Poemunity — your poem community

1 What do we like best about ourselves? Our inability to be content. We might see this restlessness as a chip not yet cashed in. 2 You appear because you’re lonely maybe. You would not say that. You come to tell me you’re saving money by cooking for yourself. You’ve figured out what units you’ll need to exchange for units if you intend I know I mustn’t interrupt 3 Hectic and flexible, flames are ideal new bodies for us!

The last twenty years were good for practically everybody save the dead. But maybe for them as well. Maybe the Almighty Himself has turned a bit bourgeois and uses a credit card. For otherwise time’s passage makes no sense. Hence memories, recollections, values, deportment. One hopes one hasn’t spent one’s mother or father or both, or a handful of friends entirely as they cease to hound one’s dreams. One’s dreams, unlike the city, become less populous the older one gets. That’s why the eternal rest cancels analysis. The last twenty years were good for practically everybody and constituted the afterlife for the dead. Its quality could be questioned but not its duration. The dead, one assumes, would not mind attaining a homeless status, and sleep in archways or watch pregnant submarines returning to their native pen after a worldwide journey without destroying life on earth, without even a proper flag to hoist. 1992

I am not asleep, but I see a limb, the fingers of death, the ghost of an anonymous painter leaving the prints of death on the wall; the bright feathers of soft birds blowing away in the forest; the bones of fish and the white backs of strange women; your breathing like the slow thunder on the other side of some river as you sleep beside me; old dancing teachers weeping in their offices; toads with bellies as quiet as girls asleep in mansions, dreaming of saddles and pulling the sheets between their legs; fireflies going to sleep on moonseed flowers around a plantation gazebo at dawn; a girl sweating in bed; hawks drifting through the moon; a woman’s hair, the flavor of death, floating in the fog like a flag on a ship full of ghosts, the ghosts of soldiers searching for the graves of their mothers; june bugs listening to Leoncavallo; christ weeping on Coney Island, inevitable, like a fissure in a faggot’s ass; a widower with no sons, a lonesome janitor, a worm in the sun, the dusty sockets of poets, who have lost their eyes, their

The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks before coughing up the question that had dogged him since he first read Emerson: Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered while his lecture drifted against us like snow. If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind. I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too, a quiet little interlude from everyone outside rooting up the corpse of literature for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer to my own question (how come no one loved me, stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle): I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet, though I liked If the red slayer think he slays— the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul. Then he read a chapter from his own book: naptime. He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks. When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard where dogwood bloomed despite a few last dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal being chased across the tundra by those wolves, the postmodernists. At any moment you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes. And I am I who never understood his question, though he let me climb to take a seat aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it from his yard, into my life—remains a mystery. The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.

His car rolls up to the curb, you switch your mood, which doll to bring and rush out again on the sliding steps of your shoes half-on, forgetting to zip your new pink coat in thirty degrees, teeth and hair not brushed, already passing the birch, mid-way between us, too far to hear my fading voice calling my rope of reminders as I lean out in my robe, another Saturday morning you’re pulled toward his smile, his gifts, sweeping on two flattened rafts from mine to his, your fleeting wave down the rapids of the drive.

1 I reached heaven and it was syrupy. It was oppressively sweet. Croaking substances stuck to my knees. Of all substances St. Michael was stickiest. I grabbed him and pasted him on my head. I found God a gigantic fly paper. I stayed out of his way. I walked where everything smelled of burnt chocolate. Meanwhile St. Michael was busy with his sword hacking away at my hair. I found Dante standing naked in a blob of honey. Bears were licking his thighs. I snatched St. Michael’s sword and quartered myself in a great circular adhesive. My torso fell upon an elastic equilibrium. As though shot from a sling my torso whizzed at God fly paper. My legs sank into some unimaginable sog. My head, though weighed with the weight of St. Michael, did not fall. Fine strands of multi-colored gum suspended it there. My spirit stopped by my snared torso. I pulled! I yanked! Rolled it left to right! It bruised! It softened! It could not free! The struggle of an Eternity! An Eternity of pulls! of yanks! Went back to my head, St. Michael had sucked dry my brainpan! Skull! My skull! Only skull in heaven! Went to my legs. St. Peter was polishing his sandals with my knees! I pounced upon him! Pummeled his face in sugar in honey in marmalade! Under each arm I fled with my legs! The police of heaven were in hot pursuit! I hid within the sop of St. Francis. Gasping in the confectionery of his gentility I wept, caressing my intimidated legs. 2 They caught me. They took my legs away. They sentenced me in the firmament of an ass. The prison of an Eternity! An Eternity of labor! of hee-haws! Burdened with the soiled raiment of saints I schemed escape. Lugging ampullae its daily fill I schemed escape. I schemed climbing impossible mountains. I schemed under the Virgin’s whip. I schemed to the sound of celestial joy. I schemed to the sound of earth, the wail of infants, the groans of men, the thud of coffins. I schemed escape. God was busy switching the spheres from hand to hand. The time had come. I cracked my jaws. Broke my legs. Sagged belly-flat on plow on pitchfork on scythe. My spirit leaked from the wounds. A whole spirit pooled. I rose from the carcass of my torment. I stood in the brink of heaven. And I swear that Great Territory did quake when I fell, free.

You have a strange pet — one eye is a cat’s, the other a sheep’s. Yet, it won’t socialize with felines, will attack any flock. On moonlit nights, it wanders on the roof. When you’re alone it will lie in your lap preoccupied, slowly studying you until — on its face — a challenge. Translated from the Chinese

The poppies start as aliens end as husbands, a pause of light, a dull scatter. Transports dandelion clouds. Venus passes between sun & earth. Exceedingly rare, Transit, have you noticed how close the ode & elegy are? (In the United States someone dies every sixteen seconds!) Husband, Supermoon, Venus come & go. Death says there is no you at the end of weather. "Among the rarest of all predictable astronomical . . ." Husband presented me. The weatherman says we are locked in the clouds.

The Brent geese fly in long low wavering lines on their migrations. They start in western Europe, fatten in Iceland, then fly over the Greenland ice cap to Canada. They sometimes breed on the Arctic coasts of central and western Siberia and winter in western Europe, some in England, the rest in Germany and France. What I have to offer here is nothing revolutionary. They learn the map from their parents, or through culture rather than through genetics. It is just an observation, a small observation that sometimes art can hold the oil wars and all that they mean and might yet mean within. Just as sometimes there are seven stanzas in a song. And just as sometimes there is a refrain between each stanza. And just as often this sort of song tells a certain sort of story, one about having something and then losing it. Just as sometimes the refrain of a song is just one word said four times. Just as sometimes the word is huge, sometimes coming from a machine and yet hitting in the heart; uplifting and ironic and big enough to hold all these things in its four syllables. Just as some- times, often even, it contradicts, and thus works with, the stanzas. Just as the police clear out yet another public space and yet another camera follows along behind. Just as the stream has no narration, only ambient noise. And the police move slowly, methodically in a line as if they are a many-legged machine. They know what they are doing. It is their third time clearing the park and they will clear it many more times and then they will win and a building will be built where there once was the park. In this song, as is true of many songs, it is unclear why the singer has lost something, maybe someone. In this time, the time of the oil wars, there are many reasons that singers give for being so lost. Often they are lost because of love. Sometimes they are lost because of drugs. Sometimes they have lost their country and in their heart it feels as if they have lost something big. And then sometimes they are lost just because they are in Bakersfield. Really though they are lost because in this time song holds loss. And this time is a time of loss. The police know, as they move through the park yet one more time, that they will win and a building will be built on the space. But right now, the building is not there. All that is there are the police and debris and the police deal with the debris. They push over book- shelves, open up boxes and look inside, tear into tents, awkwardly, the poles springing. They are only there to see if any humans remain. Tomorrow the bulldozers will push the debris into big piles and load it into trucks. The police wear white helmets and short sleeves under their kevlar vests. For many years the Brent geese ate eelgrass, but once the eelgrass was gone to the wasting disease and the estuaries filled, they moved inland to agricultural lands and began eating grasses and winter-sown cereals. The Brent geese are social, adaptable. They fly around together, learning from each other, even as these groups are often unstable, changing from season to season. Songs in their most popular versions tend to be epiphanic, gorgeous with swelling chord changes, full of lament too. And this song, like many, expresses the desire to be near someone who is now lost. It travels as something layered, infiltrated, unconfused with its refusals to make a simple sense. I want to give you this song sung in a bar in Oakland one night during the ongoing oil wars. The singer had clearly been lost once, but they sang as someone who eventually got in the car and drove out of Bakersfield, perhaps early in the morning, the sun just starting to rise, or perhaps later after sun-up, the light washing out everything in Bakersfield as the sun is wont to do there. Eventually they arrived to sing this song. This might have taken them many years. There was nothing that implied that the lostness was recent. But the lostness, it was clear, was huge and had been experienced fully by them. It probably doesn't matter where the sun was that day in Bakersfield when they got in the car. It probably just matters that there is a sun, still, and they got in the car and drove, drove through the oil fields with their wells pumping out amber colored oils and their refineries with tall towers that heat the oil so as to sort its various viscosities, and drove through the black cloud that is the slow constant burn of the oil wars. Then at some point they were in Oakland. The oil near Bakersfield is heavy but it often benchmarks against the Brent