Poemunity — your poem community

Where am I today? The dangers, all, with their appliance, hickishly gamey, pitchfork-high the heavensfallow hoisted, the losses, chalkmouthed—you upright mouths, you tables!— in the disangled town, harnessed to glimmerhackneys, —goldtrace, counterheaved goldtrace!—, the bridges, overjoyed by the stream, love, up there in the branch, niggling at the coming-escaping the Great Light elevated to a spark, on the right of the rings and all gain.

because I go like the professed sinner repentant to the altar of your baptismal flame I am saved despite your sculptor-love whose whimsy kneads and molds and fires then breaks the free-form of my fasting body to make me whole yet thankful I accept these carnal gifts of you Eros and wear them as I would flawless jewels (how can you know that I have bled the way and back biting the dust to wear your name?) . . . the wound lies not in your infliction but in my expectations . . .

One last time I unlock the house where they lived and fought and tried again: the air of the place, carpet with its unchanging green, chair with its back to me. On the TV set, the Christmas cactus has bloomed, has spilled its pink flowers down its scraggly arms and died, drying into paper. At the round oak table, ghosts lean toward one another, almost a bow, before rising, before ambling away.

I spent a night turning in bed, my love was a feather, a flat sleeping thing. She was very white and quiet, and above us on the roof, there was another woman I also loved, had addressed myself to in a fit she returned. That encompasses it. But now I was lonely, I yelled, but what is that? Ugh, she said, beside me, she put her hand on my back, for which act I think to say this wrongly.

The Republic lies in the blossoms of Washington. —Robert Bly White petals drop into the dark river. Heedless of political significance, they ride out to the sea like stars. I'm the space explorer. I travel to a planet where there are no plants or animals. Everyone lives in harmony. I don't want to go home. I'm the pioneer man and the pioneer woman, both at the same time. I build my house with my own hands, and it's beautiful, with simple, perfect lines. I'm the farmer waiting for the vegetables to grow, so I can eat. I'm the hunter aiming at the bear. I don't want to shoot it, but my family needs meat. The bear gives me a long dumb animal look. We'll use his skin for blankets, his fat to light our lamps. Our cabin will stink all night. I'm the cabin boy who graduates to captain. Shipboard sex is rough, but it suits my taste. I'm the man on the steps of the house where the President's widow lives. All night I wait for the stranger to get out of his car so I can flash my look of recognition. I'm the cowpoke who sleeps with his horses. I'm the man who loves dogs. I'm the cranky President sneaking away to swim in the Potomac. I'm the black man. I close my eyes and it gets dark inside. I feel the sun on my face. I see the light through my eyelids. It's bright, intelligent free of all cares. I'm the heir of a great American family. My success is guaranteed. Unexpected tragedy is all that can stop me. I'm the popular senator teaching his son to shave.

The obvious is difficult To prove. Many prefer The hidden. I did, too. I listened to the trees. They had a secret Which they were about to Make known to me, And then didn’t. Summer came. Each tree On my street had its own Scheherazade. My nights Were a part of their wild Storytelling. We were Entering dark houses, More and more dark houses Hushed and abandoned. There was someone with eyes closed On the upper floors. The thought of it, and the wonder, Kept me sleepless. The truth is bald and cold, Said the woman Who always wore white. She didn’t leave her room much. The sun pointed to one or two Things that had survived The long night intact, The simplest things, Difficult in their obviousness. They made no noise. It was the kind of day People describe as “perfect.” Gods disguising themselves As black hairpins? A hand-mirror? A comb with a tooth missing? No! That wasn’t it. Just things as they are, Unblinking, lying mute In that bright light, And the trees waiting for the night.

you gave me a white rose put the lamp on the stove it caught fire the I Ching said thunder above the lake lightning in Baker Street switched on the cooker and blew a fuse blue flash you see the whole experience is electric

Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets. There is a port-hole of light at the end of the hemlock tunnel: birds cross it, flashing their voices at you, and you feel— from the way they tilt their heads and their throats swell— the beat of their brief song, another sign the world is what it is: a shade-tree heavy with households, its fruit for meat, its leaf for medicine. But that business of the first kiss is hard to fathom: knees quaking, white water over broken rock, and the coracle you trusted your life to in a bit of a spin, head swimming with the smell of flesh so close you feel it breathing, spilling secrets— its inmost name, for one, and what the near future feels like, time wobbling to a tribal thing without tenses, and that tenacious "I" a thing of the past, only a particle of the action now, nothing separate, a luminous tumult, an affair of air and palate, air and larynx, tongue, throat, teeth, whatever brings the words out in their summer dresses—and you can hear the crow's black scavenger guffawing, egg- and offal-scoffer, comedian of windspin, so all of a sudden you rush your kingdom-come, the two of you, insects shedding your dry, chitinous skins. And although what's left is raw for a while, the slightest breath burns it, in time it comes to become you, you can live into it, intoning the Sebastian koan— whose who in pain, who's who?— and know, or close-to-know, the here it is: two clean rooms in the next parish to wholeness.

That Whitsun, I was late getting away: Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. We ran Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence The river’s level drifting breadth began, Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet. All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept For miles inland, A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrial froth; A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped And rose: and now and then a smell of grass Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth Until the next town, new and nondescript, Approached with acres of dismantled cars. At first, I didn’t notice what a noise The weddings made Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys The interest of what’s happening in the shade, And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls I took for porters larking with the mails, And went on reading. Once we started, though, We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls In parodies of fashion, heels and veils, All posed irresolutely, watching us go, As if out on the end of an event Waving goodbye To something that survived it. Struck, I leant More promptly out next time, more curiously, And saw it all again in different terms: The fathers with broad belts under their suits And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat; An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms, The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes, The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that Marked off the girls unreally from the rest. Yes, from cafés And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days Were coming to an end. All down the line Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; The last confetti and advice were thrown, And, as we moved, each face seemed to define Just what it saw departing: children frowned At something dull; fathers had never known Success so huge and wholly farcical; The women shared The secret like a happy funeral; While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared At a religious wounding. Free at last, And loaded with the sum of all they saw, We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast Long shadows over major roads, and for Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem Just long enough to settle hats and say I nearly died, A dozen marriages got under way. They watched the landscape, sitting side by side —An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And someone running up to bowl—and none Thought of the others they would never meet Or how their lives would all contain this hour. I thought of London spread out in the sun, Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat: There we were aimed. And as we raced across Bright knots of rail Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail Travelling coincidence; and what it held Stood ready to be loosed with all the power That being changed can give. We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Who kills my history knows it is buried in the same air ay breathe. Only a hair is needed to keep you, mother. Only a fit of bone. Comfort, comfort, ay am my own. Wanting simple, a sun like water, a flow and stir of air. Warm stone, black-warm, dirt scent and bird. Ay am put out to weather. Animal eyed me here—heaving, breathing over— felt by smell for me and loomed. Air shifted my hair as it neared and sniffed then left. Comfort, comfort me. A thresh of sticks and vine, hand-carried high—ay am my own weight carried by, kind horse, kind mother, gone.