Poemunity — your poem community

Always the script, the dramatic comma, the pointed ellipsis, half turn, beat, the exit itself as punctuation. Let’s say the back wall of the house fell away: first cracks down the plaster, then it crumbles to reveal seventy-five rows of spectators. That’s the explanation: they’ve been there all along; I mulled blocking on a blind impulse, but it turns out a correct one. Maybe someone is making love to me (in the 19th century sense): do I throw off his hand, exit with pithy wit? Or simply submit to it: the sappy moment which will, I know, have to be resisted in some later scene. Had I been there, had it been me, I would have said— and the audience would have been moved to applaud. Astounding improvisation! I’d have walked right up to the lawyer, the bank manager, and I’d have said— or, if it was me, it would never have gotten that far; I’d have turned to her and said— So I am contemplating in its shade an apple tree. Haven’t I often done that? So why not me? Late August, the leaves like arrowheads, dark green, waxy, punctuated by apples—constellations of apples. There I see The Hunter, bow pulled back, the apples of his quiver fixed with perfect aim: William Tell, daughter across the tree, of apples herself, poised with a perfect fruit above her head: wet tension of its surface, red skin that kisses the sun. And this perfect tree. This perfect tree in which every stamen was touched by pollen, in which every flower thickened to fruit: tree that knows by its own example perfection. In each cluster, five apples bunch as tight as chambers of a human heart. Had I been there, had it been me—and the slither up the trunk brought my attention low, the rippling body sliding along the trunk, I who have been so good all these years at resisting, and giving in, and resisting— I’d have heard the melodious hiss, seen the glinting tongue, its fork invading the region of my heart, the archer in that perfect canopy aiming right at me, I who have given in to desire when the stakes were much lower, could I resist those movements, how fully the serpent’s hiss gives itself over to simile: I am like, I am like, I am like. . . . Seen it before, mister. I’d have sighed in an aside, glanced up at the sky, deadpanned the audience, and said— Or had my lover brought the apple. For years I have told them not to burn money on me. But to bring only this, to hold it out with a silent smile as they enter the house, down center on the stage of the palm. No better way to say I love you. So why not me? Early October, the outsize hunger after running, and my lover brings it over. I recognize on his breath the scent of the serpent, and the apple, the one forbidden thing. Deep voice, dark eyes, silent smile and perfect apple; only midday draped across his body, tight, alert, alive to the moment of sin. And reaching out to take it in my hand. Who better than me? Let the tension linger, let the audience pulse with anticipation. We touch over the forbidden fruit. The stage lights dim, and I look at him, and I look at him, and raise my eyebrows, and say— But even so, wouldn’t I end up here again, always here? Angels crossing swords behind me, shame clothing me, conflating all my losses—the loss of God, the loss of apples, how they expand inside to fill up hunger. Maybe there are no words here, just the sky blackening with anger. Maybe words wouldn’t be useful here anyway. Consider a scrim: the night sky blotted of constellations; nothing but gray swirls of wrath. And project against it a man’s silhouette: head bent, empty- handed, the memory of apples imprinted on his wordless tongue, and around his neck, loss—like a cowbell—announcing his presence to the fallen world.

1 This blank sky between parallel wires reserved for penmanship practice. 2 The cold rays of the bristle cone, she writes — she who admires imitations. Such sparse coronas surrounding every knobby fist! 3 “Naught” must follow “for” which will come after “all.” Come as “always,” walking backwards

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel! The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy! The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels! Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas! Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums! Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles! Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul! Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch! Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss! Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul! Berkeley 1955

I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story, about arriving at a long loved place, the house of friends in Maine, their lawn of wildflowers, their grandfather clock and candid portraits, their gabled attic rooms, and woodstove in the kitchen, all accessories of the genuine summer years before, when I was their son’s girlfriend and tied an apron behind my neck, beneath my braids, and took from their garden the harvest for a dinner I would make alone and serve at their big table with the gladness of the found, and loved. The eggplant shone like polished wood, the tomatoes smelled like their furred collars, the dozen zucchini lined up on the counter like placid troops with the onions, their minions, and I even remember the garlic, each clove from its airmail envelope brought to the cutting board, ready for my instruction. And in this very slight story, a decade later, I came by myself, having been dropped by the airport cab, and waited for the family to arrive home from work. I walked into the lawn, waist-high in the swaying, purple lupines, the subject of   June’s afternoon light as I had never been addressed — a displaced young woman with cropped hair, no place to which I wished to return, and no one to gather me in his arms. That day the lupines received me, and I was in love with them, because they were all I had left, and in that same manner I have loved much of the world since then, and who is to say there is more of a reason, or more to love?

