Poemunity — your poem community

Translation broadens language as divorce and remarriage extend family. Born to fade and break, facts huddle inside black brackets. Work means inquisition as a child separates a cricket’s wings from thorax. Ideas come apart as monads, metastasizing rhapsody on the edge of delicate dusk. Thunder sounds in the distance or television, always on in this constant rain.

Dedicated to Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz 1 I turn to my Rand McNally Atlas. Europe appears right after the Map of the World. All of Italy can be seen page 9. Half of Chile page 29. I take out my ruler. In global perspective Italy amounts to less than half an inch. Chile measures more than an inch and a quarter of an inch. Approximately Chile is as long as China is wide: Back to the Atlas: Chunk of China page 17. All of France page 5: As we say in New York: Who do France and Italy know at Rand McNally? 2 I see the four mountains in Chile higher than any mountain of North America. I see Ojos del Salado the highest. I see Chile unequivocal as crystal thread. I see the Atacama Desert dry in Chile more than the rest of the world is dry. I see Chile dissolving into water. I do not see what keeps the blue land of Chile out of blue water. I do not see the hand of Pablo Neruda on the blue land. 3 As the plane flies flat to the trees below Brazil below Bolivia below five thousand miles below my Brooklyn windows and beside the shifted Pacific waters welled away from the Atlantic at Cape Horn La Isla Negra that is not an island La Isla Negra that is not black is stone and stone of Chile feeding clouds to color scale and undertake terrestrial forms of everything unspeakable 4 In your country how do you say copper for my country? 5 Blood rising under the Andes and above the Andes blood spilling down the rock corrupted by the amorality of so much space that leaves such little trace of blood rising to the irritated skin the face of the confession far from home: I confess I did not resist interrogation. I confess that by the next day I was no longer sure of my identity. I confess I knew the hunger. I confess I saw the guns. I confess I was afraid. I confess I did not die. 6 What you Americans call a boycott of the junta? Who will that feed? 7 Not just the message but the sound. 8 Early morning now and I remember corriendo a la madrugada from a different English poem, I remember from the difficulties of the talk an argument athwart the wine the dinner and the dancing meant to welcome you you did not understand the commonplace expression of my heart: the truth is in the life la verdad de la vida

The palm tree exposes a large number of loose, carved spines out of pleasure? Boredom?

I Students, look at this table And now when you see a man six feet tall You can call him a fathom. Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun And the alphabet is full of blood And when you knock upon a sentence in the Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags Likewise, hello and goodbye. II Nick Algiers is my student And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide And so, I am the one in front of him And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed. Likewise the distance between us then Is the knife that is not marriage. III Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess Like making love or writing a poem Or drinking wine on a tropical island With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night. I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous. And in dreaming myself upon the moon I have made the moon my home and no one Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips. And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is That I will never win.

So grateful the process is clean and faithful. Does not cheat like a disenchanted spouse dozing on a haggard couch. Take heart: the process is always right — is automatic, phlegmatic. Clean, cold, and always refreshing. Brewed to perfection some say. Guaranteed to satisfy you might say. Give thanks the process is organized. Synchronized and sterilized. Optimized but not disguised, like the grown man at my door long after trick-or-treaters have gone, hand outstretched, mask covering his eyes. Thankful, too, for the oversight: no boogeyman standing over the drain pipe, clogging it with debris when no one sees so he can charge you your life for the cleaning; name your price. And how shall we praise the instruments of investigation? So shiny, so new, gleaming with silver and glass? No traces of fingerprints or funders. No whispered voices softly requesting, of the results, a first glance. There’s no need to come clean. We know the process won’t fall prey to steak and wine and then slink upstairs to spend some time, just a little. The process doesn’t. The process wouldn’t. The process isn’t that kind.

