Poemunity — your poem community

My love looks like a girl to-night, But she is old. The plaits that lie along her pillow Are not gold, But threaded with filigree silver, And uncanny cold. She looks like a young maiden, since her brow Is smooth and fair, Her cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed. She sleeps a rare Still winsome sleep, so still, and so composed. Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams Of perfect things. She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream, And her dead mouth sings By its shape, like the thrushes in clear evenings.

1. Bridge’s absence gave the creek a new aspect. Uncrossable, irascible. Crosser stems on the bank with her will and form, extension “Phantom of incapacity which is me.” Bright roar of water, x of indomitability. 2. The bridge is not an x. It bridges nothing. The turmoil is only a portion. 3. Bridge on the grass is brideless. Tufts of terra like a bloom in air. Rational slats, a surface’s accretion, slat system. Grass tints it, heliotropic emanation, sharp, up, or complex occupation in shiving rain. 4. Creek’s uncrossability, a new beauty. “It looked like the process of a thinking, deep run.” It became the suffering of form and mute suggestion. The syllables were not perennial. They broke and grew. 5. The blue pants of the crosser were neither sky nor water. They orient to the body as form and boundary. The crosser’s green shirt neither grass nor leaf-thought. Desire to not get wet, another hurt. 6. “Glamour of limit, where the rocks just slant” down the bank, in a wet stratification, and the creek spills blows and goings and is omniform leaving, a prime of seem. 7. High water as a contour of relation swells, hurls. The creek which was other but not antipodal, or refusal. “The wish to touch it with my phenomenal hand” loves it as material. 8. The bridge made the force containable. Bridgeless the crosser sits, and very still. “My phenomenal body crosses and longs.” Ceaseless body of the audible.

A bridge engineer, Mr. Crumpett, Built a bridge for the good River Bumpett. A mistake in the plan Left a gap in the span, But he said, “Well, they'll just have to jump it.”

