Poemunity — your poem community

Cylinder sacks of water filling the oceans, endless bullets of water, skins full of water rolling and tumbling as we came together. As though light broke us apart. As though light came with the rubble of words, though we die among the husks of remembering. It is as we knew it would be in the echoes of endless terminals, in the slow scaled guises of ourselves when we came together in the envelopes of ourselves, the bare shadow, the breath of words invisible; as slight errors repeating themselves; as degradation passes like madness through a crowd. It was not ordained. It was one drop of salt water against another.

He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still. He is affection and the future, strength and love that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky and on banners of ecstasy. He is love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. We have all experienced the terror of his yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him, he who loves us for his infinite life And we remember him and he travels. . . And if the Adoration goes away, resounds, its promise resounds: “Away with those superstitions, those old bodies, those couples and those ages. It’s this age that has sunk!” He won’t go away, nor descend from a heaven again, he won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and of all that sin: for it is now accomplished, with him being, and being loved. O his breaths, his heads, his racing; the terrible swiftness of the perfection of forms and of action. O fecundity of the spirit and immensity of the universe! His body! The dreamed-of release, the shattering of grace crossed with new violence! The sight, the sight of him! all the ancient kneeling and suffering lifted in his wake. His day! the abolition of all resonant and surging suffering in more intense music. His footstep! migrations more vast than ancient invasions. O him and us! pride more benevolent than wasted charities. O world! and the clear song of new misfortunes! He has known us all and loved us all. Let us, on this winter night, from cape to cape, from the tumultuous pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from glance to glance, our strengths and feelings numb, learn to hail him and see him, and send him back, and under the tides and at the summit of snowy deserts, follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.

Surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting, nipping at itself, snarling inwardly at strangers. If I had a car in this town I'd rig it up with a rear bumper horn, something to blast back at the jackasses who honk the second the light turns green. If you could gather up all the hornhonks of just one day in New York City, tie them together in a big brassy knot high above the city and honk them all at once it would shiver the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if they were made of sand, and usher in the Second Coming. Christ would descend from the sky wincing with his fingers in his ears and judge us all insane. Who'd want people like us up there yelling at each other, trashing the cloudy, angelic streets with our candywrappers and newspapers and coffeecups? Besides, we'd still be waiting for the next thing to happen in Heaven, the next violin concerto or cotton candy festival or breathtaking vista to open beneath our feet, and thinking this place isn't quite what it's cracked up to be, and why in hell does everybody want to get here? We'd still be waiting for someone else to come and make us happy, staring through whatever's in front of us, cursing the light that never seems to change.

After Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s “Self Stones Country” photographs Know what the almost-gone dandelion knows. Piece by piece The body prayers home. Its whole head a veil, a wind-blown bride. When all the mothers gone, frame the portraits. Wood spoon over Boiling pot, test the milk on your own wrist. You soil, sand, and mud grown bride. If you miss your stop. Or lose love. If even the medicine hurts too. Even when your side-eye, your face stank, still, your heart moans bride. Fuck the fog back off the mirror. Trust the road in your name. Ride Your moon hide through the pitch black. Gotsta be your own bride. Burn the honey. Write the letters. What address could hold you? Nectar arms, nectar hands. Old tire sound against the gravel. Baritone bride. Goodest grief is an orchard you know. But you have not been killed Once. Angel, put that on everything. Self. Country. Stone. Bride.

—“mu” sixty-first part— Gray morning, blue morning, a feather blown between. Mashed earth incumbent, gone up from, never more naked if ever to be naked, brink what it was to be on... Where next we came stick-figure people greeted us. Abstract was abstract, also something else. Line, shape, extension each other than itself, of number we’d have said the same... Aspect arrested us, riveted we stood... Stick- figure epiphany held us in our tracks, everyone’s bones in full view... Gray morning, blue morning, an unheard string between. Bad heads’ morning reluctance, ennui’s next-day dispatch... We were chill, shiver, exegetic sweat, backed- up interpreters put upon by sluff, none of us could say what was what. Pale admonishment poised upon lack, like to unlike, pale strain recumbent, re- combinant, rude amniotic straw... Took leave, leave long since taken, awoke to what would otherwise not have been. We contested birth, we wanted to be pre- andoumboulouous, done-dead gnostics again... Sound bubbled up, it kept bubbling, sonic residue, sonic remit. A fickle sonance, fraught sonance, warning we knew nothing, stick-figure entourage otherwise issue- less, beginning to be remiss it seemed... Erst- while ecstatics’ lapsed enchantment, trance gone none could say since when... Ghost of what lifted us, ghost what lifted us, erstwhile enchantment between... Fell back, full-out extended. Pilgrim someone called me, I said no, then I said yes... Brax was on the box was what it was, toned uncertainty Stick-figure counsel all air, edge, angle, down from where we’d been and we were again where the Alone lived, adage, had it not been so abstract, it might’ve been... Long day of the abalone-shell sunset... Stood among redwoods expecting the worst... What was of note and what abjured nothing. What was all, none, one, all the same _________________ It was a ghost of a trance. I was a guest of the trance. What went on we blamed on the ghost... It was the ghost of a trance, each of us a guest of the trance. No two times were the same... When we hit a wrong not we said nothing. When we hit the right note we said so what... Tell my horse, we were told, fluke solace, horse we were mounted by... What was done was done by the ghost, gray morning, blue morning, eternity be- tween _________________ Told my horse we would gather at Nod House, down drinks at the no-host bar. Dirt was in the drinks we drank, planet sludge. Double-take told its horse whoa, told it unwhoa, back and forth and back without end... Talk spun our heads, told our horses ride on. Unresolved which to insist on, stick with. Could it whoa unwhoa's ramble unresolved... Spinning heads made us feel we sat on swivel seats... Double-take talked us in, took us in _________________ Sat again at the same table, no two times the same, twinship long since gone. Leaned back, the back legs of our chairs broke, Nod House Nub's new address... A straining look made our faces look raw, made our skin flush... Dreamt each other's dream, donned each other's costume, hosted one another, one stepped in as one stepped out

This prisoner and other “ghost detainees” were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment and conditions, officials said. —“Rumsfeld Ordered Iraqi Suspect Held as ‘Ghost’ Prisoner,” San Francisco Chronicle , June 17, 2004 The ghost prisoner, a murderer, wishes he was invisible, sheer air, already dead. His narrow bed washes him away to dream escape through holy gaps that open in the grin of his small son. Lost teeth offer him a freedom so absurd he wakes and laughs. No one hears the ghost prisoner. Whether he groans or bears stoically what instruments we’ve paid to play this march toward a freedom so absurd we wake and silently shake our heads. We do not speak ill of the dead. The ghost prisoner, still murderer, wishes he was visible, fiery air, rallying the dead. His narrow cell just the place for prayer. Holy, holy, a ghost’s revenge pushed through gaps in his own gashed mouth, a curse so absurd, he wakes to its howl. No one says his name, his crimes, how many jolts it took to resurrect him as a betrayer of insurrection, paying for freedom’s ring. We do not want to know what it took. We’d rather not speak the dead ill. We do not want to know what it took to make him wish he were dead still.

i We lived on a lake with Muscovy ducks. Interior decorators flush with furniture plans, the ducks thrust with the thrust of youth. ii We met at the gay community center, called Compass, in Lake Worth, where they sponsored “The Coming Out Group,” with Forest, our skilled leader. Transsexuals met before. You were fifty, I thirty-nine— somewhat late to begin a life together for the first time; we had begun to see announcements in the New York Times, so we knew it was possible to print: “Paul O’Shaughnessy and Spencer Reece were joined on a celery green love-seat . . .” Five years we had, not forever, but something still. iii Our consent took a long time. There were lulls. We played Scrabble: I arranged the tiles and you kept score. Sometimes we rolled the dice and read the I Ching. We went about our days unseen and we loved that. I placed too many books against the walls— Capote,Madame Bovary, a biography of Anne Boleyn. You complained about the clutter. “Where will guests put their suitcases?” you asked. Sometimes, we squabbled about money. Often, you stretched out upon the double bed, your skin no longer young, pebbled, freckled, known by me. iv The city was jammed under your nails from construction work, callused hands that knew bar-joists. Yours was an Irish body formed and punished by the tin-colored rains around Croagh Patrick. Beyond you, manatees, scarred by propellers, huddled in the power plant’s warm waters. Palm fronds and their shadows shook wildly as pornography. v On the edges of our dreams was the sea, which the moon walked across with soft footsteps. vi Our dog, a Lab-mix named Butch, chewed a bone at your bare feet. Butch moved like a shadow on the sea’s floor. Big and black, he came to us abused— who does such a thing and why is it permanent? We fed him a daily Xanax tablet before he pulled us on his manic journeys that had no arrivals. vii When we visited your Aunt Annie in the nursing home, her walker dominated the room like an empty kennel. She did not know who I was, her senility rendering me oblique. Long ago, when your mother died, your father sent a letter and a photograph of the four children to Killeen, asking Aunt Annie to come. As she strove across the sea, she watched the Connemara ponies disappear, then Knock, Letterfrack, Roundstone, and Cashel Bay blurred, blurred and blurred until they were nothing but green. She left Ireland for good and raised you and your three sisters—Joan, Ann, and Maureen. In America, she went about her days unseen. On her day off, she lit four candles for each one of you at the Shrine of St. Anthony on Arch Street, in Boston. She never married. She adored you. When we visited, she kept saying: “Paul, Paul, I have to get the cows across the stream.” viii We overlooked Pelican Lake in Juno Beach where caregivers and patients from the Alzheimer’s Support Group awkwardly commenced their semi-detached dates, eating potato chips off paper plates and feeding their broken bits to the ducks. Eyes vacantly connected in Florida, where born-agains with failed marriages sent pamphlets to Jews so they could be saved by Christ: to conquer and subdue was what Florida was for. There, we napped while the ducks strutted and preened with greasy black-green plumes and speckled red pates; it looked like they had mashed crayons on their heads— a sort of evolutionary mishap. Developers demanding more room, the ducks were sated, companioned, unbundling with poop. ix A retired couple volunteered, instructing residents in the tango— the