Poemunity — your poem community

The tide’s a Bach cantata. The beach is the swollen neck of Isaac. The tide’s a lamentation of white opals. The beach is free. The Coke machine rusted out. Here is everything you’ll never need: hemp-cords, curry-combs, jade and musk, a porcelain cup blown into the desert— stockings that walked to Syria in 1915. On the rocks some ewes and rams graze in the outer dark. The manes of the shoreline undo your hair. A sapphire ring is fingerless. The weed and algae are floating like a bed, and the bloodless gulls— whose breaths would stink of all of us if we could kiss them on the beaks— are gnawing on the dead.

For Ruth Fainlight I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing. Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? This is rain now, this big hush. And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic. I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires. Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. A wind of such violence Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. I let her go. I let her go Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. How your bad dreams possess and endow me. I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches?—— Its snaky acids hiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

Leaning from the platform, waiting for a glimmer to braid the rails the eyes of the action hero cut from the poster all that concrete pressing down A fine edge gleams around your body as if it could be contained The way each finger is licked, dipped in & rubbed across the gums until the teeth go away Even my hands kiss you A night broken down into grains If you find yourself lost, dig a cave in the snow, quickly you need shelter against the night A candle could keep you alive the engine of your lungs will heat the air around you, someone will miss you, they will send out dogs You must be somewhere, right?

(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.) Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy, In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement. Now see I That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy. Oh, God, make small The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

Imagine, not even or really ever tasting a peach until well over 50, not once sympathizing with Blake naked in his garden insisting on angels until getting off the table and coming home with my new heart. How absurd to still have a body in this rainbow-gored, crickety world and how ridiculous to be given one in the first place, to be an object like an orchid is an object, or a stone, so bruisable and plummeting, arms waving from the evening-ignited lake, heading singing in the furnace feral and sweet, tears that make the face grotesque, tears that make it pure. How easy it is now to get drunk on a single whiff like a hummingbird or ant, on the laughter of one woman and who knew how much I’d miss that inner light of snow now that I’m in Texas.

Coming home with the last load I ride standing on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor in hot exhaust, lank with sweat, my arms strung awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform. Almost 500 bales we’ve put up this afternoon, Marshall and I. And of course I think of another who hung like this on another cross. My hands are torn by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended on two points of pain in the rising monoxide, recall that greater suffering. Well, I change grip and the image fades. It’s been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop, but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed. Now is our last chance to bring in the winter’s feed, and Marshall needs help. We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales to the barn, these late, half-green, improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds or more, yet must be lugged by the twine across the field, tossed on the load, and then at the barn unloaded on the conveyor and distributed in the loft. I help— I, the desk-servant, word-worker— and hold up my end pretty well too; but God, the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe. I think of those who have done slave labor, less able and less well prepared than I. Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony, her father in the camps of Moldavia and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands too bloodied cannot bear even the touch of air, even the touch of love. I have a friend whose grandmother cut cane with a machete and cut and cut, until one day she snicked her hand off and took it and threw it grandly at the sky. Now in September our New England mountains under a clear sky for which we’re thankful at last begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches in their first color. I look beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills, to the notch where the sunset is beginning, then in the other direction, eastward, where a full new-risen moon like a pale medallion hangs in a lavender cloud beyond the barn. My eyes sting with sweat and loveliness. And who is the Christ now, who if not I? It must be so. My strength is legion. And I stand up high on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say woe to you, watch out you sons of bitches who would drive men and women to the fields where they can only die.

He wore a little spiraled hat and wrote a song that everyone sang. He lived on the mountainside above a lake with a mythical beast he’d subdued. A train circled the village each hour, over and over, as he leaned down over the clock of   his world where people were days becoming months and years. In a park, from the hides of  ten cows, he’d constructed a  giant ball that everyone touched until it became a torn rag. He had no family, and because he worried so much about them:What if, what if, what if, like another beast pawing away, he’d invented a vitamin for everyone old that allowed you to continue slowly to grow until you forgot everything you once knew.

On the first page of my dreambook It’s always evening In an occupied country. Hour before the curfew. A small provincial city. The houses all dark. The storefronts gutted. I am on a street corner Where I shouldn’t be. Alone and coatless I have gone out to look For a black dog who answers to my whistle. I have a kind of Halloween mask Which I am afraid to put on.

The Oldest Love Poem (For Susan) Back from Istanbul, she gives to me the photograph she took inside the Archaeological Museum’s blue tiled hush, of a tablet carved in terra cotta from Nippur, written in Sumerian. Delicate etches, a lift of riverbed where the summer waters ran glistened on this piece of earth the earnest working hand, a pause between the lines to contemplate cedars’ ornate overhanging leaf-work become inseparable from the carving.  Maybe reading sky, reading wind, or tree sounds beside the sound of clay shaped to carry a human mark. Maybe it says we are so elegant in our exchange that looking at each other the trees whisper their contented green across any distance to be here branches heat-satiated full in our veins of holding

At two thousand feet the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand. Closer, in a monotone of peristalsis, Its fugue-like swells create and recreate One image in an idiot concentration. From horizon to horizon, this desert With the eye athirst for something stable When off to southeast-ward— It was a plane all right, or had been, A shipside fighter, her pontoons floated her. Smashed like a match-case, no one could be sure If it were ours or had been one of theirs. That’s all there was. A thousand miles anywhere There was only the north ocean, the poleward pallor, Like a desolation of spirit, lonelier than god. What did it mean? They thought of night fleets In the ghostly boreal dark or maybe Toy cardboard silhouettes in the bleak limbo of noon: The salvos wink in bloom at twenty miles, The pause, the roar like a night freight And the near misses building their faery forests. Where were these giants? The sea offered A single clue, a symbol; no explanation. Northward the fog banks thickened and on all horizons As if jealous of giving up secured positions The night stirred angrily like an old suspicion.