478 Identity poems

The one who pulled the trigger with his toe, spread-eagled on his girlfriend’s parents’ bed, and split his face in halves above his nose, so that one eye looked east, the other west; sometimes that sad boy’s bifurcation seems to replicate the math of love and grief — that zero sum of holding on and letting go by which we split the differences with those with whom we occupy the present moment. Sometimes I see that poor corpse as a token of doubt’s sure twin and double-mindedness, of certainty, the countervailing guess, the swithering, the dither, righteousness, like Libra’s starry arms outstretched in love or supplication or, at last, surrender to the scales forever tipped in the cold sky.

Art begins with a lie The separation is you plus me plus what we make Look into lightbulb, blink, sun’s in your eye I want a rare sky vantage point free from misconception Art begins with a lie Nothing to lose, spontaneous rise of reflection, paint the picture of a lightbulb, or eye the sun How to fuel the world, then die Distance yourself from artfulness How? Art begins with a lie The audience wants to cry when the actors are real & passionate Look into footlight, then feed back to eye You fluctuate in an artful body You try to imitate the world’s glory Art begins with a lie That’s the story, sharp speck in the eye.

Go, soul, the body’s guest, Upon a thankless errand; Fear not to touch the best; The truth shall be thy warrant. Go, since I needs must die, And give the world the lie. Say to the court, it glows And shines like rotten wood; Say to the church, it shows What’s good, and doth no good. If church and court reply, Then give them both the lie. Tell potentates, they live Acting by others’ action; Not loved unless they give, Not strong but by a faction. If potentates reply, Give potentates the lie. Tell men of high condition, That manage the estate, Their purpose is ambition, Their practice only hate. And if they once reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell them that brave it most, They beg for more by spending, Who, in their greatest cost, Seek nothing but commending. And if they make reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell zeal it wants devotion; Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion; Tell flesh it is but dust. And wish them not reply, For thou must give the lie. Tell age it daily wasteth; Tell honor how it alters; Tell beauty how she blasteth; Tell favor how it falters. And as they shall reply, Give every one the lie. Tell wit how much it wrangles In tickle points of niceness; Tell wisdom she entangles Herself in overwiseness. And when they do reply, Straight give them both the lie. Tell physic of her boldness; Tell skill it is pretension; Tell charity of coldness; Tell law it is contention. And as they do reply, So give them still the lie. Tell fortune of her blindness; Tell nature of decay; Tell friendship of unkindness; Tell justice of delay. And if they will reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell arts they have no soundness, But vary by esteeming; Tell schools they want profoundness, And stand too much on seeming. If arts and schools reply, Give arts and schools the lie. Tell faith it’s fled the city; Tell how the country erreth; Tell manhood shakes off pity; Tell virtue least preferreth. And if they do reply, Spare not to give the lie. So when thou hast, as I Commanded thee, done blabbing— Although to give the lie Deserves no less than stabbing— Stab at thee he that will, No stab the soul can kill.

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour before the house had woken to make sure that everything was in order with The Lie, his drip changed and his shackles all secure. I was by then so practiced in this chore I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye. Such, I liked to think, was our rapport. I was at full stretch to test some ligature when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore his gag away; though as he made no cry, I kept on with my checking as before.

Some bloodied sea-bird’s hovering decay Assails us where we lie, and lie To make that symbol go away, To mock the true north of the eye. But lie to me, lie next to me; The world is an infirmity. Too much of sun’s been said, too much Of sea, and of the lover’s touch, Whole volumes that old men debauch. But we, at the sea’s edge curled, Hurl back their bloody world. Lie to me, like next to me, For there is nothing here to see But the mirrors of ourselves, the day, Clear with the odors of the sea. Lie to me. And lie to me.

