Poemunity — your poem community

Scrambled eggs and whiskey in the false-dawn light. Chicago, a sweet town, bleak, God knows, but sweet. Sometimes. And weren’t we fine tonight? When Hank set up that limping treble roll behind me my horn just growled and I thought my heart would burst. And Brad M. pressing with the soft stick, and Joe-Anne singing low. Here we are now in the White Tower, leaning on one another, too tired to go home. But don’t say a word, don’t tell a soul, they wouldn’t understand, they couldn’t, never in a million years, how fine, how magnificent we were in that old club tonight.

Green and brown current of river: Reverberant iron bridge: crossing over, Woman and child fixed at the center, Holding hands and both weeping: Because her child is weeping: because His mother weeps: because the river, far Underfoot, glitters through cracks In the wooden flooring that widen Perceptively as he steps. Ahead, heightened by a hill, dwarfed In yellow trees, the house is made ready. All should have been primer-perfect, Including the train rushing headlong Past the station, always in arrears, Never deigning to stop and put down A stepping-stool. Nothing more is given: Except perhaps an assignment of cause: A plank has fallen away to the river. The two figures clasp hands across the gulf, Rocking back and forth in soundless Oscillation there on the bridge Where my mind proposes to leave them In place, my mother and me, On the first day of school, 1921.

It was cousin Alvin who stole the liquor, slipped down Aunt Mabie's steps on the ice, fresh from jail for some small crime. Alvin liked to make us laugh while he took the liquor or other things we did not see, in Aunt Mabie's with her floors polished, wood she polished on her hands and knees until they were truth itself and slippery enough to trick you, Aunt Mabie who loved her Calvert Extra and loved the bright inside of family, the way we come connected in webs, born in clusters of promises, dotted with spots that mark our place in the karma of good times, good times in the long ribbon of being colored I learned when colored had just given way to Negro and Negro was leaving us because blackness chased it out of the house, made it slip on the ice, fall down and spill N-e-g-r-o all over the sidewalk until we were proud in a new avenue of pride, as thick as the scrapple on Saturday morning with King syrup, in the good times, between the strikes and layoffs at the mills when work was too slack, and Pop sat around pretending not to worry, not to let the stream of sweat he wiped from his head be anything except the natural way of things, keeping his habits, the paper in his chair by the window, the radio with the Orioles, with Earl Weaver the screamer and Frank Robinson the gentle black man, keeping his habits, Mama keeping hers, the WSID gospel in the mornings, dusting the encyclopedias she got from the A&P, collecting the secrets of neighbors, holding marriages together, putting golden silence on children who took the wrong turns, broke the laws of getting up and getting down on your knees. These brittle things we call memories rise up, like the aroma of scrapple, beauty and ugliness, life's mix where the hard and painful things from folk who know no boundaries live beside the bright eyes that look into each other, searching their pupils for paths to prayer.

I have seen the arrested shrub inform the crag with grief. Lichens crust the rocks with red. Thorns punctuate the leaf. Sorrow is not a desert where one endures the other— but footing lost and halting step. And then another.

Long scree of pill bottles spilling over the tipped brim of the wicker basket, fifty or more, a hundred, your name on every one and under your name the brusque rune of instructions— which ones to take, how many, and often, on what days, with or without food, before or after eating, impossible toward the end to keep them all straight, not even with your charts, your calendars, the bottles ranged in sequence along the kitchen counter—you always so efficient, organized, never without a plan, even when planning had come down to this and nothing more, for there was still a future in it, though the future reached only from one bottle to the next, from pill to pill, each one another toehold giving way beneath you on the steep slope you never stopped struggling against, unable not to climb, and then, when climbing was impossible, not to try slowing the quickening descent. You had descended now, your body thinned to the machine of holding on, while I exhausted by the vigil, with all your medicine spread before me, looked for something, anything at all to help me sleep. To help me for a short while anyway not be aware of you, your gaunt hand clutching the guardrail, your eyes blind, flitting, scanning, it seemed, the air above them for their own sight, and the whimper far back in the throat, the barely audible continuous half-cry half- wheeze I couldn’t hear and not think you were saying something, though I couldn’t make out what. I wanted to sleep, I wanted if just for that one night to meet you there on that steep slope, the two of us together, facing opposite directions, I, because I wasn’t dying, looking down, desiring what you, still looking up, resisted, because you were.

