63 Home poems

1 Efficient as Fate, each eye a storm trooper, the cleaners wipe my smile with Comet fingers and tear the plaster off my suicide note. They learn everything from the walls’ eloquent tongues. Now, quick as genocide, they powder my ghost for a cinnamon jar. They burn my posters (India and Heaven in flames), whitewash my voicestains, make everything new, clean as Death. 2 When the landlord brings new tenants, even Memory is a stranger. The woman, her womb solid with the future, instructs her husband’s eyes to clutch insurance policies. They ignore my love affair with the furniture, the corner table that memorized my crossed-out lines. Oh, she’s beautiful, a hard-nippled Madonna. The landlord gives them my autopsy; they sign the lease. The room is beating with bottled infants, and I’ve stopped beating. I’m moving out holding tombstones in my hands.

Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our house, July 10th. 1666. Copied Out of a Loose Paper. In silent night when rest I took, For sorrow near I did not look, I wakened was with thund’ring noise And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice. That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,” Let no man know is my Desire. I, starting up, the light did spy, And to my God my heart did cry To straighten me in my Distress And not to leave me succourless. Then, coming out, behold a space The flame consume my dwelling place. And when I could no longer look, I blest His name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust. Yea, so it was, and so ‘twas just. It was his own, it was not mine, Far be it that I should repine; He might of all justly bereft But yet sufficient for us left. When by the ruins oft I past My sorrowing eyes aside did cast And here and there the places spy Where oft I sate and long did lie. Here stood that trunk, and there that chest, There lay that store I counted best. My pleasant things in ashes lie And them behold no more shall I. Under thy roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy Table eat a bit. No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told Nor things recounted done of old. No Candle e'er shall shine in Thee, Nor bridegroom‘s voice e'er heard shall be. In silence ever shalt thou lie, Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity. Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide, And did thy wealth on earth abide? Didst fix thy hope on mould'ring dust? The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? Raise up thy thoughts above the sky That dunghill mists away may fly. Thou hast a house on high erect Frameed by that mighty Architect, With glory richly furnished, Stands permanent though this be fled. It‘s purchased and paid for too By Him who hath enough to do. A price so vast as is unknown, Yet by His gift is made thine own; There‘s wealth enough, I need no more, Farewell, my pelf, farewell, my store. The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above.

my husband thinks we have too many chairs in our house. I know we need more, my friend has enough chairs, many many more than we have. I told my husband: chairs, picture frames — they are the same. when my friend and her husband have talked about looking for a different place to live, one with space for the families of their six children, he says, "but I want this view." on the interior walls, facing away from the sea, are paintings of this view — "well, it's not exactly our view, but close" — taken somewhere on this small stretch of land near the lighthouse, the painting of their house really of the one next door, a corner of their house visible in the background (receding in the perspective). in the Whistleresque painting, the house next door is a train rushing forward through the night fog. our daughter believing, acting as though (she believes) she can control the universe externals, personal at dinner, after three days joking of this (its urgency, extravagant tampering, how she commands and navigates, exhorts us: parents, boyfriend), I say, too bluntly, "so — have you thought of modifying your behavior?" crude, hurt her, she cries, is embarrassed, she says, thinking the others in the restaurant have heard, "I know you don't mean to, but you're hard of hearing, you talk too loud." reading garden books the last week, immersed in gardens, in words, in visions of gardens deer ate all the roses, the night Lily left the gate open her husband wants this view, there is a place down the road, much larger, it has the same view (nearly). he wants to move there, but the houses are entirely different, the new one very formal, "a real house," my friend says. she is reluctant to leave her perfect — the perfect she created — structure. the chair, the frame, matter as much as the view they arrange. ashamed, aware I've cut too close "your behavior" jokes are dismissable/admissible this was criticism. I want to apologize but do not explanation       self-righteous (remember an earlier fight, when she lived with us, her shouting, "why do you always have to be right?" me shouting, "because I AM!") or sinking, return the authenticity (not authority) of others’ visions, seeing New York thirdhand at the moment of being there firsthand with my friend. my my interpretation of her memories — she’d lived there — inextricable from my own immediately perceived visions. descending into the subway on an August day, the steps down to an aqua pool filled with Perrier. everyone breathing in the airpockets the bubbles made, cool and floating under water. they rose from the subway refreshed. her dream became my strongest image of the city later, we go to the movies, split up at the multiplex, the men to a macho flick (we see the previews of their film/ glad we missed it). she and I sit in the last row — she doesn't want anyone behind her — spatial boundary preemptive, compelling throughout the movie she tells latecomers the two seats beside her are taken. I talk to her about imagining her aura I want to give her the house she wants. I love her so. I want her to know. like my mom reading about newborn babies in the hospital, cribs ribboned in blue and pink, "as if that's not enough," she says, "the cribs are labeled: 'I'm a boy!' 'it's a girl!' " looking out from oneself: I and thou. (bowing acknowledgment in that "thou": blessing.) looking out for oneself: I and it. imagining her aura — huge and wide — so if someone sits near — it won't matter — she'll still have personal space — "I know, I know" — driving her Delta 88 — and she squeezes my hand — her father out fishing on a boat in the afterlife (according to the psychic) — something about wine — your mother — tell her — "my mother doesn't drink" — tell your mother to stop whining. it is not one view. from the same chair it’s constantly changing, coloring, waving. from different chairs, more so. gradations. water, clearest of notices that we are (the world is) in constant motion. putting forth first: we are? the world is? world/we. moving out from where we are/moving in from out there. the ferry crossing back and forth to the mainline, to “America.” this place called simply, by islanders, “the island.” THE island. there is no other frame or chair, no need for description, the world is circumscribed. For Becca, Betty, Marie

