Poemunity — your poem community

After his ham & cheese in the drape factory cafeteria, having slipped by the bald shipping foreman to ride a rattling elevator to the attic where doves flicker into the massive eaves and where piled boxes of out-of-style cotton and lace won’t ever be decorating anyone’s sun parlor windows. Having dozed off in that hideout he fixed between five four-by-six cardboard storage cartons while the rest of us pack Mediterranean Dreams and Colonial Ruffles and drapes colored like moons, and he wakes lost— shot through into a world of unlocked unlocking light— suddenly he knows where he is and feels half nuts and feels like killing some pigeons with a slingshot. That’s all, and that’s why he pokes his calloused fingers into the broken machinery, hunting for loose nuts a half inch wide— five greasy cold ones that warm in his pocket— and yanks back the snag-cut strip of inner tube with a nut snug at the curve to snap it at the soft chest of a dopey bird. Then the noise of pigeons flopping down to creosoted hardwood, and then a grin the guy gives me & all his other pals later. And afternoon tightens down on all our shoulders, until the shift whistle blasts, blowing through the plant like air through lace. As it always has, as it does. That bright. That stunned.

Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four, the soldierly grey boulevards slippery with tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding, the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knew whose face was wheel-broken in a crash, and remade so well it was hard to say how she looked wrong. I’d brought two questions here— holding them as if they might slip:who were my mother’s people? Where did they die? In an attic-archive—deep card indexes, ink turned lilac with age—I handed my questions to a love-laborer in a yarmulke; with sad palms and a shake of the head he regretted that any answers now lay probably beyond our reach. So I abandoned questing and went back to tourism; joined the passeggiata, drank black tea, got stickied under sooty lime trees, saw boisterous children, all knees and elbows, skyline-capering on the wall at the river-divide. Beyond their frail silhouettes against the petrol dusk huge cranes were moving, courtly, confident, building another new Warsaw across the Vistula.

To those fair isles where crimson sunsets burn, We send a backward glance to gaze on thee, Brave Toussaint! thou was surely born to be A hero; thy proud spirit could but spurn Each outrage on the race. Couldst thou unlearn The lessons taught by instinct? Nay! and we Who share the zeal that would make all men free, Must e’en with pride unto thy life-work turn. Soul-dignity was thine and purest aim; And ah! how sad that thou wast left to mourn In chains ’neath alien skies. On him, shame! shame! That mighty conqueror who dared to claim The right to bind thee. Him we heap with scorn, And noble patriot! guard with love thy name.

i

The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you, To see you shake your head. The mic may as well Be a leather belt. You drive to the center of town To be whipped by a woman's voice. You can't tell The difference between a leather belt and a lover's Tongue. A lover's tongue might call you bitch, A term of endearment where you come from, a kind Of compliment preceded by the word sing In certain nightclubs. A lush little tongue You have: you can yell, Sing bitch, and, I love you, With a shot of Patrón at the end of each phrase From the same barstool every Saturday night, but you can't Remember your father's leather belt without shaking Your head. That's what satisfies her, the woman With the microphone. She does not mean to entertain You, and neither do I. Speak to me in a lover's tongue— Call me your bitch, and I'll sing the whole night long.

We thought nothing of it, he says, though some came so close to where we slept. I try to see him as a boy, back in the Philippines, waking to the sound of machine guns. His family would spend their morning spreading a paste over the sores of the house’s thick walls. He tells how he touched points where bullets entered, his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes, as if inside there existed a space where everything from this world could vanish. Here we could place the memory of my sister, his daughter, who died after a car wreck. Wedge her into the smoky path & cover her in sunlight. The family next door is raking leaves in the yard. A father scolds his children for jumping into large piles he arranged into a crescent moon. We cannot hear them from inside, but I feel they are frightened as he grabs both of them around the waist & spins. I wait for the ending to my father’s story, but he is too busy smiling, as if enjoying the silence of bullets frozen there in his mind.

Though there's no such thing as a "self," I missed it— the fiction of it and how I felt believing in it mildly like a book an old love sent with an inscription in his hand, whatever it meant, After such knowledge, what forgiveness . . . —the script of it like the way my self felt learning German words by chance— Mitgefühl, Unheimlichkeit —and the trailing off that happened because I knew only the feelings, abstract and international, like ghosts or connotations lacking a grammar, a place to go: this was the way my self felt when it started falling apart: each piece of it clipped from a garden vaguely remembered by somebody unrecognizable— such a strange bouquet that somebody sent to nobody else, a syntax of blossoms.

Fair tree! for thy delightful shade 'Tis just that some return be made; Sure some return is due from me To thy cool shadows, and to thee. When thou to birds dost shelter give, Thou music dost from them receive; If travellers beneath thee stay Till storms have worn themselves away, That time in praising thee they spend And thy protecting pow'r commend. The shepherd here, from scorching freed, Tunes to thy dancing leaves his reed; Whilst his lov'd nymph, in thanks, bestows Her flow'ry chaplets on thy boughs. Shall I then only silent be, And no return be made by me? No; let this wish upon thee wait, And still to flourish be thy fate. To future ages may'st thou stand Untouch'd by the rash workman's hand, Till that large stock of sap is spent, Which gives thy summer's ornament; Till the fierce winds, that vainly strive To shock thy greatness whilst alive, Shall on thy lifeless hour attend, Prevent the axe, and grace thy end; Their scatter'd strength together call And to the clouds proclaim thy fall; Who then their ev'ning dews may spare When thou no longer art their care, But shalt, like ancient heroes, burn, And some bright hearth be made thy urn.

I knew a man, he was my chum, but he grew blacker every day, and would not brush the flies away, nor blanch however fierce the hum of passing shells; I used to read, to rouse him, random things from Donne— like “Get with child a mandrake-root.” But you can tell he was far gone, for he lay gaping, mackerel-eyed, and stiff, and senseless as a post even when that old poet cried “I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost.” I tried the Elegies one day, But he, because he heard me say: “What needst thou have no more covering than a man?” grinned nastily, and so I knew the worms had got his brains at last. There was one thing that I might do to starve the worms; I racked my head for healthy things and quoted Maud. His grin got worse and I could see he sneered at passion’s purity. He stank so badly, though we were great chums I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.

When last we came this pleasant way The hedgerows blossomed, high and hard, And blue with shade the violets lay In every cherry-lightened yard. Now, in commemorative rain, I walk the quiet way alone, And there are violets again As blue as I have ever known. Useless to barricade the flesh To splendid branch and flower-row: I see the cherry, flaked and fresh, And smell the violet as I go Perplexed past wetted flowerbed And boxwood glimmering into leaf, Companionless, disquieted, And fearfully as any thief— Smarting of some sacrilege Too profligate to understand, As one who disavows a pledge And treads repudiated land.