Poemunity — your poem community

La Belgique ne regrette rien Not with her ruined silver spires, Not with her cities shamed and rent, Perish the imperishable fires That shape the homestead from the tent. Wherever men are staunch and free, There shall she keep her fearless state, And homeless, to great nations be The home of all that makes them great.

Mother said to call her if the H-bomb exploded And I said I would, and it about did When Louis my brother robbed a service station And lay cursing on the oily cement in handcuffs. But by that time it was too late to tell Mother, She was too sick to worry the life out of her Over why why . Causation is sequence And everything is one thing after another. Besides, my other brother, Eddie, had got to be President, And you can't ask too much of one family. The chances were as good for a good future As bad for a bad one. Therefore it was surprising that, as we kept the newspapers from Mother, She died feeling responsible for a disaster unverified, Murmuring, in her sleep as it seemed, the ancient slogan Noblesse oblige.

How could I not? Have seen a man walk up to a piano and both survive. Have turned the exterminator away. Seen lipstick on a wine glass not shatter the wine. Seen rainbows in puddles. Been recognized by stray dogs. I believe reality is approximately 65% if. All rivers are full of sky. Waterfalls are in the mind. We all come from slime. Even alpacas. I believe we’re surrounded by crystals. Not just Alexander Vvedensky. Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard’s bullet did him in. Nonetheless. Nevertheless I believe there are many kingdoms left. The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather. A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life even though even though this is my second heart. Because the first failed, such was its opportunity. Was cut out in pieces and incinerated. I asked. And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart in a jar. Strange tangled imp. Wee sleekit in red brambles. You know what it feels like to hold a burning piece of paper, maybe even trying to read it as the flames get close to your fingers until all you’re holding is a curl of ash by its white ear tip yet the words still hover in the air? That’s how I feel now.

There is a two-headed goat, a four-winged chicken and a sad lamb with seven legs whose complicated little life was spent in Hopland, California. I saw the man with doubled eyes who seemed to watch in me my doubts about my spirit. Will it snag upon this aging flesh? There is a strawberry that grew out of a carrot plant, a blade of grass that lanced through a thick rock, a cornstalk nineteen-feet-two-inches tall grown by George Osborne of Silome, Arkansas. There is something grotesque growing in me I cannot tell. It has been waxing, burgeoning, for a long time. It weighs me down like the chains of the man of Lahore who began collecting links on his naked body until he crawled around the town carrying the last thirteen years of his life six-hundred-seventy pounds. Each link or each lump in me is an offense against love. I want my own lit candle lamp buried in my skull like the Lighthouse Man of Chungking, who could lead the travelers home. Well, I am still a traveler and I don’t know where I live. If my home is here, inside my breast, light it up! And I will invite you in as my first guest.

All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling work of turning a yard from the wild to a gardener’s will, I heard a bird singing from a hidden, though not distant, perch; a song of swift, syncopated syllables sounding like,Can you believe this, believe this, believe? Can you believe this, believe this, believe?

2810 El Paso Street, 1974 Solitary as a mast on a mountaintop, an ocean of knowing long withdrawn, she dittied the days, grew fluent in cat, felt, she said, each seed surreptitiously split the adamantine dark, believing green. It was the town's torpor washed me to her door, it was the itch existence stranded me on that shore of big-lipped shells pinked with altogether other suns, random wall-blobs impastoed with jewels and jowls sometimes a citizen seemed to peek through, inward and inward all the space and spice of her edible heavens. O to feel again within the molded dough wet pottery, buttery cosmos, brain that has not cooled; to bring to being an instant sculpture garden: five flashlit jackrabbits locked in black. From her I learned the earthworm's exemplary open-mindedness, its engine of discriminate shit. From her I learned all the nuances of neverness that link the gladiola to God. How gone she must be, graveless maybe, who felt the best death would be for friends to eat you, whose last name I never even knew: dirt-rich mouse-proud lady who Rubied me into a life so starred and laughtered there was no need for after.

