478 Identity poems

56. I wanted to write the story of a metamorphosis. The story is at least partly based on a dream I recall from the diary of another writer. In the dream, which may not be a dream but simply a vision the writer has while seated at his desk, an image of a white horse appears on the wall. It is a white horse that haunts the writer's mind. The white horse has escaped its traces somewhere on an urban street. It is moving toward the suburbs with an eye to the countryside. It is successful in this movement because it progresses without hurry. It does not gallop. It moves along the street with the gait of a horse that drags a heavy cart behind it. The horse moves successfully toward its liberation since it does not appear to be a fugitive. My heart beats more quickly when I think about this story, which I have almost certainly partially invented. The horse hides its fear of slaughter. It plays a game. Irony is a kind of secrecy. It is a principle of groups.

I wanted to write the story of a metamorphosis. The story is at least partly based on a dream I recall from the diary of another writer. In the dream, which may not be a dream but simply a vision the writer has while seated at his desk, an image of a white horse appears on teh wall. It is a white horse that haunts the writer's mind. The white horse has escaped its traces somewhere on an urban street. It is moving toward the suburbs with an eye to the countryside. It is successful in this movement because it progresses without hurry. It does not gallop. It moves along the street with the gait of a horse that drags a very heavy cart behind it. The horse moves successfully toward its liberation since it does not appear to be a fugitive. My heart beats more quickly when I think about this story, which I have almost certainly partially invented. The horse hides its fear of slaughter. It plays a game. Irony is a kind of secrecy. It is a principle of groups.

75. Even with geographic proximity, there may exist temporal systems such that two people cannot meet one another or will never meet again. Dream last night includes swimming. Something about a thick river, keep riding boats on it, travel from station to station, temporary home to home. It is Berlin or a group of islands called "Connecticut." I am alone or have a child or am with my brother. It is sunset, when one seeks something. It is possible we somehow die for a time, a year, a month, a day, without realizing this, then awake to find ourselves, which is to say "someone," present again, attentive, expectant, apologetic even?

75. Even with geographic proximity, there may exist temporal systems such that two people cannot meet one another or will never meet again. Dream last night includes swimming. Something about a thick river, keep riding boots on it, travel from station to station, temporary home to home. It is Berlin or a group of islands called "Connecticut." I am alone or have a child or am with my brother. It is sunset, when one seek something. It is possible we somehow die for a time, a year, a month, a day, without realizing this, then awake to find ourselves, which is to say "someone," present again, attentive, expectant, apologetic even?

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips. As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak, inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips. Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards, wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips. Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some. Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips. Gotta love us girls, just struttin' down Manhattan streets killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips. Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.

There’s a dispute as to whether a name can be given to mills or not. If an essential root is given to one arm, they might be revolvers in insect’s casings, winding down a river of dirt in giving you, America, too small a thimble, the carcass of instruction and wavy, diminutive hand signals. From a cracked stone mouthing, to an unplayed game (still wrapped), to the skin of my plastic voice. There is a slow moving, not fast like the static form of urban frames. If you want (and here is IF, again, with indecision) to describe misdirected outcroppings from a battery of daylight shells, I mean light, I mean dark colored turtles, one map giving birth to another, this, flown heavy with rupture and landed after a piece was found. Not enough. There is a simple solution to your house, and my wooden block. One politic NOT on top of an Other, as one’s head is wrapped in a box, in a hole. Spittle looms swim, bide time clicks, made queues on an S, connected to separate one from a ONE, towels, in seeing an ocean first and making Balboan curves, you know there are all kinds of sticks. A brick, painted with soft hair, builds up questions to age and blacken linings, whip tailed lizards, their eyes are what implants carbonized blinking, placed alongside letters, the hold on becoming an END. Chips give sound to fingers, the Oh returning in flowing error, twice committed. Flood. Not a zero or a one, as if cornered with prostituted faces leaning outward, an Escape weighing about an army of lip collectors and fused hands and their whispers of Xs as in 2 again or more. There is the border of skin there is the border of membrane there is the border of number. Tongues firing the burned and buried. 2 and on, and THEN its disappearance. Invisibility solidified, a welt on a willow. You know a letter, a cache in a person. Memory management errors undone. Fluid as blood. Blood as a turning through time.

