Poemunity — your poem community

The red eyes of rabbits aren't sad. No one passes the sad golden village in a barge any more. The sunset will leave it alone. If the curtains hang askew it is no one's fault. Around and around and around everywhere the same sound of wheels going, and things growing older, growing silent. If the dogs bark to each other all night, and their eyes flash red, that's nobody's business. They have a great space of dark to bark across. The rabbits will bare their teeth at the spring moon.

I have not used my darkness well, nor the Baroque arm that hangs from my shoulder, nor the Baroque arm of my chair. The rain moves out in a dark schedule. Let the wind marry. I know the creation continues through love. The rain’s a wife. I cannot sleep or lie awake. Looking at the dead I turn back, fling my hat into their grandstands for relief. How goes a life? Something like the ocean building dead coral.

After Les Murray Inside the sandpit you are playing for your life. Your bucket and spade that smiled all day long, like family in your satchel, now work hard. Your material is sand. It weaves a universe where you are huge, the cellar behind you, eclipsed by twelve chestnut trees and their pigeon gods. On and on you burrow, into your sanctuary, devotion’s priest. There are rituals to do, like counting leaves on the sky’s loom. Any lapse and you tumble back into the brain’s forks, rick-racking the minutes for the lock that unclicks, the coffining dark, the hooded stranger with Papa’s voice, the makeshift bed.

It’s a little-known fact that God’s headgear — A magician’s collapsible silk top hat, When viewed from Earth, from the bottom up — Is,sub specie aeternitatis, A pluperfect halo, both circle and square, And a premonition of this truth Spurred on an ancient philosopher, Anaxagoras, to make numerous vain Attempts to approximate the circle Of his concerns with the square of the cell He was jailed in for impiety. Doomed calculations which God acknowledged By doffing then pancaking his topper. He was still bareheaded millennia later, When he learned of von Lindemann’s proof that pi Is not the root of a polynomial With rational coefficients, hence Squaring the circle’s impossible. God un-collapsed, re-donned his hat! But — it was 1882, Progress was a juggernaut And the public had no patience for “proof.” From below, God’s gesture looked like a signal For all hat- and cap-wearing men, Proper in their headgear, for nations, Well-stocked with helmets for delicate brainwork, To take up “the compass and straightedge” And prepare for a singular all-out attack On this seductive conundrum, so men Enlisted en masse in Geometry’s army, Tossing up and away all hats Of cloth, opaque haloes, hurray!

