478 Identity poems

The letters still come for Mrs Watters, who must, at one time, have warmed this house and lived as we do. Mostly small matters — the rolled calendar that, had she stayed, might hang now where I drew the rusted nail, the catalogues, the last gas bill unpaid — and always Mrs Watters. So for me the spirit of the house is feminine, its whisper of the one who, constantly, draws letters that assume she has never gone. On which I weekly write, without conviction: 'No longer living here. Address unknown.'

The boy painted himself white and ran into the darkness. We let the words “he may be dead, bury him,” bury him. We took his clothes to the rummage sale in the basement of the mission We put his photographs and drawings in a birdcage and covered it with a starquilt. For four nights voices carried clear to the river. After winter so many storms moved in strangers came among us They danced They shoveled in the shadows of trees Then, somehow we all felt all of us were of this one boy.

Who kills my history knows it is buried in the same air ay breathe. Only a hair is needed to keep you, mother. Only a fit of bone. Comfort, comfort, ay am my own. Wanting simple, a sun like water, a flow and stir of air. Warm stone, black-warm, dirt scent and bird. Ay am put out to weather. Animal eyed me here—heaving, breathing over— felt by smell for me and loomed. Air shifted my hair as it neared and sniffed then left. Comfort, comfort me. A thresh of sticks and vine, hand-carried high—ay am my own weight carried by, kind horse, kind mother, gone.

Every time I use my language, I tell the truth. A cat in a white collar, like a priest with calico fur, walks across the dead grass of the yard, and out through the white fence. The sun’s strong, but the colors of the lawn were washed out by the winter, not the light. February. Stained glass window of the house next door takes the sun’s full brunt. It must look spectacular to the neighbor in my head, a white-haired woman with an air of dignity and grace, who through pools of the intensest colors climbs the flight of stairs. I’ve never seen it, but I know it’s there.

I wait for my shadow to forget me, to take that one phantom step that I keep from taking. I wait for the simple flash of a dancer's spat upon this one moon of stage-light, the mind's lonely oval illuminated on the surface of some windless pond or slew. And the old soft-shoe practices to get it right, husha-husha-hush in its constant audition of sawdust. Even this choreography of useless wishing is not enough to keep tonight from becoming nothing more than some floor's forgotten routine where faded, numbered dance-steps silently waltz themselves away. The orchestra's now ready to Fauré into the evening's last song while I try to convince myself to cross this room for the first time all night and rinse what's left in some débutante's silver sequined waterfall, hope keeling hopelessly ever closer to the edge. Across the floor other couples sashay on. A tin flask empties itself from asking, the shadow's last chance now wasted in some chandelier's dim lust.

For once, I felt wanted, dead or alive, the day my fame outgrew the Famous Five. There came a time I could give no more to the other guys in the Gang of Four and I felt the dead weight fall from me when I unyoked the clowns of the Crucial Three. I considered all this as I boarded the bus to quit the town not big enough for both of us. One eye didn’t seem so much to leave behind as I sped to my job in the kingdom of the blind.

And blush for a cheek of stone. Blush for the lips sewn tight with thread, no speech for the dead maker— You’ve got the razor. You can make each suture snap. And watch the mouth bloom up with foam, as if he’d drowned himself in soap— You lift the neck and let the head drop back. The mouth yawns wide its prize— White thrive. The larval joy. Hot in their gorge on the stew of balms, a moist exhale— as if there were a last breath, a taunt coiling into your inner ear,Good Dog, you dig your hands in, up-cupping the glossal bed— saying, Graduate of the School of Flesh, Father Conspirator— I will learn it. I will bite the tongue from the corpse.

In the day’s mirror you see a tall black man. Fingers of gold cattail tremble, then you witness the rope dangling from a limb of white oak. It’s come to this. You yell his direction, the wind taking your voice away. You holler his mama’s name & he glances up at the red sky. You can almost touch what he’s thinking, reaching for his hand across the river. The noose pendulous over his head, you can feel him grow inside you, straining to hoist himself, climbing a ladder of air, your feet in his shoes.

