Poemunity — your poem community

There are  at  least two  types of people,  the  first for  whom the  ordinary worldliness is easy.  The  regular  social routines  and  material  cares  are nothing too external to them and easily absorbed. They are not alien from the  creation  and  maintenance of the world, and the world does not treat them  as  alien. And also, from  them, the efforts  toward the world, and to them,  the  fulfillment  of the  world's  moderate desires, flow. They are ef- fortless at eating, moving, arranging their arms as they sit or stand,  being hired, being paid, cleaning up,  spending, playing, mating.  They are in an ease and comfort. The world is for the world and for them. Then there are those over whom the events and opportunities of the every- day  world wash  over.  There  is  rarely,  in this  second type, any easy kind of absorption.  There  is only  a  visible  evidence  of having  been made of a different  substance,  one that  repels.  Also, from them,  it is almost impos- sible  to  give  to  the  world  what  it will  welcome or reward. For how does this  second  type  hold  their arms?  Across their chest? Behind their back? And  how  do  they  find  food  to eat  and  then prepare this food? And how do  they  receive  a  check or endorse it? And what also of the difficulties of love  or  being loved, its  expansiveness,  the way it is used for markets and indentured moods? And what is this  second  substance?  And how does it come  to have as one of  its  qualities  the  resistance of the world  as it is?  And also,  what is  the person  made  of  the  second  substance?   Is this a  human or more or  less than one? Where is the true impermeable community of the second human whose  arms  do  not  easily  arrange  themselves and for whom the salaries and  weddings  and  garages do not come? These are, perhaps, not two sorts of persons, but two kinds of fortune. The first is soft and regular. The second is a baffled kind, and magnetic only  to the second substance, and made itself out of a different, second, substance, and having, at its end, a second, and almost blank-faced, reward.

Had I but lived a hundred years ago I might have gone, as I have gone this year, By Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know, And Time have placed his finger on me there: "You see that man?" — I might have looked, and said, "O yes: I see him. One that boat has brought Which dropped down Channel round Saint Alban's Head. So commonplace a youth calls not my thought." "You see that man?" — "Why yes; I told you; yes: Of an idling town-sort; thin; hair brown in hue; And as the evening light scants less and less He looks up at a star, as many do." "You see that man?" — "Nay, leave me!" then I plead, "I have fifteen miles to vamp across the lea, And it grows dark, and I am weary-kneed: I have said the third time; yes, that man I see!" "Good. That man goes to Rome — to death, despair; And no one notes him now but you and I: A hundred years, and the world will follow him there, And bend with reverence where his ashes lie."

No doubt to-morrow I will hide My face from you, my King. Let me rejoice this Sunday noon, And kneel while gray priests sing. It is not wisdom to forget. But since it is my fate Fill thou my soul with hidden wine To make this white hour great. My God, my God, this marvelous hour I am your son I know. Once in a thousand days your voice Has laid temptation low.

At night on the station platform, near a pile of baskets, a couple em- braced, pressed close together and swaying a little. It was hard to see where the girl’s feet and legs were. The suspicion this aroused soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover’s back, to become a small brown paper parcel under the arm of a stout en- gine-driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgy- nous fantasy, the self-sufficient core of his stupor. Such a romantic thing, so tender, for him to contain. He looked more comic and complaisant than the couple had done, and more likely to fall heav- ily to the floor. A café with a frosted glass door through which much light is dif- fused. A tall young girl comes out and stands in front of it, her face and figure quite obscured by this milky radiance. She treads out onto a lopsided ochre panel of lit pavement before the doorway and becomes visible as a coloured shape, moving sharply. A wrap of honey and ginger, a flared saffron skirt, grey- white shoes. She goes off past the Masonic Temple with a young man: he is pale, with dark hair and a shrunken, earnest face. You could imagine him a size larger. Just for a moment, as it happens, there is no one else in the street at all. Their significance escapes rap- idly like a scent, before the footsteps vanish among the car engines. A man in the police court. He looked dapper and poker-faced, his arms straight, the long fingers just touching the hem of his checked jacket. Four days after being released from the prison where he had served two years for theft he had been discovered at midnight cling- ing like a tree-shrew to the bars of a glass factory-roof. He made no attempt to explain his presence there; the luminous nerves that made him fly up to it were not visible in daylight, and the police seemed hardly able to believe this was the creature they had brought down in the darkness. In this city the governing authority is limited and mean: so limited that it can do no more than preserve a superficial order. It supplies fuel, water and power. It removes a fair proportion of the refuse, cleans the streets after a fashion, and discourages fighting. With these things, and a few more of the same sort, it is content. This could never be a capital city for all its size. There is no mind in it, no regard. The sensitive, the tasteful, the fashionable, the intolerant and powerful, have not moved through it as they have moved through London, evaluating it, altering it deliberately, setting in motion wars of feeling about it. Most of it has never been seen. In an afternoon of dazzling sunlight in the thronged streets, I saw at first no individuals but a composite monster, its unfeeling sur- faces matted with dust: a mass of necks, limbs without extremities, trunks without heads; unformed stirrings and shovings spilling across the streets it had managed to get itself provided with. Later, as the air cooled, flowing loosely about the buildings that stood starkly among the declining rays, the creature began to divide and multiply. At crossings I could see people made of straws, rags, cartons, the stuffing of burst cushions, kitchen refuse. Outside the Grand Hotel, a long-boned carrot-haired girl with glasses, loping along, and with strips of bright colour, rich, silky green and blue, in her soft clothes. For a person made of such scraps she was beau- tiful. Faint blue light dropping down through the sparse leaves of the plane trees in the churchyard opposite after sundown, cooling and shaping heads, awakening eyes.

