Poemunity — your poem community

You can’t begin just anywhere. It’s a wreck. Shrapnel and the eye Of a house, a row of houses. There’s a rat scrambling From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A baby strapped to its mother’s back Cut loose. Soldiers crawl the city, The river, the town, the village, The bedroom, our kitchen. They eat everything. Or burn it. They kill what they cannot take. They rape. What they cannot kill they take. Rumors fall like rain. Like bombs. Like mother and father tears swallowed for restless peace. Like sunset slanting toward a moonless midnight. Like a train blown free of its destination.         Like a seed fallen where There is no chance of trees                 or anyplace       for birds to live. No, start here.                           Deer peer from the edge of the woods. We used to see woodpeckers The size of the sun, redbirds, and were greeted By chickadees with their good morning songs. We’d started to cook outside slippery with dew and laughter, ah those smoky sweet sunrises. We tried to pretend war wasn’t going to happen. Though they began building their houses all around us and demanding 
more. They started teaching our children their god’s story, A story in which we’d always be slaves. No. Not here. You can’t begin here. This is memory shredded because it is impossible to hold by words, even poetry.

All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms. Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food. The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, preferably from a horse culture. He should often weep alone. That is mandatory. If the hero is an Indian woman, she is beautiful. She must be slender and in love with a white man. But if she loves an Indian man then he must be a half-breed, preferably from a horse culture. If the Indian woman loves a white man, then he has to be so white that we can see the blue veins running through his skin like rivers. When the Indian woman steps out of her dress, the white man gasps at the endless beauty of her brown skin. She should be compared to nature: brown hills, mountains, fertile valleys, dewy grass, wind, and clear water. If she is compared to murky water, however, then she must have a secret. Indians always have secrets, which are carefully and slowly revealed. Yet Indian secrets can be disclosed suddenly, like a storm. Indian men, of course, are storms. They should destroy the lives of any white women who choose to love them. All white women love Indian men. That is always the case. White women feign disgust at the savage in blue jeans and T-shirt, but secretly lust after him. White women dream about half-breed Indian men from horse cultures. Indian men are horses, smelling wild and gamey. When the Indian man unbuttons his pants, the white woman should think of topsoil. There must be one murder, one suicide, one attempted rape. Alcohol should be consumed. Cars must be driven at high speeds. Indians must see visions. White people can have the same visions if they are in love with Indians. If a white person loves an Indian then the white person is Indian by proximity. White people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves. Those interior Indians are half-breed and obviously from horse cultures. If the interior Indian is male then he must be a warrior, especially if he is inside a white man. If the interior Indian is female, then she must be a healer, especially if she is inside a white woman. Sometimes there are complications. An Indian man can be hidden inside a white woman. An Indian woman can be hidden inside a white man. In these rare instances, everybody is a half-breed struggling to learn more about his or her horse culture. There must be redemption, of course, and sins must be forgiven. For this, we need children. A white child and an Indian child, gender not important, should express deep affection in a childlike way. In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.

The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris, indicative of war or official acts upstream, but it went by, it all goes by, that is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by. He seemed drunk and we asked him Why had he and this junk come down to us so from the past upstream. “Friends,” he said, “the great Battle of Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians and myself: this is a joke between me and a man named Alexander, whom all of you ba-bas will hear of as a god.”

A famous battle happened in this valley. You never understood the nature poem. Till now. Till this moment—if these statements seem separate, unrelated, follow this silence to its edge and you will hear the history of air: the crispness of a fern or the upward cut and turn around of a fieldfare or thrush written on it. The other history is silent: The estuary is over there. The issue was decided here: Two kings prepared to give no quarter. Then one king and one dead tradition. Now the humid dusk, the old wounds wait for language, for a different truth: When you see the silk of the willow and the wider edge of the river turn and grow dark and then darker, then you will know that the nature poem is not the action nor its end: it is this rust on the gate beside the trees, on the cattle grid underneath our feet, on the steering wheel shaft: it is an aftermath, an overlay and even in its own modest way, an art of peace: I try the word distance and it fills with sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen And as I write valley straw, metal blood, oaths, armour are unwritten. Silence spreads slowly from these words to those ilex trees half in, half out of shadows falling on the shallow ford of the south bank beside Yellow Island as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion begins to be complete: what we see is what the poem says: evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows— and whin bushes and a change of weather about to change them all: what we see is how the place and the torment of the place are for this moment free of one another.

