Poemunity — your poem community

LaBohem Brown In a package of minutes there is this We. How beautiful. Merry foreigners in our morning, we laugh, we touch each other, are responsible props and posts. A physical light is in the room. Because the world is at the window we cannot wonder very long. You rise. Although genial, you are in yourself again. I observe your direct and respectable stride. You are direct and self-accepting as a lion in Afrikan velvet. You are level, lean, remote. There is a moment in Camaraderie when interruption is not to be understood. I cannot bear an interruption. This is the shining joy; the time of not-to-end. On the street we smile. We go in different directions down the imperturbable street.

Andromeda, by Perseus sav'd and wed, Hanker'd each day to see the Gorgon's head: Till o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean, And mirror'd in the wave was safely seen That death she liv'd by. Let not thine eyes know Any forbidden thing itself, although It once should save as well as kill: but be Its shadow upon life enough for thee.

Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds. Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door. The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red. This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson. Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down. Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath, Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour. —Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson. Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant. Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson Saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?” Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall. Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home; Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars. Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes, Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down, The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief- Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.

Cleanse me of my iniquity and wash away my sins.

The landlord says we have to go. On the night the thermostat read seventeen below zero, and there was no heat on the first floor, the Massachusetts State Sanitary Code appeared in the landlord’s in-box like a spirit tapping bony knuckles on his window, and a letter appeared in the landlord’s in-box like a spirit scratching the words no rent in the frost on his window, and the landlord’s mouth foamed as if he’d swallowed detergent, and the foam froze on his beard, and the landlord’s plumber laid twenty-four feet of baseboard on the first floor, and now we have to go. The landlord keeps his purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo parked at the edge of the driveway, purple inside and out, paint job and upholstery purple, the color of emperors. The mad emperor Caligula assassinated his cousin, jealous of his purple cloak, and the mad emperor’s mouth foamed as if he’d swallowed detergent, and the foam froze on his beard. The neighbors report a moose sighting today. The moose charges from the woods, mad as an emperor jealous of a purple cloak, sees the purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo as another moose, and rams Caligula’s chariot with his bristling antlers, kicking the car the way a teenager high on detergent T-boned my leased Toyota Corolla two weeks ago, and so the moose claims his territory, this land without a gas station or a movie theater or a pizza joint or a doctor’s office, and gallops back into the woods, snorting foam. Now come the hunters tracking the moose, crossbows bristling since crossbow season is upon us, their vision blurred by a night of Red Bull and detergent, and see the purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo as a moose, firing volley after volley of arrows into the windshield, and the talisman of the air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror does not keep the glass from exploding, and the jumper cables coiled in the back seat do not rise magically like electric eels, and the hunters explode in a cry of huzzah, waving their crossbows as if their arrows thumped the hump of Richard the hunchback king. The purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo is a dead moose, tow truck dragging away the carcass to a round of applause in my brain. The landlord will snort and foam, demanding to know why there is nothing left but his mutilated vanity plate stamped with the year 1976, and I will speak to him in Brooklynese, palms turned upward in the universal gesture of the uncooperative witness. He will keep my security deposit, his territory without a gas station or a movie theater or a pizza joint or a doctor’s office. I say huzzah.

Rain commenced, and wind did. A crippled ship slid ashore. Our swimmer’s limbs went heavy. The sand had been flattened. The primary dune, the secondary dune, both leveled. The maritime forest, extracted. Every yard of the shore was shocked with jellyfish. The blue pillow of the man o’ war empty in the afterlight. The threads of the jellyfish, spent. Disaster weirdly neatened the beach. We cultivated the debris field. Castaway trash, our treasure. Jewel box, spoon ring, sack of rock candy. A bicycle exoskeleton without wheels, grasshopper green. Our dead ten speed. We rested in red mangrove and sheltered in sheets. Our bruises blushed backwards, our blisters did. is it true is it true God help us we tried to stay shattered but we just got better. We grew adept, we caught the fish as they fled. We skinned the fish, our knife clicked like an edict. We were harmed, and then we healed.