If honor to an ancient name be due, Or riches challenge it for one that’s new, The British language claims in either sense Both for its age, and for its opulence. But all great things must be from us removed, To be with higher reverence beloved. So landskips which in prospects distant lie, With greater wonder draw the pleasèd eye. Is not great Troy to one dark ruin hurled? Once the fam’d scene of all fighting world. Where’s Athens now, to whom Rome learning owes, And the safe laurels that adorned her brows? A strange reverse of fate she did endure, Never once greater, than she’s now obscure. Even Rome her self can but some footsteps show Of Scipio’s times, or those of Cicero. And as the Roman and the Grecian state, The British fell, the spoil of time and fate. But though the language hath the beauty lost, Yet she has still some great remains to boast. For ’twas in that, the sacred bards of old, In deathless numbers did their thoughts unfold. In groves, by rivers, and on fertile plains, They civilized and taught the listening swains; Whilst with high raptures, and as great success, Virtue they clothed in music’s charming dress. This Merlin spoke, who in his gloomy cave, Even Destiny her self seemed to enslave. For to his sight the future time was known, Much better than to others is their own; And with such state, predictions from him fell, As if he did decree, and not foretell. This spoke King Arthur, who, if fame be true, Could have compelled mankind to speak it too. In this once Boadicca valor taught, And spoke more nobly than her soldiers fought: Tell me what hero could be more than she, Who fell at once for fame and liberty? Nor could a greater sacrifice belong, Or to her children’s, or her country’s wrong. This spoke Caractacus, who was so brave, That to the Roman fortune check he gave: And when their yoke he could decline no more, He it so decently and nobly wore, That Rome her self with blushes did believe, A Britain would the law of honor give; And hastily his chains away she threw, Lest her own captive else should her subdue.

I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice that ripples between them like hair still moist, if it ripples at all. Propped on a pallid elbow, the helix picks out of them no sea rumble but a clap of canvas, of shutters, of hands, a kettle on the burner, boiling—lastly, the seagull’s metal cry. What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region is that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision. Only sound needs echo and dreads its lack. A glance is accustomed to no glance back A list of some observations. In a corner, it’s warm. A glance leaves an imprint on anything it’s dwelt on. Water is glass’s most public form. Man is more frightening than his skeleton. A nowhere winter evening with wine. A black porch resists an osier’s stiff assaults. Fixed on an elbow, the body bulks like a glacier’s debris, a moraine of sorts. A millenium hence, they’ll no doubt expose a fossil bivalve propped behind this gauze cloth, with the print of lips under the print of fringe, mumbling “Good night” to a window hinge. I recognize this wind battering the limp grass that submits to it as they did to the Tartar mass. I recognize this leaf splayed in the roadside mud like a prince empurpled in his own blood. Fanning wet arrows that blow aslant the cheek of a wooden hut in another land, autumn tells, like geese by their flying call, a tear by its face. And as I roll my eyes to the ceiling, I chant herein not the lay of that eager man’s campaign but utter your Kazakh name which till now was stored in my throat as a password into the Horde. A navy-blue dawn in a frosted pane recalls yellow streetlamps in the snow-piled lane, icy pathways, crossroads, drifts on either hand, a jostling cloakroom in Europe’s eastern end. “Hannibal...” drones on there, a worn-out motor, parallel bars in the gym reek with armpit odor; as for that scary blackboard you failed to see through, it has stayed just as black. And its reverse side, too. Silvery hoarfrost has transformed the rattling bell into crystal. As regards all that parallel- line stuff, it’s turned out true and bone-clad, indeed. Don’t want to get up now. And never did. You’ve forgotten that village lost in the rows and rows of swamp in a pine-wooded territory where no scarecrows ever stand in orchards: the crops aren’t worth it, and the roads are also just ditches and brushwood surface. Old Nastasia is dead, I take it, and Pesterev, too, for sure, and if not, he’s sitting drunk in the cellar or is making something out of the headboard of our bed: a wicket gate, say, or some kind of shed. And in winter they’re chopping wood, and turnips is all they live on, and a star blinks from all the smoke in the frosty heaven, and no bride in chintz at the window, but dust’s gray craft, plus the emptiness where once we loved. In the little town out of which death sprawled over the classroom map the cobblestones shine like scales that coat a carp, on the secular chestnut tree melting candles hang, and a cast-iron lion pines for a good harangue. Through the much laundered, pale window gauze woundlike carnations and kirchen needles ooze; a tram rattles far off, as in days of yore, but no one gets off at the stadium anymore. The real end of the war is a sweet blonde’s frock across a Viennese armchair’s fragile back while the humming winged silver bullets fly, taking lives southward, in mid-July. Munich As for the stars, they are always on. That is, one appears, then others adorn the inklike sphere. That’s the best way from there to look upon here: well after hours, blinking. The sky looks better when they are off. Though, with them, the conquest of space is quicker. Provided you haven’t got to move from the bare veranda and squeaking rocker. As one spacecraft pilot has said, his face half sunk in the shadow, it seems there is no life anywhere, and a thoughtful gaze can be rested on none of these. Near the ocean, by candlelight. Scattered farms, fields overrun with sorrel, lucerne, and clover. Toward nightfall, the body, like Shiva, grows extra arms reaching out yearningly to a lover. A mouse rustles through grass. An owl drops down. Suddenly creaking rafters expand a second. One sleeps more soundly in a wooden town, since you dream these days only of things that happened. There’s a smell of fresh fish. An armchair’s profile is glued to the wall. The gauze is too limp to bulk at the slightest breeze.. And a ray of the moon, meanwhile, draws up the tide like a slipping blanket. The Laocoön of a tree, casting the mountain weight off his shoulders, wraps them in an immense cloud. From a promontory, wind gushes in. A voice pitches high, keeping words on a string of sense. Rain surges down; its ropes twisted into lumps, lash, like the bather’s shoulders, the naked backs of these hills. The Medhibernian Sea stirs round colonnaded stumps like a salt tongue behind broken teeth. The heart, however grown savage, still beats for two. Every good boy deserves fingers to indicate that beyond today there is always a static to- morrow, like a subject’s shadowy predicate. If anything’s to be praised, it’s most likely how the west wind becomes the east wind, when a frozen bough sways leftward, voicing its creaking protests, and your cough flies across the Great Plains to Dakota’s forests. At noon, shouldering a shotgun, fire at what may well be a rabbit in snowfields, so that a shell widens the breach between the pen that puts up these limping awkward lines and the creature leaving real tracks in the white. On occasion the head combines its existence with that of a hand, not to fetch more lines but to cup an ear under the pouring slur of their common voice. Like a new centaur. There is always a possibility left—to let yourself out to the street whose brown length will soothe the eye with doorways, the slender forking of willows, the patchwork puddles, with simply walking. The hair on my gourd is stirred by a breeze and the street, in distance, tapering to a V, is like a face to a chin; and a barking puppy flies out of a gateway like crumpled paper. A street. Some houses, let’s say, are better than others. To take one item, some have richer windows. What’s more, if you go insane, it won’t happen, at least, inside them. ... and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real cheese. After all these years it hardly matters who or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes, and your mind resounds not with a seraphic “do,” only their rustle. Life, that no one dares to appraise, like that gift horse’s mouth, bares its teeth in a grin at each encounter. What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech. Not that I am losing my grip; I am just tired of summer. You reach for a shirt in a drawer and the day is wasted. If only winter were here for snow to smother all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed book, while what’s left of the year’s slack rhythm, like a dog abandoning its blind owner, crosses the road at the usual zebra. Freedom is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name and your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie, and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram nothing drops from your pale-blue eye. 1975-76