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Arbeit Ist Scheisse
The cherry trees in Monsieur Coupon’s orchards
are heavy with child
and we are delivering them to his buckets
heavy with us
fruit pickers from Morocco, America, France and Spain
breaking water and climbing pillars of our own salt
from South of France soil
into cherry leaves
into Van Gogh sunshine
into sour pangs of labor
and earth twirls of toil
On the first day out
the granddaddy from Spain
calls me down
his voice heat-cracked and stained red-brown
from hauling his days
across the long lonesome plain
of working for the man
He shows me I’ve bruised chickadee cherries
by dropping them like gravel into bucket
Ne sont pas pierres, he says
These are not stones, he says
then parts cherry leaves like lover hair
caresses before plucking
puckers his lips and lays them longingly down
Otherwise, he smiles,
Le patron ne sera pas content
The bossman will not be content
Meanwhile his sons and daughters
have set free an entire tree from its responsibilities
made it a child again
the Morrocans too
generations of francs and daydreams and buckets
ahead of Suzy and me
Le patron ne sera pas content
It’s as famous as the fruit in paradise
and the story of my life
But when we stop to roll tobacco smoke
and broken French across our tongues
Rachid tells us this is bad but better than
picking grapes in Bavaria
and Luc and Didier the French boys
ask if we know Stevie Wonder
and if we love him
and when Mohammed
begs off our cherry sandwiches
he flashes a smile
directly
into my
dark
red
emptiness
So in the mid-afternoon swing of it
the plink-plunk groove of it
when desire goes thumping
with fruit into bucket
and nobody wording but a bird or two
a Moroccan voice bellows out
sing-song German from top of tree
Arbeit ist Scheisse! Work is shit!
everybody knows it’s Rachid
gonging from the belfry
rooster-cocking the proclamation
That this grind
is just manure
out of which rises
tent walls
supper after the sun goes down
the bite of global swear words
cleansing our palates
beer and cigarettes and the promise
of all this being over someday
Our fingers in somebody’s hair
no longer looking for the fruit
But all day long sun hangs in galaxy
world barely ticks
the round weight
of something better than this
unravels in our hands
then grows heavy, then unravels
then ripens and bruises and drops away
and Arbeit ist Scheisse!
and laughter is our only hope
and Le patron ne sera pas content
but he will never be content
So whatever contentedness is left in the world
will be ours
So somebody loan me a dime,
a word, a language
so I can say it again:
Grandfathers, Stevie Wonder lovers,
tobacco rollers, sisters and brothers:
The bosses in this world refuse to be content
therefore
All the contentedness is ours
Fruit in paradise, dreams under ribs, kiss on lips
it’s all here and it’s ours
As We Know It
It’s just before the end of America
I’m on my back stoop in Cleveland
watching our crooked river weep and burn
and I can hear somebody in a kitchen somewhere
humming to themselves as they crack
all the eggs in the world into a pan
And while the sun trembles
into the pool of crankcase oil on the horizon
I chip away at the mortar and rust
between my ribs
I’ve been bragging about myheart to you
but in truth it’s been closed for years
like the bowling alley across the street
all the steel mills down the river
But wait, come back
my heart’s not closed forever
it’s just resting, and like the moon
it’s planning something really big
behind that mountain there
That’s right--there’re mountains in Cleveland now
I need them--I need coyotes
to saunter right up to these broken steps
barefoot children twirling baguettes
on their way home from the parade
galaxies honking their horns in jubilation
But it’s not over yet--tonight
the plumber’s gonna mine-sweep
my neighbor’s poetry books
for fertilizer bombs
and the meter reader’s due to appear on TV
to tell the world I’ve got an axis of evil in my fuse box
It’s just before the end of America
and I need them to quit drugging the violins
I need the music in the Prozac commercials
to stop ignoring the fact
that a landfill of missing persons
has been bulldozed onto the dancefloor of my heart
I need some help here
I need to get out of radio contact
so I can travel by moonlight across French terrain
so far out of radio contact
that it’s 1942 and I’m a partisan inthe Resistance
Every day we walk the blade
for extravagantly meaningful reasons
we peel back our secrets one by one
our lovemaking is unpatriotic
bottomless with possibility
and every night is the last night on earth
But it’s not over yet
General Custer’s guts
are still drying on the boot scraper
and instead of children twirling baguettes
insurance salesmen prowl the land
armed with cough medicine and meat cleavers
Here, they cough, Drink this
and disregard the smell of rotting flesh
coming from the thorn tree
And you? You’ve seen Saturn impaled on a screwdriver
grown heartsick listening to coyotes
heave their last songs
into the blood-soaked, chainlink skies
So come in here with your trip-wire fingertips
and gunpowder kisses
I’m a girl on ice
and you’re a boy bound in newsprint
Roll up against me if you can, baby
I’ll salt my body and wrap myself all around you
See if this time we can plunge our hearts
into the world as we know it
Where the river is still on fire
and fish
are still swimming up it
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