Poemunity — your poem community

Cold for so long, unable to speak, yet your mouth seems framed on a cry, or a stifled question. Who placed you here, and left you to this lonely eternity of ash and ice, and himself returned to the dust fields, the church and the temple? Was it God—the sun-god of the Incas, the imperial god of the Spaniards? Or only the priests of that god, self-elected—voice of the volcano that speaks once in a hundred years. And I wonder, with your image before me, what life might you have lived, had you lived at all—whose companion, whose love? To be perhaps no more than a slave of that earthly master: a jug of water on your shoulder, year after stunted year, a bundle of reeds and corn, kindling for a fire on whose buried hearth? There were furies to be fed, then as now: blood to fatten the sun, a heart for the lightning to strike. And now the furies walk the streets, a swarm in the milling crowd. They stand to the podium, speak of their coming ascension ... Through all this drift and clamor you have survived—in this cramped and haunted effigy, another entry on the historian’s dated page. Under the weight of this mountain— once a god, now only restless stone, we find your interrupted life, placed here among the trilobites and shells, so late unearthed.

It’s summer, and just the sunniest of afternoons. Outside the sanatorium, in the arboretum, the attendees are served their teas. The strudel is toothsome when Herr Stumpf, from the lectern, contradicts the consensus that I is for ice cream. No, now he’s proposing that I’s for spaghetti, all spaghetti, he avers, being once alphabetti, all spaghetti being once that capital I that it is when it’s dry, not the maddening doodle that it is when it’s done and awry. His audience listen, but once he has spoken, then beneath their applause that’s not fulsome but token, they don’t soften, no rather, they stiffen.

One cuts blocks From the abundant river, Hauls them house to house. One falls, unseen, The heart Inoculated cold Against a sky still moving. Moving even now Above the river, The canal. Willows shimmering Across the water, Muskrats diving out of reach. The river whispers Till it freezes— A body Twirling sluggishly Beneath the surface as again One stack, then Spreads the straw. Another falters, Slips, or Puts a sliver on your tongue To feel it melting there— The ice-lit Underworld Of someone else.

From where I stood at the field’s immaculate edge, walking past the open patch of land that’s money bounded, in California’s flat sunlight, by suburban shadows of houses occupied by professors, lawyers, radically affluent do-gooders, simple casual types, plus a few plumbers, children of lettuce-pickers and microchip princes, grandchildren of goatherds and orchard keepers who pruned and picked apricot trees that covered what wasn’t yet block after block. Vaporized by money, by the lords and ladies of money, in one month, on one block, three bungalows bulldozed, and the tanky smells of goatherds and, before them, dirt farmers who never got enough water, held momentary in the air like an album snapshot’s aura, souls of roller-rink sweethearts and sausage-makers fleeing heaps of crusty lath, lead pipe, tiny window casements, then new foundations poured for cozy twelve-room houses. So what was she doing in that field among weeds and ice plant? The yellow and pink blooms spiking around her feet like glory? Cranking her elbow as surveyors do, to a bored watcher in the distance, she fanned the air, clouds running low and fast behind her. A voice seeped through the moodless sunlight as she seemed to talk to the flowers and high weeds. She noticed me, pointed in my direction. Accusation, election, I could not tell, nor if it was at me myself or the green undeveloped space she occupied, welded into her grid by traffic noise.Okay! A word for me? A go-ahead?Okay! Smeared by the wind and maybe not her own voice after all. I held my place. She would be one of the clenched ministers adrift in bus terminals and K-Marts, carrying guns in other parts of America, except she dressed like a casual lady of money, running shoes, snowbird sunglasses, wristwatch like a black birthday cake. The voice, thin and pipey, came from the boy or girl, blond like her, who edged into view as I tracked the shot. The child, staring down while he cried his song, slowly tread the labyrinth of ice plant’s juicy starburst flesh of leaves. Okay! He follows the nested space between flowers that bristle at his feet, his or hers, while the desiccated California sky so far from heaven and hell beams down on us beings of flower, water, and flesh before we turn to money. The sky kept sliding through the tips of weeds. The sky left us behind.

Pyke, from his Massachusetts madhouse, envisioned it as a divine craft, an Ark impervious to torpedoes. ICE is with us, ICE will win this war, he wrote Mountbatten. With a draft of one hundred and fifty feet, two million tons displacement, it could carry one hundred twin-engine planes, three thousand men, and required no steel to assemble, only water and pulp. Onboard, the men lived in cork-paneled cabins, skated down corridors to deliver urgent messages. A miracle ship, organically arisen from the element it moved in, indistinguishable from its medium, formed by Nature’s design, not the Royal Navy’s. Even her weaponry resembled God’s own: “brine guns” which would encase the enemy in ice like straw in glass, or block his harbor will a flotilla of icebergs. Churchill himself approved draining White Bay for its construction and ordered all cork immediately diverted to Canada, where a prototype built by conscientious objectors lasted through the summer disguised as a boathouse. By then Allies had landed in France, and the project was scrapped— Mountbatten threatened to lock him up again, paying no attention to a new plan for smuggling assassins into Berlin in boxes marked “Officers Only” on the grounds that the Germans were an obedient race. Love and duty stir men to action, but war makes us dream: before his suicide he shaved his beard, head. Outside, wet snow fell hard against the city, as though to clear it for another world.

Then all one day because of ice they couldn't make it down the hill. Or up, James says, dabbing at a spill of coffee, crunching toast as if it had a spine. But he could work, at any rate, could concentrate on that book he's been reading, or meaning to, the flu— or was it famine?—of '49, some smoldering fact he's found in the cold ash of some war. Gusting upward, lobes and nose on fire, his whole face florid from the heart attack he's somehow never had, he sways, repeating: Oh, we'd get down just fine, I expect, but we'd never make it back, then goes into his room and shuts the door. Eva's hours have nearer ends. She heats the little disk the cat sleeps on; chips, until her hands are gone, the glaze off all the feeders for the birds; then writes two friends to thank them for the birthday chocolates they've sent. The word alone makes her stomach burn. Which is mostly what age is, she's learned, the senses sharpening backwards, keen to what they can't perceive, when to be wise means mostly not to wish for what you love, for what you love is pain: spices or coffee, gin bringing the evening light into your veins, good chocolates the grandkids ravish like a horde of crows. You stuff your bellies with tomorrow's ache, she can almost hear him bellow, nipping and pinching to make them squeal. Hot water with honey, one coddled egg, dry saltines: Oh, what difference does it make? She picks up the chocolates, breaks the seal. • He draws the blinds on a wall of glass, winces at the glare, drags his chair into the bright crevasse between his bed and bookshelf, takes a deep breath of air, and buries himself in one of the early wordy furies of William Gladstone, never a man for minor keys. Creak and tick of the burdened limbs. A creak and tick inside of him as he crosses his legs and then uncrosses them, shifts his weight to ease the stiffness in one side, turns a page like a summit he has climbed, and breathes... Think of it—twenty thousand books devoured in Gladstone's life, and of his own enough to keep an army of bibliographers occupied; a whole age and empire crammed into one man: spellbinding crowds until he couldn't stand, felling his million trees, filling six decades' worth of diaries because a life is owed as well as owned, time a gift of which a good man gives account; who would mount, night after night, a moral, high-rhetorical siege upon some poor Haymarket tart in whom ruin and beauty were one word, then go home and whip himself for a sin that, all the evidence suggests, never occurred but in his heart. • And has just one, pleasure spreading through her blood like a single drop of ink. She scours the stove and countertop, bleaches coffee stains off the sink, cleans leaf by leaf the emerald ripple and the paradise palm, both mostly dormant now, reaches high for the philodendron, huge since trained to climb, and pauses, remembering the calm of constant motion that her mother was— a beauty, men said, though it hardly seemed a part of her, looking out of her own face like someone on a train; and remembering, too, the child-high hedgerows alone the lane behind their house on Paddox Close, the slice of sky above growing wider as she grew, the little park with its central statue (who was it of?), which, last time she'd seen, weather had worried to a Swedish ivy sort of green. • Emma Clifton, Elizabeth Collins, P. Lightfoot— even the names of those women are there amid the parliamentary proceedings, bulldog scholarship, affairs of state. He lifts his hand like a weight to check his watch, little trembles traveling through his bones into the air as through plucked strings a sound. Two hours until the final round at Palm Springs, with its hairpin fairways, lacquered greens, and that great eighteenth in homage to Bobby Jones. What a character!—touring in his teens, retired at twenty-eight with nothing left to win, at forty storming Normandy with men half his age. Even his death was rare— syringomyelia—cane to brace to wheelchair without a trace of self-pity, regret, rage: We all have to play the ball as it lies. How much of a man's revealed in how he dies... Poor Owen, barely sixty, Dean of the College, a decent book on Kant behind him: two days of chest pain slivering into a lifetime's knowledge and all the old beliefs come flooding back, silly relics and rituals, griefs you're born into, some guilt you can't even name. "Ischemia," that's exactly right: blood lack. • Sweet pickles and white bread, salted ham, a soybean spread that is his one concession to his heart, two butter cookies, plum jam: she clicks across the polished floor through motes that rise and float like molecules of light, pausing outside his door, hearing the Mahler chorus to which he always cries, plays to cry, she suspects, as if even sadness could be planned. She takes the knob in her hand, sees, inside its shine, white tablecloths, crystal cut fine as jewels, and, and... and a man with American shoulders and vowels, that face so open it wasn't, like the ocean, and that tidal way he had of filling any space that wasn't taken, the table where she sat with friends, afternoons and weekends, classrooms, boardrooms, lecture halls, the very bodies of their children, in whose broad limbs he seems to sprawl. Was that what she had fallen for, talk of golf, and Oxford, and roast beef in that gray decade after the war, that it seemed so safe a fall? • There—where the strings go silent and that woman's whole soul is in her throat... Ahome can have but one composer. Wasn't that the quote? That long ironclad letter Mahler wrote to Alma, the most exquisite woman in Vienna, who packed away that cold contract, her party dresses, and her own precocious technique, and settled, if you could call it that, into the role of being Gustav Mahler's wife: I am not happy, and yet not unhappy. My ship is in the harbor, but it has sprung a leak. But he loved her; and she is in his music as surely as the God he never quite possessed nor fully lost, as surely as the daughter is alive inside this song, whose life it cost. Gladstone also had a daughter die at five. Odd, not to have thought of that before. And Mahler's sisters name was Anna, and Gladstone's sister Ann; and wasn't Mrs. Gladstone's family from Oxford, or near? Oh, William dear, she told him once,if you weren't such a great man,you'd be a terrible bore. • Was that a laugh or a sob? Mahler dies off into the long silences, polite applause, and weirdly reverential tones of golf. This could take all day. She lets go of the knob, backs away. • He looks up as if he's heard a sound— what was it called, that late-medieval game out of which golf evolved? He looks down: O'Connor's on the second tee, It must have started earlier than he thought, Steady head, steady head, that pro at Sea Pines always said. James lifts one hand above his knee, so palsied now he can't keep his cocktails quiet, as if every instant were a shock his body took. Think of a stake driven through your skull into the ground.

