Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World Read online

just before hitting the ground,

  say mint in a jar

  purple picked daisies

  that still close at night

  still love the sun with their wilt.

  Say there’s a man out the window or

  a cat scratching the door

  like a strange man

  and no telephone,

  no way to call out

  or fish guts spilled straight

  into the Aegean

  farther up the beach

  or that our skin can burn

  can glare sunward so and scratch.

  True, paper-eating bugs

  have got in the paper paintings

  mold in our pillows, rough sheeting

  and that we’ve got to leave

  on the ferry on Tuesday,

  out with the tide,

  but don’t say it say instead

  love, I love you you sleepyhead get up

  get up get up

  the sun is.

  TRANSCRIPT OF BIRDS, CONTINUED

  [second bird:]---------

  [to its mother]

  [mother gives it some food]

  ---------

  ---------

  [chews, no swallows, whole]

  [1 and 2 sit] [patiently] [wait]

  [mother hands it to the black bird

  w/ the orange on its face]

  [you’ve got to hand it to her]

  THE DAY BEFORE THE DAY BEFORE WE HAVE TO LEAVE

  From high above, I take three photographs of the same view of the terraces leading to Chrysopigi: whitewashed church on the peninsula-turned-island, its once-neck cracked by God away from the mainland to save monks under attack. Also it is beautiful, this our everyday view from breakfast, and also it is completely ordinary.

  I want to commit it to memory. I want to commit it to memory. The photographs slip in place of memory, metaphors for the actual landscape. Transubstantiation. Out of my hands. I sit and watch.

  Plain

  I AM ON A PLANE

  Have I been

  on a plane

  the greater part

  of the day?

  I believe I have.

  I fall asleep.

  I wake up still

  on a plane.

  I see the sun out

  the window I shut

  the window shade I go

  to sleep. I wake up.

  Still on a plane.

  I see the moon halved

  in the sky in the late

  afternoon the same day.

  I spend time off the plane

  buying food and killing time

  till the next plane leaves

  and leave it must

  and I on it still

  I go to sleep.

  *

  I am asleep on the plane

  next to the coffee machines

  and I wake up smelling

  burnt coffee on hot plates.

  I am still on the plane.

  The lady dispensing

  the coffee is

  halfway down the plane

  and I am at the end.

  Sometimes they start

  at the end

  but this is not

  one of those times.

  I go to sleep.

  *

  I wake up maybe

  five minutes later

  maybe an hour

  maybe we are almost there and

  the lady with the coffee

  is two rows off,

  has she passed me by

  once already, asleep,

  and come for a second round or

  have I been sleeping

  for just five minutes.

  I don’t know.

  I open the shade halfway.

  Tops of clouds.

  *

  I wake up and my throat is parched

  it feels as though the adjustable air hole

  has been blowing directly on

  my throat

  the lady offers me

  pretzels peanuts or cookies

  I choose peanuts

  she gives me two packages

  12 g each, calories from fat 60

  well and good

  but I am so thirsty.

  *

  I’m on a plane and

  the woman next to me

  has a project.

  She is tearing the pages

  of a magazine

  into smaller pieces,

  maybe to mark pages

  in a book, maybe

  for some other reason

  but I am trying to sleep

  and I am trying to sleep.

  The lady puts the torn paper

  in her purse

  for later use.

  *

  I try objectifying

  the flight attendants.

  This is not as fun

  as one might think.

  And a guy gets up into

  the middle of the aisle

  and begins his mild

  calisthenics

  bend, stretch, arms up,

  bend, toe touch,

  arms up,

  rolls his head.

  *

  The overhead bins

  of some sizes of planes

  are too small for roller

  carry-ons so nothing fits

  and this is one of those

  sizes of planes,

  I am row 37

  and my bag is row 28,

  had to move all

  the plastic-wrapped

  blankets to fit it,

  over there, I keep thinking,

  remember to remember

  you are missing parts.

  *

  Am I getting anywhere?

  I must be

  if slowly, if bit by bit,

  an act of faith

  hurtling through the sky

  500 miles an hour or more

  I put myself in someone else’s

  hands, nod off, even,

  and when I wake

  the solid surface of clouds below

  looks like a landing pad

  in this light.

  FARM PLOT

  Even looking up, it is flat.

  Sky stretched tight just

  above the trees, great white lid

  flat screen projected with

  the movie of a sky (no plot)

  great white parallel lines, sky, snowy ground,

  a whole house gone blank as if caught between mirrors, smaller and smaller.

  Sky pieced with light clouds brown white

  washed blue new floodwater

  and I can tell I am in Ohio just by the sky and

  the parallel horizons line up thusly, mathematical:

  huge cloud line, pieced top, like reflected farm plots then

  thin line of bright horizon and

  then the ground.

  INTERVIEW

  You love your west. Your home.

  I do.

  Your rocks. Your landscape.

  My mountains. My mountains.

  So why do you want to work in Ohio?

  I have a job in Ohio.

  That simple?

  Oh I would not say simple. Rock

  is simple. Sand in the desert is. My job

  in Ohio is not.

  And how is Ohio different?

  Ohio is not different.

  When you say different do you mean

  from itself or from other landscapes?

  You said different.

  I said different?

  Look at the transcript.

  So I did.

  What I mean is that Ohio is the same as itself.

  That seems clear.

  In Ohio, I cannot tell field from field. I drive

  past a field and cannot find

  a mark to differentiate it

  from other fields. I have no mountains

  to orient my map,

  I have no map in my head to begin with, only stop
s

  on the route, as with a subway line.

  You have no cardinal directions?

  No scope. No freeway ramp

  high enough to see it from.

  High enough for landscape, you mean?

  Not nearly landscape.

  Could a ladder help?

  Perhaps a ladder. Perhaps

  I could use a very tall ladder. To take it all in.

  LAY OF THE LAND

  Listen: train, train.

  It goes low, high

  the high part lasts longer

  low

  low, high.

  Cool window air

  feet height

  when I am on my bed.

  On my radio

  a dead guy sings.

  Let’s say it doesn’t bother me.

  Let’s say there’s no breeze

  and I open the window.

  Let’s say no breeze I look out the window.

  What does one do the land is flat.

  No where for a breeze to start.

  I am tired.

  It takes more here to walk a dog.

  *

  A grocery store.

  A gas station.

  And Upground Reservoir,

  built on the old quarry

  where they removed the rock,

  and Riverbend Park,

  the prettiest spot in town but so flat

  I can’t tell which direction

  the water is going.

  Cooper Tires.

  A cemetery, then the city edge,

  line of trees

  field field silo with an eagle

  painted on its side

  then a plain old silo then 12 more

  exactly like it

  another cemetery.

  National Lime and Stone you can’t see

  from the freeway

  Benton Ridge Sewage Lagoon

  you also can’t see

  and the hole they dug

  to build the overpass is

  now filled with water, a campsite

  right by the onramp

  surrounded by trailers, and in the overpass pond

  roiling screaming kids with inner tubes

  then field field field quiet

  line of trees

  then a cemetery then

  field field field field field.

  *

  And in the winter

  the snow flattens things further

  a two-dimensional version

  of landscape, a map of itself,

  flattens everything around it

  flattens even the sky.

  POEM FOR THE PUTTING IN OF THE NEW CARPET

  Findlay, Ohio

  This day’s a green one, breezed, wet with air.

  I sit by the window, wonder

  if I will become kind again

  once the carpet is in.

  I am far from home.

  I am in a house I have bought I have

  come far.

  *

  We put up a painting we have bought,

  a painting with pieces of figures taken from Courbet

  and spliced to other figures

  one’s part of a head that turns into

  part of a hand that turns into—who knows?

  *

  I have painted the two desks green

  the kitchen table wine rack

  side tables a chair all green

  the chairs around the table brown.

  This is the stuff of our old families.

  We have taken the stuff of our old families

  and put a layer of green on.

  *

  How to hold

  to have my house contain.

  It keeps out the humidity keeps in the cool

  and we will pay for it later for

  all of it and our

  secret togetherness, now housed,

  is put down in a book

  and calculated and summed

  and the average part is

  I have become cold.

  Meantime the sky

  is heavy without girth

  like the wet air.

  The sky is a blue roof and not.

