Poemunity — your poem community

On occasion, when the mood takes him as it so often does, he will put down his papers, get up from his kindly old chair, and leave for a while the sweeping beam to sow its charitable seed — that seed which, when falling on the ground of a helmsman’s fertile consciousness, ought germinate in it a cautious vigilance. He descends then, the long corkscrew of the stairs and opens at their base the metal door so that he may take a closer look at what might be beyond his tower’s environs. There he always finds the churning world, she laps at him from every side with no respite, and spatters him with spray. Thanks to a certain modulation, a tone which he adopted long ago when he still wore shorts and buckled shoes, there is no danger here from neither shark nor crocodile, not in this sea stuffed as it is like a dressing-up box with whimsy. Indeed, were there such creatures hidden neath the sliver-thin surface of the waves, they’d have no teeth but only soft gray gums and goofy grins, and they’d be giggling knowingly at the whole thing. And so it is that as he gazes out, he cannot help but wonder what it is he might be warning of with the light that turns atop his tower, because that tower is itself in fact the only hazard anywhere on which a ship might rip her wooden skin and haemorrhage her lumpy blood that’s made of all the gasping sailormen.

The rake is like a wand or fan, With bamboo springing in a span To catch the leaves that I amass In bushels on the evening grass. I reckon how the wind behaves And rake them lightly into waves And rake the waves upon a pile, Then stop my raking for a while. The sun is down, the air is blue, And soon the fingers will be, too, But there are children to appease With ducking in those leafy seas. So loudly rummaging their bed On the dry billows of the dead, They are not warned at four and three Of natural mortality. Before their supper they require A dragon field of yellow fire To light and toast them in the gloom. So much for old earth’s ashen doom.

O white little lights at Carney’s Point, You shine so clear o’er the Delaware; When the moon rides high in the silver sky, Then you gleam, white gems on the Delaware. Diamond circlet on a full white throat, You laugh your rays on a questioning boat; Is it peace you dream in your flashing gleam, O’er the quiet flow of the Delaware? And the lights grew dim at the water’s brim, For the smoke of the mills shredded slow between; And the smoke was red, as is new bloodshed, And the lights went lurid ’neath the livid screen. O red little lights at Carney’s Point, You glower so grim o’er the Delaware; When the moon hides low sombrous clouds below, Then you glow like coals o’er the Delaware. Blood red rubies on a throat of fire, You flash through the dusk of a funeral pyre; And there hearth fires red whom you fear and dread O’er the turgid flow of the Delaware? And the lights gleamed gold o’er the river cold, For the murk of the furnace shed a copper veil; And the veil was grim at the great cloud’s brim, And the lights went molten, now hot, now pale. O gold little lights at Carney’s Point, You gleam so proud o’er the Delaware; When the moon grows wan in the eastering dawn, Then you sparkle gold points o’er the Delaware. Aureate filagree on a Croesus’ brow, You hasten the dawn on a gray ship’s prow. Light you streams of gold in the grim ship’s hold O’er the sullen flow of the Delaware? And the lights went gray in the ash of day, For a quiet Aurora brought a halcyon balm; And the sun laughed high in the infinite sky, And the lights were forgot in the sweet, sane calm.

and you press into the dark, imagine the stranger two rows back, that fragile chance you’ll forget in the second trailer. Now it’s quiet, still this burden of being watcher and screen and what floats across it–light pouring out its time and necklines and train wrecks. What a relief to yield to the EXIT sign red “I” blinking like a candle. Soon the enormous figures moving across rooms, the emphatic narrative arcs. (There’s the thrum of the subway, its engine of extras.) Here now the beginning of trivia tests. Warning puppets with brown-bag faces and fringy hair. You’re almost here. But what you want is the after. How yourself you are now walking into the night, full moon over Houston Street, at the bright fruit stand touching the yellow mums. Here you are: Woman with Cilantro listening to the rattle of the wrap, the paper sound paper makes after you have heard movie paper. Apples are more apples. Paper more paper. Cilantro, its sweaty green self.

The evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot Far down into the valley’s cold extreme, Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream Like fleeing specters, shudder and are not. The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream, From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam, London, one moment fallen and forgot. Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright Prick door and window; all her streets obscure Sparkle and swarm with nothing true nor sure, Full as a marsh of mist and winking light; Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.

