478 Identity poems

Oh, black Persian cat! Was not your life already cursed with offspring? We took you for rest to that old Yankee farm, — so lonely and with so many field mice in the long grass — and you return to us in this condition —! Oh, black Persian cat.

Poor devil, dog six years on a tether clipped to a cubby box. The sun dropped into a slot on one side & after a dark spell popped up on the other. Birds of a weather chattered along wires overhead & the yards around shrilled emergencies. Who knew? Once upon afternoon a dust demon spins itself up in the master’s tumbleweed to his match scratch: puff: mega blaze & four hours’ ruckus until doused out. I’ll bask three days in wonders. I’ll slobber & yawn. I’ll gnaw & grunt in my groin to my heart’s content. They say death changes a body’s mind about things. Master shuts up & just rots.

What—write my name! How vain the feeble trust, To be remembered When the hand is dust— Grieve rather that the talents freely given Were used for earth—not treasured up for Heaven!

Here, an olive votive keeps the sunset lit, the Korean twenty-somethings talk about hyphens, graduate school and good pot. A group of four at a window table in Carpinteria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi. Here, in my California, the streets remember the Chicano poet whose songs still bank off Fresno's beer soaked gutters and almond trees in partial blossom. Here, in my California we fish out long noodles from the pho with such accuracy you'd know we'd done this before. In Fresno, the bullets tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day. In Fresno, we hope for less of the police state and more of a state of grace. In my California, you can watch the sun go down like in your California, on the ledge of the pregnant twenty-second century, the one with a bounty of peaches and grapes, red onions and the good salsa, wine and chapchae. Here, in my California, paperbacks are free, farmer's markets are twenty four hours a day and always packed, the trees and water have no nails in them, the priests eat well, the homeless eat well. Here, in my California, everywhere is Chinatown, everywhere is K-Town, everywhere is Armeniatown, everywhere a Little Italy. Less confederacy. No internment in the Valley. Better history texts for the juniors. In my California, free sounds and free touch. Free questions, free answers. Free songs from parents and poets, those hopeful bodies of light.

When I gather my long leaf-colored hair and make of it a stem and twist the handle of my head and join it back to me with metal pins I’m on your lap again my hands are in the air my view is mile upon mile I feel you fashioning the serpent on my head and the thick braid of you inside me I’m ready now to enter a prim public place where I am the teacher the police a saint I turn my back and everyone I command sees what it can be to be commanded

My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I’ve heard New York, Paris, or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it. Radio waves can obscure it. Words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form. For instance, that fool crow, picking through trash near the corral, understands the center of the world as greasy strips of fat. Just ask him. He doesn’t have to say that the earth has turned scarlet through fierce belief, after centuries of heartbreak and laughter—he perches on the blue bowl of the sky, and laughs.

A name trimmed They    are   seated   in    the   shadows with colored husking   corn, shelling   peas. Houses ribbons of wood set in the   ground.   I try to find the spot at which the pattern on the   floor   repeats.   Pink,   and rosy, quartz. They   wade   in brackish water. The    leaves    outside    the window tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them, making it impossible to   look   past   them, and though holes were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as port- holes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a few of the rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over its bowls through a fading light and backed by the protest of the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded in tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different shape, but all otherwise the same. I am urged out rummaging into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite directions, and their scrambling amounted to nothing. This simply means that the imagination is more restless than the body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for ex- ample, you say, “I always prefer being by myself,”   and, then, one afternoon, you want to telephone a friend, maybe you feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into the sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly frayed, all loose ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous egg, sitting in the vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day my grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular pelargonium. With a name like that there is a lot you can do. Children are not always inclined to choose such paths. You can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter buttons. In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for my nap, the light coming through was of a dark yellow, near- ly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and it made me thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it seems even more incomplete when we were there in person. Half the day in half the room. The wool makes one itch and the scratching makes one warm. But herself that she obeyed she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is an apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of breathing fish and breathing shells seems sad, a mystery, rap- turous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this different world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along the road she has cleared with her fingers. I mean untroubled by the distortions. That was the fashion when she was a young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by beaux. Once it was circular and that shape can still be seen from the air. Protected by the dog. Protected by foghorns, frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a message of happiness by which we were called into the room, as if to receive a birthday present given early, because it was too large to hide, or alive, a pony perhaps, his mane trimmed with colored ribbons.

