Poemunity — your poem community

We did not want to be unblessed, so we were blessed. Long, thin wire, a little patch where we might lay our heads. It was this way, this looking fore and back, a pole held tightly in our hands. You want to tell me what went wrong? Confusing shapes across a wall, depression in the ground. The gorgeous soldiers fought and fell.Hie unto hell. How we will lie in that brave grave apart, our aperture: a heart that has been ruptured absolutely by a passing God.

A migraine's aura swallows an eye from a face into gapless, absent folds of unseeing. His scars concealed, the three-legged cat limps fluidly along a soft shore redrawn by storms.

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. I walk into a room Just as cool as you please, And to a man, The fellows stand or Fall down on their knees. Then they swarm around me, A hive of honey bees. I say, It’s the fire in my eyes, And the flash of my teeth, The swing in my waist, And the joy in my feet. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. Men themselves have wondered What they see in me. They try so much But they can’t touch My inner mystery. When I try to show them, They say they still can’t see. I say, It’s in the arch of my back, The sun of my smile, The ride of my breasts, The grace of my style. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. Now you understand Just why my head’s not bowed. I don’t shout or jump about Or have to talk real loud. When you see me passing, It ought to make you proud. I say, It’s in the click of my heels, The bend of my hair, the palm of my hand, The need for my care. ’Cause I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me.

I In the cubbyhole entrance to Cornell and Son, a woman in a turquoise sweater curls up to sleep. Her right arm seeks a cold spot in the stone to release its worry and her legs stretch against the middle hinge. I want to ask her in for coffee, to tell her go sleep in the extra bed upstairs, but I’m a guest, unaccustomed to this place where homeless people drift along the square bordering Benjamin Franklin Parkway. From her portrait on the mantel, Lucretia Mott asks when will Americans see how all forms of oppression blight the possibilities of a people. The passion for preserving Independence Square should reach this nameless woman, settling in the heavy heat of August, exposed to the glare of every passerby. What makes property so private? A fence? No trespassing signs? Militia ready to die for it and taxes? Lights in the middle storeys of office buildings blaze all night above me. Newspapers don’t explain how wealth is bound to these broken people. North of here, things get really rough. Longshoremen out of work bet on eddies in the Schuylkill River. Factories collapse to weed and ruptured dream. Years ago, Longhouse sachems rode canoes to Philadelphia, entering these red brick halls. They explained how the law that kept them unified required a way to share the wealth. Inside the hearths of these same halls, such knowledge was obscured, and plans were laid to push all Indians , west. This city born of brotherly love still turns around this conflict. Deeper in the dusk, William Penn must weep from his perch on top of City Hall. Our leaders left this woman in the lurch. How can there be democracy without the means to live? II Every fifteen minutes a patrol car cruises by. I jolt awake at four a.m. to sirens screeching and choppers lugging to the hospital heliport someone who wants to breathe. The sultry heat leads me to the window. What matters? This small square of night sky and two trees bound by a wide brick wall. All around, skyscrapers are telling their stories under dwindling stars. The girders remember where Mohawk ironworkers stayed that day they sat after work on a balcony, drinking beer. Below them, a film crew caught some commercials. In another room above a mattress caught fire and someone flung it down into the frame. A woman in blue sashayed up the street while a flaming mattress, falling at the same speed as a flower, bloomed over her left shoulder. Every fifteen minutes a patrol car cruises by. The men inside mean business. They understood the scene. A mattress burning in the street and business deadlocked. Mohawks drinking beer above it all. They radioed insurrection, drew their guns, then three-stepped up the stairs. Film crews caught the scene, but it never played. The Mohawks didn’t guess a swat team had moved in. When policemen blasted off their door, the terrified men shoved a table against the splintered frame. They fought it out. One whose name meant Deer got shot again and again. They let him lie before they dragged him by his heels down four flights of stairs. At every step, he hurdled above his pain until one final leap gained him the stars. The news reported one cop broke his leg. The film’s been banished to a vault. There are no plaques. But girders whisper at night in Philadelphia. They know the boarding house, but will not say. They know as well what lasts and what falls down. III Passing Doric colonnades of banks and walls of dark glass, passing press-the-button-visitors-please Liberty Townhouses, I turned up Broad Street near the Hershey Hotel and headed toward the doorman outside the Bellevue. Palms and chandeliers inside. A woman in mauve silk and pearls stepped into the street. I was tracking my Mohawk grandmother through time. She left a trace of her belief somewhere near Locust and Thirteenth. I didn’t see you, tall, dark, intense, with three bouquets of flowers in your hand. On Walnut and Broad, between the Union League and the Indian Campsite, you stopped me, shoving flowers toward my arm. “At least, I’m not begging,” you cried. The desperation in your voice spiraled through my feet while I fumbled the few bucks you asked for. I wanted those flowers— iris, ageratum, goldenrod and lilies— because in desperation you thought of beauty. I recognized the truth and human love you acted on, your despair echoing my own. Forgive me. I should have bought more of those Philadelphia flowers, passed hand to hand so quickly, I was stunned a block away. You had to keep your pride, as I have done, selling these bouquets of poems to anyone who’ll take them. After our exchange, grandmother’s tracks grew clearer. I returned for days, but you were never there. If you see her — small, dark, intense, with a bun of black hair and the gaze of an orphan, leave a petal in my path. Then I’ll know I can go on. IV Some days you get angry enough to question. There’s a plan out east with a multitude of charts and diagrams. They planned to take the timber, the good soil. Even now, they demolish mountains. Next they’ll want the water and the air. I tell you they’re planning to leave our reservations bare of life. They plan to dump their toxic wastes on our grandchildren. No one wants to say how hard they’ve worked a hundred years. What of you, learning how this continent’s getting angry? Do you consider what’s in store for you?

