Poemunity — your poem community

Just north of town, a quaint Sargasso Sea for bric-a-brac: the barn, itself antique, spills over with a grab-bag panoply of outworn stock revalued as “unique.” Typewriters tall as headstones fill the loft where they’ve been ricked away like sacks of grain; a coffer yawns the must of oak—gone soft— when one man, squinting, lifts the lid to feign intrigue. Nearby, his wife surveys the smalls: art deco bangles bright as harpsichords, a glut of iron trivets, Christmas balls, Depression glass and warping Ouija boards. One man’s junk is another’s all the same. They don’t buy much, but that’s not why they came.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself;myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.

I painted a phoenix in bright colors cut it in nine pieces and cooked it in a pot at the mountaintop. I stirred it as if cranking reels of a movie. Unraveled were a series of faces in mosaic. Kurosawa appeared. He asked me what my story was about. Tongue-tied, I could not answer. He handed me a token with a silvery eagle engraved, ready to fly. How real I thought everything was in my dream! In my waking hour, I see the remnant of the war between my head and heart. Now in cease-fire, my chest is filled with the fresh breeze of serenity. I begin to breathe gently as my story is unraveled like in a movie. No longer haunted, my love of God soars as I see my guardian angel smile in the clear blue sky, transforming to one gigantic phoenix. My wandering in the wilderness of the mind has taught me a little wisdom. I believe my dreams are real as my life is a dream.

As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being! I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together as were the dead souls in the living room, gathered about my mother, some of them taking care to pass beneath the beam of the movie projector, some record playing on the victrola, and all of them desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell I turned to the young man on my right and asked, “How is it, there?” And he begged me protestingly don’t ask, we are poor poor. And the whole room was suddenly posters and presentations of brake linings and other automotive accessories, cardboard displays, the dead roaming from one to another as bored back in life as they are in hell, poor and doomed to mere equipments my mother, as alive as ever she was, asleep when I entered the house as I often found her in a rocker under the lamp, and awaking, as I came up to her, as she ever had I found out she returns to the house once a week, and with her the throng of the unknown young who center on her as much in death as other like suited and dressed people did in life O the dead! and the Indian woman and I enabled the blue deer to walk and the blue deer talked, in the next room, a Negro talk it was like walking a jackass, and its talk was the pressing gabber of gammers of old women and we helped walk it around the room because it was seeking socks or shoes for its hooves now that it was acquiring human possibilities In the five hindrances men and angels stay caught in the net, in the immense nets which spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets which hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels and the demons and men go up and down Walk the jackass Hear the victrola Let the automobile be tucked into a corner of the white fence when it is a white chair. Purity is only an instant of being, the trammels recur In the five hindrances, perfection is hidden I shall get to the place 10 minutes late. It will be 20 minutes of 9. And I don’t know, without the car, how I shall get there O peace, my mother, I do not know how differently I could have done what I did or did not do. That you are back each week that you fall asleep with your face to the right that you are present there when I come in as you were when you were alive that you are as solid, and your flesh is as I knew it, that you have the company I am used to your having but o, that you all find it such a cheapness! o peace, mother, for the mammothness of the comings and goings of the ladders of life The nets we are entangled in. Awake, my soul, let the power into the last wrinkle of  being, let none of the threads and rubber of the tires be left upon the earth. Let even your mother go. Let there be only paradise The desperateness is, that the instant which is also paradise (paradise is happiness) dissolves into the next instant, and power flows to meet the next occurrence Is it any wonder my mother comes back? Do not that throng rightly seek the room where they might expect happiness? They did not complain of life, they obviously wanted the movie, each other, merely to pass among each other there, where the real is, even to the display cards, to be out of hell The poverty of hell O souls, in life and in death, make, even as you sleep, even in sleep know what wind even under the crankcase of the ugly automobile lifts it away, clears the sodden weights of goods, equipment, entertainment, the foods the Indian woman, the filthy blue deer, the 4 by 3 foot ‘Viewbook,’ the heaviness of the old house, the stuffed inner room lifts the sodden nets and they disappear as ghosts do, as spider webs, nothing before the hand of man The vent! You must have the vent, or you shall die. Which means never to die, the ghastliness of going, and forever coming back, returning to the instants which were not lived O mother, this I could not have done, I could not have lived what you didn’t, I am myself netted in my own being I want to die. I want to make that instant, too, perfect O my soul, slip the cog II The death in life (death itself) is endless, eternity is the false cause The knot is other wise, each topological corner presents itself, and no sword cuts it, each knot is itself its fire each knot of which the net is made is for the hands to untake the knot’s making. And touch alone can turn the knot into its own flame (o mother, if you had once touched me o mother, if I had once touched you) The car did not burn. Its underside was not presented to me a grotesque corpse. The old man merely removed it as I looked up at it, and put it in a corner of the picket fence like was it my mother’s white dog? or a child’s chair The woman, playing on the grass, with her son (the woman next door) was angry with me whatever it was slipped across the playpen or whatever she had out there on the grass And I was quite flip in reply that anyone who used plastic had to expect things to skid and break, that I couldn’t worry that her son might have been hurt by whatever it was I sent skidding down on them. It was just then I went into my house and to my utter astonishment found my mother sitting there as she always had sat, as must she always forever sit there her head lolling into sleep? Awake, awake my mother what wind will lift you too forever from the tawdriness, make you rich as all those souls crave crave crave to be rich? They are right. We must have what we want. We cannot afford not to. We have only one course: the nets which entangle us are flames O souls, burn alive, burn now that you may forever have peace, have what you crave O souls, go into everything, let not one knot pass through your fingers let not any they tell you you must sleep as the net comes through your authentic hands What passes is what is, what shall be, what has been, what hell and heaven is is earth to be rent, to shoot you through the screen of flame which each knot hides as all knots are a wall ready to be shot open by you the nets of being are only eternal if you sleep as your hands ought to be busy. Method, method I too call on you to come to the aid of all men, to women most who know most, to woman to tell men to awake. Awake, men, awake I ask my mother to sleep. I ask her to stay in the chair. My chair is in the corner of the fence. She sits by the fireplace made of paving stones. The blue deer need not trouble either of us. And if she sits in happiness the souls who trouble her and me will also rest. The automobile has been hauled away.