The entrance at the back of the complex led onto a road, where an upended couch tilted into a ditch and a washing machine gleamed avocado beneath pine needles. From the end, you turned left and left again, then cut a trail to find the cul-de-sac of bright brick houses. We'd walk as far as we dared before a man pushing a mower might stop to ask, "whadda you boys need?" That was a question we could never answer. I loved the name of the place, White Hall, imagined that each interior was a stretch of marble perfect wall adorned by smiling photos of the family. Our own halls were brailled with nail holes of former tenants, the spackled rounds of fists. But doesn't longing clarify the body? The boys I left behind: Tommy, wearing the World War II trenching tool; Danny, whose father, so much older than the other parents, died in his recliner one sunny afternoon while watching baseball; Duke, who stole his mother's car and crashed into a wall. Boys who knew when you were posing, waiting for someone to say, "smile." Boys who, on those latch-key days, held themselves in narrow passages when no one was there to show them what to do.

I went into one room and then I went into another. I was in a room inside a room. There I felt safe.

To our land, and it is the one near the word of god, a ceiling of clouds To our land, and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns, the map of absence To our land, and it is the one tiny as a sesame seed, a heavenly horizon ... and a hidden chasm To our land, and it is the one poor as a grouse’s wings, holy books ... and an identity wound To our land, and it is the one surrounded with torn hills, the ambush of a new past To our land, and it is a prize of war, the freedom to die from longing and burning and our land, in its bloodied night, is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far and illuminates what’s outside it ... As for us, inside, we suffocate more!

All night I dreamed of my home, of the roads that are so long and straight they die in the middle— among the spines of elderly weeds on either side, among the dead cats, the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase thrown open, sprouting failures. 2. And this evening in the garden I find the winter inside a snail shell, rigid and cool, a little stubborn temple, its one visitor gone. 3. If there were messages or signs, I might hear now a voice tell me to walk forever, to ask the mold for pardon, and one by one I would hear out my sins, hear they are not important—that I am part of this rain drumming its long fingers, and of the roadside stone refusing to blink, and of the coyote nailed to the fence with its long grin. And when there are no messages the dead lie still— their hands crossed so strangely like knives and forks after supper. 4. I stay up late listening. My feet tap the floor, they begin a tiny dance which will outlive me. They turn away from this poem. It is almost Spring.

The galloping collection of boards are the house which I afforded one evening to walk into just as the night came down. Dark inside, the candle lit of its own free will, the attic groaned then, the stairs led me up into the air. From outside, it must have seemed a wonder that it was the inside he as me saw in the dark there.

Mittens are drying on the radiator, boots nearby, one on its side. Like some monstrous segmented insect the radiator elongates under the window. Or it is a beast with many shoulders domesticated in the Ice Age. How many years it takes to move from room to room! Some cage their radiators but this is unnecessary as they have little desire to escape. Like turtles they are quite self-contained. If they seem sad, it is only the same sadness we all feel, unlovely, growing slowly cold.

It has arrived—the long rag rug multiply folded. On top, one alien hair. I put my face to the folds and smell despair palpable as salt air in all those rooms and houses, small and smug— enclosures I passed through on my way where? Whoever did the weaving appears old in my mind’s eye. I can’t make out her face, can only conjure up the faintest trace of an abstracted grace, clack of the loom. Does she know they’ll be sold these precious things, in some unheard-of place? I perch her on a hill, precariously beyond the reach of waves’ daily boom. Sun blazes overhead, but her dim room (no bigger than the loom) is proof against the violence of the sky From it I further spin what I once called my home: Endless horizons fading into haze, the mornings dawn came up so rosy clear; snails in the garden, sheep bells everywhere, the brightness of the air, terraces, valleys organizing space and time’s cessation. So this package here I’m now unwrapping, in New York, today (rugs like rainbows, woven with a grace my strands of language barely can express; dishrags of dailiness dispersed and recombined and freshly gay) comes to me imbued with images, slowly and faithfully across the water, across the world. It represents a time I myself snipped and recombined as rhyme as soon as I went home, if that is where I am. These rugs recover the sense of stepping twice into a single river.