Poemunity — your poem community

Venice, December Ours are the only mouths to taste with this smothering slow touch, and the only steps to sink like bellsounds and cave deep into the marble snow. Women who go to the window to push their arms out to the snow and then bring the shutters back in follow us as we fall past their eyes where the black night lives. We are snowflakes at last, as the thick never locked, never closed doors follow us through squares of light their windows have left on the snow. Once again, warmth that falls, again, though our tracks fill and slow.

Tulsidas, the poet, was wandering, deep in thought, by the Ganges, in that lonely spot where they burn their dead. He found a woman sitting at the feet of the corpse of her dead husband, gaily dressed as for a wedding. She rose as she saw him, bowed to him, and said, "Permit me, Master, with your blessing, to follow my husband to heaven." "Why such hurry, my daughter?" asked Tulsidas. "Is not this earth also His who made heaven?" "For heaven I do not long," said the woman. "I want my husband." Tulsidas smiled and said to her, "Go back to your home, my child. Before the month is over you will find your husband." The woman went back with glad hope. Tulsidas came to her every day and gave her high thoughts to think, till her heart was filled to the brim with divine love. When the month was scarcely over, her neighbours came to her, asking, "Woman, have you found your husband?" The widow smiled and said, "I have." Eagerly they asked, "Where is he?" "In my heart is my lord, one with me," said the woman.

Mother is drinking to forget a man who could fill the woods with invitations: come with me he whispered and she went in his Nash Rambler, its dash where her knees turned green in the radium dials of the 50's. When I drink it is always 1953, bacon wilting in the pan on Cook Street and mother, wrist deep in red water, laying a trail from the sink to a glass of gin and back. She is a beautiful, unlucky woman in love with a man of lechery so solid you could build a table on it and when you did the blues would come to visit. I remember all of us awkwardly at dinner, the dark slung across the porch, and then mother’s dress falling to the floor, buttons ticking like seeds spit on a plate. When I drink I am too much like her— the knife in one hand and the trout with a belly white as my wrist. I have loved you all my life she told him and it was true in the same way that all her life she drank, dedicated to the act itself, she stood at this stove and with the care of the very drunk handed him the plate.

Apprentice morning come easily now, silver with fog and the breakdowns of neighbors: shouts from up hill where the land curls under vines and under the porches of oaks, where even now wintergreen and inkberry shiver forth streamers of new growth, and the green frogs suck at the dew and sing their bent songs. It is easy to hear my own voice in the liquid contraltos of rage, the vents and accusations that feed fires up the hill. It is all human enough, the yelling, capacious and frank, the doors slamming, cries of betrayal. I too have betrayed, lost my place among the condensations of commitment, dallied. I go among friends who say with neither fear nor fury in their voices that they too don’t know what’s next, that from the studied impactment of their lives they have sallied small lines of proposition, made a few calls. Slight affairs shiver and fail; we go for a walk by the rotunda, where, on the perishable lawn, a band plays Dixieland—speaking, not earnestly, but with steady intent, of the play of choices, the simple chance of another future somewhere else, perhaps a house in the hills above L.A., part-time work for the screen, a few avocado trees. For a while it is as if the hazy play of evening light, the splashes of music, the unbundled oaks surrounding the Square, are enough in themselves to sustain, as if mood is itself sustenance, that our struggle to conceive a continuance is of no more moment than the fuchsia and soft yellow clothes of the tourists. Perhaps it is possible to be gentle no matter what, to seek not restraint but surrender entirely, to turn from the snarling reproach not into the keening dismissal of hope but to whatever bright fluttering is next, the bright fluttering of wisteria petals, a felicitous phrase, fingers touching a face. How else to avoid redemption, or its opposite, which we stopped believing in one day in high school, suddenly startled over a steaming lunch tray by the way the fizzed flowers of a stunted mimosa seemed to beg for release? We realized then we could say whatever we wanted, that the world was no more particular than anything else, it too could be out-argued, confused by refusal or lies, that it was no wonder people were stunned by the eloquent permanence of death. So there is permission, not granted but given, as a forsythia at the edge of the walk, having stolen more light than it can contain, trembles, and the echoes of argument fade into a fluttering over the price of butterscotch floats, and we are dazzled by the gouge of perception, as if there was in fact a word we were waiting to hear, not as completion but as synoptic and inevitable entitlement—the drift of some stranger’s conversation, the memory of a thin mist moored temporarily over the garden, that face we saw from the window on the way to St. Albans: beautiful, indifferent, unequivocably doomed.