The bridge barely curved that connects the terrible with the tender. —Rilke 1 The children play at the Luxembourg fountain. Their small ships catch wind and sail out and come round again. 2 Sometime between 250 and 200 B.C. fishermen and boatmen of the tribe Parisii discovered and built their huts on the largest island in the River Seine. Celtic Lutetia, “Town surround- ed by water,” thus was born there. The island is shaped like a boat— and this figure became a part of the capital’s coat-of-arms. So this was the start of the City first named for its engulfing water (on whose economy it depended), then after the people themselves: members of the tribe of Paris. We listen to these water folk and know they hear us, for we are born out of boats and out of water. The first sound we hear is the heart knocking quiet as a boat docks: and we all dissolve to island, earth and tears later. 3 And into air and fire! Once in the Latin Quarter in a space formed for him by waves of bright loiterers near the shortest street named for the Cat Who Catches Fish— or who (with slight inflection) “sins”— I watched a dark young man, naked to his thin waist, push long plumes of flame into the air above our awed faces raised there. From the sharp heat inside and out, his head and chest glowed in the night with an aura of oil or sweat. Thirsting, he drank again from a sponge of kerosene and breathed out long strings of fire and smoke into the Street of the Harp. Dark ash dropped back upon his face and cap, which lay open on the cobbled road waiting for coins from all who guessed at the mystery in what he’d done. He built a vast pillar of fire as if to guide us, then suddenly stopped, walked across the space, and kissed a reaching child (to bless and heal that amazed head), waved gratefully to us who now filled his cap with alms, and, smiling and burned (I saw scars beneath his raised arm), he sailed up that narrowing street in a wildly bal- looning white shirt we had watched him casually don to cover his vestment of skin. 4 For centuries that old City ended its west boundary in a small archipelago separated from the main island by the Seine’s two arms. It was on one of these small islets that Philip the Fair about the year 1314 had raised up a stake for the grand master, Order of Templars, whom he condemned, then from the palace window watched him burn. These little islands, quickened with their ghost victim’s screams, were joined in the sixteenth century by the decree of Henry Third (and by a great engineering feat Faust could envy) to the main island of the City. This new western tip was given the name of a park, “Vert Galant,” nickname of Henry Fourth: “The Gay old Spark.” Near there I watched in a loud street a white-haired man stand with one foot on the curb, the other in the cobbled street, and play an old mandolin. He was dressed in a black and frayed tuxedo and played with intense passion, sadly, but this desperate, dignified man, transformed by his art and by poverty (his case kept open for money), could not play the mandolin. —He just strummed the same chord again and again and again ... 5 It was also Philip the Fair who created an aristocratic prison air by building the blocks-long Gothic Conciergerie. The best view is from the Right Bank: The Slaughter House Quay (which now is a market for pets). You can see the four recently cleaned towers reflect- ed in the Seine. (At the Seine in fall, beneath the red and gold leaves, you see the rust, mahogany and beige boats gently jostle together at the shore and wait.) On the right: the crenelated Bonbec Tower stays. Bonbec means “babbler,” for this place was used through the centuries as a torture chamber. The right one of the twin towers, Argent, held treasure. Still the gorgeous Horloge Tower on the left corner of the ancient building across from the Bridge of Change houses the giant clock which gave its name to that quay: in its field of blue the many great gold fleurs-de-lys and the two life-sized mythical women, one with a fascicle of wheat, one with a balanced scale raised high in the clock, whose silver chime used to toll the hours for the monarch. (This was melted down in those days when Terror struck.) In this turreted place we have shaved the graceful neck and head of Marie Antoinette, ripped her white, ruffled collar wide and wrapped the cuff of rope about her hands behind her back. We made her face the casual knitting women and men making fists sitting on steps in the “May Court” (where a fresh tree was placed each spring by the lawyers’ clerks!) on her way to the guillotine. Its blade was heavy as primeval stone: she, the chemist Lavoisier, Charlotte Corday, poet and brother André Chénier, Madame du Barry—all 2600 who died, having said their last farewells in the Women‘s Courtyard, twelve per day underneath the blade! and some were disemboweled beside. Was there sometimes an image of beauty in their minds at the last? Perhaps on white sands beside the blue-black sea a matched pair of roan horses galloping together in the bright spume, riderless. Or a nude young man and woman lying together touching in a field of flowers? 6 Nearby on this Island the gargoyles of Notre Dame gawk in ancient horror and some forever gnaw on stone rabbits in the parapets or wail in winged, formal misery outside the set limits of the orthodox Church— all glory happening within the walls where they squat: so hunched, so beaked, so horrorstruck. 7 A wing of the May Courtyard where the condemned waited “Monsieur de Paris” as executioners were named now adjoins the building of glass and light, with no walls, it seems, jewel of Sainte Chapelle, its windows of rose and blue, gold, green, yellow, purple, rising fifty feet: its spire piercing the foliate, layered, many-colored egg of the vault of heaven, showering all the primal hues and shadows given— bright as the truth reflected in a drop of fresh blood or the colors of the body’s inner organs hid- den before the sure explosion of light that hits them at the moment of violent death. —This is a time like that of the sun that once a year, just at the dawn of winter solstice, lights up an ancient Celtic stone grave, striking the bones spread on shelves with all the colors of the flesh. 8 Who can stand these juxtapositions of person and place and time? I walk across the Bridge of Change where I have so often watched by the towers of the Conciergerie. Now, water laves a little higher up the stair from the River to the Quay, hiding some of the steps from me. Boats nudge at the edge. I walk along the Boulevard past the great gold and blue corner clock, the ornate wrought-iron gate and fence of the Place of Justice (its name changed from the time of kings), past the shadow and spire of Sainte Chapelle. I cross the Bridge of Saint Michel into the Latin Quarter. But I do not look for the Street of the Cat Who Fishes or the Street of the Harp. I turn right, wandering a bit, and suddenly, as if by chance, find myself at this street, and here I will wait, for it is our street,Rue Gît le Coeur: Here Lies the Heart. for Roger Aplon—1975

Our eye goes past the hieroglyphic tree to the swimmer carving a wake in the water. And almost to the railroad bridge from which the swimmer might have dived. Then, as though come to the end of its tether, our gaze returns, pulling toward the blemish on the surface of the print. An L-shaped chemical dribble, it sabotages the scene’s transparence and siphons off its easy appeal. At the same time, the blemish joins together the realms of seer and swimmer in our experience of plunging into and out of the image.

That there are things that can never be the same about my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious but also lacking in courage, That from this yard I have been composing a great speech, that I write about myself, that it’s good to be a poet, that I look like the drawing of a house that was pencilled by a child, that curiously, I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides, that I love the ocean and its foam against the sky, That I am sneezing like a lion in this garden that he knows the lilies of his Nile, distant image, breakfast, a flock of birds and sparrows from the sky, That I am not the husband of Cassiopeia, that I am not the southern fish, that I am not the last poet of civilization, that if I want to go out for a walk and then to find myself beneath a bank of trees, weary, that this is the life that I had, That curiously I miss the sound of the rain pounding on the roof and also all of Oakland, that I miss the sounds of sparrows dropping from the sky, that there are sparks behind my eyes, on the radio, and the distant sound of sand blasters, and breakfast, and every second of it, geometric, smoke from the chimney of the trees where I was small, That in January, I met him in a bar, we went home together, there was a lemon tree in the back yard, and a coffee house where we stood outside and kissed, That I have never been there, curiously, and that it never was the same, the whole of the island, or the paintings of the stars, fatherly, tied to sparrows as they drop down from the sky, O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still these assignments in the night, to remember the texture of the leaves on the locust trees in August, under the moonlight, rounded, through a window in the hills, That if I stay beneath the pole star in this harmony of crickets that will sing, the bird sound on the screen, the wide eyes of the owl form of him still in the dark, blue, green, with shards of the Pacific, That I do not know the dreams from which I have come, sent into the world without the blessing of a kiss, behind the willow trees, beside the darkened pansies on the deck beside the ships, rocking, I have written this, across the back of the sky, wearing a small and yellow shirt, near the reptile house, mammalian, no bigger than the herd, That I wrote the history of the war waged between the Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks, beside the sea, I, Thucydides, having written this, having grown up near the ocean.

I stood on the bridge at midnight, As the clocks were striking the hour, And the moon rose o'er the city, Behind the dark church-tower. I saw her bright reflection In the waters under me, Like a golden goblet falling And sinking into the sea. And far in the hazy distance Of that lovely night in June, The blaze of the flaming furnace Gleamed redder than the moon. Among the long, black rafters The wavering shadows lay, And the current that came from the ocean Seemed to lift and bear them away; As, sweeping and eddying through them, Rose the belated tide, And, streaming into the moonlight, The seaweed floated wide. And like those waters rushing Among the wooden piers, A flood of thoughts came o’er me That filled my eyes with tears. How often, O, how often, In the days that had gone by, I had stood on that bridge at midnight And gazed on that wave and sky! How often, O, how often, I had wished that the ebbing tide Would bear me away on its bosom O’er the ocean wild and wide! For my heart was hot and restless, And my life was full of care, And the burden laid upon me Seemed greater than I could bear. But now it has fallen from me, It is buried in the sea; And only the sorrow of others Throws its shadow over me. Yet whenever I cross the river On its bridge with wooden piers, Like the odor of brine from the ocean Comes the thought of other years. And I think how many thousands Of care-encumbered men, Each bearing his burden of sorrow, Have crossed the bridge since then. I see the long procession Still passing to and fro, The young heart hot and restless, And the old subdued and slow! And forever and forever, As long as the river flows, As long as the heart has passions, As long as life has woes; The moon and its broken reflection And its shadows shall appear, As the symbol of love in heaven, And its wavering image here.

I love. Wouldn't we all like to start a poem with "I love . . ."? I would. I mean, I love the fact there are parallel lines in the word "parallel," love how words sometimes mirror what they mean. I love mirrors and that stupid tale about Narcissus. I suppose there is some Narcissism in that. You know, Narcissism, what you remind me to avoid almost all the time. Yeah, I love Narcissism. I do. But what I really love is ice cream. Remember how I told you no amount of ice cream can survive a week in my freezer. You didn't believe me, did you? No, you didn't. But you know now how true that is. I love that you know my Achilles heel is none other than ice cream— so chilly, so common. And I love fountain pens. I mean I just love them. Cleaning them, filling them with ink, fills me with a kind of joy, even if joy is so 1950. I know, no one talks about joy anymore. It is even more taboo than love. And so, of course, I love joy. I love the way joy sounds as it exits your mouth. You know, the word joy. How joyous is that. It makes me think of bubbles, chandeliers, dandelions. I love the way the mind runs that pathway from bubbles to dandelions. Yes, I love a lot. And right here, walking down this street, I love the way we make a bridge, a suspension bridge —almost as beautiful as the Golden Gate Bridge—swaying as we walk hand in hand.

I regard your affections, find your teeth have left me a bruise necklace. Those lipstick marks leech a trail, ear to ear, facsimile your smile. Your 40 ounces of malt liquor, your shrink hate, your eyes dialing 911. The hearts you draw with ballpoint on my cigarette packs when I've left the room, penned in your girl's cursive, look demented, misshapen approximations of what I refuse to hand over. It's a nice touch, though: a little love to accompany the cancer. My thought follows you to where you spend your days lying in bed, smoking and reading the Beats. The accumulation of clothes and ashes circles you, rising like a moat after rainfall. Often you are a study in detachment—the trigger eye is your eye, still as a finger poised to press should one refuse to cooperate, and I wonder how you can hate men so much when you think like one. Think of what I could be doing outside if I could unlock the door of myself: think bikini, think soda fountain, think tradition, a day lacking entirely your brand of ambivalence. If you were a number, I'd subtract you; if you were a sentence, I'd rewrite you. Are you the one who left these wilted flowers, are you the one whose PIN spells out H-O-L-E? Why are you wearing my clothes? If you are weather, then I am a town, closing down at word of your coming: you're a glacier on fast forward, you're direct as a detour, when I say good-bye you move in next door. You say you want to have my baby, you want to buy me a car, and you're too young to enter a bar. I should tether you to a tree in the dark park, allow the moon to stroke your white neck. I should give you a diamond collar, walk you around the block and show you off.

