The Giant Rat of Sumatra

Is a phrase and a name,

And a collocation

And coordination

Of names, the common noun,

Rat, with its myriad

Of associations,

The proper Sumatra,

From the Sanskrit, Island

Of Gold, colonial

And exotic enough

To ‘20s British minds,

The adjective, giant,

Often given to lives

A bit large for their kind,

And the whole together

Suggesting all these things

At once, an adventure,

Something grisly, something

Monstrous, alien, cruel,

But in familiar ways

To the fans of Doyle’s Holmes,

Plus the thrilling promise

Of a tale for which the

World is not yet prepared,

All went to prove just that—

The story of the rat,

That is, of names like that,

Made from names, no such rat,

Tale of a name itself,

Its referents floating

In pieces in the minds

Of many memories

Habitually building

Half-lit worlds of ruins

From imagination,

A name that has a life,

Of sorts, or could perhaps—

The world’s not yet prepared

For a story like that.

Cut It Out

Start with telling the truth—
If that’s what you’re selling,
That’s not what you’re about.

Details, details, details
Garnish your evergreen
Beds of pine-scented lies—

Strip off blossoms of facts,
And the same bare needles
Found everywhere lie there,

Coniferous salad.
No one wants to eat that.
You want something newer,

A new dish, colorful,
Tangy orange petals,
Crimson-speckled florets

Burgeoning above
Resinous crudités—
Whatever makes you think

Your plate’s unique (it is)
And you can finish this
(You can’t). Old woods run deep.

Hierapolis

Gravity crushes gas to light,
And then it swallows back the light.
Mornings when you rise in the dark
And leave all the household lights out,
Color leaches slowly into the courtyard
Of your awareness through animal eyes.

Ploutonion, all shrines to gravity,
The mystery of what falls to what,
The weakest glue, the darkest love.
What can you enjoy right now, what
Is enjoyable about this now? Sparrow,
Don’t fly into that mouth. The bull died,
A sacrifice in an instant. You’ll fall.

How do the priests survive as you die?
They stand tall, as far out from the core
Of this world as they can manage, while
You keep your nose to the lethal ground.
The legendary breath of Cerebus flows
And pools by the entrance to the fault,
The fault itself in the crust, the crust torn
And shifted constantly by the magma,
The magma clinging to the magnetic core,
The iron core a tiny bead whizzing
Billions of iterations around its true love
The local bull of fused and burning light,

And so on, on and on and out and down.
You can see the shadow of Cerebus
Every summer morning before dawn
Not by looking down but up, like a priest.
Look up, and there’s the bigger mouth
Chewing the middle of the backbone
Of night, and beyond, all the eyes of all
The other hounds of hell, leashed together,
Clutched by the colorless hand of gravity.

Hierapolis has been destroyed repeatedly
By earthquakes, and you know where
Those come from. But columns still stand
Where the priests went once, and tourists
Still come to bathe in geothermal pools
In the glorious limestone glow of the light.
Around the fenced-off entrance to hell,
Sparrows, blackbirds, beetles, and wasps
Cloud the ground. You breathe the waves
Too much, you’ll fall down to your love.

Phase Precession

There is nothing for you
But the experience
Of being. That is you.

All that goes into you,
All the lives, the long nerves,
The dark orchestration

Of electricity,
Proteins, phase precessions,
Your whole inheritance,

That’s not you. That’s the ground,
Evolving memories
For your experience,

But what you are, you are
As what you feel you are,
More waves that have no shores.