Poemunity — your poem community

Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats. "I don't belong to nobody," Yang insists vulgarly. "Yang," I reply, "you don't know nothing." Yin, an orange tabby, agrees but puts kindness ahead of rigid truth. I admire her but wish she wouldn't idolize the one who bullies her. I once did that. Her silence speaks needles when Yang thrusts his ugly tortoiseshell body against hers, sprawled in my cosmos. "Really, I don't mind," she purrs—her eyes horizontal, her mouth an Ionian smile, her legs crossed nobly in front of her, a model of cat Nirvana— "withholding his affection, he made me stronger.'

The wind is fitful now: soot piles in the corners of new buildings, gulls stumble out of place in ragged branches to skim against a rise of pond water.

It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father’s, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. “Dear Son,” was the way it began. “Dear Son” and then nothing.

For Rabbi Berger, Beth El Synagogue, Durham North Carolina Bess was my gussy friend She always took care. From the friction Or could. a bell is something different. Altogether. Such costly errors Of the mind. Eso and exoterror Skeletons. The pink body Eating its shell. She had pleaded not to pick Up with the underneath Legs and all scrabbling. But the fluorescent tests Allowed for prepreception. Every ghost limb has a war story. But not every war story has a limb. Fifteen thousand candles are Little kittens. It's an exed out eye Thing for this one. Or in the rubble, an Oboe Tuned by the wind. Half of him is impounded In the tree folk Gemeinschaft Half of him is a city. If you call him in the forest You might get the gut side Vertiginous and quiver, Covered in vines and hair To camouflage What's on the inside that counts? What fixed and determinate story Hails from the forest these Fisted halls? Most of him is hanging in the tree you See blinking in the sunlight, such a drip. The rainwaiter tickles the private. Got to get it together. From formal folk Comes the shining.

Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.

It’s the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me, That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously— The search for a bright square cloud—the scent of lemon verbena— Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters Play in the surf. It is these small things—and the secret behind them That fill the heart. The pattern, the spirit, the fiery demon That link them together And pull their freedom into our senses, The smell of a shrub, a cloud, the action of animals —The rising, the exuberance, when the mystery is unveiled. It is these small things That when brought into vision become an inferno.

The day was mild, the light was generous. The German on the café terrace held a small book on his lap. I caught sight of the title: Mysticism for Beginners. Suddenly I understood that the swallows patrolling the streets of Montepulciano with their shrill whistles, and the hushed talk of timid travelers from Eastern, so-called Central Europe, and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?— like nuns in fields of rice, and the dusk, slow and systematic, erasing the outlines of medieval houses, and olive trees on little hills, abandoned to the wind and heat, and the head of the Unknown Princess that I saw and admired in the Louvre, and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings sprinkled with pollen, and the little nightingale practicing its speech beside the highway, and any journey, any kind of trip, are only mysticism for beginners, the elementary course, prelude to a test that's been postponed.

I was asleep while you were dying. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I make between my slumber and my waking, the Erebus I keep you in, still trying not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow, but in dreams you live. So I try taking you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, my eyes open, I find you do not follow. Again and again, this constant forsaking. * Again and again, this constant forsaking: my eyes open, I find you do not follow. You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning. But in dreams you live. So I try taking, not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow. The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying— I make between my slumber and my waking. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow. I was asleep while you were dying.

night – sky         bird’s         world to know         to know         in my life to know what I have said to myself the dark to escape in brilliant highways of the night sky, finally why had they not killed me why did they fire that warning wounding cannon only the one round I hold a superstition because of this    lost to be lost    Wyatt’s lyric and Rezi’s running thru my mind in the destroyed (and guilty) Theatre of the War    I’d cried and remembered boyhood    degradation         other degradations and this crime I will not recover from that landscape it will be in my mind it will fill my mind and this is horrible death bed         pavement         the secret taste of being lost dead clown in the birds’ world what names (but my name) and my love’s name to speak into the eyes of the Tyger         blaze of changes . . . ‘named the animals’         name and name the vigorous dusty strong animals gather under the joists   the boards   older than they   giving them darkness the gifted dark tho names   the names   the ‘little’ adventurous words   a mountain   the cliff a wave are taxonomy I believe in the world because it is impossible         the shack on the coast under the eaves the rain barrel flooding in the weather and no lights across rough water illumined as tho the narrow end of the funnel what are the names of the Tyger   to speak to the eyes of the Tiger   blaze of the tiger   who moves in the forest leaving no scent but the pine needles’ his eyes blink quick in         the shack in the knife-cut and the opaque white bread each side of the knife

Yes, I’ll haul your ashes back to Oklahoma, the Lord G-d of Abraham riding shotgun. I got the coffee sweats already, just Him and me on I-55, you in a box on the seat between. We aim for that dent in the dust where your pa was born in a sod stable and your ma minced a snake with a garden hoe; that place the trappers named Beaver, not thinking, for once, of women. Reminded too much of Texas, G-d and I both hate the cottonwoods stuck to a high sky. We share a drink, swap our lies, and sift out what we can from the radio. Your name comes up and G-d’s eyes get dusty. When Gene Pitney sings the “Sh’ma Yisrael,” G-d stares out, that box of ashes inside His jacket, as close as He can hold it. There’s Beaver at nightfall, and bean burritos to wash down the beer. We scatter your ashes where we stop to pee, the Lord G-d’s laugh steady as a train blows, soft as lightning across the panhandle.