As we are so wonderfully done with each other We can walk into our separate sleep On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers My hands are hallowed where they touched over your soft curving. It is good to be weary from that brilliant work It is being God to feel your breathing under me A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . . Don’t let anyone in to wake us.

Loot my point of view, hove my heart free from its hived booth though I know your smoke, its black blossom, is a substance I’ll never become: colors of plaster and grass I’ve prepped flawlessly, rivers I’ve whittled thin. It’s a personal matter to me, the wind. But let it be our cathedral feeling: a sculpture of ash dragging its robe over the hills because of us, because of me. Yellow is hurried, but red moves like a swarm through toothpick homes, pans over roofs, where the ethos we child from the ground will blacken to ruin. Let’s glory this roughened nap of landscape, this parched Arcadia, with one nude-struck match and a breeze.

& as you bow your heads to pray /      pray a silent prayer around a chicken who lies motionless before your hungry eyes /     dead dead as your dreams /      as your hopes / dead as that silent prayer that dies more & more each day / that no ears will ever share that that dead chicken      / which you in your shame dare to call a turkey will never hear not that god /    lost in the heavens eating real turkey who to you now pray for blessings will never hear / i wish you a happy thanksgiving. & as you bow your heads to pray /      pray a silent prayer for the little boy who dances in the snow / barefooted he loves to greet new falling snow & has no shoes & hopes that santa on christmas eve will slide down the chimney of his tenement slum & in his stockings which he has hung by the fire escape / o so carefully as not to tear them any more will find them filled with little hopes & tiny dreams & beneath that narrow leaf       / which he in his shame dares call a tree / a christmas tree santa will leave toys of wooden soldiers & plastic dolls filled with love for him and his ( & does not know that santa nods on roofs & climbs on fire escapes & snatches pocket-books / & leaves no wooden soldiers or plastic dolls filled with love for him & his beneath his narrow leaf) / i wish him a merry christmas. & as you bow your heads to pray /      pray please pray a silent prayer for the poor old woman who sits by the stove / to keep warm as she looks out her window / watching the falling snow & for the numbers' man / she waits       / waits silently for steam to rush through rusty pipes / for santa to stop his nodding for you to stop your prayer /      open your eyes & boooooooo away the mouse that nibbles on your chicken ( there are too many prayers that need be prayed for all/     all to be done at just one meal) & waits /       she silendy waits for god to hear your prayers / after dinner / / i wish her a happy new year.

As you came from the holy land Of Walsingham, Met you not with my true love By the way as you came? “How shall I know your true love, That have met many one, I went to the holy land, That have come, that have gone?” She is neither white, nor brown, But as the heavens fair; There is none hath a form so divine In the earth, or the air. “Such a one did I meet, good sir, Such an angelic face, Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear By her gait, by her grace.” She hath left me here all alone, All alone, as unknown, Who sometimes did me lead with herself, And me loved as her own. “What’s the cause that she leaves you alone, And a new way doth take, Who loved you once as her own, And her joy did you make?” I have lov’d her all my youth; But now old, as you see, Love likes not the falling fruit From the withered tree. Know that Love is a careless child, And forgets promise past; He is blind, he is deaf when he list, And in faith never fast. His desire is a dureless content, And a trustless joy: He is won with a world of despair, And is lost with a toy. Of womenkind such indeed is the love, Or the word love abus’d, Under which many childish desires And conceits are excus’d. But true love is a durable fire, In the mind ever burning, Never sick, never old, never dead, From itself never turning.

A grainy predawn dark, early Expressway traffic bleeding arterial tail lights across gray water and its blue heart. Under Lemon Hill, grunts from Boathouse Row, woodshop clunks, young men’s voices too loud for a day exhaling into starless skies, bad boys after keg night, hungover, push long sculls into the water and slice its marcelled run, a marbled peacock wake behind each stroke and coxswain counting that muscled steadiness past the Water Works, Spring Garden Street Bridge then Girard Avenue Bridge, where on the bank Eakins sketches Max Schmitt in a single scull, his light like this, tinfoil blue, where the crews sweat off last night’s lost time but won’t row too far north to river canals, Manayunk Reach, its towpath, mules and barges and anthracite from Point Carbon to feed stoves and Bessemers in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh

like a single branch of ash honed to the handle of an axe and made to take the hand of a woodsman as he throws his body weight to fell all the ash has sown, I turn your words although the line you spoke was simple