Poemunity — your poem community

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost knowing she’s close, me not getting younger or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes. I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists vaporing nooses around my head and feet and genitals, conjuring my drab hair into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks. She makes me nervous, but what would I do without her? So long as I can’t have her, I want her and this alarming manic frequency. Then again, who wants to wake to change, its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies? My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom, let me get just one night’s sleep without regret, released from your foxy ticklish fondlings, your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost knowing she’s close, me not getting younger or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes. I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists vaporing nooses around my head and feet and genitals, conjuring my drab hair into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks. She makes me nervous, but what would I do without her? So long as I can’t have her, I want her and this alarming manic frequency. Then again, who wants to wake to change, its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies? My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom, let me get just one night’s sleep without regret, released from your foxy ticklish fondlings, your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.

My death was arranged by special plans in Heaven And only occasioned comment by ten persons in Adams, Massachusetts. The best thing ever said about me Was that I was deft at specifying trump. I was killed by my father And married to my mother But born too early to know what happened to me, And as I was an only child I erected selfishness into a personal religion, Sat thinking forty years saying nothing. I observed all. I loved to drink gin, Would not have thought to go farther Into arcane episodes of the heavier drugs, And, being New England, always remained sober. However, I confess now, I was Always afraid of women, I don’t know why, it was just the way it was, I could never get very close to any woman. Knowledge and intelligence allowed me The grand rationalization of this; also, I respected Delicacy, but would not go too far in any direction. I thought I was a good man. I was. I did not obstruct the state, nor religion, But I saw through both and maintained my independence. I kept my counsels among the learned. My learning was more private and precious than worldly. The world had no sense of the devious, So my private vicissitudes were mine alone. I say all this with a special sort of grace For I avoided many of the pitfalls of fallen man And while I did not have heroic size, the Creative grandeur, or mastership of the mind I earned my bread by cynicism alone, And blow you all a kiss from the tomb.

Over the river, and through the wood, To grandfather's house we go; The horse knows the way, To carry the sleigh, Through the white and drifted snow. Over the river, and through the wood, To grandfather's house away! We would not stop For doll or top, For 't is Thanksgiving day. Over the river, and through the wood, Oh, how the wind does blow! It stings the toes, And bites the nose, As over the ground we go. Over the river, and through the wood, With a clear blue winter sky, The dogs do bark, And children hark, As we go jingling by. Over the river, and through the wood, To have a first-rate play — Hear the bells ring Ting a ling ding, Hurra for Thanksgiving day! Over the river, and through the wood — No matter for winds that blow; Or if we get The sleigh upset, Into a bank of snow. Over the river, and through the wood, To see little John and Ann; We will kiss them all, And play snow-ball, And stay as long as we can. Over the river, and through the wood, Trot fast, my dapple grey! Spring over the ground, Like a hunting hound, For 't is Thanksgiving day! Over the river, and through the wood, And straight through the barn-yard gate; We seem to go Extremely slow, It is so hard to wait. Over the river, and through the wood, Old Jowler hears our bells; He shakes his pow, With a loud bow wow, And thus the news he tells. Over the river, and through the wood — When grandmother sees us come, She will say, Oh dear, The children are here, Bring a pie for every one. Over the river, and through the wood — Now grandmother's cap I spy! Hurra for the fun! Is the pudding done? Hurra for the pumpkin pie!

Back of the church the busy forsythias bow and scrape to May and all these blessed stones stiff in their careful finery of words; the mess of markers makes me go and browse. Somehow the blocks of slate and marble hate to be cut and carved to the dimensions of Mary Monday’s age and her virtues. At heart they hurt to be made literate and they are rebelling, fast as they can, shedding an edge, a letter, as they go —a year, a part of a skull, a bone— it hurts them to stand so long for this kind of death not theirs. Fast as they can they are leaning away from their duty and look down longing for the warm sod. The prides and fears they stand witness to, the ladies and gents, are only whimsy now. They cease to reflect that wary pride the flesh beneath them took in lying down. To the last date line and death’s-head-stare, the legend reads, “There! I’ve done it!” But these are only beginning, the blocks of shale forget their lines letting the sunlight and rain divide and subdivide their veins and bone. They do not care, they only feel an unnatural heaviness, tottering so in the hot light. They long to be off and away, they toss and jibe in the sun; a whole regatta of black sails, they are sailing away over the lumpy green yard of time, and never coming about for home until they capsize turned turtle by boys from Central Square. Tired of holding—they are tired of holding up; their always-leaning makes me hold my tongue and sit with them awhile. We heave our shoulders, or our shadows, on the mounds, while under the hills, memorials more fine lie lip to paper lip and keep their impossible word.

Forget the corncrake’s elegy. Rusty Iambics that escaped your discipline Of shorn lawns, it is sustained by nature. It does not grieve for you, nor for itself. You remember the rolled gold of cornfields, Their rustling of tinsel in the wind, A whole field quivering like blown silk? A shiver now runs through the laurel hedge, And washing flutters like the swaying lines Of a new verse. The high fidelity Music of the newly-wed obscures your Dedication to a life of loving Money. What could they be for, those marble Toilet fixtures, the silence of water-beds, That book of poems you bought yesterday?