#1 [COLLEGE] We packed your satchel with sweatshirts, Soccer equipment, and The Elements of Style, Loaded up the Hum Vee, a sad drive to JFK And the cross-country flight to starting college, where fortunately due to Advanced Placement Courses you’ve already been awarded your MFA And published your first book. As we pulled out of the driveway, I slammed On the brakes, and not on account of Jubilation, The neighbor’s cat. “Stacey,” I said, “we have jumped the gun.” “I didn’t know we had a gun, Pops,” you said. “This is a figure of speech, a melonaphore. But you can’t go to college yet, Stacey, you’re barely by my count five years old.” “That’s all right, Daddy-O, nice try. But my name’s not Stacey.” #2 [PUPPY] Love this puppy and your love will be repaid. I can’t stress how little this will teach you about life. Which it will. Which is a lot. Sometimes, when you’re sad, I won’t know what to say. Desire will cut into the bone. So much we need to cover before you’re on your own. This is a tea kettle, where goldfish won’t feel at home. When I was your age, before you were born, A war was almost certainly about to break out. The Russians turned out to be just like us, Only worse drivers, which is a lot like us, too. I had a pet once, too, you know. An accordion. Very tough to train, stained with fluids as it was About which nothing further need be said. Your questions matter. No, they really do. I have no clue as to the white carnations, No reason to suppose the stars were not meant for you. #3 [FISH] “Do fish sleep?” I am so glad you asked. Once Upon a time fish did not even catnap. Childhood has reached a certain point. More specific than that, I cannot be, Or less. When you drive to Chartres You can see it coming at you far away. Never pass up a cathedral if you can. Drink lots of water with the strawberries. Leap before you look too hard, which makes Things swim in your head, like fish that never sleep. #4 [BIRDS…] “Time’s come to talk to you about the birds.” “And the bees?” “What do you know about the bees?” “Was just asking.” “A falcon is one bird you can’t keep in a cage, I can’t explain why, though I might point To history for many instructive precedents.” “You have trouble explaining, Dad.” “Anyway, what I like about birds is, they’re much Like dreams—they fly in through a window Where you didn’t know there was a window before.” “I get it. We open to the known and discover Mysteries left in their place, like putting under the pillow A tooth that fell out and you come up with the cash When you need it in the morning, for school.” “Let’s stay focussed, Amy.” “Sure, Reginald.” “I mind it that you call me Reginald, who’s he?” “Someday, Dad, I may fall in love.” “Let’s go back to the birds. I don’t want to say Love is for the ornithologists, though such thoughts occur. Maybe the real topic is experience.” “I knew that.” “When?” “You told me.” “I never.” “Didn’t have to.” “That’s how, you just know?” “Life’s a vale of tears, Pops, except when it’s not.” “Hence, sweetheart, some birds thrive in cages.” “Name three.” “I want you to try on some wings. I want you to take flight. Like the day I gave birth…” “What?” “The day I gave birth to you was the day of days.” “You feeling OK?” “The epidural worked like a charm, I felt like I was swimming in air.” “I think you’re confused.” “I wouldn’t be the first, but when they handed you to me You nursed till you fell asleep.” “You’re talking about love.” “And some bees sting.” #5 [BOND] Once we had a bond, a sacred trust. I carried you on my shoulders, we watched The finches dart and feed, I read The Odyssey To you, which OK was a stretch, but who cared You did not exist? Certainly, not me. But take the example of Homer. Would you just give me a chance? There’s an old dog called Argus Who waits for the hero to show before he dies. I’m getting to the point. If we never had a dog I would wait for you to arrive from a journey Forced upon you by chance and fate. You see, the whole thing’s about waiting. There you are off-stage readying yourself For a grand entrance into a life none of us Heretofore presumed. I myself ache Barometrically in concert with the coming storms. If you never are, I have something left over Even if it’s only me, watching you wade in, as if You were a great swimmer and this world another shore.