Poemunity — your poem community

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze. And I, what fountain of fire am I among This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed About like a shadow buffeted in the throng Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned: his forehead white with illumination — a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow, darkened as if the artist meant to contrast his bright knowledge, its dark subtext. By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait, he was already linked to an affair with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out across the centuries, his lips fixed as if he's just uttered some final word. The first time I saw the painting, I listened as my father explained the contradictions: how Jefferson hated slavery, though —out of necessity, my father said — had to own slaves; that his moral philosophy meant he could not have fathered those children: would have been impossible, my father said. For years we debated the distance between word and deed. I'd follow my father from book to book, gathering citations, listening as he named — like a field guide to Virginia — each flower and tree and bird as if to prove a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision. I did not know then the subtext of our story, that my father could imagine Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh — the improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites

Little Enoch learned his colors from lettered blocks (for a is the color of fleet, b is the color of war and demolition, c is the color of echo and blur, & c.) and built a bricolage: So cab was a whirring warbler. bach was the Spanish Armada crashing and crashing. And enoch he couldn’t describe. And when it reached the height of Enoch, standing, he tore whole tongues down to their colors.

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house To match my dark mood. I have left all the sugar out of the pie. My rage is a kind of domestic rage. I learned it from my mother Who learned it from her mother before her And so on. Surely the Greeks had a word for this. Now surely the Germans do. The more words a person knows To describe her private sufferings The more distantly she can perceive them. I repeat the names of all the cities I’ve known And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home. What does it mean to love the life we’ve been given? To act well the part that’s been cast for us? Wind. Light. Fire. Time. A train whistles through the far hills. One day I plan to be riding it.

So many forget-me-nots, with their white centers, scattered, you'd say, if there weren't so many everywhere, as many as the stars last night in between the branches above the porch, behind the house. Was it an argument or were there just things they had to say? I could have faith in so many creatures— the old setter from the neighbor yard who follows me around the corner and no longer, the chick with its new beak just past breakable whose lighter top feathers have a bit of flight, any mother bear— you say things and the next day it's like they don't matter, we want our faces to alter though we don't want to get older, neither do we want to get younger, repetition with less knowledge is ridiculous, just ask the Greeks, you get to keep being a tree but without the branch that showed the sky your starlike shape? I don't think so. Steadiness can be useful, but my loyalty loves a form that will follow me through changes. At a diagonal the dark woods on the back slope have enough space to walk between, not enough to hide. He looks into them and writes notes to his mother, she looks into them and finds alignment, or looks for what she wants. She has a human skeleton on her desk. He has a protractor. I had wishes for both of them yesterday but the weather has become so kindly, so temperate, I forget what blessings they don't think they have.

The dad. body has just enough gravy on his plate to sop up one piece of bread. So, enough for one supper, says the mom. She comes back to him, says don’t argue with mom, you’re a ghost. There’s enough water around to drown a cob in its husk. in a dad. He puts up weather stripping all night. to keep out the mom. He says I should have cooked for you more. She thinks she could make her own insulin. to keep from going into dad. She says I should have married a ghost. says: You have a little raisin on your lip. a little. The mom says stop all that quiet, it’s foolish. Come on now, dad. come to ghost. says the ghost. I won’t even warn the mom. I won’t even flinch if the ghost tries to hold her mom. After all, a good séance starts with enough food and a mom. The ghost with a biscuit in meat. The mom with the smell of cracked dad. sucked out of oxygen. The mom is a smell of wrecked vines. You, the dad. with no teeth. And no, (the mom) is a garden full of ghost. No. says the dad: lost in ashes. No city is complete. its own worst ghost. who can’t remember the ghost now, the ghost says: All your selves know, now. They ghost like the bushel of a snowflower. Everyone is dead. now. says, the ghost. The mom is a yard of blackening petals. At night, I have really long dads. Without the ghosts, I wake in a puddle of ghost. But you’ll be mom one day. to know I am alive. We are all sappy dad, aren’t we. Tell the ghost, it’s ok. Let the bodies lie ghost for a while. I mom of you. I mom of you a lot.

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive, and we've talked enough and listened to enough music and stopped twice, once to eat, once to see the view, we fall into this rhythm of silence. It swings back and forth between us like a rope over a lake. Maybe it's what we don't say that saves us.

There, garland dandelions round that idol with a corn husk face &  beard patched with rat stubble from a barber’s dust pan, parade float driven by a carriage pulled by a pig. Two sticks knotted together, cake frost on that crude wood to make it gilt. There, spider cranks &  iron gyres, blueberry stain glass sprout like wings from coal burn cars, a trumpet toots the sorrow of another boy dead, there he is, limp on a gurney wrapped in gingham scrap, there, he’s blast. There, roofless houses, sarong utopias balloon, balloon toward the sky, while women beat, beat their skulls. I trail behind, mop in hand, sloshing scum water over memorials. There he stares at my tic-torn cankered face, &  begs for alms, his face horse rudder red. A son, he huffs, it is a son I want. I spit into them corned mitt hands.

