Poemunity — your poem community

My gentle friend! I hold no creed so false As that which dares to teach that we are born For battle only, and that in this life The soul, if it would burn with starlike power, Must needs forsooth be kindled by the sparks Struck from the shock of clashing human hearts. There is a wisdom that grows up in strife, And one—I like it best—that sits at home And learns its lessons of a thoughtful ease. So come! a lonely house awaits thee!—there Nor praise, nor blame shall reach us, save what love Of knowledge for itself shall wake at times In our own bosoms; come! and we will build A wall of quiet thought, and gentle books, Betwixt us and the hard and bitter world. Sometimes—for we need not be anchorites— A distant friend shall cheer us through the Post, Or some Gazette—of course no partisan— Shall bring us pleasant news of pleasant things; Then, twisted into graceful allumettes, Each ancient joke shall blaze with genuine flame To light our pipes and candles; but to wars, Whether of words or weapons, we shall be Deaf—so we twain shall pass away the time Ev’n as a pair of happy lovers, who, Alone, within some quiet garden-nook, With a clear night of stars above their heads, Just hear, betwixt their kisses and their talk, The tumult of a tempest rolling through A chain of neighboring mountains; they awhile Pause to admire a flash that only shows The smile upon their faces, but, full soon, Turn with a quick, glad impulse, and perhaps A conscious wile that brings them closer yet, To dally with their own fond hearts, and play With the sweet flowers that blossom at their feet.

I should like to live in a sunny town like this Where every afternoon is half-day closing And I would wait at the terminal for the one train Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving. At the far end of the platform is a tunnel, and the train Slows out of it like a tear from a single eye. You couldn’t get further than this, the doors all opened And the porter with rolled sleeves wielding a mop. Even if one restless traveller were to arrive With leather grip, racquets under the arm, A belted raincoat folded over the shoulder, A fishing hat, and a pipe stuck in his mouth, There would be nowhere for him to move on to And he would settle down to tea in the lounge Of the Goat Hotel, doing yesterday’s crossword, And would emerge later, after a nap, for a drink. You meet them in the bar, glassy-eyed, all the time. They never quite unpack, and expect letters From one particular friend who doesn’t write. If you buy them a drink they will tell you their life history: ‘I should have liked to live in a sunny town like this, Strolling down to the harbour in the early evening, Looking at the catch. Nothing happens here. You could forget the ill-luck dogging you. ‘I could join the Fancy Rat Society and train Sweet peas over the trellised porch Of my little slice of stuccoed terrace. I could Be in time for the morning service at Tesco’s. ‘I expect death’s like this, letters never arriving And the last remembered failure at once abandoned And insistent, like a card on a mantelpiece. What might it be? You can take your choice. ‘ “I shook her by the shoulders in a rage of frustration.” “I smiled, and left the room without saying a word.” “I was afraid to touch her, and never explained.” “I touched her once, and that was my greatest mistake.” ’ You meet them before dinner. You meet them after dinner, The unbelieved, the uncaressed, the terrified. Their conversation is perfectly decent but usually It slows to a halt and they start to stare into space. You would like it here. Life is quite ordinary And the self-pity oozes into the glass like bitters. What’s your poison? Do you have a desire to drown? We’re all in the same boat. Join us. Feel free. And when the bar closes we can say goodbye And make our way to the terminal where the last (Or is it the first?) train of the day is clean and waiting To take us slowly back to where we came from. But will we ever return? Who needs us now? It’s the town that requires us, though the streets are empty. It’s become a habit and a retreat. Or a form of justice. Living in a sunny town like this.

Happy those early days! when I Shined in my angel infancy. Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back, at that short space, Could see a glimpse of His bright face; When on some gilded cloud or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity; Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinful sound, Or had the black art to dispense A several sin to every sense, But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness. O, how I long to travel back, And tread again that ancient track! That I might once more reach that plain Where first I left my glorious train, From whence th’ enlightened spirit sees That shady city of palm trees. But, ah! my soul with too much stay Is drunk, and staggers in the way. Some men a forward motion love; But I by backward steps would move, And when this dust falls to the urn, In that state I came, return.

Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog, The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness; sleep Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the towers, The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway. What stiff unhappy silence waits on sleep Struts like an officer; tongues next-door bewitch Themselves with divination; I like a melancholy oaf Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves. And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the knees Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of mercy To the backs of obsessions. Winter like spring no less Tolerates the air; the wild pheasant meets innocently The gun; night flouts illumination with meagre impudence. In such serenity of equal fates, why has Narcissus Urged the brook with questions? Merged with the element Speculation suffuses the meadow with drops to tickle The cow’s gullet; grasshoppers drink the rain. Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now (The bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth “Hitting on all thirty-two;” scholarship pares The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores His “passionate underwear;” morality disciplines the other Person; every son-of-a-bitch is Christ, at least Rousseau; Prospero serves humanity in steam-heated universities, three Thousand dollars a year. Simplicity, Flamineo, is obscene; Sunlight topples indignant from the hill. In every railroad station everywhere every lover Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke Thickens. Ticket in hand, he pumps his body Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip, His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice or spiders Distract him from nonentity: his metaphors are dead. More sanitation is enough, enough remains: dreams Do not end—lucidities beyond the stint of thought. For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain; A corpse is your bedfellow, your great-grandfather dines With you this evening on a cavalry horse. Intellect Connives with heredity, creates fate as Euclid geometry By definition: The sunlit bones in your house Are immortal in the titmouse, They trip the feet of grandma Like an afterthought each day. These unseen sunlit bones, They may be in the cat That startles them in grandma But look at this or that They meet you every way. For Pelops’ and Tantalus’ successions were at once simpler, If perplexed, and less subtle than you think. Heredity Proposes love, love exacts language, and we lack Language. When shall we speak again? When shall The sparrow dusting the gutter sing? When shall This drift with silence meet the sun? When shall I wake?

In your arms was still delight, Quiet as a street at night; And thoughts of you, I do remember, Were green leaves in a darkened chamber, Were dark clouds in a moonless sky. Love, in you, went passing by, Penetrative, remote, and rare, Like a bird in the wide air, And, as the bird, it left no trace In the heaven of your face. In your stupidity I found The sweet hush after a sweet sound. All about you was the light That dims the greying end of night; Desire was the unrisen sun, Joy the day not yet begun, With tree whispering to tree, Without wind, quietly. Wisdom slept within your hair, And Long-Suffering was there, And, in the flowing of your dress, Undiscerning Tenderness. And when you thought, it seemed to me, Infinitely, and like a sea, About the slight world you had known Your vast unsconsciousness was thrown . . . O haven without wave or tide! Silence, in which all songs have died! Holy book, where hearts are still! And home at length under the hill! O mother quiet, breasts of peace, Where love itself would faint and cease! O infinite deep I never knew, I would come back, come back to you, Find you, as a pool unstirred, Kneel down by you, and never a word, Lay my head, and nothing said, In your hands, ungarlanded; And a long watch you would keep; And I should sleep, and I should sleep!

There is a better thing, dear heart, Than youthful flush or girlish grace. There is the faith that never fails, The courage in the danger place, The duty seen, and duty done, The heart that yearns for all in need, The lady soul which could not stoop To selfish thought or lowly deed. All that we ever dreamed, dear wife, Seems drab and common by the truth, The sweet sad mellow things of life Are more than golden dreams of youth.

