Joe Hall

Subject of That Self That Will Not Leave

Though I want to switch off the displacement machine,

it warms and begins to hum as I want to warm

and hum in the grass beside my grave, daydreaming

hand tools through which I can still extend my torn

tendons, to lever a mouth into the earth that will speak

pole beans and wandering vines and how one must not

own anything absolutely, how there are deities

below to almost name and there is water in the stone

like blood in an eye, beside the marker. I want

to heal, I want to become a winged worm

held by a concrete sky, hidden

from developers whelping cubes

into humid boxes. I want to believe

that what saves us is not a ski slope in a skyscraper

that holds the desert sun in its jewel-like eye.

I want the bus to show up, why can’t

the bus show up? And why give a cop

flowers when a cop could blow

a ragged wound of stemy asters, swelling

mushrooms, and ocean-abstracted zipties 

through his head? I want to switch off

that warm hum, watch the heat fade

into a burnt orange swatch in this black room,

to give my mouth to the night, pale moth

on a black oak trunk wider than a planet

like an onyx ring around a pale sun.

Give that planet to the night,

rest my back against its radiant ribs

to listen to the city, to Buffalo, this night

how it labors and gasps.

Heavy Rolling Bells In Buffalo

And if from the Buffalo waterline as it dawns cold

as bells ring to announce another winter, it was not cold,

no lead proceeded from the pipe, the first bus went straight home

so it felt like home, to walk and walk, the meridians

of one’s feet sore by all the cars parked zig zagged across driveways,

because there is nowhere to go, as if there were

food and it’s warm and it stays unspoiled

in every kid’s stomach, whoever wanders

up to however many tables,

as if the snow flattens long-empty houses to grass, each block

like a gap-toothed smile was not the city

preparing to give itself away,

to never get itself back,

but to hold the people that live and sweat here, heavy

bells roll through Buffalo

to walk and walk along the ribbon

of Scajaquada Creek through hills and asphalt cooling

for sixty years, as if how anything looked mattered

less than how well everyone was with each other

through the work of providing for each other

and every sound and laugh and siren, every wheel

rumble, each step through the snow,

every cry, every alarm of need, every peal of desire,

The Buffalo You Left

Or the city and so many cities in this city falling away

from steps you hurried down into the

churning stream of sidewalks, of course

so many cities fall away when you leave everything you needed

the city to be may stop bending to the light, a planet

thirsty for light, a tangle of threads, pulling

the fabric of the city: I wish I could describe

Buffalo’s weather like some soft container

that invites you to hold with care an intricate and accurate

machine, tiny gears flying, but all the Buffalos

have left with you or have knots loosened

into threads held by everyone who knew you better,

and even if all the people you collected came together

part of this city is gone, gone, not

regained, we are struck with grief, it’s just grief,

grief calls to the bitter enamel of some

day, grief brings no one back,

not you, eating an image of yourself carved from salt,

though salt is not nothing, carving

itself into the slowly parting streets,

pothole chasing pothole,

and the city that was your city is locked

in the ground: what was Rohrer St but who you talked

to there, what was Broadway Market but tastes you

orchestrated, whose long sigh of contentment

in your living room after the knee-numbing work of the week

and that this thin ribbon of play between the porch and street

without the wind shaking the rattle of

a maple’s shade across the world as it was becoming

in your chair, there where you watched it rain and go on

as it could go on

Toilets, First of All

On the wind-tousled park loop, you were older and had

to go and wanted a place to go that glistened with

reverence for returning part of what you requested

to survive and hoped that things were swelling with

the wind across the Erie, parti-colored dinghy sails and

laundry, your vining hair and curved foils on

a bubble-stem of gears, I wanted all those assemblies again

star of block by star of block, all the friction of voice

like hand rubbing hand under a snow-sieged bus shelter

want the many planets of a messy family, the kids

in furthest elliptical orbit around the grill in a meadow

that used to be a golf course, I want to walk with

you between the damage, among the stalking coyotes,

the earthwork of the voles, a clinic, down the street

where the doctor is wry and at ease with their

vices, tendrils of smoke braid letters in the air

when will there be talk, gallons of it

and years splitting sunflowers between their teeth

waiting for the bus which arrives just late enough

for you to start thinking about what you want

but not who you lost, and there it will be, the threshold

that opens into a conveyance or is it a creek slowly 

unwinding concrete, I want to be with you

on those banks shoring no ruins, knitting our beloveds,

those plants and people, extinct and unfolding, into something

set to play in the wind

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand | Fugue 141

             For Samuel Delany

1.

The taste of starlight, of urinating for a thousand years, twisted and bowed

carried alone, between planets, in the well of years,

care and how to learn what you can withstand as care, as in fitting the wheel

to the axle to pull away the bed or what I said was a morning like a salted lemon was

just a veil of thin chimes to adorn the lapping of the wind by the grey bellying expanse

was it a ribbon of chalk, rough belts of soft ash, and mollusk shells agitated into a wet ring

to have that grey dappled horizon speak its every thought

2.

Wind bellying, shot—chili pepper, lime, and salt, crushed

with a mask of petals unretracting—the chain of addiction

as a mill, a pump—the hair of stars—the hot wet mouth of August

in the stripe of mango sizzling on a water tank for sale on a lawn at Broadway and Fillmore

Jake walking a can from the water cube, Thomas arranging cigarettes on the

car seat Janice built a shelter around as large as two coffins on their feet 

before rows of flat-topped thyme—with the threads of consciousness

the flaking mind—with the axle of wind

the ring around the plunger, one bright and radiating thought: