Poemunity — your poem community

How well she has worn the wooden evangelist of the mind I wrought in her. He is fraught as Angel Clare With honesty, with his latchet Worthy of her. When I am gone she will put him on the fire As if he’d condemned her.

The pleasure of contrast: not chained up in an oilcoth sack underwater, holding his breath, but composing himself for the camera, in his only suit. You have to understand photography— unforgiving mirror, unlike oils that soften the hard edges of a man’s face if you want them to, or velvet curtain shielding the pine box during an escape. The audience imagines his bones contracting to a splinter. That’s not at all how it’s done— the camera’s lens blanketed by cloth to keep it in the dark; any halo of light ruptures the film with shadow. His eyes already turn inward to that place we’re going. She thinks about escape too: at the horse butcher, in line like the others, or arguing over the price of bread at the Market of Innocents. Adam’s rib is forever hidden inside her chest as the force of blows hibernates in a boxer’s fist, but she, at least, is smiling when he says, We have such a small family, meaning your body won’t open to me—it’s shackled inside its cage: love and rage, whose bars are meant to be broken.

—Cincinnati, Ohio, 1987 Rage is the language of men, layers of particulates fused. Rage is the wine father pours to the ground for men whose time has passed. Rage is gripped in the hands like the neck of a broom held tight. Rage gets stuck in the throat, suppressed. Rage is a promise kept.

in Fort Wayne I drank the seniors Old Milwaukee Old Crow         in Indianapolis I stopped         now I regret every drink I never took        all around          coffee grounds and eggshells      this sweating         a mouthful of  lime        as a boy I stole a mint green bra from a laundromat       I took it home to try on while my parents slept       filled its cups with the smallest turnips in our pantry       the underwire grew into me like a strangler fig       my blood roiled then as now       back on earth frogspit is dripping down wild aloe spikes       salmon are bullying their way upstream       there is a pond I leapt into once with a lonely blonde boy       when we scampered out one of us was in love      I could not be held responsible for desire       he could not be held at all     I wonder where he is now       if he looked up he might see me      a sparkling     I always hoped that when I died I would know why        my brother will be so sad      he will tell his daughter I was better than I was     he will leave out my crueldrunk nights       the wet mattresses      my driving alone into cornfields unsure whether I’d drive out       I wish he were here now        he could be here      this cave is big enough for everyone        look at all the diamonds

What if the primary colors on your spectrum were mud, muddled, and muddliest? Benjamin Franklin invented the Internet so that I could talk to folk but not face to face and I know what purple-tailed hawk of thought just perched on your extended wrist but try to fit your average feet in my size 17s. Fact: the average reader processes 300 wpm and maybe they can read other people’s faces like a vegan interrogating a list of ingredients but what if every face was written in Braille and you had only catcher’s mitts below your wrists, or IKEA bookcases with reams of instructions ciphered in tiny print with disappearing ink, imagine being so literal that when told to let sleeping dogs lie, you asked how a Doberman could be dishonest, imagine every smiling hint a girl ever sent your way was in a prescription bottle with a Youproof cap or a personal pizza delivered 30 minutes late to the door of a boarded-up summer bungalow then top that double dose of pepperoni by having even the most casual conversation served with Denali-sized asides of organic skew. Fact: the US has 95,000 miles of shoreline, but on this dinner plate the border between the Country of Carrots and the Province of Peas can never meet, say your brain is a slinky bullet-headed train but your mouth is a horse-drawn Amish wagon and what rockets across the endless gray rails of your origamied cranium is ever projected onto your grinning scrim of skin, and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t invent the Internet, but the Internet has plenty pictures of him inventing electricity which is almost the same thing, say your friend Cynthia R. claims it will storm later and you hear Oran Juice Jones singing “I saw you (and him) walking in the rain” and you beam a lighthouse smile, only Cynthia says, “Seriously, I saw it on the news,” while all you smell is full-length fur coats matted by a downpour in MacArthur Park and now Cynthia R. wants to know what’s so funny but who can say Oran Juice Jones without a concentrated face so you try to collect the loose nickels and pennies of thought spilling from your front pocket but Cynthia fires up her smartphone to show you the seven-day forecast and now the foil-covered pots on the back of her electric range are beginning to boil and you say, “No, I believe you,” but she believes in tone of voice the way Crayola once believed in a peach crayon called “Flesh” or the way banks believe in daily deposits left by a river’s most assiduous visits. Fact: the city of Pittsburgh has over 400 bridges, let’s say you arch quick when softly pricked as if any foreign finger were a cattle prod and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t invent electricity but he certainly earned a shiny penny by cutting out the lights during thunderstorms, only your steady tone is mono as a Sinatra single on the platter of a hand-cranked Victrola, and Cynthia cocks her head like a small dog that is not boarding your single-storied boat and now you’re a wind-whipped antenna on an empty dinghy bobbing dockside as she steams out of range of your radio’s befuddled dial.

