Poemunity — your poem community

Three mini ciabattini for breakfast where demand for persnickety bread is small, hence its expense, hence my steadfast recalculation of my overhead, which soars, and as you might expect the ciabattini stand in for my fantasy of myself in a sea-limned prospect, on a terrace, with a lemon tree... Not: Assessed a fee for rent sent a day late. Not: Fines accrued for a lost library book. Better never lose track of the date. Oversleep, and you’re on the hook. It’s the margin for error: shrinking. It’s life ground down to recurrence. It’s fewer books read for the thinking the hospital didn’t rebill the insurance; the school misplaced the kids’ paperwork. Here’s our sweet pup, a rescue which we nonetheless paid for, and look: he gets more grooming than I do. When I turn my hand mill, I think of the dowager who ground gems on ham for her guests; the queen who ground out two cups of flour on the pregnant abdomen of her husband’s mistress; I think of a “great rock-eating bird” grinding out a sandy beach, the foam said to be particulate matter of minute crustaceans, each brilliantly spooning up Aphrodite to Greek porticoes, and our potatoes, and plain living which might be shaken by infinitesimal tattoos.

If it had become a competition in which we, Like children desperate for the blue ribbon, Pulled knotted hemp, gripping until certain Of calluses, if our contest awarded the strongest, The boy who could best inflict pain yet not Flinch when injured, then you won, for I must Imagine the brown of your back to reach my Peak, a short thread of breaths, a tug of war With the heaviest child grunting at the end Of the rope until jerked and dragged over The line. That fat kid flounders through muck The way I splash your relentless name In shivers about me. Watch him wallow. If he tastes mud as bitter as this poem Of mine, then I win – and you love me.

my swing is more mellow these days: not the hardbop drive i used to roll but more of a cool foxtrot. my eyes still close when the rhythm locks; i’ve learned to boogie with my feet on the floor i’m still movin’, still groovin’ still fallin’ in love i bop to the bass line now. the trap set paradiddles ratamacues & flams that used to spin me in place still set me off, but i bop to the bass line now i enter the tune from the bottom up & let trumpet & sax wheel above me so don’t look for me in the treble don’t look for me in the fly staccato splatter of the hot young horn no, you’ll find me in the nuance hanging out in inflection & slur i’m the one executing the half-bent dip in the slow slowdrag with the smug little smile & the really cool shades

I have a sister who takes care of animals, whose artistry is flesh and blood mixed in with a dream or more she tries to give her son. He cuts school and drinks with his friends in the scrub woods behind the school. He thinks he wants to be an architect; he thinks the poems he writes are portions of his unmixed spirit. His habits of mind aren’t settled, ossifying so slowly for many of us, we can’t know, and no one can tell him anything about cigarettes, bad drugs, his fragile mortal spiral. He can’t cry anymore—it’s the wrong style of feeling—, and he only half knows that like his mother he will have to descend before he can break into nakedness, as if from the warmed surface of loam, from slug-soft matter that breathes or suppurates. My nephew Samuel has the same name as the son of the famous surgeon Dr. Gross, painted by the American realist Thomas Eakins. Samuel chugs gin, takes his tokes, and helps his mother with preps— a Betadine swabbing, “like a ritual,” out from the site of the incision. He confuses his mother. In this poem I want to try to stand at their shoulders in the clinic. I think I could come near to swooning from the obscene odor in the air, but I can try to imagine something beyond the surgery, the fur and the glistening blood, and I wouldn’t leave them. — The flight of gray gulls over the bay accompanied my early wrestling with flesh, “Blue Suede Shoes” playing on the radio in my parents’ house. The fluency, then, of hands and lips threw seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant fluency when I was thirty. Then I believed in the beauty of Helen and sometimes, as the fullest truth, in the colored clouds above apple trees full of blossoms and the reddened fruit afterwards. In the end, of course, the fruit turns to mash, and wasps burrow drunkenly in the meat no longer crisp. — There is a terrible beauty in the speeches of Nestor after Agamemnon has called out the spirit of his army by inviting them to go home. Imagine the sober tones of the generals and the old king, his face a lifelong gallery of portraits, grizzled hair an aura, as he faces them with his counsel. From his lips a kind of honey mixing with the bitterness of those two quarreling. He asks them for their mettle, earth born, and leans, foreshortened, his robe exposing a scarred and whitened chest. A vignette of what we cannot learn, or outlast. — One who loves earth and the sun and animals stands over the necrotic thigh of a wolfhound with scapel and rongeur, a patina of antiseptic reddening the bare skin around the wound. The odors are a mixture of rotted flowers and fruit and the beautiful blood oozing from an incision above a honeycomb of maggots, swollen, moving. If you can bear to stand close and look closely at the dissection, you will feel your own stomach turn and your nerves grow a little cleaner, and you may feel puzzled how a person would want to know that much anatomy. Wasn’t it like this for Michelangelo? This lesson of body? And the artist’s revulsion, someone trying to look beyond heroic contours of ruined flesh— softness of hip and buttocks—into the serum of spirit? To live while another no longer can live. This flesh and that muscle, and tinted spring forests, and mausoleums.

Say they still tie ropes to the caskets of immigrants they find in the desert. That a rope saves time should someone come looking.