Did wind and wave design the albatross's wing, honed compliances: or is it effrontery to suggest that the wing designed the gales and seas: are we guests here, then, with all the gratitude and soft-walking of the guest: provisions and endurances of riverbeds, mountain shoulders, windings through of tulip poplar, grass, and sweet-frosted foxgrape: are we to come into these and leave them as they are: are the rivers in us, and the slopes, ours that the world's imitate, or are we mirrorments merely of a high designing aloof and generous as a host to us: what would become of us if we declined and staked out a level affirmation of our own: we wind the brook into our settlement and husband the wind to our sails and blades: what is to be grateful when let alone to itself, as for a holiday in naturalness: the albatross, ah, fishes the waves with a will beyond the waves' will, and we, to our own doings, put down the rising of sea or mountain slope: except we do not finally put it down: still, till the host appears, we'll make the masters here.

The child I left your class to have Later had a habit of sleeping With her arms around a globe She’d unscrewed, dropped, and dented. I always felt she could possess it, The pink countries and the mauve And the ocean which got to keep its blue. Coming from the Southern Hemisphere to teach, Which you had never had to do, you took A bare-walled room, alone, its northern Windowscapes as gray as walls. To decorate, you’d only brought a black madonna. I thought you must have skipped summer that year, Southern winter, southern spring, then north For winter over again. Still, it pleased you To take credit for introducing us, And later to bring our daughter a small flipbook Of partners dancing, and a ring With a secret whistle. —All are Broken now like her globe, but she remembers Them as I recall the black madonna Facing you across the room so that In a way you had the dark fertile life You were always giving gifts to. Your smaller admirer off to school, I take the globe and roll it away: where On it now is someone like you?

In memoriam Liam Rector The little boy crying out Weenie Weenie in self-panicking delight, waving his little cock under the banner of the sun, seemed pure Blake, all anarchy and energy, an innocence unfrightened of itself that shook the lake's waters and unsettled the strained composures and appointed certainties of whatever Absolute Speaker had been ranting in my brain: Peace Through Strength Justice Must Be Ours— so many demon faces in the glass city. Each pubic triangle seemed, under the bathing suits, to grow electrical and crackle with a sexual shock that made me turn my face away: and who should be there but you, my dear Lord of Misrule, blowing smoke in all our faces, the clean bullet hole in your forehead above your self-ironic smile: Don't let the monkeys stop typing

Asleep until noon, I'm dreaming we've been granted another year. You're here with me, healthy. Then, half-awake, the half-truth— this is our last day. Life's leaking away again, and this time, we know it. Dear body, I told you, pleading, Don't Leave! but I understand you can't say anything. Who are we? Are we fictional? We don't look like our pictures, don't look like anyone I know. Daylight flickers through a bamboo grove, we approach the Forbidden City, Looking together for the Hall of Fulfilling Original Wishes. Time is the treasure, you tell me, and the past is its hiding place. I instruct our fictional children, The past is the treasure, time is its hiding place. If we told him how much we love him, how much we miss him, he could stay.

We are dropping one and gaining two—. The things I cannot do include to sleep, to calm the spillway of the blood, to face an auditorium, wishing it were churchy pillbox hats— recital mothers’— with no sense of Vogue or the Baroque. I’ve other pills to tramp on grief, estrange pain, and hatch the part of waking that is dreams, double one dose to un-depress and to write less and less a chronicle of anxiety. I spot-treat a spate of addiction in this faint dusk world of peach sky and plum leaflets— a woman in her prime, pilled together.

There’s only one horizon, yet it can be found in every direction we look. You’d think it would be easier to get the hell out of here. Just ask an iceberg. In any Chinese restaurant, never order the 42. Never answer your door during dinner, it’s probably another little shit peddling Snickers. Posing behind their windows, the mannequins remind us of their absent stylist. This is all hero worship. This poem ends the same way they all do— list everyone you’ve ever had sex with here: