Poemunity — your poem community

First it is one day without you. Then two. And soon, our point: moot . And our solution, diluted. And our class action (if ever was) is no longer suited. Wherewith I give to looting through the war chest of our past like a wily Anne Bonny who snatches at plunder or graft. But the wreck of that ransack, that strongbox, our splintering coffer, the claptrap bastard of the best we had to offer, is sog-soaked and clammy, empty but for sand. Like the knuckle-white cup of my urgent, ghastly hands in which nothing but the ghost of love is held. Damn it to hell.

We bury the sparrows of Europe with found instruments, their breasts light as an ounce of tea where we had seen them off the path, their twin speeds of shyness & notched wings near the pawnbroker’s house by the canal, in average neighborhoods of the resisters, or in markets of princely delphinium & flax, flying from awnings at unmarked rates to fetch crumbs from our table half-spinning back to clefs of grillwork on external stairs we would descend much later; in rainy neighborhoods of the resisters where streets were taken one by one, where consciousness is a stair or path, we mark their domains with notched sticks of hickory or chestnut or ash because our cities of princely pallor should not have unmarked graves. Lyric work, flight of arch, death bridge to which patterned being is parallel: they came as if from the margins of a painting, their average hearts half-spinning our little hourglass up on the screen.

I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pinpoint nucleus of being Locate an irritation            without It is                                           within Within It is without The sensitized area Is identical            with the extensity Of intension I am the false quantity In the harmony of physiological potentiality To which Gaining self-control I should be consonant In time Pain is no stronger than the resisting force Pain calls up in me The struggle is equal The open window is full of a voice A fashionable portrait painter Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment Sings “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly All the girls are nice Whether they wear their hair in curls Or — ” At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization The conception                       Brute Why? The irresponsibility of the male Leaves woman her superior Inferiority. He is running upstairs I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony Incidentally with the exhaustion of control I reach the summit And gradually subside into anticipation of Repose Which never comes. For another mountain is growing up Which          goaded by the unavoidable I must traverse Traversing myself Something in the delirium of night hours Confuses while intensifying sensibility Blurring spatial contours So aiding elusion of the circumscribed That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast Comes from so far away And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth Is no part of myself There is a climax in sensibility When pain surpassing itself Becomes exotic And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative   poles of sensation Uniting the opposing and resisting forces In lascivious revelation Relaxation Negation of myself as a unit Vacuum interlude I should have been emptied of life Giving life For consciousness in crises          races Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes Have I not Somewhere Scrutinized A dead white feathered moth Laying eggs? A moment Being realization Can Vitalized by cosmic initiation Furnish an adequate apology For the objective Agglomeration of activities Of a life LIFE A leap with nature Into the essence Of unpredicted Maternity Against my thigh Tough of infinitesimal motion Scarcely perceptible Undulation Warmth           moisture Stir of incipient life Precipitating into me The contents of the universe Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity Indivisible Acutely I am absorbed Into The was — is — ever — shall — be Of cosmic reproductivity Rises from the subconscious Impression of a cat With blind kittens Among her legs Same undulating life-stir I am that cat Rises from the sub-conscious Impression of small animal carcass Covered with blue bottles — Epicurean — And through the insects Waves that same undulation of living Death Life I am knowing All about Unfolding The next morning Each woman-of-the-people Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet Doing hushed service Each woman-of-the-people Wearing a halo A ludicrous little halo Of which she is sublimely unaware I once heard in a church — Man and woman God made them — Thank God.

You are a land I can’t stand leaving and can’t not. My party ship is pulling out. We all have hats. I try to toot some notes you’ll understand but this was not our instrument or plan.

And that’s how it is; everyone standing up from the big silence of the table with their glasses of certainty and plates of forgiveness and walking into the purple kitchen; everyone leaning away from the gas stove Marie blows on at the very edge of the breaking blue-orange-lunging- forward flames to warm another pot of coffee, while the dishes pile up in the sink, perfect as a pyramid.Aaah, says Donna, closing her eyes, and leaning on Nick’s shoulders as he drives the soft blade of the knife through the glittering dark of the leftover chocolate birthday cake. That’s it; that’s how it is; everyone standing around as if just out of the pool, drying off, standing around, that’s it, standing, talking, shuffling back and forth on the deck of the present before the boat slowly pulls away into the future. Because it hurts to say goodbye, to pull your body out of the warm water; to step out of the pocket of safety, clinging to what you knew, or what you thought you knew about yourself and others. That’s how it is, that’s it, throwing your jacket over your shoulders like a towel and saying goodbye Victoria goodbye Sophie goodbye Lili goodbye sweetie take care be well hang in there see you soon.

