Poemunity — your poem community

He asked me       if I had a choice what kind of bird would I choose to be. I know what he thought I’d say since he tried to        end my sentences half the time anyway. Something exotic he thought. He thought maybe macaw. That would fit all loudmouthed and primary colored he would think. (He thinks too much I always thought.) But really       at heart I’m more don’t laugh now an L B J little brown job except               except I’m not the flit        from branch to        branch        type such a waste of energy all that wing flap and scritch scritch scratch. Really now can you see me seed pod clamped between my beak like some landowner, Havana cigar clenched between his teeth? No         I think         not I think green heron. You ask why? Personality mainly. That hunched look wings tucked to neck waiting        waiting in the sun on a wide slab of rock alongside a slow river like some old man up from a bad night’s dream where he’s seen his coffin and you say to him Have a nice day and he says Make me. Oh          you want looks I’ll give you looks: long olive green feathers a trace of iridescence I could stand going out       iridescent chestnut sides and head a black crown yes        a crown something regal to flash when you get too close dark bill         bright yellow legs and that creamy streak down my throat and pecs good not great but good         pecs just enough for a quick hop to the next. The best part no sexual dimorphism male         female both alike endless possibilities.

The castle clock had tolled midnight: With mattock and with spade, And silent, by the torches’ light, His corse in earth we laid. The coffin bore his name, that those Of other years might know, When earth its secrets should disclose, Whose bones were laid below. “Peace to the dead” no children sung, Slow pacing up the nave,— No prayers were read, no knell was rung, As deep we dug his grave. We only heard the winter's wind, In many a sullen gust, As, o’er the open grave inclined, We murmured, “Dust to dust!” A moonbeam from the arch’s height Streamed, as we placed the stone; The long aisles started into light, And all the windows shone. We thought we saw the banners then, That shook along the walls, Whilst the sad shades of mailèd men Were gazing on the stalls. ’Tis gone! again on tombs defaced Sits darkness more profound; And only by the torch we traced The shadows on the ground. And now the chilling, freezing air Without blew long and loud; Upon our knees we breathed one prayer, Where he slept in his shroud. We laid the broken marble floor,— No name, no trace appears,— And when we closed the sounding door, We thought of him with tears.

Lostness is the You Are Here, the red star that the mall map linked to GPS. As if you’d stared into your nowhere like a sun and photoreceptors compensated with a point. Lostness is an immaculately well-dressed person or a room laid out like charcuterie. It’s a feeling someone loves you after a ten-minute talk. Oh yes, but lostness is loving someone too, knowing you would take the raft out further if it meant a few more minutes. Sometimes, I want to tell my dog that I’m the only one in the world who knows her whereabouts and that’s lostness but it’s lived in. It isn’t sadness. Lostness is the job I had in ’98 in a warehouse unpacking chic decor where I began to unravel and unmake the very things the company was selling. It was the boxes I moved forward on the shelves until they lined up well, pop choruses that played again for the beautiful and found. It’s almost gladness. It’s the walk I took one day trying to decide should I live in Montreal? and thinking that I knew something to make it plain. Lostness is the many rains of money that I once watched from an open window. It’s long been here. It was the semilunate carpal flowering in late-Cretaceous bones where everything was going then never more unclear. It was the first prokaryote closing off its little O and all that it could be instead. But lostness is a steady wage. I remember when my grandfather would come home from the squats and thousand double checks of electrical work and wash his hands: all the dirt moved in his laundry sink like garter snakes that turned up under stones, a living current so bearable in its lostness that I could know it, only, for a hundred years and still be happy. Lostness was the school I went to where leaving crumbs on rectangles of paper meant showing the way someone would have to come. It was having your knapsack up on the table like a personal flotation device. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that lostness is always there on the lip of everything, like lichen or a bomb. There is a loving lostness that if you look deep into, you see a great balance beam that everything that was, or is, or that may be, is standing on.

Child! do not throw this book about! Refrain from the unholy pleasure Of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure. Child, have you never heard it said That you are heir to all the ages? Why, then, your hands were never made To tear these beautiful thick pages! Your little hands were made to take The better things and leave the worse ones: They also may be used to shake The Massive Paws of Elder Persons. And when your prayers complete the day, Darling, your little tiny hands Were also made, I think, to pray For men that lose their fairylands.

The Poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead In summer luxury,—he has never done With his delights; for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never: On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

I set forth one misted white day of June Beneath the great Atlantic rainway, and heard: “Honestly you smite worlds of truth, but Lose your own trains of thought, like a pigeon. Did you once ride in Kenneth’s machine?” “Yes, I rode there, an old man in shorts, blind, Who had lost his way in the filling station; Kenneth was kind.” “Did he fill your motionless ears with resonance and stain?” “No, he spoke not as a critic, but as a man.” “Tell me, what did he say?” “He said, ‘My eyes are the white sky, the gravel on the groundway my sad lament.’” “And yet he drives between the two. . . .” “Exactly, Jane, And that is the modern idea of fittingness, To, always in motion, lose nothing, although beneath the Rainway they move in threes and twos completely Ruined for themselves, like moving pictures.” “But how other?” “Formulalessness, to go from the sun Into love’s sweet disrepair. He would fondly express ‘Rain trees’—which is not a poem, ‘rain trees. . . .’” “Still, it is mysterious to have an engine That floats bouquets! and one day in the rear-vision Mirror of his car we vowed delight, The insufficiency of the silverware in the sunlight, The dreams he steals from and smiles, losing gain.” “Yet always beneath the rainway unsyntactical Beauty might leap up!” “That we might sing From smiles’ ravines, ‘Rose, the reverse of everything, May be profaned or talked at like a hat.’” “Oh that was sweet and short, like the minuet Of stars, which would permit us to seem our best friends By silver’s eminent lights! For nature is so small, ends Falsely reign, distending the time we did Behind our hope for body-work, riding with Kenneth.” Their voicing ceased, then started again, to complain That we are offered nothing when it starts to rain In the same way, though we are dying for the truth.

When the collie saw the child break from the crowd, he gave chase, and since they both were border-crossers, they left this world. We were then made of— affronted by—silence. The train passed Poste 5, Paris, late arrival, no luck, no enlarging commentary magnified in any glass. “The ineffable is everywhere in language” the speaker had said in the huge hall where I sat amongst coughers, students, in the late February of that year, at the end of a sinuous inquiry on sense and sound— “and very close to the ground,” he’d said. Like mist risen above the feet of animals in a far field north of here.

After a night of wind we are surprised by the light, how it flutters up from the back of the sea and leaves us at ease. We can walk along the shore this way or that, all day. Sit in the spiky grass among the low whittled bushes, listening to crickets, to the whisk of the small waves, the rattling back of stones. “Observation,” our Golden Nature Guide instructs, is the key to science. Look all around you. Some beaches may be quite barren except for things washed up.” A buoy and a blue bottle, a lightbulb cloudy but unbroken. For an hour my daughter gathers trinkets, bits of good luck. She sings the song she’s just invented: Everybody knows when the old days come. Although it is October, today falls into the shape of summer, that sense of languid promise in which we are offered another and then another spell of flawless weather. It is the weather of Sundays, the weather of memory, and I can see myself sitting on a porch looking out at water, the discreet shores of a lake. Three or four white pines were enough of a mystery, how they shook and whispered, how at night I felt them leaning against my window, like the beginning of a story in which children must walk deeper and deeper into a dark forest, and are afraid, yet calm, unaware of the arrangements made for them to survive. My daughter counts her shells and stones, my wife clips bayberry from the pathway. I raise an old pair of binoculars, follow the edge of the sky to the lighthouse, then down into the waves as they fold around rocks humped up out of the sea. I can turn the wheel and blur it all into a dazzle, the pure slips and shards of light. “A steady push of wind,” we read in the book, “gives water its rolling, rising and falling motion. As the sea moves up and down, the wave itself moves forward. As it nears the shore friction from the bottom causes it to rise higher until it tips forward in an arc and breaks.” On the table in front of the house is the day’s collection: sea-glass and starfish, a pink claw, that blue bottle— some to be taken home, arranged in a box, laid on a shelf, later rediscovered, later thrown away, casually, without regret, and some of it, even now, to be discarded, like the lesser stones, and the pale chipped shells which are so alike we can agree that saving one or two will be enough.

On the lawn at the villa— That’s the way to start, eh, reader? We know where we stand—somewhere expensive— You and I imperturbes, as Walt would say, Before the diversions of wealth, you and I engagés. On the lawn at the villa Sat a manufacturer of explosives, His wife from Paris, And a young man named Bruno, And myself, being American, Willing to talk to these malefactors, The manufacturer of explosives, and so on, But somehow superior. By that I mean democratic. It’s complicated, being an American, Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time. Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem. We were all sitting there paralyzed In the hot Tuscan afternoon, And the bodies of the machine-gun crew were draped over the balcony. So we sat there all afternoon.

no more the chicken and the egg come one of them before the other both be fadin (steady) from the supersafeway/a&p/giant circus uh-huh the pilgrim cornucopia it ain’ a pot to pee in much (these days) gas is gone and alka seltza runnin gas a close race outasight/you name it toilet paper halfway honest politicians there’s a shortage folks/please step right up