for Kenward Elmslie Down in the boondocks rhematic sinsigns multiply jug jug to hungry ghosts, bursting open pearly gates. “Aint no grace, aint no guilt, popcorn twiddle, come full tilt” handy pathfinders whoop at no-restriction hurdles : Da woid ob sin aint dare at all, not in giggles nor reddening toes no think blink no tattle no buckle high dick fun at the fair. Vestigial legisigns just don’t operate, healty wisps entwining and buzzing, hinterland busy with fresh huggermugger. Replica points: you point your toes in fact it’s toes we fluffily toss. Secret moon lotion rub by reedy pool. “They call me Googoo” I said, I….. All upsurge, hot tip green informants signify the trees are barking “cheeze it, the cops.” Trees tease, twinkle. That need being versed in country things: guiltless I milked the cow, slaughtered chicken, swam with snakes, unjust barefoot hobbledehoy ahoy.

—for perfidious protectors I was playing in the street no one paid attention to me as I made forms out of sand mumbling Rimbaud under my breath once an elderly gentleman overheard it —little boy you are a poet just now we are organizing a grass-roots literary movement he stroked my dirty head gave me a large lollypop and even bought clothes in the protective coloring of youth I didn’t have such a splendid suit since first communion short trousers and a wide sailor’s collar black patent leather shoes with a buckle white knee-high socks the elderly gentleman took me by the hand and led the way to the ball other boys were there also in short trousers carefully shaven shuffling their feet —well boys now it’s time to play why are you standing in the corners asked the elderly gentleman —make a circle holding hands but we didn’t want tag or blindman’s buff we had enough of the elderly gentleman we were very hungry so we were seated promptly around a large table given lemonade and pieces of cake now disguised as adults with deep voices the boys got up they praised us or slapped us on our hands we didn’t hear anything didn’t feel anything staring with great eyes at the piece of cake that kept melting in our hot hands and this sweet taste the first in our lives disappeared inside our dark sleeves

from Sonnets, Third Series V How well do I recall that walk in state Across the Common, by the paths we knew: Myself in silver badge and riband blue, My little sister with her book and slate; The elm tree by the Pond, the fence of wood, The burial place that at the corner stood Where once we crossed, through the forbidden grate, The stones that grudg’d us way, the graveside weed, The ominous wind that turned us half about. Smit the flying drops, at what a speed Across the paths, unblessed and unforgiven We hurried homeward when the day was late And heard, with awe that left no place for doubt, God’s anger mutter in the darkened heaven.

How wonderful to be understood, to just sit here while some kind person relieves you of the awful burden of having to explain yourself, of having to find other words to say what you meant, or what you think you thought you meant, and of the worse burden of finding no words, of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person has found just the right words for you—and you have only to sit here and be grateful for words so quiet so discerning they seem not words but literate light, in which your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous. How wonderful that is! And how altogether wonderful it is not to be understood, not at all, to, well, just sit here while someone not unkindly is saying those impossibly wrong things, or quite possibly they’re the right things if you are, which you’re not, that someone —a difference, finally, so indifferent it would be conceit not to let it pass, unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun. And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage of those high murmurings over your head, having found, after all, you are grateful —and you understand this, how wonderful!— that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself, like a root growing wise in darkness under the light litter, the falling words.

