Poemunity — your poem community

That was a great compliment the Greeks paid to human life When they imagined their gods living as humans do, With the same pleasure in love and feasting, Headstrong as we are, turbulent, quick to anger, Slow to forgive. Just like us, only immortal. And now that those gods have proven mortal too And heaven and earth can’t be divided, Every death means a divine occasion Has been taken from us, a divine perspective, Though the loss gets only a line or two in the news. Hard to believe the headlines this morning That a banker on Mt. Olympus has been pilfering, That a builder has been guilty of shoddy construction On a bridge that spans a river in heaven, Cutting corners to squirrel away his fortune For a better day, when the great day has already come. For news that heartens we must turn to the classifieds. Here in what’s left of heaven it’s right to advertise For a soul mate. It’s right to look for a job That lets us incarnate spirit more fully And leave something behind that time is kinder to Than the flesh of gods. Lucky there’s work. Lucky the streets of heaven are in need of repair. Paint is peeling from the dream-house trim. Holy rainwater backs up in leaf-clogged gutters Till the ceiling sags and tiles need regrouting. And look at the list of practical items for sale— Used snowblowers, croquet sets, chainlink fencing. And what about a wooden canoe with two paddles. Why don’t we make time for a turn before sundown? Out on the broad lake a breeze will find us That’s wafted around the planet to cool our divinity. The clouds will hover above us in a giant halo As we watch our brother, the sun, descend, His gentle face turned toward us, his godly expression Undarkened by accusation or disappointment Or the thought of something he’s left undone.

It’s brief and bright, dear children; bright and brief. Delight’s the lightning; the long thunder’s grief.

Dogs so long with us we forget that wolves allowed as how they might be tamed and sprang up all over the globe, with all humans, all at once, like a good idea. So we tamed our own hearts. Leashed them or sent them to camp’s edge. Even the shrinks once agreed, in dreams our dogs are our deepest selves. Ur Dog, a Siberian, dogged the heels of nomads, then turned south to Egypt to keep Pharaoh safe. Seemed strange, my mother sighed, when finally we got a hound, . . . a house without a dog. Her world never knew a yard un-dogged and thus unlocked. Sudden intrusions impossible where yappers yap. Or maybe she objected to empty armchairs, rooms too quiet without the beat of tail thump or paw thud. N’de, Ojibwe say,my pet, which also suggests ode, that spot in the chest, the part you point to when you pray, or say with great feeling—great meaning, meaning dog-love goes that deep.

Dare a mighty row in Zion an’ de debbil’s gittin’ high, An’ de saints done beat de sinners, a-cussin’ on de sly; What for it am? you reckon, well, I’ll tell you how it ’gin Twuz ’bout a mighty leetle thing, de linin’ ub de hymns. De young folks say taint stylish to lin’ out no mo’, Dat dey’s got edikashun, an’ dey wants us all to know Dat dey likes to hab dar singin’ books a-holin’ fore dar eyes, An sing de hymns right straight along to mansion in de skies. Dat it am awful fogy to gin um out by lin’, An’ ef de ole folks will kumplain ’cause dey is ole an’ blin An’ slabry’s chain don kep dem back from larnin how to read, Dat dey mus’ take a corner seat, and let de young folks lead. We bin peatin’hine de pastor when he sez dat lubly pray’r Cause some un us don kno’ it an’ kin not say it squar, But dey sez we mus’ peat wid him, an’ ef we kan keep time, De gospel train will drap us off from follin’ long behin’. Well p’haps dez’s right, I kin not say, my lims is growin’ ole, But I likes to sing dem dear ole hymns ’tis music to my soul An’ ’pears to me twon’t do much harm to gin um out by lin’, So we ole folk dat kin not read kin foller long behin’. But few ub us am lef here now dat bore de slabry’s chain, We don edekate our boys an’ gals we’d do de sam’ agin An Zion’s all dat’s lef us now to cheer us wid its song, Dey mought’low us to sing wid dem, it kin not be fur long. De sarmons high-falutin’ an’ de chuch am mighty fin’, We trus’ dat God still understans ez he did in olden times; When we do ign’ant po an’ mean still worshiped wid de soul Do oft akross our peac’ful breas’ de wabes ub trouble rolled. De old time groans an’shouts an’moans am passin’ out ub sight, Edikashun changed all dat, and we believe it right: We should serb God wid ’telligence but fur dis thing I plead, Jes lebe a leetle place in chuch fur dem as kin not read.

