Poemunity — your poem community

It will be windy for a while until it isn’t. The waves will shoal. A red-legged cormorant will trace her double along glassy water, forgetting they are hungry. The sea will play this motif over and over, but there will be no preparing for it otherwise. Water will quiver in driftwood. Sound preceding absence, a white dog trailing a smaller one: ghost and noon shadow, two motes disappearing into surf. And when the low tide comes lapping and clear, the curled fronds of seaweed will furl and splay, their algal sisters brushing strands against sands where littleneck clams feed underwater. Light rain will fall and one cannot help but lean into the uncertainty of the sea. Bow: a knot of two loops, two loose ends, our bodies on either side of this shore where we will dip our hands to feel what can’t be seen. Horseshoe crabs whose blue blood rich in copper will reach for cover, hinged between clouds and sea. It will never be enough, the bull kelp like a whip coiling in tender hands, hands who know to take or be taken, but take nothing with them: I will marry you. I will marry you. So we can owe what we own to every beautiful thing.

Take a statement, the same as yesterday’s dictation: Lately pain has been there waiting when I awake. Creative despair and failure have made their patient. Anyway, I’m afraid I have nothing to say. Those crazy phrases I desecrated the paper With against the grain ... Taste has turned away her face Temporarily, like a hasty, ill-paid waitress At table, barely capable but very vague. Mistaken praise and blame degrade profane and sacred Places so strange you may not even know their names. Vacant the gymnasium where words once played naked Amazing games that always used to end in mate. Better, then, the effort than preterite perfection, I guess. Indeed, I envy the eminent dead The special effects I am ready to inherit Less than their sentiments and impenitent sense Of aesthetic gesture. Unpleasant and pretentious, The Western hemisphere has plenty to forget. The mess men might yet make of themselves, given present Events! Are many content to accept the best? Precious as sex is, flesh, perenially wretched, Begs the bread of heaven, blessing nevertheless The unexpected sender’s address on a letter. Every breathless sentence says not yet to death. The past cannot matter except as an abstraction, A flattering caricature of happy lands Wherein many a grand, imaginary castle In fact turns out to be a tourist trap at last, A vast palace that adrastic phantoms inhabit. Maps of madness, characteristically blank, Ask vatic questions, exact a magic answer: The family photograph album at a glance, Granny, Dad, Aunt Sally, that dissatisfied madame Who manages passion’s incalculable acts, Paris, everyman’s romantic trash and tarry— Abracadabra, and the vanished cast comes back! If civilization isn’t a silly gimmick, Is it the wit to wish, the will to make it stick? The mathematical vision which built this system Figures the width of a minute within an inch. Primitive physics, a sophisticated fiction, Insists that in principle everything is fixed. Visitors picnic amid pretty Chichèn Itzá With its sacrificial pit, artificial hills And cricket pitch wherein the winner is the victim. To think an instinct like iniquity exists! Hidden riches fill big individual middens; In the Wizard’s Pyramid little lizards live. Specious sweets we reach for eagerly with Eve’s evil Greed recede like the fleeting details of a dream. It seems that we have been a brief season in Eden: Chic unreal estates where immediately green Trees repeated in completely meaningless series Briefly yield to the weaker tyranny of weeds Even as we seek relief in a secret clearing. Prehistory can be too recent; need we read These steles’ queried speech? Here undefeated peoples Experienced deceit; here scenes of deepest grief Teach us to weep the cheap and easy tears of reason; Here the sea of being sleeps, a period peace. Frustration, fuss, and lust are love’s unlucky colours. Thunderstruck, the muscular monuments look dumb. Judged by the numbers that once flourished in the jungle In hundreds of miles of dull undercover scrub, Unless somebody was insufferably ugly Mistrust of one another must be in the blood. Unsuccess in a dozen tough struggles instructs us Justice is a mother-fucker. Suffering’s fun For a month, but in a millenium no wonder One becomes somewhat disgusted. Unsubtle skull, The mysteries of dust are nothing to live up to. Insulted by a touch, one mutters, “Summer sucks.” Undone by the siesta and by sudden showers, Is it uncomfortable in the hungry South? Now cowed by Kulkulkan’s geometrical scowl, Now wowed by the classic brown faces in a crowd, You falter at mounds memorial to a thousand Bleeding hearts in a single holiday cut out, Submitted to the sun, insatiable flesh-flower Of the universe, all-devouring powerhouse, Confounded by our sound of pronounceable vowels. Myths, as the guidebook says, are handed down by mouth. Though mood and voice and person, gender, tense, and number Predicate a verb, its cases explain a noun: Proper noun or pronoun, indubitably human, Whose beautiful excuse is usually youth Doomed to the brutal usufructu of the future, Consumed by the illusions of jejune amours. You used to choose the rules with superfluous humour, Tuned to the influential movements of the moon Whose smooth, translucent route through roofless rooms illumines From dewy moonrise unto lunar afternoon Tulum and its improvements, tumulus and ruins, Poorly reproduced, a too crudely stupid view. Who knew nude truth from rumour, amusement from music Soon would prove a fool. Beauty, useless, is a wound. On and off; the impossible is honour’s motto, Monotony the awful drawback of my song. What was lost was often all we had got in common, Our quasi-comic quandary depended on Qu’en dirai-je? chronic, colossal hypochondry, Neurotic complication or hypnotic calm. Gods begotten of loss, not bronze nor terra cotta, Haunt the province of law, of cause and conscious wrong. Following the Long Count a lot has been forgotten: Positive nonsense, fraud, false plots and hollow talk, Soporific concepts toppled by fall or conquest, The cosmos as a model watch that wants to stop. At any moment the doors of the soul may open And those reproachful ghosts invoked from the remote Coasts of tomorrow begin to impose the order Of bone and trophy, home and the odour of smoke. O mornings that broke on the slopes of cold volcanos, Almost frozen, golden and old-rose, like a scroll Slowly unfolded, or a brocade robe thrown over The throne of the mountains, cloaking their cones in snow! Hope, an emotion swollen by every omen, No psychotrope, only a semiprecious stone, Topaz or opal, adorns the close of the strophe. Woe wrote these notes in a code also known as prose. Ode: this leafy, streamless land where coy waters loiter Under the embroidered soil, subterfluous coin Of another culture destroyed by lack of moisture, Spoiled by the unavoidable poison of choice. Archaeological lawyers exploit the foibles Of a royalty that in time joined hoi polloi: History’s unemployed, geography’s anointed, Unlike the orchids of the forests, spin and toil. Imperfectly convinced of final disappointment, Persuaded of the possibility of joy, Pen poised for the pointless impressions of those voices That boil up like bubbles on the face of the void, Finally I try to define why divine silence Underlies the tidy designs of paradise. Priceless as the insights of the inspired psyche, Blind, violent as a geyser, right as a rhyme, Fine ideas likely to undermine the idle Mind divided between the types of fire and ice, “Highly stylized” politely describes the bright eyesores Shining like diamonds or rhinestones in the night sky, Lifelike, provided life survives its vital cycle And the tireless indictment of time’s diatribe, While mankind, sightless, frightened, like a child in twilight, Dies of the devices it was enlightened by. Amazing games that always used to end in mate! Precious as sex is, flesh, perennially wretched, In fact turns out to be a tourist trap at last. The mathematical vision which built this system Of the universe, all-devouring powerhouse, (The mysteries of dust are nothing to live up to!) Briefly yields to the weaker tyranny of weeds. You used to choose the rules with superfluous humour: Monotony, the awful drawback of my song, Slowly unfolded, like a brocade robe thrown over. Persuaded of the possibility of joy, Finally I tried to define why divine silence ...