For Toni Keller I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by wedding 
planners, dieting, in shapewear, dragging themselves in cute outfits through the freezer section for the semifreddo bender, blessed innovative cloister girl pin-ups burning to know the rabbi of electricity in poverty, obedience, in the dream stick of opium and the green Wi-Fi fuse, who marveling and cramping and wired and allergic lock themselves out of their apartments in the trenchant imperfect delight of early day, who bared their minds to bar friends by the train in twilight and saw tiny figures like fireflies splendoring apartments Botoxed flat like canvas, who passed through universities with sensual indulgence addicts 
devoted to the indefinite space of maps and science labs while the committees shifted paperwork, who left the university from a numbing homesickness for the rez and the old alcoholic lover family father temper crack methamphetamine birdsong, who galvanized in excitable need and microdermabrasioned took the lonely exit ramp on the nature, constitution, and forces of matter, who failed their enzyme multiplied immunoassay technique not once but more than once because some guy came into her room talking about publishing, hash and vintage cardigans, drunk to the abdominals looking for speed crank coke & codeine, who took Molly and mint and Motrin and methaqualone naked in the unhappy light of Saved by the Bell on the hotel flat screen, with spring of 1924 beautiful imaginary wheat stalk wanderlust 
nylons travelhope, not allowed to explore alleys or ride the rails or hitchhike either because of the magnetic pink and with all the years of training spread out boundless the rules and safety tiresome before them, Paradise papery Wisconsin-Madison visionary blue green crosshatched for elevation maps baked wild open unspoiled lands of Lake Kivu & Congo, ardent delirious combustible desire to go astray rove stir evolve princesslike, who busted out against parents’ wishes clattered cross-county in a Model T with another girl to see the iron pyrite fool’s gold The West and the finally wide open-legged Pacific zones, who wrote letters anyway to old boyfriends before setting out on the breathless orange high desert confusion with gold carrying canvas buckets for the extra water for the car, who talked all night in the tourist camps and were up with the sun and snappish with hunger, the navigators in terror of the steep mountain road refreshing the radiator with water inhaling the rust steam fragrance of open road red oxygen metal and a lunar happiness, whistlingsinging bowwowing mooing at the glamorous elations of altitude and the hayburner no handcuff no hush money open whangdoodle fiery western sky deposits of gold and silver lost stories gun-toting candlemaking dance hall prostitute stowaway freedoms not to mention ball bang bareback gamahuche cowboy, who listened while the mechanic romanced over velocity and atonement die-stampings on sheet steel and drop forgings while the diner waitress ground out pies and pies and pies, wandering nylons suffering while the word of engagements and new babies began its bone descent by mother’s phrasing and martini lunch date with the old school of the hot comb and the inner ear, who broke up with boyfriends and walked tap heels on streets for dentist’s appointment a doctor’s appointment an interview a newspaper grocery dinner tomato, who found the sublet which for what she was making she could 
afford but the roommate had trouble with rent alarm clock rooster 
cock boyfriend, who saw her clothing was available in size 00 so it was time to disappear entirely, who took a job selling print invitations to promoters where the desk was dusty with coke Aunt Mary Aunt Nora Aunt Hazel and also dust, who took the cab to the Upper West Side to deliver the express mail package of rocks and rocks of powder for the boss in his high-ceilinged mirrored walls, comatose blonde sylph and suits of bright licorice acrylic fibers, who watched the mistress arrayed in pelts panther drunk and ringed with minerals achieving her highest human form, who leaving in the elevator sad at her scuffed boots of the underclass felt the mirror reflection of her mother repeating little lamb who made thee dost thou know, who considered the elevator’s speculum dilating her cataract radioscope telescope manifestation, who listened to the TODAY show while she Kindled exasperated on an exercise bike in the new pink Manhattan Island 22.7 square miles of dawn, who carried her infant in a baby sling she designed herself out of thrift store fabrics, who wept because caesarean was a term for last resort, having felt cheated by the dictionary of the pain of real meaning and deliverance of child into atmosphere, who anyway flamed ardent and breathless in illuminated swinging as she sang lulling smooth neurons already waddling inside the babygirl’s palimpsest brain, who watched the girl with highlights blow her boyfriend and then blew her boyfriend and then copulated analytically with a stranger waiter painter truck driver in a sorcery of forgetfulness, who philosophized in the meadow flowers on her back to the sound of black flies stirring the leaves and let herself be touched by the rude one so she could see the show without paying and lost that beautiful little gold earring she’d never see the likes of it again, who contemplated such disappointments again for the tenth time the twentieth thirtieth time the earrings whooshing the Cleopatra shouldered sighs the exchange while everywhere boys are having sex and playing basketball afterward and laughing, who is up nights and days peeing restlessly endlessly with nothing but cranberry cranberry cranberry eucharist for the body’s 
unyielding sciences and the UTI of the Punishing Boy God who decided who wins, who felt the embryo always crunching futures with crushing weight of the fixed decree by which the laws of the universe are prescribed the bitch of necessity the bitch of chance and the DNA overlord, who drove her two babies wild into the lake to what she imagined was whiteness, who from curiosity and an old curse tried the spinning wheel in the coldest room of the castle and spilled drops of blood on the snow, fell into a sleep that would last a hundred years, until, what else, a boy kisses her, who lost her virginity to the three bad playing cards in cardboard plastic coated false love the slippery wet Jack of  Text Messages the forcible Jack of All Fours the odd can opener of need filled by the One-Eyed Jack who finally demystifies though it turns out not only slightly painful but truly unpleasant, followed by all the new information, who tore at it with an honest brutal mad need stripping herself this once of the manicure of propriety and sweetheart headband of the high school dance for his long-form journalism of a cock and ferocious butcher meat smell, who blonde as a lit match in Denver watched him enter and stare and took the stare not seeing yet inside the iris a splash of sweetened road that turned with pills magic grass breasts bridge rooftop roadside bedside blindside shenanigans honey, who took iconic photographs on her Brownie camera recording two myths across the street from her house, arms around each other, C.C., secret hero of this poem, lover and marble statue muse, hot Dickens reader — props to the memory of her innumerable pots of spaghetti while the boys with shining minds could wander at night, who blonde as an aristocrat felt him watch her withhold her soft imaginative thighs while another guilty child bride tumbled sweet on a trampoline it was intoxicating, who fell deeply for his car thief  master love railroad seducer inhaled the marvelous heartbeat divine heat broke fed it and waited like the road was a closed door to the doctor’s office and Russell Street the anteroom of creation and love before it went mad haywire, if it ever would, who made cacciatore with the chickens used in the Payne Whitney Clinic trials because they were 14 cents a pound, who tired of Sheila and the Upper East Side waiting for revolution among porcelain and jumped out/through/out the window to mainline all seven stories, literally broke the window she wanted out that much, who suffering as a muse in the limestone of ancient outlandish Tangier may have believed in God but even so wasn’t going to discuss it with a bop poet on the telephone, who hymned the confusing magnetic pink lozenge and painted whore bluesy blue-note secret-love-note whole-note half-note passages bellydancing gentle hip sliding doumbek thrum belly counterpoint shimmyshimmywhimseyfuck, who skirted her soul’s furnishings in the lazar house of man poetics, its closets filled with vests and ties, who imprisoned for apostasy chained up delivered the child squallish and reddening into the ballot of time, who studied painted photographed, raised children and pined, bought kreplach & Whopper Jrs dreaming of three square 
family kingdom of the push mower and powdered milk, who rode the welfare road trip of pouring innumerable thermoses of coffee, feeling the freedom wind-in-your-hair of wrapping sandwiches in wax paper, who studied and prayed and wrote in diaries and platinumed hair gleamed gloved hands stewed rabbit in blood and wine like a priest and shot the baby out in blood over everything, who worked stable and domestic and artful and innovative and sacrificed nothing, fig trees excitedly massively blossoming not that one that disappointed Jesus for not ripening, who star-spangled lost in her housebound Eden cursed with orchards and a million gossipy daffodils, writing & nursing & not on the lists as he dipped a pen quite elsewhere repeatedly, crying purring the distance openmouthed, who burned her novel this actually happened destroyed a second Bell Jar dedicated to him call her impossible but the leap from it must have been split-second maddening rapturous, who blew him three times and then his friend because it was hard to say no when you say no nobody likes you as much when you say yes or even whatever you are loved into momentary relevance existence, who begged twenty dollars from each friend to pay for a secret abortion, her man needing the child but not her to show his father manliness by imperialism of the womb and eventual abandonment like any suburban mall, who protested the clinic shouting who themselves got abortions at that same clinic (they had to, don’t tell their husbands) came back and then protested again for the unborn (but they can’t afford another child) but it should be illegal for the poor, this article was in Esquire of all places, America where is your logic, who stained the host’s linens mad crimson lipstick boy-crazy stigmata 
her animal flesh gash her crown of suburban thorns completely honest about need, who sketched the body tangible medical painted portraits and lived inside, who should have been on the road but for the uterus repeatedly 
renewing its lease convincing energy affirmative right honey that’s right honey right there, who gave a light touch delicate hand beautiful chisel cheek blonde wave Mother Image Madwoman chick and ignu driving inward toward an isolated, lonely peace, who brewed serious coffee during the murder and scrambled eggs while disposing of the body, the detective as best man and 
silence thereafter, still unpublished, who hid his shoes hating to but still he left her for Colt 45 malt liquor Johnnie Walker Falstaff Beer, and lived the biography filled however with biographies of the others for which she made a home flashbulbed in silver their likenesses and tried love in living room, attic, slanted redeemable love their fingers articulated like saints, who after the understandable and recognizable desire loveshape would then expand, against his will and this was a shame, this lie abandonment anger congenital analgesia against hope plan bugout for ten years, returning in her saffron clothes her flat dimension the mother saint devotion song of spiritual angers lovingly pressed into an incense cone of spirituality, her image carved by apostles among the lonely 
goat forgotten sheep infant in cozy rags framed by any window to be honored in her eternal loneliness, Amherst’s Evergreens’ First Congregational’s cupola and conservatory hothouse echoing pure song and archway and hymnal 
restraint, Daisy who bends her smaller life to his in her fenced-in field within which the horse can gallop wildly as she likes, grieve her your best girl with a still, restrained, almost annoyed sigh, what voice in what 
wilderness, minutest cricket, most unworthy flower I will never be tired — I will never be noisy I will be your best little girl — 
nobody else will see me, but you — but that is enough — limitlessness, wilt thou say, ah, ladies, good night, good night, good night ladies — and who therefore know the biology of the soft matter and the cluster of creation in its salty stellar lonely archive is matched by the sweet violence of thought, who transubstantiated across the desert with both of them finally under the deep clear her blonde beauty and the celestial betrayals arrayed stellar, Andromeda chained naked to a rock, the Pleiades shedding to doves to stars, to recreate young artists’ castling brains over the mountain’s whelp of monks in open out-of-bodies absolute ascent, the madgirl and saint unrecognized and writing madrigal in bedroom and recipe in library and songs during class and sketching 
sunflowers for what’s left of us, and remains magnified sanctified we should be allowed Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba Acanthus whorled and dense and impossibly real multiplying in fields an abundance of sunflowers serious beauty, with blooming, ridiculous with blooming, arriving and opening in endless profusion forever.

