Poemunity — your poem community

Forgive me, if I wound your ear, By calling of you Nancy, Which is the name of my sweet friend, The other’s but her fancy. Ah, dearest girl! how could your mind The strange distinction frame? The whimsical, unjust caprice, Which robs you of your name. Nancy agrees with what we see A being wild and airy; Gay as a nymph of Flora’s train, Fantastic as a fairy. But Anna’s of a different kind, A melancholy maid, Boasting a sentimental soul, In solemn pomp arrayed. Oh ne’er will I forsake the sound, So artless and so free Be what you will with all mankind, But Nancy still with me.

1 When you have forgotten (to bring into Play that fragrant morsel of rhetoric, Crisp as autumnal air), when you Have forgotten, say, sunlit corners, brick Full of skyline, rowhomes, smokestacks, Billboards, littered rooftops & wondered What bread wrappers reflect of our hunger, 2 When you have forgotten wide-brimmed hats, Sunday back-seat leather rides & church, The doorlock like a silver cane, the broad backs Swaying or the great moan deep churning, & the shimmer flick of flat sticks, the lurch Forward, skip, hands up Aileyesque drop, When you have forgotten the meaningful bop, 3 Hustlers and their care-what-may, blasé Ballet and flight, when you have forgotten Scruffy yards, miniature escapes, the way Laundry lines strung up sag like shortened Smiles, when you have forgotten the Fish Man Barking his catch in inches up the street “I’ve got porgies. I’ve got trout. Feeesh 4 Man,” or his scoop and chain scale, His belief in shad and amberjack; when You have forgotten Ajax and tin pails, Blue crystals frothing on marble front Steps Saturday mornings, or the garden Of old men playing checkers, the curbs White-washed like two lines out to the burbs, 5 Or the hopscotch squares painted new In the street, the pitter-patter of feet Landing on rhymes. “How do you Like the weather, girls? All in together, girls, January, February, March, April... ” The jump ropes’ portentous looming, Their great, aching love blooming. 6 When you have forgotten packs of grape- Flavored Now & Laters, the squares Of sugar flattening on the tongue, the elation You felt reaching into the corner-store jar, Grasping a handful of Blow Pops, candy bars With names you didn’t recognize but came To learn. All the turf battles. All the war games. 7 When you have forgotten popsicle stick Races along the curb and hydrant fights, Then, retrieve this letter from your stack I’ve sent by clairvoyant post & read by light, For it brought me as much longing and delight. This week’s Father’s Day; I’ve a long ride to Philly. I’ll give this to Gramps, then head to Black Lily.

This to the crown and blessing of my life, The much loved husband of a happy wife; To him whose constant passion found the art To win a stubborn and ungrateful heart, And to the world by tenderest proof discovers They err, who say that husbands can’t be lovers. With such return of passion as is due, Daphnis I love, Daphnis my thoughts pursue; Daphnis my hopes and joys are bounded all in you. Even I, for Daphnis’ and my promise’ sake, What I in women censure, undertake. But this from love, not vanity, proceeds; You know who writes, and I who ’tis that reads. Judge not my passion by my want of skill: Many love well, though they express it ill; And I your censure could with pleasure bear, Would you but soon return, and speak it here.

Dear Gary, Somehow your letter was no surprise (and I think you knew that it was no surprise or you would have tried to break the news more gently); somehow I think we understand what the other is going to say long before we say it—a proof of love and, I think, a protection against misunderstanding. So I've been expecting this letter for five weeks now—and I still don't know how to answer it. Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you—Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price I paid, the oath I signed to write poetry. I think that someday you'll enter Bohemia—not for me (I'm not worth the price, no human being is), but for poetry—to see the windows and maybe blast a few yourself through the rocks of hell. I'll be there waiting for you, my arms open to receive you. But let's have these letters go on, whether it be days, years, or never before I see you. We can still love each other although we cannot see each other. We will be no farther apart when I'm in Berkeley than we were when I was in Minneapolis. And we can continue to love each other, by letter, from alien worlds. Love, Jack [c.1951-2]

My head, my heart, mine Eyes, my life, nay more, My joy, my Magazine of earthly store, If two be one, as surely thou and I, How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lye? So many steps, head from the heart to sever If but a neck, soon should we be together: I like the earth this season, mourn in black, My Sun is gone so far in’s Zodiack, Whom whilst I ’joy’d, nor storms, nor frosts I felt, His warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt. My chilled limbs now nummed lye forlorn; Return, return sweet Sol from Capricorn; In this dead time, alas, what can I more Then view those fruits which through thy heat I bore? Which sweet contentment yield me for a space, True living Pictures of their Fathers face. O strange effect! now thou art Southward gone, I weary grow, the tedious day so long; But when thou Northward to me shalt return, I wish my Sun may never set, but burn Within the Cancer of my glowing breast, The welcome house of him my dearest guest. Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence, Till natures sad decree shall call thee hence; Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, I here, thou there, yet both but one.

