Poemunity — your poem community

for Charles Fishman Before you go further, let me tell you what a poem brings, first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries, yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this, instead of going day by day against the razors, well, the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from the outside you think you are being entertained, when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise, your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course, is always open for business too, except, as you can see, it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play, you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is, the mist becomes central to your existence.

The skyscrapers of New York will never know the coolness that comes down on Kifisia but when I see the two cypress trees above your familiar church with the paintings of the damned being tortured in fire and brimstone then I recall the two chimneys behind the cedars I used to like so much when I was abroad. All through March rheumatism wracked your lovely loins and in summer you went to Aidipsos. God! what a struggle it is for life to keep going, as though it were a swollen river passing through the eye of a needle. Heavy heat till nightfall, the stars discharging midges, I myself drinking bitter lemonades and still remaining thirsty; Moon and movies, phantoms and the suffocating pestiferous harbour. Verina, life has ruined us, along with the Attic skies and the intellectuals clambering up their own heads and the landscapes reduced by drought and hunger to posing like young men selling their souls in order to wear a monocle like young girls — sunflowers swallowing their heads so as to become lilies. The days go by slowly; my own days circulate among the clocks dragging the second hand in tow. Remember how we used to twist breathless through the alleys so as not to be gutted by the headlights of cars. The idea of the world abroad enveloped us and closed us in like a net and we left with a sharp knife hidden within us and you said ‘Harmodios and Aristogeiton’. Verina, lower your head so that I can see you, though even if I were to see you I’d want to look beyond. What’s a man’s value? What does he want and how will he justify his existence at the Second Coming? Ah, to find myself on a derelict ship lost in the Pacific Ocean alone with the sea and the wind alone and without a wireless or strength to fight the elements. Kokkinaras, 5 August 1928

On summer nights I sleep naked in Jerusalem. My bed stands on the brink of a deep valley without rolling down into it. In the daytime I walk around with the Ten Commandments on my lips like an old tune someone hums to himself. Oh touch me, touch me, good woman! That’s not a scar you feel under my shirt, that’s a letter of recommendation, folded up tight, from my father: “All the same, he’s a good boy, and full of love.” I remember my father waking me for early prayers. He would do it by gently stroking my forehead, not by tearing away the blanket. Since then I love him even more. And as his reward, may he be wakened gently and with love on the Day of the Resurrection.

To have that letter arrive was like the mist that took a meadow and revealed hundreds of small webs once invisible The inevitable often stands by plainly but unnoticed till it hands you a letter that says death and you notice the weed field had been readying its many damp handkerchiefs all along

Zeus always introduces himself As one who needs stitching Back together with kisses. Like a rock star in leather & sapphires—conflagration & a trick of silk falling Between lost chances & never Again. His disguises are almost Mathematical, as Io & Europa Pass from their dreams into his. This lord of storm clouds Is also a sun god crooning desire & dalliance in a garden of nymphs. Some days, he loves gloxinia, & others, craves garlic blooms— Hera, Aegina, & Callisto in the same song.

This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves. Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant at having persisted in counting by hand branch by branch and marked down on paper with pencil each total. Adding them up was a pleasure I could understand; I did something on my own that was not dependent on others, and to count leaves is not less meaningful than to count the stars, as astronomers are always doing. They want the facts to be sure they have them all. It would help them to know whether the world is finite. I discovered one tree that is finite. I must try counting the hairs on my head, and you too. We could swap information.

Canal du Midi, France Arcades of plane trees arc Aves above the canal. I know they are not a choir. I know they are not Kabuki, tusk, knuckle, or the swords and flames St. Joan rode into, though it’s true I think of them as these, and as the sky’s deep pockets of snow, white keys, mammoth teeth. It is my way and my need: mes amours, sycamores. My emblems on a crest, gallery of visible ghosts. Mostly I love the light they hold inside, the all-too-much and aged toujours of them, their airborne electricities. Who’s to explain affinities like these? Two seas were joined this way in 1681, sparing sailors from piracy and storms. In the 1830s, planes were planted on its banks to protect vacationers from sun. Now a careless tourist nicks a tree with rope and spreads disease that will kill them all.Ceratocystis platani, traced to munitions boxes brought by World War II GIs. 42,000 must be felled and burned to save, scientists hope, the remaining planes, cousin to our sycamore, that is the wood that made the box that held the fungus riding in the waters of the canal. Measures have been taken. The road to hell, etc. St. Joan, finally, was burned to death for the cross- dressing; Kabuki theaters incinerated by soldiers for their drag shows and wartime sympathies. Sorrow. Desire. There are so many auto fatalities on plane-lined streets here, the French joke about why the tree crossed the road. They burn the hollows out sometimes. Inscribe vaginal lips around the gashes in swaths of hot pink paint. What we leave behind and what is left of us are related questions. The graves in town are up to three centuries old. Some crypts, forged crosses, chipped wreaths of ceramic flowers. Earth gouged, trees felled, buildings razed, never mind the lives. In the new world, a fungus-resistant sycamore is bred to replace relatives destroyed at the canal. Measures taken. Like swapping out the burnt-out bulbs on a string of Christmas lights. So what if we are replaceable? Mostly I love how we burst the prisons of our skins and shine. Outside the cemetery, someone’s magic-markered a locked electrical box with the words Sexe Toyes. The plaques on the graves nearby are inscribed Souvenirs and Regrets. Which are, even in my language, polite ways of saying Done.

based on photographs from Rural Japan: Radiance of the Ordinary /afloat two boats with no riders still moving on water the hulls barely touching each with a single oar safely propped so it won’t fall /lotus leaves close into themselves at night on their wide folded backs water beads inside, their sleeping flowers /inside do the carp just below the water’s stillness see the pines /fall daikon just pulled from the soil these pungent roots hang from bamboo poles their white tubed bodies bend as if slightly aroused each ripe radish will be drenched in salt then eaten raw all winter /lone pine ancient tree with so many tongues how long this throated stem this stillness before rain

With the body of a morbid hanging doll my aura burns by shifts by ambles by mirages by the sun in its primordial morass summoned from a spectral locust feast through electric bartering grammes living as if a spectrum had been transmogrified across the sum of exploded solar windows amidst motions of viral infamy of sudden discharge pontoons of magical lyncean sails above ships of pure vitrescence enthralled by empty Minoan game dogs debating oxygen as form debating menace as ideal as one listens to fire in dense eruptional gullet in hanging hydrogen mirrors so that each image is shifted back & forth between gales & the apparition of gales so that unicorns from Çatal Hüyük cease to condense as forms of the earth but take on the body of enigma as transparence as blackened meteor in abstraction the sun no longer quantified by strange calendrical posses but becomes balletic differential which ceases to quarrel with the magic of fragment as schism as mist as a power cast before oasis because the game dogs the unicorn mirrors spun as a wakeless ocular thirst as a conjured distance evolved from the force of a clarified activity like darkened water as shock as scale which looms as humidity then the eyes always focused as pleas for hushed exhibits

Now you hear what the house has to say. Pipes clanking, water running in the dark, the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort, and voices mounting in an endless drone of small complaints like the sounds of a family that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore. But now you must listen to the things you own, all that you’ve worked for these past years, the murmur of property, of things in disrepair, the moving parts about to come undone, and twisting in the sheets remember all the faces you could not bring yourself to love. How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark.