Poemunity — your poem community

Before my drift-wood fire I sit, And see, with every waif I burn, Old dreams and fancies coloring it, And folly’s unlaid ghosts return. O ships of mine, whose swift keels cleft The enchanted sea on which they sailed, Are these poor fragments only left Of vain desires and hopes that failed? Did I not watch from them the light Of sunset on my towers in Spain, And see, far off, uploom in sight The Fortunate Isles I might not gain? Did sudden lift of fog reveal Arcadia’s vales of song and spring, And did I pass, with grazing keel, The rocks whereon the sirens sing? Have I not drifted hard upon The unmapped regions lost to man, The cloud-pitched tents of Prester John, The palace domes of Kubla Khan? Did land winds blow from jasmine flowers, Where Youth the ageless Fountain fills? Did Love make sign from rose blown bowers, And gold from Eldorado’s hills? Alas! the gallant ships, that sailed On blind Adventure’s errand sent, Howe’er they laid their courses, failed To reach the haven of Content. And of my ventures, those alone Which Love had freighted, safely sped, Seeking a good beyond my own, By clear-eyed Duty piloted. O mariners, hoping still to meet The luck Arabian voyagers met, And find in Bagdad’s moonlit street, Haroun al Raschid walking yet, Take with you, on your Sea of Dreams, The fair, fond fancies dear to youth. I turn from all that only seems, And seek the sober grounds of truth. What matter that it is not May, That birds have flown, and trees are bare, That darker grows the shortening day, And colder blows the wintry air! The wrecks of passion and desire, The castles I no more rebuild, May fitly feed my drift-wood fire, And warm the hands that age has chilled. Whatever perished with my ships, I only know the best remains; A song of praise is on my lips For losses which are now my gains. Heap high my hearth! No worth is lost; No wisdom with the folly dies. Burn on, poor shreds, your holocaust Shall be my evening sacrifice! Far more than all I dared to dream, Unsought before my door I see; On wings of fire and steeds of steam The world’s great wonders come to me, And holier signs, unmarked before, Of Love to seek and Power to save,— The righting of the wronged and poor, The man evolving from the slave; And life, no longer chance or fate, Safe in the gracious Fatherhood. I fold o’er-wearied hands and wait, In full assurance of the good. And well the waiting time must be, Though brief or long its granted days, If Faith and Hope and Charity Sit by my evening hearth-fire’s blaze. And with them, friends whom Heaven has spared, Whose love my heart has comforted, And, sharing all my joys, has shared My tender memories of the dead,— Dear souls who left us lonely here, Bound on their last, long voyage, to whom We, day by day, are drawing near, Where every bark has sailing room. I know the solemn monotone Of waters calling unto me; I know from whence the airs have blown That whisper of the Eternal Sea. As low my fires of drift-wood burn, I hear that sea’s deep sounds increase, And, fair in sunset light, discern Its mirage-lifted Isles of Peace.

While the tennis ball went back and forth in time A girl was burning. While the tonic took its greeny Acid lime, a girl was burning. While the ruby sun fell From a cloud’s bent claws and Wimbledon was won And lost, we sprawled along the shore in chairs, We breathed the azure airs alongside A girl with the thinnest arms all scarred and scored With marks she’d made herself — She sat with us in flames That not all saw or saw but couldn’t say at risk Of seeming impolite. And later we’d all think Of the monk who’d doused himself with gas, Lit a match, then sat unmoving and alert amid Devouring light. She didn’t speak. She touched No aspect of our silly selves. I was the awkward guest everybody hardly knew. She was an almost ghost her mother saw Erasing the edges of herself each day Smudging the lines like charcoal while her parents Redrew her secretly into being over and Again each night and dawn and sleepless All years long. Having seen that mother’s love, I testify: It was ocean endless. One drop could’ve Brought to life the deadest Christ, and she Emptied herself into that blazing child with all her might And stared a hundred million miles into The girl’s slender, dwindling shape. Her father was the devoted king of helicopter pad And putting green. His baby burned as we All watched in disbelief. I was the facile friend of friends insisting on a hug Who hadn’t been along for years of doctors, wards, And protocols. I forced her sadness close. I said C’mon let’s hug it out. Her arms were white Birch twigs that scissored stiffly at my neck till she Slid on. That night we watched Some fireworks on the dewy lawn for it was Independence Day. Soon after, she was gone. She was the flaming tower we all dared To jump from. So she burned.

Someday compassion would demand I set myself free of my desire to recreate my father, indulge in my mother’s losses, strangle lovers with words, forcing them to confess for me and take the blame. Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet by sheet on the patio and gathered them into a pyre. I wanted to let them go in a blaze, tiny white dwarfs imploding beside the azaleas and ficus bushes, let them crackle, burst like winged seeds, let them smolder into gossamer embers— a thousand gray butterflies in the wind. Today was that day, but it rained, kept raining. Instead of fire, water—drops knocking on doors, wetting windows into mirrors reflecting me in the oaks. The garden walls and stones swelling into ghostlier shades of themselves, the wind chimes giggling in the storm, a coffee cup left overflowing with rain. Instead of burning, my pages turned into water lilies floating over puddles, then tiny white cliffs as the sun set, finally drying all night under the moon into papier-mâché souvenirs. Today the rain would not let their lives burn.