Esto no es realismo mágico Dear Martín: In Izalco, while Christ waits for Easter in his glass tomb in the cathedral a single long note is blown on a trumpet en el parque central. Los perros flacco forage at the feet of la gente. Los poetas mount the stage in a shower of rose petals thrown by old ladies. The Mayor opens his arms wide. In the audience are campesinos, hijitos, shopkeepers, viejos, the town trauma surgeon, and a generous contigent of la policia con pistolas, escopetas y M16s. Solamente el volcán duerme esta noche. Los perros flaccos jump into the big blue garbage cans. Martín, you will certainly believe this. Each poeta is introduced with a fireworks rocket. Los perros flaccos jump out of the big blue garbage cans. Poetas de Argentina, Taiwan, Guatemala, España, Peru, Nicaragua, France, Costa Rica, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, y Los Estados Unidas open their mouths. Out come pajaros, serpientes, y duendes, hombres, mujeres, y alquimistas with flasks of aether; out come revolutionaries in diapers, ambassadors in limousines of obsidian, the Virgin in a Madonna T-shirt, y los Indios with flutes made of thigh bones and bombs made of skulls; out come the dead dictators chained together by ectoplasm swinging censors that emit the stink of money, priests with rifles, nuns with giant beasts whose names are forgotten hidden in the musk of their habits; out come conquistadores on roller skates, Moros in black on black motorcycles, Mad Max with tattoos de los Maras Salvatruche. When los poetas have finished, there are more fireworks. They are swarmed by hijitos, viejos y otros wanting autographs. Their hands are as soft as their hearts. Death does not hide here but lives among them dressed in white lace with earrings rattling on her skull. Life does not hide here but steps through irony as if it were the vanishing fog.

October2017 You once said:My reward for this life will be a thousand pounds of dirt shoveled in my face. You were wrong. You are seven pounds of ashes in a box, a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around you, next to a red brick from the house in Utuado where you were born, all crammed together on my bookshelf. You taught me there is no God, no life after this life, so I know you are not watching me type this letter over my shoulder. When I was a boy, you were God. I watched from the seventh floor of the projects as you walked down into the street to stop a public execution. A big man caught a small man stealing his car, and everyone in Brooklyn heard the car alarm wail of the condemned:He’s killing me. At a word from you, the executioner’s hand slipped from the hair of the thief.The kid was high, was all you said when you came back to us. When I was a boy, and you were God, we flew to Puerto Rico. You said: My grandfather was the mayor of Utuado. His name was Buenaventura. That means good fortune. I believed in your grandfather’s name. I heard the tree frogs chanting to each other all night. I saw banana leaf and elephant palm sprouting from the mountain’s belly. I gnawed the mango’s pit, and the sweet yellow hair stuck between my teeth. I said to you:You came from another planet. How did you do it? You said:Every morning, just before I woke up, I saw the mountains. Every morning, I see the mountains. In Utuado, three sisters, all in their seventies, all bedridden, all Pentecostales who only left the house for church, lay sleeping on mattresses spread across the floor when the hurricane gutted the mountain the way a butcher slices open a dangled pig, and a rolling wall of mud buried them, leaving the fourth sister to stagger into the street, screaming like an unheeded prophet about the end of the world. In Utuado, a man who cultivated a garden of aguacate and carambola, feeding the avocado and star fruit to his nieces from New York, saw the trees in his garden beheaded all at once like the soldiers of a beaten army, and so hanged himself. In Utuado, a welder and a handyman rigged a pulley with a shopping cart to ferry rice and beans across the river where the bridge collapsed, witnessed the cart swaying above so many hands, then raised a sign that told the helicopters:Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten. Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof, as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them. A nurse says:These people are going to have an epidemic. These people are going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said:Tres pulgadas de sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel digging graves in the backyard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising. I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again. Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face. Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart. I promised myself I would stop talking to you, white box of gray grit. You were deaf even before you died. Hear my promise now: I will take you to the mountains, where houses lost like ships at sea rise blue and yellow from the mud. I will open my hands. I will scatter your ashes in Utuado.