Return The taste is strong as ever, figs and cheese and wine. I recall each savor; the taste is strong as ever, even if it will never be quite so fresh again. The taste is strong as ever, figs and cheese and wine. Obverse Two sides of one coin love and worry seem. Both of them are mine: two sides of one coin, two links in one chain, left/right of one brain? Two sides of one coin love and worry seem. Metamorphosis Why does transformation sneak up on us so? In life, not just narration, why does transformation creep up—yes, in slow motion, inexorably, though? Why does transformation sneak up on us so? Technology Where are worry beads now people have cell phones clamped against their heads? Where are worry beads? Ancient human needs, new millennium; where are worry beads? People have cell phones. Fortress Before we reach the top, street sounds fade away. Many steep steps up before we reach the top; just when did they stop? Silence; scalding sky. Before we reach the top, street sounds fade away. Dactylic Tino's counting on his fingers. Syllables and rhyme; a faint Sapphic cadence lingers. Tino's counting on his fingers. Generations of singers keeping, conquering time. Tino's counting on his fingers; syllables and rhyme.

This Earth the king said Looking at the ground; This England. But we drive A Sunday paradise Of parkway, trees flow into trees and the grass Like water by the very asphalt crown And summit of things In the flow of traffic The family cars, in the dim Sound of the living The noise of increase to which we owe What we possess. We cannot reconcile ourselves. No one is reconciled, tho we spring From the ground together— And we saw the seed, The minuscule Sequoia seed In the museum by the tremendous slab Of the tree. And imagined the seed In soil and the growth quickened So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green Needles of a redwood until the tree Stood in the room without soil— How much of the earth's Crust has lived The seed’s violence! The shock is metaphysical. For the wood weathers. Drift wood And the foot print in the forest grow older. This is not our time, not what we mean, it is a time Passing, the curl at the cutwater, The enormous prow Outside in the weather. In that breeze, The sense of that passage, Is desertion, Betrayal, that we are not innocent Of loneliness as Pierrot, Pierrette chattering Unaware tho we imagine nothing Beyond the streets of the living— A sap in the limbs. Mary, Mary, we turn to the children As they will turn to the children Wanting so much to have created happiness As if a stem to the leaves— —we had camped in scrub, A scrub of the past, the fringes of towns Neither towns nor forest, nothing ours. And Linda five, Maybe six when the mare grazing In the meadow came to her. ‘Horse,’ she said, whispering By the roadside With the cars passing. Little girl welcomed, Learning welcome. The rest is— Whatever—whatever—remote Mechanics, endurance, The piers of the city In the sea. Here are whole buildings Razed, whole blocks Of a city gone Among old streets And the old boroughs, ourselves Among these streets where Petra beat A washpan out her window gathering A crowd like a rescue. Relief, As they said it, The Relief. Petra Decisive suddenly among her children In those crumbling bedrooms, Petra, Petra—. And how imagine it? or imagine Coughlin in the streets, Pelley and the Silver Shirts? The medieval sense seems innocent, the very Ceremony of innocence that was drowned. It was not. But how imagine it Of streets boarded and vacant where no time will hatch Now chairs and walls, Floors, roofs, the joists and beams, The woodwork, window sills In sun in a great weight of brick.

What was it like, God of mine, what was it like? —Oh unfaithful heart, indecisive intelligence! Was it like the going by of the wind? Like the disappearance of the spring? As nimble, as changeable, as weightless as milkweed seeds in summer . . . Yes! Indefinite as a smile which is lost forever in a laugh . . . Arrogant in the air, just like a flag! Flag, smile, milkweed pod, swift spring in June, clear wind! . . . Your celebration was so wild, so sad! All of your changes ended up in nothing— remembrance, a blind bee of bitter things!— I don’t know what you were like, but you were!

Because of time being an arrow, I had to imagine everything. I had to fold the song with my mind because of the time being. Wash the rice here, in the present. Because of the arrow I pent up the fourth wall as though I were diapering my own newborn. I put time to the breast, though I feared it was not an arrow but an asp. Being time I kept that fear under my tongue like a thermometer. I felt its mercury rolling under my teeth, boiling like language. A deaf man, an old man, I am his hand, rough and gentle, an arrow here and then. Time, I can see what I feel. In the future even your future becomes my past. Arrow, I have died. There is peace. I pull it from me like a blanket. As in a dream, because of time being an arrow, I put on the dress of a young, lovely mother. Because of her, because of the time, here I am, always watching over you.