Poemunity — your poem community

Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless. Titan! to thee the strife was given Between the suffering and the will, Which torture where they cannot kill; And the inexorable Heaven, And the deaf tyranny of Fate, The ruling principle of Hate, Which for its pleasure doth create The things it may annihilate, Refus'd thee even the boon to die: The wretched gift Eternity Was thine—and thou hast borne it well. All that the Thunderer wrung from thee Was but the menace which flung back On him the torments of thy rack; The fate thou didst so well foresee, But would not to appease him tell; And in thy Silence was his Sentence, And in his Soul a vain repentance, And evil dread so ill dissembled, That in his hand the lightnings trembled. Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen Man with his own mind; But baffled as thou wert from high, Still in thy patient energy, In the endurance, and repulse Of thine impenetrable Spirit, Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, A mighty lesson we inherit: Thou art a symbol and a sign To Mortals of their fate and force; Like thee, Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source; And Man in portions can foresee His own funereal destiny; His wretchedness, and his resistance, And his sad unallied existence: To which his Spirit may oppose Itself—and equal to all woes, And a firm will, and a deep sense, Which even in torture can descry Its own concenter'd recompense, Triumphant where it dares defy, And making Death a Victory.

Stay, I said to the cut flowers. They bowed their heads lower. Stay, I said to the spider, who fled. Stay, leaf. It reddened, embarrassed for me and itself. Stay, I said to my body. It sat as a dog does, obedient for a moment, soon starting to tremble. Stay, to the earth of riverine valley meadows, of fossiled escarpments, of limestone and sandstone. It looked back with a changing expression, in silence. Stay, I said to my loves. Each answered, Always.

He plays a train. She plays a whistle. They move away. He plays a rope. She plays a tree. They swing. He plays a dream. She plays a feather. They fly. He plays a general. She plays people. They declare war.

I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter and in my twenties I almost ended up there— and then as an alternative to vodka, to live alone like a hermit philosopher and court the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway— and then there were the years in which I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity, years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares, and that was the worst, the very worst— you could say that always my life was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart— my life like scraps stitched together in a dream in which animals and people, plants, chimeras, stars, even minerals were in a preordained harmony— a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten, but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason— and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth. I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion, the voices still talking inside me . . . but then, instead of harmony, there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground. And maybe that's all it means to be a poet.

We were thinking of starting a band, all lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery. This one would be gem, that one metamorphic, the rest pebbles and some laboratory-grown, semi-precious stones. The trees were in it for the long-run; they swayed or stood stoic, sheltered what they could. We made the cast as an idle grouping: we played the trump, the idiot, the glue. We backdropped with hearts hardly beating, our eyes set straight in our heads: the bombed- out school kids, the oilfields scrubbed in turns. We chewed the fat amongst ourselves. You said, this place should be more festive: a lightning bolt, a snail, a fraud. I set a crumb aside for the local roof rat; you tallied the droppings, the amputees, the gold. I blew my top when you lost "Dominion." You said, what can be done? It's gone, it's gone. Wind started in through the rift-way, buzzed over our slate-blue bones. All the leaves have aged with kindness, all our pretend looped and windowed raggedness went largely unseen. We were on stage the whole performance, held our breath for the final moments with cheeks rent and red. No neck was slit on our backs; no distraught lover jumped from our cliff's edge. There was a stirring backstage we could sense it: a temptress, some anger, some sin. Weeds came thick around us. The act had been bungled sorely. We withheld our opinions, sat in wait. We were good for a throwing.

The poet pursues his beautiful theme; The preacher his golden beatitude; And I run after a vanishing dream— The glittering, will-o’-the-wispish gleam Of the properly scholarly attitude— The highly desirable, the very advisable, The hardly acquirable, properly scholarly attitude. I envy the savage without any clothes, Who lives in a tropical latitude; It’s little of general culture he knows. But then he escapes the worrisome woes Of the properly scholarly attitude— The unceasingly sighed over, wept over, cried over, The futilely died over, properly scholarly attitude. I work and I work till I nearly am dead, And could say what the watchman said—that I could! But still, with a sigh and a shake of the head, “You don’t understand,” it is ruthlessly said, “The properly scholarly attitude— The aye to be sought for, wrought for and fought for, The ne’er to be caught for, properly scholarly attitude—” I really am sometimes tempted to say That it’s merely a glittering platitude; That people have just fallen into the way, When lacking a subject, to tell of the sway Of the properly scholarly attitude— The easily preachable, spread-eagle speechable, In practice unreachable, properly scholarly attitude.

Mid-October in Central Park, one of the elms has changed early, burning with a light grown accustomed to its own magnificence, imperceptible until this moment when it becomes more than itself, more than a ritual of self-immolation. I think of sacrifice as nourishment, the light feeding bark and veins and blood and skin, the tree better off for wanting nothing more. I used to imagine the chakra like this—a hole in the soul from the top of the head, where the light of knowing can shimmer through. In the summer of 1979 I saw that light shoot from my brother’s forehead as we sat chanting in a temple in Manila. He didn’t see it pulsing like a bulb in a storm, but he said he felt the warmth that wasn’t warmth but peace. And I, who have never been so privileged, since then have wondered if we believed everything because not to believe was to be unhappy. I’ve seen that light elsewhere —on a river in Bangkok, or pixeled across the shattered façades of Prague—but it is here where I perceive its keenest rarity, where I know it has passed over all the world, has given shape to cities, cast glamour over the eyes of the skeptic, so that it comes to me informed with the wonder of many beings. I can’t begin to say how infinite I feel, as though I were one of many a weightless absence touches, and out of this a strange transformation: the soul ringed with changes, as old as a tree, as old as light. I am always learning the same thing: there is no other way to live than this, still, and grateful, and full of longing.

That twig of light, that branch, that fork, that form. Beyond that, a city. A horse drowning in a river, and beyond that, a city. Wildfire, and beyond that, a city. God, a slippery thing, an eel, is twined from our hands. That rainy hum is the wharf, is the light that etches a bridge between pronouns, the bottle of amber formaldehyde, the infant orangutan, the wing of a gull stitched to its scapula. Here is a river drowning in a horse’s dark eye. Devitalized, humming, rainy, the feather of this gull, this small spill of light, the written thing that glues each hill to the earth, that follows a pull with its wobbly needle. God is a drowned horse fifty hands at the shoulder. To write what convinces with the impossible whisper. After that, a city. They call this floating thing an angel and hurry you out of the tent. A bear eating its own paws, and after this, a city. A window full of smoke, and after this, a city. A meter to measure day and time Adapted for that purpose by the God of our hands.

One day the Earth will be just a blind space turning, night confused with day. Under the vast Andean sky there’ll be no more mountains, not a rock or ravine. Only one balcony will remain of all the world’s buildings, and of the human mappa mundi, limitless sorrow. In place of the Atlantic Ocean, a little saltiness in the air, and a fish, flying and magical with no knowledge of the sea. In a car of the 1900s (no road for its wheels) three girls of that time, pressing onwards like ghosts in the fog. They’ll peer through the door thinking they’re nearing Paris when the odor of the sky grips them by the throat. Instead of a forest there’ll be one bird singing, which nobody will ever place, or prefer, or even hear. Except for God, who listening out, proclaims it a goldfinch.

I’m playing with the devil’s cock it’s like a crayon it’s like a fat burnt crayon I’m writing a poem with it I’m writing that down all that rattling heat in this room I’m using that I’m using that tingling rattle that light in the middle of the room it’s my host I’ve always been afraid of you scared you’re god and something else I’m afraid when you’re yellow tawny white it’s okay. Transparent cool you don’t look like home my belly is homeless flopping over the waist of my jeans like an omelette there better be something about feeling fat what there really is is a lack of emptiness I’m aiming for that empty feeling going to get some of that and then I’ll be back