478 Identity poems

In what sense I am I a minor observer as in a dream absorbed in the interior, a beardless youth unaccountably remote yet present at the action reminding me faintly of Prufrock. . . . a diminutive figure barely discernible seemingly ageless escapes me. The original impulse to sing compressed into one exultant note breaks out of the chest-space, vibrating along the shoulders in the presence of full-bodied womanliness, the eyes dark in the inner scene, the hair long and black, our dark lady, inmate of courtship. She does not speak. She is nameless. The reason for her presence there is unknown. A shepherd, vaguely associated, stands at a distance under a birch tree, causally, playing a flute. Sweetness streams across. . . . also from the balance and the position of each, it issues. Neither moves. The scene is not matter that can pall or diminish. Its secret holds as fast as I. As in Giorgione the suspense is eternal.

Hunted and sung unhunted / unsung clump of loghouse / chaxed hill unuttered / unstrung clistered bow hunted and unsung hunted / strung hunted / sung.

Alone, unfriended, on a foreign shore, Behold an hapless, melancholy maid, Begging her scanty fare from door to door, With piteous voice, and humbly bended head. Alas! her native tongue is known to few: Her manners and her garb excite suprise; The vulgar stare to see her bid adieu; Her tattered garments fix their curious eyes. Cease, cease your laugh, ye thoughtless vain; Why sneer at yon poor Indian’s pain? ’Tis nature’s artless voice that speaks: Behold the tear bedew her cheeks! Imploring actions, bursting sighs, Reveal enough to British eyes.

Indigenous Elvis works security: Chief Joseph hair, blue-black and pomped, turquoise and shell dangling from one ear, silver chunks of rings on every bronze knuckle. Indigenous Elvis works security: X-ray glances at your backpacks, laptops, empty still-moist shoes. Indigenous Elvis waves me to his line. A perfect gentlemen at all times, gingerly lifting my naked phone, holding the line as I return my computer and extra undies to my briefcase. Next line, next flight, Indigenous Elvis eases in too close, asks, "Where you headed this time?" Subtle tango, I lean away, wondering what it is he saw first gave me away— My beaded barrettes in their travel case? A slight turn to my eyes? Oh, mortification when I get him! Indigenous Elvis, at security, a third time. He lifts my carry-on, maneuvers my hand, gestures me close to ask, "How is my sweetheart?" Then against my neck, so my hairs rise with his sight, "How’s my sweetheart doing … your sister … ? ... the one that got away."

When two sane persons are together one expects that A will recognize B to be more or less the person B takes himself to be, and vice versa. — R.D. Laing, “The Divided Self” The woman in the attic did not have visitors. The man in the basement gave parties that were popular. The woman in the attic had mononucleosis. The man in the basement had type 1 diabetes. The woman in the attic listened to audiobooks which the man in the basement held in disdain. The door to the attic swelled in some weathers; in order to shut, it had to be slammed. “There is a way in which” was a way in which the man opened sentences, as in “There is a way in which to close a door so it doesn’t slam.” The woman in the attic took cautious walks to build her strength. The man in the basement pointedly said, “Some of us have ailments which are not manufactured.” The man in the basement wrote stories about heroin. The woman in the attic read stories with heroines. The woman in the attic noticed a bruise that ran from the top to the base of her thigh. The bruise looked like Europe. The man in the basement was in love with the sister of the secretive man who loved him more. He whooped at the woman, “You killed your student?” To himself he wept, “I killed my father.” The man in the basement, recently divorced, was left with literally two possessions. The woman in the attic purchased books on psychopathology. The man in the basement produced fecal matter that blocked the pipes in both attic and basement. The woman in the attic produced nothing at all. The woman in the attic was a waste of space. The man in the basement had sex almost daily. The woman in the attic had panic attacks. The man in the basement had only one rule: the woman in the attic was banned from his bedroom. But once she stole in and lay on his bed in his absence (or perhaps he was absent because she was there). The man in the basement moved to the West Coast; the woman in the attic crossed the Atlantic, whereas the house with the attic and basement saw states of fumigation, exorcism, detoxification, and rehabitation.

silver & gossamer & porcelain & cobwebs some people are made out of they walk from here to there a limited number of times only— but the bony phone is just dumb plastic it rings not at all i don’t understand: my ideas are universal but my audience is five guys at the shell station people just don’t get it she longs for what makes her grin (tînjeşte dupâ ce rînjeşte) the sweetness of want the repulsiveness of having after days she was returned by the storms of language that had tossed her far & she rearranged her face for the english language— what i heard i did not hear what i saw i did not see i trust my sense to dullness then i kill my joy & cease to be

in memory of Lorenzo Thomas How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? How Long, a city in China The nouns come toward you "Knee how," they say To the cluster of synonyms also approaching . . . has that evening train been gone? How long, how long, baby, how long? Let me know if you ever change your mind about leaving, leaving me behind or at least tell yourself before you find yourself on that train winding its way through the mountains of How Much Province The ten thousand yellow leaves of the ginkgo tree kerplumfed onto the sidewalk on East 12th Street, a deep-pile carpet of them on the roof of the parked car proving that Nature does have a sense of humor, though if a sense of humor falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it. . . . for everyone has clustered alongside the railroad track for the arrival of night and its shooting stars with trails like pigtails I am among them and I know this track is mine though it does not belong to me Nothing belongs to me for at this moment the boxes are being stacked to make way for you to move through them, reading their labels: family photos, Pick-Up Stix, miscellaneous and the song of the porcelain, the celadon, and Delft itself vibrating How long, how long will this baby take to depart? But I don't want to think about the past I want to be the past, with everything I've ever known and done spread out on a two-dimensional plane erected vertically and moving through the space I occupy on Earth There is a lot more room left in me though everyone I've ever known who's died is there My mother my father say hello to Ted and Joe and laugh with them though Joe knows they are crying too and that Ted is crying and it sounds like laughter They do this to console me and I let them do it, to console them What? I didn't hear you or rather I heard you but I couldn't make out what you said The phone lay in its cradle pretending to be asleep and the blinking light made you think that it was dreaming and that there was someone you were supposed to call— or were they supposed to call you? Supposed. What does that mean. It means no more than the contours of the landscape that is as beautiful as the contours in John Ashbery's poetry but it doesn't mean anything unless you turn your mind on its side and let it lie there inert, and from this inertia will arise a wing, the white wing of a bird that has no anything else, only this one wing that folds and unfolds itself like the magnetic field it rises above in wave after wave after wave. Then it's back to basics: If you bone or debone a chicken it comes out the same, if you dust a cake with sugar you add something but if you dust your house you take away. Oh to be a rock or a stone or even a pebble! Momentarily, for there is much that is unattractive about being a rock. For one thing, I wouldn't be able to finish this poem, I would sit here petrified until they carted me away to a park to serve as ornamental sculpture, if I were lucky. Now that you are convinced of something that you already believed, the wallpaper becomes a fact in the home of Anne and Fairfield Porter, in the upstairs hallway and the bedroom where Jimmy stayed, the wallpaper that here and there was curling off the wall so Joe could tear it off and glue it to a big white sheet of paper. There is no other wallpaper I would ever want. Now the wallpaper goes away, back on the wall in 1969 where I stood and gazed at it for a long time and then went downstairs to add coal to Fairfield's stove, the big Aga he had shipped all the way from Sweden because he was very determined to have it. All day its warmth rose up to the second floor and caressed the wallpaper. Do you mind my going on like this? You want something else, right? Perhaps you want what you think poetry should give you, but poetry doesn't give anyone anything, it simply puts the syllables on the table and lets you rearrange them in your head, which you can do unless your head is a square the size of the tabletop. So why don't you lift your head off the table and go lie down somewhere more comfortable and not worry about anything, including the list of things to worry about that you keep revising in your head, for there is a slot through which that list can slip and float down like a baby in a rocking crib, down to a comfy dreamland and be transformed into a list of gods whose jokes are wonderful. But when the alarm goes off the jokes don't seem funny now that something is missing from them— but what? (You weren't even asleep.) It's not something you feel you're going to remember, it's not as if you can go down the alphabet until you get to a letter that has a special hum because it's the first letter of the name you can't quite recall, it's not as if you can look