Poemunity — your poem community

All trembling in my arms Aminta lay, Defending of the bliss I strove to take; Raising my rapture by her kind delay, Her force so charming was and weak. The soft resistance did betray the grant, While I pressed on the heaven of my desires; Her rising breasts with nimbler motions pant; Her dying eyes assume new fires. Now to the height of languishment she grows, And still her looks new charms put on; Now the last mystery of Love she knows, We sigh, and kiss: I waked, and all was done. ‘Twas but a dream, yet by my heart I knew, Which still was panting, part of it was true: Oh how I strove the rest to have believed; Ashamed and angry to be undeceived!

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see or the child’s older self, a poet, a woman dreaming when she should be typing the last report of the day. If this were a map, she thinks, a map laid down to memorize because she might be walking it, it shows ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert here and there a sign of aquifers and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map it would be the map of the last age of her life, not a map of choices but a map of variations on the one great choice. It would be the map by which she could see the end of touristic choices, of distances blued and purpled by romance, by which she would recognize that poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co., mass-produced yet durable, being here now, is what it is yet a dream-map so obdurate, so plain, she thinks, the material and the dream can join and that is the poem and that is the late report. October/November 1987

I saw the hand of Rasputin cast in bronze and used as an oversized paperweight on someone’s desk. The authentic hand. Smooth as Italian leather. It was molded from plaster before he was killed. Bought at an auction in Europe. She was a collector. She knew the value of everything. I wouldn’t like Rasputin’s hand on my desk, even though it wore the skin over its fine bones like a soft glove and healed the tsarevitch. I wouldn’t like her Samurai sword. I’m glad I don’t know what I’m worth. There are days when the whole world feels like somebody else’s collection. Even your hands. We walk in another country and the mist slowly rises above the lake like the heaviness we left, dissolving. Only it’s not our heaviness. * Sometimes, waking, I forget where I am. The things around me go on with their old existence like props in a play, as if the curtain has just risen on a room in an Italian villa. It’s not my play. In the old life there was a photo of Valentino on my desk. Agnes Ayers was swooning in his arms, the Sheik in a rapture of lips without any words. Benevolent uncles spoke in a language. I didn’t know, their fleshy hands, their anxious eyes smiling as they patted me gently on the head. Like watching a silent movie, when they opened their mouths like fish under water I turned off the sound. All that sweet absence. * Once I learned the thirteen principles of Rabbi Salanter, but I remember only seven: truth, diligence, honor, repose, cleanliness, frugality, and silence. If I collected words they would have to belong, like moss or fleas. Things you say that I can believe in. Honor reminds me too much of the Samurai. I like repose. It belongs to this landscape where even the lizards rest when we stand still and look at the wall together. Naming the things of this world you begin to own them. Cyclamen. Mustard. I can’t manage so many flowers. But I already know the word for lake in Italian. * Gulls wheel over Lago di Como at sundown on their way south trying to catch the last warm currents. Their wings are white, then silver, and then smoke when the light abandons them and dusk settles in their feathers. If you don’t collect things, it’s easier to move. Easier to stand on this cliff for another minute and watch the leaves fall, one by one, yellow, into the lake. They belong to the air for the time they are drifting. It’s a long way down.

He has five children, I’m papa to a hundred pencils. I bought the chair he sat in from a book of chairs, staplers and spikes that let me play Vlad the Impaler with invading memos. When I said I have to lay you off a parallel universe was born in his face, one where flesh is a loose shirt taken to the river and beaten against rocks. Just by opening my mouth I destroyed his faith he’s a man who can think honey-glazed ham and act out the thought with plastic or bills. We sat. I stared at my hands, he stared at the wall staring at my hands. I said other things about the excellent work he’d done and the cycles of business which are like the roller-coaster thoughts of an oscilloscope. All this time I saw the eyes of his wife which had always been brown like almonds but were now brown like the crust of bread. We walked to the door, I shook his hand, felt the bones pretending to be strong. On his way home there was a happy song because de Sade invented radio, the window was open, he saw delphinium but couldn’t remember the name. I can only guess. Maybe at each exit that could have led his body to Tempe, to Mars, he was tempted to forget his basketball team of sons, or that he ever liked helping his wife clean carrots, the silver sink turning orange. Running’s natural to most animals who aren’t part of a lecture series on Nature’s Dead Ends. When I told him, I saw he was looking for a place in his brain to hide his brain. I tried that later with beer, it worked until I stood at the toilet to make my little waterfall, and thought of him pushing back from a bar to go make the same noise.

