Imaginary Logic Hardcover - 2011 - 1st Edition

In the Days of Magical Realism

I went everywhere with invisible
camera crew and musicians.
Portaged by lust, convinced it was beauty.

Washington, early spring, 1976,
three girls moving away from the cab,
speaking French, as I crawled in,

and one, faux-blond, with pearls,
decked out in hotpants and shawl —

I saw her as a zoologist sees a pet
detransmogrifying from a carpet

and was wondering might this ideal
suggest goddess, hooker, or model

when the look she threw back over one shoulder
rendered into stone the eyes
with which I had seen myself.

Voice Making the Sounds of Engines

Aging imaginary playmates,
arbiters of loneliness
and childhood, have they
fallen on hard times,
sleeping under bridges
and eating from trash bins?

When I knew them,
they already had wives,
experience in the military,
and full-time jobs:
mechanic, truck driver,
steam shovel engineer.

In the shadows under
the house of women,
they used to help me
with heavy equipment,
laying out boulevards
for a city of missing men.

Idols, stooges, parrot
and laminate of vox
mundi, backfiring, doubleclutching,
from this distance
they seem stalled
in the fifties and leaking grease.

Except for the clean,
well-spoken one,
twisting his mustache
like an appellate judge
or ambassador from
the commonwealth of mothers.

And the rooster Caesar,
worm-poaching with
harem and sycophants.
Vuden, vuden, we would go,
and he would show us
the nature of masculinity.

Ambition

The new house had the air
of a stationary ark
ready to set out: the flood
a freshet in each faucet,

the shine and lacquer smell,
pecan floors, transfigurations
of porcelain and enamel.
Each plug-in was an owl’s face

being attacked by a snake.
The fear that he might slip
and flush down the toilet
balanced his wishing

the Apaches could leap
from the television. Meanwhile,
since the carpenters
had left a few light boards

stacked by the door, he plundered
the vacant house in the field
for wings, six years old
with an airplane to build.