What vegetable leviathan extends beneath the dinner table, an unseen, monstrous green that pulls the chair out from under our faith in appearances: see a mere tuft of leaf on the plate like a wing, but if it flies away, it undoubtedly will disturb the continental drift asleep under the salad plate, the hidden world we forget as we reach for the smaller fork— (and now, mouth full, don't speak: politely chew your leaf of firmament that's torn and tossed up in vinegar here as we'll be tossed before its vast root maybe someday or any moment).

see Amos , 3:15 A door sunk in a hillside, with a bolt thick as the boy’s arm, and behind that door the walls of ice, melting a blue, faint light, an air of cedar branches, sawdust, fern: decaying seasons keeping from decay. A summer guest, the boy had never seen (a servant told him of it) how the lake froze three foot thick, how farmers came with teams, with axe and saw, to cut great blocks of ice, translucid, marbled, glittering in the sun, load them on sleds and drag them up the hill to be manhandled down the narrow path and set in courses for the summer’s keeping, the kitchen uses and luxuriousness of the great houses. And he heard how once a team and driver drowned in the break of spring: the man’s cry melting from the ice that summer frightened the sherbet-eaters off the terrace. Dust of the cedar, lost and evergreen among the slowly blunting water walls where the blade edge melted and the steel saw’s bite was rounded out, and the horse and rider drowned in the red sea’s blood, I was the silly child who dreamed that riderless cry, and saw the guests run from a ghostly wall, so long before the winter house fell with the summer house, and the houses, Egypt, the great houses, had an end.

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn Which once he wore! The glory from his gray hairs gone Forevermore! Revile him not, the Tempter hath A snare for all; And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, Befit his fall! Oh, dumb be passion’s stormy rage, When he who might Have lighted up and led his age, Falls back in night. Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark A bright soul driven, Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark, From hope and heaven! Let not the land once proud of him Insult him now, Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, Dishonored brow. But let its humbled sons, instead, From sea to lake, A long lament, as for the dead, In sadness make. Of all we loved and honored, naught Save power remains; A fallen angel’s pride of thought, Still strong in chains. All else is gone; from those great eyes The soul has fled: When faith is lost, when honor dies, The man is dead! Then, pay the reverence of old days To his dead fame; Walk backward, with averted gaze, And hide the shame!

The father died and then the mother died. And you were so addicted to not feeling them, you told no one about the clamp inside— around the vena cava. Dam against the blood's trash— But I've got you now. Trussed at the waist in a wooden chair, odor of spice and oranges, clove-pierced, incandescent stores to light our lab's decor— Here. I saved this just for you. Beetle-cleaned and sharp at the tip, the finger that shook in your set face from the hand that smoothed your hair— Make a fist. Wrap the tube round your fleshy arm, pull the black rubber tight— will we finally see the sludge of their accumulated mouths, ah, you've said, how they poisoned me... Pierce in with your mother's finger-bone, taste the slow up-well— Sweet. Sweet. Surge ambrosial and clear— A honey, an ichor. From those who waited long in your veins.