Poemunity — your poem community

Columns, arches, vaults: how he knew The ways you promise what you lack; And that your bodies, like your souls, Always slip from our grasping hands. Space is such a lure . . . Swift to disappoint, As they raise and topple clouds, the sky's Architects still offer more than ours, Who only build a scaffolding of dreams. He dreamed, all the same; but on that day, He gave a better use to beauty's shapes: He understood that form means to die. And this, his final work, is a coin With both sides bare. He made in stone, Of this great room, the arrow and the bow.

1. INSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A TREE Beautiful women in smoky blue culottes lying around on fluffy pink pillows beneath windows onto charming views, sea views, seasonal leaves and trees. Inside is outside and outside inside. Smell of saltwater swimming in the room. 2. OUTSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A ROCKING CHAIR Shadow of lighthouse along the beach. Whales spotted every day lately though winter’s two months yet. The evening is as warm as an interior. Silverlight lagoonlight, snorkeling light. And a line of joggers against last light. Blue smoke snaking up the pink sky.

This poem was found written on a paper bag by Richard Brautigan in a laundromat in San Francisco. The author is unknown. By accident, you put Your money in my Machine (#4) By accident, I put My money in another Machine (#6) On purpose, I put Your clothes in the Empty machine full Of water and no Clothes It was lonely.

Since I stopped the flow Of primordial ciswhite straight men Whom I heedlessly collect And from whom the spring feeds Without reason I have been Shopping so much more Than suits a prophet in the forest. A man said he felt like an awful cad But an admission as such Does not irrigate a dry spell Once it’s surpassed the length Of a petty offense record Because the body’s memory is not so Mutated by language And there’s very little pleasure in force When the subject is inertia. I used to leave as soon as The mysterious chemistry worked out Now I am both the one who leaves And the one who stays Eco-novelty is rare and common And each design reforms The future and the last.

In this blue light I can take you there, snow having made me a world of bone seen through to. This is my house, my section of Etruscan wall, my neighbor’s lemontrees, and, just below the lower church, the airplane factory. A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls. There’s milk on the air, ice on the oily lemonskins. How clean the mind is, holy grave. It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor. Come, we can go in. It is before the birth of god. No one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line—bodies and wings—to the open air market. This is what the living do: go in. It’s a long way. And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening. Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn, but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops.

for Tony I could not disengage my world from the rest of humanity. Wind chill factor 11° below. All night wind thrashes barechested trees like a West Texas tent evangelist hissing them on his knees, lisping sinnn . . . sinn . . . sinn . . . All night wind preaches. Old tool shed behind my house fist-cuffs itself to nail-loose tin, horse pasture gates clank their crimes, while neighing black stallions of rain stampede on the patio fleeing gunshots of thunder . . . . Miles south of here, nightscopes pick up human heat that green fuzz helicopter dash panels. A mother whispers, “Sssshhhh mejito, nomás poco más allá. Nomás poco más allá.” Dunes of playing-dead people jack rabbit under strobe lights and cutting whack/blades, “Ssshhh mejito. Sssshhhh.” Child whimpers and staggers in blinding dust and gnashing wind. Those not caught, scratch sand up to sleep against underbellies of roots and stones. Eventually Juanito comes to my door, sick from eating stucco chips— his meals scratched off walls of temporary shelters, and Enrique, who guzzled water at industrial pipes pouring green foam out at the El Paso/Juarez border, and Maria steaming with fever, face dark meteorite, whispers, “Where I come from, Señor Baca, a woman’s womb is a rock, and children born from me, drop like stones, to become dust under death squad’s boots.” And Juanito, “They came at midnight and took my brothers. I have never seen them since. Each judge’s tongue is a bleeding stub of death, and each lawyer’s finger a soft coffin nail.” And Enrique, “You can trust no one. Each crying person’s eye is a damp cellar where thieves and murderers sleep.” They have found refuge here at Black Mesa. The sun passes between our lives, as between two trees, one gray, one green, but side by side.

People pray to each other. The way I say "you" to someone else, respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says "you" to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely ... —Huub Oosterhuis You       who I don’t know       I don’t know how to talk to you —What is it like for you there? Here ... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship— The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear. Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes. But they will not be mine; to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices— What are you afraid of? What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death. What happens when you die? “... not scatter the voices,” Drown out. Not make a house, out of my own words. To be quiet in another throat; other eyes; listen for what it is like there. What word. What silence. Allowing. Uncertain: to drift, in the restlessness ... Repose. To run like water— What is it like there, right now? Listen: the crowding of the street; the room. Everyone hunches in against the crowding; holding their breath: against dread. What do you dread? What happens when you die? What do you dread, in this room, now? Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin. To die, not having listened. Not having asked ... To have scattered life. Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.

The tide pool crumples like a woman into the smallest version of herself, bleeding onto whatever touches her. The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled with plastic lace, and closer to the vanishing point, something brown breaks  the surface—human, maybe, a hand or foot or an island of trash—but no, it’s just a garden of kelp. A wild life. This is a prayer like the sea urchin is a prayer, like the sea star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber— as if I know what prayer means. I call this the difficulty of the non-believer, or, put another way, waking, every morning, without a god. How to understand, then, what deserves rescue and what deserves to suffer. Who. Or should I say, what must be sheltered and what abandoned. Who. I might ask you to imagine a young girl, no older than ten but also no younger, on a field trip to a rescue.Can you see her? She is lead to the gates that separate the wounded sea lions from their home and the class. How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself: to claim her own barking voice, to revel in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers woven into the cyclone fence.

Our ropes are the roots of our life. We fish low in the earth, the river beneath runs through our veins, blue and cold in a riverbed. When the sun comes up, the moon moves slowly to the left. I tie the logs and limbs together, holding them in place. The ocean beats them smooth like rock. Here my sense of time is flat. I find in a strip of damp sand footprints and marks of hands, and torn pieces of flesh. Night is a beast. The tide moves, gushing back and forth. Sunlight touches our faces, turning us, turning us, turning us in our morning sleep. 1976

The language of cranes we once were told is the wind. The wind is their method, their current, the translated story of life they write across the sky. Millions of years they have blown here on ancestral longing, their wings of wide arrival, necks long, legs stretched out above strands of earth where they arrive with the shine of water, stories, interminable language of exchanges descended from the sky and then they stand, earth made only of crane from bank to bank of the river as far as you can see the ancient story made new.