I was ready for a new experience. All the old ones had burned out. They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields. From a distance some appeared to be smoldering But when I approached with my hat in my hands They let out small puffs of smoke and expired. Through the windows of houses I saw lives lit up With the otherworldly glow of TV And these were smoking a little bit too. I flew to Rome. I flew to Greece. I sat on a rock in the shade of the Acropolis And conjured dusky columns in the clouds. I watched waves lap the crumbling coast. I heard wind strip the woods. I saw the last living snow leopard Pacing in the dirt. Experience taught me That nothing worth doing is worth doing For the sake of experience alone. I bit into an apple that tasted sweetly of time. The sun came out. It was the old sun With only a few billion years left to shine.

The eyes on a face have brought me sadness: the right eye searching for seams in ripped fishnets; the left eye lost and wandering the dark; the eye of the baby god crawling behind a couch in the moist suburb where we planned our escape from video games and grilled cheese; the eye of a whale we met in a dream who spit us out so we could make the 8 o’clock screening of On Golden Pond; the eye of the clock, blinking when the oboe wailed like a burning shofar; the eye inside the eye, curled up—a sprouting lima bean, remembering the nineteenth century, those rosy drapes; the eyes of missing finger tips, of sad afternoons in French cafés in Dayton, Ohio; the eyes on the very real parrot who sits on the shoulders of a wax actor dressed as a pirate; the eyes of an actress, pretending to be my mom; the eyes of my father, sleeping on a train, dreaming about miniature crashing planes; the eyes of a swimming pool, looking up or down everyone’s swimsuits and into their souls; the eyes in love songs written by mean men; the eyes in the painting lost in a fire where we tried to save the ancient cat; the eyes underneath tap shoes clicking like teeth; the eyes of Fred Astaire, never blinking, even to kiss in the dark; the eyes of the state of Texas secretly tattooed on everyone’s ass, and the eyes on the billboard, ripped and faded from rain like the eyes of the best waitress on the Upper West Side who knows everyone’s order, even those of customers she’s never met. Can you hear  the eyes under my eyes? They steal other people’s dreams to use them for ad copy. Here are the eyes of a man who’d be my husband if he hadn’t married my twin, and there are the eyes of the judge who divorced them, blue as his tie. I forget the eye color of the first man I loved—what color was my hat when we cried in the snow? The whites of everyone’s eyes swirl together in silent music. Nothing like the closed eyes of a flamenco dancer, eating a dripping hamburger by the highway. Instead it is the right eye of a teacher when she touches her student; the eyes inside my mouth and the eyes outside your mouth; the eyes of the writer and reader, a broken vase and a whole petal; the eyes on what you thought of as a cunt and the eyes on what I thought of as a cock; the small eyes on the open book and the bigger eyes of the closed book; the eyes I swallow when we talk, and the eyes that fly above us in sleep.

I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped. After "We acoustic banjo disciples!" Jebediah said, "When and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?" We stole my Uncle Windchime's minivan, penned a simple ballad about the drag of lovelessness and drove the end of the chitlin' circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in temple where our new folk was not that new, but strengthened by our twelve bar conviction. A month later, in pulled a parade of well meaning alabaster post adolescents. We noticed the sand-tanned and braless ones piled in the ladder-backed front row with their boyfriends first because beneath our twangor slept what I'll call a hunger for the outlawable. One night J asked me when sisters like Chapman would arrive. I shook my chin wool then, and placed my hand over the guitar string's wind- ow til it stilled. "When the moon's black," I said. "Be faithful."

I was making a new friend, blonde-gray, a living opal, pellucid, also reminding me of a green apple napping underneath its tree, where I have tumbled too, being of an age, “elderly” but undepressed, she tall enough to change the smoke alarm — sharing a ripeness that we liked comparing, bosses who couldn’t see us, perforation by divorce, retirement, and stairs. One lunch that I was looking forward to, the first thing on her mind — “Do you believe in the Occult?” — “Merline! No, I don’t think so.” She was in an auditorium — her older, deader sister sat right down beside her with a message — a large figure not her body but a sum — what did it mean? I’d thought one of us leaned forward at the lectern but a ghost was there, holding sway, or forth. Well, it came true — she’s richer by that sum — and urges making sure to be attentive to my dreams. She knows that it will happen — I’m her friend, as the Occult has been so far. I didn’t want my brother appearing in a dream to bring me news of unexpected income — if only I would pray about it first — to the God who had my brother die after all. And certainly not my sister prophesying ill on my behalf. I guess I’d stand up, put on a mike, look out at all the empty faces, make them look alive, and even cheer. Had I remembered a firsthand poltergeist, a temptatious legend ... I guess I’d accept a sleek Angora bunny in a mohair hat, or magic like a two-dollar bill, ask for a life my brother could have back.