blend. Brent blend is a light crude oil, though not as light as West Texas Intermediate. It contains approximately 0.37% of sulphur, classifying it as sweet crude, yet not as sweet as West Texas Intermediate. When the park is cleared and the building is built, it will headquarter an oil company. When this oil company named their oil fields off the coast of Scotland, they choose the names of water birds in alphabetical order: Auk, Brent, Cormorant, Dunlin, Eider, Fulmar, and so on. Brent is also an acronym for the Jurassic Brent formation that makes up the Brent oilfield, for Broom, Rannoch, Etive, Ness, and Tarbert. About two thirds of oil is benchmarked against what is called the Brent Crude Oil Spot price. Petroleum suppliers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East often price their oil according to Brent Crude's value on the Interconti- nential Exchange if it is being sold to the West. The Brent Crude Oil Spot price is set in dollars, maintained by force, endlessly manipulated by commodity futures markets. The refrain is the moment when the singer makes it clear that they understand something about what is being lost. It was obvious they had lost their country, it being taken over by bankers and all. They had clearly been rejected. Loved too much and gotten too little of it back in return, many times. But none of this matters, it was obvious, in comparison to what is now being lost for that night even though the song is about a minor loss, about the loss of tongue on clit or cock, the singer seemed to understand s0mething about the other things that are lost. While a formation of police clear the far side of the park of the debris of its occupation, another forma- tion of police on the other side shoot the new gasses, the ones we do not yet know by name, into another part of the park where people are now clustered. This camera  has sound and every few seconds there is a pop. It is unevenly steady. The song is just about two people who are not near each other, who have probably chosen not to be near each other any more. The song reflects and refracts the oil in ways both relevant and trivial in how it tells about what happens when one lets love go, when one gives up the tongue. It might be that only through the minor we can feel enormity. It might be that there is nothing to epiphany if it does not hint at the moment of sweaty relation larger than the intimate. For what is epiphanic song if it doesn't spill out and over the many that are pulled from intimacies by oil's circulations? The truckers, the sailors and deckhands, the assembly line workers, those who maintain the pipelines, those who drive support in the caravans that escort the tankers, the fertilizers, the thousands of interlocking plastic parts, the workers who move two hundred miles and live in a dorm near a factory, alone, those on the ships who spend fifty weeks circulating with the oil unable to talk to each other because of no shared language and so are left only with two weeks in each year where they can experience the tongue in meaningful conversation. A life that is only circulations. Before the police come, before the building, in the middle of one night, a group of people form a line leading to the entrance of the park. Or several groups form several lines, all leading to the entrance. Some wear medical masks. Some wear glasses too. All pass bricks, one by one, down the line so as to make a pile. They are silent for the most part, silent enough that it is possible to hear the bricks make a clink as they fall. The pile gets bigger and bigger. It is waist high. Then chest high. Some get out of the line and climb on the pile, hold both their hands in the air because they know now is the transitory, momentary triumph and it should be felt. Others continue passing brick after brick, from one hand to another hand, arms extended, torsos at moments also going back and forth with the bricks. When they run out of bricks, the pile is topped with fencing. Then they gather behind it, waiting. Back there, some- one might possibly be singing to a child, singing the epiphanic song that alludes to losing the moment of tongue on clit or cock over and over because the child cannot be comforted, because the singer knows only loss. The room will be dark. The light will be on in the hall. There will be shadows, in other words. And the singer will know about these shadows at this moment and know they had agreed to be with shadows when they had the child. They had gambled in a sense on a question of sustaining. They had agreed to exist from now on with a shadow. A shadow of love and a shadow of the burning of the oil fields that has already happened and is yet to come and yet must come and a million other shadows that might possibly disappear in the light at that moment.

We trekked into a far country, My friend and I. Our deeper content was never spoken, But each knew all the other said. He told me how calm his soul was laid By the lack of anvil and strife. “The wooing kestrel,” I said, “mutes his mating-note To please the harmony of this sweet silence.” And when at the day’s end We laid tired bodies ’gainst The loose warm sands, And the air fleeced its particles for a coverlet; When star after star came out To guard their lovers in oblivion— My soul so leapt that my evening prayer Stole my morning song!