Poemunity — your poem community

Departing summer hath assumed An aspect tenderly illumed, The gentlest look of spring; That calls from yonder leafy shade Unfaded, yet prepared to fade, A timely carolling. No faint and hesitating trill, Such tribute as to winter chill The lonely redbreast pays! Clear, loud, and lively is the din, From social warblers gathering in Their harvest of sweet lays. Nor doth the example fail to cheer Me, conscious that my leaf is sere, And yellow on the bough:— Fall, rosy garlands, from my head! Ye myrtle wreaths, your fragrance shed Around a younger brow! Yet will I temperately rejoice; Wide is the range, and free the choice Of undiscordant themes; Which, haply, kindred souls may prize Not less than vernal ecstasies, And passion's feverish dreams. For deathless powers to verse belong, And they like Demi-gods are strong On whom the Muses smile; But some their function have disclaimed, Best pleased with what is aptliest framed To enervate and defile. Not such the initiatory strains Committed to the silent plains In Britain's earliest dawn: Trembled the groves, the stars grew pale, While all-too-daringly the veil Of nature was withdrawn! Nor such the spirit-stirring note When the live chords Alcæus smote, Inflamed by sense of wrong; Woe! woe to Tyrants! from the lyre Broke threateningly, in sparkles dire Of fierce vindictive song. And not unhallowed was the page By wingèd Love inscribed, to assuage The pangs of vain pursuit; Love listening while the Lesbian Maid With finest touch of passion swayed Her own Æolian lute. O ye, who patiently explore The wreck of Herculanean lore, What rapture! could ye seize Some Theban fragment, or unroll One precious, tender-hearted scroll Of pure Simonides. That were, indeed, a genuine birth Of poesy; a bursting forth Of genius from the dust: What Horace gloried to behold, What Maro loved, shall we enfold? Can haughty Time be just!

What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Yet they were of a different kind, The names that stilled your childish play, They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman’s rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were In all their loneliness and pain, You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair Has maddened every mother’s son’: They weighed so lightly what they gave. But let them be, they’re dead and gone, They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight; The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves; The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves, And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows. Under a tree in the park, Two little boys, lying flat on their faces, Were carefully gathering red berries To put in a pasteboard box. Some day there will be no war, Then I shall take out this afternoon And turn it in my fingers, And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate, And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves. To-day I can only gather it And put it into my lunch-box, For I have time for nothing But the endeavour to balance myself Upon a broken world.

It keeps on happening again and it will be forgotten again until it’s September. We’re in the tall building paying the bill overdue to the city for gas to fuel our furnace. We’re thinking November— it keeps on happening again—and we’ll need heat. Now it’s still summer, too hot until fall to turn off the AC . Consider that other cloudless day, paying the bill in City Hall. It’s way too high now, still we pay it. Look at the line, at him, her— it keeps on happening again and it will. Energy’s costly. We forget it can kill. Though some of our children can’t remember, we in the building paying the bill look at the date, at the window sill, think of their choice between jump and tinder. It keeps on happening again and it will. We’re in the tall building, paying the bill.

It’s turneresque in twilight. The word comes at me with its headlights on, so it’s revelation and not death. I figure I’m halfway home though I’ve only started. Nothing is moving but me: I’m a blackbird. The neigh- bor’s in labor, but so am I, pushing against the road. Physics tells us nothing is lost, but I’ve been copping time from death and can’t relent for every job the stars drop on my back.

September is work to the center Of arguments and controversies. Prejudgments and incomprehensions. What will I love if not that That was enigma? The years of infancy, Memory says, And there we are, with the demon Of the art of living Traced on the glass of some window. In the beauty of the night of May, Clear of moon, to the lume of a candle There was a design like the profile Of a landscape almost abandoned. Gone But not gone yet. It's fascinating, These mysterious uncovered feelings. Enigma of an afternoon of autumn, the picture Of which is a composition Of the eye of my mind. Every hour That I watch this picture I see again still that moment. Nevertheless the moment is an enigma For me, in how much is inexplicable. The physical things hide in the architecture Of the event. The enigma of a mock-up, Of a shadow, the spectral and eternal aspect Of the moment. Praises to you for being One great box of surprise, Your head the scene of a wonderful theater Of the most tender gray of the fog That joins the sky to the earth. A tangling of truth and memory, Mythology and iconography, I watch with the eye Of the mind the city that accommodates That one beautiful day that is now infinite. It deepens. It begins. The cyclical method. Memory is deeply not alive; it's a mock-up And this renders it hateful. Yet, it is not a fiction, Is a truth, indeed a sad and monstrous truth. I was assigned to you, together we were A beautiful and melancholic picture. This last picture is the realization Of the overwhelming moment In which the acute eye perceives you as a now That is over. A now that is fixed In the swept past.

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer, Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing, Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects, Ceaseless, insistent. The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples, The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence Under a moon waning and worn, broken, Tired with summer. Let me remember you, voices of little insects, Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters, Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us, Snow-hushed and heavy. Over my soul murmur your mute benediction, While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest, As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to, Lest they forget them.

Everyone comes here from a long way off (is a line from a poem I read last night). *     *     * Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked. (Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.) His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled. *     *     * Alternatively: A man and a woman, old friends, are in a theater watching a movie in which a man and a woman, old friends, are driving through summer on a mountain road. The woman is describing the end of her marriage and sobbing, shaking her head and laughing and sobbing. The man is watching the road, listening, his own more diffuse unhappiness in abeyance, and because, in the restaurant before the film the woman had been describing the end of her marriage and cried, they are not sure whether they are in the theater or on the mountain road, and when the timber truck comes suddenly around the bend, they both flinch. *     *     * He found that it was no good trying to tell what happened that day. Everything he said seemed fictional the moment that he said it, the rain, the scent of her hair, what she said as she was leaving, and why it was important for him to explain that the car had been parked under eucalyptus on a hillside, and how velvety and blurred the trees looked through the windshield; not, he said, that making fictions might not be the best way of getting at it, but that nothing he said had the brute, abject, unassimilated quality of a wounding experience: the ego in any telling was already seeing itself as a character, and a character, he said, was exactly what he was not at that moment, even as he kept wanting to explain to someone, to whomever would listen, that she had closed the door so quietly and so firmly that the beads of rain on the side window didn’t even quiver. *     *     * Names for involuntary movements of the body— squirm, wince, flinch, and shudder— sound like a law firm in Dickens: “Mr. Flinch took off his black gloves as if he were skinning his hands.” “Quiver dipped the nib of his pen into the throat of the inkwell.” *     *     * The receptionist at the hospital morgue told him to call the city medical examiner’s office, but you only got a recorded voice on weekends. *     *     * Setup without the punchline: Three greenhorns are being measured for suits by a very large tailor on Hester Street. *     *     * Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me; their best friend was a bear named Always Arguing. What kind of animals were the sisters? one child asked. Maybe they could be raccoons, said the other. Or pandas, said the first. They could be pandas. *     *     * “Why?” he asked. “Because she was lonely, and angry,” said the friend who knew her better, “and she’d run out of stories. Or come to the one story.” *     *     * It is good to sit down to birthday cake with children, who think it is the entire point of life and who, therefore, respect each detail of the ceremony. There ought to be a rule, he thought, for who gets to lick the knife that cuts the cake and the rule should have its pattern somewhere in the winter stars. Which do you add to the tea first, he’d asked, the sugar or the milk? And the child had said, instantly: “The milk.” (Laws as cool and angular as words:angular,sidereal.) *     *     * Stories about the distribution of wealth: Once upon a time there was an old man and an old women who were very, very poor. *     *     * How Eldie Got Her Name The neighborhood had been so dangerous, she said, there was one summer when the mailmen refused to deliver the mail. Her mother never appeared and her grandmother, who had bought a handgun for protection and had also taught her how to use it, would walk her to the post office for the sweet, singsong, half-rhymed letters that smelled, or that she imagined smelled, of Florida. She had, when she was ten, shot at an intruder climbing in the window. The roar, she said, was tremendous and she doesn’t know to this day whether she hit the man or not. (A big-boned young woman, skin the color of the inside of some light-colored hazelnut confection, auburn eyes, some plucked string of melancholy radiating from her whole body when she spoke.) Did her mama come back? They had asked. She never came back. The mail started up again but the letters stopped. Turned out she was good in school, and that was what saved her. She loved the labor of schoolwork. Loved finishing a project and contemplating the neatness of her script. Her grandmother shook her head, sometimes, amused and proud, and called her “Little Diligence.” *     *     * Punchline without the setup: And the three nuns from Immaculate Conception nodded and smiled as they passed, because they thought he was addressing them in Latin. *     *     * He had known, as long as he’d known anything, that he had a father somewhere. When he was twelve, his mother told him why he had no shadow. *     *     * Because she, not her sister, answered the door, she was the first to hear the news. *     *     * A Ballad: He loved to watch that woman sew. She let her hair grow long for show. Riddle’s a needle (a refrain might go) and plainly said is thread. *     *     * She looked beautiful, and looked her age, too. She’d had a go at putting herself together; she had always had the confidence that, with a face like hers, a few touches to represent the idea of a put-together look would do, like some set designer’s genius minimalism. It had a slightly harridan effect and he remembered that it wasn’t what was headlong or slapdash about her, but the way they gestured, like a quotation, at an understanding of elegance it would have been boring to spell out, that had at first dazzled him about her. He felt himself stirring at this recognition, and at a certain memory that attended it, and then laughed at the thought that he had actually stimulated himself with an analysis of her style, and she said, as if she were remembering the way he could make her insecure, “What? What are you smiling about?” and he said, “Nothing.” And she said, “Oh, yes. Right. I remember nothing.” *     *     * Two jokes walk into a bar. A cage went in search of a bird. A boy walks out in the morning with a gun. Three rabbis walk into a penguin. *     *     * In the other world the girls were named Eleanor and Filina, and one night it was very warm and they could not sleep for the heat and the stillness, and they went outside, beyond the wall of their parents’ garden and into a meadow. It was a dark night, moonless, and the stars were so thick they seemed to shudder, and the sisters stood a long time in the sweet smell of the cooling grasses, looking at the sky and listening in the silence. After a while they heard a stirring and saw that a pair of bright eyes was watching them from the woods’ edge. “Maybe it’s their friend, the bear,” one of the children said. “I don’t like this story,” said the other.

