Poemunity — your poem community

I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould. I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was. I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face in which all things were graven. I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.

for Larry Levis So it is here, then, after so long, and after all— as the light turns in the leaves in the old golden way of fall, as the small beasts dig to the place at the roots where survival waits, cowardly crouching in the dark, as the branches begin to stretch into winter, freed of their cheerful burden of green, then it comes home, the flea-ridden bitch of desolation, a thin dog with its ribs exposed like a lesson in mathematics, in subtraction; it comes home, to find its bowl empty—then the numberless things for which to be grateful dissolve like the steam from a fire just doused with water on a day of overcast grays, lined by a cold slanting rain— it is October, that season when Death goes public, costumed, when the talking heads on the TV screen float up smiling at the terrible news, their skin alight with the same strange glow fish give off when they have been dead a week or more, as the gas company adds odor for warning that the lines may be leaking, the sweet smell of disaster hanging, invisible, in the air, a moment before you strike the match— it is then, brother, that I think of you, of your Caravaggio, of the head of Goliath swung by its hair, wearing the artist’s own weary expression, exhausted of everything but its desire for that beautiful David he used to be; and I think of all the boys walking the streets each carrying the severed head of the man he will become—and the way I bear it is to think of you, grinning, riding high in the cart leaving the scene, a pair of huge horses hauling the wagon, a fine mist rising from their damp shoulders, unconcerned with what hangs, nailed to the museum walls—luckily the fall of Icarus has nothing to do with them, nor the ruined Goliath who fell like a forest, nor the wretched Salomes with their blood-splattered platters, nor the huge stone griffins sobbing at the gates to Valhalla as the litters are carried past ... the dark eyes of the horses are opaque with wisdom, their hoofs strike the pavements with such a musical decision, the derisive curl of their lips is so like the mysterious smile on the angel at Chartres, on Kuan Yin, on the dolphin, as they pull the cart safe through the blizzards of Main Street, the snow slowly swallowing the signs though the crossing light beckons— a soft glowing green like some spectral Eden in the blank white swirl of the storm. The stallion neighs once, sends a warm cloud of breath into the snow-filled air, and the mare isn’t scared yet—at least she’s still pulling. There’s a barn out there somewhere, as they plow through the light’s yellow aura of caution, its warm glow foretelling what hides in the storm: a stall full of gold, where the soul— that magician—can wallow and winter in straw.

Operation Phantom Fury. *       *       * The full force of the will to live is fixed on the next occasion: someone coming with a tray, someone calling a number. *       *       * Each material fact is a pose, an answer waiting to be chosen. "Just so," it says. "Ask again!"

Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60 -pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [ C 57 H 98 O 6 ], used as a plasticizer: 52 % . Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2 % . Nonylphenol [ C 15 H 24 O ]: 16.6 %. Formaldehyde [ CH 2 O ]: 4.8 %. Maleic anhydride [ C 4 H 2 O 3 ]: 2.6 % . Glycerol [ C 3 H 8 O 3 ]: 9.6 % . Traces of alkali catalyst: .2 %] : 47 %): 53.7 %. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7 %. Isophthalic acid [ C 8 H 6 O 4 ]: 9.5 %. Trimethylolpropane [ CH 3 CH 2 C(CH 2 OH) 3 ]: 4.7 % . Reaction product of tall oil rosin: 12.5 %. Maleic anhydride [ C 4 H 2 O 3 ]: 2.5 %. Pentaerythritol [ C 5 H 12 O 4 ]: 5 %. Aliphatic C 14 Hydrocarbon: 15 %): 19.4 %. Carbon Black (C: 92.8 %. Petroleum: 5.1 %. With sulfur, chlorine, and oxygen contaminates: 2.1 %) , used as a pigmenting agent: 18.6 %. Tung oil (Eleostearic acid [ C 18 H 30 O 2 ]: 81.9 %. Linoleic acid [ C 18 H 32 O 2 ]: 8.2 % . Palmitic acid [ C 16 H 32 O 2 ]: 5.9 % . Oleic acid [ CH 3 (CH 2 ) 7 CH=CH(CH 2 ) 7 COOH ]: 4.0 %. ), used as a reducer: 3.3 % . Micronized polyethylene wax ( C 2 H 4 )N: 2.8 %. 3 / 50 Manganese compound, used as a through drier: 1.3 % . 1 / 25 Cobalt linoleate compound used as a top drier: .7 % . Residues of blanket wash (roughly equal parts aliphatic hydrocarbon and aromatic hydrocarbon): .2 % . Adhered to: cellulose [ C 6 H 10 O 5 ] from softwood sulphite pulp (Pozone Process) of White Spruce ( 65 %) and Jack Pine ( 35 %): 77 %; hardwood pulp (enzyme process pre-bleach Kraft pulp) of White Poplar (aspen): 15 %; and batch treated PCW ( 8 %): 69.3 %. Water [ H 2 O ]: 11.0 % . Clay [Kaolinite form aluminum silicate hydroxide ( Al 2 Si 2 O 5 [OH] 4 ): 86 %. Calcium carbonate ( CaCO 3 ): 12 %. Diethylenetriamine: 2 %], used as a pigmenting filler: 8.4 %. Hydrogen peroxide [ H 2 O 2 ], used as a brightening agent: 3.6 %. Rosin soap, used as a sizer: 2.7 % . Aluminum sulfate [ Al 2 (SO 4 ) ]: 1.8 % . Residues of cationic softener ( H 2 O : 83.8 %. Base [Stearic acid ( C 18 H 36 O 2 ): 53.8 % . Palmitic acid ( C 16 H 32 O 2 ): 29 % . Aminoethylethanolamine ( H 2 -NC 2 -H 4 -NHC 2 -H 4 -OH ): 17.2 %]: 10.8 % . Sucroseoxyacetate: 4.9 % . Tallow Amine, used as a surfactant: 0.3 % . Sodium chloride [ NaCl ], used as a viscosity controlling agent: .2 %) and non-ionic emulsifying defoamer (sodium salt of dioctylsulphosuccinate [ C 20 H 37 NaO 7 S ]), combined: 1.7 % . Miscellaneous foreign contaminates: 1.5 % .