just to the side of where you think a dim star is and thereby have it magically appear. The glow is gone, and knowing it comes back sometimes is little consolation. But I'll take it and go not to a deserted island but to the factory where they make the bottles that are washed ashore with a message inside, and though the message has been blurred by water stains it's a message, like the poetry in Valéry's saying that poetry is something written by someone other than the poet to someone other than the reader. To you, Paul Valéry,chapeau, though in some of your works no chapeau, for in them it is not a bottle but a test tube one finds one's finger stuck in. • What do you want to do with your life? is a question asked of a young person but slightly modified for an older one: What do you want to do with the rest of your life? Having control is an illusion we like to be fooled by: the pinball machine of experience has bounced us off one thing and onto another bing bing bing! Life might be like a pinball machine but it isn't one, and the trouble is that you might be like a person and you are one, as if in reverie, but then it all seems crambe. And so Sir Thomas Browne walks in with an insane look on his face, he is searching for examples of the number 5, do you have any new ones for him? If not please step aside, and out he goes into the garden, eyes locked onto the vegetation, the afternoon light on the back of his coat. You're relieved he didn't stay long. For God's sake here he comes again. Lock the door! But he performs osmosis and becomes the door and then the room and then you! And you go about the house looking for examples of the number 5 and you don't know why or where it will all lead to. But I do. Who said that? I did. Why did you say that? I didn't. You didn't what? I heard you! You mean you hurt me. No, I . . . I see there's no point in talking to you. And there wasn't for there was no one there, only the residue of an idea that lasted a few moments, like the history of Bulgaria or the rattling of bamboo trees in the wind or the Millennium Hotel in Minneapolis. The water lilies float on the surface of the water unaware that they are being depicted by brushstrokes "I love to be beside your side beside the sea, beside the seaside by the beautiful sea!" we sang underwater glub glub as the propeller turned to face us and we fled because Hitler was the propeller and he was unsanitary So Père Noël took a bath whose bubbles rose up around his beard and tickled his fancy enough to keep him ho-ho-hoing throughout the holiday season, for he was in denial about his powerlessness in the face of Hitler Hitler kept a special area on his face for the powerlessness of Santa Claus, he wore it like a merit badge among the many others that covered his face so that no one could see what he really looked like, the way Santa Claus used his beard to hide the deep sadness he felt for all humanity, for if he arrived on their rooftops weeping and wailing it would not do, it would not do to bring the children model replicas of Auschwitz or dolls in the form of the Butcher of Buchenwald or even of himself with downcast eye and ashen brow. The doctor comes in and says, "What seems to be the trouble?" for the twenty-fifth time today but you are only once today so you say, "There's a pain in my chest it's been there for three days it started on Sunday night right after dinner," but the doctor is thinking about the dinner he is having tonight with an incredibly attractive woman He is more worried about her than he is about your symptom In fact he isn't worried about you at all though he might be worried about being sued by you if he tells you to go home and take an aspirin and when you do you die But maybe you were going to die anyway no matter what he said or did and the lawyer who eagerly took the case on behalf of your family was hit by a car as he crossed the street toward the courthouse steps and your entire family was killed in a plane crash on their way to a Grief Management Center in Arizona But none of this happens because the pain was due to a strained muscle in your chest and now you do remember that right after dinner you tried to stop in midsneeze Two hundred dollars for half a sneeze is the going rate these days The cost of living sticks a hose into your wallet and vacuums out the money in a trice and you are so grateful you aren't having heart surgery that you don't even notice until cold air drifts across the floor like fog in a horror film, the one you decided not to be in, and now it pursues you in the form of frozen air, the evil brother of cool air that filtered down out of the early summer evening and told you that the world is kind, that atoms rearrange themselves to make you feel better, that the sun is departing only because it felt you wanted to be alone for a while It didn't say, "I will never rise again, I will go far away and be a pinprick in the sky among the billions of others, and you will never know which I am and I will never tell you." And you will never answer back, "Sun, I do not think you have that power: only I do, and I will go away and be the sky." Is that what is meant by "aesthetic distance"? Say what? It's as if the Panama Canal had been given aesthetic distance by becoming a passageway in your brain and you floated down it and came out on the end that you started at! Hunh? I keep a ball of laughter inside that Hunh.