Oh why is heaven built so far, Oh why is earth set so remote? I cannot reach the nearest star That hangs afloat. I would not care to reach the moon, One round monotonous of change; Yet even she repeats her tune Beyond my range. I never watch the scatter'd fire Of stars, or sun's far-trailing train, But all my heart is one desire, And all in vain: For I am bound with fleshly bands, Joy, beauty, lie beyond my scope; I strain my heart, I stretch my hands, And catch at hope.

for Hannah The way my daughter sleeps it’s as if she’s talking to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll backwards in her head, her senses fold one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat. Every night she fights this silent way of being with all the whining ammunition that she has. She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small and willful links to life that carry her away. Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She’s gone to Hades with her stuffed animals. When she wakes, the sad circles disappeared, she blinks before she knows me. I have listened to one million breaths of her. And every night my body seizes when she leaves to go where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.

For months my daughter carried a dead monarch in a quart mason jar. To and from school in her backpack, to her only friend’s house.   At the dinner table it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast. She took it to bed, propped by her pillow. Was it the year her brother was born? Was this her own too-fragile baby that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world? Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house? Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there? This plump child in her rolled-down socks I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me and carry safe again.   What was her fierce commitment?   I never understood. We just lived with the dead winged thing as part of her, as part of us, weightless in its heavy jar.

We pretended to know nothing about it. I withdrew to childhood training: stay out of swampy undergrowth, choked edges. This was around the time we were too cruel to kill the mice we caught, leaving them in the Have-a-Heart trap under the sun-burning bramble of rugosa. But moving up the trail, we caught a glimpse right at the start: the fox just over the hillock on the dune-side slope, spoiling the grass-inscribed sand. Neither of us looked— it seemed best to back away. On the dune’s steep side we surveyed what we’d come for: ocean’s snaking blues beyond the meadow, the silvered blade-like wands lying down. Lovely enough to hold ourselves to that view. But the currents of an odor wafted in and out, until the sweep of smell grew wider, wilder. The heat compounded, and ugliness settled its cloud over us, profound as human speech, although by then we were not speaking.

The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. I'm sad. I make horrible sentences. A woman alone in the park waves. The water. The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. Put down the cell phone. I'm sad. The waves. The horrible staring. A woman alone in the park. Waves. The leaves. Leaves along in the park. I'm staring. The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. I'm sad. Put down your cell phone. A wave. The sad girl alone in the park. Leaves. Put down your cell phone. The Bartlett. The staring. A leaf alone in the horrible leaves. The dead girl. The staring.

Though I can’t recall your last name now, Howie, I’ve been penciling myself in to your way back then, way back when, in your gangbangland, she was loose and gone, struggling up on a limb to raise herself off from your bed, but lost, fell back, let the all of you in again. Said just trying to get out your room was no use since she’d got her own self in. Curbside-mind, I venture you are still alive. Wondering what she’d think of that, but, then, I don’t know, can a ghost think when its body’s shot itself in the head? Hell, just thinking about it makes me wish I were dead. Just some girl, you, then you letting your friends shovel their coal-selves up into her, just some person. I knew. Her mother’s now offering a twenty-percent discount for crystal healing therapy on her website. In high school, she was a calm mother, dull job as telephone operator, back in that town her dead daughter and I always swore we would leave, back in that town dead to me, and me, I marry a man who mocks me for crying.We-we-we, he calls out, snickering in the gloom. Yet still I wear the dead girl’s perfume. And I’ve got an accident to report. Because it was all our centers, uninvited, you rucked up inside, then bade your friends park their reeking selves in the garage of her feminine. What did you call it back then? You balding fuck, you’ve forgot. Sloppy seconds. Forgot her slippage, eyes dead drunk spirals, face some fluid spilling down your sheets. I’ve been where she’s been, and I can be where you are now, switch my hips, sashay into your office to see you any day now, wearing her perfume. What pack animal would you choose to be in your next life? Every day, the marsupial clouds grow hungrier for our reunion, the reunion I’ve been packing for all my life. There is a swing set and a girl in a dress who doesn’t know about this next. First, she’s pretty. Finally, she’s done for. So I took some pills to forget I knew you last as friend. Then I learned the ways of your wiles, how you did my girl who’s now dead in.