Hello, hello, what to tell you was The world's invisible You see only yourself, that's not the world although you are of it Are you there hello why do you have your head in a sack? a roony-bomb dream tank? Why you got a banana in your ear? You where? Brown eyes they see blue sky The world imagines you Figure it's a planet You hear? an obscure star in the middle Once you were pleasure-milk and egg Were you there Now you are eggs of milk between your legs Are you there “I am situated somewhere near the rim of a fairly large galaxy which is one of a group of same & outside of which a considerable number take their way at incredible speeds & apparently in the opposite direction...” You are a wish to squirt pleasantly You want a lot of things & they are nice & you imagine They are you and therefore you are nice You are a wish to be here Wishing yourself elsewhere “Hello. Try to talk some sense even if you don't think any It is history (your mistake: “History WAS”) now * History an explanation of why I deserve what I take * History an explanation of why I get what I deserve * (Through more or less clenched teeth): “How can you sit there & look at the faces you see in Montgomery Street wiped blank from selling whatever brains they got faces in 3rd Street blank from facing a lathe all day & TV all night African tromped-on faces Asiatic hunger faces Washington war-masks & smile at me about how after all this is a Moral Universe gives me the screaming jumping meemies I thought you were bright enough had enough work-experience yourself to have some faint idea of...” * hello. “THE WIND RATTLES THE WINDOW I CAN'T SLEEP FRIDAY NIGHT IS VERY LARGE IN SAN FRANCISCO THE LOWER CLASSES GET PAID ON FRIDAY & GET ON THEIR WAY TO SPEND IT IN UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS CLIPJOINTS THEY CLAIM AREN'T TOURIST TRAPS THE UPPER CLASSES ARE LUSHED OUT OF THEIR HEADS DOWN IN PEBBLE BEACH SUCKING EACH OTHER'S & WILL SKIP THE SHRINKER MONDAY HE'S GAY HIMSELF THE SILLY SON OF A BITCH AS LONG AS I'M NOT OUT HUSTLING SAILORS ON MARKET STREET & ONLY WHEN I'M LUSHED OUT ON MY OWN PREMISES (FOR WHICH I PAY EXCESSIVELY HIGH TAXES) I DON'T CARE” “The middle classes the middle class is mainly from out of town (that's what I like about San Francisco everybody's either up or down) they come & look at us they go away puzzled where they remain, outclassed... (they will fight the Rooshuns &c. they will fight the gooks & wogs & chinks & japs & niggers & commies & catholics & wall street & any man that tries to tell them different...)” “The upper class don't bother me a bit except why do they let themselves be buffaloed into hiring the creepy managers they do? Faceless men to represent a legal fiction? The upper well, the...” “UPPER CLASSES ARE HARMLESSLY IMBE- CILE THE CLASSES PRETEND NOT TO EXIST (& VERY NEARLY CAN'T, OUTSIDE OF JAIL) THE MIDDLE CLASS MANAGER MERCHANT BANKER PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL THE SOLID (IT'S THE CHEESE THAT MAKES IT BINDING) CALVINISTFREUDIAN DEMOC- RACY SWELLS & B L O S S O M S ! ” TERMINAL LUES ACROSS THE SHOULDERS OF THE WORLD “The Roman Empire went to hell when the Romans bought them- selves a goon-squad; bankrupted themselves trying to enforce moral and sumptuary laws...” History's now

