A MI HERMANO MIGUEL

          In memoriam MHR, 1961 - 1998

1.

Michael, now you have become a catalogue,
An exploded architecture, the fragments of a question,
A personality without a person,
And even more opposed to everything.
The voice box of your guitar has been stuffed
With last month's newspapers
And flies home over oceans and islands.
Your tortured shoes are sleeping.
Your iceberg ramparts have abandoned the telephones.
Perfect rules thrash on deck with heaving gills.
Empty addresses turn their eyes to a dizzy zodiac.
Explanations drift by like small clouds.

As for me, my pillow is a stone,
I walk on alone by the black, muddy river,
And I can only do what the earth does.


2.

Now you are swimming under the full moon of music.
Now you are playing the cello to statues of your family.
Now your body is full of needles.
Now your eyes are undressing beautiful women.
Now you are charming even your employers.
Now you are alone begging into a circuit
To come home, and you are as sorry as a soldier.
Now your mystical hair is a sculpture by God.
Now we are in your apartment in the Tenderloin,
Downstairs from the gay pornographer.
Chinese dreams drip from my jet lag as you smoke heroin.
Now you are fighting no one with razors on your knuckles.
Now an umbrella spindle stabs up your nose in a thunderstorm. 
Now we are laughing about something, a delicious galaxy.
Now you are holding my hand as it rests on your shoulder.
Now I am the empty quadrant.
Now you have lost your plane ticket.
Now you are telling me what I would do if I loved you.
Now a Mexican doctor enlarges the hole of your penis with his scalpel.
Now my bunkmates are pissing on your denim jacket.
Now you are slipping away as I read Vallejo's poem.
Now you are alone on your birthday.
Now, near daybreak on an August night, you are hiding,
But instead of laughing in the shadows, you are sad.
Now I am so tired of looking for you.
Now you are silent and I sleep on Paradise Divide.
The night is clear and calm, illuminated only by stars.
Now we will never have Paris.
Now you are the mendacious weasel of compulsion.
Now your name is a fiction.
Now Anthea is weeping in Vancouver.
Now Cindy is dead in a bathtub.
Now Lynn is nowhere to be found.
Now a Chinese woman whose name I never knew
Is sent far away for enjoying your body.
Now a child's wooden block travels the swift trajectory
From the toe of my shoe to your head.
Now you are a grateful, whirling dervish in a Taiwan market.
Now you are urinating incoherently on the living room floor.
Now you have magically transformed every word you utter into mendacity.
Now you have followed my eastern footsteps.
Now I tell you I love you.
Now you are explaining why my lies should continue.
Now you are a wandering tornado.
Now you sweat poison in Boston, in Arizona, in Seoul, and your failures are fiery.
Now you flinch as I raise my hand.
Now you are painting bricks and meadows and visions.
Now you are licking your fingers.
Now you are singing a terrible song at my wedding.
Now you are happy in a mindless ring of electric drums.
Now we are flopping in enormous rainstorm sidewalk puddles!
Now you have pronounced that you know everything.
Now you accuse me of jealousy, but maybe it's art.
Now like a drunk comet you blow out of ten thousand prep schools and universities.
Now you call again at dawn from the other side of the planet.
Now you are writing letters in a foreign prison.
Now wandering enlightenment spanks all four of our eyes.  
Now I cannot imagine what you were doing.
Now you take on rolls of flesh.  Now you put them off.
Now you watch me bounce on a trampoline.  You are silent.
Now you are writing diaries parodies pleas manifestos utopias curses accusations 
      letters songs signatures and art criticism.
Now your money is a tangle of disappearances.
Now we are talking philosophy, or maybe one-liners.
Now you believe a prostitute loves you.
Now we are raking the lawn off the ground.
Now you don't know where you are.
Now you have an import export restaurant English music school film documentary 
      auto theft credit card fraud drug smuggling scheme.
Now you are pounding Ritalin into injectable powders.
Now we are swimming across a small lake together.
Now you are sorry.  Now you are enraged.
Now you graduate.  Where was I?
Now magical letters scatter ancient meanings in your salad.
Now you refuse to eat certain things.
Now you are swallowing your life.
Now your t-shirts describe an itinerant religious stew.
Now you are hungry.
Now I am falling through space.
Tonight the sunset was beautiful.
Now you insist on wiping the grease off of each tortilla chip in an upscale 
      yuppie Salt Lake City Mexican restaurant.
Now maybe you have stolen a camera.
Now you have hidden yogurt containers behind the washing machine.
Now your room is a pigsty.  Who will pay to repaint the walls?
Now your life has been scribbled on small pieces of paper.
Now it is too late to be what you might have been.
Now I cannot become an uncle.
Now the dirt holds more secrets.
Now we have a secret code for reading.
Now our paper airplanes are reaching the ceiling of a Mexican apartment.
Now we are eating bad ice-cream in Chapultepec.
Now we are getting penicillin shots in the ass because we ate the bad ice-cream.
Now you are smiling in New Mexico.
Now you describe the starry night and the empire of light.
Now you sow your salt seed across continents without issue.
Now you have composed and created a piece of music
By recording a fart, digitizing it, and running it through a keyboard
On which you perform improbable melodies.
Now we have made a beautiful book together.  
Now ten thousand infinite, doomed, and defunct deals bargains agreements 
      contracts promises and hysterical rational negotiations with branches 
      of the family tree constellate above your turbulent oceans.
Now I refuse to cut any deals.
Now you star in a bad movie by pretentious art students.
Now your painting of the opening flower is a sad ecstasy.
Now several dozen therapists may go broke.
Now you want to come home.
Now the beauty of which you have become part seems less beautiful.
Now you accuse me of terrible things.
Now you show my poems to a cantor who was once a revolutionary.
Now you leave your guitar in a taxi.
Now you want to get high.
Now I must borrow your tears.
Now you are high, deep with the calculus of pleasure.
Now you are sitting slumped over for a long time.
Now every finger of my left hand holds ten thousand sentences.
Now there is no emperor.
Now you are quietly dead in the unrealized prime of 37,
Leaving me as your abandoned peer,
And now your name shatters through my own.

Brother, now that my career as a brother is over,
I thank you for taking me by the shadow of my hand.
I thank you for illuminating blue and red and black,
The dungaree jackets stuccoed all over with little plastic animals,
The brick corner in rain, the city at night, the kite-string extending 
      into the sky.
I thank you for getting dirt on your feet,
For standing wildly on a speck of blue dust.
Your eyes lecture on the sadness of everything.
You have enlightened every aftermath.
And now you jump on your bicycle in the way you had,
And take off down Crescent Street,
You swim like a small tiger in the lanes at Look Park,
Placing among the six-year-olds.
And I see you, from the chairlift at Jiminy Peak,
Making a fairly well-carved turn to your right,
On hard snow, near the bottom of the run,
Late in the afternoon, under a gray sky.
Such visions glow like foam in the black night's wake.
Only a blind mouth could talk about fresh woods or new pastures now.
For you sing on in invisibility and silence,
And all your days instruct me in the five sad senses of grief.