Poemunity — your poem community

When the summer fields are mown, When the birds are fledged and flown, And the dry leaves strew the path; With the falling of the snow, With the cawing of the crow, Once again the fields we mow And gather in the aftermath. Not the sweet, new grass with flowers Is this harvesting of ours; Not the upland clover bloom; But the rowen mixed with weeds, Tangled tufts from marsh and meads, Where the poppy drops its seeds In the silence and the gloom.

In the morning that comes up behind the roof, in the shelter of the bridge, in the corner of  the cypresses that rise above the wall, a rooster 
has crowed. In the bell tower that rips the air with its shining point, the notes ring out and already the morning din can be heard in the street; the only street that goes from the river to the mountain 
dividing the woods. One looks for some other words but the ideas are always just as dark, just as simple and singularly painful. There is hardly more than the eyes, the open air, the grass and the water in the distance with, around every bend, a well or a cool basin. In the right-hand corner the last house with a larger head at the window. The trees are extremely alive and all those familiar companions walk along the demolished wall that is crushed into the thorns with bursts of laughter. Above the ravine the din augments, swells, and if the car passes on the upper road one no longer knows if it is the flowers or the little bells that are chiming. Under the blazing sun, when the landscape is on fire, the traveler crosses the stream on a very narrow bridge, before a dark hole where the trees line the water that falls asleep in the afternoon. And, against the trembling background of the woods, the motionless man.

I’ll go among the dead to see my friend. The place I leave is beautiful: the sea Repeats the winds’ far swell in its long sound, And, there beside it, houses solemnly Shine with the modest courage of the land, While swimmers try the verge of what they see. I cannot go, although I should pretend Some final self whose phantom eye could see Him who because he is not cannot change. And yet the thought of going makes the sea, The land, the swimmers, and myself seem strange, Almost as strange as they will someday be.

This room, how well I know it. Now they’re renting it, and the one next to it, as offices. The whole house has become an office building for agents, businessmen, companies. This room, how familiar it is. The couch was here, near the door, a Turkish carpet in front of it. Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases. On the right—no, opposite—a wardrobe with a mirror. In the middle the table where he wrote, and the three big wicker chairs. Beside the window the bed where we made love so many times. They must still be around somewhere, those old things. Beside the window the bed; the afternoon sun used to touch half of it. . . . One afternoon at four o’clock we separated for a week only. . . And then— that week became forever.

Quick passage into memory and behind only blank spaces, blue stain on pink litmus or merely known so closely something falls away receding from touch, caught in the air your fingers move, agile water-fly padding the surface of what is seen even among these defractions, bent pencil or warps of a flat eye, the wide world circling.

A short ride in the van, then the eight of us there in the heat—white shirtsleeves sticking, the women’s gloves off—fanning our faces. The workers had set up a big blue tent to help us at graveside tolerate the sun, which was brutal all afternoon as if stationed above us, though it moved limb to limb through two huge, covering elms. The long processional of neighbors, friends, the town’s elderly, her beauty-shop patrons, her club’s notables. . . The world is full of prayers arrived at from afterwards, he said. Look up through the trees—the hands, the leaves curled as in self-control or quietly hurting, or now open, flat-palmed, many-fine-veined, and whether from heat or sadness, waving.

Oh, my beloved, shall you and I Ever be young again, be young again?

Where the Story Leaves Off We had set out, the four of us, like pilgrims. It’s a quick jaunt to Guanajuato from San Miguel, over long stretches of restless earth, not desert, not valley, patchy green on tawny ground, head to head in the passing lane with a pick-up sprouting children and a blunderbuss fifties’ Chevy with no hood over its engine, with its insides exposed. A quick jaunt to the underworld, the gauzy mummies. But we lingered in the marketplace: the two women—my cousin’s wife, my lover— poring over shawls and serapes; my cousin clicking away with his Nikon and zoom at the gargoyles’ leering and capricious faces, while I lost myself among the hawkers’ masks— swinging like lanterns on the standards— blessed and damned with edgy, angular, yet impassive facades. And made of no special wood. I wanted one anyway and forked out eight pesos. It’s hard crawling through the crypt. You have to get down on your hands and knees and the openings were meant for smaller people, unless the getting down was part of a solemn ritual. It was a relief to be in the cool of the underworld, away from the tension of the light. The dead were well preserved. They stood upright. They stayed together. I couldn’t have known it then, but soon my cousin, his wife, my lover—soon we would all be lost to each other forever— not taken by death, just gone into another kind of dust.

