Poemunity — your poem community

Corpses push up through thawing permafrost as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink; on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom of a decaying exterior jamb when I glimpsed jagged ice floating in a bay. Naval sonar slices through whales, even as a portion of male dorsal fin is served to the captain of an umiak. Stopped in traffic, he swings from a chairlift, gazes down at scarlet paintbrush. Moistening an envelope before sealing it, I recall the slight noise you made when I grazed your shoulder. When a frost wiped out the chalk blue flowering plant by the door, I watered until it revived from the roots. The song of a knife sharpener in an alley passes through the mind of a microbiologist before he undergoes anesthesia for surgery. The first night of autumn has singed bell peppers by the fence, while budding chamisa stalks in the courtyard bend to ground. Observing people conversing at a nearby table, he visualizes the momentary convergence and divergence of lines passing through a point. The wisteria along the porch never blooms; a praying mantis on the wood floor sips water from a dog bowl. Laughter from upstairs echoes downstairs as teenage girls compare bra sizes. An ex-army officer turned critic frets over the composition of a search committee, snickers and disparages rival candidates. A welder, who turns away for a few seconds to gaze at the Sangre de Cristos, detects a line of trucks backed up on an international overpass where exhaust spews onto houses below. The day may be called One Toothroad or Six Thunderpain, but the naming of a day will not transform it, nor will the mathematics of time halt. An imprint of ginkgo leaf—fan-shaped, slightly thickened, slightly wavy on broad edge, two- lobed, with forking parallel veins but no midvein—in a slab of coal is momentary beauty, while ginkgoes along a street dropping gold leaves are mindless beauty of the quotidian. Once thought extinct, the ginkgo was discovered in Himalayan monasteries and propagated back into the world. Although I cannot save a grasshopper singed by frost trying to warm itself on a sunlit walkway, I ponder shadows of budding pink and orange bougainvilleas on a wall. As masons level sand, lay bricks in horizontal then vertical pairs, we construct a ground to render a space our own. As light from a partial lunar eclipse diffuses down skylight walls, we rock and sluice, rock and sluice, fingertips fanned to fanned fingertips, debouch into plenitude. Venus vanishes in a brightening sky: the diamond ring of a solar eclipse persists. You did not have to fly to Zimbabwe in June 2001 to experience it. The day recalls Thirteen Death and One Deer when an end slips into a beginning. I recall mating butterflies with red dots on wings, the bow of a long liner thudding on waves, crescendo of water beginning to boil in a kettle, echoes of humpback whales. In silence, dancers concentrate on movements onstage; lilacs bud by a gate. As bits of consciousness constellate, I rouse to a 3 A.M. December rain on the skylight. A woman sweeps glass shards in a driveway, oblivious to elm branches reflected on windshields of passing cars. Juniper crackles in the fireplace; flukes break the water as a whale dives. The path of totality is not marked by a shadow hurtling across the earth’s surface at three thousand kilometers per hour. Our eyelashes attune to each other. At the mouth of an arroyo, a lamb skull and ribcage bleach in the sand; tufts of fleece caught on barbed wire vanish. The Shang carved characters in the skulls of their enemies, but what transpired here? You do not need to steep turtle shells in blood to prognosticate clouds. Someone dumps a refrigerator upstream in the riverbed while you admire the yellow blossoms of a golden rain tree. A woman weeds, sniffs fragrance from a line of onions in her garden; you scramble an egg, sip oolong tea. The continuous bifurcates into the segmented as the broken extends. Someone steals a newspaper while we doze. A tiger swallowtail lands on a patio columbine; a single agaric breaks soil by a hollyhock. Pushing aside branches of Russian olives to approach the Pojoaque River, we spot a splatter of flicker feathers in the dirt. Here chance and fate enmesh. Here I hold a black bowl rinsed with tea, savor the warmth at my fingertips, aroma of emptiness. We rock back and forth, back and forth on water. Fins of spinner dolphins break the waves; a whale spouts to the north-northwest. What is not impelled? Yellow hibiscus, zodiac, hairbrush; barbed wire, smog, snowflake—when I still my eyes, the moments dilate. Rain darkens gravel in the courtyard; shriveled apples on branches are weightless against dawn.

On Sundays, the preacher gives everyone a chance to repent their sins. Miss Edna makes me go to church. She wears a bright hat I wear my suit. Babies dress in lace. Girls my age, some pretty, some not so pretty. Old ladies and men nodding. Miss Edna every now and then throwing her hand in the air. Saying Yes, Lord and Preach! I sneak a pen from my back pocket, bend down low like I dropped something. The chorus marches up behind the preacher clapping and humming and getting ready to sing. I write the word HOPE on my hand.

The church knelt heavy above us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkered on little wood folding chairs where we gave our nickels, said our verses, heard the stories, sang the solid, swinging songs. It could have been God above in the pews, His restless love sifting with dust from the joists. We little seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light. Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, or how the winter air knifed after the dreamy basement. Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believing I was just watching light poke from the high, small window and tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrap my ankle, embrace any part of me.

