Poemunity — your poem community

Here is the place; right over the hill Runs the path I took; You can see the gap in the old wall still, And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook. There is the house, with the gate red-barred, And the poplars tall; And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard, And the white horns tossing above the wall. There are the beehives ranged in the sun; And down by the brink Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun, Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink. A year has gone, as the tortoise goes, Heavy and slow; And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows, And the same brook sings of a year ago. There ’s the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze; And the June sun warm Tangles his wings of fire in the trees, Setting, as then, over Fernside farm. I mind me how with a lover’s care From my Sunday coat I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair, And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat. Since we parted, a month had passed,— To love, a year; Down through the beeches I looked at last On the little red gate and the well-sweep near. I can see it all now,—the slantwise rain Of light through the leaves, The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane, The bloom of her roses under the eaves. Just the same as a month before,— The house and the trees, The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,— Nothing changed but the hives of bees. Before them, under the garden wall, Forward and back, Went drearily singing the chore-girl small, Draping each hive with a shred of black. Trembling, I listened: the summer sun Had the chill of snow; For I knew she was telling the bees of one Gone on the journey we all must go! Then I said to myself, “My Mary weeps For the dead to-day: Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps The fret and the pain of his age away.” But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill, With his cane to his chin, The old man sat; and the chore-girl still Sung to the bees stealing out and in. And the song she was singing ever since In my ear sounds on:— “Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”

My son and I walk away from his sister’s day-old grave. Our backs to the sun, the forward pitch of our shadows tells us the time. By sweetest accident he inclines his shadow, touching mine.

How should I praise thee, Lord! How should my rhymes Gladly engrave thy love in steel, If what my soul doth feel sometimes, My soul might ever feel! Although there were some forty heav'ns, or more, Sometimes I peer above them all; Sometimes I hardly reach a score; Sometimes to hell I fall. O rack me not to such a vast extent; Those distances belong to thee: The world's too little for thy tent, A grave too big for me. Wilt thou meet arms with man, that thou dost stretch A crumb of dust from heav'n to hell? Will great God measure with a wretch? Shall he thy stature spell? O let me, when thy roof my soul hath hid, O let me roost and nestle there: Then of a sinner thou art rid, And I of hope and fear. Yet take thy way; for sure thy way is best: Stretch or contract me thy poor debtor: This is but tuning of my breast, To make the music better. Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust, Thy hands made both, and I am there; Thy power and love, my love and trust, Make one place ev'rywhere.

When this day returns to me I will value your heart, long hurt in long division, over mine. Mouth above mine too — say you love me, truth never more meant,say you are angry. Words, words we net with our mouths. Soul is an old thirst but not as first as the body’s perhaps, though on bad nights its melancholy eats us out, to a person. True, time is undigressing. Yet true is all we can be: rhyming you, rhyming me.

What is mysterious about loss, flush of arm pulled from a wilted sleeve, summer’s urine-tang in autumn leaves? Let   John Keats light another fag. Or Brontë refuse the doctor on her black sateen settee. For whatever part of   you may be taken away, you said, is the scar I will visit first with my mouth, each time, as gold visits the thieved till, sun the obliterated sill, saying praise you for leaving me this you, this living still.

Full of light and music, the beating air. Light like a bird, Calvino says, not a feather. Over the water the shags come in to land All wings, uh-ohing over the cliffs. Rock, their nests, and bare the rookeries. Blue eye, blue eye, the wind plays fast and sharp. They lift and ride and do not pick their fights. Oh, blue sky, blue day. Heart Of muscle, thrumming down, and swift.

Where they will bury me I don't know. Many places might not be sorry to store me. The Midwest has right of origin. Already it has welcomed my mother to its flat sheets. The English fens that bore me have been close curiously often. It seems I can't get away from dampness and learning. If I stay where I am I could sleep in this educated earth. But if they are kind, they'll burn me and send me to Vermont. I'd be an education for the trees and would relish, really, flaring into maple each October— my scarlet letter to you. Your stormy north is possible. You will be there, engrossed in its peat. It would be handy not to have to cross the whole Atlantic each time I wanted to lift up the turf and slip in beside you.

Leaving again. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me, like this room I lived in for eleven days, how I learned the way the sun laid its palm over the side window in the morning, heavy light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.

The link between us all is tragedy, & these so many years later, I am thinking about him, all of twenty & gay & more free than any of us might ever be, & this is one way of telling the story, another one is aphorism or threat: blood on my knife or blood on my dick, which is to say that surviving that young & beautiful and willing to walk every day as if wearing sequins meant believing that there is always something worth risking doom. There is no reason for me to think of him now, especially with the football player’s hanging body eclipsing another prison cell, except, maybe the kid whose name I can’t remember but walk I can, had mastered something the dead man’s singing legs could never, how not to abandon the body’s weight, & how to make the body expand, to balloon, to keep becoming, until even the danger could not swallow you. One day I watched him, full of fear for my own fragility & wondered how he dared own so much of himself, openly. For all I know every minute in those cells was safe for the kid whose name I cannot recall. But how can a man ever be safe like that, when you are so beautiful the straight ones believe it & want to talk to you as if they love you and want you to dare them to believe some things in this world must be far too lovely to ever be broken.

For John Thornton Fellow fugitive Forgive yourself And me thereby Thus we can live Whatever’s left Of time for us, Each day a gift We take on trust