Poemunity — your poem community

I know a little what it is like, once here at high tide Stranded, for them to be so attached to the bottom’s Sarcophagus lids, up to their brown green gold wine Bottle necks in the prevailing booze, riding, as far As we can see, like a picnic on a blanket. Whatever plucks them from below the red horizon Like snapped pulleys and ropes for the pyramidal effort Of the moon, they come in, they come through the breakers, Heaps of hair, writing across the beach a collapsed Script, signers of a huge independence. Melville thought them pure, bitter, seeing the fog-sized Flies dancing stiff and renaissance above. But I Have eaten nori and dulse, and to have gone deep Before being cast out leaves hardly a taste of loneliness. And I take in their iodine.

For Chino In the middle of that desert that didn’t look like sand and sand only, in the middle of those acacias, whiptails, and coyotes, someone yelled “¡La Migra!” and everyone ran. In that dried creek where 40 of us slept, we turned to each other and you flew from my side in the dirt. Black-throated sparrows and dawn hitting the tops of mesquites, beautifully. Against the herd of legs, you sprinted back toward me, I jumped on your shoulders, and we ran from the white trucks. It was then the gun ready to press its index. I said, “freeze, Chino, ¡pará por favor!” So I wouldn’t touch their legs that kicked you, you pushed me under your chest, and I’ve never thanked you. Beautiful Chino— the only name I know to call you by — farewell your tattooed chest: the M, the S, the 13. Farewell the phone number you gave me when you went east to Virginia, and I went west to San Francisco. You called twice a month, then your cousin said the gang you ran from in San Salvador found you in Alexandria. Farewell your brown arms that shielded me then, that shield me now, from La Migra.

Poetry? It’s a hobby. I run model trains. Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons. It’s not work. You dont sweat. Nobody pays for it. You could advertise soap. Art, that’s opera; or repertory— The Desert Song. Nancy was in the chorus. But to ask for twelve pounds a week— married, aren’t you?— you’ve got a nerve. How could I look a bus conductor in the face if I paid you twelve pounds? Who says it’s poetry, anyhow? My ten year old can do it and rhyme. I get three thousand and expenses, a car, vouchers, but I’m an accountant. They do what I tell them, my company. What do you do? Nasty little words, nasty long words, it’s unhealthy. I want to wash when I meet a poet. They’re Reds, addicts, all delinquents. What you write is rot. Mr Hines says so, and he’s a schoolteacher, he ought to know. Go and find work.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

So like the slow moss encroaching, this dark anxiety. In the bricks by now and all along the shaded left side of the house. And the statue, behind her knee. Her ankle, in the cool space between her breasts, spreading in the earliest hours of the morning. Between her fingers. Her parted lips. That black-green whispering.

Please raise your hand, whomever else of you has been a child, lost, in a market or a mall, without knowing it at first, following a stranger, accidentally thinking he is yours, your family or parent, even grabbing for his hands, even calling the word you said then for “Father,” only to see the face look strangely down, utterly foreign, utterly not the one who loves you, you who are a bird suddenly stunned by the glass partitions of rooms. How far the world you knew, & tall, & filled, finally, with strangers.

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Again the day begins, only no one wants its sanity or its blinding clarity. Daylight is not what we came all this way for. A pinch of salt, a drop of schnapps in our cup of tears, the ticket to the life to come, a short life of long nights & absent dawns & a little mercy in the tea.

I wear my heart on my sleeve, or rather both sleeves, since it's usually broken. Sometimes when I join my hands to pray, the jagged edges briefly touch, like a plate that fell and cracked apart from being asked to hold too much.

Accompanied To the Campi Flegrei By a shadow, She listened to voices rise From the darkness, Then recede. Instruments Sustained them. When one had finished Others played. False proportions Sung boldly. Rain on the roof tiles. O selve, o campi.