How little we know, and when we know it! It was prettily said that “No man hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was . . . Never mind, dears, the afternoon will fold you up, along with preoccupations that now seem so important, until only a child running around on a unicycle occupies center stage. Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you will have to come up with something, be it a terraced gambit above the sea or gossip overheard in the marketplace. For you see, it becomes you to be chastened: for the old to envy the young, and for youth to fear not getting older, where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin. And it was said of Gyges that his ring attracted those who saw him not, just as those who wandered through him were aware only of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache, while lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about, whether it was something they could be part of sans affront to self-esteem. And those temple hyenas who had seen enough, nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze, were no place you could count on, having taken a proverbial powder as rifle butts received another notch. I, meanwhile . . . I was going to say I had squandered spring when summer came along and took it from me like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine. But here it is winter, and wrong to speak of other seasons as though they exist. Time has only an agenda in the wallet at his back, while we who think we know where we are going unfazed end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know by the unexpectedness of ice and stars and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it, a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down into this wagonload of prisoners. The meter will be screamingly clear then, the rhythms unbounced, for though we came to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails of proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed, only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.

The subtlest strain a great musician weaves, Cannot attain in rhythmic harmony To music in his soul. May it not be Celestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves That half the sweetness of the song, he leaves Unheard in the transition. Thus do we Yearn to translate the wondrous majesty Of some rare mood, when the rapt soul receives A vision exquisite. Yet who can match The sunset’s iridescent hues? Who sing The skylark’s ecstasy so seraph-fine? We struggle vainly, still we fain would catch Such rifts amid life’s shadows, for they bring Glimpses ineffable of things divine.

Only he Remembered the day we met And only I The day we said goodbye: “Last day of  June, our first blackberry pie,” He always said. A wood fire in the summer kitchen, The hottest day.... A squall in the bedroom. I can’t remember. Nor he, The December cube of  clay, The storm the day before, How the bare trees Played Giant Step in the dawn wind, Or how On the other bed, rhythmically Touching her knuckles to the wall, My mother slipped forever into fantasy. Only he Remembered the spoken hate (Its change too sheepish to impart) Saw daggers still growing In bristling clump out of my heart. I beg you, kids—no memorials, please. Don’t write poems to me. Don’t bother. What we said we said. What’s unsaid lacks ears. In this I’m like my father.

Who knows this or that? Hark in the wall to the rat: Since the world was, he has gnawed; Of his wisdom, of his fraud What dost thou know? In the wretched little beast Is life and heart, Child and parent, Not without relation To fruitful field and sun and moon. What art thou? His wicked eye Is cruel to thy cruelty.

She stepped into the tub at dawn and turned on first the radio and then the tap. The Predator operators of Nellis afb have as much or more ptsd as pilots who fly. Down the hall and oceans distant I listened to her work to wash events away as quickly as they accumulated. A sort of race. I thought of where the soap was going. Targets glowed on monitors in the base’s trailers near Las Vegas and operators in full flight suits drank coffee from paper cups and adjusted altitude as I stroked myself beneath the blankets. I don’t like to take chances and haven’t been to Vegas in years. The pilots call people who run for cover, black sperm writhing across their screens, “squirters.” Near my finish line she tugged up the puckered rubber no-slip safety mat. The sound should remind you of a time a doctor took hold of your arm for comfort or leverage and tore the bandage off. If nothing like this has happened to you, imagine it. The haberdasher in Diderot who stole his wife’s dowry (long story) plans to leave Paris for Geneva, sensing distance will make him less guilty. She wasn’t coming back to bed. She may already have left. Villagers call the drones, which make a buzzing sound, “wasps.” The radio reported to an empty room. “An assassin,” writes Diderot, “if transported to the shores of China, will lose sight of the corpse he left bleeding on the banks of the Seine.” Asia’s always such a great place to hide, but Geneva’s obviously more convenient. Say she expected her husband to return from duty in a month. Would anything we did between now and then make us any more or less wretched than we were? The drone returns to Bagram without the missiles it left with and a soldier restores its complement. Either his name is Dan or else imagine that. And that a cuckold’s rage can snuff a bomb. I came into either a tissue or my fist. This was weeks or months ago, and I can’t recall. When de Castañeda and his men clambered down into the Grand Canyon in 1540, they found the boulders which had looked as tall as a man from the rim in fact stood taller than Seville’s La Giralda. They must have marveled at distance’s power to deceive and to wake deception’s twin, oblivion. Their women and homes forgotten. You can’t hear their screams from here, but they’re there.