Poemunity — your poem community

December 26, 1969 Dear Kenward, What a pearl of a letter knife. It's just the thing I needed, something to rest my eyes on, and always wanted, which is to say it's that of which I felt the lack but didn't know of, of no real use and yet essential as a button box, or maps, green morning skies, islands and canals in oatmeal, the steam off oyster stew. Brown agate, veined as a woods by smoke that has to it the watery twist of eel grass in a quick, rust-discolored cove. Undulating lines of northern evening—a Munch without the angst—a hint of almost amber: to the nose, a resinous thought, to the eye, a lacquered needle green where no green is, a present after-image. Sleek as an ax, bare and elegant as a tarn, manly as a lingam, November weather petrified, it is just the thing to do what with? To open letters? No, it is just the thing, an object, dark, fierce and beautiful in which the surprise is that the surprise, once past, is always there: which to enjoy is not to consume. The un- recapturable returns in a brown world made out of wood, snow streaked, storm epi- center still in stone.

Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners with an arc of piss, and then—until he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,” incanting a doggerel prayer about God the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and she, if loose in the halls, would join him, squatting in the center of the room and masturbating with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why they were sent to the madhouse: this is what they needed to do once in the madhouse: this is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion there, created from the few, make-do materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago: her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers (for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session), nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom; the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet; endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose, in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise. One dusk, one vividly contusion-color dusk, with my fists in my pockets and a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window (Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in: a full-grown pig was splayed on the table, stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife, and then they both scooped out a tumble of many dozens of wasps, preserved by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I see it? From inside this, over their wrists in the tripes, they carefully removed the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun and matching brass coin of a moon, and then a child’s-third-grade-version of a house made out of pallid wax: a square of walls, a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.

the thief has made me a gift of his night’s booty somewhere, a daughter discovers her mother’s coral brooch missing, somewhere, a man recoils at the absence of his gambling stash. somewhere, a miser rifles over a vanished ransom in newly minted silver all this to buy a hotbed of memories to feed the children fresh-killed lies to open all the locks on love forever is a moment we hold in our stomachs as he brushes the smudge of his kiss across my lips, i smell the cologne of his fear a robust and smoky aroma mingled with the woody musk of courtrooms and the stench of pain-paved alleyways i take these things and promise to say mum

The stones we have thrown I hear fall, glass-clear through the year. In the valley confused actions of the moment fly howling from tree-top to tree-top, quieting in air thinner than now's, gliding like swallows from mountain-top to mountain-top till they reach the furthest plateaus along the edge of existence. Where all our deeds fall glass-clear to no ending except ourselves.

