Poemunity — your poem community

A little girl made of sugar and spice and everything nice was eaten by someone with a sweet tooth the size of an elephant’s tusk. Ah, he said, this darn tooth, it’s driving me nuts. Then another voice is heard. It’s the little girl’s father who says, have you seen a little girl made of sugar and spice and everything nice?--Incidentally, what’s that thing sticking out of your mouth like an elephant’s tusk? My sweet tooth, and it’s really driving me nuts. You ought to see a dentist. But he might want to pull it, and I don’t like people pulling at me. If they want to pull they should pull at their own pullables. So true, said the little girl’s father, people should pull at their own pullables and let other people's pullables alone. But still, he asked again, I wonder if you’ve seen a little girl made of sugar and spice and everything nice?

I got a letter from the government. It said let there be night. I went through your trash. There was night, all right. I consider how your light is spent. I have butterflies a little bit. I have some pills I take for it. I’ve been up since four the day before. Agony’s a cinch to sham. Don’t worry about the environment. Let it kill us if  it can. I give a tiny tinker’s damn. I put the ox behind the cart. Consume away my snow-blind heart. Fastened to a service animal it is waiting for the beep. It is waiting for the right to change. Hello, I know you’re there, pick up.

No, I am not deformed. I wear these socks Because I haven't any gloves, And my fingers are bitten with frost. They feel like stumps. Luckily, I finished covering The citrus tree with sheets of burlap. Before darkness, I will light a smudge pot Near the mummified trunk, Then anoint my hands in a blue salve. Yesterday was cold But the freeze is on now. I must remind myself Not to lick any cars. Mr. Nishizawa, a house over, Told me his nephew Lost a fourth of his tongue For that reason. Years ago, The rosebushes were ruined to a freeze And have never come back. If needed, I will stay up all night And pray, will let the hoarfrost Burn in my chest. My grandfather Ate the yield from this tree After he died. I saw him.

The very longest swell in the ocean, I suspect, carries the deepest memory, the information of actions summarized (surface peaks and dibbles and local sharp slopes of windstorms) with a summary of the summaries and under other summaries a deeper summary: well, maybe deeper, longer for length here is the same as deep time: so that the longest swell swells least; that is, its effects in immediate events are least perceptible, a pitch to white water rising say a millimeter more because of an old invisible presence: and on the ocean floor an average so vast occurs it moves in a noticeability of a thousand years, every blip, though, of surface and intermediacy moderated into account: I like to go to old places where the effect dwells, summits or seas so hard to summon into mind, even with the natural ones hard to climb or weigh: I go there in my mind (which is, after all, where these things negotiably are) and tune in to the wave nearly beyond rise or fall in its staying and hum the constant, universal assimilation: the information, so packed, nearly silenced with majesty and communicating hardly any action: go there and rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threat shot up in a disintegrating spray, the many thoughts and sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad.

Selvakumar had waked too often to the shouts of dogs — come home too many times to an empty chicken coop, stray feathers where dinner was supposed to roost. Finding two dogs in his house one night, he slammed his door to trap them, gathered stones and — the flinging done — gibbeted the bodies from a tree. A week later, he woke in darkness, feeling himself swept down a black, stinking hole the way in Kansas City, Missouri, Inspector Daniel Collins, smacked by a surge of sewer-water, slipped from his safety line and clattered down a 28-inch pipe dark as the grave it seemed about to be. Waking from sound sleep that morning, wolfing a breakfast of high-fiber toast and raisin bran, Dan never dreamed a real nightmare would swallow him. Selvakumar — squeezed by his nightmare — screamed. One ear was deaf; both hands were numb; his legs, too weak to hold his weight, tongue lolling like a dead fish in his mouth the way Dan’s did as liquid filth shoved his head under, while — first thrashing and battering, then not — he rolled/banged/slithered through earth’s bowels in darkness worse than what seized Irmgard Holm’s left eye when, after cataract surgery, she groped for eye drops in the night, grabbed a Super Glue tube, and sealed her lid tight. Doctors took Selvakumar’s cash, and shook their heads. A village healer diagnosed, “The dogs cursed you.” To break the curse, friends caught a stray, named her Selvi — Repentance — wrapped her in an orange sari, and hung a purple garland on her neck. Selvakumar — all in white, but for a purple garland like his bride’s — felt his dead legs quiver as she edged toward him. Even as he pledged eternal love, he planned to wed a woman when his health returned. Unlike a two-legged wife, though, Selvi didn’t hound him about the marital act, didn’t demand a better sari or a bigger home, or nag as he grew more helpless every day. Easy to laugh, invoking Brad & Angelina, Pyramus & Thisbe. Still, on the night Selvakumar found himself rushing again down the dark hole, who can say that Selvi didn’t guide him — as Irmgard’s husband led her to the doctor who dissolved the glue and saved her eye — as Daniel’s cries led rescuers to him, twelve feet underground, two miles from where he began — as the son of Marjorie Potts Gaffrey (dead in her sleep at 99), by sprinkling his mother’s ashes in her favorite flower pot, led Marjorie to wake as an African violet, sun bright on her leaves as it was in Daniel’s and Irmgard’s eyes, the dew of morning like the feel, as Selvakumar lay dying in his bed, of Selvi’s tongue.

What shall Presto do for pretty prattle To entertain his dears? Sunday: lightning fifty times! This week to Flanders goes the Duke of Ormond! Shall hope of him, although he loves me well! All of my hopes now possible, None certain. As, my lampoon Talked up all over, cried up to the sky —You are an impudent slut to be so positive Though all has gone just as you said it would! Sirrah! write constantly! don’t I write every day And sometimes twice? Stella writes like an emperor. Sirrah, I am surprised forever—by myself! Or by the others—dee dee: an angel child Stupid in me, stupid or innocent Astonished by the gush of vanity The stone and the eyes of pride—yet equally By the least straw or glitter of nobility! —Faith, Madame Dingley, what think you of the world to come? Patience! Patience is a gay thing—O saucy rogues, Patience is better than knowledge: be gay til I return. Mr. Harley speaks every kind thing to me. Truly, I do believe, would serve me if I stayed —Called at the coffee house, stayed there a while, Coldly converse with Mr. Addison: All our friendship and dearness now are off: Is it not odd? I think he has used me ill: I have as little pleasure as anyone In all the world, although I am In full favor with the entire ministry. Nothing gives Presto any dream of happiness But letters now and then from his delest ones. The pride of power, the pride and pleasure of place and power are Towers And trivial toys which lure me grievously Ravaging furiously in a lunation’s infuriation . . . Bursting the Rome in my head, my empire! Gulliver? Gullible! The Caesars in my heart Tell me how all infamy is possible, And certain treacheries extremely probable! I must take leave of deelest MD now. Prithee, Be merry, patient girls and love your Presto. I have read all the trash and I am weary: Deelest lives, there is peace and quiet with thee And thee alone. None have the leisure here for little things. Farewell again, dear rogues; I am never happy But when I think of thee MD. Sirrah, I have had enough of courts and ministries. I wish I were once more at Laracor: Faith, do you know each syllable  I write I hold my lips exact for all the world As if I talked the little language with MD. Yesterday died the Duke of Ormond’s daughter: Poor dear, she was with child. She was My favourite pet—save thee—I hardly knew A being more valuable, more beautiful, Of more nobility. I fear the certainty That she was thrown away quite carelessly, And merely lacked care. ’Tis clear, at any rate, That she was very healthy naturally. —Her Lord’s a puppy. I’ll no more of him, Now that he’s lost his only valuable . . . —I hate life when I see it thus exposed To accidents like these, so many thousands Burthening the earth with their stupidity, While such as she must die—abruptly—pointlessly. Somebody is coming wants a little place. My heart is set upon the cherry trees By the river side. My saucy sluts Farewell my deelest Nite poo dee MD . . . Y’see a Sea that’s ten miles wide, a town On t’other side, ships sailing in the Sea Discharging great Canons at MDs and mee, I see a great Sky, Moon and Stars, and ALL: I am a Fool.

Bing Crosby died in Spain while playing golf with Franco but who could care less, and at this writing only a few of my dear ones are gone—ah I could make a sad list—the swifts, as if to prove a point, fly into the light and make a mockery out of our darkness. They scream for food but in the world of shadows they only make a quick motion; I have studied them—the whiter the wall is—the barer the bulb— the more they scream, the more they dip down. I have made my two hands into a shape and I have darkened the wall to see what it looks like—I have shortened my two broken fingers to make the small tail and twisted the knuckles sideways so when they come in to eat one shadow overtakes the other, that way I can live in the darkness with Franco's poisonous head and Crosby's ears, who fainted, a thousand to one, behind a number two club, though no swift died for him, well, for them, digging for clubs. I watch the birds every night; they fly in a great circle, much larger than what I can see, their dipping is what I dreaded in front of my plain white wall—I say it for the nine hundred Americans who died in Spain. I thought I'd have to wait forever to do them a tiny justice and listen to their songs and die a little from the foolhardy mournful words, flying down one air current or another and doing the sides of buildings and tops of trees, the low-lying straggling dogwood, the full-bodied huge red maple, my dear ones.

Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains. The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads. But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child You shout, 'The swifts are back!' Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields. Swereee swereee. Another. And another. It's the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs. The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether. These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers. But a shift of wing, and they're earth-skimmers, daggers Skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves. Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for Earth is forbidden to them, water's forbidden to them, All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms, They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains. Here is a legend of swifts, a parable — When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds, The swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things Like shoes, with long legs and short wings, So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk. And they stayed there. 'Well,' said the Raven, after years of this, 'I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky On condition that you give up rest.' 'Yes, yes,' screamed the swifts, 'We abhor rest. We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep, Soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms. Let us be free, be air!' So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies. He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives. He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet. Then he released them,Never to Return Inscribed on their feet and wings. And so We have swifts, though in reality, not parables but Bolts in the world's need: swift Swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply Sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world's breathing. The grace to say they live in another firmament. A way to say the miracle will not occur, And watch the miracle.

He clings to her while other boys play Marco Polo. A year of lessons, this is what she gets? She wants to lie in the sun. Enough, she says, loosens her arms, releases him. The boy winces at light bouncing off water. He grasps at her, where he thinks she is, but feels blind. He decides to drown for his mother. Just this morning he breathed only when she breathed, laughed when she laughed. Before he goes under he hears one boy catch another:My eyes were closed! His cries, underwater, make bubbles that rise like loose balloons. He watches his mother’s legs move away. Out of breath, he swims toward empty blue.

for Gertrude Ederle As Europe woke from sleep, Young Trudy Ederle At Cap Gris Nez in France Dived into a daunting sea. Many had tried to make This superhuman swim — Thirty-five punishing miles. Chances, at best, were slim. When Fury found the waves, Far from the western shore, Her trainer shouted, "Let's turn back!" But Trudy cried, "What for?" Under an English moon, The celebration began After the fastest crossing By woman or by man.