Poemunity — your poem community

I Every day it is the same. He comes home. He tells her about it. As he speaks, his breath condenses in front of his face. She goes about her business; every now and then she looks over. She doesn’t hear his voice. She sees the soft fog that continues to form a halo. She knows he is still talking about that place. He never tires of it like she does. Only on summer days when the air is hot and moisture is still a long time in coming, she asks him to tell her about that place. She sits facing him. Waiting for the first vocalic, non-stops, the push of air from his lips. He tells her of the place where clouds are formed. The cool dampness of his voice is rich. Even on a dry June day her face beads with wetness as he talks directly to her. Each aspirated sound a gentle burst of coolness. “Tell me again, tell me again,” she teases. If he knew she only wanted relief from the heat and not the story, he would stop talking. He begins, “The first time I saw the place where clouds are formed was from the window of a train . . .” Another time was in a mirage in the heat outside Tucson. Once he thought he saw it in the dry light of stars. The place he remembers best was when he saw it in the eyes of a woman he spoke to. When he first noticed it, she hid it by lowering her gaze. Soon she let him look freely. There were times when she opened her eyes wide, allowing an unobscured view. Sometimes he saw her eyes smolder with dryness on a summer day. Other times she was rich with moisture. Clouds came in succession. The earth’s shadows muted. “You know the forty days and forty nights? I was there. I’ll be there when it happens again,” she said with a slight smile. Like a child, he rushed to look into her eyes at every opportunity. If he could, he would hang on her eye socket, peering inside, marveling at her displays. II An unusually cold December day right around Christmas; clouds, mist find solace in the canyons of the Santa Catalina Mountains. White moisture quietly moving amid the cactus. Truly, clouds, wind, and rain are the few elements that can touch the saguaro from head to foot. Oblivious of spines, needles. Rubbery hide surrounded, soothed by elements. Contact triggers stored heat of remembered summers. Moisture beads roll forward, unstoppable. From the city below we see mist rising, mist rising. III We sit close in the cab of the truck. The weather is cold, wet outside. Too messy to stand in waiting for a school bus. My father’s truck is warm inside, having been at work since four a.m. The sound of the engine is soothing, heater working to capacity. Inside the cab we are silent. We don’t need language. We listen to the regular hum of the engine, rhythm of the windshield wipers, soft rain on the hood. Aware of the cold air surrounding our temporary shelter. We look out over the fields where fog clings to the soil. Every now and then with the back of his gloved hand he wipes the windshield. “Is it coming yet?” The three of us sit quietly, breathing clouds. Clouds condense as they contact the coolness of the windows. My father appears to breathe air with temperature in balance. He forms no clouds. He watches us. We continue to breathe gray, soft mist, waiting for the school bus.

