Poemunity — your poem community

I’m amazed we haven’t crawled off by now. Later we could go back and cross things out, that way we wouldn’t know where we came from, the shapes we asked to be bent into. Sinatra’d be okay again, mother the same distal approximation, the sea still trying to spit it out. Sometimes your sleep is different than mine. I can’t catch up. I don’t know—there are voices tangled outside. Wind wants to make me correct something, the refrigerator says something needs to be pushed further from the sun. Out where the sunset ends, they’ve installed a graveyard and where it rises, some automatons bash together mellifluous metal tubing imparting a festive contusion to the usual calm disaster of getting out of bed. To find out why life has this glass sparkle at the end of a dark hall. To find out why the paper skeleton holds its hands demurely over its crotch. Did it fall that way? To find out how we fell. There is a name to wake into and music to sleep through. To find out where the blood comes from on the towels. Old friends, I believe your betrayals were inadvertent. To find out if my heart is unruined. Father, are you out there or was your corpse accurate?

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year; There are four seasons in the mind of man: He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear Takes in all beauty with an easy span: He has his Summer, when luxuriously Spring's honied cud of youthful thought he loves To ruminate, and by such dreaming high Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings He furleth close; contented so to look On mists in idleness—to let fair things Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook. He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

Aristotle was a little man with eyes like a lizard, and he found a streak down the midst of things, a smooth place for his feet much more important than the carved handles on the coffins of the great. He said you should put your hand out at the time and place of need: strength matters little, he said, nor even speed. His pupil, a king's son, died at an early age. That Aristotle spoke of him it is impossible to find—the youth was notorious, a conqueror, a kid with a gang, but even this Aristotle didn't ever say. Around the farthest forest and along all the bed of the sea, Aristotle studied immediate, local ways. Many of which were wrong. So he studied poetry. There, in pity and fear, he found Man. Many thinkers today, who stand low and grin, have little use for anger or power, its palace or its prison— but quite a bit for that little man with eyes like a lizard.

—After Robert Pinsky Defier of closed space, such as the head, opener Of the sealed passageways, so that Sunlight entering the nose can once again Exit the ear, vaporizer, mist machine, whose Soft hiss sounds like another human being But less erratic, more stable, or, if not like a human being, Carried by one, by my mother to the sick chamber Of my childhood — as Freud said, Why are you always sick, Louise ? his cigar Confusing mist with smoke, interfering With healing—Embodied Summoner of these ghosts, white plastic tub with your elegant Clear tub, the water sanitized by boiling, Sterile, odorless, In my mother’s absence Run by me, the one machine I understand: what Would life be if we could not buy Objects to care for us And bear them home, away from the druggists’ pity, If we could not carry in our own arms Alms, alchemy, to the safety of our bedrooms, If there were no more Sounds in the night, continuous Hush, hush of warm steam, not Like human breath though regular, if there were nothing in the world More hopeful than the self, Soothing it, wishing it well.

I bring you a hummingbird’s nest, woven from seed-down, thistle head, bound with lichen and spidersilk, shaped by a mother who presses her breast against the cup, uses her rump, chin, the curve of her wing, who stomps her claws on the base to check it’s windproof under this leaf porch. The male gone, she works alone, hurrying back and forth thirty times an hour, before the eggs come. She lays them in a home small as a nutshell, the rim turned in, the sides pliant so they’ll stretch as the chicks grow. Little mother, I’ve read your file filled with letters to the mairie, begging for a place where we could live together. I know now how hard you fought the powers, like a jeweled dart stabbing at their door, before you fell prey to the jungle mantis. Instead of flowers, I leave you this nest on your grave, in case you make it from your migration — only a wisp of feathers, no flesh left on your bones.

"Heaven bless the babe," they said. "What queer books she must have read!" (Love, by whom I was beguiled, Grant I may not bear a child!) "Little does she guess today What the world may be," they say. (Snow, drift deep and cover Till the spring my murdered lover!)

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king's horses and all the king's men Couldn't put Humpty together again.

All you have to lose is one connection and the mind uncouples all the way back. It seems to have been a train. There seems to have been a track. The things that you unpack from the abandoned cars cannot sustain life: a crate of tractor axles, for example, a dozen dozen clasp knives, a hundred bolts of satin— perhaps you specialized more than you imagined.

I would like a century a tree grows slow a crack of light hits my palm while I’m reading I grab to take a picture & the crack is gone branches pouring out of my hands days has made its mark I have wind swept hair I think of my step brother who I knew more like this his face a photo graph on a beach on a book & when he died I was family watching a tree in the wind & I wanted to speak to him who was truly my brother that speck of light is gone on my hand and him. I told her I’d probably like to end here like my com puters do & my dog did. I took a chance w horrifying her. I’m shooting for this love where I live. See me dying now or running across the beach to catch the tree book cover in the end of summer’s wind. The ocean is a feast & it’s here I bring my water tree book feet, taste branches the lot that is me who wants a century.

Sometimes I long to be the woodpile, cut-apart trees soon to be smoke, or even the smoke itself, sinewy ghost of ash and air, going wherever I want to, at least for a while. Neither inside nor out, neither lost nor home, no longer a shape or a name, I’d pass through all the broken windows of the world. It’s not a wish for consciousness to end. It’s not the appetite an army has for its own emptying heart, but a hunger to stand now and then alone on the death-grounds, where the dogs of the self are feeding.