Poemunity — your poem community

Nothing curves at sea, and the men there die abruptly, in imitation of the fact, except when the ship rises higher than necessary and then they must drop suddenly but for a long time, so that their deaths appear natural in the end, and the women sweeping the coutyards pause, thinking the dust to be the cause of a specific dryness in the mouth. They leave half of a pastry to harden on a plate. They leave all of the lemons and figs in bowls. They leave fuschia splattered on the stone steps leading down to the bay. They carry their brooms with them, keep sweeping the air, cleaning it back to the sea. They sweep the sand from the shore, feet standing in neat little rows of foam. Each at the edge of something when the foghorns remind them: they will not clearly remember it, they will not altogether forget it. They will wait for something to emerge, like a man at sea carving his children from soap. One woman will start the rumor that the sea is deeper than necessary: Tell her, when has anyone ever come back for one day’s effort on earth?

The wild and wavy event now chintz at the window was revolution . . . Adams to Miss Abigail Smith: You have faults You hang your head down like a bulrush you read, you write, you think but I drink Madeira to you and you cross your Leggs while sitting. (Later:) How are the children? If in danger run to the woods. Evergreen o evergreen how faithful are your branches.

Amazing to believe that nothingness Surrounds us with delight and lets us be, And that the meekness of nonentity, Despite the friction of the world of sense, Despite the leveling of violence, Is all that matters. All the energy We force into the matchhead and the city Explodes inside a loving emptiness. Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth, Out of which comes and into which light goes, This God recedes from every metaphor, Turns the hardest data into untruth, And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows Itself in absence, which the stars adore.

I was a minuteman at Concord Bridge, I was a frigate-gunner on Lake Erie, I was a mortarman at Stony Ridge, I fought at San Juan Hill and Château Thierry, I braved Corregidor and the Arctic Sea: The index finger brings democracy. These States bred freedom in and in my bone— Old as the new testament of Plymouth Bay. When the Founding Fathers laid the Cornerstone And rued the thirteen clocks that would not say The hour on the hour, I nerved myself with them Under the noose in the hand of the tyrant’s whim. I’ve seen the alien ships of destiny Plow the sea mountains between the hemispheres. I’ve seen the Gulf Stream of our history Littered with derelicts of corsair careers. I’ve heard the watchman cry, “The bars! The bars!” When midnight held the funeral of stars. I saw horizontal States grow vertical, From Plymouth Harbor to the Golden Gate, Till wedged against skyscapes empyreal Their glories elbowed the decrees of fate. These States bred freedom in and in my bone: I hymn their virtues and their sins atone. The tares and wheat grow in the self-same field, The rose and thorn companion on the bush, The gold and gravel cuddle in the yield, The oil and grit and dirt together gush. The Gordian knot to be or not to be Snares not the free. My faith props the tomorrows, for I know The roots of liberty, tough-fibered, feed On the blood of tyrants and martyrs; the judas blow Tortures the branches till they twist and bleed; And yet no Caesar, vitamined on loot, Can liberty uproot! I am the Unknown Soldier: I open doors To the Rights of Man, letters incarnadine. These shrines of freedom are mine as well as yours; These ashes of freemen yours as well as mine. My troubled ghost shall haunt These States, nor cease Till the global war becomes a global peace.

— “mu” one hundred sixteenth part — Again that closer walk, legless though they’d be. Low Insofarian sun I cut my teeth on, theirs to be better to bite with, me theirs the closer we walked. They were insisting time seeds grievance, crooned it the closer I got, Zeno and Zenette moment’s nurs- es, Nunca Anuncia’s net...    Thus it was they were there again, thus they walked legless, noses thumbed at the sun. Unlay’s avatar said to’ve become caricature, sacred clown of late’s late awakening, laughed having thought it so...    So it was I saw what I saw was too much. So it was I sewed my mouth shut, they who’d have heard me gone again, what- say’s entourage. “So it was” were the words they’d gone away muttering, unlay’s non- chalance...    Everything was leaving itself, eve- ryone himself, herself, all of them, all of it, moving. It was as though they were each an- other. Outmost urge met indrawn joust, pe- yote-pod baritone tap. They were saying they’d gotten back from this or that place. Where was the honey we’d heard about I wanted to know... In the realm of whatsay it all bore consequence. They did a slack-legged shuffle, legless though they were, quick-switch imbroglio the cost of it, rum- ble in the house of who knew. It was my own most inward step, my heart itself, closer than close could be. I had a go at it but fell, my legs were in the way, no way could legless grace come again...    I thought about walking. I had to think about walk- ing, Nunca’s pelvic sway. Though what I saw I couldn’t say, it made me say things, realm in whose wood I hung in love with her hard look, walk in whose wake I lay ________________ I was whistling when my lips fell off. Lip- less was to legless in some way I couldn’t say, the closer walk words got in the way of... What it was lay on the tip of my tongue, say to unlay already in some way, unsay’s day begun. We were of more than one mind Huff had it. Sophia said the same... I wanted rele- vance, trust, I whistled even so, wind in the gaps in my teeth • A new lady named Ahdja joined our group, slight of limb, loose tomboy body, smile so broad we blushed. The Egyptian spring was up in smoke in back of us, we trudged on, far from all that, even far from Lone Coast, a former life stalked us it seemed... We took tiny steps, unsure what lay under us, unlay’s realm the sweet precinct we sought, unsure what would get us there... To say we was too much my head told me. Not so my second head said. To say we was all I wanted my third head said, sec- ond head said to’ve lost itself, third head always at odds with itself, want wanting more of itself... It was Ahdja’s dream we were in, the we I went on about, unlay’s adumbration. When would its day begin we wondered, the we I so insisted on, the we we’d eventually be, when would lay’s day be done. It was my dream of Ahdja we were in said my third head, we the one risk I took, one wish, flat rhapsodic stitch... I walked haunted by the we she made us, Nunca’s promenade be- hind us now. We’d seen Egypt in flames and we kept walking. Huff said, “I told you so,” and we kept walking, unlay’s late promenade all there was left... I dreamt a dream of moving on, I dreamt a dream of standing pat, first head and second head and third head’s agreement, a dream I let my true self slide • Unlay was no simple stand, this or that mystic hustle, this or that bodily rebuke. In the end it will have been all there was we grew to expect, no soul’s captivity some book had called Egypt, a book we no longer read... In the realm of whatsay we tramped along, there no matter spun by the swirl of it, there no matter where we were. Moment’s notice moment’s gnosis, the moment brought bad and good. Ahdja’s ka was Layla, Itamar’s Majnun, our crew caught up in the old way, the old way’s day redone... “Madness be our name,” we chimed in unison, incensed, Majnun’s dream of a just world just dreaming, Majnun’s each and all we were. So it was and so we sang, snuffed Egyptian spring an- acrustic, uncuffed auspice there’d be. Thus it was, so it went, unlay unlike what it was we expected, sanc- tified feet where voices met water, far from cause and consequence we stumped... We were relishing being together for a time, something seen in a face peering out from inside we saw was what soul was. “This is how it is,” I was telling myself, some spectral aspect it had somehow. “This is how it is,” I said, “this is how it is,” voice eaten at by the bay we stood in front of, cold ad- vent of water, cold commiseration, ythmic arrival, salt... If not what wet our hems anointment was nothing, nothing if not what tugged our feet. “Froth be what we’ll be,” we chimed, indignant, high falsetto in- sistence, deep gubgubi thrum. There was a sense there was a core to be gotten to, cloth drawn aside or gone under, frills fallen away at the water’s edge... If not it, albeit illusory it might have been, instigation was nothing ________________ The advance I wanted lay at Ahdja’s feet, scruffy thought’s nubbly dispatch. That all bow down and be at rest, unlay’s un- soon come... Chill water, careening bus, what Egypt was... World under glass wraps, flat

A hole torn in the fabric of the world, the web, the whole infernal weave through which life-giving rain is falling but mixing with the tears and with the blood. Dead body-snatchers enter, the mega-corpses, much in the news these days, enter and grind bones, flesh and sinews down to dry tree bark, mixing with tree bark, crawling with the demonic beetles. They’ll tell it later: “No one expected this”: not one—patient, doctors, practitioners of every stripe, no one except the one whose daily work is close to prophecy, who feels it in his nerves or in her muscles—where news travels up fast and lodges in the eyes, all-seeing, all-pervading vision of disaster. And comes in like a mouse, wee small, [wee modest, so wee, wee practical,] mouse with big ears and popping eyes, looking this way and that and not one tittle-tattle fazed by your huge presence. Later drowns in a bucket with a lizard: everything drowns round here getting to water. Not able to get out again. Thus coming quietly, thus probing, [thus stealing in,] squatting thus quietly back of the house: how do the tears well up, well down again, what makes them well, the seeing eyes know not, what routes the change parent-to-orphan? Stop. Orphan-to-parent? Stop. Then back again to tears? Look out beyond the healthy trees preserved in a close circle round the house for privacy, look out the window over hills and dales of this milagro country, see living green, see dying brown—on each and every morning mourn the trees. Criminal imbeciles who run the shows we live in from top to bottom of their slimy theater, have now decreed they will not solve the water. Matter of fact, they will not solve what we are made of—the high percentage water in all of us compounded. They will not solve a single problem by the name of life we give to human business. They will prefer to dip their steel in blood, to let the semen drip from off of their steel into the blood and thus contaminate, infuse with every cancer both body politic and body not so politic, just private, single, individual—but gives to other individuals their mien and color. Ghosts walk the hills and dales between the dying trees. “Remember now,” they say, with stab at tragic countenance, [for when can privacy enter into collective?] “those days, those days you took no notice of, counting them poor, dispersing them among the memories you could not value at their true worth, you could not recognize enough to feel: who knows if these few days, [these very days], were not those ones we lived together here, the only paradise?”

A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight, its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea. The town storyteller wasted no time in getting to work: the beguiling, eldest girl of a proud, bankrupt farmer had slammed that door in the face of a Freemason’s son, who in turn had bulldozed both farm and family over the cliff, except for the girl, who lived now by the light and heat of a driftwood fire on a beach. There was some plan to use the door as a jetty or landing-stage, but it was all bullshit, the usual idle talk. That’s when he left and never returned. Him I won’t name — not known for his big ideas or carpentry skills, a famous non-swimmer, but last seen sailing out, riding the current and rounding the point in a small boat with tell-tale flashes of almost certainly purple paint.

I don't own an exquisite way to move around in the night —Doug Benezra It occurs to me that, when I die, they might find the necklace I dropped behind the bed and wonder how long it was there, and whether I’d missed it. But will they care about my favorite color, my long-range plans, or my habit of searching myself for signs of rust?

1. Now you are all here you might as well know this is America we do what we like. 2. Be spontaneous it is the right way. 3. Mothers you have met before still defy comprehension. 4. Our scene is foggy we are asking you to clarify. 5. Explains geomoetry of life. Where? At Catholic Worker. 6. Very glad you came. With our mouths full of cornflakes we were expecting an emergency. 7. Cynics declare you are in Greece. 8. Better get back quick before the place is all used up. 9. The night court: the mumbling judge: confused. 10. Well-wishers are there to meet you head on. 11. For the journal: soldiers, harbingers of change. 12. You came just in time, the score is even. 13. None of the machines has yet been broken. 14. Come on we know you have seen Popes. 15. People have been a little self-conscious around here in the emergency. 16. Who cares what the cynics declare. But you have been in Greece.

between basalt cliffs no one mourns the loss of statecraft. a blaze over water reminds a quayside that soon the sea shall round up stoneposts, tapers and— should the seafarer invite tenderness to meander through returning hairlines should his fingers become racy or go idling through wingtips of paranoia —the sea shall watch itself riot and reclaim the storm that snaps and screams and whirls past clambacks porcupine quills seeds of clover flesh of tides.