for flatscreens honey-bees
for the promise of erasing
decades of lines in a face
Did they too study history
Did they too seek change
marveling at the
instruments of their own
imagination Look
how the dust rises
from these pages then
settles into place again

 

 

This poem first appeared in The Cortland Review, Issue 52

 

 

 

 

Variations

 

 

“The universe is suddenly smaller and life will never be the same”

            read the cover of the Geneva Times on July 21st, 1969

over black-and-white photos of Buzz Aldrin

and Neil Armstrong, the two astronauts

embossed in glossy newspaper laminate

on history’s front page.

 

“The universe is suddenly smaller and life will never be the same”

            are words the third astronaut, Michael Collins, probably

doesn’t savor too fondly, his name

hardly ever mentioned, not even

an absence in the paper where

his picture should have been—

 

“The world is smaller suddenly and life may never be the same”

            is a variation of that sentence and words my brain

might have uttered in some far corner

the first time I lost something—

a stone, a pet, my first love telling me

we had nothing left to say, while

 

“Life is suddenly smaller and the world will never be the same”                                   

            is a phenomenon I experience most nights when I try

to fall asleep: variations visiting in the dark,

memories of faces once known

so well they can’t help but

grow strange, the whole of

 

Existence suddenly smaller and our lives never these single worlds

unto themselves but bodies hurled through space

                        and pulled upon by other bodies in erratic

                                    orbits, the moon not even a source

of light as was commonly thought

but a mirror telling me

 

“Time is suddenly shorter and the world will never be this close.”

            Even on the darkest nights, when I cannot sleep, I hear it—

                        reflection of balcony lights spreading across our bed

                                    and the words I would say to you

to keep this moment fixed in time

unspoken, the moon

 

Suddenly small as a word and apparently, at night, always the same,

            though the mind, perceiving some grief, reads it differently:

                        There’s a man up there, or: It’s made of cheese,

and what must that third man be thinking

now, staring up at the sky if

he’s even still alive:

 

“The orbits grow steadily smaller and time continues unchanged”?           

             The stars, in memory, winking out like bruised filaments

 around that ship still circling the white planet, each

a hope he might have touched

and held it there a moment

he was that close.

 

 

This poem first appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Vol. 36 No.1

 

 

 

 

East River

 

 

If you stand on the shore of the East River, beneath the broad berth of the FDR,

you can just make out, in broken neon on the river’s surface,

dim letters from bodegas across the avenue:

Platanos, Mariscos; red and green

lights from the overpass.

 

Nothing in the long black sheet of the water to tell you more than the direction it’s going.

Less than that, even, if it’s midnight or later, and you can’t read the map

waves make under tankers and signs,

long sidles in the current

a tugboat pushes upstream.

 

The East River remains as they must have seen it that night:

two men—boys, really—half-drunk on whiskey

half-drunk on beer—

I’ll race ya…

Here to the other side…

 

I know what you’re thinking. And it wasn’t even the trip across

that took them. When they reached Brooklyn they found

high concrete walls, docks like ladders

with the rungs cut loose,

too steep to climb. 

 

Bodies burning with cold, the black thrill of the water a promise

turned animal now, fear and consciousness

sliding beneath them, the beams of passing ships

touching their wakes as

they vanished—

 

On a night like this when the air is warm and bridges

make rainwater patterns out of oil-slicks

and burnt feathers, you can walk

right down to the river’s edge,

iron twisting in the water.

 

It’s not even a river. They call it a strait, a piece of the harbor

that abandons its body and finds it again.

But there’s nothing it would tell you

even if it could. No answers

for the one who survived.

 

 

This poem first appeared in the New England Review, Vol. 32 No.1