born 19.6.32—deported 24.9.42 Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. This is plenty. This is more than enough.

1. HELL You’d have to be as crazy as Dante to get those down, the infernal hatreds. Shoot them. Shoot them where they live and then skip town. Or stay and re-engineer the decrepit social contraption to distill the 200-proof elixir of fear and torture the...the what from the what? And didn’t I promise, under threat of self-intubation, not to envision this corridor, coal-tar black, that narrows down and in to a shattering claustrophobia attack before opening out to the lake of frozen shit where the gruesome figure is discerned? Turn around, go home. Just to look at it is to become it. 2. PURGATORY, THE FILM He was chronically out of work, why we don’t know. She was the second born of a set of estranged identical twins. They met, hooked up, and moved in with her mother, who managed a motel on Skyline Drive. But always it was the other, the firstborn, the bad twin, the runaway, he imagined in the shadow of the “Vacancy” sign or watching through the window below the dripping eaves while they made love or slept. The body is relaxed and at rest, the mind is relaxed in its nest, so the self that is and is not itself rises and leaves to peek over the horizon, where it sees all its psychokinetic possibilities resolving into shapely fictions. She was brave, nurturing, kind. She was evil. She was out of her mind. She was a junkie trading sex for a fix, a chief executive, an aviatrix. She was an angel to the blinded and the lamed, the less-than-upright, the infra dig. And she was even a failure. She went to L.A. to make it big and crept back home injured and ashamed. 3. PURGATORY, THE SEQUEL They put him in jail, why we don’t know. They stamped him “Postponed.” But he didn’t mind. The screws were almost kind. He had leisure to get his muscles toned, mental space to regret his crimes, and when he wasn’t fabricating license plates he was free to remember the beauty that not once but a thousand times escaped him forever, and escapes me, too: ghosts of a mist drifting across the face of the stars, Jupiter triangulating with the crescent moon and Mars, prismatic fracturings in a drop of dew... 4. HEAVEN There’s drought on the mountain. Wildfires scour the hills. So the mammal crawls down the desiccated rills searching for the fountain, which it finds, believe it or not, or sort of finds. A thin silver sliver rises from an underground river and makes a few of the hot rocks steam and the pebbles hiss. Soon the mammal will drink, but it has first to stop and think its reflexive, impeccable thought: that thinking comes down to this— mystery, longing, thirst.