I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late; They cannot choose. Many a road and track That, since the dawn’s first crack, Up to the forest brink, Deceived the travellers, Suddenly now blurs, And in they sink. Here love ends, Despair, ambition ends; All pleasure and all trouble, Although most sweet or bitter, Here ends in sleep that is sweeter Than tasks most noble. There is not any book Or face of dearest look That I would not turn from now To go into the unknown I must enter, and leave, alone, I know not how. The tall forest towers; Its cloudy foliage lowers Ahead, shelf above shelf; Its silence I hear and obey That I may lose my way And myself.

L ike a cloud above a ravine is the hell you already know: That sublime work of the imagination by Dante Alighieri. But the rain that falls from that cloud is not made up of human souls. It rains, and the rain funnels down into the something-other-than-human sewer. Look how a Chinese writing brush ends in a cone of rigid horsehair. Loaded with ink, the cone will flex, will leave a wet trench in the rice paper. It will leave an attractive trench, and the daylight sucked into the ink Will give it a reflective “shine dot” — like looking into an animal’s eye. Which of you has looked into the looking-up eyes of a hair-trigger fox? A backyard fox or a campsite coyote: Daoist, unintelligible, brave  . . . Which of you knows how not to part the pebble on the beach from its colors? The songbird from its social network? the fruit from its multifaceted peel? Oh, that sugary piece of phosphorus in its form-fitted velvet casing! That unappreciated Egyptian sarcophagus meant | to be opened from the inside. And each seed-bearing fruit has an atmosphere. Each has its several moons, Has tides (subject to gravity), changing weather, lunar eclipses . . . But should an arrow suddenly snatch the waiting pomegranate out of your hand, If it snatches the cap off your head, recall: its circuit has only begun . . . For the arrow of the luckless archer returns to the middle of his or her back. There, between athletic shoulder blades, is a diploma tube full of arrows. Is a diploma tube full of arrows, and so | it is time for graduation. The genie’s gone back to his bottle; the devils to their fallow hells. And the C hinese writing brush , and the cloud above the ravine (wherein The charged particles have sorted themselves along their up-and-down axis), And the looking-up eyes of the fox, and the sarcophagus, and the campsite Are irreducible to a system, are each of them floating over a void. Truly: “All hells and hierarchies are works of the imagination.” And equally: “It is not the part of the Daoist sage to conjure meaningless hells.”

I want the hole in my ear to be quiet And inside the hole in my ear to be quiet And I want it to tell me what to do Or I will go to my lover’s mouth And say oh my quiet I am coming And tell the quiet how its kingdom should be made Though the quiet has already eaten me Because the quiet loves me But does the lover love me And why must the quiet be so quiet And why can’t the quiet have a cock And where is its violet mouth Its ten fingers with which to fix me And where is its belly breathing And O I want to be fixed But I am already fixed Why don’t I feel it

How little we know, and when we know it! It was prettily said that “No man hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was . . . Never mind, dears, the afternoon will fold you up, along with preoccupations that now seem so important, until only a child running around on a unicycle occupies center stage. Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you will have to come up with something, be it a terraced gambit above the sea or gossip overheard in the marketplace. For you see, it becomes you to be chastened: for the old to envy the young, and for youth to fear not getting older, where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin. And it was said of Gyges that his ring attracted those who saw him not, just as those who wandered through him were aware only of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache, while lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about, whether it was something they could be part of sans affront to self-esteem. And those temple hyenas who had seen enough, nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze, were no place you could count on, having taken a proverbial powder as rifle butts received another notch. I, meanwhile . . . I was going to say I had squandered spring when summer came along and took it from me like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine. But here it is winter, and wrong to speak of other seasons as though they exist. Time has only an agenda in the wallet at his back, while we who think we know where we are going unfazed end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know by the unexpectedness of ice and stars and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it, a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down into this wagonload of prisoners. The meter will be screamingly clear then, the rhythms unbounced, for though we came to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails of proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed, only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.

Dedicated to the Federal and Late Confederate Soldiers Like heart-loving brothers we meet, And still the loud thunders of strife, The blaze of fraternity kindles most sweet, There’s nothing more pleasing in life. The black cloud of faction retreats, The poor is no longer depressed, See those once discarded resuming their seats, The lost strangers soon will find rest. The soldier no longer shall roam, But soon shall land safely ashore, Each soon will arrive at his own native home, And struggle in warfare no more. The union of brothers is sweet, Whose wives and children do come, Their sons and fair daughters with pleasure they greet, When long absent fathers come home. They never shall languish again, Nor discord their union shall break, When brothers no longer lament and complain, Hence never each other forsake. Hang closely together like friends, By peace killing foes never driven, The storm of commotion eternally ends, And earth will soon turn into Heaven.