i

According to local belief, Squaw Island—which is situated in the midst of the Niagara River near Buffalo, New York—was home for a band of prostitutes who serviced workers from the Erie Canal, circa 1840. Today, Squaw Island is a municipal refuse dump for the city of Buffalo. 1 Slime burlap on timbers riverside, yea More captive berths to consider: boundaries Set by familar propositions Of comfort and flatbottom mud. We men Haul up some miracle of a ditch To what’s called Squaw Island. And such remains the canalman’s trade At last. Harsh ways, we tell you, Woman, your eyes and rapture averted To the long boats pulled in tandem To your door. How could we see then How it was always us alone— Unknown stations in need of poor launch? 2 If they could sing or even listen A little, we’d be lost deep in the pitch And rumble of real lives, primed To unload a pledge or two of return. One day, under the shadow of hawks, We locked in the long grass As if slugs. The aftermath was quick Parting, forever maybe, then back To our stories of the packet boat Whacking through tangle reeds And the stoop-backed Irish turning mythic In this, a speechless country, Almost mysterious as perfume itself. 3 Captivated at Little Falls, gone clean By Weedsport, pressing toward Those vainglorious times up in Lowertown Where we’d stroll the day, liquor In hand, waiting a turn at the Locks. It should be allowed as how girls Were not forgotten, either. Sure In any faint light setting off-island, You see the hair’s worn from their legs By woolen trousers. Odd why Such standard gossip keeps us Huddled around cigar smoke and fun, Ever shuffling, ready again to move soon. 4 After miles of stumps and clear-cut skies, More stumps. And the deadly matter Of building country in the calm of summer Burdens like a search for much worse. Thinking through a warm afternoon rain, Thinking of getting there, downwater Toward neglect for glory’s sake And other never-lasting bounty, A blessing, it seems, becomes this— All passages so unworldly hot As to be bitter, our own massive bones Sweating. O Motherly touch and need, What have we to do with thee? 5 Just nervous, and the skirtless brides Seem just the same. At the taking Of shore, there’s care for the prize Portraiture of a girl at sixteen in your vest, Driving you mad, and on. It’s a gravity In the blood, unchangeable as the waif You are, a dwarf among dwarfs, no force. They tell you they understand. So half The time so drunk as to see, you wear Your life like a bandanna. That’s all Nobody’s business. That’s all the secret There is. But to any woman’s edges, Rubbed soft as landscape, you are less. 6 Kissing that last sure drop of sweat From a heavy lip, tongues wag easy In this good composted land Amid mire and flesh, a threat of snow. We rise from a hut born To game and holiday, knowing barely Ourselves. None of us escape The terrible progress we make Suffering yet another pleasure. Sad, say, the ways we loved like stones— No courting dance, no feathers Or gesture. But then nobody asked For more than favors or strange luck. 7 They watch for clouds. Any muster Could ruin business, however damp Already the shining caves that bristle Like pearl in moonlight. Beneath their belts The sources of circumstance and invention Turn nightfall to a wash. Lacking A westerly push toward Erie, the hide Tingles for a pressure, a sign, If only the whine of a full day’s water Lost to Niagara. In fair time, The swell might thicken and warm As soup in the casual hands Of a visitor aging to unwelcome weathers. 8 So it’s Buffalo: gutspill and sideshow, Crusade of rascals swaggering Up Front Street. Lovey, it all passes forth— The heart’s infirmities, our grinding Labors .... Who hasn’t spent a life Making civilization right and not Gone wrong? Soon there’ll be other empires, Then farther west, further refinements Of the breed. We conclude here, A rainy frontier, end of a pity. What’s more? Ah, dreaming, we’d scheme of strangers Above our sorry place, wise builders erecting Able love some hundred years hence! 9 Like a hatch of horseflies streaming Into gray light, we’ve grown free to cross The flushing river on abundant piping Of sludge. Where’s the barrelhouse, The waste of laughter and bile that releases? Instead there’s a world piled on bedrock, A history failing its horizons, Properties of muck increased by modern Wealth. We’re where the lost bodies Of unshared spheres intertwine As a distant rescue from style and form, From tales left squalid in the telling: Now just a vigilance, faith’s fallen banner ....

I watch a squirrel get run over by a car on my walk to work. She is lying dead in the street and still has an acorn in her little hands. I am amazed at how she is able to hold on to her acorn after being tumbled like that, after bouncing so high off the street. I walk over to the squirrel and see that her face is blown to bits and looks like uncased sausage spilling onto the asphalt. But that acorn is still so tight in her hands. I pick her up by her tail, take off my dress shirt and swaddle her in it, then put her in my bag. I know right where she is as I walk into work, everybody looking at me, everybody asking me about my shirtlessness. The world is as steady as if it were sewn into the skin of the universe.

Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon: My breath to heaven like vapour goes; May my soul follow soon! The shadows of the convent-towers Slant down the snowy sward, Still creeping with the creeping hours That lead me to my Lord: Make Thou my spirit pure and clear As are the frosty skies, Or this first snowdrop of the year That in my bosom lies. As these white robes are soil'd and dark, To yonder shining ground; As this pale taper's earthly spark, To yonder argent round; So shows my soul before the Lamb, My spirit before Thee; So in mine earthly house I am, To that I hope to be. Break up the heavens, O Lord! and far, Thro' all yon starlight keen, Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star, In raiment white and clean. He lifts me to the golden doors; The flashes come and go; All heaven bursts her starry floors, And strows her lights below, And deepens on and up! the gates Roll back, and far within For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits, To make me pure of sin. The sabbaths of Eternity, One sabbath deep and wide— A light upon the shining sea— The Bridegroom with his bride!

The dramatis personae include a fly-specked Monday evening, A cigar store with stagnant windows, Two crooked streets, Six policemen and Louie Glatz. Bass drums mumble and mutter an ominous portent As Louie Glatz holds up the cigar store and backs out with $14.92. Officer Dolan noticed something suspicious, it is supposed, And ordered him to halt, But dangerous, handsome, cross-eye'd Louie the rat Spoke with his gat, Rat-a-tat-tat— Rat-a-tat-tat And Dolan was buried as quickly as possible. But Louie didn't give a good god damn, He ran like a crazy shadow on a shadowy street With five policemen off that beat Hot on his trail, going Blam! Blam!-blam! While rat-a-tat-tat Rat-a-tat-tat Said Louie's gat, So loud that Peter Wendotti rolled away from his wife, Got out of bed to scratch his stomach and shiver on the cold floor Listening to the stammering syllables of instant death Met on secret floors in the big vacant galleries of night. Then Louie sagged and fell and ran. With seven bullets through his caved-in skull and those feeble brains Spilling out like soup. He crawled behind a water-hydrant and stood them off another half minute. "I'm not shot," he yelled, "I'm not shot," he screamed, "it isn't me they've shot in the head," he laughed, "Oh I don't give a damn!" And rat-a-tat-tat Rat-a-tat-tat Muttered the gat Of Louie the rat, While the officers of the law went Blam! Blam!-blam! Soft music. Violins moan like weeds swaying far under water. The vibrant throats of steam-ships hoot a sad defiance at distance and nothing. Space curls its arm across the flat roofs and dreary streets. Bricks bulge and sag. Louie's soul arose through his mouth in the form of a derby hat That danced with cigarette butts and burned matches and specks of dust Where Louie sprawled. Close-up of Dolan's widow. Of Louie's mother. Picture of the fly-specked Monday evening and fade out slow.

A roof over my head, protected from the rain, I’m reading, pilgrim father, your letters to your son and wondering if, unlike you, I should head for home. Escaping the turbulence of this modern Rome in a flurry of skyline views and exploding foam, I can see that 747 in flight over Nova Scotia, Lahinch and Limerick, snoring back to the future; I can see the old stormy island from the air, its meteorological gaiety and despair, some evidence of light industry and agriculture, familiar contours, turfsmoke on field and town; I can even hear the cabin crew’s soft ‘fáilte’ and the strains of ‘My Lagan Love’ as we touch down. A recovering Ulster Protestant from Co. Down, I shall walk the Dublin lanes as the days grow shorter, I who once had poems in The New Yorker, and spend old age, if any, in an old mac with the young audibly sneering behind my back, deafened by seagulls and the playground cries of children — ourselves, once — by perilous seas. Now, listening to the rus-in-urbe, spring-in-winter noise of late-night diners while the temperatures rise and the terrible wind-chill factor abates, I realize the daffodils must be out in ditch and glen and windows soon flung wide to the spring rain; and marvel how, a figure out of the past, an old man in a hurry, you stuck it here to the last, negotiating the icefields of 8th Avenue to die on West 29th of the ‘Asian’ flu. But first you met by chance at the riverside a young woman with a sick child she tried to hide (not out of shame, you felt, but anguished pride), soft-spoken, ‘from Donnybrook’, amid the alien corn. ‘It pained me that her bright image should fade.’ Thus your epiphany, and you wrote to explain: ‘The nightingale sings with its breast against a thorn, it’s out of pain that personality is born.’ Things you understood: children, the human face, ‘something finer than honesty’, the kindness of women and the priority of the real. Things that puzzled you: economy, fear, the argument from design, the need to feel secure, the belief in another world besides this one here. Despite your rationalism, did it ever appear that the universe might be really‘magical’, sir, and you yourself a showing-forth of that soul? ‘Art is dreamland.’ When you rejoined the whole what glimpse was given to you in the black hole? Now, to ‘Yeats, Artist and Writer’, may we add that you were at home here and in human nature but also, in your own words, lived and died like all of us, then as now, ‘an exile and a stranger’?