Must be entered through the sharpener every Sunday, else your name will be lovingly written in the Book of the Down Arrow. The One Steeple to Every Church rule breaks in half in the Church of the Open Crayon Box; the One Bell to Every Steeple rule breaks off its tip. “Climb stairs to the steeples,” the preacher commands, “and let every belltone ring out!” You can see the whole town from the steeple, and you exit the church through the view, and you walk through what calls itself Flagpole—the town is a blot on the town, but the railroad is coming out this way and we must give them a smear to see through the windows: now you pass the General Store, that even your vaguest stick figure can enter, now you pass a vacant lot: the post office isn’t here yet, is only a set-aside space in the center of the country’s envelope; now you pass the voting- place, where we stuff our handwriting through a slit. Tall trees fall in the pinewoods, tall telegraph poles are raised, and words inch along our wires: text text text stop, text text text stop. And now you pass the Feed Store, which sells carrot and turnip and sugar-beet tops—only the visible parts—and now Whitey BaLavender’s Hardware, where everything hangs off the hook of its color, or color hangs off the hook of its all, where you work your hands into cool washers, and work hands into nailheads of the color blue, and watch Whitey BaLavender busy himself pouring crayons into bullet molds. You show him a list that says “ax,” and he sells you a red line through it. All up and down Main Street ponies are covered with strokes as coarse as horse blankets. And once you have drawn the ponies you begin to draw the saddle shop, you grip the right color like a saddle horn and somehow keep from falling off, and you ride to the edge of town, where you draw the fur trading post, where they sell tails of any shy animal, the rest of the animal gone down a hole, where you trade in your skin for a possibles bag and wear possibles bag where your skin was. Fat geese fly in any letter you like but you need red meat for once, and write a splayed- hide word like “Deerslayer,” and take hold of the ending and drag it home, and now you are almost there, now you are building the home with hand-drawn Log Cabin Font, you are building it log by log of course and smoothing the logs with a color called Adze, you are biting the crayon to notch the logs and driving in dots of nailheads. Stumps of umber surround you, and the sky is beginning to look like sky. You are hoping a man can be really alone here; you are hoping your father can tell what it is; and now only the doorknob is left to draw and in your enthusiasm you shout at the paper, and the weather changes just in time, not raining, beginning to spit.

That whine is the sound of waste, rot, the frantic, grinding inability to attend to anything but sere thwarting of yourself, a dry corrosion which some say they know, but you and I— (my jaw clenched as you turn a page, you with a heart like drywall, I who would lace my arms with razors, then press them slowly to your lips, the metal taste mixing with flesh, and through gritted teeth I making the sound of you, you, you do not know, meaning only me, me) we know best.

Whine as though a pine tree is bowing a broken violin, As though a bandsaw cleaves a thousand thin sheets of titanium; They chime like freight wheels on a Norfolk Southern slowing into town. But all you ever see is the silence. Husks, glued to the underside of maple leaves. With their nineteen fifties Bakelite lines they'd do just as well hanging from the ceiling of a space museum — What cicadas leave behind is a kind of crystallized memory; The stubborn detail of, the shape around a life turned The color of forgotten things: a cold broth of tea & milk in the bottom of a mug. Or skin on an old tin of varnish you have to lift with lineman's pliers. A fly paper that hung thirty years in Bird Cooper's pantry in Brighton.

Watch — Vasenka citizens do not know they are evidence of happiness in a time of war, each is a ripped-out document of laughter. God, deaf  have something to tell that not even they can hear — you will find me, God, like a dumb pigeon’s beak I am pecking every way at astonishment. If you climb a roof in the Central Square of a bombarded city, you will see my people and me — one neighbor thieves a cigarette another gives a dog a pint of sunlit beer.

On the first warm day, the aides fret about his pate, fetch his hat. I push him out the automatic doors into the pallid sun. Dad thinks we should stay put until all the Indians are back in their tepees,

In the film that doesn’t begin and never ends, a man wakes, drives to a country farmhouse where he finds the guests he knows from his recurring dream, each telling their own strange tale to him, the architect called in to pitch his new design—a fratricidal son, that ventriloquist whose dummy mouths his life— progressive horror, till from his nightmare the man wakes, drives to a country farmhouse where he finds the guests he knows from his recurring dream. . . . So with Dead of Night, Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle wake to their design, the universe a Steady State, a cloud that never moves from its mountaintop, one droplet added for every one lost. Or like our own bodies freshened cell by cell, creation continuous, God-less, and atoms bred from atoms from alchemical stars. You drive with Hoyle in the hills above Montalcino, the cloth merchant’s son, outspoken, caustic, truant, who would label you comically “The Big Bang Man,” arguing the probabilities: “What matter, Fred, creates itself?” “Nothing, my dear Georges, then in an instant a universe?” All that is, is, is spinning on a pencil point. And you in his dinner portrait of you, a Friday fast, coveting his steak, the enormous, undesired fish appearing to stay the same size however much you eat.

So much I thought was only personal, like poetry, like caring nothing for Caillebotte the man, like arriving in Chicago by bus one gray morning and having no place to go, going to the Art Institute and the rain outside became nothing next to the glorious gray of Paris, life-size. The artist dead and all my life, I thought, I've liked right things for wrong reasons. My sojourn among meticulous dreams continued. One summer I spent among smart children taking lessons and abuse from the famous mathematician who taught old words new:point, line, between. And the long nights of teaching each other other words, our fortunate failures. And the furious wind blew down from time to time among us, hurricanes which turned live oaks inside out like little minds, mine, for instance, finding its fervent mode. Remember that you, too, could live where men spit while watching you and your mother pass. That you want her for yourself alone. Remember that those men are tall as God at such moments, more mean. So walk among them, the afternoon cooling within its limits, the mosquitoes taking equally from black and white, true and false. But there was a peninsula of time I lived on when our family poverty left me the couch to sleep on, the great clock ticking terror through the night. Who can love through his childhood insomnia? Only rain could save me–those blessed gray nights of noise, when sleep, like Ali Baba's quartered brother, was sewn back together.