Poemunity — your poem community

Fly from me does all I would have stay, the blossoms did not stay, stayed not the frost in the yellow grass. Every leash snapped, every contract void, and flying in the crows lingers but a moment in the graveyard oaks yet inside me it never stops so I can’t tell who is chasing, who chased, I can sleep into afternoon and still wake soaring. So out come the bats, down spiral swifts into the chimneys, Hey, I’m real, say the dream- figments then are gone like breath-prints on a window, handwriting in snow. Whatever I hold however flies apart, the children skip into the park come out middle-aged with children of their own. Your laugh over the phone, will it ever answer me again? Too much flying, photons perforating us, voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating yet getting brighter. Remember running barefoot across hot sand into the sea’s hovering, remember my hand as we darted against the holiday Broadway throng, catching your train just as it was leaving? Hey, it’s real, your face like a comet, horses coming from the field for morning oats, insects hitting a screen, the message nearly impossible to read, obscured by light because carried by Mercury: I love you, I’m coming. Sure, what fluttered is now gone, maybe a smudge left, maybe a delicate under- feather only then that too, yes, rained away. And when the flying is flown and the heart’s a useless sliver in a glacier and the gown hangs still as meat in a locker and eyesight is dashed-down glass and the mouth rust- stoppered, will some twinge still pass between us, still some fledgling pledge?

(Independence Day, 1964) On her 36th birthday, Thomas had shown her her first swimming pool. It had been his favorite color, exactly—just so much of it, the swimmers’ white arms jutting into the chevrons of high society. She had rolled up her window and told him to drive on, fast. Now this act of mercy: four daughters dragging her to their husbands’ company picnic, white families on one side and them on the other, unpacking the same squeeze bottles of Heinz, the same waxy beef patties and Salem potato chip bags. So he was dead for the first time on Fourth of July—ten years ago had been harder, waiting for something to happen, and ten years before that, the girls like young horses eyeing the track. Last August she stood alone for hours in front of the T.V. set as a crow’s wing moved slowly through the white streets of government. That brave swimming scared her, like Joanna saying Mother, we’re Afro-Americans now! What did she know about Africa? Were there lakes like this one with a rowboat pushed under the pier? Or Thomas’ Great Mississippi with its sullen silks? (There was the Nile but the Nile belonged to God.) Where she came from was the past, 12 miles into town where nobody had locked their back door, and Goodyear hadn’t begun to dream of a park under the company symbol, a white foot sprouting two small wings.

We have a microsopic anatomy of the whale this gives Man assurance William Carlos Williams We have a map of the universe for microbes, we have a map of a microbe for the universe. we have a Grand Master of chess made of electronic circuits. But above all we have the ability to sort peas, to cup water in our hands, to seek the right screw under the sofa for hours This gives us wings.

I come off a little bit ventilated but you must realize the material world is constantly crumbling under my eyes it's too much for the novel tongue I speak the glitter of pavement in my brainstem, you must accommodate the polytonal grimace of the set lips becoming a smile, and you must accept the thin section of arm advancing across your peripheries to grip you in pleasure, measuring feeling in your restraint We have lived through the most furious little chunk of history for this? that we must unburden ourselves on night roof air, presuming the poise and perks of champ pigeon teams planing the evening winds until, signaled from the roof with a flag we become American birds

This is what it sounds like outside, fat geese and guinea hens holding hands. I am 31, which is very young for my age. That is enough to realize I’m a pencil that has learned how to draw the Internet. I explain squiggles diagramming exactly how I feel and you are drawn to read in ways you cannot yet. Slow goes the drag of creation, how what’s within comes to be without, which is the rhythmic erection of essence. Life’s little deaths, petite orgasms, as the French nearly said but never came to. Feathers outstrip the weather as we stand with binoculars inquiring how winged creatures can hold their blood to warmth without a proper insulation system overlaying circulation. That is, sans fat and simple wooden bones with hair glued on. Mostly though they pulsate on the horizons of backlit vision, where we only meet the subways with handshakes, the rainbow filters of downloaded electronica, the telephone poles as archaic checkpoints to past cultures. They don’t have screens to seek their cues in. We drift from one culture to another and fight the stitcheries of racism, classism, anti-Muslim terrorists among us, with overlaps in the complete dis-ease our bodies settle into for next to no resistance. So we create something else. As in, roughshod moments of fake hate will position a fluid hello of death rattles that settle for the injunction of existence and state: Here am I made manifest by not being you, by not going in the same unsteady destination, by not asking the questions or repeating the paintings that came before me, by not singing in the register of  your bubble baths as you hug that person close in a wish to outlast bullets, even as the light leaves your eyes just a little next time we overlap paths. So the hens and geese make us think in terms of help outside, how they flap and move with fat ease in front of trains, across the chopping block, to the hungry winters of final leviathans, even as they land just so on the wires above us, and we go on complaining, murderous, too far out, unspoken.

The hastily assembled angel flies With patchwork wings red patches and white patches And yellow patches blood and emptiness And sun and usually      an angel’s wings would Be made of  only one of  these      but his Were made at the last minute and were almost Not made at all and wouldn’t have been made Had Azrael not seen      in the hastily Assembled angel’s eyes as Azrael Placed his white palm on the hastily assembled Angel’s chest fear      as Azrael placed his palm there To shove him from the cloud      and saw he had No wings      and paused and thought      then pulled him back And so the angels stitched together what was Near      blood      emptiness      sun      as what was near Was Heaven      and what else would Heaven be

Big smelly bowel movements this blue January morning. From the living room TV, a commercial from our TV company:We’re the fastest, the only — Meaning,Love us above all others. What makes poop more pungent on certain days? A question for science. From the living room TV: the powerful cite Law, bark Order— Meaning,Love us or else. Years ago, a teacher said never to use the word “poop” in a poem. Today, the icy kiss of the toilet seat wakes me up. Today, I poop while my boyfriend shouts from the living room,Did you hear that, meaning the atomic scientists who say we are now two & a half minutes to midnight. But still I marvel whenever poop comes out as one true Platonic tube. I am trying to be marvelous. & to make my enemies throw up. I mean, if you shower with soap & eat well, maintaining consistent gastrointestinal health, you should be ready for a rimjob or other forms of anal play. My boyfriend & I are not platonic. From the TV: a white supremacist cites Science, barks Two sides to every — I mean, up the throat, out the mouth: the fastest, the only way the powerful will let go of their shit. I mean, my boyfriend & I are not into scat but if you are I hope your beloved produces the most fragrant, citrusy shit. I mean, is “shit” more or less literary than “poop”? I mean, one winter night I got sick & pooped the bed. & he just got up with me. Helped strip the sheets, carry it all to the washer. I kept saying,I’m so sorry, shivering,I’m so, I’m sorry. But he said,What? Hey. I love you.

I don’t know what to say to you, neighbor, as you shovel snow from your part of our street neat in your Greek black. I’ve waited for chance to find words; now, by chance, we meet. We took our boys to the same kindergarten, thirteen years ago when our husbands went. Both boys hated school, dropped out feral, dropped in to separate troubles. You shift snow fast, back bent, but your boy killed himself, six days dead. My boy washed your wall when the police were done. He says, “We weren’t friends?” and shakes his head, “I told him it was great he had that gun,” and shakes. I shake, close to you, close to you. You have a path to clear, and so you do.

A kind of Danish cow long thought to be extinct lumbers slowly from a fog-soaked forest. Past the statue of two men shaking hands on horseback. Into the trainyard with its newly brunette-colored coal cars. It is late, lamps light the trainyard. One of the trainmen sees the cow and has a thought like a small grey infant sinking ever so slowly in the icy harbor. The cow continues out the other side of the trainyard. The trainman shudders at the thought. The trainman’s cat Stamina crunches walnuts in her cat dish. Now, nearly thirty years later, ladies and gentlemen it is my great pleasure to introduce to you that very same cow. (The cow is led out onto the stage by a young boy dressed as a farmer.)

A little heat in the iron radiator, the dog breathing at the foot of the bed, and the windows shut tight, encrusted with hexagons of frost. I can barely hear the geese complaining in the vast sky, flying over the living and the dead, schools and prisons, and the whitened fields.