Poemunity — your poem community

He was so tired that he was scarcely able to hear a note of the songs: he felt imprisoned in a cold region where his brain was numb and his spirit was isolated. 1 Requite this angel whose flushed and thirsting face stoops to the sacrifice out of which it arose. This is the lord Eros of grief who pities no one; it is Lazarus with his sores. 2 And you, who with your soft but searching voice drew me out of the sleep where I was lost, who held me near your heart that I might rest confiding in the darkness of your choice: possessed by you I chose to have no choice, fulfilled in you I sought no further quest. You keep me, now, in dread that quenches trust, in desolation where my sins rejoice. As I am passionate so you with pain turn my desire; as you seem passionless so I recoil from all that I would gain, wounding myself upon forgetfulness, false ecstasies, which you in truth sustain as you sustain each item of your cross. 3 Veni Redemptor, but not in our time. Christus Resurgens, quite out of this world. ‘Ave’ we cry; the echoes are returned. Amor Carnalis is our dwelling-place. 4 O light of light, supreme delight; grace on our lips to our disgrace. Time roosts on all such golden wrists; our leanness is our luxury. Our love is what we love to have; our faith is in our festivals. 5 Stupefying images of grief-in-dream, succubae to my natural grief of heart, cling to me, then; you who will not desert your love nor lose him in some blank of time. You come with all the licence of her name to tell me you are mine. But you are not and she is not. Can my own breath be hurt by breathless shadows groaning in their game? It can. The best societies of hell acknowledge this, aroused by what they know: consummate rage recaptured there in full as faithfulness demands it, blow for blow, and rectitude that mimics its own fall reeling with sensual abstinence and woe. 6 This is the ash-pit of the lily-fire, this is the questioning at the long tables, this is true marriage of the self-in-self, this is a raging solitude of desire, this is the chorus of obscene consent, this is a single voice of purest praise. 7 He wounds with ecstasy. All the wounds are his own. He wears the martyr’s crown. He is the Lord of Misrule. He is the Master of the Leaping Figures, the motley factions. Revelling in auguries he is the Weeper of the Valedictions. 8 Music survives, composing her own sphere, Angel of Tones, Medusa, Queen of the Air, and when we would accost her with real cries silver on silver thrills itself to ice.

What had you been thinking about the face studiously bloodied heaven blotted region I go on loving you like water but there is a terrible breath in the way all of this You were not elected president, yet won the race All the way through fog and drizzle When you read it was sincere the coasts stammered with unintentional villages the horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . . I worry the water beetle head why of course reflecting all then you redid you were breathing I thought going down to mail this of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard you come through but are incomparable the lovely tent mystery you don’t want surrounded the real you dance in the spring there was clouds The mulatress approached in the hall—the lettering easily visible along the edge of the Times in a moment the bell would ring but there was time for the carnation laughed here are a couple of “other” to one in yon house The doctor and Philip had come over the road Turning in toward the corner of the wall his hat on reading it carelessly as if to tell you your fears were justified the blood shifted you know those walls wind off the earth had made him shrink undeniably an oboe now the young were there there was candy to decide the sharp edge of the garment like a particular cry not intervening called the dog “he’s coming! he’s coming” with an emotion felt it sink into peace there was no turning back but the end was in sight he chose this moment to ask her in detail about her family and the others The person.   pleaded—“have more of these not stripes on the tunic—or the porch chairs will teach you about men—what it means” to be one in a million pink stripe and now could go away the three approached the doghouse the reef.   Your daughter’s dream of my son understand prejudice darkness in the hole the patient finished They could all go home now the hole was dark lilacs blowing across his face glad he brought you

After  Jean-Michel Basquiat Crows and more crows. One crow with a rat hanging from its beak, sloppy and beautiful. Another crow with its wings plucked empty. I wanted so much of today to be peaceful but the empty crow untethers something in me: a feral yearning for love or a love that is so full of  power, of  tenderness, the words fall to their knees begging for mercy like tulips in wind. I don’t wear the crown for the times power has tainted my body, but I can tell the difference between giving up and giving in. If  you can’t, ask the crow that watches me through the window, laughing as I drink my third bottle of wine. Ask the sound the tree makes when the crow has grown disgusted with my whining. After years of repression, I can come clean. I was a boy with a hole other boys stuffed themselves into. I have wanted nothing to do with blackness or laughter or my life. But about love, who owns the right, really? Who owns the crow who loves fresh meat or the crow who loves the vibration of its own throat? Everything around me is black for its own good, I suppose. The widow, the picture of the boy crying on the wall, the mirror with its taunting, the crows that belong to their scripture. Can you imagine being so tied to blackness that even your wings cannot help you escape? About my life, every needle, a small prayer. Every pill, a funeral hymn. I wanted the end several times but thought, Who owns this body, really? God? Dirt? The silly insects that will feast on my decay? Is it the boy who entered first or the boy who wanted everything to last?

