Poemunity — your poem community

Do me my elegy now, or I'll scrawl the thing I scrawl as you're going or screw in a ball when you're gone, Or you and I write unaware in each other's tongue That you or I ever set foot . . . Or do what our son And/or little daughter got done: got our brilliant names Pricily grooved in marble by one skilled In times of loss; dream iridescent dreams It's that first Saturday. Let this hour be filled With anything but the case, so that Time the clerk Goes panting in horror from gremlin to error to glitch And his screen is stripes and he knows he saved his work In one of a billion files but fuck knows which, And he lets us alone or, at worst, as we tiptoe by, Feels we're familiar, can't for the world say why.

1 The woman on the mantel, who doesn't much resemble me, is holding a chainsaw away from her body, with a shocked smile, while an undiscovered tumor squats on her kidney. 2 The present is a sentimental favorite, with its heady mix of grandiosity and abjection, truncated, framed. 3 It's as if I'm subletting a friend's apartment. Even in the dream, I'm trying to imagine which friend. And I'm trying to get all my robes together, robes I really own and robes I don't

I am in Rome, Vatican bells tolling a windowful of God and Bernini. My neighbor, the Pope, has died and God overnight, has wept black mantles over the sainted stone age whose skirted shadows flit through to the main cave. I nurse a cold. It must be error to sniffle in sight of holiness. “Liquids,” the doctor said. He has no cure, but since I have my choice, I sip champagne. If I must sit dropsical to Heaven, let me at least be ritual to a living water. In the crypt under the cave the stone box in its stone row has been marked for months now. My neighbor knew where he was going. I half suspect I, too, know, and that it is nothing to sneeze at, but am left to sneeze. I drink my ritual Moët et Chandon and wish (my taste being misformed for the high authentic) I had a California—a Korbel or an Almaden. I like it “forward,” as clerics of such matters say, not schooled to greatness. It is loud in Heaven today and in the great stone school my neighbor kept. The alumni procession of saints is forming for him. Bells clobber the air with portents. I sniffle and sneeze, wad kleenex, and sip champagne, trying to imagine what it might be to take part in a greatness, or even in the illusion of something like. The experience might deepen my character, though I am already near the bottom of it, among wads and butts of what was once idea. And the last swallow I do not like the after-taste, if that is what I am tasting. But this is ritual. I toast my neighbor: may he find his glass, and may its after-taste be all that he was schooled to.

Open the window and you want to fly out, though you never actually do— I think I see you, still there on the ledge, where I've left you. How pulled-awake and flung can one life be? Again I thought, It will end. Again I promised and clung. I learned there that to cling was in my nature. I think I see you, though you flash quickly through the shutter. I think I hear you, though I sleep. Remember this as a bolero, a finite flaring— both the tulip tree burning in full bloom and the weeping silver birch.

Old and blind and in love with light, he’d reach for the hands of writers to guide him back to the landscape, once the subject of his photo- graphs. Often he’d see just how hard it was to render it right, and would feel free of such burdens. A last cloud on a lake he’d let carry him into night. Breaking sounds of autumn he’d leave a pond to compose, rustling the stream of images. The panicked flight of the hunted he’d let the dry grasses capture, their golden yield his release. Even in the crimson cusp of an evening he’d wedge himself, curling into a ball without twilight ever sinking him. The man swam with the fog and its very touch of resolve. Further than any writer his shadows lapped up the sand. All this in the ebb and flow of a ninth decade by the tide, an inlet mapped by its egress to the sky. And when moonlight would come to wash his window, a heavy tome floating lost worlds on his lap, often his other hand would read the apertures of old cameras, an author’s intent the subject of his alignments. But when the milky skies would dip the hand of a writer in the milky seas, to the light- house he’d ascend, dreaming of being a writer who was blind, tracing a horizon.

Psychoanalysis always looks for the egg in a basket that has been lost. *       *       * I sample sin as if it were the beginning of well-being. *       *       * I don't like Paradise as they probably don't have obsessions there. *       *       * If God absolves me he always does so for insufficient evidence. *       *       * Everyone is a friend of his own pathology. *       *       * When I raise a toast to madness, I toast myself as well. *       *       * There are nights that don't ever happen.

As I am Catholic I have never played. *       *       * I've had thirty-six lovers plus tax. *       *       * I am the most chaste woman in Italian literature. *       *       * I am completely asexual not counting errors and omissions. *       *       * Mount Sinai is sometimes confused with the Mons Veneris. *       *       * No one can know what is between me and God.

I The most devout long to breathe the dirt's scent once more. The cat runs faster at night; he sees you better. Only the ordinary is reprehensible, but praise disgusts the just. Wine is not drunk enough. Be bitter but only about the Truth. With a friend, poison is sweet; sweetness, with an enemy, poisons. The colder things are, the slower, unless they are flowers. You will never know the river wets your hair. What is sweetness, that bees do not remember honey? Work is wings. II If you would judge, then be a Judge. If you would be judged, be just. The color of a stone is darker in water. To be loved, love no one. The catacombs are not the end. Past them lies a wall. I am an enemy to what I have forgotten. If a bell rings, then a bell has been moved from its sleep. Change admits error, but will prove correct in its assumptions. Every antipole is itself. Every identity is another. As I walked along the river, an old man carried a walking stick on his shoulder, as a soldier will carry a rifle. When we passed I greeted him, but he could not bring himself to answer, though I too am an old man, taking pains as I go.

Aphra Behn is not wearing all her clothes in some part of South America nobody knows. Everyone is polite, and not. Maybe she left off her petticoats, her skirts look limp. She coughs. Of course her bosom is bare. He's bats about her, also noble and misunderstood — that’s too much culture for you. His black skin is just skin, what with his wealth,frisson, and all those bearers and banners. The play is predominant, the manor- house-reach. What she makes of it — not of husbands, not even of the rights of humans richer-than- thou, the local gentry who scheme more than they breed — is insolence, not to bore us. What is real is real, she says, wearing what he wants with Damn the insects biting. His type tends to the florid—strange how everyone speaks well of him, then how chains become him — who says that? — and someone dies, someone like her father who fueled a nice plantation with witty wives and loneliness and slaves enough to drive the horses into pantaloons and full sleeves— or play. Aphra grins at us, in disrepute as always, sailing to England on a petticoat.

Love ’ s language is hyperbole, but whispered, sibilant similes and promises sotto voce. It ’ s easy to imagine you ’ ve misheard, the form and content clash, create this weird distortion like an echo or a tape delay. Love ’ s language is hyperbole, but whispered. On which do you place emphasis: The words? Or the breath? The farfetched or the foreplay? It ’ s easy to imagine you ’ ve misheard when objectivity has disappeared and your lover is getting further carried away. Love ’ s language is hyperbole, but whispered vows? It ’ s hard to take him at his word, or hers: Speak up! Proclaim! you want to say. It ’ s easy to imagine you ’ ve misheard, hard to admit one sharp as you is stirred. You need to back off, cool down, act blasé. Love ’ s language is hyperbole, but whispered. It ’ s easy to imagine you ’ ve misheard.