This is an old apartment and therefore the mirrors are huge and ornate. They go with the high ornate ceilings. There’s one such mirror in the living room and another in the bedroom. Both have intricately carved borders and a leafy crest on top. In the living room these have been painted over in white, but in the bedroom it’s still the original gilt rococo. Both mirrors sit on top of fireplaces and are as big as tombs. I think the descriptive term for them is French Regency Baroque. The mirror in the bathroom is pretty big too, and again somewhat ornate. And there are two other mirrors here as well. Not bad for a small, one-bedroom flat. The problem is I’ve never been too fond of mirrors. I rarely look into them, and only then to make sure my hair isn’t sticking up, or there’s no toothpaste showing, or when I’m fine-trimming the beard, to make sure I’ve missed no section. Oh, there are exceptional other occasions. Once when I got a red eye on a transatlantic flight, for example, I kept checking on the progress of the red’s disappearance. Or when I fell on gravel and got an ugly friction wound on my forehead, I had to first deal with applying the dressing, then keep an eye on how that healing was coming along. Very slowly, as it happened. As for gazing into the mirror to see if  I look OK enough to go out into the world, or — perish the thought — if I look attractive today, the answer is no way!Que sera, sera, as the song goes. Tiny children love the mirror and it’s very pleasant to watch them gazing into it. Dogs don’t understand it and bark fiercely at the rival dog that’s their reflection. I once gave a woman a full-length mirror as an Xmas present. It wasn’t ornate or gilded, and it got smashed soon afterwards, and seven years of bad luck followed. But if   I want to look at myself in the mirror regularly or for lengthy periods there’s plenty opportunity for it in this apartment. I could even stand naked and see everything. And as Monsieur Baudelaire reminds us, according to the immortal principles of 1789, everyone has equal rights; therefore I have the right to behold myself with pleasure or distaste. It is between me and my conscience.

There’s a spirit in me that admits no weakness. Is it the best of me or worst? Cow daisies burn their stars into the stalled air of pastures. No one else cares whether they’ll last. I shirk the sick and go out to pick flowers, Bushels of the tough and prickly-legged, Whichever I can pull out of the gulch, And push them into thunder-pitchers. An invalid in a peignoir pulls the covers over her head In the high cherry bed great-grandmother had made To match the chest of drawers. Solitudes gather under the Beau D’arc. I ache for the meanness, the glorious meanness That knocked croquet balls into its soft meal trunk, To hear the thwack of that mallet, To be it, as it cleanly cracks and lets the other ball be gone. Acquisitive gall made my people call themselves victorious. They thought they won the Mexican War, among others. One ancestor drove his bayonet into the dirt when he returned — This tree is what took root and bloomed, Though Beau D’arcs grow complex in illness. The locusts have chewed its thatch into fretwork, Its leaves fluted crisp, poxed yellowish, kissed by the worm. Huptemugs believed that train rides to the capital to hear Charlemagne singing Franz would cure the soul (As venison is cured) against life’s turmoil — They could not tolerate complaints of the feet, Corns and hammertoes, evidence of rot. If generous you might have called us committed to transcendence, Though who that ever fought her way into an opera box Ever let the arias consign her to a fate of constant care? There is a spirit in me that admits no weakness. When it sings, the rest of me despairs.

he ceased to exist as          a boy became          an appellation filed away          embedded hairs of a chin now hearsay of          hyperglossia my eyes are dyed blue my breast plate protects a spool   adversary’s nail was lodged in my skull       these roots       won’t work said the cook          changed the valance          spooked form of panther ran