Poemunity — your poem community

When first I walked here I hobbled along ties set too close together for a boy to step easily on each. I thought my stride one day would reach every other and from then on I would walk in time with the way toward that Lobachevskian haze up ahead where the two rails meet. Here we put down our pennies, dark, on shined steel; they trembled, fell still; then the locomotive out of Attleboro rattling its berserk wheel-rods into perfect circles, brightened them into wafers, the way a fork mashes into view the inner light of a carrot in a stew. In this late March sunshine, crossing the trees at the angle of a bow when it effleurages out of the chanterelle the C three octaves above middle C, the vertical birthwood remembers its ascent lines, shrunken by half, exactly back down, each tree on its fallen summer. Back then, these rocks often asked blood offerings—but this one, once, asked bone, the time Billy Wallace tripped and broke out his front teeth. Fitted with gold replicas, he asked, speaking more brightly, “What good are golden teeth, given what we’ve got to eat?” Nebuchadnezzar spent seven years down on all fours eating vetch and alfalfa, ruminating the mouth-feel of “bloom” and “wither,” until he was whole. If you held a grass blade between both thumbs and blew hard you could blurt a shriek out of it—like that beseeching leaves oaks didn’t drop last winter just now scratch on a breeze. Maybe Billy, lured by bones’ memory, comes back sometimes, too, to the Seekonk Woods, to stand in the past and just look at it. Here he might kneel, studying this clump of grass, as a god might inspect the strands of a human sneeze that percusses through. Or he might stray into the now untrafficked whistling-lanes of the mourning doves, who used to call and call into the future, and give a start, as though, this very minute, by awful coincidence, they reach it. And at last traipse off down the tracks, with arrhythmic gait, as wanderers must do once they realize: the over-the-unknown route, too, ends up where time wants. On this spot I skinned the muskrat. The musk breezed away. I buried the rat. Of the fur I made a hat, which as soon as put on began to rot off, causing my scalp to crawl. In circles, of course, keeping to the skull. One day could this scrap of damp skin crawl all the way off, and the whole organism follow? To do what? Effuse with musk, or rot with rat? When, a quarter- turn after the sun, the half-moon, too, goes down and we find ourselves in the night's night, then somewhere hereabouts in the dark must be death. Knowledge of it beforehand is surely among existence’s most spectacular feats—and yet right here, on this ordinary afternoon, in these woods, with a name meaning “black goose” in Wampanoag, or in modern Seekonkese, “slob blowing fat nose,” this unlikely event happens—a creature walking the tracks knows it will come. Then too long to touch every tie, his stride is now just too short to reach every other, and so he is to be still the wanderer, the hirtle of too much replaced by the common limp of too little. But he almost got there. Almost stepped in consonance with the liturgical, sleeping gods’ snores you can hear humming up from former times inside the ties. He almost set foot in that border zone where what follows blows back, shimmering everything, making walking like sleepwalking, railroad tracks a country lane on a spring morning, on which a man, limping but blissful, makes his way homeward, his lips, suppled by kissing to bunch up like that, blowing these short strands of hollowed-out air, haunted by future, into a tune on the tracks. I think I’m about to be shocked awake. As I was in childhood, when I battered myself back to my senses against a closed door, or woke up hanging out of an upstairs window. Somnambulism was my attempt to slip under cover of nightmare across no father’s land and embrace a phantasm. If only I had found a way to enter his hard time served at labor by day, by night in solitary, and put my arms around him in reality, I might not now be remaking him in memory still; anti-alchemizing bass kettle’s golden reverberations back down to hair, flesh, blood, bone, the base metals. I want to crawl face down in the fields and graze on the wild strawberries, my clothes stained pink, even for seven years if I must, if they exist. I want to lie out on my back under the thousand stars and think my way up among them, through them, and a little distance past them, and attain a moment of absolute ignorance, if I can, if human mentality lets us. I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now. The moment I have done one or the other, I here swear, no one will have to drag me , I’ll come but never will I agree to burn my words. The poplar logs creosoted asleep under the tracks have stopped snoring. Maybe they’ve already waked up. The bow saws at G. An oak leaf rattles on its tree. The rails may never meet, O fellow Euclideans, for you, for me. So what if we groan. That’s our noise. Laughter is our stuttering in a language we can’t speak yet. Behind, the world made of wishes goes dark. Ahead, if not now then never, shines what is.

It is not that I love you less Than when before your feet I lay, But to prevent the sad increase Of hopeless love, I keep away. In vain (alas!) for everything Which I have known belong to you, Your form does to my fancy bring, And makes my old wounds bleed anew. Who in the spring from the new sun Already has a fever got, Too late begins those shafts to shun, Which Phœbus through his veins has shot. Too late he would the pain assuage, And to thick shadows does retire; About with him he bears the rage, And in his tainted blood the fire. But vow’d I have, and never must Your banish’d servant trouble you; For if I break, you may distrust The vow I made to love you, too.