At night the states I forget them or I wish I was there in that one under the Stars. It smells like June in this night so sweet like air. I may have decided that the States are not that tired Or I have thought so. I have thought that. At night the states And the world not that tired of everyone Maybe. Honey, I think that to say is in light. Or whoever. We will never replace you. We will never re- place You. But in like a dream the floor is no longer discursive To me it doesn’t please me by being the vistas out my window, do you know what Of course (not) I mean? I have no dreams of wake- fulness. In wakefulness. And so to begin. (my love.) At night the states talk. My initial continuing contr- diction my love for you & that for me deep down in the Purple Plant the oldest dust of it is sweetest but states no longer how I would feel. Shirt that shirt has been in your arms And I have that shirt is how I feel At night the states will you continue in this as- sociation of matters, my Dearest? down the street from where the public plaque reminds that of private loving the consequential chain trail is matters At night the states that it doesn’t matter that I don’t say them, remember them at the end of this claustro- phobic the dance, I wish I could see I wish I could dance her. At this night the states say them out there. That I am, am them indefinitely so and so wishful passive historic fated and matter- simple, matter-simple, an eyeful. I wish but I don’t and little melody. Sorry that these little things don’t happen any more. The states have drained their magicks for I have not seen them. Best not to tell. But you you would always remain, I trust, as I will always be alone. At night the states whistle. Anyone can live. I can. I am not doing any- thing doing this. I discover I love as I figure. Wed- nesday I wanted to say something in particular. I have been where. I have seen it. The God can. The people do some more. At night the states I let go of, have let, don’t let Some, and some, in Florida, doing. What takes you so long? I am still with you in that part of the park, and vice will continue, but I’ll have a cleaning Maine. Who loses these names loses. I can’t bring it up yet, keeping my opinions to herself. Everybody in any room is a smuggler. I walked fiery and talked in the stars of the automatic weapons and partly for you Which you. You know. At night the states have told it already. Have told it. I know it. But more that they don’t know, I know it too. At night the states whom I do stand before in judgment, I think that they will find me fair, not that they care in fact nor do I, right now though indeed I am they and we say that not that I’ve erred nor lost my way though perhaps they did (did they) and now he is dead but you you are not. Yet I am this one, lost again? lost & found by one- self Who are you to dare sing to me? At night the states accompany me while I sit here or drums there are always drums what for so I won’t lose my way the name of a personality, say, not California I am not sad for you though I could be I remember climbing up a hill under tall trees getting home. I was going to say that the air was fair (I was always saying something like that) but that’s not it now, and that that’s not it isn’t it either At night the states dare sing to me they who seem tawdry any more I’ve not thought I loved them, only you it’s you whom I love the states are not good to me as I am to them though perhaps I am not when I think of your being so beautiful but is that your beauty or could it be theirs I’m having such a hard time remembering any of their names your being beautiful belongs to nothing I don’t believe they should praise you but I seem to believe they should somehow let you go At night the states and when you go down to Washington witness how perfectly anything in particular sheets of thoughts what a waste of sheets at night. I remember something about an up-to-date theory of time. I have my own white rose for I have done something well but I’m not clear what it is. Weathered, perhaps but that’s never done. What’s done is perfection. At night the states ride the train to Baltimore we will try to acknowledge what was but that’s not the real mirror is it? nor is it empty, or only my eyes are Ride the car home from Washington no they are not. Ride the subway home from Pennsylvania Station. The states are blind eyes stony smooth shut in moon- light. My French is the shape of this book that means I. At night the states the 14 pieces. I couldn’t just walk on by. Why aren’t they beautiful enough in a way that does not beg to wring something from a dry (wet) something Call my name At night the states making life, not explaining anything but all the popular songs say call my name oh call my name, and if I call it out myself to you, call mine out instead as our poets do will you still walk on by? I have loved you for so long. You died and on the wind they sang your name to me but you said nothing. Yet you said once before and there it is, there, but it is so still. Oh being alone I call out my name and once you did and do still in a way you do call out your name to these states whose way is to walk on by that’s why I write too much At night the states whoever you love that’s who you love the difference between chaos and star I believe and in that difference they believed in some funny way but that wasn’t what I I believed that out of this fatigue would be born a light, what is fatigue there is a man whose face changes continually but I will never, something I will never with regard to it or never regard I will regard yours tomorrow I will wear purple will I and call my name At night the states you who are alive, you who are dead when I love you alone all night and that is what I do until I could never write from your being enough I don’t want that trick of making it be coaxed from the words not tonight I want it coaxed from myself but being not that. But I’d feel more comfortable about it being words if it were if that’s what it were for these are the States where what words are true are words Not myself. Montana, Illinois. Escondido.

At nights birds hammered my unborn child’s heart to strength, each strike bringing bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone among women who cursed their hearts out, soured themselves, never-brides, into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy. Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice; shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulb and light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a poui tree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.

The thick-walled room’s cave-darkness, cool in summer, soothes by saying, This is the truth, not the taut cicada-strummed daylight. Rest here, out of the flame—the thick air’s stirred by the fan’s four slow-moving spoons; under the house the stone has its feet in deep water. Outside, even the sun god, dressed in this life as a lizard, abruptly rises on stiff legs and descends blasé toward the shadows.

for Edward Hirsch Like a distant singing, like a finger sizzling for just one moment on the iron, it almost hurts. Almost. But then something pulls away, and the smooth belly of evening slides over the earth; the pines and the spaniels stop howling and suddenly drop off to sleep. While the air is numb with the drowsiness of clouds, the needle sails free of the scars on the record and the record player lifts its artificial arm! This hurts. But then a boy lays his cards on his bedspread the way a sailor spreads his sails on the sand, and even this reminds me of tables being set, of a woman calling and calling her children through blistered hands. Then something lets go, and in her left palm she sees her own eyes, and in her right the evening’s first star pulls her toward the distant singing of the sky. Then something else lets go; the long sheet of night winds slowly through the pines. Here and there the lights go up, like a shy applauding.

i.m. Marty Crickard I came to light a candle for a friend but Jesus had a really bad mustache and those were only pinpricks in his palms so I passed on. I came to light a candle for a friend but Joseph’s hands were manicured and soft as Fairy Liquid hands I could not light one there so I passed on. In the corner was a fellow with a cowled robe and a tonsure like a saucer — he palmed a young and curly blonde Adonis — so I passed on then to Benoît-Joseph Labre, a tattered man whose wide eyes blazed, he looked quite mad, had beggar’s hands, I liked him. I lit two dozen candles, didn’t pay, and nicked this book on him before I left. I did all this in honor of my matchless absent friend, whose honest calloused workman’s hands maintained the half of Belfast, and nothing’s been the same since he passed on.

Alexandria, 1954 When my grandfather came back from his swim, battered this time by the treacherous currents, the rocks jutting out of the water like knives, my sister and I sidled into his room thinking the house too quiet and saw him like a hurt beast standing by his bed, naked, wet. My grandmother was kneeling, toweling his calves, my mother was mixing a poultice. “Look at his bruises,” my sister was whispering, “and the veins like swollen rivers.” We kept inching toward him while my grandmother daubed him with cream and wound him in a bedsheet and made him odder than any dream of him. “Children,” she said turning toward us, “let him sleep, this is your grandfather.” We hurried away, having said not a word to him, nor he to us, though our eyes had never left his body and we ached to touch him, brush our fingertips along the webs of cuts and discolorations in his pale skin. All day we wished he would somehow rise like a true ghost, the sheet ruffling in the drafts; “Grandfather,” we whispered at his closed door, “come to us, bring us your stories,” but when the last lights were put out that night and the dark spread about us like a purple bruise we wished we had never wished what we had, every waft of wind had a rustle to it and the sound of water was deep in our ears and by morning, he had become for us in his shut room the ghostliest of imaginings, and keeping our distance, we waited only for his door to suddenly swing forth and reveal him standing either healed and smiling and unstrange, or what seemed likelier to us now, about to change our lives.