Poemunity — your poem community

Once my sister told me that from her summit at the city pool she could see the yellow billows spread like gas or dreams between kids’ legs. In something the size of the sea, you can’t be sure who’s watching from above. Let’s say it’s the Almighty, twirling His whistle, ready to blow it at any moment and let loose the bottomless Apocalypse: the ocean would make bone of a body, coral of bone. Piss, and a tiger-fish darts through a skull-hole, a weed weaves itself through ribs. You, too, have seen the bulbs flash from the sea. You, too, have felt it breathing down your neck. You eat fish. You’ve heard that mermaids sing. My dreams are as beleaguered as the next Joe’s, my happiness as absurd, but I’m not going to go piss in the ocean about it. No, not in the ocean.

Not that I lacked an eye entirely, But give me an oblique enough kiss To visualize, and my eye said “See ya later.” A little practice might have sharpened it, But what was needed here was not as much A sharper as a higher order eye, A whole other orb altogether.

Each time we moved to a new apartment, and we did three times, I knew I shouldn't, that I should leave while I had the chance, but each time we moved to a new apartment we were desperate, had been kicked out or priced out and we only had one bed, no savings, just friends some of whom knew that you fractured your hand punching through a wall, inches from my head, and some of whom were aware that you threw things at me when I said things you didn't like, as if my words were things I threw at you first. It made sense to you. I can't remember the bad things I said—my self-serving memory enraged you, and why not: I always remembered the bad things you did. And, yes, I do remember everything you threw: a chair over our heads at a bar (Liz was there), a mirror like a frisbee aimed at my knees, a carton of fried rice that splat on the shade of our only nice lamp, oil stains patterned it with tiny bugs. Also, you threw me against a wall, but you always said it was because I made you so mad because you loved me so much and didn't want to lose me that you'd lose control instead and later beg me to stay, that if I left you it meant you would never be loved and I couldn't bear to have you think that about either one of us. I wasn't someone who'd let herself be hit; I'd never take that from a man. A man would be a criminal if he did what you did. But you had been hurt and all that pain and anger needed more time, and I made you so crazy, I was so stubborn and good at mean words, what else were you supposed to do? You liked to raise your fist pretending to hit me and then half-smile when I winced or cringed. It was important that you had never actually hit me, never punched me with a closed fist: you'd only grabbed me and choked me and flung me and made dents in the wall next to me, and narrowly missed me, but we knew you meant to miss, never truly meant to clobber me on the head with something heavy, something light, maybe, like a book I loved. When a woman you love hits you on the head with a book you love, is that love? I was so ashamed and afraid someone would find out about us, then I was afraid and ashamed people already knew but didn't know what to do. Did I really think this was a secret? Not from the cops we called during two bad fights or from Peggy who let you stay with her rent-free that month I kicked you out. You two had a blast. But I couldn't pay the rent on my own, so you moved back in, triumphant, Peggy still in love with you, and you gloated about how much money you'd saved. Surrounded by friends, whom could I tell? Why would I tell anyone who didn't already know us well enough to already know? If everyone knew, none of us said so. We talked, all of us, almost constantly, intimately, so how did we keep ourselves so quiet? You and I, together in this, were alone with this, alone among women who loved us. The two of us never more alone than when together.

Every morning I look for you on the menu. Where are your eyes and lips, my side order of thighs? I’m so hungry for the sauce of you and the way your blouse opens like a flame.

We is gator teeth hanging from the rear- view mirror as sickle cells suckle at Big Momma’s teats. We is dragonfly choppers hovering above Walden Pond. We is spinal cords shedding like the skin of a cottonmouth. We is Psalm 23 and the Pastor’s chattering chicklets. We is a good problem to have. We is throats constricting and the grape juice of Jesus. We is Roach and Mingus in Birdland. We is body electric, eyes watering with moonshine, glossy lips sticky with lard. We is half brothers in headlock, arm-wrestling in the dirt. We is Vaseline rubbed into knocked knees and cracked elbows. We is ham hocks making love to kidney beans. We is Orpheus, lute in hand, asking do we have a problem

The morning that the world began The Lion growled a growl at Man. And I suspect the Lion might (If he’d been closer) have tried a bite. I think that’s as it ought to be And not as it was taught to me. I think the Lion has a right To growl a growl and bite a bite. And if the Lion bothered Adam, He should have growled right back at ’im. The way to treat a Lion right Is growl for growl and bite for bite. True, the Lion is better fit For biting than for being bit. But if you look him in the eye You’ll find the Lion’s rather shy. He really wants someone to pet him. The trouble is: his teeth won’t let him. He has a heart of gold beneath But the Lion just can’t trust his teeth.

It’s about to rain, suddenly and without mercy. The rain will be brief, I can tell. but I will be driven inside within earshot of those anxious sounds bent on occluding my mind like a pile of unpaid bills —perhaps I will even see the pile of bills. The rain will be brief, but no matter—I won’t get back outside tonight. ~ So, I have maybe ten minutes for this to get said before all is wet and after the fact ~ because I have only a succession of chances, most missed. ~ Cal is finally fast asleep; the machine that makes the mist that keeps his trach moist rattles like an idling truck. Simone is plotting something, standing and yelling in her crib, jumping now, her sleep a bad joke. Ten years since last I was alone. My mind is not my own. ~ Reading the new poems tonight of my old teacher —she was never taken with me, not particularly—I admire her lifelong pursuit of childhood through art. She has pursued art as though it is as serious as childhood, which we all pursue to the end. ~ And yet, if her poems—ornate as stained glass leaning against a wall in the glass shop, windows looking in on almost nothing—say anything, it is,I am alone; beauty is everything except company, so beauty is nothing, almost. ~ Does she want what I have? Do I? My poems lie. The rain is coming. A few drops more and I’ll lose these letters. Simone still won’t sleep.

How tense it makes me, reading poetry, knowing how much I miss, misunderstand, how only some of the words resolve under my eyes into sentences while others slip by unnoticed, like a note inscribed on a greeting card by an aunt who never knew me well. What I mean is the job is never done, I’m never through. And I’m not made for tasks that linger; some of me is always considering all the money I owe to banks and credit card companies and the kid who kindly bought me most of my high school lunches because my dad forgot to send me to school with a couple of bucks. Which is of course to say reading poetry is a metaphor. Nothing ever finishes. ~ So why did I choose poetry? Maybe because it acknowledges right away what scares me most, how the line breaks before the thought is done, how the line, a partial thing, is the measure, and it’s never enough. My college love never did come running back after I sent her that photocopied pamphlet of heartbroke verses, and my lamentation did not un-injure my son or get me back my job. ~ I woke up panting and confused from the same nightmare over and over through childhood—I can’t remember when it stopped: my task was to build with colored blocks atop a floating green island a kind of little city; this was urgent—there would be no forgiveness if it was not complete. The dream ended with me standing before this hovering shard of land as it hovered away, my job still undone, and I was dropped back into my bed to beg my mother for something she could understand but not give. It’s hard now not to see it as a premonition, maybe a preparation for her dying only a few years later, her life, my life like all lives, unfinished. ~ And so I came to poetry.

In response to a student who told me he just “skims” the poetry right before class The barn was in the Netherlands, in a field where fierce night wind caught the straw as if to fuse the winter stars to their coldness. A farmer, woken by the sound, knowing his animals would be agitated, walked to the barn and by lantern brushed the tails of his horses. In calming them he gathered many long, gleaming strands of their nut-brown hair. Given over to what he heard in the swishing of their tails— the lash, the taut string of grief, turned slow, persistence turned to rhythmic movement— he hoped that if he listened long enough the layered sound would become a salve. He rolled the strands together, laid out along the windowsills of the barn. Then, once dry enough in spring, he rolled them in paraffin wax to preserve the sound and left them to absorb all the varied rays of sun, the spills of rain, and then snow flying fast across the latched windows and the slats, the rhythm of other breathing, animals plodding by the barn walls. The wax melted as the years progressed and other horses resided in the stalls, and their tail strands were added to the aging threads.  From that encased sound deepening over years, a rope, pulled strong and taut, would resonate. Then another generation worked the land and waxed the horse-tail cord again, and in turn when it caught that century’s light, was spun into amber. Woven into the cells of hair: the tones of canal and field, pasture, furrows of plough, leaf and shadow, straw and stone, the human calling, the animal uttering. And when melted again, incrementally strands from other horses living there were added until there were enough layers of sound, set with the nourishment of grass and salt, to be given away and the space the hair had occupied would be returned to emptiness. The horse-hair cord was brought by a farmer to a luthier’s shop along a canal, and it was a perfect fit, she said, for a violin bow she had carved a few months earlier, waiting, and for the bow-less violin someone had just given her.  She knew rosin carrying a current through pastures, filled thirst, and the grief of night wind and scavenged apples made the gathered pieces a whole. And now they are together in your hands this moment to make unrehearsed, immediate, after all those animals’ years, when you bring the instrument to your chin, when you raise the hair-strung bow, again their elemental sounding, and then their measured note, their first.

And then I thought, Can I have more of this, would it be possible for every day to be a greater awakening: more light, more light, your face on the pillow with the sleep creases rudely fragmenting it, hair so stiff from paint and sheet rock it feels like the dirty short hank of mane I used to grab on Dandy’s neck before he hauled me up and forward, white flanks flecked green with shit and the satin of his dander, the livingness, the warmth of all that blood just under the skin and in the long, thick muscle of the neck— He was smarter than most of the children I went to school with. He knew how to stand with just the crescent of his hoof along a boot toe and press, incrementally, his whole weight down. The pain so surprising when it came, its iron intention sheathed in stealth, the decisive sudden twisting of his leg until the hoof pinned one’s foot completely to the ground, we’d have to beat and beat him with a brush to push him off, that hot insistence with its large horse eye trained deliberately on us, to watch— Like us, he knew how to announce through violence how he didn’t hunger, didn’t want despite our practiced ministrations: too young not to try to empathize with this cunning: this thing that was and was not human we must respect for itself and not our imagination of it: I loved him because I could not love him anymore in the ways I’d taught myself, watching the slim bodies of teenagers guide their geldings in figure eights around the ring as if they were one body, one fluid motion of electric understanding I would never feel working its way through fingers to the bit: this thing had a name, a need, a personality; it possessed an indifference that gave me logic and a measure: I too might stop wanting the hand placed on back or shoulder and never feel the desired response. I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine and inflict on me, the sudden jerking of head away from halter, the tentative nose inspecting first before it might decide to relent and eat. I loved what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure might be blended, one warmth bleeding into another as the future bleeds into the past, more light, more light, your hand against my shoulder, the image of the one who taught me disobedience is the first right of being alive.