1 On a wall shadowed by lights from the distance is the screen. Icons come to it dressed in capes and their eyes reflect the journeys their nomadic eyes reach from level earth. Narratives are in the room where the screen waits suspended like the frame of a girder the worker will place upon an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with a plot or a quarter inch of poetry to encourage nature into his building and the tree leaning against it, the tree casting language upon the screen. 2 The telephone is Flaubert’s parrot and it flitters from perch to perch across the city. Or someone is holding the dead thing in her hand in a remote hotel. A sensitive person with a disability who speaks to the inanimate. She may even resemble Louise Colet or the helpful niece. She hasn’t sent her meaning and I am absent in these reminiscences of her. The telephone is the guignol of messages. It may have been cold moving down from roofs, a continental wind caught between buildings. Leaves and pollen blowing onto fire escapes. Windstruck hambones lying in a gutter. Equinoc- tial changes the body knows, the hand feels, the truck passes without notice and buildings con- tinue their nervous commitments. The earth may have been moaning underneath this junk. I am caught in the wind’s draft. 3 At night viewing the screen of distance with shadowy icons framed by light I understood the rasping interior was rearing other icons, No longer gentle they flashed ripened clauses, or images raised formidable projections of ice, the wall was placed in a temporary position where words glittered from a dark cover, Narcissism lived in a silver hut. 4 In the lighter time of year words arrived concealed in branches. Flaubert exchanged himself for words, night became a night of words and a journey a journey of words, and so on. Words became “a superior joke”, I trembled under a revolutionary weight, a coward fleeing from a cloud. The ego of words stretched to the room’s borders assuming the sonorous movement of a poem. 5 I entice this novice poem with a mineral,Beryl. The dictionary bestows on Beryl a skittish description, like a sequence in which a car moves over ruptured roads and slices into ghost veins of color— a camera follows each turn, examines the exits where rock protects a visionary tool that prods it:— “A light greenish blue that is bluer and deeper than average aqua, greener than robin’s eggs blue, bluer and paler than turquoise blue and greener and deeper than beryl blue—a light greenish blue that is bluer and paler than beryl or average turquoise blue— bluer and slightly paler than aqua.”

I sit here in a shelter behind the words Of what I’m writing, looking out as if Through a dim curtain of rain, that keeps me in here. The words are like a scrim upon a page, Obscuring what might be there beyond the scrim. I can dimly see there’s something or someone there. But I can’t tell if it’s God, or one of his angels, Or the past, or future, or who it is I love, My mother or father lost, or my lost sister, Or my wife lost when I was too late to get there, I only know that there’s something, or somebody, there. Tell me your name. How was it that I knew you?

He was led to be hanged. How to write this scene? Was it winter? Summer? From behind the fence across the street his mother watched. What should I call her? Let’s say, Antanina. And he is Maxim. Why Maxim, and not Basil or Yanak? The stones tucked themselves under his feet, two magpies stalked him, poplar to poplar. You’ve ever been hanged? Me, never yet. And that’s the problem. So are the magpies. Why should there be two, not one? The gutters silver with spring waters. So was it spring? Alright. By the courthouse, gray soldiers, lined up in a row. In the park — ladies. And ladies’ men. And where’s mother? “It’s best without her,” he thought. Do change her name. How’s then? A truck with sides already dropped — above it — a noose. Above a noose — a cloud. Who’s sitting at the wheel? His brother? Son? No, a son is pushing it. A brother then. And from behind the curtain in a palace next to the courthouse she watches. Marysya? Alright, Marysya. Those magpies. Soldiers. Water. Park. That cloud again. And glances from the crowd. “It’s him ... Not you ... Not me ... For that, thank God ... ” Bells ringing. Will he hear the bells? Behind Marysya stands the one who shares her bed. With blazing epaulets. And profile. And a hand around her waist. A river embraces the park. A river jammed with ice. Life blazes, rings. To sum it up, considering all mentioned: “He was led to be hanged.” Alone. Translated from the Belarusian

I Why should you sweare I am forsworn, Since thine I vow’d to be? Lady it is already Morn, And ’twas last night I swore to thee That fond impossibility. II Have I not lov’d thee much and long, A tedious twelve houres space? I must all other Beauties wrong, And rob thee of a new imbrace; Could I still dote upon thy Face. III Not, but all joy in thy browne haire, By others may be found; But I must search the blank and faire Like skilfull Minerallist’s that sound For Treasure in un-plow’d-up ground. IV Then, if when I have lov’d my round, Thou prov’st the pleasant she; With spoyles of meaner Beauties crown’d, I laden will returne to thee, Ev’d sated with Varietie.

In the barn demoted to garage, the ax in a cherry stump can’t be budged. Daylight perforates siding despite the battered armor of license plates— corroded colors, same state: decay, their dates the only history of whoever tilled the soil and left, as a welcome, the skull of a possum nailed to the door, and the trail of lime to the torn sack in a corner where cobwebs festoon a scythe. Rusted sharp, it sings when he grips its splintery handle, swings, and crowns topple from Queen Anne’s lace.