1 Gently disintegrate me Said nothing at all. Is there still time to say Said I myself lying In a bower of bramble Into which I have fallen. Look through my eyes up At blue with not anything We could have ever arranged Slowly taking place. Above the spires of the fox Gloves and above the bracken Tops with their young heads Recognising the wind, The armies of the empty Blue press me further Into Zennor Hill. If I half-close my eyes The spiked light leaps in And I am here as near Happy as I will get In the sailing afternoon. 2 Enter a cloud. Between The head of Zennor and Gurnard’s Head the long Marine horizon makes A blue wall or is it A distant table-top Of the far-off simple sea. Enter a cloud. O cloud, I see you entering from Your west gathering yourself Together into a white Headlong. And now you move And stream out of the Gurnard, The west corner of my eye. Enter a cloud. The cloud’s Changing shape is crossing Slowly only an inch Above the line of the sea. Now nearly equidistant Between Zennor and Gurnard’s Head, an elongated White anvil is sailing Not wanting to be a symbol. 3 Said nothing at all. And proceeds with no idea Of destination along The sea bearing changing Messages. Jean in London, Lifting a cup, looking Abstractedly out through Her Hampstead glass will never Be caught by your new shape Above the chimneys. Jean, Jean, do you not see This cloud has been thought of And written on Zennor Hill. 4 The cloud is going beyond What I can see or make. Over up-country maybe Albert Strick stops and waves Caught in the middle of teeling Broccoli for the winter. The cloud is not there yet. From Gurnard's Head to Zennor Head the level line Crosses my eyes lying On buzzing Zennor Hill. The cloud is only a wisp And gone behind the Head. It is funny I got the sea's Horizontal slightly surrealist. Now when I raise myself Out of the bracken I see The long empty blue Between the fishing Gurnard And Zennor. It was a cloud The language at my time's Disposal made use of. 5 Thank you. And for your applause. It has been a pleasure. I Have never enjoyed speaking more. May I also thank the real ones Who have made this possible. First, the cloud itself. And now Gurnard's Head and Zennor Head. Also recognise How I have been helped By Jean and Madron's Albert Strick (He is a real man.) And good words like brambles, Bower, spiked, fox, anvil, teeling. The bees you heard are from A hive owned by my friend Garfield down there below In the house by Zennor Church. The good blue sun is pressing Me into Zennor Hill. Gently disintegrate me Said nothing at all.

I enter the void, it has the shape of a viola: Israel, Jenin, West Bank, Nablus—a rubble boy shifts his scapula as if it was his continent, underground Gazaground, I want to say—his only bone, the rubble boy is a girl, I think, her hair tossed, knotted and torn under the green shank of fibers, tubes and shells. She digs for her rubble father, I say rubble because it is indistinguishable from ice, fire, dust, clay, flesh, tears, concrete, bread, lungs, pubis, god, say rubble, say water— the rubble girl digs for her rubble mother, occupation—disinheritance—once again, I had written this somewhere, in a workshop, I think, yes, it was an afternoon of dark poets with leaves, coffee and music in the liquor light room. A rock, perhaps it's a rock, juts out, two rocks embrace each other, the shapes come to me easily, an old poetic reflex—memoria, a nation underground, that is it, the nation under-ground, that is why the rocks cover it. I forget to mention the blasts, so many things flying, light, existence, the house in tins, a mother in rags. It is too cold to expose her tiny legs, the fish-shaped back—you must take these notes for me. Before you go. See this undulate extend beyond the pools of blood. I ride the night, past the Yukon, past South Laredo, past Odessa, past the Ukraine, old Jaffa, Haifa and Istanbul, across clouds, hesitant and porous, listen— they are porous so we can glide into them, this underbelly, this underground: wound-mothers and sobbing fathers, they leave, in their ribboned flesh, shores lisp against nothingness, open—toward you, they dissolve again into my shoes— Hear the dust gong: gendarme passports, cloned maize men in C-130's, with tears bubbling on their hands, pebbles en route—we are all en route to the rubblelands. I want to chant a bliss mantra— Prajnaparamita can you hear me? I want to call for the dragon-slayer omchild. I am on my knees again. On the West Bank count the waves of skull debris—a Hebrew letter for "love" refuses me, an Arabic letter for "boundary" acknowledges me. Sit on an embankment, a dust fleece, there is a tidal wave ahead of me. It will never reach me. I live underground, under the Dead Sea, under the benevolent rocks and forearms and mortar shells and slender naked red green torsos, black, so much black. En route: this could be a train, listen: it derails into a cloud.