My brother's funeral over, the dark-clothed congregation clots the church doors, a lingering aftermath moving into flat light—the sky low and swollen, a storm siren's long expansive notes, evenly measured, so loud the pauses between ring with aftersound. Used to it, no one here appears alarmed, the church ladies filing into his house bearing heavy covered dishes, the funeral flowers. On the muted television tuned to the weather, a small area of Watch now upgrades to Warning; the words stream across the bottom of the screen calling conditions perfect, this town, this house disappeared beneath the map's isolated lesion, its red edges uneven, stalled. The forecasters rely they say on spotters to confirm what the radar cannot—they call it ground truth; until then no one knows anything for certain beyond this inward watching. The room hums, an airless, crowded hive. Their mouths are full, plates layered—fried chicken, deviled eggs, casseroles, bright congealed salads with fruit suspended inside. All of it dust. I have come here too late, his body gone, already ash. The storm's body could be forming now, tightening from cloud to the gyre that will consume its path, all of it a becoming—spiraling a wall of water, mud, dust, and sand; with dispassion taking up into itself the fence line, a barn—the house beside them spared with the same dispassion. Or this, more likely now: siren silenced, the winds diminishing, the light, afternoon's concession to another dusk—severe, more common truth.

In June, amid the golden fields, I saw a groundhog lying dead. Dead lay he; my senses shook, And mind outshot our naked frailty. There lowly in the vigorous summer His form began its senseless change, And made my senses waver dim Seeing nature ferocious in him. Inspecting close his maggots’ might And seething cauldron of his being, Half with loathing, half with a strange love, I poked him with an angry stick. The fever arose, became a flame And Vigour circumscribed the skies, Immense energy in the sun, And through my frame a sunless trembling. My stick had done nor good nor harm. Then stood I silent in the day Watching the object, as before; And kept my reverence for knowledge Trying for control, to be still, To quell the passion of the blood; Until I had bent down on my knees Praying for joy in the sight of decay. And so I left; and I returned In Autumn strict of eye, to see The sap gone out of the groundhog, But the bony sodden hulk remained. But the year had lost its meaning, And in intellectual chains I lost both love and loathing, Mured up in the wall of wisdom. Another summer took the fields again Massive and burning, full of life, But when I chanced upon the spot There was only a little hair left, And bones bleaching in the sunlight Beautiful as architecture; I watched them like a geometer, And cut a walking stick from a birch. It has been three years, now. There is no sign of the groundhog. I stood there in the whirling summer, My hand capped a withered heart, And thought of China and of Greece, Of Alexander in his tent; Of Montaigne in his tower, Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

The monsters that come at night don't breathe fire, have two heads or long claws. The monsters that come at night don't come bloody and half-dead and calling your name. They come looking like regular boys going through your drawers and pockets saying You better not tell Counselor else I'll beat you down. The monsters that come at night snatch the covers off your bed, take your pillow and in the morning steal your bacon when the cook's back is turned call themselves The Throwaway Boys, say You one of us now. When the relatives stop coming When you don't know where your sister is anymore When every sign around you says Group Home Rules: Don't do this and don't do that until it sinks in one rainy Saturday afternoon while you're sitting at the Group Home window reading a beat-up Group Home book, wearing a Group Home hand-me-down shirt hearing all the Group Home loudness, that you are a Throwaway Boy. And the news just sits in your stomach hard and heavy as Group Home food.

This water flows dark red from alder tannin: boot-stain river between white rocks. An ouzel, flannel-feathered, sips the current up. Mossgatherers spread their patches across a dry, flat turnaround. They seem embarrassed, want to shelter in the dark. A coyote running in broad day; stumps ruffling with sulphur polypores woodsy to the tongue, woody to teeth. Early yellow leaves paste river to its bed; blackberries drop, the last, many out of taste and strictly smudge. Puddles loop in the road: Bottomland— the foolhen waits there for the fool gun, gray throat-down free in a burst, the pose, the afterslump. Carcass beside spirit. O come to my hand, unkillable; whatever continues, continue to approach.

Growing a bear — a midnight occupation, the need for which you perhaps first realized when you saw the wrong kind of shadow under your chin — a convex when you expected concave, so now it’s clear you’re getting older. Your wife was in the shower and you wanted to step inside and soap her up like you did in college when she said “I’ll shower with you, but I’m leaving my underwear on,” and you enjoyed her in every way you could enjoy a person with soap. You didn’t join your wife in the shower. She’s gotten funny about letting you see her shave her legs or wash herself anywhere. You think she read it somewhere — that letting your husband see you pluck anything, trim anything, apply medicine to anything, will make him feel like he’s furniture. It’s exactly on cold nights like these that the basement is not as forbidding as it should be, despite the fact that you have to put gloves on in what is part of  your own home. Downstairs, a large bathtub, kept, for some reason, after remodeling. It is there that your bear will be grown, by you, though you have no idea how. Probably wishing is most of it; fertilizer, chunks of raw stew meat, handfuls of  blackberries, two metal rakes, and a thick rug make up the rest. Then water. You get an e-mail from a friend late at night saying he can’t sleep. You write back “I hope you feel sleepy soon” and think how childish the word “sleepy” is. And you’re a man, older than most of  the people you see on television. You haven’t even considered how your wife will feel when you have finished growing your bear. You could write a letter to her tonight, explaining how your life was just so lacking in bear: “Janet, it’s nothing you’ve done — clearly you have no possible way of supplying me with a bear or any of the activities I might be able to enjoy after acquiring the bear.” It might just be best to keep the two worlds separate. Janet clearly prefers things to be comfortable and unchallenging. Janet soaps herself up. Janet puts herself to bed, and you just happen to be next to her. You go on your weekly bike ride with Mark and tell him that you’ve been growing a bear. An eighteen-wheeler flies by and he doesn’t seem to hear you — plus he’s focused on the hill. You think about how not all friends know what each other sounds like when struggling and breathing heavy. Past the age of college athletics, most friends don’t even know what each others’ bodies look like, flushed, tired, showering, cold.