Poemunity — your poem community

The fake Parthenon in Nashville, Stonehenge reduced by a quarter near Maryhill on the Columbia, the little Statue of Liberty taken from the lawn of the high school and not recovered for months, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in the tile maker’s shape of a ship to sail home in, the house in the shape of a ship near Milwaukee where once before the river below rose up to swallow the bank, World’s Fairs where one can enter the cell of a human body or see Paris, London, Marrakech and the Taj Mahal in one afternoon, the headache that may be sinus or bad eyes or allergy or a tumor, the bruise that was blue now yellow the effect of labor or abuse, the cataclysmic event in a personal life not totally forgotten, the memory of doing well that turned to unexpressed anger just because love was everywhere preventing helpless mistakes— achievement and perfection for the first time considered in error, the end of life being life itself, life itself ignorance, we never tire of making the world smaller, looking in doll houses, and a mailman who has picked up every bright piece of glass and tile in forty years of rounds retired to build a house of glass and tile which is his life, no kick coming, while in a suburb of Chicago a leaning tower of Pisa drawn to scale signals a shopping plaza where goods come in from around the world, for the people who live there. And Vico says gods and goddesses are the self writ large— selves to make earthquakes, tornadoes, eclipses, selves to lift the sun— and Vico says all things having been named for the namers, us, we give a chair arms, legs, a seat and a back, a cup has its lip and a bottle its neck, and ever after rivers flow from their headwaters and a well-oiled engine purrs at the center of good feeling. So take your misery down a notch in aches and pains and little diseases, in years of photo albums, in journals of dreams interrupted by mornings, in furniture you built yourself, in copies and imitations, in scale-model wars and families and the age of fancy automobiles. And when once in your life you make the big trip to the original, chances are you’ll mainly see your own face in the glass that protects everything of which there’s one only in the form of its only maker.

For Flaco A cooler head of lettuce prevailed, but when the actor asked his question and paused for us to watch him pause and think inside the pause, I almost answered as if we were in a bar, just the two of us and a balcony and spotlight. The two of us and programs and makeup and a sofa from the director’s living room and the black/ womb/agora/séance of theater inviting us to feel together alone. I recall I don’t recall the question but its scope on his face was immense, as if he were the Milky Way asking am I pretty, am I here for sure for real for long

And so among the starry refineries and cattail ditches of New Jersey his bus dips from egg-white sky into shadow. When he next looks up from Kafka a blur of green sanatorium tile flows by then presto, Port Authority, full daylight. He has been cheated of the river, dawn, a considered fingering of his long and polished rosary of second thoughts. Is it any wonder children are born weeping? Out to Eighth Avenue to walk twenty blocks home to her sleeping curve beneath a sheet. He cracks three eggs into a bowl and says to each, Oh you got trouble? The yellow yolk is his, the orange is hers, the third simply glistens, noncommittal. Except to mention Kafka's restlessness before his death, his trips from spa to spa to country house to sanatorium, and that she's awake now, sweet with sleep sweat, patting her belly's taut carapace and yes hungry as an ape but first a kiss mister how was your trip and what have you brought us, and that the knowledge that dooms a marriage is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage, the poem has nothing further to report.

I have no conscience because I always chew my pencil. Can we say white paper with black lines on it is like a human body? This question not to be decided by pointing at a tree nor yet by a description of simple pleasures. Smell of retrieval. Led to expect the wrong answer. An arsenal without purpose but why yes please. There is no touching the black box. The tree not pointed at lives in your bringing up the subject and leaves space for need, falling. The white ground. The waning heat. I’d like to say the history of the world. Or that grammar milks essence into propositions of human kindness. The difficulty here’s not true or false but that the picture’s in the foreground and its sense back where the gestures link so closely to the bone the words give notice. The application is not easy.

Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth; What silly beggars they are to blunder in And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame— No, no, not that,—it's bad to think of war, When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you; And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts That drive them out to jabber among the trees. Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand. Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen, And you're as right as rain ... Why won't it rain? ... I wish there'd be a thunder-storm to-night, With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark, And make the roses hang their dripping heads. Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves, Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green, And every kind of colour. Which will you read? Come on; O do read something; they're so wise. I tell you all the wisdom of the world Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out, And listen to the silence: on the ceiling There's one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters; And in the breathless air outside the house The garden waits for something that delays. There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,— Not people killed in battle,—they're in France,— But horrible shapes in shrouds--old men who died Slow, natural deaths,—old men with ugly souls, Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins. *          *          * You're quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home; You'd never think there was a bloody war on! ... O yes, you would ... why, you can hear the guns. Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft ... they never cease— Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out And screech at them to stop—I'm going crazy; I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

By the river years ago, recursive in memory, a finite moment, the past ended. Future began. The river flowed south. You were a man’s face floating among stones. By a river in autumn, willow leaves were yellow whisks in updrafts. We were not alone. Cottonwood boles twisted against banks, turtles dozed in the roots, bark slivered into water. The river sounded the swish of its name. You waded the Neosho as it meandered east. Two sandhill cranes fly overhead. Their legs stretch straight behind as they swim through air. Their grace is the river’s. No one saw flood-seined silt, gravel, broken mussel pearls. I stayed, you left. By the river I met you each day. I meet you each day. I will be meeting you in invariant futures. By the river leaves turn. Mud cracks pentagonal shapes. You return and leave. The river remains. By the river I was a child, I am grown. I remember water pooled, not moving.

Little has been made of the soft, skirting action of magnets reversed, while much has been made of attraction. But is it not this pillowy principle of repulsion that produces the doily edges of oceans or the arabesques of thought? And do these cutout coasts and incurved rhetorical beaches not baffle the onslaught of the sea or objectionable people and give private life what small protection it's got? Praise then the oiled motions of avoidance, the pearly convolutions of all that slides off or takes a wide berth; praise every eddying vacancy of Earth, all the dimpled depths of pooling space, the whole swirl set up by fending-off— extending far beyond the personal, I'm convinced— immense and good in a cosmological sense: unpressing us against each other, lending the necessary never to never-ending.

Give, give me back that Trifle you despise, Give back my Heart, with all its Injuries: Tho’ by your Cruelty it wounded be, The Thing is yet of wond’rous Use to me. A gen’rous Conqueror, when the Battle’s won, Bestows a Charity on the Undone: If from the well aim’d Stroke no Hope appear, He kills the Wretch, and shews Compassion there: But you, Barbarian! keep alive Pain, A lasting Trophy of Unjust Disdain.

Play the one about the family of the ducks where the ducks go down to the river and one of them thinks the water will be cold but then they jump in anyway and like it and splash around. No, I must play the one about the nervous man from Palestine in row 14 with a brown bag in his lap in which a gun is hidden in a sandwich. Play the one about the handsome man and woman standing on the steps of her apartment and how the darkness and her perfume and the beating of their hearts conjoin to make them feel like leaping from the edge of chance— No, I should play the one about the hard rectangle of the credit card hidden in the man’s back pocket and how the woman spent an hour plucking out her brows, and how her perfume was made from the destruction of a hundred flowers. Then play the one about the flower industry in which the migrant workers curse their own infected hands from tossing sheaves of roses and carnations into the back of the refrigerated trucks. No, I must play the one about the single yellow daffodil standing on my kitchen table whose cut stem draws the water upwards so the plant is flushed with the conviction that the water has been sent to find and raise it up from somewhere so deep inside the earth not even flowers can remember.

The angels I love bicker over cod guts and snapper spines. They joust for flounder skulls and pick the bones clean, screaming. Their harsh, fine voices break across my town in a language lost to my kind, thoughtless in the clear now of now without death. Christ, walk down streets paved with rain to me and you drown in my choir, my angels beating prayer under wing which is the want I have not loved well. Where did my weather go? Meet me where my hidden weather went, where praise and rain are never spent. "Requiem" is from a sequence titled "Hard Weather Prayers."