Poemunity — your poem community

Not magnitude, not lavishness, But Form—the Site; Not innovating wilfulness, But reverence for the Archetype.

Stivenson Magloire Amidst the glossy dark green foliage of trees around the hotel pool, I spy a low-hanging golden fruit. So many trees whose names I do not know and for the first time do not care to learn. The overwhelming now in its countless inflections cancels vocabulary: eyes lips skin instead of words. Still in the pool, floating on my back as the sun gets low, I look at the mango, if that is what it is (I think it is some wholly other fruit), and suddenly smell garlic sautéed in butter. Chefs in the kitchen under the trees are getting the hors d’oeuvres ready. Yesterday in a dim, airless gallery, following your lead, I hunted down an iconography written in a grisly alphabet yet full of life, the haunting gaze direct, transcending death. Death had in winning lost. Art trumped death and life trumped art. Last night (our third together — sleep a whole new texture in a bed with you) I gave you space and found myself at the border of a far province in the king-sized bed, a dimly lit hinterland where paintings ruled, a region wholly devoted to the work of the same painter, mysteriously killed, stoned to death (“lapidated” was one word), assassinated — why? A mystery to be solved by iconography? Death had won but also death had lost. Garlic and butter. Glossy dark green leaves. Voices across the pool. A hanging fruit. An azure splash. And as the sun goes down, you sit by the window in our room, drawing pictures of this this this time. What to call it? Colors in your hands trump words. Like the fruit, like the solution to the mystery, something I am at a loss to name.

The way my grandmother put back the green bananas, unwilling to make an investment in her future, is how I’m feeling, watching my grown children watching CNN, sitting side by side on the sofa—no teasing, no tattling— just image upon image of Armageddon: starvation, explosions, long lines at the gas pump, and even the Rabbi abandoning town. Biological, my son says. And my daughter answers no, nuclear. I’m too embarrassed just now to admit how happy I am to have them home again, even though they’re only visitors, no longer “at home.”I built my house too close to the water, my grandmother used to say whenever I went away. She meant she was easily moved to tears, and it took my own mother years to teach me the impossibility of protecting the weak from the strong.Enough crying, she’d say, clicking her tongue like she was contesting the intricate but historical patterns of sudden death. Y ou don’t die so easily. You have to suffer first. She meant, I now know, to comfort me, to protect me from her brother’s tank blown upside down in Germany, the long lines at the gas pumps, the clergy blissfully following their prayers back home. O but then she’d kiss whatever ailed me, while my sister railed against injustice, her theme song exploding above the cushion separating her rights from all I’m still doing wrong. How can we expect world peace, my father would have said, —if he wasn’t at that very moment watching I Love Lucy’s slide across the world’s stage on an overripe banana— when under one roof my own two children can’t get along. As for me, just now I’m setting the table and filling the fruit bowl, whistling like Ricky Ricardo, unaware of his wife’s grand schemes, the well intentioned but certain and coming disaster.Please stay, Grandma, I say, holding her tightly in the aisle, unashamed of my tears. But of course, she died that very day, falling into honeydews, the melons, like hand grenades, rolling every which way.

Green groweth the holly, So doth the ivy. Though winter blasts blow never so high, Green groweth the holly. As the holly groweth green And never changeth hue, So I am, ever hath been, Unto my lady true. As the holly groweth green With ivy all alone When flowers cannot be seen And greenwood leaves be gone, Now unto my lady Promise to her I make, From all other only To her I me betake. Adieu, mine own lady, Adieu, my special Who hath my heart truly Be sure, and ever shall.

To be a disco ball dangling in a storefront window, in the sun, with a cage on
 it. To be two and three disco balls, downtown McAllen, spangles of sun and
 water that grew tangerine skins late February, pink bottlebrush nostrils, buff-bellied hummingbirds. To be mirrors and hexagonal combs, mexican honey
 wasps, larvae, paper, wax. To make geometry without vocabulary, to be live 
music—take off your jacket, girl, wear your tank top . . . it's ninety degrees! To be a green light go, downtown Corpus, after cars and trucks zooming on beach
 sand, before hot tubs. To be an orange sun driving from Anzaldúa's grave, to
 be a cactus bloom fuchsia, opuntia, Laguna Atascosa, Laguna Madre, to be a
 watering hole, a mud chimney air vent for crawdad water tunnels. To be a silver lizard run over by tires, a swatch of river on asphalt, to be a bolt loosened from 
the border wall, to be a peso falling out of the border crossing's revolving slot, 
to be a coke-bottle dove, a mexican coca-cola, a cooing quorum of lotería cards
 signing a resolution. To be a goose perched on top of an abandoned sink in a yard, in a town that fords the river, to be the woman stretched on her beloved's grave, returned after decades. To be a kid in juvie, to be her guardian, the judge, 
the p.o., to be the letters she writes, the words that matter more than food, almost as much as music and more than makeup, nearly suns seen through the mandatory skylight, imagined by the control room monitor. To be el chalán, the last hand-drawn ferry on the river, its ropes pulled by pilots, to be a passenger
 almost on the other side.

Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed Their snow-white blossoms on my head, With brightest sunshine round me spread Of spring's unclouded weather, In this sequestered nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard-seat! And birds and flowers once more to greet, My last year's friends together. One have I marked, the happiest guest In all this covert of the blest: Hail to Thee, far above the rest In joy of voice and pinion! Thou, Linnet! in thy green array, Presiding Spirit here to-day, Dost lead the revels of the May; And this is thy dominion. While birds, and butterflies, and flowers, Make all one band of paramours, Thou, ranging up and down the bowers, Art sole in thy employment: A Life, a Presence like the Air, Scattering thy gladness without care, Too blest with any one to pair; Thyself thy own enjoyment. Amid yon tuft of hazel trees, That twinkle to the gusty breeze, Behold him perched in ecstasies, Yet seeming still to hover; There! where the flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings, That cover him all over. My dazzled sight he oft deceives, A brother of the dancing leaves; Then flits, and from the cottage-eaves Pours forth his song in gushes; As if by that exulting strain He mocked and treated with disdain The voiceless Form he chose to feign, While fluttering in the bushes.

rumdumb from last night’s shrubbery tryst exhales soot, fernseed, shoots and vines, brings his hot breath from the city park’s wood, saying a song we don’t understand through the briar and bay leaves of his beard. And in Philadelphia, 1954, out of late autumn’s darkening he came, a junkman lugging a Penn Fruit cart, straw bristling his face, crying a name. Or from manholes in other cities, his holographic ectoplasm greets us when traffic lights turn green. Uncover and there he is, membranous Caliban alone with sewer rats, or stumblebum Puck, unnameable solids crusting nails and toes, bringing us his dark. Or our neighborhood’s soused John-John, cobra down-at-heel boots skidding at my feet among the maddening jasmine, when I grab too late to save him growls: “I can save you darling pigs. Behold, behold, and maybe I’ll help.”

On a hill overlooking the Rock River my father’s pear tree shimmers, in perfect peace, covered with hundreds of ripe pears with pert tops, plump bottoms, and long curved leaves. Until the green-haloed tree rose up and sang hello, I had forgotten. . . He planted it twelve years ago, when he was seventy-three, so that in September he could stroll down with the sound of the crickets rising and falling around him, and stand, naked to the waist, slightly bent, sucking juice from a ripe pear.

As you told it to me — our clearest, most reflective conversations so often then and there, in the middle of the night, staring into the darkness from wherever the mind has perched in its wanderings — you left your mother and the home aide upstairs, and went down into your father’s basement workroom to look for the right size screws; in her own wanderings, she has tugged off the front door lock. Paneled in warped wood and abandoned like a mine, you find the string for the light in the middle of the room, as he must have known how to find it in the dark, and again you see the pegboard walls covered with constellations of polishing tools, the larger buffers hooked onto the paneling like fuzzy planets, the smaller ones stuck in a Lucite block he customized to hold them like the varied moons those hanging planets might need, or a miniature copse of fantastical trees. So, too, the see-through brick in which he drilled holes for the array of drill bits themselves, their swirled metal tops imitating a skyline of onion domes and tapered gothic towers. The room’s order had been disturbed by time, and the band saw, jigsaw, the sander, and free-standing machines, the sized wrenches, pliers, picks, awls, and extra parts still hanging in their packages, the staple gun, lamps, brushes, gooseneck magnifying glass, soldering wire, conversion charts, the hundreds of other disordered tools, they might have been words in an encyclopedia before you could read more than a few words, and for you they were part of your father’s speech, or maybe more like your mother’s now, jumbled, rarely creating a sentence. With these tools he had sculpted a perfect cluster of grapes, still on their vine and still with their leaves; a wave, and a school of dolphins breaching; a formal replica of the Brooklyn Bridge with all its cabling; a bouquet of flowers — surfaces so smooth and rounded, objects so like their living counterparts we had no choice but to understand the power of creation running through the mind then tools and hands like a current. You looked around for the right size screws and came upon a small box marked Green Permanent. And when you opened it you saw small tubes of paint, now just mud without his attention, you said, holding both the power of what we do, and the sadness that it has to end.

Green first thing each day sees waves— the chair, armoire, overhead fixtures, you name it, waves—which, you might say, things really are, but Green just lies there awhile breathing long slow breaths, in and out, through his mouth like he was maybe seasick, until in an hour or so the waves simmer down and then the trails and colors off of things, that all quiets down as well and Green starts to think of washing up, breakfast even with everything still moving around, colors, trails, and sounds, from the street and plumbing next door, vibrating—of course you might say that's what sound really is, after all, vibrations—but Green, he's not thinking physics at this stage, nuh-uh, our boy's only trying to get himself out of bed, get a grip, but sometimes, and this is the kicker, another party, shall we say, is in the room with Green, and Green knows this other party and they do not get along, which understates it quite a bit, quite a bit, and Green knows that this other cat is an hallucination, right, but these two have a routine that goes way back and Green starts hollering, throwing stuff until he's all shook up, whole day gone to hell, bummer . . . Anyhow, the docs are having a look, see if they can't dream up a cocktail, but seems our boy ate quite a pile of acid one time, clinical, wow, enough juice for half a block— go go go, little Greenie—blew the wiring out from behind his headlights and now, no matter what, can't find the knob to turn off the show.