Poemunity — your poem community

It sat between my husband and my children. A place was set for it—a plate of greens. It had been there: I had seen it But not somehow—but this was like a dream— Not seen it so that I knew I saw it. It was as if I could not know I saw it Because I had never once in all my life Not seen it. It was an eland. An eland!That is why the children Would ask my husband, for a joke, at Christmas: “Father, is it Donner?” He would say, “No, Blitzen.” It had been there always. Now we put silver At its place at meals, fed it the same food We ourselves ate, and said nothing. Many times When it breathed heavily (when it had tried A long useless time to speak) and reached to me So that I touched it—of a different size And order of being, like the live hard side Of a horse’s neck when you pat the horse— And looked with its great melting tearless eyes Fringed with a few coarse wire-like lashes Into my eyes, and whispered to me So that my eyes turned backward in their sockets And they said nothing— many times I have known, when they said nothing, That it did not exist. If they had heard They could not have been silent. And yet they heard; Heard many times what I have spoken When it could no longer speak, but only breathe— When I could no longer speak, but only breathe. And, after some years, the others came And took it from me—it was ill, they told me— And cured it, they wrote me: my whole city Sent me cards lilac-branches, mourning As I had mourned— and I was standing By a grave in flowers, by dyed rolls of turf, And a canvas marquee the last brown of earth. It is over. It is over so long that I begin to think That it did not exist, that I have never— And my son says, one morning, from the paper: “An eland. Look, an eland!” —It was so. Today, in a German dictionary, I saw elend And the heart in my breast turned over, it was— It was a word one translates wretched. It is as if someone remembered saying: “This is an antimacassar that I grew from seed,” And this were true. And, truly, One could not wish for anything more strange— For anything more. And yet it wasn’t interesting.  .  . —It was worse than impossible, it was a joke. And yet when it was, I was— Even to think that I once thought That I could see it to feel the sweat Like needles at my hair-roots, I am blind —It was not even a joke, not even a joke. Yet how can I believe it? Or believe that I Owned it, a husband, children? Is my voice the voice Of that skin of being—of what owns, is owned In honor or dishonor, that is borne and bears— Or of that raw thing, the being inside it That has neither a wife, a husband, nor a child But goes at last as naked from this world As it was born into it— And the eland comes and grazes on its grave. This is senseless? Shall I make sense or shall I tell the truth? Choose either—I cannot do both. I tell myself that. And yet it is not so, And what I say afterwards will not be so: To be at all is to be wrong. Being is being old And saying, almost comfortably, across a table From— from what I don’t know— in a voice Rich with a kind of longing satisfaction: “To own an eland! That’s what I call life!”

A man and a woman are sitting at a table. It is supper time. The air is green. The walls Are white in the green air, as rocks under water Retain their own true color, though washed in green. I do not know either the man or the woman, Nor do I know whatever they know of each other. Though washed in my eye they keep their own true color. The man is all his own hunched strength, the body’s Self and strength, that bears, like weariness, Itself upon itself, as a stone’s weight Bears heavily on itself to be itself. Heavy the strength that bears the body down. And the way he feeds is like a dreamless sleep. The dreaming of a stone is how he feeds. The woman’s arms are plump, mottled a little The flesh, like standing milk, and on one arm A blue bruise, got in some household labor or other, Flowering in the white. Her staring eye, Like some bird’s cry called from some deepest wood, Says nothing of what it is but what it is. Such silence is the bird’s cry of the stone.

The man was white, grey and pale brown, the colorless colors of a used-up earth where water has sunk down, sunk down so low and risen so far above the grey-white pale-brown heaven and shrunk so far within itself that it will not come back. What can moisten a shriveled water, or can a clod of ash regain colors from the identical howl of a white powder sun? Not in me, he said, ever again, but in the street with engine and worker petals, not papery, more fragile than that, there will be color. My eye will reach color, all colors, every one together, which no one will see in me ever again. I turned to the sky then and it was all one blue, the color of seeing, and yet was as many blues, as subtle, as tones of stubble in the most sunken cheek.

This was the winter mother told time by my heart ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest. This was the fifties & we were living on nothing & what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse, what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists & each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass, what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed with rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman, into our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming & brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,” & hissed my little princess& hushed the Jordan & set the chariots on the golden streets &Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light.

Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually. New Year’s Day— everything is in blossom! I feel about average. The snow is melting and the village is flooded with children. Goes out, comes back— the love life of a cat. Mosquito at my ear— does he think I’m deaf? Under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist. Even with insects— some can sing, some can’t. All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes. Napped half the day; no one punished me!