My eye climbs a row of spoilers soldered into ailerons, cracked bay doors haphazarded into windows where every rivet bleeds contrails of rust. An hour ago, the doctor’s wand waved across my chest and I watched blood on a small screen get back-sucked into my weakened heart. It’s grown a hole I have to monitor: one torn flap shuddering an infinite ellipsis of gray stars back and forth.You’re the writer, the doctor said in French.Tell me what you see. Easier to stand in a courtyard full of tourists scrying shapes from this titanic Rorschach. Here’s a pump stub shaped like a hand; something celled, cavernously fluted as a lobster’s abdomen. How much work it must have taken to drag these bits out of pits of flame, from lake beds and rice paddies, and stack them in layers: the French planes heaped beneath the American ones, while the Englishwoman beside me peers into this mess of metals, trying to isolate one image from the rest. Ski boot buckle or tire pump, she muses at me, fossilized shark’s jaw, clothespin, wasp’s nest? According to the camera, it’s just a picture changing with each angle, relic turned to rib cage, chrome flesh to animal: all the mortal details enumerated, neutered. I watch her trace an aluminum sheet torched across a thruster as if wind had tossed a silk scarf over a face. If she pulled it back, would I find a body foreign as my own entombed in here, a thousand dog tags jangling in the dark? I tilt my head: the vision slides once more past me, each plane reassembling then breaking apart. Spikes of grief— or is it fury?—throb across the surface. Everything has a rip in it, a hole, a tear, the dim sounds of something struggling to pry open death’s cracked fuselage. White sparks, iron trails. My heart rustles in its manila folder. How the doctor smiled at the images I fed him:A row of trees, I said, pointing at my chart.Stone towers, a flock of backlit swallows— Now I kneel beside a cross of blades on which the Englishwoman tries to focus.Do you think I’ll get it all in the shot? she calls as she steps back. Steps back and back. Something like a knife sheath. Something like a saint’s skull. The sky floats past, horizon sucked into it. She won’t.

Lynda Hull Maybe you sold it to buy junk. Though I like to think not. And I don't want to think you used the money for food or rent or anything obligatory, practical. A pair of boots, perhaps. Thigh high burgandy boots with gold laces. Something crucial as lilies. Mostly, I want to believe you held onto the book, that your fingers brailed those pages' inky veins even in your final weeks. I want to believe words can be that important in the end. Who can help the heart, which is grand and full of gestures? I had been on my way out. He was rearranging his bookshelves when, in an approximation of tenderness, he handed me, like the last of the sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving, like a thing he wanted but was willing to share, the rediscovered book— he'd bought it years ago in a used bookstore in Chicago. Levine's poems, with your signature inside. That whole year I spent loving him, something splendid as lemons, sour and bright and leading my tongue toward new language, was on the shelf. These weren't your own poems, autographed, a stranger's souvenir—we'd spent vain months leafing through New York stacks for your out-of-print collections—but you'd cared about this book, or cared enough to claim it, your name looped across the title page as if to say,Please. This is mine, This book is mine. Though you sold it. Or someone else did when you died. We make habits out of words. I grew accustomed to his, the way they spooned me into sleep so many times. Now I am sleepless and alone another night. What would you give for one more night alone? No booze. No drugs. Just that hunger and those words. He gave me The Names of the Lost. Need comes down hard on a body. What else was sold? What else—do you know?—did we lose

What can be compared to the living eye? Its East is flowering honeysuckle and its North dogwood bushes. What can be compared to light in which leaves darken after rain, fierce green? like Rousseau’s jungle: any minute the tiger head will poke through the foliage peering at experience. Who is like man sitting in the cell of referents, whose eye has never seen a jungle, yet looks in? It is the great eye, source of security. Praised be thou, as the Jews say, who have engraved clarity and delivered us to the mind where you must reign severe as quiddity of bone forever and ever without bias or mercy, attrition or mystery.

Asters—sweltering days old adjuration/curse, the gods hold the balance for an uncertain hour. Once more the golden flocks of heaven, the light, the trim— what is the ancient process hatching under its dying wings? Once more the yearned-for, the intoxication, the rose of you— summer leaned in the doorway watching the swallows— one more presentiment where certainty is not hard to come by: wing tips brush the face of the waters, swallows sip speed and night.