Poemunity — your poem community

I miss you like the moon misses the sun both go on and on for ages one after each other without never really meeting!

I A cave with arms at the mouth. Our hero is blind: everything he hears he sees. Hear! Gold light sifts to his ear. A roar. The seas beaten—his duodenum, colon, blind intestine and appendix, destined for heat, they blush. II William's cabbage heart shook. He dragged himself from the dirt. If he could rest his ears he could see ginkgos in his city. The pretty boy I mean & Will, who were both aging with their senses curbed until they knew New York City by the root & crack. III As if there is a fig tree rooted in heaven & each of its leaves knows all the rules. 8:45 a.m. hum: he saw the boy had fallen into a manhole & the fig tree had fallen into a manhole & neither could be the sound of hands splitting gold hands landed up the breadth of William's back. God bleeding me a kind of blooded cry my lady makes me a heron or my leg for a stump the cursed in loam my venomous thumbs my His guts an a-readied muck. IV If your hand had been dusk- yellow not a lantern but winged —a bridge or a dove sprung from the dirt. Trying to make a shape. The feathered thumb herring— bone. We would not fall. V I brought you in from the garden since I can't stand the trees' visions. William you will be there the last stately in ribbons. But the vision is a fattened glee. The glee is a clubfoot. The glee is a mutt. The eyes sewn up the air & nothing can be seen but visions. You are burst sideways like a fist in water. Your maker staring into an apron of mud. Thou art bore a hole in the man. Thou art not a bloody bit, not the man.

When the townspeople gave the teenaged Buddha a glass of wine so delicious he grew to an unthinkable size and froze into a blue statue that shielded the town from a wave that broke upon his back and would have swept away the town if he’d not tasted the wine and afterward the people were overjoyed and said they would do good deeds like carpool their children to school more often and plant lettuce everywhere while the Buddha melted into water and receded into the calm sane sea.

Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass, They do not hear Snow water going down under culverts Shallow and clear. They wait, when they should turn to journeys, They stiffen, when they should bend. They use against themselves that benevolence To which no man is friend. They cannot think of so many crops to a field Or of clean wood cleft by an axe. Their love is an eager meaninglessness Too tense, or too lax. They hear in every whisper that speaks to them A shout and a cry. As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills They should let it go by.

Yankee Doodle went to town, A-riding on a pony; Stuck a feather in his hat And called it macaroni.

Ye old mule that think yourself so fair, Leave off with craft your beauty to repair, For it is true, without any fable, No man setteth more by riding in your saddle. Too much travail so do your train appair. Ye old mule With false savour though you deceive th'air, Whoso taste you shall well perceive your lair Savoureth somewhat of a Kappurs stable. Ye old mule Ye must now serve to market and to fair, All for the burden, for panniers a pair. For since gray hairs been powdered in your sable, The thing ye seek for, you must yourself enable To purchase it by payment and by prayer, Ye old mule.

Where did the handsome beloved go? I wonder, where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go? He spread his light among us like a candle. Where did he go? So strange, where did he go without me? All day long my heart trembles like a leaf. All alone at midnight, where did that beloved go? Go to the road, and ask any passing traveler — That soul-stirring companion, where did he go? Go to the garden, and ask the gardener — That tall, shapely rose stem, where did he go? Go to the rooftop, and ask the watchman — That unique sultan, where did he go? Like a madman, I search in the meadows! That deer in the meadows, where did he go? My tearful eyes overflow like a river — That pearl in the vast sea, where did he go? All night long, I implore both moon and Venus — That lovely face, like a moon, where did he go? If he is mine, why is he with others? Since he’s not here, to what “there” did he go? If his heart and soul are joined with God, And he left this realm of earth and water, where did he go? Tell me clearly, Shams of Tabriz, Of whom it is said, “The sun never dies” — where did he go? Translated from the Persian

The self  refuses to appear in this bare place. It fears that mute chair and the still window. The sunlight scares it. There might rise up a sound. The door doesn’t like to move, and the crow out there hesitates; he knows a hole flown into by mistake would make a bite of   him. What was sits standstill in the chair, hangs, stunned, against the dry-eyed light. Nobody in sight. Inanimate things, still  lifeless. This room’s so empty I doubt I’m standing here; there can’t be room for me and total emptiness. Only some far-off sounds persist. The brute truck over the interstate. The flames in the incinerator chewing his old vests.

sometimes you know things: once at a birthday party a little girl looked at her new party gloves and said she liked me, making suddenly the light much brighter so that the very small hairs shone above her lip. i felt stuffed, like a swimming pool, with words, like i knew something that was in a great tangled knot. and when we sat down i saw there were tiny glistenings on her legs, too. i knew something for sure then. but it was too big, or like the outside too everywhere, or maybe hiding inside, behind the bicycles where i later kissed her, not using my tongue. it was too giant and thin to squirm into, and be so well inside of, or too well hidden to punch, and feel. a few days later on the asphalt playground i tackled her. she skinned her elbow, and i even punched her and felt her, felt how soft the hairs were. i thought that i would make a fine football-playing poet, but now i know it is better to be an old, breathing man wrapped in a great coat in the stands, who remains standing after each play, who knows something, who rotates in his place rasping over and over the thing he knows: “whydidnhe pass? the other end was wide open! the end was wide open! the end was wide open . . .”

Slight whiff of toner, or is it White-Out? Brief heat of manuscript lifted from the printer, against my face. What is it about the new hire that has everybody talking? Her newness, perhaps, her éclat cutting through each of us, like a sword through wet bamboo; it’s a graceful violation. And then the water breaks, and then a darkening sky rolls over the lake, and then a meeting is called to introduce her, to make her understand, to allow her to share in our delights! Here is the coffee machine, there are the filters. You may store your lunch in the communal refrigerator, but please remember to empty yourself, all of you. Feel free to decorate your cubicle with pictures, tack up a view of the lake behind you to remind you of the lake behind you. Don’t listen to those of us who are certain of the small death each photo you tack up represents. Familiarity breeds intent, intent signals purpose, purpose is a proposition you make to those who observe, quantify and assess you; and use as many legal pads as you like. And the retractable pencils, they’re all yours. Marigolds. Sunflowers. Black-Eyed Susans. Just keep it yellow. Paper cuts will happen. Band-Aids are in the top left drawer in the kitchen, next to the cake-cutting knife we pull out for anniversaries, birthdays, retirements, record days, or the first time you see all of us converge on the conference room, leaving you alone in your cube.