Poemunity — your poem community

When the cow died by the green sapling, her limp udder splayed on the grass like something from the sea, we offered our words in their low calibrations— which was our fashion—then severed her horns with a pug-toothed blade and pounded them out to an amber transparency, two sheets that became, in their moth-wing haze, our parlor windows. They softened our guests with the gauze-light of the Scriptures, and rendered to us, on our merriest days, the sensation of gazing through the feet of a gander. In time we moved up to the status of glass—one pane, then two—each cupping in proof of its purity a dimple of fault, a form of distortion enhancing our image. We took the panes with us from cottage to cottage, moth-horn and glass, and wedged up the misfitted gaps with a poultice of gunny and wax. When woodsmoke darkened our bricks, we gave to the windowsills a lacquer of color—clear blue with a lattice of yellow: a primary entrance and exit for light. And often, walking home from the river and small cheese shop, we would squint their colors to a sapling green, and remember the hull of that early body, the slap of fear we suffered there, then the little wash of recovery that is our fashion—how we stroked to her bones a cadenced droning, and took back from her absence, our amber, half-literal method of sight.

After Rilke's “Les Fenêtres” i how much     loss gains suddenly in emphasis and     brilliant sadness ii far from that which lives and turns iii languages of our vain comings and goings wilt and gnaw iv beat them,                                punish them for having said and always said v tear out, finally,      our spells vi one life pours and grows impatient for another life vii and the lovers, look on them there, immobile and frail pinned like the butterflies for the beauty of their wings viii too great in the outdoors ix like the lyre, you should be rendered a constellation

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word? He is a brittle crazy glass; Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace. But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story, Making thy life to shine within The holy preachers, then the light and glory More reverend grows, and more doth win; Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin. Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one When they combine and mingle, bring A strong regard and awe; but speech alone Doth vanish like a flaring thing, And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

abide with me don’t ever abide gimme anytime a pile of leaf-hay across the field underneath the bright new blue tractor pulling the tedder which is the waffler or fluffer

The garments worn in flying dreams were fashioned there— overcoats that swooped like kites, scarves streaming like vapor trails, gowns ballooning into spinnakers. In a city like that one might sail through life led by a runaway hat. The young scattered in whatever directions their wild hair pointed, and gusting into one another, fell in love. At night, wind rippled saxophones that hung like windchimes in pawnshop windows, hooting through each horn so that the streets seemed haunted not by nighthawks, but by doves. Pinwheels whirled from steeples in place of crosses. At the pinnacles of public buildings, snagged underclothes— the only flag—flapped majestically. And when it came time to disappear one simply chose a thoroughfare devoid of memories, raised a collar, and turned his back on the wind. I closed my eyes and stepped into a swirl of scuttling leaves.

Whenever the moon and stars are set, Whenever the wind is high, All night long in the dark and wet, A man goes riding by. Late in the night when the fires are out, Why does he gallop and gallop about? Whenever the trees are crying aloud, And ships are tossed at sea, By, on the highway, low and loud, By at the gallop goes he. By at the gallop he goes, and then By he comes back at the gallop again.

The flowers I planted along my road Have lasted long despite winds and cold Already fiery noons begin to burn Slyly the secret of the roots And I know that of my footsteps nothing will remain But a trace a cluster a drop To recall along the paths I’ve chosen Those evening when the light sang In eyes hands hearts and goblets. I love the sweet harshness on the tongue Filling the palate with a promised saliva Knocking the mute keyboard of the teeth With raised draperies of which one might say That memory retains a fleeting trail of them Half-glimpsed we won’t know how or else The loud reminder of the single moment All gravity banished the unconscious pleasure recaptured Of being nothing but entirely animal. For our life closed on that iridescent sphere —Color taste perfume at their extreme limits—invokes Some miracle independent of its origin Produced by distilling air and earth— Like the move toward technological planets After a calculation made on the fingers of one hand— Time contained flowing—continual autumn This evening this wine that enters me to make My head light my tongue loose my cock happy.

The wine of Love is music, And the feast of Love is song: And when Love sits down to the banquet, Love sits long: Sits long and ariseth drunken, But not with the feast and the wine; He reeleth with his own heart, That great rich Vine.

At dawn wind out of the north, hailflecks, pebbly skates against windows. I lie thinking the drainspout’s drip comes again in the basement faucet where I am crying, a child betrayed by death’s new cardinal and the cat yawning on the porch where my grandmother found me. Risen now, I see the river full-bodied, its white wind-knotted hair swirling like hers. The polar hickory is naked as a saber recalled by a girl long gone in the gold sauce of apples. Two leaves that might be cardinals returned tumble in the hard light at the brick fence. Nothing moves in boxwood where gray soldiers lie. Among the last of them she walked, cupping apples, staining her white frock, who took a boy far back into the haze the Shenandoah hills held where family stallions might walk aimless ground littered with purpling flesh beyond the cull of seasons. Through a gate nailed with leather belts in my mind, I pass and enter the arthritic orchard tended by widows. What I gather wakes me to think how bright on the tongue was the taste kept concealed, sustained, of flesh abiding, months beneath the wintering house floors. To reach this I must go down storm-worn stones and pick my steps past the sealed boxes of family debris, nightgowns, flannels, ribbons, birthspoons, a pair of dulled skates, flowers pressed in a moldy Bible. Why is it we keep what we cannot bear to use, and can’t escape, shoving ourselves into shrunken rooms edged with old foolishness unforgiven and unforgotten? I fumble to the center and pull a yellow light down the ancient string still dependably there and stand, in my head, as she did, playfully asking where they went. I know, I know, I say back there in the dust where I’ve come again to look through tiny windows into skirts of boxwood, a morning that sends me alive among gray soldiers at the house roots. I see also blue preserving jars full of slick pulpy flesh she has put up in a juice thick as blood. Behind it all in dark eaves, baskets of apples, split pine boxes like generations steeping, undisturbed by the tick and groan of housepipes veining the overhead I leave. Oh let me see her light bring back those stallion-feeders, little red handfuls of joy! Look how long I’ve slept, learning to walk straight into a dawn-silvered web where secret spiders spin ceaseless as the seasons. Above me ice takes each room, I can hear feet pacing fretful halls, yet here I lift my face and puff back all the silk in the world. I hold every core peeled on this slab. My fingers claw the meat of family stillness, parting all the way to seeds. Oh widows of the air, fill me with your cidery, useless lying, those bladed hours you fed me the dark rotting dreams of your love.

A sentence with “dappled shadow” in it. Something not sayable spurting from the morning silence, secret as a thrush. The other man, the officer, who brought onions and wine and sacks of flour, the major with the swollen knee, wanted intelligent conversation afterward. Having no choice, she provided that, too. Potsdamerplatz, May 1945. When the first one was through he pried her mouth open. Bashō told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials. If the horror of the world were the truth of the world, he said, there would be no one to say it and no one to say it to. I think he recommended describing the slightly frenzied swarming of insects near a waterfall. Pried her mouth open and spit in it. We pass these things on, probably, because we are what we can imagine. Something not sayable in the morning silence. The mind hungering after likenesses. “Tender sky,” etc., curves the swallows trace in air.