Poemunity — your poem community

It’s the little towns I like with their little mills making ratchets and stanchions, elastic web, spindles, you name it. I like them in New England, America, particularly-providing bad jobs good enough to live on, to live in families even: kindergarten, church suppers, beach umbrellas ... The towns are real, so fragile in their loneliness a flood could come along (and floods have) and cut them in two, in half. There is no mayor, the town council’s not prepared for this, three of the four policemen are stranded on their roofs ... and it doesn’t stop raining. The mountain is so thick with water parts of it just slide down on the heifers—soggy, suicidal— in the pastures below. It rains, it rains in these towns and, because there’s no other way, your father gets in a rowboat so he can go to work.

even if we won’t admit it. Getting off the subway at Canal St. — I wonder if the author is a man or a woman? A teen? A team?

It sifts from Leaden Sieves - It powders all the Wood. It fills with Alabaster Wool The Wrinkles of the Road - It makes an even Face Of Mountain, and of Plain - Unbroken Forehead from the East Unto the East again - It reaches to the Fence - It wraps it Rail by Rail Till it is lost in Fleeces - It deals Celestial Vail To Stump, and Stack - and Stem - A Summer’s empty Room - Acres of Joints, where Harvests were, Recordless, but for them - It Ruffles Wrists of Posts As Ankles of a Queen - Then stills it’s Artisans - like Ghosts - Denying they have been -

Louisiana skies paddle north nodding hello to some exiles displaced by floodwaters so we all putter in the bisque in fretted dresses, alleviated by a fan. But we have nothing on "Le Matin," in whose rococo frame a curtain sweeps to bare a boudoir, a Bichon Frisé worrying something between paws, begging the dulcet glance of the mistress whose push-up, cupless corset and up-drawn stocking border what they fall short of, per the stern frame rippling like a cloud! Even the candle angles to get a look in the mirror engloving the scene. Why it is her slipper the bitch clutches! The gentleman's reverie is elsewhere . . . Loitering Louisiana stops to admire this engraving by "N. Lavreinee." What a chevalier! It makes the smeariest sunset think it's in a Restoration Comedy, in such humidity chefs defer meringues. "Ksar Rouge," "Taos Adobe," "Gulf Shrimp"—a thousand names of softboiled lipsticks fritter English as if it were French, meaning meeting no resistance from the flesh.

It had a secret name which in later years came to mean I will continue to stand here. It had a food mouth and a shrieking mouth. Popular wisdom indicated that Its hands could heat stones and that a man could cook meat on those stones. That being said, It had a poverty hand and a riches hand. They were the same hand. A little ways above the hands the mouths spoke together but for two different reasons, like the music was behaving but the orchestra was broken. * Even in less benevolent moments, It was known to use Its own body as a tent and as the gifts inside of the tent. Early people said It had a mother hand and a father hand, and that together they made a clapping sound. Its hands delivered the children from madness. The hands saw the riverbank sliding into the river to make a more shallow river. They scooped the mud up. The hands were giving thanks. * The hands smelled like exodus. The hands were the law. One hand grew older, and the other hand younger. They said, fairly often, We’d like to try that again. Both were restless and wanted rest. One hand said,I will go where you go, while the other hand continued on alone.

It was as if her love had become a big eye or some historical logic or a religious particle lodged in the brain. In the most costly services of a great society one may find the allure of a benign intelligence. I have hoped, since I was a child, to be surrounded by a group of articulate characters who might with gracious friendship provide some essential entertainment as Aaron’s which was a cane and then a snake and then a cane again great clouds of smoke from the forest Itsy bugs amarch my naked legs in my beard, to burn as one might with one’s eyes I learned, but can no longer remember with what dignity another’s care imbues one. You sit and pick the lice from my hair. What sort of life is this.

It was Jessica Grim the American poet who first advised me to read Violette Leduc. Lurid conditions are facts. This is no different from the daily protests and cashbars. I now unknowingly speed towards which of all acts, words, conditions — I am troubled that I do not know. When I feel depressed in broad daylight depressed by the disappearance of names, the pollen smearing the windowsill, I picture the bending pages of La Bâtarde and I think of wind. The outspread world is comparable to a large theatre or to rending paper, and the noise it makes when it flaps is riotous. Clothes swish through the air, rubbing my ears. Promptly I am quenched. I’m talking about a cheap paperback which fans and slips to the floor with a shush. Skirt stretched taut between new knees, head turned back, I hold down a branch,

Something expired. At the turning, A spirit was gone. That which was Turned to sepia: high collars, punting, Waxed mustaches, parasols. From bridges, children stared in the river And felt themselves, also, halved. Old manners were patently over. New manners had not yet arrived. The old, without waiting to speak Their parting lines in the act, Learned to exit the way of pipe-smoke. Uttered nothing. Utter tact. Steamy ghosts rose from horses' Maws as they champed at their bits. The ladies reached for their purses. The gentlemen tipped their hats.

Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag. He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it, peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood. He took a step back and gestured toward it with his arms and open palms — It’s the ark, he said. You mean Noah’s ark? I asked. What other ark is there? he answered. Read the inscription, he told me, it tells what’s going to happen at the end. What end? I wanted to know. He laughed,What do you mean, “what end”? The end end. Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled. His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters. He held the jagged piece of wood so gently. I had forgotten my brother could be gentle. He set it on the table the way people on television set things when they’re afraid those things might blow-up or go-off — he set it right next to my empty coffee cup. It was no ark — it was the broken end of a picture frame with a floral design carved into its surface. He put his head in his hands — I shouldn’t show you this — God, why did I show her this? It’s ancient — O, God, this is so old. Fine, I gave in,Where did you get it? The girl, he said.O, the girl. What girl? I asked. You’ll wish you never knew, he told me. I watched him drag his wrecked fingers over the chipped flower-work of the wood — You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it — no matter how many books you’ve read. He was wrong. I could take the ark. I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers. The way they almost glittered. It was the animals — the animals I could not take — they came up the walkway into my house, cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips, marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother, tails snaking across my feet before disappearing like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls, reaching out for him — wildebeests, pigs, the oryxes with their black matching horns, javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat. So many kinds of creature. I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it, but my brother stopped me — This is serious, he said. You have to understand. It can save you. So I sat down, with my brother wrecked open like that, and two-by-two the fantastical beasts parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles, built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup before floating it away from the table. My brother — teeming with shadows — a hull of bones, lit only by tooth and tusk, lifting his ark high in the air.

it would be that but only if I knew how again Could something like that get lost?    no only a little a little lost but if only I remember how I mean she or I oh a freight train goes by & they always do & did do I mean a real one too that I’m not on & am it very seriously in this serious love world that one where something oddly music will pass through your night and it will be me sweet me