He can say it was a painting He can say we were the painting Or that the painting wasn’t painting And that we only happen to ourselves We can say we kept things running by distracting ourselves from the hideous truth of  how things run That we were broken That we lingered near a broken factory That we had broken We can say that the disappointment of slicing into a leek and not finding the requisite layers but a thick white inedible core is not the disappointment of approaching a sleeping animal only to learn that it is dead but it does nudge one slightly further into despair We said despair We meant the strings of impossible instruments that they made in the factory That we had seen That were broken That there were different paintings That could be played as songs We had seen other things That we had seen That had come unstrung and blown between adjacent bridges whose river had presented us a city That was broken That we had been That we were broken That was our city This was our city that was a song replaying itself in the dark

It takes just two people to bring the world to ruin. So goes the history of love. At the end of the day we tally the casualties of war, victory for the one who gets wounded the least. You say it’s time for a change but I don’t know to what end, change being just the skin of some incandescent creature whose grotesque beauty is what we adore, whom some people call love, whom we venerate because it consumes us, slim pickings for its huge soul. My people say, don’t look or you’ll go blind. You say the end was always just around the bend. I say all we have is unconditional surrender to the future. So unreliable is the past that I feel compelled to leave unmourned the blind, relentless loves that may have scorched into our hearts the way the saints accepted stigmata. My people say, look back or lose your way. Or, walk backwards, if you can. So I found myself on a bus to New York City to lose myself completely. Past Hunters Point we hit the factory of souls—a thousand tombstones from which a silk-like canopy of smoke rose to meet God knows what—a spacious emptiness, the end. I’ve heard the world’s never going to end. I’ve heard it will go on and on, and we will be as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar, our live not worth a footnote, our grandest schemes no more than feeble whispers, all memory shifting like the continental plates. In the future, all science will finally come around; genetic engineering, I’ve been told, will be all the rage, and we will be a super race in a world infallibly perfected, where trains run on time, love never dies, and hope can be purchased by the pound. It’s called immortalization of the cell lines. We will choose what will survive. Our destiny made lucid, we will find the world contemplating itself, like the young Narcissus, one hand about to touch the pool, his body lurched towards that marvelous reflection. I suppose we’ve always felt compelled to desensitize our failures. My people say, to go unnoticed, you play dead. I myself may have chosen to forget a face, a name, some cruel word uttered carelessly, but not, after all the harm is done, intending any pain. And many others may have chosen to forget me. It works both ways. My people say,nasa huli ang pagsisi: regret is the final emotion. It’s what you see when you look back. It’s what’s no longer there.

