Poemunity — your poem community

It may be through some foreign grace, And unfamiliar charm of face; It may be that across the foam Which bore her from her childhood’s home, By some strange spell, my Katie brought, Along with English creeds and thought— Entangled in her golden hair— Some English sunshine, warmth, and air! I cannot tell—but here to-day, A thousand billowy leagues away From that green isle whose twilight skies No darker are than Katie’s eyes, She seems to me, go where she will, An English girl in England still; I meet her on the dusty street, And daisies spring about her feet; Or, touched to life beneath her tread, An English cowslip lifts its head; And, as to do her grace, rise up The primrose and the buttercup! I roam with her through fields of cane, And seem to stroll an English lane, Which, white with blossoms of the May, Spreads its green carpet in her way! As fancy wills, the path beneath Is golden gorse, or purple heath: And now we hear in woodlands dim Their unarticulated hymn, Now walk through rippling waves of wheat, Now sink in mats of clover sweet, Or see before us from the lawn The lark go up to greet the dawn! All birds that love the English sky Throng round my path when she is by: The blackbird from a neighboring thorn With music brims the cup of morn, And in a thick, melodious rain The mavis pours her mellow strain! But only when my Katie’s voice Makes all the listening woods rejoice I hear—with cheeks that flush and pale— The passion of the nightingale! Anon the pictures round her change, And through an ancient town we range, Whereto the shadowy memory clings Of one of England’s Saxon kings, And which to shrine his fading fame Still keeps his ashes and his name. Quaint houses rise on either hand, But still the airs are fresh and bland, As if their gentle wings caressed Some new-born village of the West. A moment by the Norman tower We pause; it is the Sabbath hour! And o’er the city sinks and swells The chime of old St. Mary’s bells, Which still resound in Katie’s ears As sweet as when in distant years She heard them peal with jocund din A merry English Christmas in! We pass the abbey’s ruined arch, And statelier grows my Katie’s march, As round her, wearied with the taint Of Transatlantic pine and paint, She sees a thousand tokens cast Of England’s venerable Past! Our reverent footsteps lastly claims The younger chapel of St. James, Which though, as English records run, Not old, had seen full many a sun, Ere to the cold December gale The sullen Pilgrim spread his sail. There Katie in her childish days Spelt out her prayers and lisped her praise, And doubtless, as her beauty grew, Did much as other maidens do— Across the pews and down the aisle Sent many a beau-bewildering smile, And to subserve her spirit’s need Learned other things beside the creed! There, too, to-day her knee she bows, And by her one whose darker brows Betray the Southern heart that burns Beside her, and which only turns Its thoughts to Heaven in one request, Not all unworthy to be blest, But rising from an earthlier pain Than might beseem a Christian fane. Ah! can the guileless maiden share The wish that lifts that passionate prayer? Is all at peace that breast within? Good angels! warn her of the sin! Alas! what boots it? who can save A willing victim of the wave? Who cleanse a soul that loves its guilt? Or gather wine when wine is spilt? We quit the holy house and gain The open air; then, happy twain, Adown familiar streets we go, And now and then she turns to show, With fears that all is changing fast, Some spot that’s sacred to her Past. Here by this way, through shadows cool, A little maid, she tripped to school; And there each morning used to stop Before a wonder of a shop Where, built of apples and of pears, Rose pyramids of golden spheres; While, dangling in her dazzled sight, Ripe cherries cast a crimson light, And made her think of elfin lamps, And feast and sport in fairy camps, Whereat, upon her royal throne (Most richly carved in cherry-stone), Titania ruled, in queenly state, The boisterous revels of the fête! ’T was yonder, with their “horrid” noise, Dismissed from books, she met the boys, Who, with a barbarous scorn of girls, Glanced slightly at her sunny curls, And laughed and leaped as reckless by As though no pretty face were nigh! But—here the maiden grows demure— Indeed she’s not so very sure, That in a year, or haply twain, Few looked who failed to look again, And sooth to say, I little doubt (Some azure day, the truth will out!) That certain baits in certain eyes Caught many an unsuspecting prize; And somewhere underneath these eaves A budding flirt put forth its leaves! Has not the sky a deeper blue, Have not the trees a greener hue, And bend they not with lordlier grace And nobler shapes above the place Where on one cloudless winter morn My Katie to this life was born? Ah, folly! long hath fled the hour When love to sight gave keener power, And lovers looked for special boons In brighter flowers and larger moons. But wave the foliage as it may, And let the sky be ashen gray, Thus much at least a manly youth May hold—and yet not blush—as truth: If near that blessed spot of earth Which saw the cherished maiden’s birth No softer dews than usual rise, And life there keeps its wonted guise, Yet not the less that spot may seem As lovely as a poet’s dream; And should a fervid faith incline To make thereof a sainted shrine, Who may deny that round us throng A hundred earthly creeds as wrong, But meaner far, which yet unblamed Stalk by us and are not ashamed. So, therefore, Katie, as our stroll Ends at this portal, while you roll Those lustrous eyes to catch each ray That may recall some vanished day, I—let them jeer and laugh who will— Stoop down and kiss the sacred sill! So strongly sometimes on the sense These fancies hold their influence, That in long well-known streets I stray Like one who fears to lose his way. The stranger, I, the native, she, Myself, not Kate, have crossed the sea; And changing place, and mixing times, I walk in unfamiliar climes! These houses, free to every breeze That blows from warm Floridian seas, Assume a massive English air, And close around an English square; While, if I issue from the town, An English hill looks greenly down, Or round me rolls an English park, And in the Broad I hear the Larke! Thus when, where woodland violets hide, I rove with Katie at my side, It scarce would seem amiss to say, “Katie! my home lies far away, Beyond the pathless waste of brine, In a young land of palm and pine! There, by the tropic heats, the soul Is touched as if with living coal, And glows with such a fire as none Can feel beneath a Northern sun, Unless—my Katie’s heart attest!— ’T is kindled in an English breast! Such is the land in which I live, And, Katie! such the soul I give. Come! ere another morning beam, We’ll cleave the sea with wings of steam; And soon, despite of storm or calm, Beneath my native groves of palm, Kind friends shall greet, with joy and pride, The Southron and his English bride!”