unwavering noon, self-minus sun flake on the levels of gold there are names for these things: rose, brick, plate glass the annunciation of the sparrow a gene for anxiety add hope, fear, greed, desire no rest but the shade to which a sun implodes perhaps on other worlds others walk streets muse on the weather psyches built, say, on a double sun of unwavering noon the balm of such congruence • thick, white, stick bicyclists painted on the esplanade to Chambers glinting Jersey cars helicopter blades under a ledge of cloud alien first descent past the Trade Towers drifting in on the flyway to LaGuardia landscape, local, locale: the man-made made man trying to open to something like days' unraveling waves • blue pulled toward fire out toward the skyscraper lights ancient mausoleums upheavals from personal terror dark pier jut into dark water turquoise, indigo, aqua, lapis; under the molten, under the bruise of night blood in your lips as a man I violated the boundary of your mouth I say this because in the phantasmagoria I was woman and man in another story you turn men to stone though here, out of narrative, poignant at Morton Street against the twilight • incomprehensible rain under sun heap-leached haze-gold fused into evening water's green-grey dense pliance shadowed face that bends to the shadows to drink and be salvaged tiered buildings like vast Titanics yellow truck-trailer's anonymous corpse conjoined to the numberless a boy swept from the rocks at the Verrazano stanchion tomb cold draining past Liberty it need not cohere but how could it not? without context, for which all are accountable this is for you of the future: one was here who is gone, into the eigen levels