Poemunity — your poem community

The cement plant was like a huge still nailed in gray corrugated panels and left out forty-five years ago in the null center of a meadow to tax itself to remorseless death near a black stream and briars, where from the moment it began to breathe, it began falling apart and burning. But it still went, and the men were paid. The plant made dust. Impalpably fine, hung in a tawny alkaline cloud, swept into drifts against mill room piers, frozen by rain on silo ledges, dust was its first and its final cause. Pinups were traced on their car windshields. Dust gave them jobs, and killed some of them. Late into evening their teeth grated. Its product was dust, its problem dust. The thing was blind to all its own ends but the one. Men’s ordinary lives, measured out on a scale alien to that on which its life was measured, were spent in crawling the junk machine, fitting new gaskets, screws, and bearings, deceiving it towards the mood required for it to avail and pay. Somehow it did. None cheered it. It sustained them.

I want to leave this place unremembered. The gas stove is leaking and the door of the refrigerator stained with rust. The mugs are ugly and there are only two forks. The walls are black and soft, the bed a balloon of night-clothing. The stairwell sloped to a dragger’s pace. There are big windows with blind-slats dusty and gray. Street life goes all night and at dawn freedmen shout and laugh outside the kitchen. Where does life begin and end? In the lamb or the cotton? My pillow is my friend.

Not yet will those measureless fields be green again Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed; There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain, Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread. But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled, We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column's head. And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things Speaking so wistfully of other Springs From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred. In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers To lovers—to mothers Here, too, lies he: Under the purple, the green, the red, It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed! Only, when all is done and said, God is not mocked and neither are the dead. For this will stand in our Market-place— Who'll sell, who'll buy (Will you or I Lie each to each with the better grace)? While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face As they drive their bargains, is the Face Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.

Into a crock of gold he’d set some weeds, Behold swart devils in the sunniest weather; He would lump the saint and the courtesan together, Most miserably jangling all the creeds. The prurient multitude heard he was mad, Yet nosed his books for some pornography. The censors doubted his virginity, And secretly conned the works that they forbade. Reporters found this dangerous oddity In rusty pantaloons, mowing the green, And wondered how so dull a wretch could have seen A naked Venus disturbing an alien sea. He watched their backs receding down the street, Raked up the grass, and suddenly had a vision Of how Venus, bathing, saw with amused derision Behind the bushes peeping satyrs’ feet.

Here's how we were counted: firstborn, nay-sayers, veterans, slow-payers, seditionists, convicts, half-breeds, has-beens, the nearly defined dead, all the disenfranchised live. Once everybody had a place among the nameless. Now we can't afford to be anonymous. Consider, they said, the poor, the misfit—consider the woman figuring herself per cent. Consider the P.A. system making a point so intimate I petition not to be anybody's good guess or estimate. I ask to be one: maybe widow-to-be watching the sun diminish brick by brick along the jail wall and also that green pear on its drunken roll out of the executioner's lunch basket. At 12:01, 02, in the cocked chamber of the digital clock the newsman said:There'll be less work in the new century.

Pei designed the building with views, smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned for a photo opportunity; inside are files sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather. Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book. He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather with views of mountains and with music constant. He wants to tell a story but no one would listen, like opera: Black women clean the floors and shine the walls like silver nightly. Computers whir Platonic as nuns. Nothing escapes naming; storms arranged in teacups like anyone’s collection, like rows of butterflies pinned and satisfactory: this is the new landscape. Or there is a lewd father among the shrubbery watching daughters in weather; he breathes heavily and the wet wisdom begins, the storm gathering to spill across the ridge, longed for. Daughters must be warned against sincerity of frantic violins: “He was a man of sympathetic tendencies,” read the official report. “He was smaller than he looked and tended to lick chocolate from his fingers in a lascivious manner.” He tried his wife’s patience, it is true, and lived alone through the marriage, kept his own counsel. With such petty symbols as weather, he kept his own counsel. A butterfly like weather; the climate like laughter, the movement of small air. Clouds, too, have names. Clouds leave home to find themselves. Good money after bad, the fathers say, and close the door called Nature against their coming back. The funny little ways children have of making the world the color they always wanted. Sunset. Birds. The mathematics of memory begin to swirl like cookie dough, like chocolate with egg and sugar and vanilla and butter. A bowl to lick, dangerous with delight, as ultraviolet. Home again! begs the mother and soon the sorry child walks that long allée as rain begins to pour.   Past such petty symbols the boy returns through architecture, a silly gauntlet: the butterfly, the mother, the fit signatures of loveliness. His parents at the door, the little cottage in the woods, Hansel home again at last, the shining path. A little like a dream. Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

The spider living in the bike seat has finally spun its own spokes through the wheels. I have seen it crawl upside down, armored black and jigging back to the hollow frame, have felt the stickiness break as the tire pulls free the stitches of last night’s sewing. We’ve ridden this bike together for a week now, two legs in gyre by daylight, and at night, the eight converting gears into looms, handle bars into sails. This is how it is to be part of a cycle— to be always in motion, and to be always woven to something else.

I place a black cloth the size of a dot over his head. Wrap his entire miniscule body with a thread of my black hair. He lies there on a white sheet of paper and squirms like a dark cocoon, thinks he is going to transform. The letter, when it begins to lose color in a book never opened, becomes a macula in thought. And when read through the lens of a decimal point: see its dark fleck of a cranium, see expendable language—grab the letter j next to him, hold it like a tiny black scythe, behead the i and watch its dot head roll to the back of a sentence.

A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin. But ceremony never did conceal, Save to the silly eye, which all allows, How much we are the woods we wander in. Let her be some Sabrina fresh from stream, Lucent as shallows slowed by wading sun, Bedded on fern, the flowers’ cynosure: Then nymph and wood must nod and strive to dream That she is airy earth, the trees, undone, Must ape her languor natural and pure. Ho-hum. I am for wit and wakefulness, And love this feigning lady by Bazille. What's lightly hid is deepest understood, And when with social smile and formal dress She teaches leaves to curtsey and quadrille, I think there are most tigers in the wood.

At the end of the story, When the plague has arrived, The performance can begin. Displacing flimsy heaven And its contraptions, now Come practical urgencies: Getting the price of salvation, Divined from the guts of birds Or from cruciform insects. Like The savior Oedipus, kittens Are histrionic: defiant swagger Then ritual flight in terror. “The soul of the cat is the form Of its body.” In Christendom, Civic mourners were hired To walk the stricken city ways Chanting: “I am sick, I must Die