Poemunity — your poem community

Child one with the sun in trackless fields of yellow grass and thistle, scent of humid heavy air and the wing music of bees and flies. Child, slender nakedness to itself unknown, true colour of the light dispersed invisibly or glowing around the black hulls of distant thunderheads, around the grasshopper’s countenance, solemn, vigilant and wise. Green apples, poured full of density, of crispness, float unmoved under leaves on the slope. Brown fallen apples nest in secret whorls of grass. The apple tree: alone in so much space. And below in the woods by the water a sweet dead branch cracks lightly in the shadow in the wind. But here is an old track through the grass head-high to a child: who made it? They must have passed and passed by this one tree, by the abandoned, tireless car where rabbits peer out, and the circle of black embers, cans, springs, skeletons of furniture. They too passed here many times on their way from the street’s end to the oaks that screen the river. There the sun is nesting now, night rises with pale flutterings of white wings from roots of plants and the black water.

Its small celestial reach stops where the counterweight, the first tough green fruit, pulls earthward and returns the brazen, almost rank perfume of blossoms now six months gone. The slurred odor of its leaves calls back that long evening’s end: we shivered in the cool light a northerly sun bent against the world into the hands of friends who helped clear the outdoor supper’s sharp debris—forks, tin plates, balled napkins and bone nests. The lemon blossoms throbbed. The air slowed with so much young life, the fragrance quickened in our veins the common, too surprising wish to hold, just then, another, whoever stood nearest, whatever charm would bind us to the lowering light. Then someone said, “Let’s eat the tree”— Tear apart the bole, raid the green heart, devour remembrance with one moment’s hunger and eat the nature of things. Scraped plates, laughter, glasses refilled . . . Our sweet anger urged and gathered us around the young tree’s tub, made us tamp the wet soil and drink fast the clear smell of unseen yellow fruit in time we ourselves might never know.

I. FRIENDS of faces unknown and a land Unvisited over the sea, Who tell me how lonely you stand With a single gold curl in the hand Held up to be looked at by me, — II. While you ask me to ponder and say What a father and mother can do, With the bright fellow-locks put away Out of reach, beyond kiss, in the clay Where the violets press nearer than you. III. Shall I speak like a poet, or run Into weak woman's tears for relief ? Oh, children ! — I never lost one, — Yet my arm 's round my own little son, And Love knows the secret of Grief. IV. And I feel what it must be and is, When God draws a new angel so Through the house of a man up to His, With a murmur of music, you miss, And a rapture of light, you forgo. V. How you think, staring on at the door, Where the face of your angel flashed in, That its brightness, familiar before, Burns off from you ever the more For the dark of your sorrow and sin. VI. God lent him and takes him,' you sigh ; — Nay, there let me break with your pain : God 's generous in giving, say I, — And the thing which He gives, I deny That He ever can take back again. VII. He gives what He gives. I appeal To all who bear babes — in the hour When the veil of the body we feel Rent round us, — while torments reveal The motherhood's advent in power, VIII. And the babe cries ! — has each of us known By apocalypse (God being there Full in nature) the child is our own, Life of life, love of love, moan of moan, Through all changes, all times, everywhere. IX. He 's ours and for ever. Believe, O father ! — O mother, look back To the first love's assurance. To give Means with God not to tempt or deceive With a cup thrust in Benjamin's sack. X. He gives what He gives. Be content ! He resumes nothing given, — be sure ! God lend ? Where the usurers lent In His temple, indignant He went And scourged away all those impure. XI. He lends not ; but gives to the end, As He loves to the end. If it seem That He draws back a gift, comprehend 'Tis to add to it rather, — amend, And finish it up to your dream, — XII. Or keep, — as a mother will toys Too costly, though given by herself, Till the room shall be stiller from noise, And the children more fit for such joys, Kept over their heads on the shelf. XIII. So look up, friends ! you, who indeed Have possessed in your house a sweet piece Of the Heaven which men strive for, must need Be more earnest than others are,—speed Where they loiter, persist where they cease. XIV. You know how one angel smiles there. Then weep not. 'Tis easy for you To be drawn by a single gold hair Of that curl, from earth's storm and despair, To the safe place above us. Adieu.

Only a dad, with a tired face, Coming home from the daily race, Bringing little of gold or fame, To show how well he has played the game, But glad in his heart that his own rejoice To see him come, and to hear his voice. Only a dad, with a brood of four, One of ten million men or more. Plodding along in the daily strife, Bearing the whips and the scorns of life, With never a whimper of pain or hate, For the sake of those who at home await. Only a dad, neither rich nor proud, Merely one of the surging crowd Toiling, striving from day to day, Facing whatever may come his way, Silent, whenever the harsh condemn, And bearing it all for the love of them. Only a dad, but he gives his all To smooth the way for his children small, Doing, with courage stern and grim, The deeds that his father did for him. This is the line that for him I pen, Only a dad,but the best of men.

¿Sólo una sombra?/Only a Shadow (Ester IV)?, from the series Santos y sombras/Saints and Shadows, 1993–1994, by Muriel Hasbun My daughter gathers the seeds she finds in our desert, calls them spirits —the spirits are us, she says when I worry those orbs in my fingers to conjure her birth. The wind’s first thought is to craft those seeds: vessels when the tree worries she’s not enough of a multiplicity, that she will burn into the cosmos. The cosmos is no thought, no worry, more than us, but less than wind, and the wind is only the infinite, not the body’s death, which is, after all, only a particle, but time formless as space. This is only if the wind worries at all. The seed doesn’t think — she is the doubling ambition of a vessel. In the wind, the idea of the copy is translated by time. We were once that idea. My daughter collects me in a box marked for spirits where I unsettle the other seeds begging for wind so that my sound will echo a thousand miles away. My daughter was the pulse I toss into the wind with the seeds. Particles of us pass over like whispers from the cosmos, the clatter the wind makes. I worry birds will take her into themselves, that she’ll become a fleck of their transience, but this is how we furrow ourselves into the cosmos, the twine of our breaths into wind, into carbon, into the tree’s colossal fingers reaching back from under the earth.

1 I cradled my newborn daughter and felt the heartbeat pull me out of shock. She didn’t know what her hands were: she folded them. I asked her was there a place where there was no world. She didn’t know what a voice was: her lips were the shape of a nipple. 2 In the park the child says: watch me. It will not count unless you see. And she shows me the cartwheel, the skip, the tumble, the tricks performed at leisure in midair, each unknown until it is finished. At home she orders: see me eat. I watch her curl on herself, sleep; as I try to leave the dark room her dreaming voice commands me: watch. 3 Always we passed the seesaw on the way to the swings but tonight I remember the principle of the lever, I sit the child at one end, I sit near the center, the fulcrum, at once she has power to lift me off the earth and keep me suspended by her tiny weight, she laughing, I stunned at the power of the formula.

The only Mexican that ever was Mexican, fought in the revolution and drank nightly, and like all machos, crawled into work crudo, letting his breath twirl, then clap and sing before sandpaper juiced the metal. The only Mexican to never sit in a Catholic pew was born on Halloween, and ate his lunch wrapped in foil against the fence with the other Mexicans. They fixed old Fords where my grandfather worked for years, him and the welder Juan wagered each year on who would return first to the Yucatan. Neither did. When my aunts leave, my dad paces the living room and then rests, like a jaguar who once drank rain off the leaves of Cecropia trees, but now caged, bends his paw on a speaker to watch crowds pass. He asks me to watch grandpa, which means, for the day; in town for two weeks, I have tried my best to avoid this. Many times he will swear, and many times grandpa will ask to get in and out of bed, want a sweater, he will ask the time, he will use the toilet, frequently ask for beer, about dinner, when the Padres play, por que no novelas, about bed. He will ask about his house, grandma, to sit outside, he will question while answering, he will smirk, he will invent languages while tucked in bed. He will bump the table, tap the couch, he will lose his slipper, wedging it in the wheel of his chair, like a small child trapped in a well, everyone will care. He will cry without tears—a broken carburetor of sobs. When I speak Spanish, he shakes his head, and reminds me, he is the only Mexican.

The straight neck held up out of the lace is bound with a black velvet band. She holds her mouth the way she chooses, the full underlip constrained by a small muscle. She doesn’t blink or look aside, although her left eye is considering a slant. She would smile if she had time, but right now there is composure to be invented. She stares at the photographer. The black crepe settles. Emerging from the sleeve, a shapely hand holds out a white, translucent blossom. “They always say things which embarrass my dog,” she tells the photographer. She is amused, but not as much as he’d like.

is the six-chambered cylinder, the spinnable heart, how it clicks into place, lonely but strong by design. She understands its negative worth, how it holds in the dark and withstands what is held, how it burns and smells of smoke when left and left and left.

Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers, bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications. Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing. And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately I can’t stand them, the shelves of canned beans and soups, freezers of identical dinners; then the snowflake-diamond-snowflake of the rug beneath my chair, rows of books turning their backs, even my two feet, how they mirror each other oppresses me, the way they fit so perfectly together, how I can nestle one big toe into the other like little continents that have drifted; my God the unity of everything, my hands and eyes, yours; doesn’t that frighten you sometimes, remembering the pleasure of nakedness in fresh sheets, all the lovers there before you, beside you, crowding you out? And the scouring griefs, don’t look at them all or they’ll kill you, you can barely encompass your own; I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.