Easter was the old North Goddess of the dawn. She rises daily in the East And yearly in spring for the great Paschal candle of the sun. Her name lingers like a spot Of gravy in the figured vestment Of the language of the Britains. Her totem the randy bunny. Our very Thursdays and Wednesdays Are stained by syllables of thunder And Woden's frenzy. O my fellow-patriots loyal to this Our modern world of high heels, Vaccination, brain surgery— May they pass over us, the old Jovial raptors, Apollonian flayers, Embodiments. Egg-hunt, Crucifixion. Supper of encrypted Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter Compass of martyrdom, Ground-up apples and walnuts In sweet wine to embody mortar Of affliction, babies for bricks. Legible traces of the species That devises the angel of death Sailing over our doorpost Smeared with sacrifice.

I find I am descending in a propeller plane upon Pasco in the state of Washington. I accept this; I have reasons for participating in the experiential sequence that has brought me here. Down below the land is printed with huge circles, doubtless an irrigation system, doubtless it makes sense. There are people who understand it living with dignity in square houses and the result possibly is one billion radishes. Now some so-called time has passed. This nation is a huge nation in which the infinity of for example Washington State is just one segment of an even less thinkable hugeness and yet zim zim zim zim United Airlines has me here in my Eastern metropolis with its ten thousand makers of third-rate pizza uncannily far from the possible radishes of Washington State. The taxi driver experiments with narrow streets to shorten our detour caused by sports fans and he says the Eagles will out-tough the Steelers. I defer to his judgment, I am conserving my powers. After “a while” I have this unsettlingly smooth tuna salad with a pale pickle in a drugstore designed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, reading a few poems by David Rivard. I have thoughts. I have my Uncle Ralph’s jacket soft and droopy giving me a Sense of the Past. The rain out there on the roofs of retail outlets is saying No Guarantee and in a way I am nowhere, in another way maybe definitely not. In a wide wet parking lot I turn back toward the store to explain to the cashier that she charged me for six cans of seltzer when in fact I only had one from a six-pack but the idea of justice seems so fatiguing I would rather read a surprisingly serious detective novel so I vibrate with indecision in the parking lot till all the car windows rattle imperceptibly. Then an alleged interval ostensibly intervenes, at the mall a woman at a piano has played 1800 songs from memory according to the radio personality who stands with a mike explaining her bid for the Guinness Book of Records. I am walking away at an unplanned angle singing “Tiny Montgomery” which I bet she wouldn’t have been ready to play. I have this inner life, I think of my father lonely in Vermont, I think of myself lonely in Syracuse and my old poem about a detective who can’t solve his biggest case and as a result I have feelings—but my teacher said the future of American poetry can’t be merely the notation of sensibility. When he said that I felt a chilly fear at the edge of consc-consc-consc-consciousness like an ice cube in the corner of my stomach. That’s how I felt. So then, so then consequently I thought “I must gather up some serious ideas” but then Ashberry phoned and left a message after the beep. “Don’t be a sucker, ideas are where it isn’t.” This made my throat get sort of dry so I drank a Classic Coke and then another Classic Coke two hours later as time so-to-say passed. What was always there? Texture, that’s what, how it was/is, the how of how; when I pick up my color prints at the camera shop the disappointment I always feel is actually a blessing is it not? I can say “I’ll go along with this charade until I can think my way out” even though I’ll never think my way out. I’ve come this far; that day in 1971 I hitchhiked all the way to Montpelier didn’t I? And here I am. Suddenly I have a son who focuses with tremendous insistence upon dogs, balloons, air conditioners, hats, clocks, and noses. To him I convey that the world is okay: life is good: we accept it. Your dad is a little mixed up but your shoes got tied, right? As Barbara Cohen in high school said about politics it’s interesting, giving the word four earnest syllables, in-ter-est-ing.

Lilacs look neon in fading light. Death makes life shine: a tiredness, a flickering between ages, which is each age; a piling up to tottering and falling back to sand. So much for cycle. The front door lock sticks each fall when we’re first back. We are advised to oil it. Olive oil in the keyhole: again the old key turns. Once again to meander along the edge of water, whether tideless sea or tidal river, pushing the stroller, dreaming oil in the lock; the key dipped in lubricity the boychild’s shining skin me tired to the bone

for John Coltrane Words after all are syllables just and you put them in their place notes sounds a painter using his stroke so the spot where the article an umbrella a knife we could find in its most intricate hiding slashed as it was with color called “being” or even “it” Expressions For the moment just when the syllables out of their webs float We were just beginning to hear like a crane hoisted into the fine thin air that had a little ache (or soft crackle) golden staffed edge of quick Mercury the scale runner Envoi C’est juste your umbrella colorings dense as telephone voice humming down the line polyphonic Red plumaged birds not so natural complicated wings French! Sweet difficult passages on your throats there just there caterpillar edging to moth Midnight in the chrome attic

cold birds still sing a bright sun chill air snow entombing precocious crocuses tricked by a spring now falsened ❏ cherry trees ... Good Friday ... —treatise: on the use of trees ❏ a flyblown carcass in the underbrush below the cypress in the cemetery : the dead above : the dead below ❏ like a Fantin-Latour the clutch of flowers in your hand and apple frothing the air ❏ the life you're not leading the blood you're not bleeding the knot you're not kneading the mouth you're not feeding the earth you're not seeding ❏ they're grooming the lawns for the graduates and the proud parents and meanwhile the yellowthroat sings unconcerned— cherries just gone by their faded blossoms thick against the insurgent leaves offer the very figure of spring melancholy o I missed when they were fully in bloom & the season & the time for the perfect spring haiku to hail another winter survived where among the redbud blooms exploding along the thin branches is my death written ❏ earth conspiring against me have a child to load the earth with vines with lives with signs songs & cries ❏ insistent crow cardinal whoop peepers booming open the night stabbing life into your heart the odious air reverberant ❏ that was no song but an alarm call ❏ the rhythmic thunk of the basketball thwacking the tarmac at the little park a block over . . . boys . . . calls . . . and the rain holding off— a May nor'easter deferring the fullest spring we might have had but leaving the lilacs to extend their delicate thrusting into the air the boys birds and blossoms share ❏ say that a heron perched immobile until alert the head turns ❏ the weather is far more violent here and present or so it seems days one's attention is open to the cloudthrottled air lit by a near-equinoctial sun—the nights too extend to a farther horizon the stars legible in this particular sky to those able and wishing to scry, too many years looking inward thinning the lexicon of the visible world its oracular reality sounding itself all along these maples that stone that garden fountain the mists rolling in over the mountains disguising the sky the world gone slate its greens drained as that fountain before the first frost the rain is passing and the lilacs the thunder the day but what have you held beheld beset as you are by yourself ❏ signing my best beset instead reveals itself the key an extra e lone vowel tiny howl I did not do what my hands did ❏ wavelap and lakeslap lick the ear; the air carries stripes in the low precincts of sky— a mower blares somewhere above A and shuts off a shock of silence into which the wave- slaps surge ❏ to enter the water in Mayan to die ❏ over there the gray gathering sheath meant rain but our private sun continues to sign- post a clear day at least for us. an earthquake in China means precisely what to me wondered Adam Smith— the world disappearing the instant my tooth aches: Sartre my skin some days extends as wide as the sea and the waves of the world roll through, equable terrible but I am living this narrow life and no other except yours I imagine some days we're graced or grazed by a shared bullet ❏ today no thrush silvered the air in the woods the wind blowing hard against the bike passing a stretch of field where tractors for miles around come to die the iron congregation rusting faithful as the grass, the cows at Saywards Farm seemed too confined why aren't they grazing in the field and why are their calves wired in— late last night after the sunset I did not see the lake took on that babyish blue I so love and I saw a sole balloon aloft lifting over Vergennes puffing by Camel's Hump and heading east— we have harnessed the air for our pleasure our leisure a rhyme with the weather clearing as if the skies cared or could ❏ radios and weathervanes conduct the air disperse manes ❏ mountains deforested by distance Hokusai shapes cut against the sky the clouds address just so and through the same air the radio pours its usual brew of cheer & death what wonder little schizo you reel so in the fractured world the sky bends to my way and to yours and to home sweet home ❏ my soul marching through the open fifths of its salvation shapenotes shaping me home ❏ not the sun but the sun in the river not the moon but the lake-swallowed moon the stars cracking open the black paved road where immortals strode