In the perfect universe of math it’s said the world’s eternal aberration. In fact, we should be less than dead, math itself disrupted for matter ever to be read as real. A thought so hard to fathom that The Nation in its article on math has said we lack the right imagination: the human head will not subtract itself from the equation, zero out the eager ego to be less than dead. Did the numbers hunger for mistake, for fun upend themselves to recalculate our infinite extinction? And was existence meant for all, since it could be said without our numbers others might have thrived: the black rhinoceros, shortnose sturgeon—? Articles of horn and scale both less and more than dead, figurative dreams that now haunt us in our beds. Memory’s another flaw in our equation. Was it The Nation? I forget. Regardless, I know that someone said in a perfect universe, we’d all be dead.

Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment, a box  filled with enough Vicodin to kill me.  I would  have sworn that  I'd  thrown it away years earlier,  but apparently not. I stared at the white pills blankly for a long while, I even took a picture of them,  before  (finally, definitely)  throwing  them away.  I'd been sober  (again)  for  some years  when  I found that box,  but every addict  has  one— a  little  box,  metaphorical  or  actual— hidden away.  Before I flushed them  I held them in my palm,  marveling that  at  some  point in  the  not-so-distant  past it seemed a good idea  to  keep a  stash of  pills on hand.For an emergency, I told myself.  What kind of emergency? What  if  I needed  a root canal on  a  Sunday  night?  This little  box  would  see me through until the   dentist   showed   up  for   work  the  next  morning.  Half  my brain  told  me  that,  while  the other half  knew that  looking into that  box  was  akin  to  seeing  a photograph of myself standing on the  edge of a bridge,  a bridge  in the  familiar  dark neighborhood of  my  mind,   that   comfortable  place   where  I  could  somehow believe that fuck it was an adequate response to life.

Hark! ah, the nightingale— The tawny-throated! Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst! What triumph! hark!—what pain! O wanderer from a Grecian shore, Still, after many years, in distant lands, Still nourishing in thy bewilder'd brain That wild, unquench'd, deep-sunken, old-world pain— Say, will it never heal? And can this fragrant lawn With its cool trees, and night, And the sweet, tranquil Thames, And moonshine, and the dew, To thy rack'd heart and brain Afford no balm? Dost thou to-night behold, Here, through the moonlight on this English grass, The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild? Dost thou again peruse With hot cheeks and sear'd eyes The too clear web, and thy dumb sister's shame? Dost thou once more assay Thy flight, and feel come over thee, Poor fugitive, the feathery change Once more, and once more seem to make resound With love and hate, triumph and agony, Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale? Listen, Eugenia— How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again—thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!

As a teenager she was like any other, boys, the craic, smoking down the backs. Later there was talk she broke things, furniture and glass, her mother’s heart. ‘Mad at the world,’ the old women nod, round each other’s faces. But it was more than that and for less she was punished. That weekend she didn’t leave a cup alone every chair hit the wall, Philomena’s revenge. Soon after she was shifted and given the shocks. Round each other’s faces the old women nod ‘Treatment, treatment they’ve given her the treatment.’ These days she gets on with the furniture, wears someone else’s walk, sees visions in glass. She’s good too for getting the messages; small things, bread and milk sometimes the paper, and closing the gate after her father drives out, she waits for his signal he always shouts twice, ‘Get the gate Philo, get the gate, girl.’

I love him so, this creature I do pray was treated kindly. I will pay as much as pig-lovers see fit to guarantee him that. As for his fat, I’d give up years yes years of my own life for such a gulpable semblable. (My life! Such as it is! This liberality of leaves! The world won’t need those seventeen more poems, after all, there being so few subjects to be treated. Three if by subject we mean anyone submitted to another’s will. Two if by subject we mean topic. One if by death we wind up meaning love. And none if a subject must entail the curlicue’s indulgence of itself.)

The man who murders his wife Is not the same as the man Who goes around and murders a stranger. I am a woman but I am not The same as another woman. Identity politics are bullshit. There is only the smart and the evil, The good and the righteous. There is only one color on the earth. In its infinite degradations it becomes music and mathematics. There is shit on my hands When I have been playing around with specifics. Love your lover. You are a lover. With each breath God has put a golden faith Upon the snowy mountains of the world. Here, look at the snowy mountains, Glittering with snow. They are wiser than you might think. And in your soul, the small grey animals Of the world sit and wait to do good For you, and together We are one thing, bleating a Somber, scurrying lullaby to Lapsing pinkish angels. Upon a mountain The angels smile sleepily as they stretch Their very long legs, thinking of us. And wise they might seem, us and the angels, But really it is only God who is wise.