Michael Daley
Dark Times
My wife says it’s dangerous I turn out
the lights, bump into door frames, book cases,
kick the dog by accident, twice,
but I like finding my way to her,
fingertips along smooth rosewood she shined,
my scarred hand sliding over a desk.
To walk in the dark is to move without body
or mirror. Often, when I was young I would
grope my way back to the cabin on the bluff
in flight— I tumbled in twigs and thorn, shivered
at the pinched sky. I was young enough to rave
at the salt dark wind shifting the boughs for hours.
My voice found thunder in the spindrift trees.
Druidic Orders emerged to swallow me.
My head squeezed out of the mouth of mythology.
On a path my feet believed in, I would have crawled
the dark wood—I did, by the middle of my life.
Spine bankrupt, head tilted to the waving tips
of forest, my feet read the brailed tracks of beetle.
In fallen yew, a branch slashed my hand.
Queen Anne’s lace, fern and rosemary clung till the ground
stopped throbbing, the sky crashed onto the bluff
and I smelled the sea’s medicine, my sweet cabin
a hulk in the dark—naive and regretful, I howled,
splaying fingers over the bare splintered
counter, and scraped the wooden match into light.
—Michael Daley
God Arrogance
She is holding the telephone up to the wind,
a licked finger searching true north,
so that I, hours to the south
in a dark eleventh floor bathroom, might hear,
cell pressed on my ear,
rude frogs awakening
down in the draw,
guttural blooms of first spring.
But I don’t.
Only her raspy “Goodnight, I love you.”
Then the dead phone.
Memory collapses beneath memory.
Stillness is pretense.
A thirty-story edifice screeches upright.
Impolite water falls through the hotel’s pipes,
unbidden the growl of a heater
stutters to silence.
Love is the surprise of flame to the gas jet.
Convoys of dump trucks
haul off the treasure of our top soil
to plant a new slab.
After New York,
the superstructure keeps collapsing
floor onto floor.
A north wind kills the power.
Fireplaces smoke up the living rooms,
and by kerosene’s singing light we make do.
Humility is forever,
the frogs crouch low.
—Michael Daley
Curved Window
Streams swollen after headlong rains, late
Light caresses a tree’s waist. —Tu Fu
I always thought the trees stood still,
but, awakened from my nap, after travel,
my eyes tricked me: a young fir was an old woman
who swayed from hip to hip, to songbirds,
the arch of each foot barely flexed,
rocking, rocking as she waited.
I always knew that John Muir,
high up a sequoia in a coastal squall,
in shorebird squawk, must have felt
the shallow root hairs slip and tear
below the sandy duff, whipped back
and out over the steep moon-flooded bluff.
But, trying to better understand,
to get beyond this bulge of glass
like all the others in the sociable hotels,
now I see she is the wallflower
who wishes to be moved by a merest breeze,
by phoebe’s song or vesper sparrow’s whisper,
but whose shy sashay, though it mimics us,
the dancers, is really just a tease.
—Michael Daley
The Daughter’s Tale
May you sleep then
on some tender
girl friend's breast
—Sappho
Because the hush of her wing
covers him in streetlight and shadow
because she sings and places the flat edge of a crystal
to her forehead
because of her exotic smile
as she sways
to muted trumpet
while her gentle parents wave the phone
because her dream of him on a concrete bench
in leaves and denim jacket came true
under a street lamp asleep by the stream
of scuffling feet
because he ran that other time into shrubbery
because she chased him till his ripped rear pocket
vanished in shadow
because she passes this way and on feet of wisdom
bears his germ in the belly,
a cargo of hysteria saddled
for a desert expedition
because her black lips and smears for eyes
down in The Pit with friends,
that don't-touch-me look not quite the one
tilting from every passenger window
because she always picks up the phone
because she finds him when asked
because she knows the story
because the heart is a thin drum
—Michael Daley
Marysville Burger King Guernica
Cum tacent clamant
Cicero
In Guernica, where it’s raining—
our good red drench of the seasons on worn tiles, slurping the gutters—
the citizens torn from contemplative scythes, reliable pastures,
bleat at the sky from faces the texture of spun wool.
The bull alone remains detached,
the signature lopsided eyes sly toward the disaster,
his curved jaw bone godfather to the Pieta with empty sack of child.
Her mangled palms have shredded all piety.
Tubes of her udders align with the loops of his scrotum and anus,
his torso so contorted the tail flares like a burning tower.
I had a little print,
in a rented room, which went
along with pipe and leather elbow patch
to a blue cabinet in a drizzling all night warehouse.
I hung it on a bare wall, which meant
for my discerning taste I’d hear the sighs of Radcliff women, slumming.
A history, thirty-eight years ago; condemned to see it as a joke,
I never sniffed the news of Mai Lai embedded in his cubic smoke.
Bravo for the red rain! Bravo for fog! Bravo the windstorm that night,
and dim headlights—and bravissimo you, petulant guy flipping me off
for crawling through a dark wet corridor of hell, I-5, 1 a.m.
Bravo my weak eyes, sore back, my ennui.
And thank you, violent, dumb laissez-faire
for far too bright windows onto this shining room.
There is the giant elegant frame
There is the mural Guernica
There is the horse there is the man
there is the bomb in the teeth of the horse
whose transparent knee
takes all the secret weight
a torch of spotlight annihilates.
So there I sit, before it,
and eat like an animal.
Ironic I fled the road
to come to Guernica,
or to art at all in fast food, or in politics
where a hand was honest enough
to draw a curtain over Guernica
before the secretary of state
who cannot tell a lie lied to the nations
to sanctify invasion.
Why is it here?
Did the owner’s wife bundle it home one night for him—
“Where shall we hide this atrocity?”
Did they recall their days as art students?
Did those two disembodied human cheeks and chins adrift
enlarge them to generosity?
Some would say the one with lantern sweeps in from ghosts.
The other on her knee—she is a she by those buttons sewn for nipples—
rises to the bulbous light from a searing eye, the flash of a divine pyramid of dollars,
so as to become the more transparent, so as to disbelieve and believe.
They will never move those open lips. When they fell silent, they were screaming.
—Michael Daley
