478 Identity poems

For Julie If I could tie a river around my love’s waist like ribbon, make sails out of her blood and pin down death like a squirming bug. If I could lift and rock each coffin in my arms I would start with hers.

(‘Brother Square-Toes’ —Rewards and Fairies ) If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

If I were another on the road, I would not have looked back, I would have said what one traveler said to another: Stranger! awaken the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued from our story together: you are so much yourself ... and I am so much other than myself right here before you! If I were another I would have belonged to the road, neither you nor I would return. Awaken the guitar and we might sense the unknown and the route that tempts the traveler to test gravity. I am only my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm. If I were another on the road, I would have hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem would be of water, diaphanous, white, abstract, and lightweight ... stronger than memory, and weaker than dewdrops, and I would have said: My identity is this expanse! If I were another on the road, I would have said to the guitar: Teach me an extra string! Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier— that’s what my new song would say. Whenever the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two on this road: I ... and another!

if your complexion is a mess our elixir spells skin success you’ll have appeal bewitch be adored hechizando con crema dermoblanqueadora what we sell is enlightenment nothing less than beauty itself since when can be seen in the dark what shines hidden in dirt double dutch darky take kisses back to Africa they dipped you in a vat at the wacky chocolate factory color we’ve got in spades melanin gives perpetual shade though rhythm’s no answer to cancer pancakes pale and butter can get rancid

Touching your goodness, I am like a man Who turns a letter over in his hand And you might think this was because the hand Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man Has never had a letter from anyone; And now he is both afraid of what it means And ashamed because he has no other means To find out what it says than to ask someone. His uncle could have left the farm to him, Or his parents died before he sent them word, Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved. Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him. What would you call his feeling for the words That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

The sun got its new angel wings tee-shirt smudged with the sandbox’s finest demi-mud. This would render appearances partial, with a cornball’s incongruence. Sidewalk chalk radioactive Well, we’ll never write that letter to the lozenges, I mean that shrinking postcard on the way to Saturn Will someone please hand me my martini, so I can make it through this The                                       awful ordeal? title                                Name there placed                                   in the palm the                                                of your natural action                                                         tremor off-center rendering that floating green eye, well it floated off onto some bell somewhere Yesterday’s duck seemed to have three parents: a vulture a turkey, & a something a plastic shapeliness unaccountably signaling Dark Star Winged creatures suspend shyness & we were stabbed with permission all over & again, the assemblages of guilt frozen in dispossession Did that closet just murmur? “No mere solar beam can harm the lord of photosynthesis” “No barrier can stop one who dwells between all boundaries” “Welcome back to life, my former foes” “& be tied to the end of your string / flying in the air babes at night” 9/4/16 Tompkins Square Park

No matter if half the park is concrete and stanchions supporting a bridge, near industrial buildings yellow in the sun, their stalks of smoke soaring awake, next to empty lots and bus stops without seats or signs or schedules, near houses bright with paint the color of dented cans of Spam, men walking the streets to work look longingly towards their doors. No matter if all the murals decay and the statue of Zapata falls, more months pile to be swept, and years ironed, folded, and put away in drawers, and if jail bars bite off chunks of your view, remember a wise gambler's words on craps: call for the dice back. And between rolls, wipe the dust off the dice, as bills coil a foot in the wind because life is a wild emotion lying in the grass, soon to be green. Not even bags of chips, cheetahs with wind, avoid being tackled, gouged, and ripped apart. We all eventually submit, are arched over by a hyena grin and growl in the sun. Soon the spots will show and the world will pull tight with relief as the jungle rallies around us, as we smile now and cry later.

Never think you fortune can bear the sway Where virtue’s force can cause her to obey.

i knew you before you had a mother, when you were newtlike, swimming, a horrible brain in water. i knew you when your connections belonged only to yourself, when you had no history to hook on to, barnacle, when you had no sustenance of metal when you had no boat to travel when you stayed in the same place, treading the question; i knew you when you were all eyes and a cocktail, blank as they sky of a mind, a root, neither ground nor placental; not yet red with the cut nor astonished by pain, one terrible eye open in the center of your head to night, turning, and the stars blinked like a cat.   we swam in the last trickle of champagne before we knew breastmilk—we shared the night of the closet, the parasitic closing on our thumbprint, we were smudged in a yellow book. son, we were oak without mouth, uncut, we were brave before memory.

Like the Necessary Evil and Enola Gay, in a sphere of air that’s calm and mildly cool, I need some last grip of blue to trigger my sleep. It was technically flawless, that mission, as they’d dropped a few dry-run pumpkins with a bird’s-eye scope. When I close my eyes under the drone of a fan, I see planes rattling in the aftermath. Smoothly soldered rivets saved the men inside. At a commemoration the captain said, “I’m proud I started with nothing and made it work as perfectly as it did.” Then, when the press persisted, red flashing his face: “Hey, I sleep clear every night.” I lie in another state, placeless in the air, with the sound of occasional sirens or barking dogs. In a magazine I read about Predators over Pakistan, our drone with fifty eyes named Gorgon Stare. The men at Langley, bombing by remote, call a person who escapes their fire, who runs from a car or burning hut, a squirter. Night is sometimes an acid, sometimes a cure. In other words,homo fabula: we’re part human, part story, but our mouths pass on in silence. I think of the men who brought that silence: Mr. Harry S. Truman, Captain Paul Tibbets, who painted his mother’s name on the nose of the plane. My dream house circles me. Peonies thrive in beds I forget to water. With pillows I lie. A white cotton sheet covers my chest. I’ve been told to sleep in peace, where the trees are crowned with plenty and where birds float through wood-lawn, broom, and shrubs. Where a found twig can be golden or mundane. To orchestrate my sleep I take a pill, and as I fade finally, at the time of night when the birds believe they’re leaves, I dream of a path in acacia season where the air smells lemony and my whole day seems to rest on the limbs of the trees. Suddenly, a siren sound. Wind ripping the valley after a flash… In Plymouth, spring of ’45, while the Pacific squadrons trained, my father was born without cataracts in his eyes—David Roderick, 7 lbs., asleep on his mother’s white gown. There must have been milk and a huge cloud of necessity in which they breathed. In August, before he could talk, neutrons sheared from a core. I’ve read what they left behind: shrines’ ashes, and the boy under his desk who sang all day while his classmates fell silent, one by one. Two concussions hit the planes. They roared away from the light they’d made, the rain. At night, when I falter again, and the pill dissolves in my veins, I think of Langley’s coffee, its infrared eyes. I think of the Enola Gay parked in the Smithsonian, where a woman smashed a jar of blood on its wing. When I signed my mortgage, I also signed for the peonies and for the shield of my yard’s tall trees. The birds daub nests of twigs and human hair. My potting shed makes its own black sense of heat. Here’s the price I pay for sleeping:Reapers circling a far-off village, my drones. To eyes at a distance, a screen lies always between a failure and a dream. In other words,homo fabula: we’re part story, part human, but only if our names are known, and only if our names, when spoken aloud, are pronounced correctly, with proper inflection, as when a mother addresses her son.