Look at their faces. You know it all. They married the week he left for the war. Both are gentle, intelligent people, as all four of their parents were. They’ve never talked about much except the children. They love each other but never wondered why they married or had the kids or stayed together. It wasn’t because they knew the answers. They had never heard the questions that twisted through the jokes to come of Moses and the Ten Suggestions. They paid their debts and never doubted God rewarded faith and virtue or when you got out of line had big and little ways to hurt you. People walked alone in parks. Children slept in their yards at night. Most every man had a paying job, and black was black and white was white. Would you go back? Say that you can, that all it takes is a wave and a wink and there you are. So what do you do? The question is crueler than you think.

I am a slave to the nudity of women. I do not know with what resolve I could stand against it, a naked woman Asking of me anything. An unclothed woman is sometimes other things. I see her in a dish of green pears. Anselmo, do you know what I mean if I say Without clothes Her breasts are the two lions In front of the New York Public Library, Do you know that postcard of mine? In those lions there is something For which I have in exchange Only sounds. Only my fingers. I see her everywhere. She is the lions And the pears, those letters of the alphabet As children we called dirty, the W, The Y, the small o. She is absolutely the wet clothing on the line. Or, you know, to be more intimate, May I? The nub, the nose of the pear, Do you know what I mean? Those parts of the woman I will call two Spanish dancer hats, Or rounder sometimes, doughboy helmets from the War. Sometimes they are flat in the late afternoon Asleep. Like drawings, Like a single rock thrown into the lake, These parts of a woman an imperfect circling Gyre of lines moving out, beyond the water. They reach me at the shore, Anselmo. Without fail, they are stronger, And they have always been faster than I am. It’s like watching the lassoing man, The man with the perfectly circling rope, Pedro Armendariz in the Mexican movies, Or Will Rogers. Wherever one is from, Whoever this man is. And he is always there. Everybody knows one. He always makes his big lasso, twirling his rope Around himself and a woman from the audience Only I am the woman, do you understand, Anselmo? Caught in the circling rope. I am the woman And me thinking of a woman Without clothes Is that man and that rope And we are riding on separate horses.

(for Philip Haas) The television set hung in its wire-net cage, protected from the flung bottles of casual rage, is fetish and icon providing all we want of magic and redemption, routine and sentiment. The year-old tinsels hang where an unclaimed no-hoper trembles; fly-corpses cling to the grimy flypaper. Manhattan snows swarm on star-boxed waters, steam trails from warm subway ventilators . . . Welcome to the planet, its fluorescent beers buzzing in the desolate silence of the spheres. Slam the door and knock the snow from your shoe, admit that the vast dark at last defeated you. Nobody found the Grail or conquered outer space; join the clientele watching itself increase.

Poetry, Wordsworth wrote, will have no easy time of it when the discriminating powers of the mind are so blunted that all voluntary exertion dies, and the general public is reduced to a state of near savage torpor, morose, stuporous, with no attention span whatsoever; nor will the tranquil rustling of the lyric, drowned out by the heavy, dull coagulation of persons in cities, where a uniformity of occupations breeds cravings for sensation which hourly visual communication of instant intelligence gratifies like crazy, likely survive this age.