It is so goddamn hot in our country that blooms —jacarandas, bougainvilleas, flamboyants— erupt in a shock of fuchsia from pipes laced with rust. Hokoyo! Step too close and your skin will crisp up like a chicken in hot Olivine. Everyone will see the fat sizzling from your innards. It is so hot that locusts drop in pools around your feet, their musical legs all melted. In our nation a waterfall is a cauldron of steaming falsehoods. S m o k e    t h u n d e r s … Maize simply withers in the miserly shade of thorns. Men quiver at cock’s crow and hang their cattle out to dry. Pumpkins turn to gourds. Midnight flushes out hunger. Ngozi dart in disregard across the oozing tar. Ach man, spare us your sermons concerning our weeknight brews: the problem we are facing now is the drunkard who drains his own water pot, leaving the mother of his children with one thing only: pure grit. Rhinos are shrinking Filthy crawfish bloat. Our grandmother is just seated as if death were a bus running late. We have now reached the stage where lackeys are openly trafficking dragon fruit, smuggling them through customs as if they were Marange diamonds. Meanwhile, at the small house, their scrawny young girlfriends are just hassling the houseboys. Our eyes run all through October, slash-and-burnt like rhizomes. We hear the drum’s skin crackling as it curls. We smell the coming rain. Archangel, your time draws near.

in the stream [1] look, the duck-rabbits swim between. The Mill Race at Granta Place tosses them from form to form, dissolving bodies in the spume. Given A and see [2] find be [3] (look at you, don’t look at me) [4] Given B, see A and C. that’s what metaphor [5] is for. Date and place in the expression of a face [6] provide the frame for an instinct to rename, [7] to try to hold apart Gestalt and Art. [1] Of consciousness [2] The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception. [3] And at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged. [4] Do not ask yourself “How does it work with me?” Ask “What do I know about someone else?” [5] Here it is useful to introduce the idea of a picture-object. [6] A child can talk to picture-men or picture-animals. It can treat them as it treats dolls. [7] Hence the flashing of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half thought.

God’s blood beads on the tarmac and something rough is boiling up just this side of the vanishing point, so it’s probably time to get off this stretch of blacktop and into the wayside bar, where every cup runneth over and you breast a thickening fret of stogie smoke to get to the dank back room where a high stakes game turns against you despite your trey of jacks, and soon enough you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame, with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff, the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash. . . So it’s into the crapper and out through the window—you’re free to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame from the hard-shoulder spillage doesn’t travel as far as the scree of garbage in the lay-by, so long as that’s not your name in the red top front-page splash on the trailer-trash kidnappee. . . Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery— what brought you to this and who might take the blame, and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea.

Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark charmèd, rook racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped & poisèd powers; Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural, rural keeping — folk, flocks, and flowers. Yet ah! this air I gather and I release He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace; Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece; Who fired France for Mary without spot.

In time and measure perfect moves All Art whose aim is sure; Evolving rhyme and stars divine Have rules, and they endure. Nor less the Fleet that warred for Right, And, warring so, prevailed, In geometric beauty curved, And in an orbit sailed. The rebel at Port Royal felt The Unity overawe, And rued the spell. A type was here, And victory of LAW.

Lie down—lie down!—my noble hound, That joyful bark give o’er; It wakes the lonely echoes round, But rouses me no more— Thy lifted ears, thy swelling chest, Thy eyes so keenly bright, No longer kindle in my breast The thrill of fierce delight; When following thee on foaming steed My eager soul outstripped thy speed— Lie down—lie down—my faithful hound! And watch this night by me, For thee again the horn shall sound By mountain, stream, and tree; And thou along the forest glade, Shall track the flying deer When cold and silent, I am laid In chill oblivion here. Another voice shall cheer thee on, And glory when the chase is won. Lie down—lie down!—my gallant hound! Thy master’s life is sped; Go—couch thee on the dewy ground— ’Tis thine to watch the dead. But when the blush of early day Is kindling up the sky, Then speed thee, faithful friend, away, And to thy mistress hie; And guide her to this lonely spot, Though my closed eyes behold her not— Lie down—lie down!—my trusty hound! Death comes, and we must part— In my dull ear strange murmurs sound— More faintly throbs my heart; The many twinkling lights of heaven Scarce glimmer in the blue— Chill round me falls the breath of even, Cold on my brow the dew; Earth, stars, and heavens, are lost to sight— The chase is o’er!—brave friend, good night!—