The Rain Falls

The rain falls.
Its pebbles skate along the street.
Its white horses rear up,
Its red petals stream along the curb,
We are all in its cold, wet throat,
Lugging our book bags
In a newly painted morning.

Wrinkled clothes
Lie across the living room floor,
Also playing cards,
Also a camel stands at the window,
Watch out, he’s got a nasty temper.

Once, in heaven, I sat down on the park bench to rest,
The boats sailed across the pond,
That sailed upon the clouds,
That twisted into vertiginous distances,
Twisted strands of the Milky Way,

The wet nose of the wind
Vibrated, then, the larynx
Of the air,
The staircase rose
And the orange blossoms.

A Diadem of Mountains

I gave you silken rivers, rivulets of stars,
But you need a diadem of mountains.
You demand rocky terrain,
Brambles, peaks and horizons.

You seek a vertiginous dirt path,
A swinging rope bridge,
You need to hear the snow tiger
Growling outside your cabin upon the vast snow plains.

You require a troupe of men
Who will carry your bier into thick, uncharted jungles,
Where you will snap your fingers and bark out orders
In a strange, uncouth tongue
And dance your songs of triumph.

You must master the wisdom of the sailing ship
And set out into bronze mornings.
You must call out new islands and discover distant planets
From an uncharted tropical sea,
Where your loveliness is legendary amidst the island peoples.

Fierce, celebrated, all-powerful,
You must arrange great ceremonies
To which even giants will stride, from across the long, shadowed hills,
To pay you homage.

Rivulets of Stars

I threw out the baby with the bath water.
I was tired of drinking bath water.
And who needs babies anyway?

Move over.
We both need to sleep,
To snore away our lives.
Of course it gets quite crowded in this bed.
I keep having to kick away guitars, old sandwiches.
I find that friend’s doorbells are digging into my back.
I curl around bassoons and double basses
So that in the morning, in the warm, body-scented sheets
I have an enormous crick in my neck.

There is so much to discover in the world—
Everywhere I have dropped crumbs of meaning.
I have left drops of my soul with so many people
And barged into the house wielding an empty wheel barrow.

I came home one evening with a packet of stars
But they all melted into a puddle when I opened the sack.

Really, when stones are rolled onto the mouths of wells,
What good are stars?
What good is light when there is no water?
And water, water shines like rivulets of stars.

Listen! Cries the Ocean

Listen! cries the ocean.
So listen.
The whole night it roars like a freight train,
It rises up and sizzles against the seawall.
For an hour you can be the ocean,
And contain within yourself swift color-shifting squid
And long trees of frond-waving kelp
Amidst which the fish wind their swift glissando bodies.
In the north your waves can rise and fall like mountains.
You can lie beneath the black night sky, covered by the sheet of ice and sleep
And at the same time glaze beneath a sun hot as yellow pepper,
You can swing back and forth drawn by your desire for the moon,
The fog can cover you for hundreds of miles
And conceal your cold thoughts.
You can have no thoughts,
You can be a shapeless god who does not live
But moves with the majesty of life.

Inside Your Blood Cells

Inside your blood cells children are talking to each other.
They race through the tunnels of your limbs.
They are so busy chatting that they do not notice
Whether they are in your toes or in your aorta.
That is as it should be.

I blanked out this morning
And found myself in a dream.
And it wasn’t about the past
But it wasn’t about the future either.
I had fallen into a computer
And was watching as it chatted to itself
And I woke up with a sense of wonder.

I woke up to find
Playing-cards arrayed in rows
Across the chairs and the floor,
And they marched across my eyes,
And everyone else was sleeping.

The Little Highways

The little highways of anger riddle your heart,
Mercury globules spill through the tunnels.
In a crowded restaurant you find it difficult to swallow,
You are eating your children alive.
The calendar on the wall is tattered,
The things you have to do
You should have done long ago.
Solid as iron are the molecules of oxygen
That spin before your eyes.
The road you walk upon
Of soft dark red
Extends darkly forward,
And the walls of the corridor pulse solemnly
As you walk to a small bright room
Where you will be allowed to meet your children
Again.

Frothy Mold

Frothy mold was growing along the inside of my scalp.
It was used to going where it didn’t belong—
On worn stairs or tables where elbows had rested without fail
Or in the wrinkles in long-used books.
How do you know, for instance, right now,
That mold has not engulfed your car,
Your children, or your wife?
I ran wildly through the health food store,
Wildly leaving marks of my choppers
In the organic fruits, the raw oats, the flasks of goat milk.

Brass Tacks

There were brass tacks all over the floor
And brass words whizzing through the air
And the rush of the wind, or rocks, or what-have-you.
There was yesterday and there was tomorrow.
There was the rain that had been swallowed into the night
And left behind puddles in the street
Like the streaks of a giant snail.
There was love and there was breakfast.

Random House

I was arranging my words
So that I could send them to Random House.
What a mistake!
There secretaries were flying out of the walls,
Abandoned IBM Selectric typewriters occasionally belched up
From the industrial carpet on the floor,
Colored salmon, charcoal gray, chartreuse,
The view outside the window shook, took off its clothes,
Put on some hard-edged skyscrapers, wiggled its sun,
Threw up a screen of clouds, of confused flamingos,
Of executives with hard-pack Pall Malls in their breast pockets.
It was all pell mell,
It was all going to hell,
Downstairs a bell cracked,
Freedom spilled out like shiny foil wrapped candies,
The hard kind with the soft taffy at the center.
My manila envelope spilled open, my words snaked across the corridor,
Past the water cooler,
Where a rhinoceros stood, shaking his heavy jaw.
I walked into the boardroom,
Where cab drivers, housewives, fast food deliverers, architectural students
And a variety of idealists
Were gazing into crooked mirrors, baring their teeth at each other.
Words were ejaculated, and small, misshapen moles scurried across the offices,
Blindly seeking the elevators, where they might descend to the basement
And find the cool tranquility of darkness.
Everyone was there in Random House,
And so I pressed into a crowded, noisy room
And held my manila envelope close to my breast
And watched the small black letters clamber out
And hurry to the morris dance.

It's Best to Talk

It’s best to talk to no one,
To the wind,
To God,
In the company of moths and trees
That are so patient they will sagely listen
All night long.

Somehow you have built a city
In which you reside, alone,
With your guitar
And the smell of yesterday.

Shake the dreams like a veil of silver coins.

Here are All the Idols

Here are all the idols,
Bustling about,
Jostling each other on the way to the synagogue,
Speeding along in their little idol cars to idol destinations.
And death oozes out from all of the crevices,
From all of the spaces between bricks,
From between teeth.
But in the gaze between our eyes there is no space,
Nor in the heart that is filled with effortless light,
Nor in the joy that waters the morning grass,
Nor in the colors of the street beneath the moon that hangs like a silver fruit.

Go Eat Candles

by Yaacov Dovid Shulman

Go eat candles, wicks, clay candle holders,
Menorahs, oil, spark, flames, dreidels.
Eat light, swallow gold,
See how the darkness of the hills, the wasteland, the unknown chaos
Awaits its crevices of golden lava shining
To flow into the river of your thoughts.

We Have Run Out of Roosters Who Know How to Tell Time

We have run out of roosters who know how to tell time.
They sleep through the morning,
Then one day, when we are in the middle of an important business meeting,
They hop up onto our head and start scratching.
We may be attempting to fix the car, as usual,
By throwing stones at it,
When it hops up onto the hood
And marches about imperiously.
It seems that wherever we look there is the rooster.
He appears when we turn down the blankets,
We had been hoping to spend some time with a good mystery,
Or in the orison of the chorus of the fall.
We try to run him off the road,
We shoo him away from the trash bin,
We wave our hands at him frantically
When he appears outside our window during breakfast.
He will no longer come again at dawn,
That was too easy for him.
Sometimes we wake up and go hunting for him through the dark streets
And see his shadow on top of a lamp post,
Or hear the silhouette of his invisible crowing in the vast black canvas of sky
And the shadow of wise foliage.

The Thick Artery of the Nile

The thick artery of the Nile
Pulsed through Egypt,
The Hidekel, meanwhile, meandered through the course
Of memory,
All the rivers were lit, lit within or
Sparks of rain showered onto their surfaces,
Lines of color coursed within the sinews of their currents.

Along their banks grew thick clusters of reeds,
Where the frogs sang the joy of their universe
And the dragonflies darted through the Eden
Of their dreams.

The Waves are Not Tired

The waves are not tired of rolling into shore,
The moon is not tired of dipping across the sky,
The mountains are not tired of their steady faithfulness,
The clouds are not tired of their shiftless drifting,
The car lights are not tired of their silent speeding across roads across the valley,
The radiator steam is not tired of its morning hiss,
Nor is the coffee tired of its wisps of steam,
But I am tired.
I have climbed down into the crevices of my brain,
I have slept in the shadows of words,
I have awoken to find that the same sultry dull summer morning
Of dry, baked earth awaited my hoeing and watering,
I have brought my desiccated peas home,
I have yearned for hills and streams of water.
I did not know that the earth itself was burning my feet
And that I was drying of thirst,
And raised my face to a sprinkle of scant rain
That raised puffs of dust.
No wonder those who looked at my dilapidated plow,
My heavy-headed, stark-ribbed ox,
My broken barn
Didn’t see the soil where tongues of flame lapped up.
Good morning,
Said the traveler, watching himself wearily hold the plow pulled by a dragging ox,
Watching himself look up at the sun crawling like a clock across the bony sky.
And his first arrow burst into his chest
And he watched his blood flow down into the thirsty soil.
And he gazed down from the lip of the canyon,
Seeing himself below holding his bow,
Seeing himself below lying upon the cracked soil
And his eyes met his.
The thunder was not tired of rumbling across the sky,
Nor were the swift shifting rivulets tired of carving their soft names
Into the hard brown earth.