  *

  When the sky is daytime blue

  it is a curtain

  drawn up over the stars.

  At night, the curtain opens

  to a flat map of the universe,

  the near and far side by side,

  one single surface.

  *

  They are putting the carpet in

  right now as we speak

  and up will go the green desks

  and up papers and books

  I will become kind or

  I was never not kind

  or I am what I always was.

  *

  Can I have your hand?

  Can you put your hand on the top

  of my head like a cover

  and can you turn it on my hair?

  *

  Rooms become smaller

  with new trim paint and nothing but scrapwood flooring.

  It’s an optical illusion—I was never blue.

  Can’t count on a house

  and the calculations are already such that

  I am green. Let’s start again. Again.

  Put it in, the carpet,

  I need a bottom so as to catch me.

  OHIO

  This day has a quietness

  that sticks. The writing

  makes a noise like sheets,

  then a quietness.

  Yesterday, a sky I could

  live with. Day before, wind.

  I pushed the side of my car

  up against the great nothingness

  of air, and it pushed back.

  Yesterday the sky had height,

  the clouds were measurable

  and various. Dark and light.

  The blue between the clouds was blue.

  SHOWER WATER

  stood in the shower today

  let water drip off my lids

  it wasn’t crying

  it was shower water

  the top of my eyelids

  if I moved back more water

  if I moved forward less

  Port

  BOAT TOUR

  You will see to your left the new port

  you will see to your right the old,

  l’obelisque, to the left the clocktower,

  only remaining piece of—

  bombed by the Germans when they left,

  now a great distribution center for fruit

  all the way from Africa,

  and the gulls on the roof scare

  all at once, middle of the night,

  all up in the air and yelling

  their human yells, the fruit,

  the stars, the war memorials in

  three different languages,

  bombed par Allemandes in 1944,

  the waves are slight, very slight,

  the water molecules, I am told,

  stay in the same vertical trajectory

  though they appear almost to be moving forward.

  FIELDGUIDE

  is it a red one it is

  desert paintbrush it is skyrocket

  is it a pink a purple

  shooting star is it a wild rose

  primrose a morning glory

  is it growing on top of a cactus

  so prickly pear is it cold

  out still glacier lily

  can you blow the petals poppy, orange

  desert dandelion blown white

  it is a weed nonnative pull it

  it is this or it is that one

  I saw a purple bell upside down

  the width of two fingers

  I’ve never seen anything

  like that way out here

  FIELDGUIDE MARGINALIA

  Flax

  is not yellow as I thought

  but purple blue, thin skinned

  as poppies—Sue<
br />
  has got a thick patch

  posing for photographs

  with whole mountains

  Dandelions, late-stage

  here there are bones—

  Addie has a bone she found

  growing as if from the ground—

  and greens and honeybees and

  the dandelions have overblown

  but there’s always another thing to be,

  the puff of white seed only an early

  stage of yellow

  Valley lily

  sweet bells, dress frilled

  faced groundward like a little girl,

  a picture book: a fairy in each

  the bell is her dress part

  wait till night only

  the sweet

  smell will

  put you to sleep

  take it for a nightcap, even

  Radiotower violet

  electric blue, blue electric purple

  stacked as with signal

  the whole meadow covered

  all parts connected

  Glacier lily

  thin, but built for ice

  meadow yellow

  thin, thin stalked, then the field

  turned to shooting stars,

  not red like Sue said

  but purple-pink, clumped

  head first for the ground

  petals back, a diver underwater

  head first, a whole meadow wide

  and the wind blows intermittent

  grasses into brushed sea

  this rapids, this blown grass

  THREE POEMS CALLED “THE BASIL”

  The basil

  The basil wilted

  clear to the side of the pot

  and I gave it some water

  and it’s back now

  I’ve quit my Ohio job I’m

  better than ever

  The basil

  It is amazing the basil

  how the water was sucked dry

  its wilt and fall

  how it took to the new water

  and how back to normal

  The basil

  The basil is big

  I trimmed it back to make it bigger

  each break a double growth

  each stalk tipping with

  its own weight

  I cannot write about my dead dog

  he is dead

  the basil I can write is big and alive

  KEEPING TRACK