1 We call change in a person the effect of time, witness my new dress, so short, with buttons on the yoke shaped like swans. I enter from the back of the room, pausing at the hopeful energy of people gathered to see me. They are a surface, alive and redolent, half unseen, like iridescent cloth. I sense structure spontaneously form, as when crossing the room to greet you, what I say forms. And I worry that spontaneity acts for its own reasons, not mine. My dress is a visual image of unconscious affirmative processes, the way spontaneity expresses its order, as I create a world, stocking it with small dogs on the runway, handbags, a bouillonne of rose tulle at the waist of a jacket. So, I'm not limited to what I observe, rather than feel. 2 They assess quite accurately my choice of babydoll dress as value for others. Each absorbs encouragement from her assessment, even though every being's imprinted with data to create every appearance. Seeing a leaf may reveal knowledge that communicates instantly among microbes, which can change in a wink. So, the optimistic idea would be the most biologically pertinent one. I dress to express a hoped for solution. Rachel's blouse, for example, is not purple just for photographers' enjoyment. Flowers are intrinsic to her feeling for her value, she seeks by expression to extend. Each guest creates her own sumptuous panoply from my honey sable coat over silvery pajamas, new, vintage, because of simultaneous time, therefore matter. So, physical change is not time, as such. 3 I feel love from the fashion community as light from photographs of others' bodies as light from their scrutiny of my photograph in a dress bold enough to sustain the penetration of disembodied light of my entrance. To audience, unnamed cutters, sewers, embroiderers, beaders I attribute this beauty, when meaning i.e., style, is given a sympathetic presence. Mirroring touches it, like exquisite jet beads on a gray coatdress in almost transparent bouclé, clusters of dark stones on the shoulder. A loose blouse in cream silk crepe is tied at the sleeves with glistening cellophane ribbons. You feel I understand your own contingency plans. Do you remember my show in London, when all the models were drunk, broken glass everywhere? Fashion does that, giving shape and color to our inarticulate impulses. I present the contemporary as liminal, transitions, transparencies. You nurture the uncontained confusion, when no permeable resonance has yet formed. The gray is cloudy, deep, but without melancholy. 4 Before dinner, we're asked to sign the guestbook on a Boulle console in the hall. People I've seen in magazines seem very tall, their features enlarged from being photographed. Each appearance has a materiality more significant than we usually expect from bodies. Style, soul, is power through which matter is formed. Like historic change, a body can re-materialize in its chrysalis, when the life you know is left behind. You're alone in a white brocade jacket with fur trim and frosting white cloque, a skirt of stiff flounces, like quartz crystals flecked with gold. In this chrysalis, you now change the contemporary, viewing the past in extending light that's mobile around your body. My dress is not stuck in time like a butterfly born in a jar, whose wings are therefore useless. 5 In the dining room, with Ming wallpaper restored by young Chinese artists, Kiki wears a blue silk coat embroidered with gold. I mention Louise's white helmet, Camilla on pewter platforms flashing to gold, light on water, what we mean visually by souls for whom the the body is potential, futural. In my closet, there's no distinction between material and the intelligible. When I continue to dress after I tell  him my dog has died, he begins to weep. He asks how I can waste this evening chattering? I say through tears I mourn my little dog, but that means little to him, because of my outfit. He makes a mistake in reading, like a wrong accessory, inserting an extra vowel or syllable and changing the whole passage, though I don't usually wear sheer stockings with that dress. It was a case of spontaneity, a transparent white warp like an open window through which a moment is perceived, unshaded by the physical. And in fact, many in the room were not in good health. Through this window, I take in a non-causative molecule to change myself, what a mother administers, placebo, the intent of a dress. When you wear it for the first time, you're surprised by a rush of feeling for yourself.

There is no warning rattle at the door nor heavy feet to stomp the foyer boards. Safe in the dark prison, I know that light slides over the fingered work of a toothless woman in Pakistan. Happy prints of an invisible time are illumined. My mouth agape rejects the solid air and lungs hold. The invader takes direction and seeps through the plaster walls. It is at my chamber, entering the keyhole, pushing through the padding of the door. I cannot scream. A bone of fear clogs my throat. It is upon me. It is sunrise, with Hope its arrogant rider. My mind, formerly quiescent in its snug encasement, is strained to look upon their rapturous visages, to let them enter even into me. I am forced outside myself to mount the light and ride joined with Hope. Through all the bright hours I cling to expectation, until darkness comes to reclaim me as its own. Hope fades, day is gone into its irredeemable place and I am thrown back into the familiar bonds of disconsolation. Gloom crawls around lapping lasciviously between my toes, at my ankles, and it sucks the strands of my hair. It forgives my heady fling with Hope. I am joined again into its greedy arms.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires.