Do I fuck you or hate you? It feels wrong in every limb But I do it anyway ’Cause it feels right when you’re in. Your generosity is perverse And confined to your bed The only thing you’ve given me freely Is head. White Boots,2014 by Rachel Louise Hodgson

I Eventually we must combine nightmares an angel smoking a cigarette on the steps of the last national bank, said to me. I put her out with my thumb. I don’t need that cheap talk I’ve got my own problems. It was sad, exciting, and horrible. It was exciting, horrible, and sad. It was horrible, sad, and exciting. It was inviting, mad, and deplorable. It was adorable, glad, and enticing. Eventually we must smoke a thumb cheap talk I’ve got my own angel on the steps of the problems the bank said to me I don’t need that. I will take this one window with its sooty maps and scratches so that my dreams will remember one another and so that my eyes will not become blinded by the new world. II The flames don’t dance or slither. They have painted the room green. Beautiful and naked, the wives are sleeping before the fire. Now it is out. The men have returned to the shacks, slaved creatures from the forest floor across their white stationwagons. That just about does it, says the other, dumping her bucket over her head. Well, I guess we got everything, says one, feeling around in the mud, as if for a child. Now they remember they want that mud, who can’t remember what they got up for. They parcel it out: when they are drunk enough they go into town with a bucket of mud, saying we can slice it up into windmills like a bloated cow.

1. between the object and the floor the couch is a pedestal and a shawl and just woke up her hair. she never ever leaves the floating other house but through some stories they call. later that was her name the collaborator of things shine in the picture. hand flew off her early hair though held by flowers. later her name was grete. her hair feels angles by flowers that before her name was shori the penetrator in the history of no décor. the station agent intimate with tight spaces refuse to hit back or be carried. later her name was danielle goldman and his serene highness thierry henry. her head is cut off by a shadow of primary folded streets she harrass with enjoyment. later her name is piet. she come from cubie with the whole club economy in her hand. when she reclines her head is lifted by a turn, someone’s arm they left there. later her name was elouise. watch her move into the story she still move 2. and tear shit up. always a pleasure the banned deep brown of faces in the otherwise whack. the cruel disposed won’t stand still. apparatus tear shit up and always. you see they can’t get off when they get off. some stateless folks spurn the pleasure they are driven to be and strive against. man, hit me again.

this is just to say I saw the icebox and wheels rumbling through the figure 5 I saw the white chickens in the dark city glazed with rain I saw the figure 5 in the white chickens the plums that were in gold on a red wheel barrow the plums that you were probably saving among the rain water I have eaten the dark city so sweet the plums that were so sweet this is just to say I have eaten the figure 5 in the plums that so much depends that were in gold on a red firetruck

You are carrying me, full consciousness, god that has desires, all through the world. Here, in this third sea, I almost hear your voice: your voice, the wind, filling entirely all movements; eternal colors and eternal lights, sea colors and sea lights. Your voice full of white fire in the universe of water, the ship, the sky, marking out the roads with delight, engraving for me with a blazing light my firm orbit: a black body with the glowing diamond in its center.

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building. It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America. People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee, sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone, I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word, a motion the brain requires for which there is no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped, when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause when we could have been perfectly American, could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact and more convincing for its precision, an expression of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt. We've lived in the sky again for some years and today on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know— switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory of the world, and just as the idea of embrace moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.