I Because I was born in a kingdom, there was a king. At times the king was a despot; at other times, not. Axes flashed in the road at night, but if you closed your eyes and sang the old ballads sitting on the well edge amongst your kinspeople then the silver did not appear to be broken. Such were the circumstances. They made a liar out of me. Did they change my spirit? Kith in the night the sound of owls. A bird fight. II We also had a queen, whetted by the moon. And we her subjects, softening in her sight. III What one had the other had to have too. Soon parrots bloomed in every garden, and every daughter had a tuning fork jeweled with emeralds. IV Learning to hunt in the new empire, the king invited his subjects to send him their knives. He tested these knives on oranges, pomegranates, acorn squash, soft birches, stillborns, prisoners who had broken rules. He used them on the teeth of traitors. V When strangers massed at the borders, the courtiers practiced subjection of the foreign. The court held a procession of twine, rope, gold, knife, light, and prostitutes with their vials of white powder. Smoke coursed into the courtyard, and we wrought hunger upon the bodies of strangers. I am sure you can imagine it, really what need is there for me to tell you? You were a stranger once too, and I brought rope. VI Afterward, I always slept, and let the dealers come to me alone with jewels. VII In the court at night, we debated the skin of language, questioned what might one day be revealed inside: a pink and soft fruit, a woman in a field. . . Or a shadow, sticky and loose as old jam. Our own dialect was abstract, we wished to understand not how things were but what spectacle we might make from them. VIII One day a merchant brought moving pictures, the emperor's new delight. He tacked dark cloth to all the windows, top and bottom, and turned the lights off, cranking the machine like a needle and thread making forms into which we could insinuate our cold bodies and find warmth. Light; dark. And the sliding images of courtiers merrily balancing pineapples on their heads, as if this were an adequate story. IX And our queen, that hidden self. What became of her? Slid into the night like a statue, and felt around into shadows, nothing to prove, all worldly latitudes, knowing as a spider in retreat. The web her mind, and in it, the fly. X On Sundays, we flew kites to ensure our joy was seen by all those who threatened to threaten us. The thread spooling out up high in the purple sky and silver gelatin films being made, sliding through the cranking machine so that the barbarians could know we made images of ourselves coated in precious metal and sent them away indifferent to our wealth. I miss the citrus smell of spring on the plaza filled with young and long-limbed kite flyers. XI Do I have anything else to add? Only that I obeyed my king, my kind, I was not faithless. Should I be punished for that? It is true some of my pictures creak unhappily through the spindle. It is true one day they came to my house. I know the powder we coated our fingers with made us thirsty and sometimes cruel. But I was born with a spirit like you. I have woken, you see, and I wish to be made new.

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - In Corners - till a Day The Owner passed - identified - And carried Me away - And now We roam in Sovreign Woods - And now We hunt the Doe - And every time I speak for Him The Mountains straight reply - And do I smile, such cordial light Opon the Valley glow - It is as a Vesuvian face Had let it’s pleasure through - And when at Night - Our good Day done - I guard My Master’s Head - ’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s Deep Pillow - to have shared - To foe of His - I’m deadly foe - None stir the second time - On whom I lay a Yellow Eye - Or an emphatic Thumb - Though I than He - may longer live He longer must - than I - For I have but the power to kill, Without - the power to die -

Reason looks for Where I woke and was awake, in the two, then room fitting the wall, withdrawn, I arranges it had my desk and thus my corner. from there While waiting, waltz. The soles of our boots wear thin, but the soles of our feet grow thick. The difference between “he presented his argument” and “they had an argument.”   I still respond to the academic year, the sound of the school bell, the hot Wednesday morn- ing after Labor Day. Must the physiologist stand apart from the philosopher. We are not forgetting the patience of the mad, their love of detail. The sudden brief early morning breeze, the first indication of a day‘s palpability, stays high in the trees, while flashing silver and green the leaves flutter, a bird sweeps from one branch to another, the indistinct shadows lift off the crumpled weeds, smoke rises from the gravel quarry——all this is metonymy. The “argument”   is the plot, proved by the book. Going forward and coming back later. Even posterity, alas, will know Sears. As for we who “love to be astonished,” there are fences keeping cyclones. Might be covered, on the ground, by no distance. She spread her fingers as she spoke, talking of artifice, which extends beauty beyond nature. Perhaps it is only a coincidence. For, as Neitzsche put it, “If a man has character, he will have the same experience over and over again.” In the morning at eight I sense the first threat of monotony. Give a penny with a knife. Candor is the high pitch of scrutiny. I was tired of ideas, or, rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had first invigorated me and then made me sleepy, so that I felt just as one does after a long, early morning walk, returning unable to decide whether to drink more coffee or go back to sleep. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. The piggy-back plant is o.k. Tell anyone who telephones that I’m not home. I liked doing that, had made rooms for dolls on trucks that way, looking in on them through windows. It was a pretense of keeping our distance from anything that ap- peared pretentious. A sorry mess, but well-framed. As if a contorted checkerboard formed the portrait of a handsome woman in a hat of several ochres and umbers. The dog circles more than a moth before resting. Let the traffic pass. They were on vacation and therefore bored. Someone wanted to go away from everywhere forever but jumped into the bay. We were warned such accidents happen while mothers talk on phones. A doodled gnarled tree. Milk belongs to the mythology of cats but it makes them sick. Ours was a stray with ringworm. One night each year on Boston’s Beacon Hill the curtains remained undrawn and the public was invited to peek in. I didn’t wear my dark glasses because I didn’t want a raccoon tan. Yet this needs shading in. It seemed that I didn’t, after all, want a birthday empty of sentimentality. It’s on the compulsive buyer’s rack up front. The real adversary of my determination was determinism, regulating and limiting the range and degree of difference between things of one day and things of the next. I got it from Darwin, Freud, and Marx. Not fragments but metonymy. Duration. Language makes tracks.