The poem in which we drive an hour to the beach and Uncle Dave doesn't get out of his lawn chair once. The poem in which we left the yellow plastic shovel behind and everyone is bereft. The poem in which I can't stop talking about how you walked deep into Lake Erie and the water was still only up to your knees when you turned into a speck past the rock jetty. The poem in which everyone listens to celebrity gossip in the car on the way back. The poem in which I pontificate on how ugly the fiancée of that Jonas brother is, and how they're too young to get married, and how my grandmother's old neighbor would have said, "Ugly? She can't help that she's ugly. It's that she's so stupid," and I would have yelled at her for assuming that all former hair- dressers are dim. The poem in which I turn into my grandmother's old neighbor. The poem in which I remember very clearly how they both stored tissues in their bras. The poem in which I think about how this would horrify your mother—the pendulous breasts, the moist tissues, the dipping into the cleavage to retrieve anything. The poem in which your mother tries not to wince when I order whatever I want from the menu despite her coupon for two medium 1-topping pizzas. The poem in which I try to find a deeper meaning for why I notice the woman ahead of us in line at Johnny's Liquor Store who buys a pack of menthols and asks the guy behind the counter if he knows her good-for-nothing brother. She has hair that looks like cats got at a skein of yarn, and a tattoo above her ankle that's dark and unspecified. It's far enough above her ankle that it's nearly mid- calf—like her ankle and calf are two different countries and the tattoo got lost in the borderlands on the way to its actual destination. The poem in which I am territory that is under dispute and no one will occupy it because of fear and uncertainty. The poem in which I reach the conclusion that this feeling is inspired by your mother and the way she hums out-of-season carols while doing kitchen tasks, though it's not really about the humming but rather the time she asked me to light the Hanukkah candles in the attic because it would be better if they were out of the way for the Christmas party. The poem in which you and I are in line waiting to buy a mixed six-pack of Great Lakes and I am staring at a stranger's tattoo and thinking about the fact that I am not Anne Frank while the baby is in the car with your mother. The poem in which I go into Walmart and buy the baby an olive-green cap that looks suspiciously like Fidel Castro's. The poem in which I could eradicate the fact that I ever went into Walmart and bought anything so the baby can one day start a revolution. The poem in which we see a couple on the highway median in a stalled-out Buick and don't stop to help. The poem in which the highway median looks like the spit of land between two enemy trenches and I feel a deep longing for my childhood. The poem in which I remember, for no apparent reason, the tornado instructions taped to the sides of all the filing cabinets in one office I worked in that was on the top floor of a mostly abandoned mall in Overland Park, Kansas. All that was left: decorative fountains, floor tiles, mirrored ceilings, Nearly Famous Pizza, the carcass of Sears. The poem in which we leave Northeastern Ohio, The poem in which we return to Northeastern Ohio. The poem in which it is night and we are lost in Northeastern Ohio and we keep passing Amish buggies adorned with reflective tape. The poem in which the moon is a vehicle for content, and is far less than a perfect reflector of anything. The poem in which we are all in some kind of limbo.

To map the consequences of regardless, of underestimate, Of feverish faith, of the mechanical modernism of your false terrain. As if Port Sulphur remained nominal, its slick globules merely figurative Between territories of wait and wetlands of trust. To etch the shallow-water horizon— a techno-utopian tribute To shrimp estuaries, bird rookeries, oyster bays, To tube worms & sea turtles. To watercolor these pelican grasses, Oxidized, unapologetic executive marshes, roseated spoonbills. For you who longed to smear concentric circles, To have trusted you with longitude and latitude, To blur this sargassum border between mourning, Fighting, and willful denying of objects and subjects. As if Generations of fishermen, scaling orders of magnitude, Navigated oily streaks of miles in a legend of inches, Skeletal, ghostly swarms of now-opaque, milky jellyfish. As if to bury the blowout, rescind the rig. To fortify, to intone. If naming were not violence,to witness an active verb: Top kill, junk shot, top hat, dance dance revolution. These wayward scripts a frontier province palimpsest. Offshore yet another beacon, another account. Explosive violet iridescent.

a netless somersault, the trapeze swing disappears in disheveled clouds among cumulus sheep, birds, rowboat the feather on the Joseph Cornell narrow shelf, unruffled as the one we pocketed from the grass in a nearby park to share week by week her house mine but soon forgot and it sat on her dresser maybe sits there still elsewhere, heat, light, a shut-eye bat hangs, a limp cyclamen stem straightens, an avocado ripens, a grapefruit tree in a winter kitchen leafs out of season. Wednesday is a calendar X, Thursday, Friday, the impulse: turn inward start with near then far. narrow then broad. wayward then homebound, that, too, is near then far, inward. rate the prospects 1 to 10, Yelp the day 1- to 4-star: accommodations, host, did it match the advertised expectation the box on your lap, open it up. open your lap, open it up and your arms,a is for arm.b is for box,c connection, go on, break the seal, unfold the replacement net