Cuk Son is a story. Tucson is a linguistic alternative. The story is in the many languages still heard in this place of Black Mountains. They are in the echo of lost, forgotten languages heard here even before the people arrived. The true story of this place recalls people walking deserts all their lives and continuing today, if only in their dreams. The true story is ringing in their footsteps in a place so quiet, they can hear their blood moving through their veins. Their stories give shape to the mountains encircling this place. Wa:k is the story of water memories of this desert. Citizens gravitate to Sabino Canyon. The humming, buzzing, clicking of water life, the miracle of desert streams on smooth boulders. Rocks, sediment older than life itself serve as reminders. It should be unnecessary for sticky notes to remind us what a desert place is. A place dependent on rains of summer, light dusting of snow, the rarity of dry beds as rebel rivers. It is real desert people who lift their faces upward with the first signs of moisture. They know how to inhale properly. Recognizing the aroma of creosote in the distance. Relieved the cycle is beginning again. These people are to be commended. It is others who lament the heat of a June day, simultaneously finding pride on surviving the heat—a dry heat. These individuals should simply be tolerated. Opposed to those who move from one air-conditioned environment to another, never acknowledging the heat of summer. Being grateful for November, when temperatures drop below eighty, complaining of the lack of seasons in the desert, heading for mountains to see colors— these people—well, what can we say. We must feel for the dogs of Tucson. Who bark as if they belong to somebody and who, before the rain, wish they were a color other than black.

You could drive out of this country and attack the world with your ambition, invent wonder plasmas, become an artist of the provocative gesture, the suggestive nod, you could leave wanting the world and return carrying it, a noisy bundle of steam and libido, a ball of fire balanced on your tongue, you might reclaim Main Street in a limo longer than a sermon, wave at our red faces while remembering that you were born a clod hopper, a farmer’s kid, and get over that hump once and for all by telling A Great Man’s stories— the dirty jokes of dictators, tidbits of presidential hygiene, insights into the psychotropic qualities of power and the American tradition of kissing moneyed ass. Your uncle would still call you Roy Boy, pheasants sun themselves beside the tracks, waiting for the dew to burn off before their first flight, and corn grow so high that if you stood in the field you’d disappear, the fact aiming your eyes down the road.

