Poemunity — your poem community

During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of  his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly. —Guy Murchie “He was mortared to death.” A pity, how we misspeak and mishear. —Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either makes a difference to the increasingly cooler downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what do

How is it satisfied I asked       clapping my hands violently and waving in fear that I would miss the parade I might have lost my sight without noticing Gone on imagining I saw the same linked-up rooms I moved through Or some cool gray space where a silence could be made I wanted a little animal to climb inside it cleanly I was asking to be left alone but in answer the sun shone brighter

Trees are never felled . . . in summer . . . Not when the fruit . . . is yet to be borne . . . Never before the promise . . . is fulfilled . . . Not when their cooling shade . . . has yet to comfort . . . Yet there are those . . . unheeding of nature . . . indifferent to ecology . . . ignorant of need . . . who . . . with ax and sharpened saw . . . would . . . in boots . . . step forth damaging . . . Not the tree . . . for it falls . . . But those who would . . . in summer’s heat . . . or winter’s cold . . . contemplate . . . the beauty . . .

The tea-kettle bubbled, the tea things were set, The candles were lighted, the ladies were met; The how d’ye’s were over, and entering bustle, The company seated, and silks ceased to rustle: The great Mrs. Consequence opened her fan, And thus the discourse in an instant began (All affected reserve and formality scorning): “I suppose you all saw in the paper this morning A volume of Poems advertised—’tis said They’re produced by the pen of a poor servant-maid.” “A servant write verses!” says Madam Du Bloom: “Pray what is the subject—a Mop, or a Broom?” “He, he, he,” says Miss Flounce: “I suppose we shall see An ode on a Dishclout—what else can it be?” Says Miss Coquettilla, “Why, ladies, so tart? Perhaps Tom the footman has fired her heart; And she’ll tell us how charming he looks in new clothes, And how nimble his hand moves in brushing the shoes; Or how, the last time that he went to May Fair, He bought her some sweethearts of gingerbread ware.” “For my part I think,” says old Lady Marr-joy, “A servant might find herself other employ: Was she mine I’d employ her as long as ’twas light, And send her to bed without candle at night.” “Why so?” says Miss Rhymer, displeased: “I protest ’Tis pity a genius should be so depressed!” “What ideas can such low-bred creatures conceive?” Says Mrs. Noworthy, and laughed in her sleeve. Says old Miss Prudella, “If servants can tell How to write to their mothers, to say they are well, And read of a Sunday The Duty of Man, Which is more I believe than one half of them can; I think ’tis much properer they should rest there, Than be reaching at things so much out of their sphere.” Says old Mrs. Candour, “I’ve now got a maid That’s the plague of my life—a young gossiping jade; There’s no end of the people that after her come, And whenever I’m out, she is never at home; I’d rather ten times she would sit down and write, Than gossip all over the town every night.” “Some whimsical trollop most like,” says Miss Prim, “Has been scribbling of nonsense, just out of a whim, And, conscious it neither is witty nor pretty, Conceals her true name, and ascribes it to Betty.” “I once had a servant myself,” says Miss Pines, “That wrote on a wedding some very good lines.” Says Mrs. Domestic, “And when they were done, I can’t see for my part what use they were on; Had she wrote a receipt, to’ve instructed you how To warm a cold breast of veal, like a ragout, Or to make cowslip wine, that would pass for Champagne, It might have been useful, again and again.” On the sofa was old Lady Pedigree placed; She owned that for poetry she had no taste, That the study of heraldry was more in fashion, And boasted she knew all the crests in the nation. Says Mrs. Routella, “Tom, take out the urn, And stir up the fire, you see it don’t burn.” The tea-things removed, and the tea-table gone, The card-tables brought, and the cards laid thereon, The ladies, ambitious for each other’s crown, Like courtiers contending for honours, sat down.

Put nothing down to distress the reader. No barking dog. No rustle in the place whispers belong or photos of petals near collapse. Erase oranges of confusing taste, a face wrinkled or in pain, a map with waterless rivers or water without a bend, still in darkness. Here, where mystery beyond hope comes too near, make a bright flight of leaves descend, none to smear all our spotless rivers. A map folds and unfolds, does not bunch or wrinkle. Rainbows to last. The First Endlessness of Eden. This was the spot I was to start on, a leg steps out of the lake, a step falters instead into dashes that spread without prints onto the screaming bank.

There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction, How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds, For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactnesses Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged, Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.

You can do the work just by starting it. You can do whatever you want. A bill is drafted on a train to Albany, or in a black limousine. Like how one day I walked the entire length of Manhattan, except I didn’t. I didn’t finish. Not nearly. How could I? Stopped as I was by the boat basin. These credit cards fill with gin and tonic. They pool with the stuff. Maybe I get a little lost sometimes, start thinking I went to Yale. Once I swam to Governors Island, between the ferries and freighters. It was like a job you should’ve seen me quit. Maybe they looked for me. Maybe it wasn’t someone else’s shift, and then it was. Sometimes people are just turnstiles. You have to tell them to keep turning, keep turning into someone else. The rain crashes across a cab, and the road has filled. We’re waterborne. Or whatever the word is for that little moment when the heart lifts. Why don’t you devote yourself the way you once did? It’s an old answer, and an early one. The alarm goes off for a while after it stops. In your face in the bathroom mirror. You play that little song to look at your teeth. My teeth. They haven’t been cared for. The class giggles at my age. This is my hearing. The chances taken on a new face.

In the apparent vacancy beyond each line, you might sense the poem waiting to think itself. Imagine the surface of a twilight pond in wind, shifting and changing the sky, then going still as a concentrating mind, the far trees deepening in its reflection. Like the poem the pond’s alive— its beauty (the sudden scintillation of a hundred thousand wavelets) and music (the percussion of a beaver’s tail) arising from what is. And when the pond accumulates the darkness, which it loves, it challenges your eyes to find the light that without darkness you could not see. Wild campsites you never noticed now appear along the far shore. It’s not only itself the poem waits for moving line by line into its own dark. It waits for you.

The day gets slowly started. A rap at the bedroom door, bitter coffee, hot cereal, juice the color of sun which isn’t out this morning. A cool shower, a shave, soothing Noxzema for razor burn. A bed is made. The paper doesn’t come until twelve or one. A gray shine out the windows. “No one leaves the building until those scissors are returned.” It’s that kind of a place. Nonetheless, I’ve seen worse. The worried gray is melting into sunlight. I wish I’d brought my book of enlightening literary essays. I wish it were lunch time. I wish I had an appetite. The day agrees with me better than it did, or, better, I agree with it. I’ll slide down a sunslip yet, this crass September morning.

The eager note on my door said “Call me, call when you get in!” so I quickly threw a few tangerines into my overnight bag, straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and headed straight for the door. It was autumn by the time I got around the corner, oh all unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk! Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie! for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest only casually invited, and that several months ago.