Dear Sirs: I have been enjoying the law and order of our community throughout the past three months since my wife and I, our two cats, and miscellaneous photographs of the six grandchildren belonging to our previous neighbors (with whom we were very close) arrived in Saratoga Springs which is clearly prospering under your custody Indeed, until yesterday afternoon and despite my vigilant casting about, I have been unable to discover a single instance of reasons for public-spirited concern, much less complaint You may easily appreciate, then, how it is that I write to your office, at this date, with utmost regret for the lamentable circumstances that force my hand Speaking directly to the issue of the moment: I have encountered a regular profusion of certain unidentified roses, growing to no discernible purpose, and according to no perceptible control, approximately one quarter mile west of the Northway, on the southern side To be specific, there are practically thousands of the aforementioned abiding in perpetual near riot of wild behavior, indiscriminate coloring, and only the Good Lord Himself can say what diverse soliciting of promiscuous cross-fertilization As I say, these roses, no matter what the apparent background, training, tropistic tendencies, age, or color, do not demonstrate the least inclination toward categorization, specified allegiance, resolute preference, consideration of the needs of others, or any other minimal traits of decency May I point out that I did not assiduously seek out this colony, as it were, and that these certain unidentified roses remain open to viewing even by children, with or without suitable supervision (My wife asks me to append a note as regards the seasonal but nevertheless seriously licentious phenomenon of honeysuckle under the moon that one may apprehend at the corner of Nelson and Main However, I have recommended that she undertake direct correspondence with you, as regards this: yet another civic disturbance in our midst) I am confident that you will devise and pursue appropriate legal response to the roses in question If I may aid your efforts in this respect, please do not hesitate to call me into consultation Respectfully yours,

1 After the Reformation had settled the loamy soil and the lettuce-green fields of dollars, the clouds drifted away, and light fell everywhere. Even the snow bloomed and New Hampshire was a big peony. A red barn shone on a hill with scattered hemlocks and white pines and the gates of all the picket fences were big shut-eyes. 2 Sometime after the Civil War, the bronze wing of liberty took off like the ribboning smoke of a Frick factory, and all the citizens in towns from Stockbridge to Willamette ran wild on the 4th. The sound of piccolos lingered, and the shiny nickel of the sun stood still before it fizzed in the windshield of a Ford. By then you were a lawyer. 3 Charles Ives was a bandmaster in Danbury, and you didn’t give him the time of day. He played shortstop on the piano. He never made it to his tonic home base, and his half-tones were like oak leaves slapping clapboard. 4 How Miltonic are we anyway? 5 In that red glass of the imagination, in that tingling crystal of the chandelier where light freezes in its own prism and the apogee of the green lawns of New Haven wane like Persian carpets in twilight, there you saw a pitcher, perhaps from Delft, next to a plate of mangoes. 6 But still, history is a boomerang, and the aborigines never threw one without a shield. 7 Beyond the porches of Key West, beyond the bougainvillea, your speech skipped on tepid waves, was lapped and lapped by lovers and friends, by scholars who loved romantic nights of the sun. But the fruits and pendants, the colorful cloth, the dry palm fronds, and the fake voodoo wood Cortes brought back as souvenirs were just souvenirs. And the shacks and the cane and the hacked plantain were tableaux, and who saw them from your dark shore? 8 The Protestant dinner plate is a segregated place, where the steak hardens, and the peas sit frightened in their corner while mashed potatoes ossify. Some gin and ice cream, and the terror of loneliness goes for a while. 9 As they say in the sunny climes, un abrazo.

I see you, not as you stand before me, so full of language threatening to spill from you, a silver-blue luminous substance the page of cups might carry in love, in a gold chalice, but as a child I might have seen, held, had I been an adult on that island where we might have become anyone other than ourselves. You are a sound you say your father carries, a beat in the heart of an African drum that seduced him with the thunder of Changó the red of blood and earth, a flesh-pink guava growing inside you, its seeds on the tips of your fingers like islands, like memories becoming leaves, their veined undersides becoming maps, palmlines, bridges where the sound of water collects childhood in a blue bucket of memory, where my Tío Machuco stands with childhood sandwiches I ate sitting on the cold terraza, leaning against the Southwest red of that couch Tía Hilda discarded like a useless memory when we were no longer voices in open rooms with connecting doors, when we were words, onion-skinned paper as transparent as re-written history or exile.