Aulder than mammoth or than mastodon Deep i’ the herts o’ a’ men lurk scaut-heid Skrymmorie monsters few daur look upon. Brides sometimes catch their wild een, scansin’ reid, Beekin’ abune the herts they thocht to lo’e And horror-stricken ken that i’ themselves A like beast stan’s, and lookin’ love thro’ and thro’ Meets the reid een wi’ een like seevun hells. ... Nearer the twa beasts draw, and, couplin’, brak The bubbles o’ twa sauls and the haill warld gangs black. Yet wha has heard the beasts’ wild matin’-call To ither music syne can gi’e nae ear. The nameless lo’enotes haud him in a thrall. Forgot are guid and ill, and joy and fear. ... My bluid sail thraw a dark hood owre my een And I sail venture deep into the hills Whaur, scaddows on the skyline, can be seen —Twinin’ the sun’s brent broo wi’ plaited horns As gin they crooned it wi’ a croon o’ thorns— The beasts in wha’s wild cries a’ Scotland’s destiny thrills. The lo’es o’ single herts are strays; but there The herds that draw the generations are, And whasae hears them roarin’, evermair Is yin wi’ a’ that gangs to mak’ or mar The spirit o’ the race, and leads it still Whither it can be led, ’yont a’ desire and will. I Wergeland, I mind o’ thee—for thy bluid tae Kent the rouch dirl o’ an auld Scots strain, —A dour dark burn that has its ain wild say Thro’ a’ the thrang bricht babble o’ Earth’s flood. Behold, thwart my ramballiach life again, What thrawn and roothewn dreams, royat and rude, Reek forth—a foray dowless herts condemn— While chance wi’ rungs o’ sang or silence renshels them. (A foray frae the past—and future tae Sin Time’s a blindness we’ll thraw aff some day!) ... On the rumgunshoch sides o’ hills forgotten Life hears beasts rowtin’ that it deemed extinct, And, sudden, on the hapless cities linked In canny civilisation’s canty dance Poor herds o’ heich-skeich monsters, misbegotten, ... Streets clear afore the scarmoch advance: Frae every winnock skimmerin’ een keek oot To see what sic camsteerie cast-offs are aboot. Cast-offs?—But wha mak’s life a means to ony end? This sterves and that stuff’s fu’, scraps this and succours that? The best survive there’s nane but fules contend. Na! Ilka daith is but a santit need. ... Lo! what bricht flames o’ beauty are lit at The unco’ een o’ lives that Life thocht deid Till winnock efter winnock kindles wi’ a sense O’ gain and glee—as gin a mair intense Starn nor the sun had risen in wha’s licht Mankind and beasts anew, wi’ gusto, see their plicht. Mony’s the auld hauf-human cry I ken Fa’s like a revelation on the herts o’ men As tho’ the graves were split and the first man Grippit the latest wi’ a freendly han’ ... And there’s forgotten shibboleths o’ the Scots Ha’e keys to senses lockit to us yet —Coorse words that shamble thro’ oor minds like stots, Syne turn on’s muckle een wi’ doonsin’ emerauds lit. I hear nae ‘hee-haw’ but I mind the day A’e donkey strunted doon a palm-strewn way As Chesterton has sung; nae wee click-clack O’ hoofs but to my hert at aince comes back Jammes’ Prayer to Gang to Heaven wi’ the Asses; And shambles-ward nae cattle-beast e’er passes But I mind hoo the saft een o’ the kine Lichted Christ’s craidle wi’ their canny shine. Hee-Haw! Click-Clack! And Cock-a-doodle-doo! —Wull Gabriel in Esperanto cry Or a’ the warld’s undeemis jargons try? It’s soon’, no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men, And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken E’en herts that ha’e nae Scots’ll dirl richt thro’ As nocht else could—for here’s a language rings Wi’ datchie sesames, and names for nameless things.

This stream took a shorter course— a thread of water that makes oasis out of mud, in pooling, does not aspire to lake. To river, leave the forest, the clamorous wild. I cannot. Wherever I am, I am here, nonsensical, rhapsodic, stock-still as the trees. Trickling never floods, furrows its meager path through the forest floor. There will always be a root too thirsty, moss that only swallows and spreads. Primordial home, I am dying from love of you. Were I tuber or quillwort, the last layer of leaves that starts the dirt or the meekest pond, I would absorb everything. I would drown. Water makes song of erratic forms, and I hear the living push back branches, wander off trail.

I feel myself in need Of the inspiring strains of ancient lore, My heart to lift, my empty mind to feed, And all the world explore. I know that I am old And never can recover what is past, But for the future may some light unfold And soar from ages blast. I feel resolved to try, My wish to prove, my calling to pursue, Or mount up from the earth into the sky, To show what Heaven can do. My genius from a boy, Has fluttered like a bird within my heart; But could not thus confined her powers employ, Impatient to depart. She like a restless bird, Would spread her wing, her power to be unfurl’d, And let her songs be loudly heard, And dart from world to world.