O Wave God      who broke through me today Sea Bream massive pink and silver cool swimming down with me watching staying away from the spear Volcano belly Keeper who lifted this island for our own beaded bodies adornment and sprinkles us all with his laugh— ash in the eve mist, or smoke, on the bare high limits— underwater lava flows easing to coral holes filled with striped feeding swimmers O Sky Gods      cartwheeling out of   Pacific turning rainsqualls over like lids on us then shine on our sodden— (scanned out a rainbow today at the cow drinking trough sluicing off LAKHS of crystal Buddha Fields right on the hair of the arm!) Who wavers right now in the bamboo: a half-gone waning moon. drank down a bowlful of shochu in praise of Antares gazing far up the lanes of Sagittarius richest stream of our sky— a cup to the center of the galaxy! and let the eyes stray right-angling the pitch of the Milky Way: horse-heads   rings clouds      too distant to be slide free. on the crest of the wave. Each night O Earth Mother I have wrappt my hand over the jut of your cobra-hood sleeping; left my ear All night long by your mouth. O   All Gods   tides   capes   currents Flows and spirals of pool and powers— As we hoe the field let sweet potato grow. And as sit us all down when we may To consider the Dharma bring with a flower and a glimmer. Let us all sleep in peace    together. Bless Masa and me as we marry at new moon         on the crater This summer. VIII 40067

What a thing it would be, if we all could fly. But to rise on air does not make you a bird. I’m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles. It’s spring, and everyone’s got something to puke. The things we puke: flights of stairs, a skyscraper soaring from the gut, the bills blow by on the April breeze followed by flurries of razor blades in May. It’s true, a free life is made of words. You can crumple it, toss it in the trash, or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining a permanent address in the sky. The postman hands you your flight of birds persisting in the original shape of wind. Whether they’re winging toward the scissors’ V or printed and plastered on every wall or bound and trussed, bamboo frames wound with wire or sentenced to death by fire you are, first and always, ash. Broken wire, a hurricane at each end. Fire trucks scream across the earth. But this blaze is a thing of the air. Raise your glass higher, toss it up and away. Few know this kind of dizzy glee: an empty sky, a pair of burning wings.

From the remains of his cremation, the monks recovered the seat of Thich Quang Duc’s consciousness — a bloodless protest to awaken the heart of the oppressor offered at the crossing of Phanh Dinh Phung & Le Van Duyet doused in gasoline & immolated by 4-meter flames the orange-robed arhat folded in the stillness of full lotus his body withering his crown blackening his flesh charring his corpse collapsing his heart refusing to burn his heart refusing to burn his heart refusing to burn

the voyage of st. brendan Books were Brendan’s love. At number one, Amazing Tales, a vast compendium. Within, he found the Mathematic Salmon, the Manticore, the breath-defying Dragon. The dog-head folks, called Cynocephali, a godless bunch who play the banjolele. The Arctic tribes who worship tiger seals, their ice-hickle cities on wagon wheels. The whale Jasconius, its mountain-back all porcupined with oak, and elm, and ash. And Inexpressible Isle, its ruined fort with butterfly judges, Heart’s Grief Court. In time, this diet of ripe and rum detail weighed on Brendan: he sickened, grew pale. He craved, instead, a simple common sense in keeping with his Rule of abstinence. “These things,” he cried, “are figments, folderols. The truth is here, at hand: a linnet’s carols, Kerry mountains, Christ upon his hook.” And Brendan made a fire, and burnt his book.

1. In the windless late sunlight of August, my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back, the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy rippled. I watched from a shallow hill as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck, galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced at the fire trench, circled back, arced again, the flames behind sketching first a C , then closing to O —a word or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart, gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence, some cinch-corral she might have known, the way the walls moved rhythmically, in and in. And to the crows, manic on the thermals? A crescent of their planet, gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter past the fence line, then settle on a Hereford's tufted nape, as if to peck some safer grain, as if the red-cast back it rode contained no transformations. 2. A seepage, then, from the fire's edge: there and there, the russet flood of rabbits. Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls began, shrill and wavering, as if their dormant voice strings had tightened into threads of glass. In an instant they were gone—the rabbits, their voices—over the fire trench, into the fallows. My father walked near the burn line, waved up to me, and from that wave, or the rippled film of heat, I remembered our porch in an August wind, how he stepped through the weathered doorway, his hand outstretched with some book-pressed flower, orchid or lily, withered to a parchment brown. Here, he said, but as he spoke it atomized before us— pulp and stem, the pollened tongue, dreadful in the dancing air. 3. Scummed and boxcar thin, six glass-walled houses stretched beside our fields. Inside them, lilies, lilies— a thousand shades of white, I think. Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax. Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed ancestral to me, the fluted heads of dowagers, their meaty, groping, silent tongues. They seemed to form perspective's chain: cinder, bone, divinity. . . 4. My father waved. The crows set down. By evening, our fields took the texture of freshened clay, a sleek and water-bloated sheen, although no water rested there—just heat and ash united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line, circled closer, the grasses all around me collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems— brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown to echo grass. The soot was warm, the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing, and as a breeze crossed slowly through, stems glowed—then ebbed— consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path, and then a kind of journey.

Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone. Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the smallest numbers. Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves, only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies.

Last time I had stamina and calluses and a bag of chalk. It hung from my lumbar like a bunny tail. Last time I was lighter and the ether better-emptied. Now blood is so close to my surface I slip off the walls. Tonight is the night of a massacre I do not look at. Although I have been to that city of bricks and black blooms. Therein I kissed a grave a million others kissed. A woman with a cigarette asked me for fire there and I provided it. I had been asked for light before but never fire. Tonight I climb three hundred stairs toward the light of my device. Maybe we’ll be wartime people leading wartime lives. Skirmishes have sprung from the heads of lesser gods. This is the light no one reads by we just stare into it. We wait for the glyphs that mean it is safe.