Katie kissed me! Yuck, it's true! My face took on a greenish hue! My knees, like jelly, started shaking! Then my stomach started quaking! Slobber slithered down my cheek! My consciousness was growing weak! My ears were ringing, my head was spinning! But, all the while Kate was grinning! My heart was pounding through my shirt! My tongue felt like I just ate dirt! Though you may think I've lost my brain! I wished she'd kiss me once again!

I was birthed restless and elsewhere gut dragging and bulging with ball lightning, slush, broke through with branches, steel I was bitch-monikered, hipped, I hefted a whip rain, a swirling sheet of grit. Scraping toward the first of you, hungering for wood, walls, unturned skin. With shifting and frantic mouth, I loudly loved the slow bones of elders, fools, and willows.

We’ve come back to the site of   her conception. She calls it why and cries all night, sleepless, wild. It seems the way is always floating and the goal — to live so the ghosts we were don’t trail us and echo. I think we are inside a flower, under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand. The air pulses with perfume, flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air. But my eyes are thin and elsewhere. I am thinking, maybe even coming into the soul is a difficult birth, squeezed by the body’s vise. My bent legs like pincers or the vegetable petals of some tropical flower. Even my mind gripped by the folds of   the flesh, how the cells keep twinning themselves out toward complexity. The tulip trees of   the valley spread their bone canopies into slick green leaves and fire flowers deep as cups. Their cups fill with rain, rain drinks the leaves drinking rain. I can’t begin to explain. How on this porous peak of stone in the sea our daughter came into me. Little flick of a fish I could not see. I was just learning to be human and upright among all that life. And what was real was stranger than night with its dust of unnamed suns. It was the beyond in us. And she was.

This is the room. Where mole guests are welcomed. At this moment you see the wedding table prepared for the mole guests. Rooms are heated with stoves. Rooms have been designed according to the patriarchal way of living. The family has, consists of, father, mather, sons and brides. There is no sex discrimination within the family. They artogether, have meal and altogether chat, but when the doors are clased. Mole guests are welcomed in “Selamlik” part. Femole guests are welcomed in “Harem” part. On such occasions mole guests are served via the cupboard in the wall which turns on its axis.

The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep; The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told! The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold To the red rising moon, and loud and deep The nightingale is singing from the steep; It is midsummer, but the air is cold; Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep. Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white, On which I read: "Here lieth one whose name Was writ in water." And was this the meed Of his sweet singing? Rather let me write: "The smoking flax before it burst to flame Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."

My father’s been dead for thirty years but when he appears behind my shoulder offering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride in something I’ve done that isn’t even thistledown or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world —“Albie, grip in the middle and turn with a steady pressure”—it’s measurable, if not the way the wind is in a sock, or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence, alive, in his undershirt, chewing his tiny licorice pellets and radiating a rough-hewn love. “Negative capability”—the phrase of course is Keats’s, from his letters, but we make it ours a hundred times a day. A hundred times we do our own pedestrian version of early maritime cartography: the known world stops, and over its edge the fuddled mapmaker writes Here There Be Monsters and then illustrates their non-existing coiled lengths and hell-breath with a color-splotched vivacity he wouldn’t waste on inhabited shores. Or: “Don’t think of a polar bear!”...the game one plays with a child. But I say with adult certainty that when Eddie’s wife Fiona went back to stripping he couldn’t stand to be at the club and see, and yet those empty hours in his mind were populated just as unbearably—and indeed, yes, there were monsters in that void, and the vigilant bears of insecurity and jealousy padded hungrily behind his eyes each night until her return. For Keats, however, the force that emptiness makes kinetic is a positive one, the way that the invisible, unknowable “dark energy” is seminal, a kind of funding agency or sugar daddy powering the universe in all its spangled beauty and veiled mystery from behind the scenes. Last night, a woozy few of us were mourning the demise of The Dusty Bookshelf. “Well I tried to support it,” I said, “by stopping in from time to time.” And B, the king of local kleptobibliomania, with his nimble touch and expando-capacious overalls, said “I tried to support it by not going in.”

Keen and lovely man moved as in a dance to be considerate in lighted, glass-walled almost outdoor office. Business wasn’t all he knew. He knew music, art. Had a heart. “With eyes like yours I should think the dictaphone” or did he say the flute? His sensitivity—it stopped you. And the neighbors said “She’s taking lessons on the dictaphone” as tho it were a saxophone. He gave the job to somebody else.

II Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my hand in your hand. In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing. I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still. Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence. I will become one with the night clasping the earth in my breast. Make my life glad with nothing. The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines in the wet untamable wind revel in their own perfume. The cloud-hidden stars thrill in secret. Let me fill to the full my heart with nothing but my own depth of joy.

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.