Poemunity — your poem community

On the tip of a hill, the silhouette is of something not of this world, the body silent in the birth of another shadow, swelling still among stars & veins. The sun dropping below the mountains left hardly any light, except what glimmers on the membrane & slips into the high grass. Alone, I pulled over to the side of 81 where semis’ blowing horns descend beyond the sloped field. Pieces of barbed wire snapped from the line. I stepped through the fence, its blood-colored rust rubbed into my hands. For a moment, it is something that stays with me, like a memory that does not give up easily. I try wiping my hands onto my jeans, but nothing. It is anything it wants to be—calf, half-life, angel—its fur a glaze of cricket sounds & cool air, a thing of stars burnt into hooves, a haze, & I stood there, not knowing whether it would be right to touch the one not breathing, its nose drying in the grass next to my hands, grit in the creases & burning now with the dust of splinters. Like flies, my fingers hover over the dead face.

Dad didn't play the ponies or manic games at night; Mom was addicted only to her soaps. Sisters at war never swore. Silence was genius of an era, nothing personal. Our hidden grief shadowed the Fifties' sunshine like Eisenhower's speech against the military-industrial complex, like playground platoons still blowing up Japs. Thanksgiving comes late in this museum of childhood, flower painted at the bottom of a porcelain teacup: cracked saucer, no sugar, no milk.

The shirtless man by the ticket counter has already broken the gloom here, his crowd of two boys and the cashier with the Star of David gathered around and mouthing astonishment as he tells the tale behind every scar. Yes, this one on the side was from the camp — he tells them not to be shy to ask — when he tripped into the ditch on the run after stealing cigarettes, the one on the knuckle from punching the soldier in the bar, brave with whiskey, a decade after. Touch it, he snarls, jutting out his fist. That split a real Nazi’s lip. In the rooms behind him, the voices lay low but touch is the rule, the extended families passing in fours and fives as tight as at church or the carnival. Are they all survivors here, dazed and exhilarated by the fate that dropped them so far from blight? A father heads the line, shirt fat with muscles and a single proud thumb pushing the stroller; the woman and girl hug sideways, then again, tight as dancers in a row. At each display, the time lines and the whispered assurances reiterate that what is done is done. Pol Pot is dead, the children of Kampuchea reading again to go to college; Rwanda has forgiven itself and opened supermarkets; the ghettos are demolished, the Cold War won. Sudan, they skip. For now, the beasts are gone. They face the new life, the one after the mending, after the last mistakes were made.

A clamor, in the distance. A crowd running under the rain beating down, between the canvases the sea wind set clattering. A man passes crying something. What is he saying? What he knows! What he has seen! I make out his words. Ah, I almost understand! I took refuge in a museum. Outside the great wind mixed with water reigns alone from now on, shaking the glass panes. In each painting, I think, it’s as if  God were giving up on finishing the world. Translated from the French

Must I, in this question I am asking, include myself Asking it? Must I include my face— My face that I cannot see—through which I speak This question about my eyes, about the field Of vision, in which my hands press down these letters Unattached to my arms? The sunlight Comes in the window and lights up my hands As they work. The world is not being kind But there is the sensation of kindness. There is an appeal to a rule when we realize a term Behaves uncomfortably. God falls down Into grammar and says

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants - At Evening, it is not At Morning, in a Truffled Hut It stop opon a Spot As if it tarried always And yet it’s whole Career Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay - And fleeter than a Tare - ’Tis Vegetation’s Juggler - The Germ of Alibi - Doth like a Bubble antedate And like a Bubble, hie - I feel as if the Grass was pleased To have it intermit - This surreptitious Scion Of Summer’s circumspect. Had Nature any supple Face Or could she one contemn - Had Nature an Apostate - That Mushroom - it is Him!

Like silent naked monks huddled around an old tree stump, having spun themselves in the night out of thought and nothingness— And God so pleased with their silence He grants them teeth and tongues. Like us. How long have you been gone? A child’s hot tears on my bare arms.

It must be somewhere, the original harmony, somewhere in great nature, hidden. Is it in the furious infinite, in distant stars’ orbits, is it in the sun’s scorn, in a tiny flower, in treegossip, in heartmusic’s mothersong or in tears? It must be somewhere, immortality, somewhere the original harmony must be found: how else could it infuse the human soul, that music?

During the weeks when we all believed my mother was likely to die she began to plan her funeral and she wanted us, her children, to consider the music we would play there. We remembered the soundtrack of my mother’s life: the years when she swept the floors to the tunes of an eight track cassette called Feelings, the Christmas when she bought a Bing Crosby album about a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. She got Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring stuck in the tape deck of her car and for months each errand was accompanied by some kind of dramatic movement. After my brother was born, there was a period during which she wore a muumuu and devoted herself to King Sunny Ade and his African beats. She ironed and wept to Evita, painted to Italian opera. Then, older and heavier, she refused to fasten her seatbelt and there was the music of an automated bell going off every few minutes, which annoyed the rest of us but did not seem to matter to my mother who ignored its relentless disapproval, its insistence that someone was unsafe.

A sycamore grove, and in its limbs the orchestra played Má vlast, so I saw boughs bouncing and tuxedo legs swinging sap-spotted above the splayed blades of the ground feathered black in moss, in the sweat of the set sun, and the players’ faces where moths roosted, where leaf-points drew water-stripes on brows and eyelids, their hands that stirred in pollen like a fog, were masked by birds’ nests and bows and flaking vines. That you were last to climb down, trumpet tied to your back with blue twine, is the only thing I believe in, and after you landed, drifting through a stream, in a mat of orange needles, you whistled to what light could float through the leaves’ screen and canopy, diffuse like tracing tissue, a scrum of benday dots, and not much at that, now that more than the concert has ended, my musician.