lady had white stained tights, the man a tambourine. The tango emoted from a boom box as the residents gathered in a crescent moon of wheelchairs. Aunt Annie watched and talked about her cows, the stream. We stood behind her like groomsmen. Out the windows, Boston pontificated. x You were distracted, distracted until one day you said, “I do not desire you.” You had always been honest. You wanted a younger man, between twenty and twenty-five. The day blued around us— our book of changes came to a close. Your Christ-kiss issued no more. You were what you had always been, only more so— Irish and unavailable, darling. xi The horizon became a handsaw. When I could not reach what I loved the world was rent. xii A friend had a stillborn, and her marriage ended. She did not name the infant. I had coffee with her at the Greek restaurant we liked. She talked about going back to teach at Dreyfoos, the arts high school, and one student, in particular, an effeminate male with acne who dreamt of Juilliard, a way out. Florida luxuriated out the window— the fire bush, the cornflower blue plumbago, the Mexican petunia. I sold my library, my piano. I boarded a train. Seagulls diminished, gray specks, gray motes. The therapist in Fort Lauderdale made no more appointments for us. The migrant day laborers out in Pahokee and Canal Point on Lake Okeechobee gleaned and went about their days unseen. The orange groves’ fragile hemispheres wobbled on their stems. Sugar cane fields burned. Electrical poles gleamed. Buck hoists and bucket trucks broke through the possum’s sedge. The Everglades sighed its nervous extinction. xiii Aunt Annie had lost her index finger in Coventry, during the Blitz. Repeatedly, she rubbed the stump. xiv Perhaps you walk now there with your young men, meaty St. Augustine grass under your feet, moving discreetly, undetected, perhaps you speak of dissatisfactions, of politics. The Atlantic narrowing to a flushed, sanguine strip, the fishing boats alone in the dark, murmuring, hooking, perhaps the young men love you at first sight and plead with you to stay. I95 and a1a pulsing down Palm Beach County’s spits like blood, perhaps your face tightens tenderly in response to what you see.

No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no Buttering. No making small contusions on the page But saying nothing no one has not said before. No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs. No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish. Extinguish me from this. I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia, Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky.    No Dove. There is no thou to speak of.

The girl grew and grew, her mother couldn’t stop it; it terrorized. What would the finger-dance do? Kindergarten art a buffet of 
markers, gluings of stuffs to seasonally-keyed paper, Elmer’s pools drying clear. A stapling and testing of cylinders versus spheres versus cubes for kinetic and entropic possibilities, stuffing balled newspaper into paper-bag dragons, two sweet silver elephants with heads too small and trunks too long, situated off-center, snuffling flowers. And silver rain. And 16 silver hearts stacked vertically and strips of masking tape, colored in reverse rainbow. Unnamable tendrils diffusing to scribbles. A bird. Another bird, more rain, peace signs, a horse with sideways-flowing mane, and knowledge: that the sky’s full of black-struck M s and W s, drifting clouds; that her kitty cats watch sunsets; sky doesn’t reach down to meet the earth; mother shrinks to the size of a penis.

A brenda is missing—where is she? Summon the seeds & weeds, the desert whooshes. Phone the finch with the crowded beak;   a little pretenda is learning to read in the afternoon near the cactus caves. Near oleander & pulpy caves with the click-click of the wren & the shkrrrr of the thrasher, a skinny pretenda is learning to read till the missing brenda is found. Drip of syllables like olives near the saguaro. Nancy Drew will find the secret in raincoats & wednesdays & sticks. Nancy whose spine is yellow or blue will find the brenda in 1962, Nancy                   who has no mother, who takes suggestions from her father & ignores them. Gleam goes the wren ignoring the thorn. They cannot tell the difference. Click of the smart dog’s nails on linoleum. Nancy bends over the clues, of brenda’s locket & dress. Word by word between syllables a clue. Where has the summer gone, the autumn— are they missing too? Maybe Nancy will parse the secret & read the book report on Nancy Drew: “neat pretty sly cute.” Syllable by syllable & still no brenda!   Nancy puts her hand to her forehead; is the missing girl in the iron bird? is the clue to the girl in the locket?