13. After the dinosaurs fell asleep, after those terrible lizards began their slow decay into mythology, Andre the Giant was there to cradle their bodies in his soft hands and weep. 24. Andre the Giant wrestled the Earth into a globe, carved his name into the ocean floor with his pinky to remind the whales who taught them to sing. 32. Andre the Giant was a village. Then he became a dragon. Then he became an army. Then he became a king. Now, he is the wind. 40. A man can’t bodyslam Andre the Giant unless he’s worthy of slaying a monster, unless the giant decides it’s time to lie down. 58. Andre the Giant stole fire from Heaven, hid it in his mouth, fed it to monkeys one lick at a time until they learned to pronounce his name. 67. Before there were boys with magic beanstalks, with slingshots or singing swords, Andre the Giant brawled with sooty angels, volcanoes spouting from where he buried their hearts 75. Andre the Giant scaled the Empire State Building with Marilyn Monroe in one hand, Cleopatra in the other. They marveled at how small we are. 81. Andre the Giant once cracked the sky’s ribs. Then he was thunder churning like trout. Then he was an avalanche of fists and knees. Then he was a fire burning through the forest. Then he was a tidal wave seething offshore. Now, he will not be a metaphor. 93. When Andre the Giant pitched a man over the top rope and out into the crowd, he aimed at the moon. 100. A man never tells a lie, always treats a promise like his mother’s name. Andre the Giant once threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, hit a buffalo in the eye and killed it as it grazed. 116. Andre the Giant drank three bottles of whiskey and grappled with the Devil in a bingo hall in Memphis. Then he invented the blues. 125. On television, Andre the Giant grinned with a mouthful of shark’s teeth. He devoured mortal men ten-at-a-time, laughed and spit their bones into our living rooms. 137. Andre the Giant was a Frenchman. Then he became an ogre. Then he became a movie star. Now, he is the constellations. All of them.

My books are full of mistakes but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt the new kid caught his arm in. Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office with an ignored view of the river pretending to be asleep, pretending to have insight into its muddy self. You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor, try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know it’s the quickness of its death that reveals the quality of the product, its proof. I don’t know what I’m talking about either. Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself I’ve got these words that mean completely different things inside myself and it’s tearing me apart? My errors are even bigger than that. You start taking down the walls of your house, sooner or later it’ll collapse but not before you can walk around with your eyes closed, rolled backwards and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker and your own damn self hanging there. Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight in snow that lasts about twenty minutes longer than a life held together by the twisted silver baling wire of deception and stealth. But I ain’t confessing nothing. On mornings when I hope you forget my name, I walk through the high wet weeds that don’t have names either. I do not remember the word dew. I do not remember what I told you with your ear in my teeth. Further and further into the weeds. We have absolutely no proof god isn’t an insect rubbing her hind legs together to sing. Or boring into us like a yellow jacket into a fallen, overripe pear. Or an assassin bug squatting over us, shoving a proboscis right through our breast plate then sipping. How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.

We rise from the snow where we’ve lain on our backs and flown like children, from the imprint of perfect wings and cold gowns, and we stagger together wine-breathed into town where our people are building their armies again, short years after body bags, after burnings. There is a man I’ve come to love after thirty, and we have our rituals of coffee, of airports, regret. After love we smoke and sleep with magazines, two shot glasses and the black and white collapse of hours. In what time do we live that it is too late to have children? In what place that we consider the various ways to leave? There is no list long enough for a selective service card shriveling under a match, the prison that comes of it, a flag in the wind eaten from its pole and boys sent back in trash bags. We’ll tell you. You were at that time learning fractions. We’ll tell you about fractions. Half of us are dead or quiet or lost. Let them speak for themselves. We lie down in the fields and leave behind the corpses of angels.

Routines of decaying time fade, and your waking life gets laborious as science. You huddle in, becoming the deathless younger self who will survive your dreams and vanish in surviving. Dream brings on its story at the pace of drift in twilight, sunless color, its settings are believed, a library of wood shingles, plain mythic furniture vivid drone of talk, yet few loves return: trysts seem unkeepable. Urgencies from your time join with the browner suits walking those arcades with you but then you are apart, aghast, beside the numberless defiling down steep fence into an imminence — as in the ancient burrow you, with an ever-changing cast, survive deciding episodes till you are dismissed and a restart of tense summons your waking size out through shreds of story.

Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea. And a look of passionate desire O'er the sea and to the stars I send: "Ye who from my childhood up have calm'd me, Calm me, ah, compose me to the end! "Ah, once more," I cried, "ye stars, ye waters, On my heart your mighty charm renew; Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you, Feel my soul becoming vast like you!" From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven, Over the lit sea's unquiet way, In the rustling night-air came the answer: "Wouldst thou be as these are?Live as they. "Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see, These demand not that the things without them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy. "And with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long moon-silver'd roll; For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul. "Bounded by themselves, and unregardful In what state God's other works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain the mighty life you see." O air-born voice! long since, severely clear, A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear: "Resolve to be thyself; and know that he, Who finds himself, loses his misery!"