Poemunity — your poem community

U p beyond the N ight sky, an I ndigo darkness like V elvet E mbraces the farthest R eaches of the mind, S un, moon, stars, E verything.

5pm on the nose. They open their mouths And it rolls out: high, shrill and metallic. First the boy, then his sister. Occasionally, They both let loose at once, and I think Of putting on my shoes to go up and see Whether it is merely an experiment Their parents have been conducting Upon the good crystal, which must surely Lie shattered to dust on the floor. Maybe the mother is still proud Of the four pink lungs she nursed To such might. Perhaps, if they hit The magic decibel, the whole building Will lift-off, and we'll ride to glory Like Elijah. If this is it—if this is what Their cries are cocked toward—let the sky Pass from blue, to red, to molten gold, To black. Let the heaven we inherit approach. Whether it is our dead in Old Testament robes, Or a door opening onto the roiling infinity of space. Whether it will bend down to greet us like a father, Or swallow us like a furnace. I'm ready To meet what refuses to let us keep anything For long. What teases us with blessings, Bends us with grief. Wizard, thief, the great Wind rushing to knock our mirrors to the floor, To sweep our short lives clean. How mean Our racket seems beside it. My stereo on shuffle. The neighbor chopping onions through a wall. All of it just a hiccough against what may never Come for us. And the kids upstairs still at it, Screaming like the Dawn of Man, as if something They have no name for has begun to insist Upon being born.

The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even A few bars of sax the stratosphere will singe-out soon enough. Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise, Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen: The dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming, Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns. Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears Disappears as if returning somewhere.

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew Is the curriculum. In mid-September The entering boys, identified by hats, Wander in a maze of mannered brick Where boxwood and magnolia brood And columns with imperious stance Like rows of ante-bellum girls Eye them, outlanders. In whited cells, on lawns equipped for peace, Under the arch, and lofty banister, Equals shake hands, unequals blankly pass; The exemplary weather whispers, “Quiet, quiet” And visitors on tiptoe leave For the raw North, the unfinished West, As the young, detecting an advantage, Practice a face. Where, on their separate hill, the colleges, Like manor houses of an older law, Gaze down embankments on a land in fee, The Deans, dry spinsters over family plate, Ring out the English name like coin, Humor the snob and lure the lout. Within the precincts of this world Poise is a club. But on the neighboring range, misty and high, The past is absolute: some luckless race Dull with inbreeding and conformity Wears out its heart, and comes barefoot and bad For charity or jail. The scholar Sanctions their obsolete disease; The gentleman revolts with shame At his ancestor. And the true nobleman, once a democrat, Sleeps on his private mountain. He was one Whose thought was shapely and whose dream was broad; This school he held his art and epitaph. But now it takes from him his name, Falls open like a dishonest look, And shows us, rotted and endowed, Its senile pleasure.

(for John Barrell) 1.gone to lunch back in five minutes night closed in on my letter of resignation out in the square one of my threads had broken loose the language i used was no and no while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills occasionally the metabolism alters and lines no longer come express waiting for you what muscles work me which hold me down below my head? it is a long coat and a van on the horizon a bird that vanishes    the arabic i learn from observation is how to break the line (genius creates surprises : the metropolitan police band singing ‘bless this house’ as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam 2.walking my back home the wind is the wind is a no-vo-cain band and the footstep echoes i have conjured peo ple 3.ah, it all falls into place when it was time what he had left became a tile bodies held shaped by the pressure of air were clipped to his attention by their gestures my but we do have powerful muscles each of us equal to gravity or sunlight that forces our shadows into the pieces of a fully interlocking puzzle 4.good morning he whispered the horrors of the horses are the crows the bird flies past the outside the library many heels have trapped the same way he tolls, he lapsed with the light from so many trees check the pattern swerves with the back the tree that holds the metal spiral staircase swings aloft the hand removes a book and checked it for death by glasses or the angle food descends 5.the broadcast she turns me on she turns on me that the view from the window is a lake and silent cars are given the noise of flies dying in the heat of the library    the grass outside goes brown in my head behind my glasses behind the glass in the precinct thus, too, they whisper in museums and banks

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard If others sang; but others never sang In the great beech-wood all that May and June. No one saw him: I alone could hear him Though many listened. Was it but four years Ago? or five? He never came again. Oftenest when I heard him I was alone, Nor could I ever make another hear. La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off— As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world, As if the bird or I were in a dream. Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still He sounded. All the proof is—I told men What I had heard. I never knew a voice, Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told The naturalists; but neither had they heard Anything like the notes that did so haunt me, I had them clear by heart and have them still. Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet: Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say That it was one or other, but if sad 'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off For me to taste it. But I cannot tell If truly never anything but fair The days were when he sang, as now they seem. This surely I know, that I who listened then, Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering A heavy body and a heavy heart, Now straightway, if I think of it, become Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

The rain is plashing on my sill, But all the winds of Heaven are still; And so it falls with that dull sound Which thrills us in the church-yard ground, When the first spadeful drops like lead Upon the coffin of the dead. Beyond my streaming window-pane, I cannot see the neighboring vane, Yet from its old familiar tower The bell comes, muffled, through the shower. What strange and unsuspected link Of feeling touched, has made me think— While with a vacant soul and eye I watch that gray and stony sky— Of nameless graves on battle-plains Washed by a single winter’s rains, Where, some beneath Virginian hills, And some by green Atlantic rills, Some by the waters of the West, A myriad unknown heroes rest. Ah! not the chiefs who, dying, see Their flags in front of victory, Or, at their life-blood’s noble cost Pay for a battle nobly lost, Claim from their monumental beds The bitterest tears a nation sheds. Beneath yon lonely mound—the spot By all save some fond few forgot— Lie the true martyrs of the fight, Which strikes for freedom and for right. Of them, their patriot zeal and pride, The lofty faith that with them died, No grateful page shall farther tell Than that so many bravely fell; And we can only dimly guess What worlds of all this world’s distress, What utter woe, despair, and dearth, Their fate has brought to many a hearth. Just such a sky as this should weep Above them, always, where they sleep; Yet, haply, at this very hour, Their graves are like a lover’s bower; And Nature’s self, with eyes unwet, Oblivious of the crimson debt To which she owes her April grace, Laughs gaily o’er their burial place.

Cortez arrives. he is absolutely lost at an unknown shore. an he is enraptured (this is the nature of poetry The poem: Cortez arrives at an unknown shore he is absolutely lost and he is enraptured Cortez arrives at an unknown shore he is utterly lost but he is enraptured Cortez arrives too late. the shore is absolutely barren, the men lost to starvation and rapture Cortez utters: “lost.” (this is the nature of description Cortez walks upon the beach. the ocean is as still as a map spread out on a table. (he takes a nap. All the Cortezs arrive. all the waves arrive (this is the nature of disaster

"light which is not sum" —Norma Cole, Mars The workaround or aura Not like repetition When we get to the final sun The maps are water the water gold He would not honor me You explain then against The disbelief displayed by the character I couldn’t know him But knew love and Know it through knowledge “Love never falls off whether prophecies will be abolished whether tongues stopped” Announced as the fact Redolent of what was The defining addition More than the parts Unprecedented Ardor also not Adding up to Sun or son to sum The outcome Unknowable Perfect and Unavowed The same sound Unknown sum

Ye aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown Who lies here with no stone to mark the place. As a boy reckless and wanton, Wandering with gun in hand through the forest Near the mansion of Aaron Hatfield, I shot a hawk perched on the top Of a dead tree. He fell with guttural cry At my feet, his wing broken. Then I put him in a cage Where he lived many days cawing angrily at me When I offered him food. Daily I search the realms of Hades For the soul of the hawk, That I may offer him the friendship Of one whom life wounded and caged.