1896 They christened my brother of old— And a saintly name he bears— They gave him his place to hold At the head of the belfry-stairs, Where the minster-towers stand And the breeding kestrels cry. Would I change with my brother a league inland? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I ! In the flush of the hot June prime, O’er sleek flood-tides afire, I hear him hurry the chime To the bidding of checked Desire; Till the sweated ringers tire And the wild bob-majors die. Could I wait for my turn in the godly choir? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! When the smoking scud is blown— When the greasy wind-rack lowers— Apart and at peace and alone, He counts the changeless hours. He wars with darkling Powers (I war with, a darkling sea); Would he stoop to my work in the gusty mirk? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not he! There was never a priest to pray, There was never a hand to toll, When they made me guard of the bay, And moored me over the shoal. I rock, I reel, and I roll— My four great hammers ply— Could I speak or be still at the Church’s will? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! The landward marks have failed, The fog-bank glides unguessed, The seaward lights are veiled, The spent deep feigns her rest: But my ear is laid to her breast, I lift to the swell—I cry! Could I wait in sloth on the Church’s oath? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! At the careless end of night I thrill to the nearing screw; I turn in the clearing light And I call to the drowsy crew; And the mud boils foul and blue As the blind bow backs away. Will they give me their thanks if they clear the banks? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not they! The beach-pools cake and skim, The bursting spray-heads freeze, I gather on crown and rim The grey, grained ice of the seas, Where, sheathed from bitt to trees, The plunging colliers lie. Would I barter my place for the Church’s grace? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! Through the blur of the whirling snow, Or the black of the inky sleet, The lanterns gather and grow, And I look for the homeward fleet. Rattle of block and sheet— ‘Ready about—stand by!’ Shall I ask them a fee ere they fetch the quay? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! I dip and I surge and I swing In the rip of the racing tide, By the gates of doom I sing, On the horns of death I ride. A ship-length overside, Between the course and the sand, Fretted and bound I bide Peril whereof I cry. Would I change with my brother a league inland? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I!

In the tower the bell is alone, like a man in his room, thinking and thinking. The bell is made of iron. It takes the weight of a man to make the bell move. Far below, the bell feels hands on a rope. It considers this. It turns its head. Miles away, a man in his room hears the clear sound, and lifts his head to listen.

When I was laughed at for my clumsy English, I touched my throat. Which said ear when my ear said year and year after year I pronounced a new thing wrong and other throats laughed. Elevator. Library. Vibrating bells in their mouths. How to say azalea. How to say forsythia. Say instead golden bells. Say I’m inESL. In French class a boy whose last name is Kring called me belle. Called me by my Korean name, pronouncing it wrong. Called it loudly, called attention to my alien. (I touched the globe moving in my throat, a hemisphere sinking.) Called me across the field lined with golden bells. I wanted to run and be loved at the same time. By Kring. As in ring of people.Where are you going? We’re laughing with you. The bell in our throat that rings with laughter is called uvula. From uva: grape. A theory: special to our species, this grape-bell has to do with speech. Which separates us from animals. Kring looked at me and said Just curious, do you eat dogs? and I wanted to end my small life. Be reborn a golden retriever of North America. Lie on a field lined with golden bells, loved. Today, in a country where dogs are more cherished than a foreign child, an Oregon Senate candidate says no to refugees. Says, years ago, Vietnamese refugees ate dogs, harvested other people’s pets.Harvest as in harvest grapes. Harvest as in harvest a field of golden rice. As do people from rice countries. As in people-eat-dog worlds. Years ago, 1923 Japan, the phrase jūgoen gojissen was used to set apart Koreans: say 15yen50sen. The colonized who used the chaos of the Kanto Earthquake to poison waters, set fire: a cruelty special to our species. A cruelty special to our species — how to say jūgo, how to say gojit, how jūgo sounds like die in Korean, how gojit sounds like lie— lie, lie, library, azalea, library. I’m going to the library, I lied, years ago, on a field lined with forsythia.

We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I'd never seen before, and the cries our breath made caught at the same time on the cold, and rising through the layers of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere that was this world, the girl breaking the surface after me and swimming out on the starless waters towards the lights of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks of the old stove factory unwinking. Turning at last to see no island at all but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight, and then a light and another riding low out ahead to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers walking alone. Back panting to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare fall on, the damp piles of clothes, and dressing side by side in silence to go back where we came from.