Without even leaving one’s door, One can know the whole world. —Laozi The rumble of the night sounds even in the bright daylight of morning. Life blooms amid the Ten Thousand Things, but does not bloom amid the Ten Thousand Things. Shrivel-eyed I wake up and tend to the One here and now, clamoring to be let out. Down with the gate, out with the boy, to the rooms of life’s necessities, first to void and next to fill. The Order is only order which is disorder, the only Disorder is the disorder that is order. We usher ourselves, each in our own way, back down the way for various brushings, combings, other groomings. Each in our own way we urge the other toward some kind of growth: one to assume, the other to renounce; one to grow larger, the other to grow smaller, thereby growing larger. Words do not work, and when they do not, other words might. This makes more sense than it seems, works more often than it doesn’t, except when it really doesn’t, and then that disorder creeps back in. In five minutes, a different challenge. In five hours, a different One. Six more hours, the One is rubbing eyes, untangled like a dragon, shucked and undone like an oyster. The night slowly rolls abed and the words form stories form sleep, the sleep of the Ten Thousand Things, the sleep that will echo the next day in the night’s rumbling sounds, in the bright light of morning.

Diarrhea: what nobody likes, though a word the French love to pronounce. They surround it with lips and tongue; it pleases, like saying cellar door does. Once I gave a pair of tweezers to an au pair girl who couldn’t extract a splinter from her foot. It was a pleasure for both of us to see that little thing come out.

For Ann Forsythe Irwin Bourgois Remembering Ann Whose beauty began At the crown of her head And ran to the deep underneath Of her feet— Never aware of her own élan. Now, half mad with pain, She crawls through her rooms, Calling for doctors, Falling, Forgetting, Consumed, Trepanned. Ever since the world began— Star fall Nightfall Bomb fall Downfall... Read the scan: Every woman and every man, Once a flowered Palestine, Falls blindly toward the Nakba— Bald catastrophe, Prescription— According to the Plan.

Outside the window the McGill smelter sent a red dust down on the smoking yards of copper, on the railroad tracks’ frayed ends disappeared into the congestion of the afternoon. Ely lay dull and scuffed: a miner’s boot toe worn away and dim, while my mother knelt before the Philco to coax the detonation from the static. From the Las Vegas Tonapah Artillery and Gunnery Range the sound of the atom bomb came biting like a swarm of bees. We sat in the hot Nevada dark, delighted, when the switch was tripped and the bomb hoisted up its silky, hooded, glittering, uncoiling length; it hissed and spit, it sizzled like a poker in a toddy. The bomb was no mind and all body; it sent a fire of static down the spine. In the dark it glowed like the coils of an electric stove. It stripped every leaf from every branch until a willow by a creek was a bouquet of switches resinous, naked, flexible, and fine. Bathed in the light of KDWN, Las Vegas, my crouched mother looked radioactive, swampy, glaucous, like something from the Planet Krypton. In the suave, brilliant wattage of the bomb, we were not poor. In the atom’s fizz and pop we heard possibility uncorked. Taffeta wraps whispered on davenports. A new planet bloomed above us; in its light the stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates. The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot; we could have anything we wanted.

Tree, we take leave of you; you’re on your own. Put down your taproot with its probing hairs that sluice the darkness and create unseen the tree that mirrors you below the ground. For when we plant a tree, two trees take root: the one that lifts its leaves into the air, and the inverted one that cleaves the soil to find the runnel’s sweet, dull silver trace and spreads not up but down, each drop a leaf in the eternal blackness of that sky. The leaves you show uncurl like tiny fists and bear small button blossoms, greenish white, that quicken you. Now put your roots down deep; draw light from shadow, break in on earth’s sleep.

It’s not spring yet, but I can’t wait anymore. I get the hoe, pull back the snow from the old furrows, expose the rich dark earth. I bare my hand and dole out shriveled peas, one by one. I see my grandmother’s hand, doing just this, dropping peas into gray gumbo that clings like clay. This moist earth is rich and dark as chocolate cake. Her hands cradle baby chicks; she finds kittens in the loft and hands them down to me, safe beside the ladder leading up to darkness. I miss her smile, her blue eyes, her biscuits and gravy, but mostly her hands. I push a pea into the earth, feel her hands pushing me back. She’ll come in May, she says, in long straight rows, dancing in light green dresses.