Poemunity — your poem community

In Sweden, they whispered all winter, counting the frozen minutes. In France, they branched out. Tips of experience. In England, they dreamed of Ireland. In Ireland they seemed to be lonely. Germany was Belgium then was Spain. Italy was something else again. Portugal, Portugal, Portugal: they said that a lot because they never went back. Later in Hungary, he lay on his back and watched the clouds — so few of them but each one big and fluffy. In the first dream the angel was having a dream; in the next dream the angel still clung to his story.

I am so lonely for the twentieth century, for the deeply felt, obscene graffiti of armed men and the beautiful bridges that make them so small and carry them into the hearts of cities written like words across nothing, the dense void history became in my beautiful century. When a man talks reason, he postpones something. He gets in the way of a machine that knows him for the sad vengeance he is, somewhere close to the bald name of his city. "New York" means "strike back." "Attica" means "strike back" and so does anyplace in the world in the huge eyes and tender hands of my century. I went to the capital. I had a banner, and there were thousands of people like me. There was an airplane, and for a moment heavy with laurel and sprays of peach blossom something that has never happened before stretched like a woman's shadow on a hedge between the plane and the people who saw it flying. It was the real name of the century. It told everyone to strike back until there was no reason in the world except a machine stalled overhead that knows everyone and is as delicate as peach blossom. But the poor years come too late.

How I’ve changed may not be apparent. I limp. Read and write, make tea at the stove as I practiced in rehab. Sometimes, like fire, a task overwhelms me. I cry for days, shriek when the phone rings. Like a page pulled from flame, I’m singed but intact: I don’t burn down the house. Later, cleared to drive, I did outpatient rehab. Others lost legs or clutched withered minds in their hands. A man who can’t speak recognized me and held up his finger. I knew he meant One year since your surgery. Sixteen since his. Guadalupe wishes daily to be the one before. Nobody is that. Sometimes, like love, the neurons just cross fire. You don’t get everything back.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Susie Asado which is a told tray sure. A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers. When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller. This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy. Incy is short for incubus. A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must. Drink pups. Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail. What is a nail. A nail is unison. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

Australia. Phillip Island. The Tasman Sea. Dusk. The craggy coastline at low tide in fog. Two thousand tourists milling in the stands as one by one, and then in groups, the fairy penguins mass up on the sand like so much sea wrack and debris. And then, as on command, the improbable parade begins: all day they've been out fishing for their chicks, and now, somehow, they find them squawking in their burrows in the dunes, one by one, two by two, such comical solemnity, as wobbling by they catch our eager eyes until we're squawking, too, in English, French, and Japanese, Yiddish and Swahili, like some happy wedding party brought to tears by whatever in the ceremony repairs the rifts between us. The rain stops. The fog lifts. Stars. And we go home, less hungry, satisfied, to friends and family, regurgitating all we've heard and seen.

I tracked it through the one mind of  the woods. Its hoofprints pressed in snow were smallish hearts. Buck fawn: he let me come so near, take aim. Crouched against a fir, I was anything. Bush, stump, doe in estrus he could rut. Not his maimer, though, not his final thought. He stared me down until I shot him: low. Then the forest forgot he’d ever been. Nascent, there were signs: bonechip, spoor, frail hair. But no memory, wounded, wants to die. He hid in the dark timber, twice crossed the creek. Finally he lay heaving out last breaths. Dusk-cast shadow, he died where he was made. A bite of  heart sustains but is not him.

Suzanna socked me Sunday, she socked me Monday, too, she also socked me Tuesday, I was turning black and blue. She socked me double Wednesday, and Thursday even more, but when she socked me Friday, she began to get me sore. “Enough’s enough,” I yelled at her, “I hate it when you hit me!” “Well, then I won’t” Suzanna said— that Saturday, she bit me.

Naked for twenty-four of our last thirty-six Hours together, and I mean museum-quality, sex- Shop, God-riddling naked, sapping gold Light from the windows of her hundred-year-old Baltimore dorm, we were hungry for selling Points, like a couple in a showroom. Compelling Arguments were made to close the deal And children were discussed. I kissed her from heel To head in a shower without water; Then with. Nude, she read me a letter as a waiter Would his specials, and I couldn't keep My eyes off: smooth shoulders, belly, pelvis, Deep olive skin all a balm against sleep. It was from her sexy grandmother in Dieppe And Séverine translated, both of us Somehow drawn to this third party in a tidal Sort of way, her lunar candor, her antipodal Ease with words and the world. We were difficult, Séverine and I, a beautiful strain, a cult Of two. Even eating, we made lots of noise. Even resting in bed, watching the trees, Our lighter breathing, our limb-shifting, sheet- Rustling, even our dreaming had fight. Her heart was exceptionally loud—not with love, But with knowing. Knowing what to be afraid of.

The Emperor thought of his heart as a water wheel flooding the rice fields of all creation and bloodied the water for a better harvest. His warriors hoped for a life with wings. His swallowtails wrote him the same lines —the secret of life is a resurrected worm— He told them eventually time would run backwards in their hands, now empty where a crossbow went. A theory works if it answers the exceptions. The writing in the air of swallowtails, from here to where the time changes at Mexico Beach, is like writing all the armies of the afterlife waiting underground in China. We are attuned to shadows. They strafe the shore. An osprey spins above the trees. But when a large one stops suddenly above the house, all the laws have been broken. A theory that a moment is a warehouse where armies are stacked to the ceiling, then one falls, is the last exception. The osprey’s underside is streaked like a zebra swallowtail. It misses the fish that dove out of the reach of shadows as the lovers jumped into theirs from the Bay Bridge to Fort Walton. If any should meet hovering over a milkweed or reflection, they might say didn’t I know you in another life, the kind of thing said often in Fort Walton or the Orient and didn’t plum blossoms freeze in the Emperor’s courtyard.

There is a coal-black Angel With a thick Afric lip, And he dwells (like the hunted and harried) In a swamp where the green frogs dip. But his face is against a City Which is over a bay of the sea, And he breathes with a breath that is blastment, And dooms by a far decree. By night there is fear in the City, Through the darkness a star soareth on; There’s a scream that screams up to the zenith, Then the poise of a meteor lone— Lighting far the pale fright of the faces, And downward the coming is seen; Then the rush, and the burst, and the havoc, And wails and shrieks between. It comes like the thief in the gloaming; It comes, and none may foretell The place of the coming—the glaring; They live in a sleepless spell That wizens, and withers, and whitens; It ages the young, and the bloom Of the maiden is ashes of roses— The Swamp Angel broods in his gloom. Swift is his messengers’ going, But slowly he saps their halls, As if by delay deluding. They move from their crumbling walls Farther and farther away; But the Angel sends after and after, By night with the flame of his ray— By night with the voice of his screaming— Sends after them, stone by stone, And farther walls fall, farther portals, And weed follows weed through the Town. Is this the proud City? the scorner Which never would yield the ground? Which mocked at the coal-black Angel? The cup of despair goes round. Vainly she calls upon Michael (The white man’s seraph was he), For Michael has fled from his tower To the Angel over the sea. Who weeps for the woeful City Let him weep for our guilty kind; Who joys at her wild despairing— Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind.