160 Illness poems

September was when it began. Locusts dying in the fields; our dogs Silent, moving like shadows on a wall; And strange worms crawling; flies of a kind We had never seen before; huge vineyard moths; Badgers and snakes, abandoning Their holes in the field; the fruit gone rotten; Queer fungi sprouting; the fields and woods Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors Rising from the earth - all these, And more began that fall. Ravens flew round The hospital in pairs. Where there was water, We could hear the sound of beating clothes All through the night. We could not count All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies. And one day in a field I saw A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous, Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other, Huddled together, silent, ominous, And heard the sound of rushing wind.

Because the silence of the dead, that blue expanse of sky about to ashen here above my head, is easily ignored, our tears are blamed on flowers whitening limbs of trees, the very air, with hymns of summer pollen no one hears except for women—old, devout. And now, these humid months, dispute them not: midsummer has no name among the dead, no Latin root to which it can be traced, no swarm of conjugations to decipher. So little left to write this summer, my mind now weak in handling form, which I still cling to just the same.

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice, Suffuses the veins of the eyes Till the retina, mooncoloured, Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape A flat hot boulder it Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums Sidles The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations Mad and stark naked Sidles The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elphantiasis Sidles All three across heaven with a rocking motion. The Doldrums: 'region of calms and light baffling winds near Equator.' But the calms are rare The winds baffling but not light And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon All in the pallescent Sargasso weed And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance For What are we but the excrement of non-existent noon? (Truth like starlight crookedly) What are we all but 'burial grounds abhorred by the moon'? And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we. But there is no snow here, nor lilies. The night is glutinous In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps Smoulder: distant fireback of copse Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond The constellations which have stopped working (?) Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps. On edge of lawn a glowworm Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn And in the centre the rugate trees Though seeming as if they go up in smoke Are held like cardboard where they are. Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move. Agesias said: 'Nero was an artist because he murdered his mother Sensibility (subliminal) is of more importance than moral obligation (prandial).' But Agesias paints cottages in watercolours and fears his own mother. Barbarieus said: 'I am passionately in love with Gito who spurns me for Praxinoê' But until he saw them together he was merely disturbed by Gito's eyelashes. Galônus said: 'The subsequent shrivelling of an orchid doesn't alter the value of its beauty.' Decanus said: 'Joy in nothing. Either dies joy or what produced it.' But Galônus is attractive to women, Decanus obese, poor, obtuse. Epinondas said: 'I have been a liar, now no longer so.' Zeuxias said: 'What I have always been, I shall remain, a fool." Is it better to be self-deceived or lazy? Epator was drunk for two days: Theodorus traced his disease to college, Iphogenês saw God and died, And so down the Alphabet, ate, and the Persian, With variegated gutterals and sibilants, the Gaelic with dipthongs and tripthongs, Choctaw with three different clicks Each letter is somebody But the Crab is nobody Nobody Nobody A ganglion of neurotic imitations Composed of each letter in turn Jointed by conflicts he does not want A word that never existed with a sense nobody can understand. Suffering for the sins his father refuse to commit He sits and thinks about the twiddling toes of Gunerita A boy-girl or girl-boy of an average pulchritude Haunted by phantoms of his female self Whom he has never seen but composed himself, thus: Breasts of Augustina brains of Beatrice Arms of Capucine on the motherliness of Dorothea Eyes of Evelyn in the brow of Francesca Fragrance of Gretchen with the understanding of Helen This he desires, but despises: Bhah! Always sideways, crabs walk. Either he is not fit for this world Or this world not fit for him. But which? After all this pain of development is there neither interval nor reward? They lured him with promises, Now it has all slipped sideways What is the good, I ask you, of going into a melting-pot If fated to melt again after getting out of it? The answers are: He is not out of it Determined to budge not from yon slippery rock Not a yard, no, not an inch, no, nor a barleycorn's breadth For chance is not blind but unimpedable And we call it blind because Since we frustrate it only by chance We prefer to shut our own eyes. The crab however crawls on. He must therefore be a crab subnormal. One day, one of his foreclaws, assembled as usual by many men, Being longer than the other, turns and pinches his tentacles With the other he pinches the persons that assembled the long one Next day the short one, equally alien, is the longer And the process is reversed. In mass production one hand never knows The evil the other is inspiring it to do This is a heretic even to the faiths he fails to believe So worthless, awkward, unintelligible, The crab crawls on. He has sufferd because he was ugly Let him be cruel now that he is attractive Caring not whether he fructifies cruelty or is merely hard on self. We trap our goldfinch trapping out souls therewinged Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods: We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer We don't. We drink and drivel. My poor Catullus, do stop being such a fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is gone. O, once the days shone very bright for you, when where that girl you loved so (as no other will be) called, you came and came. And then and there were odd things done and many which you wanted and she didn't not want. Yes indeed the days shone very bright for you. But now she doesn't want it. Don't you either, booby. Don't keep chasing her. Don't live in misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened. Goodbye, girl: Catullus is quite hardened, doesn't want you, doesn't ask, if you're not keen—though sorry you'll be to be not asked. Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for you? Who'll now go with you? Who'll be attracted? Whom'll you love now? Whom say you belong to? Whom'll you now kiss? Whose lips'll you nibble? —Now you, Catullus! you've decided to be hardened. How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid? O Aphroditê Pandêmos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind Wind humming like distant rooks Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization Civilization being relative our to Greek Greek to Persian Persian to Chinese Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction Satisfaction a matter of capacity Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram Epigrams—poems with a strabismus Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the houses of the Zodiac And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways

My eyes are shaky and glimmer like the stars. My head turns to the left and it moves just like a pendulum. The kids laugh and shake it back to me, all the ways I’m stupid, not like them. But I know how the grass sounds when the locusts come, like a spaceship taking off and how it makes the air shake. Captain Lovell, I heard it in the branches and the leaves. I heard the rocket leaving. My teacher said it wasn’t so, that you’re past hearing but my father said I could. He puts his hands hard on my shoulders from behind and holds my head still with his looking. But I can feel how much I want to shake and let myself go loose and double like a cloud of mayflies on the lake, you know just how they rise so you couldn’t see just one of them, not even with your thumb held up to catch one with your eyes. It’s something I can’t do that Babe and David can, can’t sight the stars or use a telescope or ever fire a gun. Dr. Lovell, I like to think you’re spinning and can’t feel it like I can’t feel the world shake unless I’m really tired and then it’s like a gift to let it go and just stop trying so hard. I like to think you let go too and when the kids run at me and move their heads from left to right and call me “Zigzag” I look up and wish myself up there with you just calm and swinging through the stars.

The sun is still burning in my skin even though it set half-an-hour ago, and Cindy and Bob and Bev and John are pulling on their sweatshirts and gathering around the fire pit. John hands me a cold one and now Bev comes into my arms and I can feel the sun’s heat, and taste the Pacific on her cheek. I am not in Vietnam, nor is John or Bob, because our deferments came through, and we get to remain boys for at least another summer like this one in Santa Cruz, surfing the afternoons in a sweet blue dream I’m remembering now, as the nurse puts my cheek to sleep, and the doctor begins to burn those summers away.

We keep my sister alive by force, pin her down and nurse her with raw eggs from the chickens that did not drown and milk taken from a goat staked to the ground. The dull tolling of the bell around her neck speaks as she moves. Here, I am here. She wanders to the river, and we find her. In a tree, singing to a starling, we find her. We dig a grave for the missing body, but nothing consoles her. In mourning, the cure is the sickness. A year ago, a lion took our mother as she tended the fire. This hunger bewilders me. We found half of her bones and buried her uneaten heart in a dead cub's rib cage. When we returned three days later we saw no bones, no heart, only tracks in the sand leading east.Ghost me. Fossil me. Resurrect me near dawn. We're always at the mercy of one menacing grace, one rite, an art that makes us suffer twice. At night we wait with out knives where the tall grass begins. We will kill it or die or become the lion.

A martyr this morning, as ever, to cramps and pains I organize myself to face the day. I show a leg, put my shoulder to the wheel, Daub paint on my eyelids and stick a couple of long Hairpins in my desperate mane to hold it— Too much trouble even to brush my hair. I start on the spot on this heavy, sluggish, Difficult, heartbreaking work, the reason no doubt I was first put on the earth. I take the same little plastic brush that I use On good days to spread melted butter on pastry. And gradually lay bare with insect patience, Sifting away like an ant, with a hunter’s eye, or The sharp ear of a trespassing pig, alternately huffing And puffing and effing and blinding: in the wet sand, The painful lines of our horror, the boundaried frame of fear, That lays us low so often in the bogs of despond. You’d take it as first for a boat’s skeleton, a kind Of Sutton Hoo for our people, but soon its true shape appears: Biblical Behemoth, the monster of all the old tales.

Ours are the streets where Bess first met her cancer. She went to work every day past the secure houses. At her job in the library she arranged better and better flowers, and when students asked for books her hand went out to help. In the last year of her life she had to keep her friends from knowing how happy they were. She listened while they complained about food or work or the weather. And the great national events danced their grotesque, fake importance. Always Pain moved where she moved. She walked ahead; it came. She hid; it found her. No one ever served another so truly; no enemy ever meant so strong a hate. It was almost as if there was no room left for her on earth. But she remembered where joy used to live. She straightened its flowers; she did not weep when she passed its houses; and when finally she pulled into a tiny corner and slipped from pain, her hand opened again, and the streets opened, and she wished all well.

the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle

They didn't find it in me until months later— just like Vallejo who died on a rainy day far from the heat rising over a garden in silvers and reds—far away from the din of buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overran the streets with their holiness. Laid on the surface of the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamored against the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther still from the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn. The fever should have churned my blood into tight fists while the sunset stretched across the sky like an open mouth. Everything was splintered heat. I'd awake to winter in D.C., find streets covered in snow, the words of some ancient language blooming under my ankles like a song, a mantra called home. I could trace it like a geography of someone I had once been. How to explain the hum of mosquitos in my ear, sensual and low, nothing like the sound of rusted-out engines, police sirens, a train's whistle. How easily I'd lost the taste for that water, opened my legs to their hot, biting mouths.