Poemunity — your poem community

Body my house my horse my hound what will I do when you are fallen Where will I sleep How will I ride What will I hunt Where can I go without my mount all eager and quick How will I know in thicket ahead is danger or treasure when Body my good bright dog is dead How will it be to lie in the sky without roof or door and wind for an eye With cloud for shift how will I hide?

The woman in the building across from me hauls onto the fire escape a yucca plant and squeezes it between a crate of herbs and a sapling fern tree. She looks a lot like me from twenty feet away. A forelock lies sweaty against her cheek as if she’s forgotten to fix herself. I put my thumbs and forefingers to my eye and frame her. I am reminded of those Chinese boxes made of red paper, inside one is another holding another, until at the center sits the tiniest mockery and celebration of the cell itself. She looks haggard but happy here, five flights up, bending over a fat leaf as if admiring herself in the waxy surface. Then she opens up the jewel-case of her voice, and I remember how once my sister asked my mother which one of us sang better. My mother paused from sewing as if adding seventeen to seventy-five and said we sounded the same. Good or bad, who knows. Each of us now watches the empty, open mouth of the other.

The question of my mother is on the table. The dark box of her mind is also there, the garden of everywhere we used to walk together. Among the things the body doesn't know, it is the dark box I return to most: fallopian city engrained in memory, ghost-orchid egg in the arboretum, hinged lid forever bending back and forth — open to me, then closed like the petals of the paperwhite narcissus. What would it take to make a city in me? Dark arterial streets, neglected ovary hard as an acorn hidden in its dark box on the table: Mother, I am out of my mind, spilling everywhere.

I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way, Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring, And gentle odours led my steps astray, Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling Its green arms round the bosom of the stream, But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream. There grew pied wind-flowers and violets, Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth, The constellated flower that never sets; Faint oxlips; tender bluebells, at whose birth The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets— Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth— Its mother's face with Heaven's collected tears, When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears. And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine, Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may, And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine Was the bright dew, yet drained not by the day; And wild roses, and ivy serpentine, With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray; And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold, Fairer than any wakened eyes behold. And nearer to the river's trembling edge There grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white, And starry river buds among the sedge, And floating water-lilies, broad and bright, Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge With moonlight beams of their own watery light; And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen. Methought that of these visionary flowers I made a nosegay, bound in such a way That the same hues, which in their natural bowers Were mingled or opposed, the like array Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours Within my hand,—and then, elate and gay, I hastened to the spot whence I had come, That I might there present it!—Oh! to whom?

While needles of the evergreen practice a windy chaos, heads of snarled hair; something in the tree longs for old age; bald brown knobs of skull without subterfuge; but it continues with its greedy resinous sexual odors. The odors rise against one another, spurting away from the scaly bark. Along its fingers the tree holds out microscopic traps. Popping bullets of sunlight crack into the subliminal orifices, and the tree thinks, “How exquisite. Is this love?”

Directions: For each pair of sentences, circle the letter, a or b, that best expresses your viewpoint. Make a selection from each pair. Do not omit any items. 1.a) The body and the material things of the world are the key to any knowledge we can possess. b) Knowledge is only possible by means of the mind or psyche. 2.a) My life is largely controlled by luck and chance. b) I can determine the basic course of my life. 3.a) Nature is indifferent to human needs. b) Nature has some purpose, even if obscure. 4.a) I can understand the world to a sufficient extent. b) The world is basically baffling. 5.a) Love is the greatest happiness. b) Love is illusionary and its pleasures transient. 6.a) Political and social action can improve the state of the world. b) Political and social action are fundamentally futile. 7.a) I cannot fully express my most private feelings. b) I have no feelings I cannot fully express. 8.a) Virtue is its own reward. b) Virtue is not a matter of rewards. 9.a) It is possible to tell if someone is trustworthy. b) People turn on you in unpredictable ways. 10.a) Ideally, it would be most desirable to live in a rural area. b) Ideally, it would be most desirable to live in an urban area. 11.a) Economic and social inequality is the greatest social evil. b) Totalitarianism is the greatest social evil. 12.a) Overall, technology has been beneficial to human beings. b) Overall, technology has been harmful to human beings. 13.a) Work is the potential source of the greatest human fulfillment. b) Liberation from work should be the goal of any movement for social improvement. 14.a) Art is at heart political in that it can change our perception of reality. b) Art is at heart not political because it can change only consciousness and not events.

Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin. No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge. Do they fly through God's body and come out singing? Do they swing like children from the hinges of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards? Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors? What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes, their diet of unfiltered divine light? What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall these tall presences can look over and see hell? If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole in a river and would the hole float along endlessly filled with the silent letters of every angelic word? If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume the appearance of the regular mailman and whistle up the driveway reading the postcards? No, the medieval theologians control the court. The only question you ever hear is about the little dance floor on the head of a pin where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly. It is designed to make us think in millions, billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one: one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet, a small jazz combo working in the background. She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over to glance at his watch because she has been dancing forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

I’m having trouble understanding the wife. The wife seems like she is only there as a foil to your actions. I want to know how the wife feels when you drag her and your son down into the basement to start a new religion. The religion has something to do with cowering before a force greater than yourself and then being buried alive. I want to know how the wife behaves in small, enclosed spaces: if she is trying to comfort your son by telling him Daddy likes to play funny games, or if she is already visualizing herself walking into a women’s shelter, your son on her back and maybe, because this is a fantasy, she carries a burning torch, like an angry villager, or a goddess. Does the wife merit any revenge after you weed whack the coffee table? Does she agree with you that the coffee table is yours to destroy because you built it? What has she built in the house that is hers to destroy? What kind of childhood has the wife endured that allows her to understand you? In her past life or lives, was the wife ever a shepherdess? Does she see you as a sort of Pan, goatish, and pricked by ticks, but also very well-endowed? When the wife transforms into a tree can she still think or is she just a green haze inside, an idea of growing? I would like to see the wife peel off that bark, leaving only enough for modesty’s sake, although as this is your poem, we can take a bit more off. I want to see her uproot herself, pick up the house and shake it. How many people fall out? The wife has something about her the Germans would call unheimlich. I sometimes catch a glimpse of the wife out of the corner of my eye but then I look away. I cannot look directly at the wife. The wife is a conflagration of everything dear. I wonder sometimes if she is faking; There is a certain note she holds too long so the orgasm is more operatic, less genuine. When she cries,Oh my God, really, she should stutter. Let’s say the wife wakes up in the morning. You have already made breakfast. Does your kindness feel oppressive? Does she want to take your weed whacker through the house? Has she ever, in a fit of anger, destroyed your pornography? When you found a picture of the wife online with a foreign handprint smacked red on her ass, how quickly did your shock turn to arousal? Are you aware the wife is breaking down in public places, and sometimes cannot move for thirty minutes? Sometimes her arm goes entirely numb from the shoulder down. I think the wife might need some fine-tuning, some elbow grease, some wrenching apart, and then reassembling.

My angel, don't think the great stillness is wooing us: We just haven't slept the same among the letters that have a habit of Recognizing us. Those beautiful letters live in Paris all year around. For even the best of men go astray with words within the gentle depths When they are to express something unutterable. But I believe nevertheless that you need not be left without them as a Part of me, as a recreation between hesitations, The boundless ones in moments of doubts. If you have this affection for things that don't really matter to the poor, Then everything will become clear, more coherent and somehow more Conciliatory, not perhaps how I manage to function from day to day Taking Kenneth's last words to be my daily gospel that "we must write Every day," but in your innermost consciousness and wakefulness you will Know I have patience with these black lines that I share with my most Intimate friends to say I'm still writing to you. So I sincerely beg you to have no remorse with matters of the heart, For it is a foolish, overbearing organ that does not have a place to rest Except in our sleep with dreams it cannot have during our times of Playful awareness. I only seek, as well as I can, to serve the last Wishes as a poet. What else is one to do with these unsolved hearts on Paper? Otherwise they are of no use to anyone but the dreamer who tries To cherish matters of the heart, like closed rooms to the public in some Grand museum filled with treasure, or like books written in a strange Tongue hidden in the library of moments we let slip away fearing it was What we wanted from the beginning. We stopped searching for the Answers because we could not live in their blue tents. It's a matter of Living everything. Live now, and perhaps you will then gradually, without Noticing it, one distant day live right into the answers of the heart. 8.3.03

Quick!   quick! The cat's been sick. Where?   where? Under the chair. Hasten!   hasten! Fetch the basin. Alack!   alack! It is too late, The carpet's in An awful state. No!   no! It's all in vain, For she has licked it Up again.