Poemunity — your poem community

Cigarettes in my mouth to puncture blisters in my brain. My bass a fine piece of furniture. My fingers soft, too soft to rattle rafters in second-rate halls. The harmonies I could never learn stick in Ayler's screams. An African chant chokes us. My image shot. If you look off over the Hudson, the dark cooperatives spit at the dinghies floating up the night. A young boy pisses on lovers rolling against each other under a trackless el. This could have been my town, with light strings that could stand a tempo. Now, it's the end of an ethnic dream. I've grown intellectual, go on accumulating furniture and books, damning literature, writing “for myself,” calculating the possibilities that someone will love me, or sleep with me. Eighteen-year-old girls come back from the Southern leers and make me cry. Here, there are coffee shops, bars, natural tonsorial parlors, plays, streets, pamphlets, days, sun, heat, love, anger, politics, days, and sun. Here, we shoot off every day to new horizons, coffee shops, bars, natural tonsorial parlors, plays, streets, pamphlets, days, sun, heat, love, anger, politics, days, and sun. It is the end of an ethnic dream. My bass a fine piece of furniture. My brain blistered.

To think I used to be so good at going to pieces gobbling my way through the cops and spooking what’s left of the girls. How’d I get so far, sloughing off one knuckle at a time, jerking my mossy pelt along ruined streets? Those insistent, dreadful thuds when we stacked our futile selves against locked doors. Our mumbles and groans! Such hungry nights! Staggering through the grit of looted malls, plastered with tattered flags of useless currency, I’d slobbered all over the busted glass and merchandise of America ... But first you’ll have to figure out those qualities separating what’s being alive from who’s already dead. Most of you will flunk that. Next learn how to want one thing over and over, night after night. Most of you are good at that. Don’t get tired. Don’t cough into your leftovers. Don’t think. Always stand by your hobgoblin buddies. Clutch at whatever’s there. Learn to sniff out sundowns.

As the dead, so I come to the city I am of. Am without. To watch play out around me as theater — audience as the dead are audience to the life that is not mine. Is as not as never. Turning down Shiraz’s streets it turns out to be such a faraway thing. A without which I have learned to be. From bed, I hear a man in the alley selling something, no longer by mule and holler but by bullhorn and jalopy. How to say what he is selling — it is no thing this language thought worth naming. No thing I have used before. It is his life I don’t see daily. Not theater. Not play. Though I remain only audience. It is a thing he must sell daily and every day he peddles this thing: a without which I cannot name. Without which is my life.

There's a certain sadness to this body of water adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds, handful of ducks, the water color manmade. A still life. And still life's a cold exercise in looking back, back to Florida, craning my neck like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin. As for the scrub oaks, the hot wind in the leaves was language, Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic— an obsession: I wanted to live in it. (One professor in exile did, covered himself in the stuff as a joke— then spent a week removing mites.) That's enough. The fields of rushes lay filled with water, and I said farewell, my high ship an old, red Volvo DL, gone to another coast, another peninsula, one without sleep or amphibious music. Tonight, in flight from San Francisco— because everything is truer at a remove— I watch the man I love watch the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento, lit city of legislation and flat land. I think of Florida, how flat. I think of forgetting Florida. And then the landscape grows black.

At five, the market is closing. Burdock roots, parsley, and rutabagas are poured back into the trucks. The antique dealer breaks down his tables. Light dappled, in winter parkas shoppers hunt for bargains: a teapot, or costume jewelry, a grab bag of rubbishy vegetables for stew. Now twilight, the farmer’s wife bundled in her tweed coat and pocket apron counts out her cash from a metal box, and nods to her grown-up son back from a tour in Iraq, as he waits in the station wagon with the country music turned way up, his prosthetic leg gunning the engine.

Night was and they swayed into it: a pair of scissors, of sails turning only into themselves more other than become. It is often five o’clock. Her husband has contracted not to speak of her and she has forgotten where to go. Where does everyone go?

This is not fantasy, this is our life. We are the characters who have invaded the moon, who cannot stop their computers. We are the gods who can unmake the world in seven days. Both hands are stopped at noon. We are beginning to live forever, in lightweight, aluminum bodies with numbers stamped on our backs. We dial our words like Muzak. We hear each other through water. The genre is dead. Invent something new. Invent a man and a woman naked in a garden, invent a child that will save the world, a man who carries his father out of a burning city. Invent a spool of thread that leads a hero to safety, invent an island on which he abandons the woman who saved his life with no loss of sleep over his betrayal. Invent us as we were before our bodies glittered and we stopped bleeding: invent a shepherd who kills a giant, a girl who grows into a tree, a woman who refuses to turn her back on the past and is changed to salt, a boy who steals his brother’s birthright and becomes the head of a nation. Invent real tears, hard love, slow-spoken, ancient words, difficult as a child’s first steps across a room.

It ends because the beginning won’t jumpstart again: red smudge of a mouth, lipstick everywhere the afterthought a comet leaves on its way out. What makes this moment unfold like a fine woman raising herself up from the bathroom floor? Honky-tonk in the honeyed brown of an eyeball? Perfume & its circus of heart-shaped introductions? It ends because the needle always winds up in the lead-out, like a man pawing around for broken spectacles after he wakes in the world’s rubble. Hand over hand he paws, through stilted guitar picks & abandoned stilettos, raised skirts & rocks, glasses as chipped & smudged as the topography of a skipping record. He could be Albright himself, foraging the still-life swish of low-rise tutus & skyscrapers cracked in the twisted aftermath of a smile. Even without glasses, he remembers her in high style: magnanimously coming down the blue & violet threads of night, her green dress clashing with the bathroom tile.

An agitation of the air, A perturbation of the light Admonished me the unloved year Would turn on its hinge that night. I stood in the disenchanted field Amid the stubble and the stones, Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me The song of my marrow-bones. Blue poured into summer blue, A hawk broke from his cloudless tower, The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew That part of my life was over. Already the iron door of the north Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows Order their populations forth, And a cruel wind blows.

Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn— an early warning of the end of summer. August is fading fast, and by September the little purple flowers will all be gone. Season, project, and vacation done. One more year in everybody’s life. Add a notch to the old hunting knife Time keeps testing with a horny thumb. Over the summer months hung an unspoken aura of urgency. In late July galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken, we looked at one another in the dark, then at the milky magical debris arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality. There were two ways to live: get on with work, redeem the time, ignore the imminence of cataclysm; or else take it slow, be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence (she paces through her days in massive innocence, or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so). In fact, not being cows, we have no choice. Summer or winter, country, city, we are prisoners from the start and automatically, hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice. Not light but language shocks us out of sleep ideas of doom transformed to meteors we translate back to portents of the wars looming above the nervous watch we keep.