Poemunity — your poem community

If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,— if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: “I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,— Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

Not, this time, to infer but to wait you out between regret and parking lot somewhere in the day like a dare Salt grime and the foodcarts’ rising steam, at Prospect St. a goshawk huge and aloof, picking at something, nested in twigs and police tape for a while we all held our phones up It is relentless, the suddenness of every other song, creature, neighbor as though this life would prove you only by turning into itself

I would my soul were like the bird That dares the vastness undeterred. Look, where the bluebird on the bough Breaks into rapture even now! He sings, tip-top, the tossing elm As tho he would a world o’erwhelm. Indifferent to the void he rides Upon the wind’s eternal tides. He tosses gladly on the gale, For well he knows he can not fail— Knows if the bough breaks, still his wings Will bear him upward while he sings!

The brain forgets but the blood will remember. There, when the play of sense is over, The last, low spark in the darkest chamber Will hold all there is of love and lover. The war of words, the life-long quarrel Of self against self will resolve into nothing; Less than the chain of berry-red coral Crying against the dead black of her clothing. What has the brain that it hopes to last longer? The blood will take from forgotten violence, The groping, the break of her voice in anger. There will be left only color and silence. These will remain, these will go searching Your veins for life when the flame of life smolders; The night that you two saw the mountains marching Up against dawn with the stars on their shoulders; The jetting poplars’ arrested fountains As you drew her under them, easing her pain; The notes, not the words, of a half-finished sentence; The music, the silence. . . . These will remain.

For Annie You can come to me in the evening, with the fingers of former lovers fastened in your hair and their ghost lips opening over your body, They can be philosophers or musicians in long coats and colored shoes and they can be smarter than I am, whispering to each other when they look at us. You can come walking toward my window after dusk when I can’t see past the lamplight in the glass, when the chipped plates rattle on the counter and the cinders dance on the cross-ties under the wheels of southbound freights. Bring children if you want, and the long wounds of sisters branching away behind you toward the sea. Bring your mother’s tense distracted face and the shoulders of plane mechanics slumped in the Naugahyde booths of the airport diner, waiting for you to bring their eggs. I’ll bring all the bottles of gin I drank by myself and my cracked mouth opened partway as I slept in the back of my blue Impala dreaming of spiders. I won’t forget the lines running deeply in the cheeks of the Polish landlady who wouldn’t let the cops upstairs, the missing ring finger of the machinist from Spenard whose money I stole after he passed out to go downtown in a cab and look for whores, or the trembling lower jaw of my son, watching me back my motorcycle from his mother’s driveway one last time, the ribbons and cone-shaped birthday hats scattered on the lawn, the rain coming down like broken glass. We’ll go out under the stars and sit together on the ground and there will be enough to eat for everybody. They can sleep on my couches and rug, and the next day I’ll go to work, stepping easily across the scaffolding, feeding the cable gently into the new pipes on the roof, and dreaming like St Francis of the still dark rocks that disappear under the morning tide, only to climb back into the light, sea-rimed, salt-blotched, their patched webs of algae blazing with flies in the sun.

Dark mornings shown thy mask made well thy visage and voice rolling over and hearing some perfect sweetness that one broad soul poured forth again in happy countenance and ancient word my city cold for me, my nature lost come back sallow soft and colorless thy dreams repent as: The whole family each with his own “Now, sweet child, we must kiss winter goodbye, and so too your furs.” She clutched the puppy to her breast. “Not little Bobby, father.” “Yes, my darling, little Bobby as well.” And this, as she ought, was how Gretel remembered summer – a constant giving up of things and people.

O my dark Rosaleen, Do not sigh, do not weep! The priests are on the ocean green, They march along the deep. There’s wine from the royal Pope, Upon the ocean green; And Spanish ale shall give you hope, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope, Shall give you health, and help, and hope, My Dark Rosaleen! Over hills, and thro’ dales, Have I roam’d for your sake; All yesterday I sail’d with sails On river and on lake. The Erne, at its highest flood, I dash’d across unseen, For there was lightning in my blood, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! O, there was lightning in my blood, Red lighten’d thro’ my blood. My Dark Rosaleen! All day long, in unrest, To and fro, do I move. The very soul within my breast Is wasted for you, love! The heart in my bosom faints To think of you, my Queen, My life of life, my saint of saints, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! To hear your sweet and sad complaints, My life, my love, my saint of saints, My Dark Rosaleen! Woe and pain, pain and woe, Are my lot, night and noon, To see your bright face clouded so, Like to the mournful moon. But yet will I rear your throne Again in golden sheen; ‘Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! ‘Tis you shall have the golden throne, ‘Tis you shall reign, and reign alone, My Dark Rosaleen! Over dews, over sands, Will I fly, for your weal: Your holy delicate white hands Shall girdle me with steel. At home, in your emerald bowers, From morning’s dawn till e’en, You’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers, My Dark Rosaleen! My fond Rosaleen! You’ll think of me through daylight hours My virgin flower, my flower of flowers, My Dark Rosaleen! I could scale the blue air, I could plough the high hills, Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer, To heal your many ills! And one beamy smile from you Would float like light between My toils and me, my own, my true, My Dark Rosaleen! My fond Rosaleen! Would give me life and soul anew, My Dark Rosaleen! O, the Erne shall run red, With redundance of blood, The earth shall rock beneath our tread, And flames wrap hill and wood, And gun-peal and slogan-cry Wake many a glen serene, Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! The Judgement Hour must first be nigh, Ere you can fade, ere you can die, My Dark Rosaleen!

All year, death, after death, after death. Then today look how majestically clouds float in the sky, God putting on a show of tenderness, nothing like thoughts that rise and drift in my mind, like flakes shaken in a snow globe, and my brain laboring in its own night, never feeling the punky starlight of dark thirty, the time a friend said for us to meet and had to explain it was half an hour after the first dark, when daylilies fold up and headlights lead the way home, but maybe too early to find the moon turning half its body away, holding it hidden like the black side of a mirror, unseen until it breaks, unexpectedly, the way grief breaks over you when you've already given all you've got and hands you tools you don't know how to use. The blush of dark thirty turned bleak when I heard about the O— O dark thirty, military time for 12:30 a.m., hour of the deepest dark, when, if I'm awake, as I often am, a storm of thoughts battle one another, now settling unsettlingly on the ways we make war and flaunt it. Take the Civil War double cannon the lawn of a city hall in the deep south, twinned so that two cannonballs chained together kill two at a time, often decapitating. And why did a small town, population 932, in rural New Hampshire, import a ballistic missile to crown its village green? Brecht's line floats up: "Pity the nation that needs heroes," but what to do with the guy pontificating on the Middle East, telling me with the gravest authority— that of stupidity—the reason for the strife there: "Hatred is in the rocks."

The sun that puts its spokes in every Wheel of manhandle and tree Derives its path of seashines (Sheer centrifugality) from my Regards. I send it My regards. Some yards Of lumen from the fabrika Have come unbolted from the look Of it (or likes of me), a long Unweaving or recarding I Cannot recall begun, and there Before my eyes a palm Puts lashes round the sun.

1 A tattering of rain and then the reign Of pour and pouring-down and down, Where in the westward gathered the filming gown Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane Of the light’s glory and the day’s splendor, gold and vain, Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous, Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain! And soon the hour was musical and rumorous: A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses, A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours. 2 Again, after a catbird squeaked in the special silence, And clouding vagueness fogged the windowpane And gathered blackness and overcast, the mane Of light’s story and light’s glory surrendered and ended —A pebble—a ring—a ringing on the pane, A blowing and a blowing in: tides of the blue and cold Moods of the great blue bay, and slates of grey Came down upon the land’s great sea, the body of this day —Hardly an atom of silence amid the roar Allowed the voice to form appeal—to call: By kindled light we thought we saw the bronze of fall.