Poemunity — your poem community

Where do you suppose they’ve gone the bees now that you don’t see them anymore four-winged among flowers     low sparks in the clover even at nightfall are they fanning have they gone another place blued with pollen stuck to their bristles waiting beyond us springdwindle is what we call it collapsing neonicotinoids “high levels in pneu- matic corn exhaust” loss of habitat or disappearing disease in the way of our kind      so to speak what do you think they would call it language older than our ears were they saying it all along even at daybreak —

This circle holding the afternoon sky is a lake For summer business measured in stacked pairs Of peeling oars whose dinghies all ship water. Beside it on the trampled grass a carrousel shakes And turns on an Old World instrument The plink and plank and tinkle of a tune Of plunging horses in fresh habiliment. We catch the reins of enamel Pegasus And lift the child until she is astride A purple beast, where, wrapping infant arms About his neck of wood, she whirls in space And gallops off upon the turning wheel. The horse climbs steadily the silver pole Where cherubs hang, then slides toward spinning earth; She sees the moving heaven of winged babes; Rising to meet them, rising, she returns To where our faces, staring in at hers, Fixed, while her orbit whirls and sunlight burns, Recede to artifact as her vision blurs.

1 I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness. The boy pulls an animal on a leash. The house with a red roof rests between two hills. I can look through its windows to the sea. His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation? House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theater. You don’t have to consume the space to exist, distance, point-to-point, in which a beloved ruin is middle ground, for example. 2 First house and space negate one another. Then, they’re a series. The boy watches a mouse run around the rim of a lampshade. He relates wanting to catch a mouse with the room, ground. Wanting a master image obscures ground, like objects in space. House and space are composite, like my dream, a bubble, lightning, starting point and any second place. 3 Rain pours out a gutter onto the poor horse. Horse runs under a tin roof supported by poles. Stockpiles of beams, salvaged wood, brick melt into contextless waste. I understand the situation by perceiving parts, one after another, then reversing in a glance that removes time. So, I can intuit contextless waste as ground. 4 The water tank sits on a frame of used wood, like a packing crate. I look through it to an extinct volcano. The panorama is true figuratively as space, and literally in a glass wall, where clouds appear like flowers, and the back-lit silhouette of a horse passes by. A file of evergreens secures the cliff amid debris from a crew bilding, as at the edge of the sea. Oranges, dumplings, boiled eggs take on the opaque energy of a stranger. Knowledge as lintel, bond beam (model signs) holds the world at a distance. A master image like bone condenses from the indistinct point-to-point feeling of self with which construction began. My house returns from outside, as if my spirit had been blocking my path, when I wasn’t going anywhere in particular. 5 Materials and freedom combine, so materials aren’t subjective. The material of space is like having a skeleton to gain a vantage point on seamless distance, as in a comparison. It’s a style of accumulating materials that does not become a solid thing, anymore. Accommodating a view by being able to be seen through is perceptual, not abstract, like space painted white. Give a house the form of an event. Relate it to something there, a form of compassion. Your point of view is: it’s solid already, so there’s warmth. In this primitive situation, pure form translates a former empire of space as wilderness. Chinese space breaks free from the view in front of me, while my house continues to rotate on earth.

I like the blue pill best. Just like a gladiola, its true flower is invisible. The rest is holy. Not like in that Tintoretto where no one knows god is dying, just the usual jingle and squawk from the birdmongers then sudden downpour, a few of the demons dwelling beneath the earth tentatively stir. Not like that. Not tentative. Imploring. The wound tingles. A head of foam forms on the mountain. Into my hand is placed a Mycenaean horse. Into my hand is placed a wax hand. The filament will not break. The fox gets closer. Mint barks. 5% of its life, an ant is active. The rest is holy. Wolfhowl ringtone is holy. Sticking out your tongue in the rearview mirror is holy. Any song that never leaves the lungs, all us animals garlanded and belled.

It would have been a fine path for a lizard to cross but I saw none. Brambles and sweet briar grew on the town side, poppies and wild grasses on the river. Too hot for birds, the ducks were out, in water and mud, and frogs were out, by the hundreds it seemed, saying, Way, Way, in their deepest voices. It was beautiful there but I’d seen beauty and its opposite so often that when warmth broke over my skin I remembered winter, the way fresh grief undoes you the moment you’re fully awake. When she turned two, I asked my young friend what she would serve at her birthday party and she said, Tofu and cupcakes. When she was three and I was very sad she called and said, What are you doing? Picking flowers? She talked in poems like she was dreaming all the time or very old or Virginia Woolf. More often in the first world one wakes from not to the nightmare. When I dreamed I lost my love I willed myself awake because I would not survive the pain again, even dreaming. Which is responsible for that mercy, Doktor, the conscious or the un-? I want the poppies picked and I want the poppies left where they grow. Like looking through the window of a moving train at someone walking up a road lined with poplars and being someone walking up a road lined with poplars. The train and the trees, a shower of petals and bees, sun on the glass and the train perpendicular to the road. Things entirely themselves arriving in the deep double shadows of the grass and passersby.

A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights. As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window, cupping it around the wind. He’d been assured this is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you put your hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew, and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, until the weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up. For many years afterwards he was perpetually attempting to soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breast in his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep. He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now. As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refused to abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He often pretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings, he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow. He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.

Between people’s ideals and their realization there is always a greater drop than in the highest of waterfalls. This potential gradient can be exploited rationally, if we build a sort of power station above it. The energy it supplies, even if we use it only to light our cigarettes, is something anyway; for while one is smoking one can very seriously think up ideals even crazier.

Ye tender young virgins attend to my lay, My heart is divided in twain; My Collin is beautiful, witty, and gay, And Damon’s a kind-hearted swain. Whenever my lovely young Collin I meet, What pleasures arise in my breast; The dear gentle swain looks so charming and sweet, I fancy I love him the best. But when my dear Damon does to me complain, So tender, so loving and kind, My bosom is softened to hear the fond swain, And Collin slips out of my mind. Whenever my Damon repeats his soft tale, My heart overflows with delight; But when my dear Collin appears in the vale, I languish away at the sight. ’Tis Collin alone shall possess my fond heart, Now Damon for ever adieu; But can I? — I cannot from Damon thus part! He’s loved me so long, and so true. My heart to my Damon I’ll instantly bind, And on him will fix all my care; But, O should I be to my Collin unkind, He surely will die with despair. How happy, how happy with Damon I’d been, If Collin I never had knew; As happy with Collin, if I’d never seen My Damon, so tender and true.

Well, jipes! I floored the Chevy/ fishtailed all over the soft-tarred road Old women babbling by the church shit no one with balls goes to flea markets the road festered at Pelsor curves at sixty-two overturned once on these roads still don’t know how I got out.

Dear Aleph, Like Ovid:I’ll have no last words. This is what it means to die among barbarians.Bar bar bar was how the Greeks heard our speech — sheep, beasts — and so we became barbarians. We make them reveal the brutes they are, Aleph, by the things we make them name. David, they tell me, is the one one should aspire to, but ever since I first heard them say Philistine I’ve known I am Goliath if I am anything.