I The ground dove stuttered for a few steps then flew up from his path to settle in the sun-browned branches that were now barely twigs; in drought it coos with its relentless valve, a tiring sound, not like the sweet exchanges of turtles in the Song of Solomon, or the flutes of Venus in frescoes though all the mounds in the dove-calling drought the hills and gulches all briary and ochre and the small dervishes that swivelled in the dust were like an umber study for a fresco of The Prodigal Son, this scorched, barren acre. He had the smell of cities in his clothes, the steam and soot of trains of Fascist stations and their resounding vaults, he had the memory of rain carried in his head, the rain on Pescara's beach with the pastel hotels, and instead of the doves the air-show with the jets soaring and swooping over the Fair, the smell off that beach came back on the rock-road where the turtle lifted its mating music into the dry acacias, and mixed with the smell off the galloping sea-flock, each odour distinct, of sheep trampling their pens as if their fear had caught the wolf-scent. The rock-brown dove had fluttered from that fear that what he loved and knew once as a boy would panic and forget him from the change of character that the grunting swine could smell. A sow and her litter. Acknowledged prodigal. Grey sunrise through a sky of frosted glass, the great trees sodden, the paths below them pooled, the headlands veiled and muslin-thin, no birds, and pale green combers cresting through the drizzle; a change of climate, the clouding of the self in a sudden culture but one more confident in its glazed equestrian statues in wet parks, its railway stations echoing like the combers in the ground-shaken caves under the cliff; gathering, cresting then dissolving shallows as light steps quietly into the house. Light that inaudibly fits in the house as a book on a bookshelf with its spines of tombs and names, mouths slightly parted, eager to speak wherever their station now. Every library is a cemetery in sunlight. Sometimes, a shaft . . . Across the dry hillock, leaves chasing dead leaves in resurrecting gusts, or in the ochre quiet leaves too many to rake on the road's margins, too loaded to lift themselves, they lapsed singly or in a yellow chute from the cedar, burnt branches; lyres of desiccation choked the dry gutters everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy, by the caked track to Saltibus, over D'ennery. Drought. Song of the wireless harp of the frangipani that still makes a tangled music out of silence. II Now to cherish the depredations of April even on the threshold of March, its sunlit eve— the gommier maudit unshouldering its leaves, barrow after loaded barrow, the leaves fading, yellow, burnt grass and the tigerish shadows on the hillside, and the azure a trowelled blue, and blue hill-smoke, parched shortcuts and rust, cattle anchored in shadows and groaning like winches, the didactic drought against the hot sea that teaches what? Thirst for the grace that springs in grooves of oblivious dust. A fine haze screens the headland, the drizzle drifts. Is every noun: breakwater, headland, haze, seen through a gauze of English, a bright scrim, a mesh in which light now defines the wires and not its natural language? Were your life and work simply a good translation? Would headland, haze and the spray-wracked breakwater pronounce their own names differently? And have I looked at life, in other words, through some inoperable cataract? "What language do you speak in your own country?" Every noun has its echo, a noun is a noise, as every stone in the expanding sunlight finds an exact translation in its shadow, and it may be that you were halved by language as definitively as the meridian of Greenwich or by Pope Alexander's line, but what makes this, if this is all it is, more than just bearable, in fact, exultation is the stone that is looked at, and the manchineels, bitter, poisonous yellow berries, treacherous apples that look like Eden's on the tree of knowledge when the first noun was picked and named and eaten and the shadow of knowledge defined every edge originating language and then difference, and subtlety, the snake and contradiction and the sudden Babel of the manchineel. III The blank page grows a visionary wood. A parallel section, no, in fact a whole province of far, of foreign, of self-translating leaves stands on the place where it has always stood the right-hand margin of the page loud, soft but voluble in their original language, an orchestrating lexicon, veined manuscripts going far back in time and deep in roots and echoing in the tunnel of the right ear with echoes: oak-echo, beech-echo, linden-echo, and beech and birds a half-ancestral forest whose metre was an ocean's and whose break, parting declared the white-lined conjugation of combers' centuries. This ocean, English and this forest weald, this clattering natterer "burn," this distance, mist, kept its high columns marching as my pen moves towards that gap of light that comes upon the bright salt arc of a bare unprinted beach or where the piper leaves a print, its claws, dim, imperceptible as an ancient rune— that is the landscape, that, the stand of forest made up of all these leaves and lines that still rasp with delight with rhyme and incantation pages of shade turning into translation. And my left hand another vegetation but not their opposite or their enemy, palms and wild fern and praising them, the sea, sea-almond, grape and vine and agave that the wind's finger folded carefully drawing its thumb to mark the dog-eared wave across the dry hill, leaves chasing leaves in a shiny, scurrying wind, and, in the brown quiet, leaves, unraked, tiling the road's margins, so loaded they don't lift, they lapse singly, yellow, or chute from the cedars. Lyres of desiccation in March's autumn, filling the dry gutters, everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy, except for the wireless harp of the frangipani that still makes its music out of extreme stillness. In my own botanic origins,frangere panem to break bread, flower-flour in its white lilies, except that in rare blossom I now remember the flower is pink. It doesn't matter. Since whatever hue it is, its wafer it serves that need, petal on the sky's open palate at early mass every morning but here most on this Sunday with its Lenten drought, the heart-coloured flowers then the caterpillars determinedly devour, on a Sunday when a sadness still eats at the parallel petals of my beaten heart, and the white pews of the sea, the waves coming in aisles, my longing for the communion of breakfast, the leafless, flower-less but crusted bark of the frangipani, frangere panem, the pain that I break and eat flower and flour, pain and pain, bright Easter coming, like the seas white communion. IV In the country of the ochre afternoon it is always still and hot, the dry leaves stirring infrequently sometimes with the rattling pods of what they call "women's tongues," in the afternoon country the far hills are very quiet and heat-hazed, but mostly in the middle of the country of the afternoon I see the brown heat of the skin of my first love, so still, so perfect, so unaltered, and I see how she walked with her sunburnt hands against the still sea-almonds, to a remembered cove, where she stood on the small dock— that was when I thought we were immortal and that love would be folded doves and folded oars and water lapping against eroding stone in the ochre country of the afternoon.