Sometimes the horse is simply a horse. Sometimes the horse is a stalwart bearer of bodies. Sometimes the horse is stubborn, refusing to ford the river, or the horse is a mistake in the vapor, what looks like a horse emerging out of a thrust of fog on Telegraph Avenue. There’s the perpetual feeling of being overdressed for summer and underdressed for spring. I’m variously sweat or shudder. I mistake the strange bodies for those I owe apologies to, oversleep and open my eyes on the clock radio, the time a typo, the apartment a disaster. Sometimes the horse is a disaster or the horse is time in a trot or a canter. Sometimes the horse is a boy growing in time into a man who often laments, A horse, a horse, my kingdom, etc. But there is no horse. There are two days good and one day bad without any hint of a horse. Sometimes speaking about the horse is a means of avoiding speaking about myself which is lousy. Late last night myself regarding another carelessly. Late last night my body with a temporary body. The horse is the taut metaphor for sex, but sometimes the horse is the taut silence after. Sometimes the horse is the silence after her body rises in the embarrassment of morning and leaves, and this silence is filled with less than remorse but with more than indifference. This is a feeling there is no word for. What I decided in place of what I needed. I should eat better. I should vacuum more often. I should settle down and raise a young horse. Sometimes the horse is unspoken, the horse is this feeling that will be forgotten, is the self unable to alter its ineffable horse. Late last night, a pervasive clopping of the horse on the hill. Late last night, the horse as a foghorn over the Bay. I should be rained on. I should not be forgiven.

This is her picture as she was: It seems a thing to wonder on, As though mine image in the glass Should tarry when myself am gone. I gaze until she seems to stir,— Until mine eyes almost aver That now, even now, the sweet lips part To breathe the words of the sweet heart:— And yet the earth is over her. Alas! even such the thin-drawn ray That makes the prison-depths more rude,— The drip of water night and day Giving a tongue to solitude. Yet only this, of love's whole prize, Remains; save what in mournful guise Takes counsel with my soul alone,— Save what is secret and unknown, Below the earth, above the skies. In painting her I shrin'd her face Mid mystic trees, where light falls in Hardly at all; a covert place Where you might think to find a din Of doubtful talk, and a live flame Wandering, and many a shape whose name Not itself knoweth, and old dew, And your own footsteps meeting you, And all things going as they came. A deep dim wood; and there she stands As in that wood that day: for so Was the still movement of her hands And such the pure line's gracious flow. And passing fair the type must seem, Unknown the presence and the dream. 'Tis she: though of herself, alas! Less than her shadow on the grass Or than her image in the stream. That day we met there, I and she One with the other all alone; And we were blithe; yet memory Saddens those hours, as when the moon Looks upon daylight. And with her I stoop'd to drink the spring-water, Athirst where other waters sprang; And where the echo is, she sang,— My soul another echo there. But when that hour my soul won strength For words whose silence wastes and kills, Dull raindrops smote us, and at length Thunder'd the heat within the hills. That eve I spoke those words again Beside the pelted window-pane; And there she hearken'd what I said, With under-glances that survey'd The empty pastures blind with rain. Next day the memories of these things, Like leaves through which a bird has flown, Still vibrated with Love's warm wings; Till I must make them all my own And paint this picture. So, 'twixt ease Of talk and sweet long silences, She stood among the plants in bloom At windows of a summer room, To feign the shadow of the trees. And as I wrought, while all above And all around was fragrant air, In the sick burthen of my love It seem'd each sun-thrill'd blossom there Beat like a heart among the leaves. O heart that never beats nor heaves, In that one darkness lying still, What now to thee my love's great will Or the fine web the sunshine weaves? For now doth daylight disavow Those days,—nought left to see or hear. Only in solemn whispers now At night-time these things reach mine ear; When the leaf-shadows at a breath Shrink in the road, and all the heath, Forest and water, far and wide, In limpid starlight glorified, Lie like the mystery of death. Last night at last I could have slept, And yet delay'd my sleep till dawn, Still wandering. Then it was I wept: For unawares I came upon Those glades where once she walk'd with me: And as I stood there suddenly, All wan with traversing the night, Upon the desolate verge of light Yearn'd loud the iron-bosom'd sea. Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears The beating heart of Love's own breast,— Where round the secret of all spheres All angels lay their wings to rest,— How shall my soul stand rapt and aw'd, When, by the new birth borne abroad Throughout the music of the suns, It enters in her soul at once And knows the silence there for God! Here with her face doth memory sit Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, Till other eyes shall look from it, Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, Even than the old gaze tenderer: While hopes and aims long lost with her Stand round her image side by side, Like tombs of pilgrims that have died About the Holy Sepulchre.

For my little ballads, those strange, sunset-red laments, spring paid me a gull’s egg. I bade my lover paint my portrait on its thick shell. He painted a new bulb in brown soil— on the other side, a powdery mound of sand.

I begin the day like any other day: a decade staring back in the rearview mirror of the wrecked pickup truck: you standing so tall you’re already headless: until I turn around the cornfield blurs into the torn edges of an atlas: pull your hands out from under me to anoint this god- given country of yours: mottled bones singing the anthem of a star- spangled nation: this land given enough time to list its own possibilities: atrocities like a blade of dusk resting on my throat, I bruise: by standing I practice the sacred: & kneel how the body was built toward the bottomless insides of ghosts: the small of my back the sacrum: they say, the five disciples with pocked faces unlike your self-inflicted gunshot but a single entryway: an emptiness full of faith:rise to me as only you would after god has left you with these entrance wounds with no way out: the purpling field that goes on & on: recognizable as a heartbeat: a century- long orbit around a cage of stained glass: broken, you gather me in your image of failed flesh: piecing mirror after mirror back together through the night until nobody forgets: one hundred years of this landscape behind & before us continues to stir — even if the earth under our knees, under every American sky, had been turning west- ward for centuries.

Mother came to visit today. We hadn’t seen each other in years. Why didn’t you call? I asked. Your windows are filthy, she said. I know, I know. It’s from the dust and rain. She stood outside. I stood in, and we cleaned each one that way, staring into each other’s eyes, rubbing the white towel over our faces, rubbing away hours, years. This is what it was like when you were inside me, she said. What? I asked, though I understood. Afterwards, indoors, she smelled like snow melting. Holding hands we stood by the picture window, gazing into the December sun, watching the pines in flame.