Poemunity — your poem community

I have never been the most mechanically inclined of men. Wrenches, screwdrivers, or shovels have never made nice with me. In the shipyard, I worked alone, in the dark, deep in the bilges of frigates. For two months, I hooked a torch to an oxygen tank with a green line and pulled a red hose through bulkheads to gas. The brass tool hissed like an ostrich when it fed on metal. That day, my flame cut permanent deck fittings; the loops fell like bright oranges; I ripened the rusty metal. I knew that this was a job to baby-sit me, a job they gave to bad burners, beginners playing with their tools: who pretended their brass torches were trumpets, and that gulls in the bay were tables of distracted diners. When my father was a boy, his father loaded him and his siblings in the car and dropped them off downtown so my grandfather could get drunk and my grandmother could pretend he wasn't drinking again. When I was a boy, I enjoyed watching my father dig; with dirt between his palms, he spun the shovel before he dug. As I grew, I tried to stay away from work, even when he paid me. I stayed away from him too. I never understood how he could work around so much grass. For him, life was work. For him, everything was hard. For me, it was not hard. He stalked my mother a long time after their divorce. He never understood she was not sod to be laid, or a sprinkler to be attached to a pvc pipe seven inches in the ground. That pregnant at fifteen was too soon. Neither of us is the most mechanical of men, yet we still pride ourselves on how we fashion our tools. I wake up shivering and crying in an empty bed, the afternoon light entering and leaving an empty bottle of wine near an emptier glass—or roll over and try, and fail, to remember a woman's name, which never really gets old, just uncouth to say so, and feel fixed. To feel fixed is to feel a mechanical spirit, to feel love, or at least to play at paste for an evening, to make believe she will never leave me, as life almost did when I cut the green hose, and was lonely and shaking that day on the deck of the destroyer, looking into the green water, and wondered what would be written on my tomb: "Killed by oxygen was this unmechanical man." In that moment close to death, I only wanted my own lungs. I didn't regret returning home and sleeping on my father's couch. And that summer, I returned to each of the women of my past and bedded them all, trying to reheat our want. I don't regret that—drinking wine and making love, or writing poems and making love, of wanting to stay but nonetheless leaving. I don't regret returning with Said and Spivak, with Weil and Augustine, of telling my father "All sins are an attempt to fill voids" or rebuilding my grandfather's house with Hopkins in my head as I ripped the tar and shingles off the old roof with a shovel. And I am not mad for being the second favorite son, Esau turned inside out. Can't regret saying that summer, I was, in fact, already, a bigger and better man than my father because I understood more. I didn't mind he favored my younger brother, who knew less than him. I favored my brother's way of living, of skating in the park and smoking weed while I studied and wondered for us all. How ridiculous I was that summer for us all; for not attempting to rebuild any of his love that summer, at all.

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree, morality: any working order, animate or inanimate: it has managed directed balance, the incoming and outgoing energies are working right, some energy left to the mechanism, some ash, enough energy held to maintain the order in repair, assure further consumption of entropy, expending energy to strengthen order: honor the persisting reactor, the container of change, the moderator: the yellow bird flashes black wing-bars in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay, startles the hawk with beauty, flitting to a branch where flash vanishes into stillness, hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight: honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics, the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies of control, the gastric transformations, seed dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge, blood compulsion, instinct: honor the unique genes, molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into sets, the nucleic grain transmitted in slow change through ages of rising and falling form, some cells set aside for the special work, mind or perception rising into orders of courtship, territorial rights, mind rising from the physical chemistries to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper racial satisfaction: heat kept by a feathered skin: the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen burner under the flask) so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and necessary worked out of random, reproducible, the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.

I wanted it: arc of red and blue strobing my skin, sirens singing my praises, the cinching embrace of the cot as the ambulance slammed shut and steered away. More than needle-pierce or dragging blade, I wanted the swab of alcohol and cotton, the promise of gauze-covered cure. My mother saved anyone who asked, but never me, never the way I wanted: her palms skimming my limbs for injury, her fingers finding what hurt, her lips whispering, I got here just in time.

Give me more love or more disdain; The torrid, or the frozen zone, Bring equal ease unto my pain; The temperate affords me none; Either extreme, of love, or hate, Is sweeter than a calm estate. Give me a storm; if it be love, Like Danae in that golden show'r I swim in pleasure; if it prove Disdain, that torrent will devour My vulture-hopes; and he's possess'd Of heaven, that's but from hell releas'd. Then crown my joys, or cure my pain; Give me more love, or more disdain.

after Baudelaire Quiet now, sorrow; relax. Calm down, fear ... You wanted the night? It’s falling, here, Like a black glove onto the city, Giving a few some peace ... but not me. I think, well, almost everyone I know Loves to be whipped by pleasure—right, Killer?— As they stroll the boardwalk, parading their despair. So why don’t you come too? But instead, with me, Away from all these tattered ghosts leaning off The sky’s balcony like last year’s lovers; We’ll watch everything we regret step from the sea Dripping ... while the dead sun drags its arc Towards China. Shroud of my heart, listen. Listen— How softly the night steps toward us.

1 In which I try to decipher the story it tells, this syntax of monuments flanking the old courthouse: here, a rough outline like the torso of a woman great with child— a steatite boulder from which the Indians girdled the core to make of it a bowl, and left in the stone a wound; here, the bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson, quill in hand, inscribing a language of freedom, a creation story— his hand poised at the word happiness. There is not yet an ending, no period—the single mark, intended or misprinted, that changes the meaning of everything. Here too, for the Confederacy, an obelisk, oblivious in its name—a word that also meant the symbol to denote, in ancient manuscripts, the spurious,corrupt,or doubtful; at its base, forged in concrete, a narrative of valor,virtue,states' rights. Here, it is only the history of a word, obelisk, that points us toward what's not there; all of it palimpsest, each mute object repeating a single refrain: Remember this.

Safety First. Never point your weapon, keep your finger off the trigger. Assume a loaded barrel, even when it isn’t, especially when you know it isn’t. Glocks are lightweight but sensitive; the Keltec has a long pull and a kick. Rifles have penetrating power, viz.: if the projectile doesn’t lodge in its mark, it will travel some distance until it finds shelter; it will certainly pierce your ordinary drywall partition. You could wound the burglar and kill your child sleeping in the next room, all with one shot. Open Air. Fear, of course. Then the sudden pleasure of heft—as if the hand had always yearned for this solemn fit, this gravitas, and now had found its true repose. Don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it— squeeze between heartbeats. Look down the sights. Don’t hold your breath. Don’t hold anything, just stop breathing. Level the scene with your eyes. Listen. Soft, now: squeeze. Gender Politics. Guys like noise: rapid fire, thunk-and-slide of a blunt-nose silver Mossberg, or double-handed Colts, slugging it out from the hips. Rambo or cowboy, they’ll whoop it up. Women are fewer, more elegant. They prefer precision: tin cans swing-dancing in the trees, the paper bull’s-eye’s tidy rupture at fifty yards. (Question: If you were being pursued, how would you prefer to go down— ripped through a blanket of fire or plucked by one incandescent fingertip?) The Bullet. dark dark no wind no heaven i am not anything   not borne on air   i bear myself   i can slice the air   no wind can hold me   let me   let me go   i can see   yes o aperture o light   let me   off go off   straight is my verb   straight my glory road   yes   now i can   feel it the light i am flame   velocity o beautiful body i am coming i am yours before you know it i am home

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves:justice, pine, hair, woman, you

Because it is a pearly evening I am sitting in the window reading a book I have read before. Branches emphasize their heft and sway over their shadows. Some kind of extra firmament, an ear over the earth's ear, extra, as language is to prayer. Narratives of elsewhere: in the eye inside my eye that vision makes when you tell it to when you shut your eyes so hard they hurt you get more vista and less twist of road, and then you're looking at a valley you named yourself and irrigated yourself, full of bitterroot, magnolia in the clefts of rock, sage, at last a harvest, a desert that belongs to you— The trick to renunciation is starting now. The secret of detachment is having already given up, a transcript of speech whose cadences are lost, the human need for a body to fill in all your body's deficiencies, those clefts and dents already given up, the narrative of a life completely altered in the retrospect that knowledge brings and so discredited the point of memory utterly lost. That piece of land has always been suitable for a house. That nest has never been ready for eight baby birds who, top-heavy, frightened their own branch and home and scared themselves completely and remarkably away. Do you hear that? It's the wind negotiating the spine of one leaf it cannot decide whether to raise a fragment of an inch. Duncan writes as a reader struggles with a strong sentence, I struggle at certain unmistakable times with what's furtive and most right. When people marry they finish their names. I am still listening for mine to begin. My spine wants a bicycle to order its work, a red bicycle, a hill into a heart of a city that holds something I want. The pattern of the air around that leaf is like someone tracing my ribcage with his index finger and then walking away. Who can blame us for wanting other worlds, but shall we take them, or let them come to us? Is the spirit just an ear more like a mouth that bites the air and turns it into blood? A voice in the next room goes to sleep. Sleep moves in the branches of the oak become a rootless mass unsung by skeleton or name or height. My friend who says she does not believe in Paradise believes in rest: I believe that, or more likely I like to think of her, the way she held my name in her small mouth, as she held her own name. I like to think of anyone who on a night like this would reach towards my ribcage and trace it delicately and walk away.

For one throb of the artery, While on that old grey stone I sat Under the old wind-broken tree, I knew that One is animate Mankind inanimate phantasy.