63 Home poems

For part of one strange year we lived in a small house at the edge of a wood. No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody to ask questions. Except for the one big question we went on asking ourselves. That spring myriads of birds stopped over briefly. Birds we’d never seen before, drawn to our leafy quiet and our brook and because, as we later learned, the place lay beneath a flyway. Flocks appeared overnight—birds brilliant or dull, with sharp beaks or crossed bills, birds small and enormous, all of them pausing to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings, and disappear. Each flock seemed surer than we of a destination. By the time we’d watched them wing north in spring, then make an anxious autumn return, we too had pulled it together and we too moved into what seemed to be our lives.

eviction people arrive to haunt me with descriptions of summer’s wildflowers how they are carpet of fierce colors I bet you hate to see us they say and yes I do hate to have to move again especially from here destruction brought to place of love the uneven smiles that win she’s a business woman blond tints that glow at sunset as profits rise alas what labor I employ but to ensure a moment’s joy sets branches trembling & arms chilled dear one long returning home, come to clammy feverish details, muffed sorrow I turn to throw a tear of rage in the pot never remorse but hint of scruples I’d hope for it is error it is speculation it is real estate it is the villain and comic slippery words the work of despotic wills to make money I scream take it take your money! make your money go on it’s only money, here’s a wall of dry rot here’s an unfinished ceiling, just a little sunlight peeks through this (lark, no luminance! exquisite St. Etienne stove doesn’t work icebox either too hot or frozen firescreen tumbling down kitchen insulation droops is ugly & a mess ah but love it here, only surface appearances to complain of, nothing does justice to shape of actual events I love but a fight against artificiality its inherent antagonism, bald hatred of moving and problem of thirsty fig tree in Burroughs apartment wakes me I don’t want to go down there yet & how to orchestrate the summer properly the problem of distress & not denying pride from it too atomized to make pleasure of melancholy & an uncontrollable enthusiasm for throne & altar I want to sit high want simple phalanx of power independent of everything but free will & one long hymn in praise of the cabin! it is a confession in me impenetrably walled in like aesthetics like cosmos an organ of metaphysics and O this book gives me a headache dear Weston La Barre let’s have an argument because I see too clearly how rational I must be & the kernel of my faith corrupted because you have no reliance on the shaman & outlaw or how depth of mind might be staggering everywhere except in how important science is science? no he won’t he fooled by visions whereas I wait for dazzling UFOs they announce will arrive high in these mountains I repair the portal even invite stray horses in have a little toy receiving station that sits by the bed at the edge of night all thoughts to place of love all worries to this place of love all gestures to the place of love all agonies to place of love, thaws to place of love, swarthy valley sealed in wood, log burst into flame in home of love, all heart’s dints and machinations, all bellows & pungency antemundane thoughts to palace of love all liberties, singularity, all imaginings I weep for, Jack’s sweet almond-eyed daughter to place of love, & heavy blankets and terracing & yard work & patch work & tenacity & the best in you surround me work in me to place my love dear cirques, clear constraint, dissenting inclinations of a man and a woman, Metonic cycle all that sweats in rooms, lives in nature requiems & momentum & trimmings of bushes dried hibiscus & hawks & shyness brought to this place of love trees rooted fear rooted all roots brought to place of love, mystery to heart of love & fibers and fibers in sphere of love a whole world makes spectators of slow flowering of spring & summer when you walk to town for eggs and continuous hammerings as new people arrive & today we notice for first time a white-crowned sparrow out by the feeder with the chickadees & juncos & I missed that airplane-dinosaur in dream nervous to travel again, miss buds pop open to shudder in breeze, their tractability makes sudden rise of sensibility you are shuddering too & your boy laugh comes less frequent now you’re drawn into accountability, will I return to find all stuff tidy in silver truck ready to go? it’s you in this place I lose most because it’s here in you I forget where I am, this place for supernaturals perched high in sky & wind, held by wind in stationary motion as bluebird we observe over meadow or caught up with jetstream dipping in valley’s soft cradle power & light & heat & radiance of head it takes power & light & heat & radiance of head it takes to make it work while down there someone building replicas of what it feels like to be a human multitude, fantasy molded clumsily, spare my loves and love of glorious architecture when you really put outside in, the feeling of cloud or mountain or stone having developed an idea of idyllic private life & sovereignty of spirit over common empirical demand I tell you about renunciation, I tell you holy isolation like a river nears ocean to dissolve and cabin becomes someone’s idea of a good place discretion you pay for it wasn’t mine either but sits on me imprints on me forever splendor of fog, snow shut strangers out gradual turn of season, ground stir, pine needle tickle your shoulder, peak curve, fresh air.

the termites had deboned the thing it was clean there was no saving it in one bedroom a dresser with blue drawers its peg-legs rested on pure membrane a girl just stood in her underwear ran the tips of her fingers over her ribs thought greyhound no one knew no explaining why she didn’t fall through the floor the kids were drinking beer in the yard the tetherball rope caught one girl’s throat her mother’s face obscured behind the porch screen the mesquite shadow no one could make her out her feet rested on hot sashes of dust the sounds on the television were far away as that big caliche mound looked lake a waving man the president got shot the boards stayed together for another three days it was a matter of apathy or swelling or everyone was too hot to move

God banish from your house The fly, the roach, the mouse That riots in the walls Until the plaster falls; Admonish from your door The hypocrite and liar; No shy, soft, tigrish fear Permit upon your stair, Nor agents of your doubt. God drive them whistling out. Let nothing touched with evil, Let nothing that can shrivel Heart's tenderest frond, intrude Upon your still, deep blood. Against the drip of night God keep all windows tight, Protect your mirrors from Surprise, delirium, Admit no trailing wind Into your shuttered mind To plume the lake of sleep With dreams. If you must weep God give you tears, but leave You secrecy to grieve, And islands for your pride, And love to nest in your side.

The houses those suburbs could afford were roofed with old savings books, and some seeped gravy at stitches in their walls; some were clipped as close as fury, some grimed and corner-bashed by love and the real estate, as it got more vacant, grew blady grass and blowfly grass, so called for the exquisite lanterns of its seed, and the land sagged subtly to a low point, it all inclined way out there to a pit with burnt-looking cheap marble edges and things and figures flew up from it like the stones in the crusher Piers had for making dusts of them for glazes: flint, pyroclase, slickensides, quartz, schist, snapping, refusing, and spitting high till the steel teeth got gritty corners on them and could grip them craw-chokingly to grind. It’s their chance, a man with beerglass-cut arms told me. Those hoppers got to keep filled. A girl, edging in, bounced out cropped and wrong-coloured like a chemist’s photo, crying. Who could blame her among in-depth grabs and Bali flights and phones? She was true, and got what truth gets.

It’s September: I’ve moved into town, into the attic of an old barn—a big open room I reach by climbing a ladder that rises through a hole in the floor. The room is long and high, with windows at each end, a row of skylights that leak rain, and shake and chatter in the northeast winds. I sleep beneath the roof’s steep pitch, my mattress flat on the boards, looking up at the high ceiling, where morning diffuses downward in grains of bright dust. This was the old painter’s studio. The light in those famous canvases is still here —he couldn’t carry it away with him— though his paintings took away everything else, opening space with a stroke of blue or yellow. I think of his violent loves, the stories they still tell about him here. But how quiet and alive his paintings were, how they quiver with the life not yet realized. The town is quiet in September. Sometimes I hear people talking in the street. Last night someone said they were going to wait for Michael, and a voice said that Michael had gone home. I walk the narrow path down to the marsh. Wind hard in the dunes. Rain as I’m returning, cutting through twisting streets, past gardens bent low with rain, their colors a wash of gold. I feel the air surround my body, feel it move between my legs and between each finger, as I walk, not mastering space, but in it. And when the clouds open, the sky suddenly wide and high, no roof of leaves, it seems there’s nowhere to go but into wind or water. I climb the narrow stairs that keep turning, twisting inward until they meet the ceiling, which opens and I rise through the floor, released into an openness I never learn to expect. At the yellow table I sit and read an interview with Picasso’s lover, Francoise Gilot, the only one to leave him and have another life. She says she was not destroyed by him, as the others were: “Because I am of the stuff that cannot be destroyed.” I felt something blow through me then. Some devouring wind. Surely, then, I am of the stuff that can be destroyed. Haven’t I felt it? The breaking of all I was? Don’t I sit and count my losses, here in this room where all the life I knew has ended, so bare with desire I seem to be eating sky? That’s how it is here: I’m lonely, sad; the wind blows along the roof and I can’t sleep. Rain runs down the walls and streams across the floor, leaving dirty puddles on the boards. A yellow table and a cupboard painted blue, three chairs that don't match, or even balance rightly, a dented bucket, its metal reflecting darkly what is, what cannot be taken away. What’s beautiful here? The whole thing is beauty, a clarity not in things but around them, complete. And still, I seem to remain, somehow, myself, to remain at least something, at a loss to know how much can be taken from me and leave me only changed, not ruined, alert in an emptiness so alive I recognized it as my life. What would be left, the shape of it then, this life? I said some beauty, or radiance, an endless space I fall into or am taken up by, a brightness that holds me, gathers light in the center of empty space, like a vision of the life I have not lived.

A mothball May. I lean against the kitchen wall. The sacred pear tree on the hill. The skyline, small green wheat waverunning with the wind. From west to east the green’s spanned out by men on horseback and on foot, men with long staffs slow-motion, searching. The saddles glint. What are they sweeping for? Why coming this direction? Are those staffs guns? If  they are after quail, or hares, why is their fanning law-enforcement grim, as for a felon, a missing person, or one too imbecile to find her way? One who laid waste the safe place by the kitchen wall, bankrupted her May day, malpracticed pear and gifted wheat? I’m waiting, men.

In the northwest corner of Dakota, I saw a room someone had left, a plush sofa returning its button- eyed stare to the glance she gave it over her shoulder, the dog, too, turning. In the next room, the mattress, with mattress stories one after another tumbling out of each spring, the window she opened first thing, its vista of mile after mile, and the windmill hauling its load. I saw that, and nothing alive— green oil-figured linoleum laid on counters, nails of bad craft, the ripped blackening edge that scared her more than the bed and the sound of the windmill winning its will from the aquifer night after night, the whack of her blade on the block. There are houses with too many knives sometimes she said, but when June ferned its way in she'd relent, take on its restraint, heave again on the stained sheets her burden of child, herself a torn girl again, combing her hair through fingers bruised by corn shocks, sweet juice in the cuts of her life. She began to think of the border and mustangs without brand. At night they'd bend over the bed and nuzzle. One ride was enough. She had sufficient magic to cling to a mane and fare over the windowsill. I see where the curtain fell and nobody mended the tear, I see where bare feet marked like fossils her pass in the rain. When he uncovers fiddleheads by the spring, why does he always think of that first sight of her thigh in the peach-colored dress, of his hand's searching moss with its red-gold stamens, the spring in that arid landscape like something from Canaan under his tongue? Even in old age he'd ponder the moment, lying under the moon forgiving himself, her, the world that bred their conundrum, washed in that rain.

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes on a pile of broken dishes by the house; a tall man too, says the length of the bed in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, says the Bible with a broken back on the floor below the window, dusty with sun; but not a man for farming, say the fields cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn. A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves covered with oilcloth, and they had a child, says the sandbox made from a tractor tire. Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole. And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames. It was lonely here, says the narrow country road. Something went wrong, says the empty house in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste. And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard like branches after a storm—a rubber cow, a rusty tractor with a broken plow, a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

All that once was is this, shattered glass, a rot of tin and wood, the hum of limp-legged wasps that ascend like mote swirls in the heatlight. Out front a cherry tree buckles in fruit, harvested by yellow jackets and starlings, the wind, the rain, and the sun.