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes, Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise; My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream. Thou stock-dove, whose echo resounds thro' the glen, Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den, Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear, I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair. How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills, Far mark'd with the courses of clear winding rills; There daily I wander as noon rises high, My flocks and my Mary's sweet cot in my eye. How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow; There oft, as mild Ev'ning sweeps over the lea, The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me. Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides, And winds by the cot where my Mary resides, How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave, As gathering sweet flowrets she stems thy clear wave. Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes, Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

Because I love you, and beneath the uncountable stars I have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest, I want to tell you a story I shouldn’t but will and in the meantime neglect, Love, the discordant melody spilling from my ears but attend, instead, to this tale, for a river burns inside my mouth and it wants both purgation and to eternally sip your thousand drippings; and in the story is a dog and unnamed it leads to less heartbreak, so name him Max, and in the story are neighborhood kids who spin a yarn about Max like I’m singing to you, except they tell a child, a boy who only moments earlier had been wending through sticker bushes to pick juicy rubies, whose chin was, in fact, stained with them, and combining in their story the big kids make the boy who shall remain unnamed believe Max to be sick and rabid, and say his limp and regular smell of piss are just two signs, but the worst of it, they say, is that he’ll likely find you in the night, and the big kids do not giggle, and the boy does not giggle, but lets the final berries in his hand drop into the overgrowth at his feet, and if I spoke the dream of the unnamed boy I fear my tongue would turn an arm of fire so I won’t, but know inside the boy’s head grew a fire beneath the same stars as you and I, Love, your leg between mine, the fine hairs on your upper thigh nearly glistening in the night, and the boy, the night, the incalculable mysteries as he sleeps with a stuffed animal tucked beneath his chin and rolls tight against his brother in their shared bed, who rolls away, and you know by now there is no salve to quell his mind’s roaring machinery and I shouldn’t tell you, but I will, the unnamed boy on the third night of the dreams which harden his soft face puts on pants and a sweatshirt and quietly takes the spade from the den and more quietly leaves his house where upstairs his father lies dreamless, and his mother bends her body into his, and beneath these same stars, Love, which often, when I study them, seem to recede like so many of the lies of light, the boy walks to the yard where Max lives attached to a steel cable spanning the lawn, and the boy brings hot dogs which he learned from Tom & Jerry, and nearly urinating in his pants he tosses them toward the quiet and crippled thing limping across the lawn, the cable whispering above the dew-slick grass, and Max whimpers, and the boy sees a wolf where stands this ratty and sad and groveling dog and beneath these very stars Max raises his head to look at the unnamed boy with one glaucous eye nearly glued shut and the other wet from the cool breeze and wheezing Max catches the gaze of the boy who sees, at last, the raw skin on the dog's flank, the quiver of his spindly legs, and as Max bends his nose to the franks the boy watches him struggle to snatch the meat with gums, and bringing the shovel down he bends to lift the meat to Max's toothless mouth, and rubs the length of his throat and chin, Max arching his neck with his eyes closed, now, and licking the boy's round face, until the boy unchains the dog, and stands, taking slow steps backward through the wet grass and feels, for the first time in days, the breath in his lungs, which is cool, and a little damp, spilling over his small lips, and he feels, again, his feet beneath him, and the earth beneath them, and starlings singing the morning in, and the somber movement of beetles chewing the leaves of the white birch, glinting in the dark, and he notices, Darling, an upturned nest beneath the tree, and flips it looking for the blue eggs of robins, but finds none, and placing a rumpled crimson feather in his mouth slips the spindly thicket into another tree, which he climbs to watch the first hint of light glancing above the fields, and the boy eventually returns to his thorny fruit bush where an occasional prick leaves on his arm or leg a spot of blood the color of these raspberries and tasting of salt, and filling his upturned shirt with them he beams that he could pull from the earth that which might make you smile, Love, which you’ll find in the fridge, on the bottom shelf, behind the milk, in the bowl you made with your own lovely hands.