478 Identity poems

In the field is a house of wood. A window of the house contains the field. You can't see far with a sun in the sky, with a living-room lamp at night. Locality is all you light, and you, as single as a bed. But there's no end to dark. The bed is in the clearing and the clearing's in the wind; the world is a world among others. Now your cell-stars split.

How something is made flesh no one can say. The buffalo soup becomes a woman who sings every day to her horses or summons another to her private body saying come, touch, this is how it begins, the path of a newly born who, salvaged from other lives and worlds, will grow to become a woman, a man, with a heart that never rests, and the gathered berries, the wild grapes enter the body, human wine which can love, where nothing created is wasted; the swallowed grain takes you through the dreams of another night, the deer meat becomes hands strong enough to work. But I love most the white-haired creature eating green leaves; the sun shines there swallowed, showing in her face taking in all the light, and in the end when the shadow from the ground enters the body and remains, in the end, you might say, This is myself still unknown, still a mystery.

inside my head Inside my head a common room, a common place, a common tune, a common wealth, a common doom inside my head. I close my eyes. The horses run. Vast are the skies, and blue my passing thoughts’ surprise inside my head. What is this space here found to be, what is this place if only me? Inside my head, whose face? the tools First there, it proves to be still here. Distant as seen, it comes then to be near. I found it here and there unclear. What if my hand had only been extension of an outside reaching in to work with common means to change me then? All things are matter, yet these seem caught in the impatience of a dream, locked in the awkwardness they mean. the swan Peculiar that swan should mean a sound? I’d thought of gods and power, and wounds. But here in the curious quiet this one has settled down. All day the barking dogs were kept at bay. Better than dogs, a single swan, they say, will keep all such malignant force away and so preserve a calm, make pond a swelling lake— sound through the silent grove a shattering spate of resonances, jarring the mind awake. the rose Into one’s self come in again, here as if ever now to once again begin with beauty’s old, old problem never-ending— Go, lovely rose ... So was that story told in some extraordinary place then,once upon a time so old it seems an echo now as it again unfolds. I point to me to look out at the world. I see the white, white petals of this rose unfold. I know such beauty in the world grows cold. the skull “Come closer. Now there is nothing left either inside or out to gainsay death,” the skull that keeps its secrets saith. The ways one went, the forms that were empty as wind and yet they stirred the heart to its passion, all is passed over. Lighten the load. Close the eyes. Let the mind loosen, the body die, the bird fly off to the opening sky. the star Such space it comes again to be, a room of such vast possibility, a depth so great, a way so free. Life and its person, thinking to find a company wherewith to keep the time a peaceful passage, a constant rhyme, stumble perforce, must lose their way, know that they go too far to stay stars in the sky, children at play.

I walk the purple carpet into your eye carrying the silver butter server but a truck rumbles by, leaving its black tire prints on my foot and old images          the sound of banging screen doors on hot afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on the sink flicker, as reflections on the metal surface. Come in, you said, inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the old songs that line your hands, inside eyes that change like a snowflake every second, inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel, inside the whiskers of a cat, inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you grind the pigments with your teeth, painting with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth. You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside the veins where my small feet touch bottom. You must reach inside and pull me like a silver bullet from your arm.

1 I made myself. Mommy and Daddy were proud, in that order. I didn’t mail myself like a letter some other kids already knew. I learned to use stamps. They stuck to my thumb without any glue. I didn’t have any permission. 2 There was a snowstorm that lasted three days and a cavern of monochrome memory. There were board games, and a pencil-and-paper game where the object was to figure out the object of the game. There was a stack of broad-rule writing paper, and a stapled calendar, and a 64-pack of sparkly rainbow crayons, to make each week look different since they all started out black and white, and all the same. 3 O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look, up there on the uneven climbing bars, too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it’s spring, the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors and thin swings that make no decision, like weathervanes. O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes.

Hot hot hot, you are hot, Sun, Glaring all over my east window Burning, beaming, yellowing The room. Uninterested in me Because I'm not Mayakovsky Although I feel you insisting I wake, that I produce right now Or perish as my uncle used to say. Brave Mayakovsky, doomed Mayakovsky, He could sass you, and later O'Hara (Before they turned forty, both gone) Sassed you and sassed Mayakovsky, too— But when I try I know it's just another Instance of me whistling in the dark, Me not blazing, me not burning out.

Life kept rolling her over like a piece of driftwood in the surf of an angry sea she was intelligent and beau- tiful and well-off she made friends easily yet she wasn’t able to put the pieces to- gether into any recognizable shape   she wasn’t sure who she wanted to be   so she ended up being no one in par- ticular   she made herself al- most invisible   she was the person you loved so much who really wasn’t there at all.

for Ruth Behar I’m still thinking about your porch light like a full moon casting a foggy halo in the frigid air last night, the bare oaks branching into the sky like nerve endings inches away from the frozen stars, the pink gables of your Victorian home protesting yet another winter for you captive in Ann Arbor as you practice mambo by the fireplace. I’m following your red-velvet shoes to conga beats and bongo taps taking your body, but not your life, from the snow mantling your windows outside, 1,600 miles away from Cuba. I’m tasting the cafecito you made, the slice of homemade flan floating in burnt sugar like the stories you told me you can’t finish writing, no matter how many times you travel through time back to Havana to steal every memory ever stolen from you. You’re a thief anyone would forgive, wanting only to imagine faces for names chiseled on the graves of your family at Guanabacoa, walk on Calle Aguacate and pretend to meet the grandfather you never met at his lace shop for lunch, or pray the Kaddish like your mother at the synagogue in El Vedado, stand on the steps there like you once did in a photo you can’t remember taking. I confess I pitied you, still trying to reach that unreachable island within the island you still call home. I thought I was done with Cuba, tired of filling in the blanks, but now I’m not sure. Maybe if I return just once more, walk the sugarcane fields my father once cut, drive down the road where my mother once peddled guavas to pay for textbooks, sit on the porch of my grandmother’s house, imagine her still in the kitchen making arroz-con-leche— maybe then I’ll have an answer for you last night when you asked me:Would you move to Cuba? Would you die there?

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done But he with a chuckle replied That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried. So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin On his face. If he worried he hid it. He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn’t be done, and he did it! Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that; At least no one ever has done it;” But he took off his coat and he took off his hat And the first thing we knew he’d begun it. With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin, Without any doubting or quiddit, He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn’t be done, and he did it. There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, There are thousands to prophesy failure, There are thousands to point out to you one by one, The dangers that wait to assail you. But just buckle in with a bit of a grin, Just take off your coat and go to it; Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.

It isn’t me , he’d say, stepping out of a landscape that offered, he’d thought, the backdrop to a plausible existence until he entered it;