(In Memoriam: Charles Doughty, 1843-1926) Under no hanging heaven-rooted tree, Though full of mammuks’ nests, Bone of old Britain we bury thee But heeding your unspoken hests Naught not coeval with the Earth And indispensable till its end With what whom you despised may deem the dearth Of your last resting-place dare blend. Where nature is content with little so are you So be it the little to which all else is due. Nor in vain mimicry of the powers That lifted up the mountains shall we raise A stone less of nature’s shaping than of ours To mark the unfrequented place. You were not filial to all else Save to the Dust, the mother of all men, And where you lie no other sign needs tells (Unless a gaunt shape resembles you again In some momentary effect of light on rock) But your family likeness to all her stock. Flowers may be strewn upon the grave Of easy come easy go. Fitly only some earthquake or tidal wave O’er you its red rose or its white may throw But naught else smaller than darkness and light —Both here, though of no man’s bringing!— And as any past time had been in your sight Were you now from your bed upspringing, Now or a billion years hence, you would see Scant difference, eyed like eternity. How should we have anything to give you In death who had nothing in life, Attempting in our sand-riddles to sieve you Who were with nothing, but the sheer elements rife? Anchor of truth, facile as granite you lie, A plug suspended in England’s false dreams. Your worth will be seen by and by, Like God’s purpose in what men deem their schemes, Nothing ephemeral can seek what lies in this ground Since nothing can be sought but the found. The poem that would praise you must be Like the glass of some rock, sleek brown, crowded With dark incipient crystal growths, we see; Or a glimpse of Petavius may have endowed it With the tubular and dumb-bell-shaped inclusions surrounded By the broad reaction rims it needs. I have seen it in dreams and know how it abounded —Ah! would I could find in me like seeds!— As the north-easterly garden in the lunation grows, A spectacle not one man in ten millions knows. I belong to a different country than yours And none of my travels have been in the same lands Save where Arzachel or Langrenus allures Such spirits as ours, and the Straight Wall stands, But crossing shear planes extruded in long lines of ridges, Torsion cylinders, crater rings, and circular seas And ultra-basic xenoliths that make men look midges Belong to my quarter as well, and with ease I too can work in bright green and all the curious interference Colours that under crossed nicols have a mottled appearance. Let my first offering be these few pyroxenes twinned On the orthopinacoid and hour-glass scheme, Fine striae, microline cross-hatchings, and this wind Blowing plumes of vapour forever it would seem From cone after cone diminishing sterile and grey In the distance; dun sands in ever-changing squalls; Crush breccias and overthrusts; and such little array Of Geology’s favourite fal-de-lals And demolitions and entrenchments of weather As any turn of my eyes brings together. I know how on turning to noble hills And stark deserts happily still preserved For men whom no gregariousness fills With the loneliness for which they are nerved —The lonely at-one-ment with all worth while— I can feel as if the landscape and I Became each other and see my smile In the corners of the vastest contours lie And share the gladness and peace you knew, —The supreme human serenity that was you! I have seen Silence lift his head And Song, like his double, lift yours, And know, while nearly all that seems living is dead, You were always consubstantial with all that endures. Would it were on Earth! Not since Ezekiel has that faw sun ringed A worthier head; red as Adam you stood In the desert, the horizon with vultures black-winged, And sang and died in this still greater solitude Where I sit by your skull whose emptiness is worth The sum of almost all the full heads now on Earth —By your roomy skull where most men might well spend Longer than you did in Arabia, friend!

most of my regrets         have to do with water, light    filtered through shower curtain, your skin          like yellowed paper. i sat on bathroom                  tiles cold like clammy hands i didn’t want to hold and waited for you. i didn’t think to be embarrassed then. neither                           of us could sleep that night.        the floorboards creaked and    only now do i feel guilty about sneaking into bed with you. but that was months ago. in a room         i’ll never see again parts of us have begun to die. they say that every seven years your body replaces      each cell it has ever known. soon i will be new again. some nights in my dorm room i wake up crying and there’s nothing                          humble about it. when moonlight spills across    my bed like ilfosol-3, gets caught in my throat like a soreness, it isn’t because i miss you. rather, the dark room at my old high school where i used tongs to move your picture from one chemical bath to another. in a room i’ll never see again your face develops right in front of me. stop bath, 2014 by Allegra Lockstadt

The only time I’ve been to Switzerland was early one spring on a train through the mountains. There was a lake—I guess it was Lucerne? Above me cliff tops ridged with snow fanned out so that where I stood at the edge of the platform light bathed the empty siding all around with a diffused opalescence off the water. Behind the station must have been a town, spires of churches, municipal arcades, and coffee squelching in the fogged caf és. I never saw the place, though I remember thinking this is Switzerland and took a mind-shot of the pines, breathing in the cold as the porter whistled at us to reboard.

If you should have the sniffles, you’d better blow your nose. Because if you should go “Achoo!” you’ll mess up all your clothes.

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

This is my advice to foreigners: call it simply—the river; never say old muddy or even Missouri, and except when it is necessary ignore the fact that it moves. It is the river, a singular, stationary figure of division. Do not allow the pre-Socratic to enter your mind except when thinking of clear water trout streams in north central Wyoming. The river is a variety of land, a kind of dark sea or great bay, sea of greater ocean. At times I find it good discipline to think of it as a tree rooted in the delta, a snake on its topmost western branch. These hills are not containers; they give no vantage but that looking out is an act of transit. We are not confused, we do not lose our place.