Artemisia Gentileschi A woman in a man's world, a woman making a claim, choosing her own body as the source of inspiration, wearing, as Pittura did, a gold chain bearing the mask of imitation: her tousled hair and muscled arms, the shifting gold-green colors of her dress, her sleeve rolled to the elbow, the light striking  her brow and the shadow made by the mask-shaped charm against flesh, the double mirrors she used to paint herself, the act of it captured mid-gesture, the paint laid out as her father taught her: white near the thumb then red, brown, green, her well-curved body bending around the canvas, the calculated self-image occupying the full height of the picture, her unromanticized face, dramatically lit, composed, the bare bodice, the rolled-up sleeve, her eyes turned upward, her right arm raised, its movement frozen, the mind in motion, her wide, searching gaze.

Historians will tell you my uncle wouldn't have called it World War II or the Great War plus One or Tombstone over My Head.

The whiskey stink of rot has settled in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises when I touch the dying tomato plants. Still, the claws of tiny yellow blossoms flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots and toss them in the compost. It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready to let go of summer so easily. To destroy what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months. Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit. My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village as they pulled the flax. Songs so old and so tied to the season that the very sound seemed to turn the weather.

1. Morning of Crystal This is the deathless body, and this the land’s blood … and here the wine-laced sky over Iowa resembles a heavenly parfait. In one more day Des Moines will be diapered by first snow. A young girl, barely real, glazes the sidewalk with a stupid look. Iowa in winter always dumbfounds the love in us. Before long, nothing opposes the weight and resolution of this sky, this wilderness of earth hardening. When heaviness strikes like a clock glowing incandescently, the season opens to itself, as if a familiar stunt in a traveling show, a fabulation only a touched young girl can devise for any new world. Des Moines. November 1973 2. Cooking the Cold

I That was I, you heard last night, When there rose no moon at all, Nor, to pierce the strained and tight Tent of heaven, a planet small: Life was dead and so was light. II Not a twinkle from the fly, Not a glimmer from the worm; When the crickets stopped their cry, When the owls forbore a term, You heard music; that was I. III Earth turned in her sleep with pain, Sultrily suspired for proof: In at heaven and out again, Lightning! —- where it broke the roof, Bloodlike, some few drops of rain. IV What they could my words expressed, O my love, my all, my one! Singing helped the verses best, And when singing's best was done, To my lute I left the rest. V So wore night; the East was gray, White the broad-faced hemlock-flowers: There would be another day; Ere its first of heavy hours Found me, I had passed away. VI What became of all the hopes, Words and song and lute as well? Say, this struck you —- "When life gropes Feebly for the path where fell Light last on the evening slopes, VII "One friend in that path shall be, To secure my step from wrong; One to count night day for me, Patient through the watches long, Serving most with none to see." VIII Never say —- as something bodes —- "So, the worst has yet a worse! When life halts 'neath double loads, Better the taskmaster's curse Than such music on the roads! IX "When no moon succeeds the sun, Nor can pierce the midnight's tent Any star, the smallest one, While some drops, where lightning rent, Show the final storm begun —- X "When the fire-fly hides its spot, When the garden-voices fail In the darkness thick and hot, —- Shall another voice avail, That shape be where these are not? XI "Has some plague a longer lease, Proffering its help uncouth? Can't one even die in peace? As one shuts one's eyes on youth, Is that face the last one sees?" XII Oh how dark your villa was, Windows fast and obdurate! How the garden grudged me grass Where I stood —- the iron gate Ground its teeth to let me pass!

instead of entrance Goodbye means Avoir Sved’s dream said from nowhere of aliquant angles some spindle of the sun empirically facted deafening skin open and afterwards a cough is a couch idled into without rain an island easily a third worse Indigo with a flame-red tongue

Chide me not, darling, that I sing Familiar thoughts and metres old: Nay, do not scold My spirit’s childish uttering. I know not why ’t is that or this I murmur to you thus or so: Only I know It throbs across my silences, It blows over my heart,—a long Infinite wind, again, again! Again! and then My life kneels down into a song.

Plum black & the blush white of an apple shoulder, melon & cream, in tones to list the flesh; in light, washed colors off at last & textures sheer with damp I slowly pull from you with your quick help. Weekend's ample procrastinations to forget the least of what we want to do. April, half a blast of cold, half new light, green & simple. Now dusk. Now fear. We pencil what we owe on this short form, our numbers good enough. The goose-neck glare undoes how we spent the day. Each bite each bee-sting kiss each bitten O all aftertaste. Later, at the drop-off, postmark queue, we joke: "Now we can die!"