I feel my failure intensely as if it were a vital organ the gods grew from the side of my head. You can't cover it with a hat and I no longer can sleep on that side it's so tender. I wasn't quite faithful enough to carry this sort of weight up the mountain. When I took my vows at nineteen I had no idea that gods were so merciless. Fear makes for good servants and bravery is fraudulent. When I awoke I wasn't awake enough.

Water opens without end At the bow of the ship Rising to descend Away from it Days become one I am who I was

I was the fourth ship. Behind Ni ñ a, Pinta, Santa Mar í a, Lost at sea while watching a seagull, Following the wind and sunset skies, While the others set their charts. I was the fourth ship. Breathing in salt and flying with clouds, Sailing moonbreezes and starvision nights, Rolling into the wave and savoring its lull, While the others pointed their prows. I was the fourth ship. Playfully in love with the sea, Eternally entwined with the sky, Forever vowed to my voyage, While the others shouted "Land."

The social instincts ... naturally lead to the golden rule. —CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man 1 Holding her steady, into the pitch and roll, in raw Midwestern hands ten thousand tons of winter wheat for the fall of Rome, still swallowing the hunger of the war: the binnacle glows like an open fire, east-southeast and steady, Anderssen, the Viking mate, belaboring me for contraband, my little book of Einstein, that “Commie Jew.” (So much for the social instincts, pacifism, humanism, the frail and noble causes.) I speak my piece for western civ: light bends ... stars warp ... mass converts ... “Pipe dreams,” says the Dane, “pipe dreams.” “Well, mate, remember, those Jewish dreams made nightmares out of Hiroshima, and blew us out of uniform, alive.” He stomps down off the bridge; some day he’ll fire me off his rusty liberty: I read too much. The ocean tugs and wrestles with ten thousand deadweight tons of charity, trembling on degrees and minutes. Anderssen steams back in with coffee, to contest the stars with Einstein, full ahead. We haven’t come to Darwin. 2 Freezing on the flying bridge, staring at the night for nothing, running lights of freighters lost in a blur of blowing snow, we hold on through the midnight watch, waiting out the bells. With Einstein in our wake, the tricks are easier: liberty churns on, ten knots an hour, toward Rome. One starry night we ride at last with Darwin on the Beagle: endless ocean, sea sickness, revelations of Toxodon and Megalonyx—a voyage old as the Eocene, the watery death of Genesis. The going gets rough again, the threat of all those bones churning the heavy swells: Anderssen, a true believer, skeptical, and Darwin trapped in a savage earthquake, the heave of coastal strata conjuring the wreck of England, lofty houses gone, government in chaos, violence and pillage through the land, and afterward, fossils gleaming white along the raw ridges. “Limeys.” Anderssen puts his benediction to empire: “Stupid Limeys.” After that we breathe a bit and watch the stars and tell sad stories of the death of tribes, the bones, the countless bones: we talk about the war, we talk about extinction. 3 Okinawa, Iwo Jima: slouching toward Tokyo, the only good Jap is a dead Jap. We must get the bomb, Einstein writes to F.D.R., waking from the dreams of peace, the noble causes: get it first, before the Nazis do. (The only good Nazi is an extinct Nazi.) At the death of Hiroshima, all day long we celebrate extinction, chugalugging free beer down at the px , teen- age kids in khaki puking pints of three-point-two in honor of the fire: no more island-hopping now to the murderous heart of empire. Later, in the luxury of peace, the bad dreams come. “Certainly,” Darwin broods, “no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants.” 4 Off somewhere to starboard, the Canaries, Palma, Tenerife: sunrise backlights the rugged peaks, as Darwin, twenty-two years old, gazes at the clouds along the foothills. Longitudes ease westward; it’s my birthday: twenty-two years old as Tenerife falls into the sunset, I’m as greedy for the old world as Darwin for the new, Bahia, Desire, the palms and crimson flowers of the Mediterranean, clear water dancing with mines. Ahead of us a tanker burns; the war will never end. 5 “You talk a lot,” says the melancholy Dane. “You sure you’re not Jewish yourself? You got a funny name.” “Well, mate, I’m pure Celtic on one side, pure Orphan on the other: therefore half of anything at all—Jewish, Danish, what you will: a problem, isn’t it, for Hitler, say, or the Klan, or even Gregor Mendel, sweating out the summer in his pea patch?” The fact is, I know those ancestors floating through my sleep: an animal that breathed water, had a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, undoubtedly hermaphrodite

I Above the fresh ruffles of the surf Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand. They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks, And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed Gaily digging and scattering. And in answer to their treble interjections The sun beats lightning on the waves, The waves fold thunder on the sand; And could they hear me I would tell them: O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached By time and the elements; but there is a line You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast. The bottom of the sea is cruel. II —And yet this great wink of eternity, Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings, Samite sheeted and processioned where Her undinal vast belly moonward bends, Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love; Take this Sea, whose diapason knells On scrolls of silver snowy sentences, The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends As her demeanors motion well or ill, All but the pieties of lovers’ hands. And onward, as bells off San Salvador Salute the crocus lustres of the stars, In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,— Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal, Complete the dark confessions her veins spell. Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours, And hasten while her penniless rich palms Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,— Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire, Close round one instant in one floating flower. Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe. O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise. III Infinite consanguinity it bears— This tendered theme of you that light Retrieves from sea plains where the sky Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones; While ribboned water lanes I wind Are laved and scattered with no stroke Wide from your side, whereto this hour The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands. And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise,— Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave unto Your body rocking! and where death, if shed, Presumes no carnage, but this single change,— Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song; Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ... IV Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe Chilled albatross’s white immutability) No stream of greater love advancing now Than, singing, this mortality alone Through clay aflow immortally to you. All fragrance irrefragably, and claim Madly meeting logically in this hour And region that is ours to wreathe again, Portending eyes and lips and making told The chancel port and portion of our June— Shall they not stem and close in our own steps Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell? In signature of the incarnate word The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown And widening noon within your breast for gathering All bright insinuations that my years have caught For islands where must lead inviolably Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,— In this expectant, still exclaim receive The secret oar and petals of all love. V Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime, Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast Together in one merciless white blade— The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits. —As if too brittle or too clear to touch! The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed, Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars. One frozen trackless smile ... What words Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge, Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved And changed ... “There’s Nothing like this in the world,” you say, Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look Too, into that godless cleft of sky Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing. “—And never to quite understand!” No, In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed Nothing so flagless as this piracy. But now Draw in your head, alone and too tall here. Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know: Draw in your head and sleep the long way home. VI Where icy and bright dungeons lift Of swimmers their lost morning eyes, And ocean rivers, churning, shift Green borders under stranger skies, Steadily as a shell secretes Its beating leagues of monotone, Or as many waters trough the sun’s Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone; O rivers mingling toward the sky And harbor of the phoenix’ breast— My eyes pressed black against the prow, —Thy derelict and blinded guest Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke, I cannot claim: let thy waves rear More savage than the death of kings, Some splintered garland for the seer. Beyond siroccos harvesting The solstice thunders, crept away, Like a cliff swinging or a sail Flung into April’s inmost day— Creation’s blithe and petalled word To the lounged goddess when she rose Conceding dialogue with eyes That smile unsearchable repose— Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle, —Unfolded floating dais before Which rainbows twine continual hair— Belle Isle, white echo of the oar! The imaged Word, it is, that holds Hushed willows anchored in its glow. It is the unbetrayable reply Whose accent no farewell can know.

(Instructions for the Visit) Admire, when you come here, the glimmering hair Of the girl; praise her pale Complexion. Think well of her dress Though that is somewhat out of fashion. Don’t try to take her hand, but smile for Her hesitant gentleness. Say the old woman is looking strong Today; such hardiness. Remark, Perhaps, how she has dressed herself black Like a priest, and wears that sufficient air That does become the righteous. As you approach, she will push back Her chair, shove away her plate And wait, Sitting squat and direct, before The red mahogany chest Massive as some great Safe; will wait, By the table and her greasy plate, The bone half-chewed, her wine half-drained; She will wait. And fix her steady Eyes on you—the straight stare Of an old politician. Try once to meet her eyes. But fail. Let your sight Drift—yet never as if hunting for The keys (you keep imagining) hung By her belt. (They are not there.) Watch, perhaps, that massive chest—the way It tries to lean Forward, toward her, till it seems to rest Its whole household’s weight Of linens and clothing and provisions All on her stiff back. It might be strapped there like the monstrous pack Of some enchanted pedlar. Dense, self-contained, Like mercury in a ball, She can support this without strain, Yet she grows smaller, wrinkling Like a potato, parched as dung; It cramps her like a fist. Ask no one why the chest Has no knobs. Betray No least suspicion The necessities within Could vanish at her Will. Try not to think That as she feeds, gains Specific gravity, She shrinks, light- less as the world’s Hard core And the per- spective drains In her. Finally, above all, You must not ever see, Or let slip one hint you can see, On the other side, the girl’s Cuffs, like cordovan restraints; Forget her bony, tentative wrist, The half-fed, worrying eyes, and how She backs out, bows, and tries to bow Out of the scene, grows too ethereal To make a shape inside her dress And the dress itself is beginning already To sublime itself away like a vapor That merges into the empty twinkling Of the air and of the bright wallpaper.

The householder issuing to the street Is adrift a moment in that ice stiff Exterior. ‘Peninsula Low lying in the bay And wooded—’ Native now Are the welder and the welder’s arc In the subway’s iron circuits: We have not escaped each other, Not in the forest, not here. The crippled girl hobbles Painfully in the new depths Of the subway, and painfully We shift our eyes. The bare rails And black walls contain Labor before her birth, her twisted Precarious birth and the men Laborious, burly—She sits Quiet, her eyes still. Slowly, Deliberately she sees An anchor’s blunt fluke sink Thru coins and coin machines, The ancient iron and the voltage In the iron beneath us in the child’s deep Harbors into harbor sand.

your face turning from mine to keep from cumming 8 strawberries in a wet blue bowl baba holding his pants up at the checkpoint a newlywed securing her updo with grenade pins a wall cleared of nails for the ghosts to walk through