Blood on the Tracks
“…I had a couple of years there, where I went out to be
by
myself quite a bit of the time, and that's where I experienced
those
kind of songs, on the 'Blood on the Tracks' album...I'll
do anything to
write a song..."
Bob Dylan
You sing the lawless rangy world into
My claustrophobic darkling hell
With your robber voice
Slouching under my perimeter
The purifying flames will never warm my hands
I fell off the path but never
Hard enough
To more than groan against the gravel
Rub my cheek
But someday the drizzle will
Wash away my silken mask
For which you must forgive me
But my heart is much more costly than
The pearls at my throat
I lose you every day and every night
You try to save me
You catch my downy body in your calloused hands and set
it right
Like the two-stepping mechanic from Picacho
I betrayed myself in silver oranges and cigar boxes
While you waited and the treachery
Consumed my mind like the midsummer bonfire
Infinitely easier to be a redhead but-
It’s not about any word just the right one
And every day we defile the sacred
Godhead in each other and think it funny
As we smear ourselves with dust
We can’t stop being brilliant for five minutes because
That might be peace and that can’t be
It’s all because I cannot earn salvation
Like a poor Protestant who lives through faith alone
So until I drop down the well
There’s no hope of winning back my self
From the gray-worsted banker
Someday I must become the butterfly but the cocoon
Lasts for twenty minutes or forever
The secret is forgetting
Is losing your stillness
Insensibly
Stealing and rudeness are finally allowed, though
And fuck the Girl Scouts anyway
Repentance too maybe
So what goes in the holes?
I ask with a Spaniard’s guile in the
Jesuit’s voice as they
Carry the cross neither can believe in
The problem is
My autobiography records only the last
Five minutes or so
After a few days it crumbles
In their guilty hands
Who document my corpse even while reducing
My still-quivering frame to dust
The person I am tomorrow
Could be your redemption
Ankle deep in flames
The innocence, price of admission,
Has been dropped at prescribed
Moments along the way to the penalty
What’s left will warm the locusts
I devour too but the rain will never come
Nothing could be so bountiful
The light will never spill through these selkie hands
I have caulked them shut
Sealing every crack
Until my eyes are gummed
The first honesty must be dropped to find
The other
Shot silver
And we’re too far gone for playfulness
Or everything that is real about us
But I have learned the lies as well
Silence
Crueler than words can ever be
Reducing the recipient
To nothing
Dust thou art…
She walks along the sidewalk, humming
Open like a poppy to the sun
She must be somebody’s baby
The shambling beggar speaks
Begs
That’s what he does
It is his profession
Her face contracts: white, impermeable
And she is silent
Every time they approach, she is the same-
Dropped in confusion
Speak? Keep quiet?
Acknowledge with a gesture?
Good manners fall away
And she retreats
With more haste than grace
It is a test she will always fail
Punishment
Early morning
Singing grass
Cool-washed face
My hair pulled tightly back
Feet in dainty velvet loafers
Swinging underneath the desk.
They called it detention
And so did we, for that matter.
But on a Saturday morning
In the spring
Cool air which sang of clover
Pouring in the window
Uncomplicated sunshine
Rolling on the floor
As I read and wrote and grew
In simulated meekness
I might have called it joy.