I The dialect of the scrub in the dry season withers the flow of English. Things burn for days without translation, with the heat of the scorched pastures and their skeletal cows. Every noun is a stump with its roots showing, and the creole language rushes like weeds until the entire island is overrun, then the rain begins to come in paragraphs and hazes this page, hazes the grey of islets, the grey of eyes, the rainstorm's wild-haired beauty. The first daybreak of rain, the crusted drought broken in half like bread, the quiet trumpet mouth of a rainbow and the wiry drizzle fighting decease, half the year blowing out to sea in hale, refreshing gusts, the withered lilies drink with grateful mouths, and the first blackbird of the new season announces itself on a bough the hummingbird is reglistened drilling the pierced hedges, my small shaft to your heart, my emerald arrow: A crowd crosses a bridge from Canaries to the Ponte Vecchio, from Piaille to Pescara, and a volley of blackbirds fans over Venice or the broken pier of Choiseul, and love is as wide as the span of my open palm for frontiers that read like one country, one map of affection that closes around my pen. I had forgotten the benediction of rain edged with sunlight, the prayers of dripping leaves and the cat testing the edge of the season with careful paw. And I have nothing more to write about than gratitude. For la mer, soleil-là, the bow of the arc-en-ciel and the archery of blackbirds from its radiant bow. The rest of the year is rain. II There was a beautiful rain this morning." "I was asleep." He stroked her forehead. She smiled at him, then laughed as she kept yawning. "It was lovely rain." But I thought of the dead I know. The sun shone through the rain and it was lovely. "I'm sure," she said. There were so many names the rain recited: Alan, Joseph and Claude and Charles and Roddy. The sunlight came through the rain and the drizzle shone as it had done before for everybody. For John and Inge, Devindra and Hamilton. "Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon," wrote Edward Thomas. Her eyes closed in my arms, but it was sleep. She was asleep again, while the bright rain moved from Massade to Monchy. Sometimes I stretch out, or you stretch out your hand, and we lock palms; our criss-crossed histories join and two maps fit. Bays, boundaries, rivers, roads, one country, one warm island. Is that noise rain on the hot roof, is it sweeping out to sea by the stones and shells of the almond cemetery? III The road is wet, the leaves wet, but the sun inching, and always the astonishment: in March? This blustery, this grey? The waves chopping and circling and ramming into one another like sheep in a maddened pen from a whiff of wolf, or white mares, bug-eyed from the lightning's whip, and, if they could, whinnying. But the light will win. The sun fought with the rain in the leaves and won; then the rain came back and it was finer out to sea. A drizzle blurred the promontories evenly and now the manchineels and acacias sparkled with the new rain and the cows' hides darkened as the horses dipped their heads and shook their manes, and over the horizon the faint arc of an almost imperceptible bow appeared then dimmed across the channel towards Martinique. This miracle was usual for the season. "The sun came out just for you," he said. And it was true. The light entered her forehead and blazoned her difference there. The pastures were beaded, roofs shone on the hills, a sloop was working its way against huge clouds as patches of sunlight widened with a new zeal towards detachment, towards simplicity. Who said that they were lying side by side, the cupped spoon of her torso in his own in the striped shadows of mid-afternoon? IV The doors are open, the house breathes and I feel a balm so heavy and a benediction so weightless that the past is just blue air and cobalt motion lanced with emerald and sail-flecks and the dove's continuous complaint about repletion, its swollen note of gratitude- all incantation is the monody of thanks to the sky's motionless or moving altars, even to the faint drone of that silver insect that is the morning plane over Martinique, while, take this for what you will, the frangipani that, for dry months, contorted, crucified in impotence or barrenness, endured, has come with pale pink petals and blades of olive leaves, parable of my loin-longing, my silver age. From the salt brightness of my balcony I look across to the abandoned fort; no History left, just natural history, as a cloud's shadow subtilizes thought. On a sloped meadow lifted by the light, the Hessians spun like blossoms from the immortelle, the tattered pennons of the sea-almond fluttered to the spray-white detonations of the lilac against blue the hue of a grenadier, dried pods of the flamboyant rattle their sabres and a mare's whinny across the parched pastures launches white scuds of sails across the channel, the race of a schooner launched in a canal. A grey sky trawls its silver wires of rain; these are the subtleties of the noon sea: lime, emerald, lilac, cobalt, ultramarine.

I Prodigal, what were your wanderings about? The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure. The earth grew music and the tubers sprouted to Sesenne's singing, rain-water, fresh patois in a clay carafe, a clear spring in the ferns, and pure things took root like the sweet-potato vine. Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew, as the sun turns into a cipher from a green flash, clouds crumble like cities, the embers of Carthage; any man without a history stands in nettles and no butterflies console him, like surrendering flags, does he, still a child, long for battles and castles from the books of his beginning, in a hieratic language he will never inherit, but one in which he writes "Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew," his whole life a language awaiting translation? Since I am what I am, how was I made? To ascribe complexion to the intellect is not an insult, since it takes its plaid like the invaluable lizard from its background, and if our work is piebald mimicry then virtue lies in its variety to be adept. On the warm stones of Florence I subtly alter to a Florentine till the sun passes, in London I am pieced by fog, and shaken from reflection in Venice, a printed page in the sun on which a cabbage-white unfolds, a bookmark. To break through veils like spiders' webs, crack carapaces like a day-moth and achieve a clarified frenzy and feel the blood settle like a brown afternoon stream in River Doree is what I pulsed for in my brain and wrist for the drifting benediction of a drizzle drying on this page like asphalt, for peace that passes like a changing cloud, to a hawk's slow pivot. II In the vale of Santa Cruz I look to the hills. The white flowers have the fury of battle, they lay siege to the mountains, for war there is the tumult of the white ravines, and the cascade's assault; they bow their plumes, Queen Anne's lace, bougainvillea, orchid and oleander, and they are as white as arrested avalanches, angry and Alpine, their petals blur into a white gust from the Matterhom or the streets of Zermatt. Both worlds are welded, they were seamed by delight. Santa Cruz, in spring. Deep hills with blue clefts. I have come back for the white egrets feeding in a flock on the lawn, darting their bills in that finical stride, gawkily elegant, then suddenly but leisurely sailing to settle, but not too far off, like angels. III I wake at sunrise to angelic screams. And time is measuring my grandchildren's cries and time outpaces the sepia water of the racing creek, time takes its leisure, cunning in the blocked hollows of the pool, the elephantine stones in the leaf-marked lagoon, time sails with the soundless buzzard over the smoking hills and the clouds that fray and change and time waits very quiet between the mountains and the brown tracks in the valleys of the Northern Range, a cover of overhanging bamboo, in Maraval where, if the bed were steeper, a brown stream races or tries to, pooling in rocks, with great avail for me at least, or where a range's blues and indigo over which wide hawks sail their shadows on the wells of Santa Cruz, dark benedictions on the brook's muttering shale, and the horses are slowly plunging their manes as they climb up from the paved-with-lilies pond, so much mythology in their unharnessed necks! These little things take root as I add my praise to the huge lawn at the back of the house, a field, a bright, unaltered meadow, a small savannah for cries and bicycles and joy-crazed dogs bolting after pedalling boys, the crescent ghost of the new moon showing and on the thick slopes this forest like green billowing smoke pierced by the flame petals of the immortelle. IV Petals of the flame tree against ice-cream walls and the arches across the park with its tacit fountain, the old idlers on the benches, this is the prose that spreads like the shade of an immortal banyan in front of the library, the bulk that darkens the violin of twilight when traffic has vanished and nearly over also the colonial regime when the wharves cradled the rocking schooners of our boyhood to the echo of vespers in the alien cathedral. In the hot green silence a dragonfly's drone crossing the scorched hill to the shade of the cedars and spiced laurels, the lauriers canelles, the word itself lifting the plurals of its leaves, from the hot ground, from this page, the singeing smells. How simple to write this after you have gone, that your death that afternoon had the same ease as stopping at the side of the road under the trees to buy cassava bread that comes in two sorts sweet and unsweetened, from the huge cauldron, on the road between Soufrière and Canaries. The heat collects in the depths between the ridges and the high hawks circle in the gathering haze; like consonants round a vowel, insistent midges hum round noun's hexagon, and the hornet's house. Delve in the hot, still valley of Soufrière, the black, baking asphalt and its hedges dripping shade and here is the ultimate nullity despite the moil of the churning vegetation. The small church hidden in leaves. In mid-afternoon, the halt– then dart of a quizzical lizard across the road.