The factory stands on the train of your town’s wedding gown, dirtying it and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Embarrassed, the clouds rush to cover up the track marks of the stars. On your way home from the factory -run theater, it’s too dark to say hello to the pale-faced people plummeting past you and your son. Who knows what bright things they conceal in their black coats now that they’ve rationed the rations. Home before curfew, the iodine tablets fume in the bedtime glass of water your son requests. He sips it as if it were hot tea while you read to him yet again that ancient story you three loved. You stumble over the new language, but even it is becoming beautiful. You close the book, kiss his forehead, stand the flashlight upright by the fuming glass and stumble to your bed in the dark. Your son will wake in the night and turn on the flashlight so he can see the water that he will turn into urine that you will carry in an armful of sheets down to the river, that gray, dappled, broken thing running through the dying trees like an app -aloosa spooked by gunfire.

woven plaque basket with sunflower design, Hopi, Arizona, before 1935 from an American Indian basketry exhibit in Portsmouth, Virginia The Arizona highway sailed across the desert— a gray battleship drawing a black wake, halting at the foot of the orange mesa, unwilling to go around. Hopi men and women—brown, and small, and claylike —peered down from their tabletops at yellow tractors, water trucks, and white men blistered with sun—red as fire ants—towing sunscreen-slathered wives in glinting Airstream trailers in caravans behind them. Elders knew these bia roads were bad medicine—knew too that young men listen less and less, and these young Hopi men needed work, hence set aside their tools, blocks of cottonwood root and half-finished Koshari the clown katsinas, then signed on with the Department of Transportation, were hired to stab drills deep into the earth’s thick red flesh on First Mesa, drive giant sparking blades across the mesas’ faces, run the drill bits so deep they smoked, bearding all the Hopi men in white—Bad spirits, said the Elders— The blades caught fire, burned out—Ma’saw is angry, the Elders said. New blades were flown in by helicopter. While Elders dreamed their arms and legs had been cleaved off and their torsos were flung over the edge of a dinner table, the young Hopi men went back to work cutting the land into large chunks of rust. Nobody noticed at first—not the white workers, not the Indian workers—but in the mounds of dismantled mesa, among the clods and piles of sand, lay the small gray bowls of babies’ skulls. Not until they climbed to the bottom did they see the silvered bones glinting from the freshly sliced dirt-and-rock wall— a mausoleum mosaic, a sick tapestry: the tiny remains roused from death’s dusty cradle, cut in half, cracked, wrapped in time-tattered scraps of blankets. Let’s call it a day, the white foreman said. That night, all the Indian workers got sad-drunk—got sick —while Elders sank to their kivas in prayer. Next morning, as dawn festered on the horizon, state workers scaled the mesas, knocked at the doors of pueblos that had them, hollered into those without them, demanding the Hopi men come back to work—then begging them— then buying them whiskey—begging again—finally sending their white wives up the dangerous trail etched into the steep sides to buy baskets from Hopi wives and grandmothers as a sign of treaty. When that didn’t work, the state workers called the Indians lazy, sent their sunhat-wearing wives back up to buy more baskets— katsinas too—then called the Hopis good-for-nothings, before begging them back once more. We’ll try again in the morning, the foreman said. But the Indian workers never returned— The bia s and dot s calls to work went unanswered, as the fevered Hopis stayed huddled inside. The small bones half-buried in the crevices of mesa— in the once-holy darkness of silent earth and always-night— smiled or sighed beneath the moonlight, while white women in Airstream trailers wrote letters home praising their husbands’ patience, describing the lazy savages: such squalor in their stone and plaster homes—cobs of corn stacked floor to ceiling against crumbling walls—their devilish ceremonies and the barbaric way they buried their babies, oh, and those beautiful, beautiful baskets.

Hand me this hand The sail is bent The trail is sold and the wind tied in knots Answer the phone The tune is left The stones uncoil in a wide-angle lens A search for clues encounters bliss A lip on the edge of the flowering dark A shell falls with hail Hidden and hides The following sky The descending kiss.

A man reaches close and lifts a quarter from inside a girl’s ear, from her hands takes a dove she didn’t know was there. Which amazes more, you may wonder: the quarter’s serrated murmur against the thumb or the dove’s knuckled silence? That he found them, or that she never had, or that in Portugal, this same half-stopped moment, it’s almost dawn, and a woman in a wheelchair is singing a fado that puts every life in the room on one pan of a scale, itself on the other, and the copper bowls balance.